The Old Computers Thread!

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For as long as I can remember, yours truly, EquestriatoLA has been exposed to a computer in some way. So, I thought, "How about a thread for old computers made before the turn of the century?" And here it is.
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When I went to elementary school in Shoreline, WA (north of Seattle), the school had lots of Apple computers. Some of those models used during my time there were the Apple IIe, the apple IIgs, the Macintosh LC, The LC500 series, and the Macintosh Performa 5200. Those were all great computers in their day. I'm amazed that my school kept most of those vintage computers until I moved at the end of 1998.

At home, I had a Gateway 2000 P5-60. It was a great computer to get my jump-start into the internet user I am now. Even though it was massively slow by the time I replaced it at the end of 2000.

Now it's your turn! Share your old computer memories and stories here.

The owner of a small town Radio Shack let me play Hammurabi on a TRS 80 model 1 that used cassette tapes for storage. In high school I had a computer class that used an IBM 360 and punched cards. The first floppy disks I used were 8" in diameter--stored my first assembly language programs.

First computer I actually owned was an IBM "Portable PC"--think it ran DOS 3.1.

My high school in the early 1970's was one of the first to print out report cards by computer. We thought it was a technological marvel.

Do I have old computers??? Look at my avatar! The IBM ThinkPad T23 that I am using now is a Pentium ! !! mobile based PC with 512 MB's of ram. It runs Micro$oft Windows 98 Second Edition. Another computer that I own is a no-name PC running a Pentium ! !! with Micro$oft Windows NT 4.0 SP6a, it is a work in progress. My newest PC is a Dell Dimension 2400 Pentium 4 Prescott That Ran XP but I installed Windows 2000.

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If you remember these two startup sounds, then you had a great childhood.

The first computer I encountered was the BBC Master 128 in about 1988. It had a floppy disc drive for data storage and retrieval, and didn't use a mouse or icons - one had to type in commands to make things happen! I found this to be a very good machine for learning the BBC BASIC programming language, and managed to construct a number of programs on it.

I was so disillusioned with its successor, the Acorn Archimedes, that I gave up on computers for a quarter of a century (except for using the internet in public libraries), and didn't resume my interest until buying a PC last year .