There was that period in the nineties, where PCs felt like they were 'old' after 6 months, exacerbated completely by Intel was ramping out new x86 silicon in rhythmic beat to Moores Law.

Later years at university and early work I 'discovered' RISC computing DEC Alpha's, Silicon Graphics and SPARCs. Good old day

I still prefer VMS to the Unix world 😂

In reply to a post by pluralist:

How about a bog standard paper address book, for the indexed pages it provides?

Or a card index system, can get them from Amazon, they are about a tenner. i just thought it would be nice to have it digital.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Back in the day (1992) I had an Acer 386sx with a whopping 4MB or RAM. As I recall it was socket upgradable to a a 486sx. Steady now! 🤣

i started with a 166Mhz Cyris based pc, running windows 95, it was an Amiga 4000 before that and a Amiga 500 before that, 8 bit machines before that, going backwards, CBM64, Zx spectrum and ZX81.
i have used older P.Cs, I used an Amstrad PC and a PCW, which was not a P.C.

i think the fun have gone out of computers to be honest.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

i think the fun have gone out of computers to be honest.

A little yeah. I sued to build everything up myself, from simple desktops to raid arrayed servers. Haven't had the inclination to do that in probably 25 years. They are just an appliance to me now. Sad but true.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

I still prefer VMS to the Unix world 😂

Yeh VMS was an operating system for grown ups! It was polished. You ran your company with VMS. Unix was still a bit of a toerag OS that the hippies in computer science faculties evangelised. Solaris and BSD were the start of making Unix grown up. Linux was still a newborn baby back then.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I used an Amstrad PC and a PCW, which was not a P.C.

Ermmm! The PCW was a fully-fledged CP/M microcomputer, which all such devices were for years before IBM realised they weren't just a hobbyist fad but threatened their mainframe business.

OK, Amstrad sold it bundled as a word-processor with a printer, but any CP/M software could run. The important one being Sage Accounts. I used sell the darn things and it ROFL.

The acronym PC (Personal Computer) didn't exist until IBM called their micro-computers that. There were plenty of other makes around, almost all using CP/M or MP/M (the multi-user version with dumb terminals like Unix).

Edited by pluralist (Tue 10-Aug-21 23:50:35)

My first PC in 1988 was an Amstrad 1640, EGA monitor with dual 5.25" floppy drives and no hard drive.

About a year later I got a second PC - the Amstrad 2286 which actually had a hard drive and a 3.5" floppy.

Changed PCs about once a year then for many years going through 386, 486, many breeds of pentium, etc, etc. My current PC is now about 6 years old (it was a very high spec gaming PC when I built it) and my daily use Windows device is a decent spec gaming laptop that is a couple of years old. In the early days if you didn't replace every year you couldn't keep up but now unless you have very specific requirements you can keep a device for quite a while.

Work wise I started on an IBM System 36 mainframe developing in RPG II/III. Changed jobs and spent time supporting Novell networks, Vax VMS, Digital Ultrix/Unix and onwards - this was all early 90's. Stopped doing direct support quite some time back but I still dabble to keep my hand in and may well do a bit more again soon with some changes in the way we do our support.

Edited by ian72 (Wed 11-Aug-21 09:30:01)

How about this one: https://down10.software/download-index-card-database...

In reply to a post by ian72:

My first PC in 1988 was an Amstrad 1640, EGA monitor with dual 5.25" floppy drives and no hard drive.

I used the 512 with CGA monitor and dual 5.25" floppies!

About a year later I got a second PC - the Amstrad 2286 which actually had a hard drive and a 3.5" floppy.

My parents home PC was the Amstrad portable (PPC512) with an external monitor, but with a hard drive upgrade. It had a built in modem which was very useful for Compuserve

In the early days if you didn't replace every year you couldn't keep up but now unless you have very specific requirements you can keep a device for quite a while.

Yes, Windows 11's requirements is causing an upgrade cycle as my 6 year old PC is a 4th Gen Intel CPU but no TPM option on motherboard means time to spend money.