Just passed terabyte...

[Bogie]

And life is getting strangerer and strangerer...
 
I remember my first hard drive. The size of a shoe box, and worth its weight in, well... Something heavy and expensive...
 
And a whopping 15 megabytes.

[esheato]

Ahh, yes. I had a 286/10 megahertz stuffed into quite a large box with a four color monitor. The hard drive was 20 megabytes and I had compressed it to double the capacity.

I was the coolest kid on my block.

Ed

[Cromlech]

I have a computer geek friend who has over a terabyte of Anime/Questionable material on his home network (a load of linked PCs).

[mfree]

8086, 640k, 10Mb here... Tandy 1000SL. Of course really it was the family computer since I was a young'n...

It came with 384k ram, the rest was a pricey upgrade.
An internal CLOCK was an upgrade (SmartWatch)
the 10M miniature hard drive was so new that someone had to invent a mount that went on an ISA card to use.
The hard drive was 8 bit IDE, as opposed to "normal" 16 bit.

Deskmate 3.0 kicked booty though, and the 16 color graphics made games much better looking than 4 color CGA.

[robear]

feh..

First PC was a Kaypro 4.  http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=549
Zilog Z80 chip, running at a screaming 2.5Mhz.   64K of RAM.   2 double sided, double density 400K 5.25 floppies.  9" green monochrome screen, text only.   It was considered "portable" at the time, but could better be described as "luggable". (33 lbs!!)  OS was CP/M - similar to DOS.    I connected to compuserve via my external Hayes 300baud modem; you could actually read faster than the characters appeared on screen.   Printer was a Telex TTX1014 daisy-wheel; it printed slower than the modem!

Kaypro also made the Kaypro 10, which also included a 10meg hard drive, but it was too rich for my blood at the time.

-R

[ilbob]

I had the same model Kaypro.

Also a Vic20, Commodore64, and a TimexSinclair.

feh..

First PC was a Kaypro 4.  http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=549
Zilog Z80 chip, running at a screaming 2.5Mhz.   64K of RAM.   2 double sided, double density 400K 5.25 floppies.  9" green monochrome screen, text only.   It was considered "portable" at the time, but could better be described as "luggable". (33 lbs!!)  OS was CP/M - similar to DOS.    I connected to compuserve via my external Hayes 300baud modem; you could actually read faster than the characters appeared on screen.   Printer was a Telex TTX1014 daisy-wheel; it printed slower than the modem!

Kaypro also made the Kaypro 10, which also included a 10meg hard drive, but it was too rich for my blood at the time.

-R

[Fly320s]

Had a Radio Shack TRS80, Trash80 I called it.

Bogie, do you have a terabyte of storage, or is this standard on some new machine?

[Perd Hapley]

Elementary School.  The Apple with the 5.25 disk drive.  Oregon Trail, anyone?   

[Mabs2]

I only have 200 gigs over two drives.
And at LEAST half of it is anime. :3

[MechAg94]

I now have more memory than the hard drive of the first computer I ever bought.

[MechAg94]

My first real computer as a kid was a Tandy 1000.  It had 3.5" and 5.25" disk drives with no hard drive.  Booted off a Dos disk.  Ran Word Perfect off a 5.25" disk.  Still got me some good grades on reports.

[mtnbkr]

I now have more memory than the hard drive of the first computer I ever bought.

I passed that benchmark in the mid 90s.

I have an 80gig drive that isn't even close to full.  Frankly, I'd rather have a smaller capacity (100gig or less), yet higher quality and less expensive drive than a multi-hundred gigabyte drive for $100+ that's going to fail in a year or two. 

Chris

[zahc]

I have two 320GB internal, and an external 250 for backup. I'm about 70% full with anime and ripped movies, but I'll probably delete some of the movies because I don't use my computer as a HTPC anymore. I have over 120GB of digital music now.

[RadioFreeSeaLab]

Apple IIe for me.  Then an 8086 I built from scrap, an 80386 built from scrap, and I've so many computers since then I can't recall.
My current network is a Macbook Core 2 Duo @ 2.0 GHz, a PowerMac G3 @ 300MHz, and a Sun Ultra 10.

[Brad Johnson]

I remember the first machine I ever worked on in any detail.  It was a Tandy 8086 at 4Mhz.  It had 640k RAM, but only if the expansion slots were full.  It had dual drives - a 5.25" internal and 8" external.  Hard drive was a 5MB full height 8-bit card.  Greenscreen monochrome monitor.  It came with the extra-special dot matrix printer that would support a two color ribbon.

Brad

[mtnbkr]

I've been *using* personal computers since the Apple II days, but the first one I *owned* was a Tandy 1000 286 8mhz with da swith, I mean turbo button.  It had 1meg of ram and a 20meg hdd on a card (never filled that one up either).  It was equipped with a 5.25 and 3.5" floppy, both standard capacity, not those new fangled high capacity ones (760k on the 3.5) and a 2400bps modem.  I used the modem to dial ever BBS I could find.   The monitor was a 16 color Tandy job (which delivered as good if not better games graphics than my friend's SVGA monitor), the printer was a noisy 9pin dot matrix (I think it had a red and black ribbon).  My suitemates in college loved it when I'd print a research paper early in the morning.   I played the original Civilization for hours on that machine.  Of course, it was so slow that it took nearly an hour to create a new world each time you started a new game.

I ran DOS 5.0 on it till I replaced it with a Pentium 75 running Win3.11 and later OS/2, and then even later, Win95.

Chris

[Brad Johnson]

I played the original Civilization for hours on that machine.

Leisure Suit Larry forever!

Brad

[BakerMikeRomeo]

The first computer I can remember using was a 386 (maybe a 286? I don't know), but it had the turbo button (go from thirty three MHz to a whopping sixty six! Burnin' up the ROAD! Yeah!). Later we upgraded to a 486DX4  (rock on, 100 MHz) and a 2 GB hard drive. Oh man. X-COM: UFO Defense. You know how we roll, dog.

~GnSx

[Perd Hapley]

What happened after the Pentium?  When I was a teenager, I was only marginally interested in computers, but I remember the 486 being The Bomb, then the Pentium topped that.  I know there's also a Pentium II, but what happened after that?  What generation are we on with PCs?

[RadioFreeSeaLab]

Great Moments in Microprocessor History.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/pa-microhist.html?ca=dgr-mw08MicroHistory

[Bogie]

I still have my Kaypro 4, and it still boots!
 
I didn't go 'dos until about 1987...  That machine was a turbo 8088 with the aforementioned 15 megger. I never thought I'd need any more...
 
The terabyte is spread around my home network, and is gonna get bigger here in a week or so, because I'm going to try to shoehorn in a sacrificial box to play with this MCSE crap on - it'll become a linux box after I'm through.
 
A lot of the storage is used by .wav files.
 

 

[Manedwolf]

I played the original Civilization for hours on that machine.

Leisure Suit Larry forever!

Brad

I'm disillusioned. I remembered the Space Quest games as being so much fun. But now they just came out with a Collection of them I picked up.

Now I find that the pacing is maddeningly slow, the humor is lame at best, painful at worst, and the games are abysmally short with puzzles that are clumsy and impossible unless you find the right pixel or get the parser phrase perfect. Now that it's all these years later, I'm not a little kid, and I've been spoiled by fast-paced, deeper games, everything from Splinter Cell to Twilight Princess. The old Sierras seem primitive and painfully SLOW in comparison. And the narrator could make you homicidal.

Amazing how memories seem better than the reality...

[Ben]

Timex Sinclair for my first one -- real men used cassette tapes for data storage back then (and before anyone says "punch cards", I used them in High School).

First hard drive was a 4meg jury-rigged into an old IBM desktop case that then plugged into the back of my Atari ST. The hard drive enclosure was twice the size of the computer. 

[Sindawe]

First machine I got a chance to play with was an Apple IIe in Jr. High.  Writting simple programs with a keyboard was MUCH more fun than doing it longhand, then transfering it to punch cards as we'd done earlier in the semester.

First one I actually owned was a hand-me-down PCjr that had been upgraded with side cars for extra RAM and a parallel printer port. Even had Lotus 123 on a ROM cartridge. Got it from my then FIL when he went to a '286.  Spent many hours playing King's Quest I and Mean 18.  We were a bit freaked about what the inlaws would say when they learned we'd spent $200 for a 1200 baud modem for the thing, since the ex and I were still struggling immediately post college.

Now, my home looks like a 'white-trash geek's house'.  PC carcasses most rooms, old drives litter the stairs, ethernet cable everywhere.  I think I passed the terabyte mile post in active storage space sometime around 1998.

[RevDisk]

And life is getting strangerer and strangerer...
 
I remember my first hard drive. The size of a shoe box, and worth its weight in, well... Something heavy and expensive...
 
And a whopping 15 megabytes.

Back at my old job at DISA, amoung other things, we supported the military's IT needs.  Our storage capacity was classified, obviously, but here's a hint.  We measured our capacity in 100 TB containers.  And we had lots of 'em.

Of course, our storage capacity was a joke compared to the NSA.  'em folks buy disk space by the warehouse.