Computer nostalgia

[tezza007]

When I edited some picons I used GIMP.

My preferred tool would actually be Deluxe Paint on the Amiga, but the overhead of setting that up for a few bitmaps didn't seem worth it.

Ah, the Amiga, fond memories of a great computer. I'm amazed someone is still using them

[netmask]

I still have a 500 and heaps of software but it is boxed away....

[MrQuade]

http://fs-uae.net/

Amiga emulators are very good these days. All you need is a Kickstart ROM, and you are set!

I occasionally bust this out or a C64 emulator for a little nostalgia.

[tezza007]

That's probably where most of them are
I had a 500 and a 2000 with a whopping 3MB of ram and a 20MB HDD!!!

[tonymy01]

500 with dual floppy here, and 512K? expansion with RTC.

[peteru]

I either owned or had access to pretty much every Amiga ever built, starting with the 256k NTSC only A1000. I owned some esoteric beasts like the A2500-UX Unix box with a tape drive, a few iterations of CDTV and CD32 with the full motion MPEG cartridge. I think some of these were only ever engineering samples with only about 10 or so produced.

Good times!

[MrQuade]

Awesome PeterU, I'm very jealous. The Amiga years unfortunately coincided with my penniless years, so I could only dream of owning a real one.

And prl....stay on topic!!!.....oh wait

[netmask]

My introduction to computers was via an Amiga 1000 NTSC unit. Later I updated it with a new motherboard called the Phoenix developed in Adelaide . Previously I did have a nerdy MicroBee with an external EPROM programmer. Had all the add on toys ranging from Audio and video digitisers and a midi interface. In 1985 it was so advanced compared to anything else in the consumer market.

[prl]

Shall I create an "Amiga nostalgia" topic and move all the Amiga stuff there?

[jpp]

Yes, and add the Microbee and S100 system, and oh, what about all the DEC and HP Magnetic Core memory systems and not to mention those whopping 12 inch disk platters that held an awesome 3MB of data .

[peteru]

My flatmate bought the VAX and a couple of washing machine drives to go with it when UNSW was decommissioning it. Had to get 3-phase power installed to run it!

[tezza007]

I was late into computers
1985 Commodore 64, tape drive, TV, twin cassette deck with high speed dubbing for copying commercial games
1986 Amstrad 128 for about a week then took it back for a refund
1986 Commodore 128
???? Amiga 500, Thompson monitor, 9-pin dot matrix printer
1992 Amiga 2000, 3MB, 20MB HDD
1995 Couldn't justify the cost of an Amiga 4000 so I moved to the dark side and bought a DX4-100
Many, many computers since, many I built myself
Moved to laptops in 2004, starting with a 17" screen Pentium, weighed a ton and had about 6 fans
Latest was an i7 Toshiba Sattelite 850, a great computer but I got sick of laptops
10 days ago changed back to a tower
i7-6700, 32GB, 480GB SSD, 3TB 7200rpm, gaming case/motherboard/ram/PSU [haven't played a game in 20 years] 24"BenQ on a gas-filled strut, Windows 10, Office 2016
I'm like a pig in the proverbial
As much as I loved the Amiga and how it was light years ahead of anything else at the time, I hate anything old; computers, cars, movies, TV shows, sheilas and most old blokes as well, despite being one. Old cars are great to look at but terrible to drive. Old sheilas are neither
Enough waffle for today

[Gully]

My history is very different - no Amigas!

Started out in the 70's using DEC PDP-10s and PDP-8s.

And from there I went the Sinclair route through the 70's and 80's - ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum, QL.

Along side that starting in the early 80's various IBM PC's

[stevebow]

I had one of the very first PAL A1000s bought from Maxwells in Collingwood, and later put in a DKB Wildfire 060 board and "massive" 2MB 32-bit FAST mem and 60MB HDD plugged in to the Zorro port, which sounded a little like a 747 starting up at the time!

Unfortunately the quality of the PAL encoder was not too crash hot and when I used to work at channel 9 I'd hook up the RGB output through a $1 million Questech framestore, which in those days was one of the very few pieces of kit that would handle RGB video - and also got around the bother of genlocking the A1000 to boot. In fact, I did a few animations for Hey Hey It's Saturday back then, I think the first use of the Amiga for on-air in Australia.

Hyperion pretty much looks after AmigaOS development nowadays (currently up to AOS4.1), http://hyperion-entertainment.biz/ if anyone is interested.

[tezza007]

I had one of the very first PAL A1000s bought from Maxwells in Collingwood, and later put in a DKB Wildfire 060 board and "massive" 2MB 32-bit FAST mem and 60MB HDD...

60MB ? And I thought my 20MB was massive

[prl]

The first computer I ever had hands-on access to, in 1977, (PDP-11/40) had 2.5 MB cartridge disks (RK-05 for those who care). Roughly one-millionth the capacity of what now are standard size desktop disks.

The first computer I was paid to work on had 30MB disk pack drives. The drive units were about the size of washing machines. We had a disk pack fail, and it became unformattable. The service technician washed its platter using long cotton swabs and some sort of organic solvent, and then it worked again

That same computer was also one of the first few computers in the world to run Unix on something that wasn't a PDP-11 (or PDP-7).

It ended its days when the air conditioning evaporator unit in the false ceiling above the computer room developed a blockage in its condensate drain pipe, the condensate tray filled with water, the water overflowed the tray, onto the false ceiling, and ran through a light fitting onto the top of the computer. The computer vented its cooling air through the top, so the water dripped straight down onto the rack crates for the CPU and main memory. The boards were horizontal, and the machine was off-level by just enough that the water dripped off the front top edge of the crate and onto the top board. When that got enough water on it, it repeated down to the next board, and so on.

The computer was replaced by the insurers, and we bought back the wreck for $1000, and got it working again, though some of the memory boards, especially the ones that were core memory, couldn't be recovered.

A bunch of 50A 5V power supplies can certainly have some interesting electrolytic effects.

[tezza007]

1977? They had computers then? The internet porn must've been awful

[Gully]

1977? They had computers then? The internet porn must've been awful

It was much more literary - all ASCII art.

[prl]

... It was much more literary - all ASCII art.

For instance: Abraham Lincoln.

[Recusant]

I either owned or had access to pretty much every Amiga ever built, starting with the 256k NTSC only A1000. I owned some esoteric beasts like the A2500-UX Unix box with a tape drive, a few iterations of CDTV and CD32 with the full motion MPEG cartridge. I think some of these were only ever engineering samples with only about 10 or so produced.

Good times!

...where are they now?! dibs!

[Recusant]

My introduction to computers was via an Amiga 1000 NTSC unit. Later I updated it with a new motherboard called the Phoenix developed in Adelaide . Previously I did have a nerdy MicroBee with an external EPROM programmer. Had all the add on toys ranging from Audio and video digitisers and a midi interface. In 1985 it was so advanced compared to anything else in the consumer market.

Only a couple of years ago i gave away my A1000 with Phoenix board. I didn't have a keyboard and there was an issue with it that was well beyond me.

After i did some research i thought i was an idiot. But i'm friends with the guy now and he's given me good advice and also an A500 Compact Flash reader with 8mb of RAM. I've physically installed it (required solder) but i haven't set it up yet. Gotta get sorted...

[peteru]

I either owned or had access to pretty much every Amiga ever built, starting with the 256k NTSC only A1000. I owned some esoteric beasts like the A2500-UX Unix box with a tape drive, a few iterations of CDTV and CD32 with the full motion MPEG cartridge. I think some of these were only ever engineering samples with only about 10 or so produced.

Good times!

...where are they now?! dibs!

I sold the whole lot for peanuts about 2 weeks before I moved to Japan a few decades ago. By then I moved on to the BeBox and was paid by Be Inc. to develop drivers. The guy that picked up all the Amiga gear had to make two trips with his car and filled the boot and back seat both times. It's a good thing that I sold the Amiga gear too. If I didn't, it would have gone to storage with the rest of my stuff. Unfortunately, Sydney was hit by a major hailstorm that smashed the asbestos roof at the storage facility. By the time the management have notified me and I managed to come back from Tokyo, pretty much everything was ruined. Whatever wasn't contaminated by asbestos dust and shrapnel was soaked through by being exposed to the elements for weeks.

I still have a dual PPC BeBox, which I should probably sell to a collector.