PureBasic Forums - English

I have a 2 MB S3virge ISA graphics card laying around hehehe.
Never got to use it hehehe

I was clearing out some old junk the other month and found an old ISA 28.8 Modem! Ah, it reminded me of when i used to play Jedi Knight (Dark Forces II) on the net in the wireplay league. Happy days, i used to be ranked number 2 in the UK! I also remember when playing i had no lag whatsoever. Must be all the spam that has slowed things down nowadays. That was in 1998!

My first experience with the internet was with a 33,6 kb modem.
Man that was expensive back then. But what was even more expensive was about 6 or 7 years ago when I used my laptop to surf the web using my cell phone as a modem. Think the connection speed was 9.6 kb or something, if I remember correctly.

Pantcho!! wrote:I had Apple //C

It rocked!

The only good thing about the Apple //c was that it was functionally a clone of an Apple //e.

Beyond that I though it was trash and a failed attempt at making a portable Apple //e.

In the good 'ol days, I supported a SCO Xenix system that ran on a 2MB 80386 33MHz server with 4 x 30 MB Disks that ran all the Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Sales Order Processing, Warehousing and Accounting Systems for 41 Users using WYSE Terminals. Total cost <> £10K

Today, that same company has 52 Windows PCs with MS Office on each, 2 Print Servers, 1 Active Directory and a 16W 2GHz Unix system with Oracle for its Accounts, Sales Order Processing and Warehousing with a 2TB SAN and 3 guys in the IT dept. Total cost <> £260,000

Somewhere along the line, things got *over-complicated*

Tipperton wrote: Does anyone know what the first hobbyist micro computer was?

Well, if you REALLY were KEEN:

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1147

Quote from the above page:

"Launched in 1976, the Introkit appeared to be very popular. It was the first affordable all-in-one computer everyone could acquire to know a bit about computers.

The basic version was really minimalist: one SC/MP (or "Scamp") microprocessor, one 512-byte ROM containing a monitor program and 256 bytes of RAM for user's programs.

The system was designed to connect to a Teletype - the CPU had serial In and Out pins, but very few hobbyist could afford this massive and expensive equipment. N.S. thus released an optional display kit which was comprised of an add-on card that fitted onto the main board, and a modified calculator for keyboard and display. The machine also needed a dual voltage PSU

Once everything soldered and wire-wrapped, the Introkit was a complete computer and an efficient learning tool. The novice programmer could enter, modify and run programs and thus learn all hardware and software basic concepts of any computing system.

Several of these kits - and other SC/MP machines, were connected to larger computers thanks to the unique and advanced ability of the SC/MP CPU to completely share its system bus with other processors, and thus run smoothly in a multiprocessor environment."

256 Bytes of RAM meant (of course) machine language only. NO BLOAT ALLOWED!

NS released a kit in Australia and I remember the staff of Electronics Australia releasing a little system around it.

Back then, "hobbyist" meant "enthusiast" - in spades!

Amundo wrote:

Tipperton wrote: Does anyone know what the first hobbyist micro computer was?

Well, if you REALLY were KEEN:

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1147

... snip ...

Back then, "hobbyist" meant "enthusiast" - in spades!

Thanks for the compliment!! I had one of those kits only we called them scumps (sc/mp) but it is the same machine. Yeah now i remember I wrote the original "Duck hunt" with sound and light fx for that machine whoah programming on paper in hex and machine code. Those where the days, no 'backup om tape' that had to be invented back then.
The 'scumpy' was on 24/7 which explained why it blew itself up after one and a half year! The ROM literrally "pop-ed" from the motherboard a common feature from "old" computers from that era! Even then with 1Mhz or if you really had a load of money a machine (aka pc) run at 4.7Mhz yes the first PC ran at that very fast speed!!

Thanks for the font memory!!

btw my sc/mp came from England and costed then around 80 pound!! Now i think in the neigborhood of 300 dollar. And yes i was 20 years old then! Had a Pet2001 (a 6510 proc, from Commodore). A Nascom (z80 proc) yes!! an Exidy Sorcerer (z80) I wrote my first commercial program on that machine in (horror) MS Basic brrrrrrr....

Spectrum machines they where really 'odd' machines from Sir Clive!! Who knows him now, does he still is alive?

Jan Vooijs

Yeah now i remember I wrote the original "Duck hunt" with sound and light fx for that machine whoah programming on paper in hex and machine code. Those where the days, no 'backup on tape' that had to be invented back then.

You must be kidding me!!! That's a big honour i can talk to you now. I played that game on my NES system in 1994 (when i was 6) years old and i can still remember it .

Inf0Byt3 wrote:20 MHZ Intel CPU from 1986

??
Are you sure 20MHz in 1986? It sounds me really strange!

I had a 12 mhz IBM AT clone in 1988, I paid over $3000 for it and it was pretty much current technology for the time so 20 mhz in '86 does seem a bit early.

Well, that's what the copyright statement says : . It's written on it. About the frequency, i'm not that sure it oscillates at 20 Mhz, but here's the proof:


Source: http://www.cpu-collection.de/?l0=co&l1=Intel&l2=FPU

20 MHz, my phone has a CPU running at 416 MHz
Just gotta love that progress

copyright may refer to the old 8086 design, or perhaps 80286 design or something that was released earlier

This thread is really taxing my (already failing, taxed to the max) memory (all 256 bytes of it - hohoho!), but I "THINK" the 80486 was the first Intel CPU with integrated math unit (FPU). Previous to that, the FPU unit was a separate chip, and of course, with all the retail space used by just silicon that had to perform FPU operations, it could run at faster speed than the CPU chip (hence, the rated 20MHz, faster than the compatible CPU).

So the photo you show there, Infobyte, is an FPU chip, which still needs an CPU to function.

So, to clarify:
80386DX = CPU
80387DX (chip in photo) = FPU

Of course, this could all be bullsh*t and my memory really has failed....now where did I put that mouse...?