Your Favourite Computer?

[reel-to-reel-man]

My favourite (And still is) is the Amiga A500 followed closely by the A4000T (The last and the best) and an A1200, I still have 4 Amiga A500's including an early RED LED power light version, I kept everything and the boxes, I still have the GVP Impact series II 80MB HDD, Amiga A570 CDROM, Zippo external HDD (A1200) Rocktech external HDD and of course 1001 FDD's.

Then only thing I haven't got still is the A4000 and the Commodore monitor, it was spec'ed to the hills with a 4GB HDD CDR, 200MB ZIP, 128MB fast ram, Cyberstorm PPC250MHz with 060 Motarola and the Cyberstorm GFX card, Toccata sound and GVP Ethernet, I had it on the internet and everything but sold it a few years ago for a surprising amount of money.

[MarkWills]

Mine is the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, from 1981.

It's unique in many ways: The first 16 bit home machine, first machine with sprites and a few other things.

It's architecture is, frankly, rather bananas, which is another reason for liking it. The assembly language, TMS9900 is gorgeous, very orthoganol. If you've done PDP assembly then you'll be right at home on it.

It's well supported in terms of Emulators for both Windows and Linux.

I also have fond memories of my beloved ZX Spectrum 48K, my Atari 800XL, and later, the Atari ST range of machines. They were great machines.

Ahhh, the memories!

[mikelect]

You're just biased

Mike

[MarkWills]

Originally Posted by mikelect

You're just biased

Mike

He he!!! Yep!!

[SteveCG]

IBM 704 - it brought us Fortran, with all that meant for ease of programming.

Home Micro? The Acorn Atom - mixing Basic and in-line 6502 assembler gave some interesting programmes. However the Mac SE/30 took some beating for power at that time.

[Paulus.d]

Atari ST was mine. I was working musically with a lot of MIDI in those days and it could keep up data wise - my P4 2.5ghz can't do that! The lag with MIDI data is such that you play the note and you hear it a second later!

I've just fixed it's floppy drive and I am looking forward to using it again!

regards Paul

[Roger-M0TDM]

commodore 64 of which i still have 6 off in excellent condition with the original diskette and interestingly enough each one has the accompanying discdrive,might have a game o boulderdash lol..

[electroanorak]

Hi.

My favorite computer is my trusty old Compaq E500 laptop. It may be a bit old now: 600MHz, 256Mb of RAM. But I do everthing on it and it goes just about anywhere with me. I had two of them given to me by a very nice, kind E-bayer (John) from Ireland, who I helped out with a few bits and peices a few years back. The main one does all my PCB design work, holds all my component data (13Gb of it), as well as all the normal day to day letters and internet stuff. The second is a back-up.

Thank you John....

Daniel.

[Phil G4SPZ]

My Compaq Contura Aero 4/33C sub-notebook with 16 Meg of RAM, 33MHz processor and 250 MB hard drive... running Windows 3.11 and Calmira II it did everything I needed, including Office, home finance, the Internet, even Packet radio, and it ran direct off 12 volts so it was totally portable.

I made two good working machines out of three scrap ones, and I still have both. One of its best features was a built-in trackball with mouse buttons on the side of the case, really intuitive and much quicker to use single-handed than the horrid slide pads fitted to all laptops nowadays.

It was too slow to run Windows 9x, however MS-DOS and W3.1 were perfectly adequate, in my opinion, and still are!

[Ever-HMV]

I owned several home computers back in the 80's, as follows:

1. Commodore PET (8K/Cassette)
2. ZX81
3. BBC Model B
4. Oric 1
5. Commodore C16
6. Commodore Plus 4

My favorite would be either the BBC Micro or the Commodore Plus 4:

On the BBC Micro I learned to program BASIC and 6502 Assembler. It was really well designed, but expensive! I developed ROM's for it, and sprite software for games programmers that was sold (in a VERY small way) by a software house in Cardiff.

The Plus 4 had lots (64k!) of memory, good graphics with 121 different colours and good sound. Although the built in Assembler was somewhat basic (a line assembler) I liked the immediacy of it, and used it to write several commercial games.

[Roger-M0TDM]

Got to be the commodore 64 for me,oh the games we played-boulderdash,iball exploding fist dambusters to name a few ...
I still have 5 examples all in excellent condition with original datasettes and even the disc drives,i even have the replay 3 utility which you slotted in the back and you could pause the games ,enter cheats pokes and even copy the games naughty naughty..
Oh nostalgia but good times..
Merry Xmas to all-Roger

[avro]

My Atari 1040 Ste. I was a real power user with it, maxed Ram at 4MB, dual monitors, 790 MB HDD, CD drive and much more. Did email and the WWW with it.

[M0XNA Neil]

Mine is the Ferranti FM1600B. I learned to program in microcode and assembler (FIXPAC) using toggle switches, paper tape and all with 32 Kbytes max. magnetic core store. Admittedly, the machine used 24 bit words and was the size of a wardrobe!

Neil.

[Aub]

Originally Posted by M0XNA Neil

Mine is the Ferranti FM1600B. I learned to program in microcode and assembler (FIXPAC) using toggle switches, paper tape and all with 32 Kbytes max. magnetic core store. Admittedly, the machine used 24 bit words and was the size of a wardrobe!

Neil.

I remember the Ferranti Argus 500 and the later 700, from my time at British Gas. If I recall correctly, the 500 used 56k of core store and the 700 had a 10mb disc.

Cheers

Aub

[Geoff 555]

Hello well favourite is a Sharp IIRC K80 the first one I owned , monitor, keyboard and tape deck all in one. Bought for £5.00 in a church bazaar. Went all over England to find disc drives and printer etc. My son learnt and taught me how to use it. Found a 1/2" thick folder of print outs from work the other day. It never failed.
Cheers.
Geoff.

[rovereab]

My favourite computer has to be the Honeywell 6060 my employer had which opened up the delights to me of developing COBOL programs (called TPRs) that controlled VDUs (Honeywell VIPs) and hierarchical databases (IDS). This was a revelation to me after years of developing batch processing COBOL programs.

Of course, I was only 10 at the time

Happy New Year.

Eamonn

[Acornguy]

Hello All,

Mine has to be Acorn's (its in the name!) previously had everything from Electron's, BBC's to Masters. I had a mass clearout in october and offloaded 5 boxes on ebay of a lot of rare and vintage stuff, the Master was in Mint condition with all relevant paraphernalia.

Space was needed and space gained. Currently running a 2 slice Acorn RISC PC 600 running RISC OS 4.x which is superb, loading time is unreal compared to how long it takes a windows PC to 'boot', just under 18 seconds and the speed of it with the turbo board is quite acceptable for 21st century apps, just a pity now that not much software made for RISC OS now but pleased to see that there's a strong user base on the web. The redeeming factor of my system was the software i got with it, a treasure trove of CD's, i've not even needed to trawl the net for stuff i have that much.

Also got 2 x toshiba 50CT 'VHS' notebooks, for want of a word, smashing little computers, get 3-4 hours on a full charge, ok if you're running W95 or W2000 and not too bothered about modern applications but the amount of stuff out there is immense, you're only limited by the size of the hard drives (which are usually 850mb for the 50). I have a 100CT coming soon which has a bigger screen and can do wireless to with the PCMCIA card it has, the beauty of these is they fit in the glovebox of a car nicely, very portable in every sense of the word and ideal computers for radio shacks or sheds. Now used by the Linux camp apparently whereby they run Linux flavours quite nicely even on the limited hardware, not my cup of tea though.

When these came out the going price in the USA was just over $1,000 but can be had for 40-50 quid now in good condition, new batteries can be picked up for 20 quid a throw which is a must as although they keep a charge they deplete in about an hour off the mains. Very old school computing but it's amazing how easy it is to be productive on such what would be considered now a low-spec system.

A few pics attached which may be of interest. If you have some spare cash it's well worth getting one to have a play with, hours of fun, with the replicator port you can plug in printers, scanners (as I do) and also an external monitor and 'proper' mouse, the inbuilt mouse is fiddly but you get used to it.

[baldrick]

It appears that I'm going against the grain here but I hve to say that my favourite vintage computer is the Apple II.
Back in the eighties you could buy clone bare motherboards and populate them yourself. You'd of course have to know someone with a functional Apple II and an EEPROM burner to make yourself a set of EEPROMs which contained the Basic interpreter and the character generator.
I built several of these back in my teenage years, learned to program them and generally had a hoot.

[RobinBirch]

Very definitely the PDP11 but my favourite was the 11/70. Impressive to look at, easy to make it look like you were a mad genius in that you could use the front panel but very very easy to use.

A very close second was an ancient home build called the transam triton. I was given this as a wreck and I got it going, added enough static memory to take it up to 64k and had lots of fun with it. It was a true 8080 with the three chip set and I probably learnt more about making things work with that than anything else.

Regards

Robin

[pressure]

I learnt basic on a ZX81 then progressed to an Atari 800 XL
Then moved to Amega A500 which I loved.

In industry it was the glory days of the PDP11 running unix for me (I loved unix) it was later replaced with Sun Sparkstation about 100th of the size and way faster but without the nostalgia

I remember having internet (pre world wide web) email and usenet access in about 1982 Didn't have many people to email back then but usenet was good. (my kids don't know life without the world wide web) and google has become the new oxigen!!
Happy days