What is Your Favorite Vintage Computer from the 80s or early 90s?

Neat Topic ~ I can’t wait to read the responses! :smiley:

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I’m going to say that my favorite vintage computer from that time was the Apple IIe. It was the ONLY computer in our high school; and, in order to use it, we would have to be the first to complete our typing assignments accurately. Most of our friends could care less about it; but, my younger brother and I absolutely loved using it! Needless to say, we both had top grades in our typing glass! :sunglasses:

Below was a bit about one of my more ‘proud’ (as a teen) moments with it… hehe… :joy:

I bought my first computer, a Southwest Technical Products 6809, as a kit and built it during the summer between my Junior and Senior years of college. I thought I was going to go blind soldering the 8K memory board. Yes, that was 8 KILObytes of static RAM on a printed circuit board maybe 6" by 8".

I finished building it about a week before I had to go back, plugged a terminal into it and powered it up. Nothing. The limited tools I had at home did not reveal anything obvious. I will have to diagnose it in the electronics labs where there was much more equipment.

When I finally got time to look at it, everything seemed to point to a defective serial interface card. As I was digging through the box it came in to pack it up, a small piece of paper fell out which stated that this newer model of the board has hardware handshaking, that I had to either have more than three conductors in the cable or a jumper for the Clear To Send pin. Aha!

A few minutes later, the thing was running. Because I did not have the money at the time to buy any storage devices, not even a cassette interface board, I had to settle for entering machine code with the system monitor. But that was loads of fun.

A year later, my first floppy disk drive only held about 70K, but it was heaven compared to keying in programs or trying to use unreliable cassette tape storage.

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'80’s? '90’s? Vintage? This is new stuff!:slight_smile:

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Mine was a grey TRS-80 Color Computer since that is what I grew up with as a kid. Saved my allowance, sold off 2 Atari 2600 game consoles, and collected aluminum cans to buy it and mom and stepdad pitched in the last $100.

If you guys have a vintage computer you’re trying to fix, I run arcadecomponents.com in my spare time and have a huge assortment of old ICs to fix things. I have a lot of ICs that Tanner’s doesn’t have. :slight_smile:

I’m in San Jose this week for the day job and am coming home with a suitcase full of parts, including 4 aluminum chip tubes of Signetics 21F02 1k x 1 bit MOS RAM. When’s the last time you saw aluminum chip tubes?

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Hmm … I’m tied between the Commodore 64 and the IBM XT …

Commodore 64

IBM XT

I had quite a few good memories running a bulletin board. And making ANSI art with THEDRAW …

Here is an example of ANSI art … not my BBS

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I liked the Apple II series as well … never will forget the unique sound of the floppy disk drives vibrating then scratching as it read the disk …

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It also sometimes had that slightly off purple green text…

Original Apple IIe system

Then I remember when they got the new version … ooooooo … aaaaahhhhh

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Does late 1979 count? How about favorite computer with least favorite feature?

I got my Atari 400 in January of 1980. I still have it and the cassette drive. I don’t miss typing on that membrane keyboard! :slight_smile:

http://oldcomputers.net/atari400.html

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Regarding Apple II graphics…

Odd = green, Even = violet, that crazy Woz!

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I cut my teeth on an NCR 8100 (predecessor of the 8200) minicomputer running M/PM (multiprocessing CP/M), later moving to an NCR PC-6. You might guess where my Dad was employed. :slight_smile: I have many fond memories of these two machines.

At school, we had Apple ][s (some were even e!), friends had C=64s, Sinclair, and an actual IBM PC-AT.

I’d say the PC-6 was my favorite.

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Couple of months ago, Fred’s warehouse. :wink:

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Had to give this though as to my favorite… I prefered to use the CP/M machines for work, but no computer I have ever used was more fun then this one.

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I had an Amiga, briefly, but never really got into it. Seemed pretty cool, but Macintosh interested me more.

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I know we maybe lumping “retro” in with “Vintage” but this is more out of the fact that the next generation deems anything older than two years as vintage.

But with that said it would still be great to hear about ones experiences and systems from the days before the home pc market. So feel free to add those as well.

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My earliest computer that I used in College was called 12" Slide Rule.l,

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Only fair I share mine as well.

So as some of you may already know, I’ve been programming since I was six years old. My first computer was the TRS-80 MC-10 where I was learning to program basic games, do math, and a few “database” programs for my Grandpa’s Library of books and videos. Doing this time I also had the Atari 2600, Nintendo and a C64.

Fast forward a few years of weekends in the computer lab at the library and taking pre-collage course at Community College of Southern Nevada I start making a few friends in the Computer Science program and they allow me to sneak into the computer lab where I start learning about BBS’s, DOS/Windows 3.1 and a tone of other great stuff. Eventually I get my own Ibm clone that had a 286 processor, 2Mb ram, EGA, a 9600 hayes modem, and a 40Mb harddrive where I start to program in QBASIC and start surfing around on bbs’s and uucp sites mostly learing what I could but also publishing a basic game or two that never really went anywheres.

Things for me really didn’t kick off until after I got my IBM PS/2 M55 and INTEL FM-144VR FaxModem to run a Wildcat 6 BBS and started to hang out with LOA on IRC and the Hackers.com forums. Of course this was the later half of the 90’s but honestly I ran my board and early hosting system off a collection of IBM PS/2 model 30/55’s and a few donated 486’s, and Motorola workstations. It wasn’t until I saved up and bought my first P6 board that I could get really serious about IT and UNIX as a whole.

My fondest memories though would be spending all those hours in the Community collage’s lab learning hands on from the guys that actually built out and ran the lab. They had a passion for computers which no one could rival and greatly enjoyed sharing what they knew. That kind of spirit left a large impression with me and its part of what motivated me growing up with these computers right there in my bedroom and when I dialed up some random board or shell account I just found while surfing.



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I used those too.

My first thing called a “computer” was this gadget in the upper-right corner to calculate the altitude of a model rocket: http://www.ninfinger.org/rockets/nostalgia/70est128.html

Later, I owned several programmable calculators, but nobody called those computers.

My very first program (sophomore year) was in assembly language on an IBM 370 mainframe computer using punched cards. At the time, I was really into road rallyes, so my program read an input deck containing route instructions along with time and mileage events and calculated whether I was ahead or behind the designated pace. Never mind that there was no way I was going to get that monster of a machine (physical size-wise) into any vehicle and have it running as I drove. I did not understand what I was doing and somehow managed to get it working.

Luckily, the following quarter was an introduction to microprocessors which made sense to me and showed me the way to the future.

Generally, freshmen took an introduction to programming elective using FORTRAN; that made sense at the time at an engineering school. When my turn came, that class was not offered for some reason and in its place, we were taught a fictional machine with no hands-on lab work.

We were also given access to a DEC PDP-10 minicomputer. Many of us wasted an inordinate amount of time playing text-mode “Star Trek” and adventure games.

Once, a fancy multiplayer space war game appeared. You were assigned a fleet of spaceships seemingly at random and we played against the computer or each other. It was difficult to lose a ship, but they did sustain damage. The fun ended in a scandal when someone discovered that the size and number of ships depended on the number and size of files in our account. As ships suffered damage, bytes were changed in our files; if we lost a ship, a file disappeared.

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Did anybody else attend Mark Haven’s class on BBS systems back in, I think, March? He used to run one out of his childhood bedroom at the time when ANSI graphics was a thing.

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Army ROTC made me take FORTRAN IV to familiarize myself with the “world to come” in 1976. Never used it as a language, gawd I hated key-punching those cards to input program, but it did prove valuable in it taught me somewhat how computers think, at that time very linearly.

IBM 370, that was pretty much the workhorse standard for a lot of years.

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