All hail GPU computing!! The CPU cruncher is dead!

The first computers I worked on were DEC 11/30's.
The first one I owned was a Tandy Color Computer II,
with an amazing 128K of RAM, and an add on floppy drive.

The first computer I built started as an XT,
but by the time I was finished it had evolved into a 286/12,
with an entire 1 meg of RAM, 30 Megabytes of hard disk, and both 3.5
and 5.25" floppy disks.


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Janice

Mine was a 1 Mhz 6502 in an Apple II+ - even then we overclocked the CPU to 1.33Mhz with a new crystal for the clock generator. It had 48k of RAM at purchase and then I upgraded it with another 16k to 64K total. And let me tell you when I got my 1MB ram disk I thought I was pretty darn cool!

Todd

My first PC was a 486-66 with (I think) 8MB ram and a 340MB HD.

No, wait...the 340MB HD was in my next one, a Cyrix 686-166.

Well my computer experience doesn't go back quite as far as some of you. My first taste of computers was in 1989 in 2nd grade. The school had bought 6 of the "new" Macintosh SE/30's. 16MHz of speed. I still remembering the school teaching us how to load programs from the 5-1/4's to play 'learning games'. Included games like SimCity and "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego". Those two games got me pretty invested in computing the rest of my life. Later in school age years they skipped computers for us until about 6th grade where we start learning about various things, then devious things started happening in 8th and 9th grade. ;) Especially when in 1992' I was introduced to Geo-Cities and the 'Modern' internet. It's been one heck of a trip and speeding up all the time!

The first pc I had at home was a Packard Bell 33Mhz Pentium with 500MB of hard disk and 4MB of ram. Awesome machine at the time, good enough to play the original Warcraft!
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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Todd,
ALGOL on a G-10. FORTRAN/COBOL on a G-20. I think that's what they were. I dropped too many stacks of punch cards to remember.

bob

I handled punch cards (from a nostalgic standpoint), but never actually used them for an actual business purpose. I did learn a lot of FORTRAN and Pascal in college, and one semester of COBOL. It was the COBOL for which I was hired out of college for my first job. :(
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"Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think."

"I never get into an argument that I cannot win."

The Mac SE didn't have a 5 1/4" drive - they were 3.5" 400k drives.
Todd

I still remembering the school teaching us how to load programs from the 5-1/4's to play 'learning games'.

Perforated paper tape data..
Wow.. it was all electro mechanical so I never even considered using it in discussion. Yes, actualy used, spliced, put stacks of paper in, take reels of perforated paper out..

State of the Ark equipment even at that time.
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Janice

too funny..
My work for quite some time used..

Washtub Disk drives
20" Filestores(estimated at 6-8 megabytes
8" lark drives (20 megs fixed, 20 meg removable hard drive)
13" hard disks(still in use when I retired in 2009)
6250 BPI reel to reel tapes

The papertapes I worked on had perforators about the size of a Washing Machine,
the reels were near 30" diameter.. They were continuous so we had to periodically cut off the output and ship it to be read elsewhere. The incoming strips were folded but not perforated much like a 3-4" wide box of computer paper, and when one box got low needed to be spliced onto the next box...

I did manage to upgrade some TTY's while I was there (yes, actual teletypes)
from baud to 300 baud.. I got a lot of flack for "why? I can not type that fast anyway"

But downstairs had the dedicated 4 wire data circuits running the brand new Dataspeed 40's.
At an amazing 1200 "baud"
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Janice

6250 BPI reel to reel tapes

Here is a sneak peek at what should be just around the corner.

http://techresearch.intel.com/ProjectDetails.aspx?Id=151

Steve

The 1st computer I used was in high school. we programed a dragster with horsepower,wheel size,weight,etc and then saw how our car performed. we watched as the race progressed, printed on continous feed paper with a dot matrix. Later my brother had an apple IIc I believe, that I used and the 1st I bought for myself was a Mac SE. My brother bought one at the same time, he got the 20 mb hard drive and I got the dual floppy.( I got this one because I had no idea what a hard drive was or the function it performed haha)
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