General Chat

When did you get your first computer and what was It? I got a Spectrum in the early 1980's the best Christmas present ever, no mouse like we have now, with only games like space invaders, pac man and Horace and if you wanted to create a nice pattern page you had to take hours typing in the info. Does anyone remember loading on the info from a tape recorder bur bur be be be for ages. How life has got so much easier. Lou

YOU WERE LUCKY, THIS IS MY FIRST PC HP PAVILLION, BASIC BUT DOES THE JOB, IT'S ME THAT NEEDS UPDATING lol.

we had an old one in the 80's from ex's work. can't remember there being a mouse on that one either! used it just for typing and playing minesweeper! only really got into the internet when he started working from home and had it all set up here with broadband. Maz. XX

I too had a spectrum in the 80's. Maybe that's what put me off getting one till 18 months ago when my hubby bought this one. lol

I have been lucky as I had the Spectrum and then stayed on computers at school and then work so I have never been of them. The thought of only just starting using one now would terrify me as there is so much to learn. You must be a brave lot. Lou

We had a Sinclair ZX81 sometime around 1982 Susan

Yep Me too Lue The good old days of DOS eh and can you remember the 28k modem now that was a high speed connection lol Steve

I got an Amstrad CPC464 in the late 80',s as a Xmas pressie,, It had a green screen and i thought it was the business,, games took at least 3 hrs ( well it seemed like it) to load and you had to remember to turn your tape over straightaway to load side 2 of the cassette otherwise you would have to start from scratch GGRRR!!! I also remember having long arguments in the playground about which was better,, the Speccy or the Commodore 64!!! I was a Speccy fan thru and thru Nic

my first was a commodore 64 in the early 80's. My favourite game was one called Gridrunner. I learned how to program it, and also bought a disc drive (v v expensive then) so I could do word processing & rudimentary spreadsheets on it. A bit geeky, but I used to love messing about with the display models in shops, to disable the cursor function. (It still responded to commands, but you couldn't see what you'd typed) My first 'proper' PC was in 1991, bought with redundancy money. It had a 40M hard drive - you couldn't even load an operating system on that now! And it came without a sound card or modem.

I think the main change besides not having a mouse was the fact that you had to plug them into the telly. I used to love it when no-one was in the house and I could use the big colour telly in the front room. The rest of the time I had it on a b/w protable in the bedroom. Poor me. Lou

1987: BBC computers in school (ok not mine but I hogged it ok) you had to press ctrl, rtn and alt (or was it shift) to boot it up and it used 5' floppy floppy disks. We had Pod can..... and Yellow brick road. (my secondary school had one in the science lab in 1995 with chemistry programs). 1987/8: Fisher Price? my first computer. 1989ish: Spectrum - heap of junk that took hours to load and the gun thing was a waste of box space. We had Trivial persuit, popeye platform game (had to rescue sweet pea and Olive), a maths game/quiz and a spelling program. How many Sundays did I waste waiting for those stupid tapes to load up? I was only 6 for goodness sake 1991ish: SNES - again not wanted (dad bought it for me like he had the spectrum) We still use it my brother and I. We have Super Mario, Mario cart, James pond (that's Pond not Bond) and Super metriod. 1996/7: first PC - mam persauded dad that it would be good to have so I could do course work (it still works and has had 0 upgrades.). 2002: My beloved laptop. Going by that lot I've used most OS known to man woman and child! windows:- 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, ME, NT, XP - how times have changed!!

This is my first computer - only did a basic computer course last Xmas, so still very new at it. I got it 2nd-hand, but it is an XP one. Don't know what I used to do before I had it - housework I expect, don't get much of it done now though! Stella