Veteran CEG\'er
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 807 |
Originally posted by chemguru:
Hmm... No one else had a Commadore 64?
Heh, I was thinking the same thing by this point in the thread.  We got our first computer, a Commodore 64 the day before my eighth birthday, Aug. 5, 1983. I was opening up my presents, and opened a cartridge game called Jupiter Lander. I said, "Where's the um, where's the system?" My dad shrugged. "Maybe you'll get that for Christmas." Feeling dejected, I kept plugging away through the rest of my presents until I got to the big one. Never in a million years would I have expected a freakin' computer!
The other game I got was Gortek and the Microchips, a learning tool for teaching BASIC programming to kids. Opening it up we found cassettes, and looking through the manual my dad found we needed the $40 Datasette drive to play it, and bought that the next night. In October, I believe, he sprang for the 1541 disk drive, which cost more than the computer itself but, as I so often point out to Apple II worshippers (?!), the total cost was still less than that of an Apple IIE for a MUCH better computer. (even if Commodore BASIC was grossly underdeveloped; it's no wonder assembly became the standard for writing games, might as well if you'd have to POKE everything into memory using BASIC...)
In early '85 my dad got an AT&T IBM 8088 clone, 8 MhZ processor, 128K RAM to start (he later brought it up to 640) and two 5.25" disk drives. Eventually he got a hard drive that could hold a whopping twenty megabytes! Not gigabytes kiddies, a 20 meg hard drive that was a cube about five inches on all dimensions.
My dad traded the Commodore 64 to a friend for his Franklin Ace 1500, an Apple IIE compatible, getting all of his software without giving up any of ours , and soon bought a Commodore 128. These were our computers until 1993 when we FINALLY got a 50 MhZ 486 DXII. Christmas '98 was the very end of the Pentium II's run, and we got a 450 MhZ PII that's still in the kitchen and still runs almost anything. Before I moved out I had an Athlon 1.53GhZ machine built by a computer store in Countryside. 64 megs of memory on the graphics card, 256 MB of regular RAM, 80 gig hard drive, 3.5" flopppy, DVD/CD ROM drive and a CDROM/burner. Not quite state of the art, but it runs GTA.  Not long after this my dad put together a machine for himself, not quite what mine is but it'll run anything he needs it to for a good decade or so.
Oh, and I've also got an Amiga 500 I bought off Ebay a while back because I REALLY wanted an Amiga in late '88. Haven't done anything with it in a while...
--T.J.
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