Prior to my Amstrad 1640 I had access to a string of home computers (my Dad was a bit of a collector- most donated to the National Computer museum in Bletchly Park after he died). Those were machines with character: the 16 bit Texas TI 99/4 - not the 4a, the 4 - obvious difference- chicklet keyboard and this was from 1979, an Acorn Electron, Amstrad CPC 464, 6128, 8256 - bit of an Amstrad fan for a bit, Commodore 64 (original beige and sleaker C version, Sharp MZ700 (great looking machine, fired up into a simple machine operating system and you had to load basic or another language from tape) and a Tatung Einstein (which was often used in professional settings as a development machine for Amstrad and Spectrum games). The Amstrad 1640 was the beginning of the end when it came to quirky machines - like Dabsy though I did get a evesham machine at some point, though mine was a AMD64 equiped laptop.
AmiPro word processor was the worst! A northern Scottish utility I worked for had their IT department run by bean counters, so AmiPro was chosen on the grounds it was cheaper! It’s the only application level program I came across that could actually zap the BIOS - after AmiPro crashed the PC told me it didn’t have a hard drive any more! The same group of idiots chose CC Mail which could only exchange mail items between different servers by dialling up a dedicated modem link - at a time when we had a routed multi protocol data network. Oh well - you know who you are!!
Up until then it was Sun Workstations. With a Psion 5 and a Nokia GSM mobile using a backdoor dialup modem at 300baud for on the road email and job monitoring.
On receipt of a new computer, it is my policy to clean the HDD of games, bells, screensavers, freebies, and most importantly, no bloody Adobe constantly updating itself.......
Definitely agree about the Psion 3, I did get a 5 and whilst technically superior I didn't like it.
As for early computers, my stepdad was one of the founders of one of the first credit data companies in the UK. They had a Sperry Univac mini as their main company machine, with Superbrain's as the terminals and for other bits and pieces. Definitely looks to me like Intertec took a few design ideas from the Q1!
So he brought one of those home and I got to play with it. Twin 8" floppies, running CP/M and of course Microsoft Basic v1.
I remember in 1995 that it would cost about $100 per MB of RAM, and a magazine had come up with an AutoCad workstation sporting a full 64MB of RAM ! We drooled at the prospect of how much architectural drafting could be contemplated All At One Time...
(I updated my cranky old 3800x Ryzen, circa 2020, the other day with a 4TB M.2 and 128 GB of DDR4 for a total outlay of about $300. Within its vast plains resides Virt-Manager, which encapsulates numerous, long-gone realms of Windows 7; Windows 10; lessee I've got a Solaris in there; I've got a Next OS; there's a couple of Mac OS-X; a couple more Ubuntu servers; plus one instance of the extremely brilliant Kolibri OS -- the entire OS can be booted from a solitary 1.44 MB diskette -- which contains the most maddening copy of Laser Tank that I'd ever come across. Ye gods, how to conquer level 16? It's impossible! And Yet..)
My weirdest computer definitely was the Acorn Archimedes A310 when it was still running its Arthur OS from ROM. The worst one was the Power Macintosh 7100 in 1994 which was struggling to "run" System 7.1 or so but apparently had some chronic problems with its rosette. Got rid of that one quickly...
Ah, the Series 3. I covered MacWorld Boston 1992 or 1993 for MicroScope using one of those as my word processor. It's one of those things I periodically look up on eBay, think 'why not, it's only 50 quid', and then wonder what the eff I'd actually use if for. Ditto Cambridge Z88, Amstrad N100 and countless other bits of retro kit I've ogled over the years.
At least pre-Windows / OSX you could just delete the crapware. Now even Dell and HP are pre-loading an ever-increasing number of "Apps" (FFS why would _documentation_ require _installation_?). It's also getting increasingly difficult to know without days of reading between the lines and following red herrings to know what software is a complete waste of hard drive space / read/write time and CPU cycles and what's actually going to be of some benefit. Microsoft, really? *SIX* different language versions of Office 365 *AND* OneNote? 🤦🙄
It was buying a Tiny PC that got me into IT. It was so crap, I had to learn how to fix and upgrade it from the get go. Not sure if I should hate or love Tiny for this - I bought it to work on my degree in Product Design and I haven't designed anything since.
A gigabyte of RAM or HDD on your 486SX/16 ?
That's a very short list! Surely not comprehensive?
Lord save us from beasties and ghosties and unwanted software!
Prior to my Amstrad 1640 I had access to a string of home computers (my Dad was a bit of a collector- most donated to the National Computer museum in Bletchly Park after he died). Those were machines with character: the 16 bit Texas TI 99/4 - not the 4a, the 4 - obvious difference- chicklet keyboard and this was from 1979, an Acorn Electron, Amstrad CPC 464, 6128, 8256 - bit of an Amstrad fan for a bit, Commodore 64 (original beige and sleaker C version, Sharp MZ700 (great looking machine, fired up into a simple machine operating system and you had to load basic or another language from tape) and a Tatung Einstein (which was often used in professional settings as a development machine for Amstrad and Spectrum games). The Amstrad 1640 was the beginning of the end when it came to quirky machines - like Dabsy though I did get a evesham machine at some point, though mine was a AMD64 equiped laptop.
AmiPro word processor was the worst! A northern Scottish utility I worked for had their IT department run by bean counters, so AmiPro was chosen on the grounds it was cheaper! It’s the only application level program I came across that could actually zap the BIOS - after AmiPro crashed the PC told me it didn’t have a hard drive any more! The same group of idiots chose CC Mail which could only exchange mail items between different servers by dialling up a dedicated modem link - at a time when we had a routed multi protocol data network. Oh well - you know who you are!!
What on earth possessed you to buy a 486SX? I thought everyone knew that the SX's were just DX's that had failed quality control
Managed to avoid PCs until circa 2001.
Up until then it was Sun Workstations. With a Psion 5 and a Nokia GSM mobile using a backdoor dialup modem at 300baud for on the road email and job monitoring.
Kids. They've never had it so good.
Bloatware is the spawn of the Devil.
On receipt of a new computer, it is my policy to clean the HDD of games, bells, screensavers, freebies, and most importantly, no bloody Adobe constantly updating itself.......
Definitely agree about the Psion 3, I did get a 5 and whilst technically superior I didn't like it.
As for early computers, my stepdad was one of the founders of one of the first credit data companies in the UK. They had a Sperry Univac mini as their main company machine, with Superbrain's as the terminals and for other bits and pieces. Definitely looks to me like Intertec took a few design ideas from the Q1!
So he brought one of those home and I got to play with it. Twin 8" floppies, running CP/M and of course Microsoft Basic v1.
I remember in 1995 that it would cost about $100 per MB of RAM, and a magazine had come up with an AutoCad workstation sporting a full 64MB of RAM ! We drooled at the prospect of how much architectural drafting could be contemplated All At One Time...
(I updated my cranky old 3800x Ryzen, circa 2020, the other day with a 4TB M.2 and 128 GB of DDR4 for a total outlay of about $300. Within its vast plains resides Virt-Manager, which encapsulates numerous, long-gone realms of Windows 7; Windows 10; lessee I've got a Solaris in there; I've got a Next OS; there's a couple of Mac OS-X; a couple more Ubuntu servers; plus one instance of the extremely brilliant Kolibri OS -- the entire OS can be booted from a solitary 1.44 MB diskette -- which contains the most maddening copy of Laser Tank that I'd ever come across. Ye gods, how to conquer level 16? It's impossible! And Yet..)
NIN … was that the music the Chemical Brothers sampled for Hey Boy Hey Girl?
My weirdest computer definitely was the Acorn Archimedes A310 when it was still running its Arthur OS from ROM. The worst one was the Power Macintosh 7100 in 1994 which was struggling to "run" System 7.1 or so but apparently had some chronic problems with its rosette. Got rid of that one quickly...
Ah, the Series 3. I covered MacWorld Boston 1992 or 1993 for MicroScope using one of those as my word processor. It's one of those things I periodically look up on eBay, think 'why not, it's only 50 quid', and then wonder what the eff I'd actually use if for. Ditto Cambridge Z88, Amstrad N100 and countless other bits of retro kit I've ogled over the years.
At least pre-Windows / OSX you could just delete the crapware. Now even Dell and HP are pre-loading an ever-increasing number of "Apps" (FFS why would _documentation_ require _installation_?). It's also getting increasingly difficult to know without days of reading between the lines and following red herrings to know what software is a complete waste of hard drive space / read/write time and CPU cycles and what's actually going to be of some benefit. Microsoft, really? *SIX* different language versions of Office 365 *AND* OneNote? 🤦🙄
It was buying a Tiny PC that got me into IT. It was so crap, I had to learn how to fix and upgrade it from the get go. Not sure if I should hate or love Tiny for this - I bought it to work on my degree in Product Design and I haven't designed anything since.