Your computer timeline?

What a mice idea for a topic. And here's my timeline (All are all in one computers for some strange reason):

1. 1989 - Mac 128K which became a 512K

My first mac ever. Yes I was only 4 at the time. My family just had that old mac lying around and my uncle said better him learning early. So I used that for a while. And it was upgraded to a 512K later. Yes it didn't even have a hard drive. Just a internal and external floppy drive.

2. 1994 - Mac SE

My 2nd computer. Got it to replace my previous one. Still works though, the SE and 512K.

3. 1998 - Colour Classic

Yes my first colour computer. And I loved it.

4. 2000 - Mac LC 580

A work horse. Used it for many years. And did it's job.

5. 2004 - Imac Bondi Blue

Had it for a few weeks but the cd drive in it was shot so I got it replaced for a . . .

6. 2004 - Imac 5 flavours a blue one.

Worked like a charm and now it's my downstairs OS 9 machine.

7. 2007 - 17 inch white C2D imac

My old imac was not liking video editing and a few other things so I upgraded. And am so happy I did.

If I can remember, my very first PC was a Packard Bell (now HP). It was awesome. Can't remember the details but I remember it had a wopping 66mhz of proc power and 2 cd rom drives. Playing Doom while listening to my Run DMC cd's was awesome.

Then we moved up to an IBM something. Huge increase from 66mhz to 333mhz.

After that we got some brand called 'neo computers'. It had 750mhz 256mb of ram.

Then I built my own computer. AMD XP 2400+, 2gigs of ram, Geforce ti4200, 120gig hd. That was a monster.
I eventually gave that rig to my bro and build a new one.
AMD 64 (forget the model but it was a single proc chip). 2gigs of ram, ATI Radeon x1900xtx. Monster gaming rig at the time.

Bought an iMac G5 from a fan. Liked it at first but the fan noise got to me.
My gaming rig got fried.
Now I have a MBP.

1994 : Tandy 1000
Got thrown out in a move a couple of years ago, never really work anyways

1996: Packard Bell
Biggest piece of crap. Turned itself on at odd hours, turned itself off when you were using it, often the power button had to be held for 10 minutes before it would start, when it did work it wasn't very long before it had a fatal error.

1998 : Gateway Desktop and Laptop
Both second hand from family member, rebuilt the desktop, laptop worked great but battery didn't hold any charge.

2000 : HP pavillion desktop, systemax desktop, and a few other no name computers.
Upgraded the Systemax with parts from all the other computers and it lasted me until 2004

2004 : Work gave me a toshiba satellite and I took one of our servers for home desktop use after it was retired. Then I got a dell laptop later that year from girlfriends dad.

2005 : mac mini, still in use
2006 : ibook g4 14"
2007 : Macbook Pro, and some vintage LCII for the collection.

Left some out but they are really worth saying because they are basically just vintage items I have laying around.

edit Oh and leecho as I said in a previous thread like this, packard bell is not hewlett packard, packard bell left the us market for europe and is still a brand there, until they were recently bought by emachines/gateway.

The bell's have nothing to do with each other, hewlett packard was a brand name long before and long after packard bell.

OK [...takes deep breath...] here goes:

1993:

Micron "Winstation" 486DX2/66 with 8 MB RAM, 220 GB hard drive, DOS 5.0/Windows 3.1.

The 66 MHz 486s where just new then, and friends kept asking me why I needed "all that power"!

1994:

Micron "PowerStation" Pentium 90 MHz with 16 MB RAM, 540 MB hard drive, DOS 6.2 (I think)/WFWG 3.11

Great machine for its time - could actually render a JPG without much of a wait. The web suddenly seemed usable... if you could just keep your modem connection from dropping!

1996:

Micron "Magnum Pro 200" 200 MHz Pentium Pro with 32 MB RAM, 1 GB hard drive, Windows NT 3.51 (with free upgrade to Windows NT 4.0 when it was released)

Seemed lightening fast at the time - it was lightening fast with the applications of the time - and with Windows NT, was the first unconditionally stable PC I had ever used. That machine NEVER crashed. Windows NT was a great product.

1999:

Dell XPS-R450 450 MHz Pentium II with 128 MB RAM, 14.4 GB hard drive, Windows 98

Great machine, very stylish case, very quiet, very expandable. I eventually maxed it out with 384 MB of RAM and and extra 30 GB hard drive.

2001:

HP Pavilion 9800 1.4 GHz Pentium IV with 256 MB RAM, 75 GB hard drive, Windows ME

Unequivocally the WORST computer I have ever owned. ENORMOUSLY loud, it sounded like the back end of a jet engine when it was running, flaky hard drive, and Windows ME... ughhh... I couldn't wait to get rid of this box.

2003:

Custom build from Northwest Custom Computers, 3.0 GHz Pentium IV with 1 GB RAM, 120 GB hard drive, Windows XP Home Edition

In response to the incredible noise made by the HP 9800, I sought out a custom builder who specialized in building whisper quiet PCs. The resulting machine was (and still is) so quiet that you can barely tell it is running. Was and still is a great machine. I still have it, and use for Win XP stuff when I need to use Win XP.

2006:

Apple PowerMac G5 2.3 GHz dual core, 2.5 GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive, Mac OS X Tiger 10.4

My current machine and my first personal Mac. Wonderful machine, but I am a speed freak - as soon as a significantly faster Mac comes out, I will upgrade. The iMacs are my upgrade machine of choice, thanks to that gloriously beautiful glossy display the current iMacs have.


That's it!

I hope to add to the list this year, if Apple releases a 3.0 GHz or faster iMac, OR a quad core iMac. I will then upgrade to a 24" iMac.

i will just list the ones i have owned
HP ze4500 laptop (gave to sister) - 2006
HP dv5000t laptop (sold it) - late 2006
iBook g3 900mhz (sold it) - early 2007
iBook g4 1.33ghz 14" (sold to other sister) - early/mid 2007
Custom built P4 tower 1.5gb ram, 140 gig, Geforce 6800 (died) - Summer/Fall 2007
Macbook black 2.0ghz CD, 2gb ram, 80gig hdd (sold) - Fall 2007
Macbook black 2.0ghz C2D, 1.5gb ram, 120gig hdd - current

I forgot to add a vintage Mac SE30 I bought off ebay for £30 in 2003

Never really used it do do anything with, just bought it because it was the first Apple I ever used at college

Came complete with black carry bag, manuals and all the software on floppy disks

Hmmm first computers...

Coleco Adam: I believe this is what our first one was. My mother got it on sale at some place like EB at the mall for Christmas one year. She even got a special computer stand for it. It never got used. Ever. I think I turned it on once. That must have been around 1983/1984. At the time, I was very much computer ignorant, never having used or needed one. My sole exposure outside of game consoles was a brief intro to the original Macintosh that my math teacher showed off one day, and a Commodore system owned by a classmate/buddy of mine who I had long admired for being very hip with electronics and computers even at that time.

Commodore (128?): Around Christmas 1988, my mother decided to try buying another computer that we might actually use. I was well into college at this point, and with classes requiring use of PC software in many cases (although the computer lab had Macs also), I told her she needed to get an IBM-type computer since that was easily where the future was. My much younger brother insists on a Commodore. I tell her they are pretty much useless for the real world and are pretty much just used for playing games. Guess whose advice she took?

Amstrad 80088 Desktop: Making regular trips to the computer lab at college was getting to be tedious, and since I couldn't use a Commodore to run WordPerfect and other needed apps, I decided to get my own PC. My mother gets bent... points to the Adam that was still gathering dust in the corner... and asks why I can't use that? LOL! I still have fond memories of that computer. It came with some software called GEM, which was a GUI that ran on top of DOS like Windows 3 did. It came with two 5 1/4" floppy drives and had 4-color CGA graphics. One day, I decided to add a hard drive (actually it was called a hard card) so I could get away from using floppy discs to boot the system and use my software. $300 for a 40 megabyte hard drive! LOL! Anywho... I really got to know DOS a bit when I decided I wanted to run GEM off the hard drive, but merely copying the files over didn't work. I eventually studied up on the DOS commands, learned about batch files, and crafted a way to make GEM boot off the drive. I was really tickled over myself and enjoyed the challenge.

Self-assembled "generic" 486 PC: Come 1995, with my career finally under way and I was making some real money, the Amstrad was long overdue for a replacement. I had used other people's Windows PCs, mostly Packard Bells it seemed, and I knew I had to do better than that! After doing a lot of reading, I decided the best route was to build it myself. My first one was built around a Micronics 486DX board that was "upgradable" to a Pentium chip in the future. Graphics card was a Diamond Stealth 64. The Micronics board turned out to be a great choice. Expensive, but very fast, very stable, and that computer ran circles around everyone else's Packard Bells with Pentiums. The Diamond card was awful, though I never fully realized how awful till I built my next system using a Matrox Millenium graphics card.

Mac Powerbook G4: I bought this on a lark in 2002. Up until then, I had zero interest in the Mac platform. My brief exposure while in college didn't really interest me in it, and all this time since 1995 I had been building/upgrading my own PCs with great success. But I heard great things about OS X recently, was impressed by how it was built on Unix, so gave it a whirl. Within a few weeks, I was sold.

PowerMac G5: I must have gotten this around 2004. I was ready to ditch Windows full-time now. I ran this alongside my PC for awhile, but eventually the PC just gathered dust. Recently, I gave that PC away to my in-laws.

Mac Pro: Bought this last year... decided I wanted to be able to dual-boot so I could play some Windows-only games that I really liked and some newer ones. In reality, I piddled with Bioshock a bit, but it seems games don't interest me much anymore. At the least, rebooting just to play a game seems such a chore.

Diamond Stealth 64

Click to expand...

Matrox Millenium

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boy, those were the days

Never really had a "family" computer, they've all been mine or for work.

1995: Work: Mac Classic, System 7.0

1995: Work Performa 475, System 7.5.1

1996: Work: PowerBook 180, System 7.5.3

1996: Work Performa 6205 CD, System 7.5.3 - System 7.6.1

1996: Mac Performa 6400 System 7.5.3 - System 8.6

1998: Work: HP something or another, Win 95

1998: Work: IBM Notebook, Windows NT 4.0, SP 6

2000: PowerMac G4/400, System 9.0 - OSX 10.4

2001: Work: Dell C610, 1Ghz P3, Windows 2000

2004: iBook G4/1Ghz

2007: PowerMac G5 Quad OSX-10.4 - 10.5

2008: Work Dell D630, 1.8Ghz C2D WinXP Pro

2008: Black Macbook (hopefully).

baggss said:

Never really had a "family" computer, they've all been mine or for work.

1995: Work: Mac Classic, System 7.0

1995: Work Performa 475, System 7.5.1

1996: Work: PowerBook 180, System 7.5.3

1996: Work Performa 6205 CD, System 7.5.3 - System 7.6.1

1996: Mac Performa 6400 System 7.5.3 - System 8.6

1998: Work: HP something or another, Win 95

1998: Work: IBM Notebook, Windows NT 4.0, SP 6

2000: PowerMac G4/400, System 9.0 - OSX 10.4

2001: Work: Dell C610, 1Ghz P3, Windows 2000

2004: iBook G4/1Ghz

2007: PowerMac G5 Quad OSX-10.4 - 10.5

2008: Work Dell D630, 1.8Ghz C2D WinXP Pro

2008: Black Macbook (hopefully).

Click to expand...

Baggs is back.....back again.....baggs is back......tell a friend

If you look at my birthdate, you will find that I didn't have my first personal work computer until I was 29 and my first personal computer until I was 30. I didn't surf the web until I was almost 30.

baggss said:

If you look at my birthdate, you will find that I didn't have my first personal work computer until I was 29 and my first personal computer until I was 30. I didn't surf the web until I was almost 30.

Click to expand...

Hah, Youngsters.

Got my first computer at about 29, maybe 30.
Was no such thing as a "web" until I was about 40.
BBS's don't count.

I'm just sticking with computers I've bought on my own as a main computer. I could dig deep and try and recall every computer I've ever bought to repair and resell/ possibly keep but I won't.

Custom Built AMD Athlon XP 2200+ 2GHz PC - 2003
It was pretty basic and upgraded it to a Shuttle PC over time and it was pretty fast.
MacBook Core Duo 2GHz - Late 2006
Didn't have internet when I moved out on my own so sold the PC and bought the MacBook to get WIFI for free at Panara.
iMac Core Duo 2GHz - 2007
Sold the MacBook after 3 months of owning it because photo editing on it was a total pain. Finally got internet in my apartment. Cool computer but hated the all-in-one idea.
Mac Pro Quad 2.66GHz - Late 2007
When Apple upgraded to the Ai iMac, the Core Duo felt way too outdated. I didn't like the all-in-one system so my only other choice besides the mini was the Pro. I like it a lot and hope I keep this one for many years but it cost WAY too much for the limited uses I need it for.

louishen said:

boy, those were the days

Click to expand...

Yup. You know.... I had gotten that Diamond based in part on its great specs, but the whole time I had that first self-built system, I was never satisfied with the graphics. It seemed my eyes strained too much so I thought it was the monitor. But when I swapped out for a Matrox... it was sooo much better. I later read that Diamond admitted they lied about the specs of that card to generate sales. That ticked me off. Then they bought out Micronics and, shortly thereafter, left the business. Taking down with themselves what was then one of the best mainboard manufacturers really ticked me off, but thankfully Asus turned out to be a great alternative.

It's really a shame Matrox never got truly competitive with ATI and nVidia in 3D graphics. Last I heard, they still have the best cards for 2D graphics.

1994 - IBM PS/2 486SX 25Mhz w/ 2MB RAM and 80MB HDD - DOS 6.22 & Win 3.11 >> Great machine, no issues.

1997 - Compaq K6-2 350Mhz w/ 32MB RAM and 80GB Quantum Bigfoot HDD - XP Home >> Great machine, kept in closet until I gave it away two years ago.

2001 - HP Pavilion N5190 PIII 700Mhz w/ 256MB RAM and 20GB HDD - XP Home >> 3 Year ext. warranty through CompUSA who drops it at 2.5yrs old when in for repair for bad modem. Given full refund on machine in '03.

2003 - 12" Apple Powerbook 867Mhz w/ 128 MB RAM (Rev. A) >> Multiple issues....hinges replaced, LCD, and battery. Apple repair center scratches the heck out of the case...Apple replaces the unit.

2004 - 12" Apple Powerbook 1Ghz DVI >> Great machine for about 1.5yrs when it went in for bad logic board. Flextronics (Apple's depot) beat it up in the repair....came back w/ warped case, could see inside. Went back for second repair, unit came back w/ white spots in display. Apple replaced display. Hard drive went out 8 months later, came back and fan was damaged in repair. Apple replaced w/ another 12" PB 1.5Ghz.

2006 - 12" PB 1.5Ghz....great machine for about 6mo. hard drive went out....came back from repair depot w/ overtightened screws. Brought it to Genius Bar to get RAM door removed so I could install my third-party RAM. Damaged by repair tech getting the door off. Offered to either repair unit or replace w/ Macbook...took Macbook (although I really LOVED the 12" PB).

2006 - 13" White Macbook - lines in screen....brought back to Apple, exchanged.. turned out to be software issue. Gave unit to my nephew and went back to PC for a while.

2007 - Bought 13" white Macbook....my current machine and I'm very happy w/ it.

Apple has always been good to me, even when their repair center (Flex) has dropped the ball a few times.