Commodore Hooked to a Commodore 128!

[nicksteel]

First computer with a hard drive was a 5MB drive from a commercial Commodore hooked to a Commodore 128. Very expensive, but had to have one. PC's had floppy only drives at the time and dual single side 5 1/4 floppies. You could cut a notch on the side and use both sides, although IBM swore only one side was coated! There was even a tool available to cut the notch out without damaging the disk.

[kwag]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nicksteel

There was even a tool available to cut the notch out without damaging the disk.

I always used a regular binder hole punching tool. So it would be a round hole, instead of square, but it worked just fine
And for the 720KB plastic floppies, I used a drill

-kwag

[nicksteel]

720's? Now you're bragging.

[lschafroth]

I built my first computer. it was a HeathKit H80 if I recall.

You got a package with all the resisters, capiciters and chips. You soldered everything yourself and put it all together piece by piece.

Was great!

LS

PS 1980 or 81 I believe.

[kwag]

It's a shame there's no more HeathKit
I assembled a lot of stuff from them, like a great Digital Clock, and also a VTVM ( Vacuum Tube Volt Meter )
An uncle of mine had the Heath revolving charge account, and he used to buy stuff from them every year. He built the old GR-2000 ( I remembered the name ) 25" TV set, back around 1974.
At that time, a 25" TV has huge
And it had the ultrasonic wireless remote control
Those were the days

-kwag

[rds_correia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kwag

...Those were the days

"Those were (also) the days" of "All in the family" with Archie Bunker although it just hit us here in Portugal in the begining of the 80's.
What a great series...
I still watch it a lot on a "nostalgia" TV channel called SIC Gold I have on cable TV.
"I kill myself" laughing with ALF, All in the family, Cheers and last but not least my favorite of all times "Family ties".
Back on topic, I still remember my father using 8 inches floppies (that's were the name floppy comes from as you should pick up an 8 inch one) at work 160K I believe. It was as big as an LP music record
My 1st PC was a i8088 with 512KB of RAM and a 720KB FDD: No hard drive.
I had to buy an external one with 10MB.
Gaming with that one was really bad as it had an Hercules-mode "graphics" adapter which was monochromatic.
Though, it could emulate CGA by software.
Oh! and I used MS-DOS 3.3 on it!
My cousin had an Amstrad i8086 with 1MB of RAM, a 3.5" and a 5-1/4" floppies.
We ran Windows 2.something on it
It was cool. Seamed like GEM
Those days were fun.
Nowadays it's just stress with our P4-Xeons with GBs of RAM...
Cheers guys

[vmesquita]

My first computer was an MSX 8-bit manufactured by "Gradiente", and it was adquired in 1988. It had 64 kb of memory and used the TV as a 16 color display. It's initial use was playing some games that came in cardiges. Some months later, my father bought a special tape-recorder (which was just a little-better tape-recorder), where I could load game from the the tape. It took some minutes to load the games and softwares (and sometimes it hang in the middle of it), but it was fun.

at this point I also started coding some programs in BASIC just for fun and saving in the tape recorder. I can remeber the "Study" programs series I created that went up to 3.0 (which I never completelly finished). This software would ask questions randomly from a database and compare answers, giving a grade... Very cool.

Two years later, my father finally bought a 360 kb floppy which came with MSX-DOS, a MS-DOS clone for MSX. Then I started copying tons of games (at this time Brazil didn't have any piracy laws so anyone could buy tons of games very cheap). And I started coding more interesting stuff. I remember creating a monopoly game with more than 1000 lines which unfortunatelly I could never run because I accidentally deleted before it could get to a working state.

Then I moved on to PC-XT, a 486, a Celeron 300, a Duron 950 and now a AthlonXP 2000+. But none of them were so much fun as my old MSX, which still works... When it doesn't hang. Some other day I saw an MSX being sold in the street for 20 Reais (About USD 6) and I almost bougth it, I just gave up because i have no place at home for this.