For me, it was the runtime version 1, distributed with early DTP programs. My first full version was 3.1...
The 1st version I installed was 95, but 3.1 or 3.11 was the 1st I used, before that I used Workbench on my Amiga 4000, Windows was a step down
Remember all those floppy disks. :)
Only last month I got rid of a set of 3.11 floppies
I think I may still have a set somewhere, hoarder that I am. :)
The first version of Windows I used on a day to day basis was the first version, version 1 which might have been labled v1.3. The first version I bought and used at home was 3.11.
However the first windowed GUI I used was on the Apple's Lisa which was light years ahead of Microsoft, highly innovative, multitasking, cost and arm and a leg, and run like a dog with no legs ;D
I remember it well. :)
3.1 here, I think I've stiil got the disks somewhere. :)
Another hoarder. ;D
3.11 for workgroups for me, on a 486. ;D
I started at a 286, then 386sx, 386, 486 etc. Seperate, optional, maths co-processors you could plug in. Those were the days. ;D
I do miss the 486. It was kind of uncomplicated technology.
I don't. ;D
My first full version was 3.0.
Uncomplicated, having to manually assign IRQ settings, configuring the BIOS clock speed etc via dip switches......
Quote from: Sebby on Jul 29, 2009, 18:11:44
I do miss the 486. It was kind of uncomplicated technology.
A bit like me, really. ;D
Quote from: Glenn on Jul 29, 2009, 18:13:43
Uncomplicated, having to manually assign IRQ settings, configuring the BIOS clock speed etc via dip switches......
Happy days. ;D
I'm a newbie. I started with Windows 95, then soon to 98.
Quote from: Rik on Jul 29, 2009, 18:14:13
A bit like me, really. ;D
Quote from: Rik on Jul 29, 2009, 18:14:31
Happy days. ;D
So are you say that you are an android, configured by dip switches :eek4: ;D
Some say mis-configured. ;D
Quote from: Simon on Jul 29, 2009, 18:19:44
I'm a newbie. I started with Windows 95, then soon to 98.
That is a newbie, just a decade or so under the belt, eh Simon? ;) I've got six, but that's another story... ;D
Our first pc had a 5 1/4 floppy drive and you had to boot it up from the floppy. Can't remember what operating system it was.
Our first 3 1/2 floppy was a 286, then a 386 then first win95 which was an IBM state of the art which I thought of at the time.
Probably DOS, Lona.
I started with a Comodore 64 then a 128 then a Amiga 1200 Oh how I missed Workbench then on to Windows 95 , 98, XP and at the moment Vista Looking forward to October and Windows 7. ;D
Maybe I should ask for the earliest version of DOS people ran? ;)
Sinclair Basic on the ZX81 , Commodore V2 basic on the C64 then windows 3.1 and I also still have the disks and the DOS ones. Oh what happy days :hairpull: :comp:
sinclair ZX81 with all that typing into a tape recorder, just to play tennis with a bat at each end and a ball , but what fun and high technology !! for the time
Quote from: Rik on Jul 29, 2009, 18:11:17
I started at a 286, then 386sx, 386, 486 etc. Seperate, optional, maths co-processors you could plug in. Those were the days. ;D
I started with an Atari PC3 which was an 8086 CPU with a
32Mb HDD and 5.25" floppies running DOS and the predecessor to Windows, which I have totally forgotten what it was called, but is was WYSIWYG.
Colin
I used to prefer DR-DOS with the GEM based GUI rather than the MS-DOS versions.
No one has mentioned IBM OS/2 yet, where MS made a GUI based OS for IBM the pinched the ideas and created Windows :evil:
Quote from: talos on Jul 29, 2009, 20:28:05
Sinclair Basic on the ZX81 , Commodore V2 basic on the C64 then windows 3.1 and I also still have the disks and the DOS ones. Oh what happy days :hairpull: :comp:
BBC BASIC, Bob, then straight into DOS, but can't for the life of me remember the version number. Floppies on the Beeb were 5.25" and held 160k of data. :shake:
Quote from: bobleslie on Jul 29, 2009, 23:42:16
I used to prefer DR-DOS with the GEM based GUI rather than the MS-DOS versions.
That's the one. :)
Quote from: Glenn on Jul 30, 2009, 05:55:50
No one has mentioned IBM OS/2 yet, where MS made a GUI based OS for IBM the pinched the ideas and created Windows :evil:
Did anyone ever use it? :whistle:
Quote from: Rik on Jul 30, 2009, 09:00:15
Did anyone ever use it? :whistle:
I played around a bit with OS/2. Never used it for anything serious.
Windows/386 was the first version I used. WfWG 3.11 was the first useful one and Windows 2000 was the first reliable one. :D
First GUI I used was GEM on an Atari ST. Later I was involved in MiNT, the multitasking replacement for TOS (the underlying OS - hence Mint is Not TOS) which I think eventually got used in the later 680x0 Atari machines.
First OS I used was on the Oric 1 and I don't think the OS itself had a name. :D
I still have some IBM PC-DOS floppies at home.
Quote from: Rik on Jul 30, 2009, 09:00:15
Did anyone ever use it? :whistle:
I bought a P60 that came with both OS2 Warp and Windows 3.11 pre-installed on it, to change from one to the other you had to make BIOS changes to IRQs during boot-up.
We bought Windows 95 for that machine on the day it was released.
First O.S. I used was Sinclair Basic for the Z80 and over time AmigaDOS, PCDos, Dragon Basic, BBC Basic, Atari. All the versions of Windows from 3.0 onward, we even ran Millennium on one PC for a while.
Various Linux flavours, mostly Ubuntu since that appeared and now Linspire on the netbook.
The Dragon, Spectrum, Amiga 1200 and BBC are in the attic and there are a lot of Floppies and CDs with old O.S.s on them up there too.
Aren't we a bunch of hoarders. :)
Quote from: Rik on Jul 30, 2009, 09:00:15
Did anyone ever use it? :whistle:
I was one of the first in the UK to get a full retail copy of OS/2 2.0 32-bit. At the time, it was a sensational OS amongst it's 16-bit counterparts. The trickiest part was installing it and then keeping it up. ;D
I moved on to Windows NT.
I'd forgotten how long it took to move from 16 to 32 bit, Bob. Makes you realise that universal 64 bit might take a while...
I'm not holding my breath... :whistle:
Quite right, blue is just not your colour. ;D
Actually, it's my favourite colour, but not on my face. ;D
Oh wode is me. ;D
Not quite my shade. Too violent. ;)
I quite like Wedgwode.
:grn:
Alright me old china. ;D
You know, we do write some rubbish here. Do you think anyone's noticed? :whistle:
It's like the Spectrum 128 I had, no one made software for it, only the 64, so buying the extra 64kb of memory was a waste of money.
Quote from: bobleslie on Jul 30, 2009, 17:33:07
You know, we do write some rubbish here. Do you think anyone's noticed? :whistle:
Impossible. :)
The first version of Windows I ran was the one I broke with a ball as a kid, I ran from that very fast ;D
Maybe the question should be, how did you pay for your first windows :evil:
Hard cash. :)
£200, but it came with a second hand computer. ;D
In Gary's case, maybe his fathers hand
Quote from: Glenn on Aug 01, 2009, 13:05:38
Maybe the question should be, how did you pay for your first windows :evil:
Well we had a quote from Anglian......
My first o/s was 98SE back in 1999. For some reason I didn't buy a PC until then, despite using them for 10 years by that time.
As for computer hardware, I started with a ZX81 (I swapped it for a 6 wheel tyrrel remote controlled car :) ), then Acorn Electron, BBC model A (then a B), Ti994a(texus instruments) http://oldcomputers.net/ti994a.html , Amiga500 then a 10 year period where I just played games consoles, then finally the PC :)
You missed the best bit, Niall, all that re-booting the computer 10 times a day when it kept locking up. :)
The PCs I used at Wrexham ITeC all ran on DOS. Even though windows OS had been released, it was widely regarded by the techy savvy at the time, as "an unstable waste of time". :)
A bit like ADSL really. ;D :out:
:evil:
Quote from: Rik on Aug 01, 2009, 13:30:02
A bit like ADSL really. ;D :out:
Let's be fair, it's ADSL2+. ;D
Not for everyone, Seb. ;D
Okay, everyone apart from you. :)x
I was thinking of those on Max having problems. ;)
Ah. I'll just quietly step out of this thread... :)
Don't wake the children. ;D
At home the first machine was a BBC Model B with its BBC BASIC OS.
Later I added an extra fiveway Sideways ROM extender board with two 16 KB RAMS chips on it and a 5-1/4" "proper" floppy diskdrive that that a 256 KB RAM drive in it too.
(For the youngsters note the KB's where the K's are not typos) :)
It never ceases to amaze me these days just how many and how varied the programs were that ran in just 32KB of RAM!
Originally with a cassette player to load the programs from tape my eldest daughter learnt to count in hex as each block of code was slowly loaded and its number displayed on the TV screen.
Next it was a 486 with its integral maths co-processor facility running MS DOS 5.1 from a "massive" 110 MB hard disk drive.
(I have the DOS manual and the disks squirreled away somewhere I feel sure - maybe in the loft)
Word Perfect, XTGold and DOS games galore for the kids to name but a few applications.
This machine also ran Windows 3.1 then 3.11 for Workgroups and the DOS went up to 6.2 or maybe even 6.22.
Remember Memory managers like QEMM (Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager) to get stuff loaded above that 640 KB barrier.
To send my eldest daughter off to University with her own machine we obtained a second hand IBM PS/2 Model 55 SX (http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/computer/ps2/8555sx.htm) that soon had a maths co-processor chip added and a software upgrade to Windows 95 if my memory is not playing tricks on me and yes I to do remember all those disk!
This machine came with a set of Windows 3.0 floppy disks but I never installed this version of Windows going straight to W95.
(Dare I say that I just might still have these W3.0 disk somewhere safe) :-*
My younger daughter took my original 486 running W3.11 to university and I had a new machine with a Cyrix P166 processor running W95 on it to start with.
For my son when he went to university, initially he took this "new" machine with W98SE installed on it by then. After his first year we obtained a PC Chips M571 that came with a Cyrix P233 processor but during the Summer break that year we upgraded this machine with an AMD K6-2 450 MHz (http://phorums.com.au/showthread.php?t=8799) processor and had it running Windows 2000 before the new term started.
My own OS's went from DOS through W3.1, W3.11, W95, W98SE, XP Pro (x86) Vista Home Premium (x86) and now W7 RC with W7 Home Premium (x64) pre-ordered for October.
I managed to miss Windows Millennium, Windows 2000 and XP Home myself but have installed and maintained all but Millennium for family members but have maintained Millennium on a machine that came with it pre-installed from new.
For me Millennium is like Vista, rushed to market and short lived. I did install NT4 for the experience at home on a long gone tinkering machine but used it extensively for many years a work. I believe NT was short for New Technology, the technology that broke that 640 KB barrier that all the DOS based OS's prior to NT4 and then Win2K suffered with up to and including Millennium.
Let's not forget the mechanical wonders of the dot matrix printers of the early days.
I remember waiting for prices to come down to affordable levels for home consumption.
There we are a potted history as best my aging memory can recall but if I have any of it wrong I am sure someone with better recall than I will put me right.
As I have said before I never use ten words when a hundred will do. ;)
Today, I nearly broke my back lifting three old CRT screens out of the loft and down to the local dump. I'd forgotten how heavy those things were.
:eyebrow:
Quote from: lodge on Aug 01, 2009, 21:49:12
Today, I nearly broke my back lifting three old CRT screens out of the loft and down to the local dump. I'd forgotten how heavy those things were.
:eyebrow:
Mine are in the bottom of the wardrobe, for easy access. ;D
We really do hoard, don't we. ;D
I, too, had the ROM extender board for my Beeb, Les, plus a 2nd processor, both the 6502 and the Z80, modem, a dual floppy (at ridiculous cost), eventually adding a 10MB (and I do mean MB) HD at the cost of £300. I used Epson, Taxan and NEC dot matrix printers, the last being a wide carriage machine with colour ribbon. I had an amber monitor, forget the make, and a Taxan colour one - steel case.
It was a good machine, though, easy to program, either in BASIC or machine code.
My first computer was one I built from LSI and prgoramed with switches ;D
I can remember building a binary adding machine at school. Simple, but it gave great satisfaction when it worked. :)
Quote from: Rik on Aug 02, 2009, 10:19:31
We really do hoard, don't we. ;D
I, too, had the ROM extender board for my Beeb, Les, plus a 2nd processor, both the 6502 and the Z80, modem, a dual floppy (at ridiculous cost), eventually adding a 10MB (and I do mean MB) HD at the cost of £300. I used Epson, Taxan and NEC dot matrix printers, the last being a wide carriage machine with colour ribbon. I had an amber monitor, forget the make, and a Taxan colour one - steel case.
It was a good machine, though, easy to program, either in BASIC or machine code.
That reminds me of the time I went to a computer fair to get a Plextor CD writer. It was one of the first ones out and I saved £70 getting it there. It still cost me £176 though!
The first CD-ROM drive I bought was bundled with Corel Draw. A SCSI drive, the bundle price was £520...
I had a Rom extender plugged in to the back of my ZX81 which would "wobble" if the keys were pressed too hard, ruining hours of programing :mad: laboriously typed in two finger style.
Been there, Bob, especially when saving stuff to tape, therefore not very often...
Quote from: Rik on Aug 04, 2009, 11:38:14
The first CD-ROM drive I bought was bundled with Corel Draw. A SCSI drive, the bundle price was £520...
:eek4:
Quote from: talos on Aug 04, 2009, 14:28:54
I had a Rom extender plugged in to the back of my ZX81 which would "wobble" if the keys were pressed too hard, ruining hours of programing :mad: laboriously typed in two finger style.
Haha I remember that. You only had to touch it and the ZX81 would crash. I actually preferred the look of the white ZX80 :)
Quote from: Niall on Aug 06, 2009, 10:01:51
You only had to touch it and the ZX81 would crash.
Remember those tape-drives? :eek4:
The joys of waiting 30 minutes for a game or program to load, only for it to fail in the last few seconds.
And that horrible screen as stuff loaded...
It was the de-bugging I hated on the ZX81, spending hours typing the prog in after which it invariably refused to run because of a "syntax error" or a missing comma in a line of data, and when it did finally run, it was nothing like the pic on the magazine cover.
Oh those happy days of magazines with pages of programs to type in - only to find that the magazine had a typo in it. :)
Quote from: Rik on Aug 07, 2009, 09:18:16
And that horrible screen as stuff loaded...
On a slight tangent, the DVD for the IT Crowd has the usual selection screen, but one of them is that loading screen (well, the Spectrum one) that you have to wait a few seconds before it loads. I thought this was a fantastic touch. I'm such a nerd :D
Quote from: Rik on Aug 07, 2009, 10:41:36
Oh those happy days of magazines with pages of programs to type in - only to find that the magazine had a typo in it. :)
I had that happen once with a 10 (or more) page program. I left the Ti994a while I went for a drink and came back to find a white screen. I switched it off at the wall and went out in a foul temper. My temper didn't improve when I discovered that this was the machines screen saver type of thing!
;D
A lesson quickly learned, eh Niall.
Quote from: Rik on Aug 07, 2009, 09:18:16
And that horrible screen as stuff loaded...
I remember that on my Commodore 64. 8-)
I wonder if any of us could tolerate such slow loading nowadays?
Ask the WBC users with low throughput
I doubt it. I think we're all guilty of expecting computers to be near instantaneous these days.
Quote from: Glenn on Aug 15, 2009, 16:18:53
Ask the WBC users with low throughput
:rofl:
Quote from: Sebby on Aug 15, 2009, 16:19:13
I doubt it. I think we're all guilty of expecting computers to be near instantaneous these days.
Me too, Seb. Back then, I was so gobsmacked with the whole concept that the wait was acceptable. Now... :shake:
I know what you mean.
I think it has a lot to answer for though, people have less patience nowdays.
I'm sending you round a cassette with Firefox on it, Glenn. :evil:
OK I have a cassette player on my hifi, will it work on there?
If you connect the output to your sound card, it should. ;D
3.1, because the SDK in 3.0 was atrocious. As I remember it was something like 3 disks and then another 8 of printer drivers or something ridiculous. I installed it on a 286 in 16-bit mode with 20MB disk drive by stripping out all the help files. Windows then was still somewhat of a novelty though. It was something you dipped into from DOS occasionally as opposed to the other way around.
Windows 7 is pretty great so far, by the way.
Yes, Windows was where you went to do things graphical, I was still using WordPerfect in DOS, with all the arcane key sequences for markup.
I loved WordPerfect.
You could do all sorts of clever things and sort out all sorts of problems if you knew what you were doing.
Unfortunately, ...... ;)
I used to have people call me for the sequence of keys needed for particular formatting, Bob. The worrying thing was that I knew them all. :eek4:
I still think it's a much better WP than Word.
I have WordStar if anyone fancies some real retro key-typing action!
Oh how I remember that, and XyWrite. :)
I just found my DOS 3.22 disk still works. That makes me happy though it really shouldn't.
It's the little things in life... :)
:lol:
Interestingly I've just had to check a 16-bit Visual Basic program I wrote in 1994 works on Windows 7, as a company pretty much relies upon it.
It does.
Fortunately.
:phew:
All take a deep breath and let it out slowly. ;D
I am fascinate, that al you peeps can remember so far back, I can't :blush:
All I can tell you is that the first computer I worked on was in 1967, and English Electric Leo Marconi System 4:50, which was a copy of the RCA machine. As for software it had its own.
That beats me by 15 years. ;)
Haha, yes a bit older than me. I was at the electronics research lab at the Roland Institute in Boston for a while, and they were all older guys boasting and comparing their RF burns and so on, talking about iron core memory which used magnetic properties of the material. Unfortunately, you had to apply sufficient field onto the iron cores (due to hysterisis) to find out whether it was '1' or '0', in the process changing the status of the memory, and thus had to reset the 'iron bit' back to what it was after you'd read it.
I can only imagine the amount and heat of noise those kind of 'computers' must have made.
I read that they consumed enough electricity to power the Blackpool Illuminations.
Quote from: Broadback on Aug 20, 2009, 15:30:04
All I can tell you is that the first computer I worked on was in 1967, and English Electric Leo Marconi System 4:50, which was a copy of the RCA machine. As for software it had its own.
Not sure about it being a copy of an RCA machine as I always thought the original Leo was made for Joe Lyons the caterers during the 1950s. Leo = Lyons Electronic Office. It was then bought up by English Electric which was based at Kidsgrove. EE later became ICL.
Whatever happened to the Corner Houses. I can remember being taken there as a treat. :)
Quote from: Rik on Aug 20, 2009, 18:38:09
Whatever happened to the Corner Houses. I can remember being taken there as a treat. :)
Obviously you're old enough to remember the 'nippies'......
I am, Tac. The Corner Houses seemed to disappear almost overnight, but at the time, I wasn't taking much interest.
Quote from: Tacitus on Aug 20, 2009, 18:35:12
Not sure about it being a copy of an RCA machine as I always thought the original Leo was made for Joe Lyons the caterers during the 1950s. Leo = Lyons Electronic Office. It was then bought up by English Electric which was based at Kidsgrove. EE later became ICL.
You are correct about the Leo, though it was a bit before my time. When I joined it was English Electric Leo Marconi, whic as you say progressed to ICL then Fujitsu, which it still is. ICL was named in the computer press as It Can't Last. The 4.50 was the first of the System Four series, I worked on the first one that came to Kidsgrove, it was actually badged as an RCA machine. We got their amendments for a long time. One that tickled us was to say that they no longer recommended that we used Pepsodent Toothpaste to clean the gold contacts on the PCbs as it removed the gold over a period of time. We all knew that, after all:
"You will wonder where the yellow went, when you use Pepsodent" :lol:
Hoover beats as it sweeps as it cleans... ;D
The first version of Windows that I tried was 3.0 running under a DOS emulator (VP/ix) on Xenix which was a Unix port written by .... Microsoft (yes, it's true). On an Apricot 386. It was rather slow!
S
Ah, so you were a late developer, Simon. ;)
All these old-timer antics are just way too far before my time ;-)
S
:lol:
Just because you've still got hair and your own teeth, Simon. ;D
Quote from: Rik on Aug 21, 2009, 19:29:24
:lol:
Just because you've still got hair and your own teeth, Simon. ;D
Well I still have my own hair and teeth, though both hair and teeth are a bit thinner. Also why does your hair go whiter as you grow older but your teeth grow darker? One of life's mysteries I guess! :dunno:
For that matter, why does hair growth transfer from the head to the nose and ears? :dunno:
That is easy Rik, it is our friend gravity, which is why your shape goes pear shaped as well! :whistle:
:rofl: :karmic:
It still doesn't explain the teeth, though. :)
It does in my case Rik, my brains are being pulled down and staining my teeth. Well I think that is where my brain has gone, because gone it certainly has! :'(
What really gets to me is that moment where the word you want disappears and you just can't get it back until you've re-written the sentence to work around the omission. :shake: