Discovering My Past: The Evolution of Computers in 1984

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The discussion revolves around a vintage computer, identified as a Compaq Portable, from the early 1980s. Participants reminisce about the high costs of early computers, with the Compaq priced at $2,999 when it was released in 1983. They reflect on the limitations of technology at that time, such as the absence of the internet and the reliance on word processing. The conversation touches on personal experiences with various computers, including the Apple Lisa and early IBM PCs, and the nostalgia associated with using DOS and early gaming. The humor in the thread is highlighted by playful banter about the appearance of the original poster and the shared memories of using outdated technology. The mention of a program that mimicked Stephen Hawking's voice adds a lighthearted touch to the discussion. Overall, the thread captures a sense of nostalgia for early computing experiences and the evolution of technology over the decades.
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This is me, 9 months pregnant with the Spawn. What computer is that? The year is 1984. I know I had a Commodore 64 with a large monitor (in orange). What is this?

spawncomputer6hq.jpg
 
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Evo said:
What is this?

It is an electric space heater. :biggrin:
 
Is it an Atari?
 
There's a computer there? All I saw were some legs :-p
 
Does that fuzzy white say IBM?
 
mattmns said:
There's a computer there? All I saw were some legs :-p
Aw...free GOOBF card for mattmns. :smile:
 
cyrusabdollahi said:
Does that white bit say IBM?
I can't tell what it says. I'll bet it's somewhere in my basement.

I had a Compaq, but it was a laptop. It came with a hand crank and optional hamster wheel.
 
Looks like an IBM to me,

ibm5155.jpg


They were the power house back in the day.
 
Evo said:
I can't tell what it says. I'll bet it's somewhere in my basement.

I had a Compaq, but it was a laptop. It came with a hand crank and optional hamster wheel.

hey, you got it!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0d/CompaqPortable.jpg

It is a compaq! And here I was searching oscilloscopes...:rolleyes:
 
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  • #10
Notice the size of the box of floppies?
 
  • #11
cyrusabdollahi said:
hey, you got it!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0d/CompaqPortable.jpg

It is a compaq! And here I was searching oscilloscopes...:rolleyes:
OMG! That's it!

Ok, I now have to give cyrus anything he wants.
 
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  • #12
Evo said:
OMG! That's it!

Ok, I know have to give cyrus anything he wants.

According to wiki, that bad boy cost $2999 bucks new in 83!

It's a good thing computer prices have gone down :rolleyes:
 
  • #13
Is it a museum piece? :smile: http://www.vintage-computer.com/compaq_portable.shtml

:smile: It's a "portable" computer. :smile:
 
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  • #14
I first thought it was the fine machine called the Apple Lisa:

apple1_00.jpg
 
  • #15
cyrusabdollahi said:
According to wiki, that bad boy cost $2999 bucks new in 83!

It's a good thing computer prices have gone down :rolleyes:
Yep, it wasn't cheap. I bought it in 83. But I could type recipes into it. :bugeye:
 
  • #16
yomamma said:
I first thought it was the fine machine called the Apple Lisa:

apple1_00.jpg

:smile: For some reason that made me bust out in laughter! :smile:

Oh man, your killing me...

I always knew Lisa! was evil!

The mouse has ONE button! :smile: ohhh my goodness...what a POS...
 
  • #17
Evo said:
Yep, it wasn't cheap. I bought it in 83. But I could type recipes into it. :bugeye:

Yeah, but this was before the internet!

What did you use it for? It probably had word processing and that's about it.
 
  • #18
cyrusabdollahi said:
Yeah, but this was before the internet!

What did you use it for? It probably had word processing and that's about it.
:frown: :redface: Word processing.

Well, there were billboards back then , if you knew how to connect.
 
  • #19
Hey, I was on the bleeding edge of technology.
 
  • #20
When Tim Berners-Lee gave the world his www adressing, that started the internet. That was in 1993, If I am not mistaken.
 
  • #21
In 1993 I also bought a Pckard Bell multi media computer that allowed me to plug my cable tv cord in and record cable tv shows. And I bought Myst and another very cool program I can't remember with a dragon that was hidden.
 
  • #22
Evo said:
In 1993 I also bought a Pckard Bell multi media computer that allowed me to plug my cable tv cord in and record cable tv shows. And I bought Myst and another very cool program I can't remember with a dragon that was hidden.


:smile: What was the record time, 5min before your 1GB hard drive was full? :smile:

The dark ages :devil:
 
  • #23
cyrusabdollahi said:
:smile: What was the record time, 5min before your 1GB hard drive was full? :smile:

The dark ages :devil:
1 Gb was unheard of. :redface:
 
  • #24
lol our first computer ran on windows 98 and I told my parents it sucked but they woudln't listen to me
 
  • #25
mattmns said:
There's a computer there? All I saw were some legs :-p


i was thinking of those legs on way from work and mattmns beats me to it, they are a 10 out of 10 on the wollie wow factor.:!)
 
  • #26
wolram said:
i was thinking of those legs on way from work and mattmns beats me to it, they are a 10 out of 10 on the wollie wow factor.:!)
Awwww, a GOOBF card for you too wolram. :smile:
 
  • #27
Evo said:
Is it a museum piece? :smile: http://www.vintage-computer.com/compaq_portable.shtml

:smile: It's a "portable" computer. :smile:
I still have an original 1.1 Dos disk for one of those compaqs. :smile:
 
  • #28
Evo said:
Awwww, a GOOBF card for you too wolram. :smile:

Any up to date pics:rolleyes: :biggrin:
 
  • #29
Evo said:
1 Gb was unheard of. :redface:
Not entirely. I had a .5 gig, I bought used for around $300 back then.
IIRC a new 1Gig disk was about $1500 in 93 and $10,000 in 85.

PS: Nice legs
 
  • #30
NoTime said:
PS: Nice legs
Thanks, I've always been told that.
 
  • #31
I had a vic 20, or was it a mick 40.
 
  • #32
Evo said:
Thanks, I've always been told that.
With good reason :smile:
 
  • #33
I have to say all I saw were the legs, too...

On another note, I remember using DOS, enjoying fancy 16 colors in Empire and later Warcraft 1! Now when I play Warcraft 3, there are some kids that don't even know what Starcraft is! Probably never even played Doom 1...

I believe I first got onto the internet with 98, though I had the capability with 95, just not the knowledge. I remember getting a new computer that I thought was just awesome. It had 6 gigabytes and took me years to fill. Now my music library is larger than that.
 
  • #34
Two threads have me all goose pimply tonight, Ivans jets, and Evos computer,i am torn between the two, i think i would forgo my life long ambition and go with Evos computer.
 
  • #35
Evo said:
Is it a museum piece? :smile: http://www.vintage-computer.com/compaq_portable.shtml

:smile: It's a "portable" computer. :smile:
They were commonly refred to a "lugable" not exactly a laptop.

I was runing my Apple ][+ pretty hard in those days. And, at work, beginning to learn the new IBM OS... MS-Dos.
 
  • #36
Nice Computer, wonder if it is worth something now. I remeber DOS, and also 3.11.. which was interesting.. I can't remeber the code, but I would boot up into DOS, then like linux init 5 cmd would load up the GUI, I was young at this time, so I did it to play games mostly hehe... Thats when I was totally fed up with Daily Thomasons Olympic game on my ZX Spectrum

My Dad still has a co-axe single bus ethernet network at home joinning a bunch of old PC's he still has to access from time to time.
 
  • #37
In 1982, I bought a Zenith (for about $2000), which used Dos 2.0. It had 8088 chip with 320 kB RAM and two 5.25" (360 kB) floppy drives. What a pain.

I subsequently added an 8087 math co-processor. :rolleyes:

My best friend bought an original IBM PC. With the employee discount he still paid several thousand bucks for it.
 
  • #38
My first computer sometime in the late 80s I think, was similar to Astro's Zenith. It ran DOS 3(ish), had a tiny RAM (some kB), a pair of 5 1/2" drives and no hard drive. You had to think thrice before hitting the Save key!
 
  • #39
I couldn't afford a hamster drive like Evo's, so I had to use personal peddle power. It also had a build in slide rule for back up. :smile:

The OS was Xenith version of MS-DOS. :rolleyes:

Seriously, though, I couldn't afford and HD, which were on the order of 2 MB back then. One of my friends and colleague invested in a 300 baud modem. :smile:

Those were the days!

In the NE department, we used MACs and were fortunate to have a network in our department, which we put together ourselves. We also had an early CP/M based machine - Ugh!
 
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  • #40
I use to have this bad boy...

amiga_1000_small.jpg


It had games like Chesssmaster, "I am the chess master" "I win, you loose!"
"check mate, you loose!"

And there was one prog you could type and it would talk. It sounded exactly like stephen hawking :smile:
 
  • #41
Geez, I just noticed the computer desk - someone's cute legs were in the way. :biggrin: We had the same model.
 
  • #42
Don't mean to hijack this thread, but GOOD GOD - Sis, our legs are SO identical! I swear - it's like looking at my very own legs attached to a PREGNANT BODY! And I've never had kids, so you can imagine what a shocker THAT is... :biggrin:

OK. Sorry. Back to the computer... Those recipes you spent so much time typing into it... can you still access those? :smile:
 
  • #43
Tsu said:
Don't mean to hijack this thread, but GOOD GOD - Sis, our legs are SO identical! I swear - it's like looking at my very own legs attached to a PREGNANT BODY! And I've never had kids, so you can imagine what a shocker THAT is... :biggrin:
I know every time I see that bathing suit pic of you on the beach in Hawaii, I think it's me.

Oh and you remember the little neighborhood boy, Vermin. I looked like a barrel on toothpicks. So he goes over to my husband and say's "hey mister, your wife is really fat".

OK. Sorry. Back to the computer... Those recipes you spent so much time typing into it... can you still access those? :smile:
Uhm, no. :frown:
 
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  • #44
Tsu said:
... can you still access those? :smile:
At the first company at which I worked out of grad school, I walked into the 'computer room' during the interview. IBM XT and AT. Not even networked. I thought Oh, Sh!#! Well they did upgrade to 1200 baud modem - over a NYNEX line. We used time sharing on a mainframe in Dallas. I can't tell you how often I had to resend or re-retrieve a deck that got boogered up due to the noise on the phone line. And one of the clients wanted to know why we did so many runs. Spurious characters. :rolleyes:

I remember the first P5-133 with Win 3.1 :rolleyes:

We also had to bash together a network, the first of which was for printing.
 
  • #45
Evo said:
I know every time I see that bathing suit pic of you on the beach in Hawaii, I think it's me.

:biggrin: separated at birth... :biggrin:

Oh and you remember the little neighborhood boy, Vermin. I looked like a barrel on toothpicks. So he goes over to my husband and say's "hey mister, your wife is really fat".

What a crack up. 'A barrel on toothpicks was ALWAYS how I described myself, except with my thyroid weight loss, I'm now just a pony keg on toothpicks. :smile: :smile: :smile:

Uhm, no. :frown:

:smile: :smile: :smile: :smile:
 
  • #46
cyrusabdollahi said:
And there was one prog you could type and it would talk. It sounded exactly like stephen hawking :smile:



YES! I remember!

The programme was called "Say". I still giggle when I think of Steven Hawking saying "poo" over and over again!
 
  • #47
You cropped it. Post the rest of the pic!


Evo said:
This is me, 9 months pregnant with the Spawn.
spawncomputer6hq.jpg
 
  • #48
Astronuc said:
Geez, I just noticed the computer desk - someone's cute legs were in the way. :biggrin: We had the same model.
:smile: :smile: :smile: Now that you mention it. I have the same desk too. :smile: :smile: :smile:
That's just to funny.
 
  • #49
cyrusabdollahi said:
According to wiki, that bad boy cost $2999 bucks new in 83!

It's a good thing computer prices have gone down :rolleyes:
I don't know, it could be worth the same today :-p
 

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