Technology poll

[sally_maria]

After being baffled last week by one of the till-children at work, who had never heard of an electronic typewriter, I decided to follow wellinghall's example and ask nosy questions about old-fashioned technology. :-)

Poll #6050

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9

View Respondents

What sort of storage/way of loading software did the first computer you used regularly have?

View Answers

Audio cassettes
3 (33.3%)

Punch cards
1 (11.1%)

Typing in listings from a magazine
2 (22.2%)

5.25" floppy disks
5 (55.6%)

3" disks
1 (11.1%)

3.5" disks
0 (0.0%)

Internal hard drive <100Mb
2 (22.2%)

Internal hard drive <500Mb
0 (0.0%)

Some other option that you ought to have listed
1 (11.1%)

How much memory did it have?

View Answers

<100K
6 (75.0%)

<1Mb
2 (25.0%)

<4Mb
0 (0.0%)

<512Mb
0 (0.0%)

You mean a computer can run on that little?
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[sophinisba]

The first computer I used had floppy disks, but when I was a kid my older brother used one with audio cassettes. I have no idea how much memory those computer have - I'm not actually sure about the one I have now, heh. I remember my dad carrying around the punch cards when I was younger but I don't know if those were for a computer he actually used or if they were just used ones around at work that he would use as note paper.

[sally_maria]

My Dad used to bring home computer paper, the kind that had holes punched in both sides, and went through a dot matrix printer - their work computers obviously used to waste 10 or 20 sheets between print outs. I'm not sure we ever bought any.

Our first computer had 32K, and started out with audio cassettes, but we bought a disk drive for it later. Suddenly games loaded in 30 secs or so, rather than 5 mins.

[tree_and_leaf]

BBC Micro, 128 KB!

[sally_maria]

A BBC Master? We had those at secondary school, but our original home computer was a BBC B with 32K. Still, there's somebody on the LJ version of this post who saw a computer with 256 bytes of RAM, which makes 32K sound positively decadent.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, that's right! Good times...

Dad, who was a teacher, was working for the local authority computers in education project, so we then moved on to the Mac Plus a few years later.

[sally_maria]

I got a PC after I went to university, and wanted to able to write essays at 2 o'clock in the morning (386sx, 2Mb of RAM and 100Mb hard drive). Around the same time my Dad got an Acorn Archimedes, which was the update to the BBC micros.

Our BBC was still working up to a couple of years ago, though. They don't make them like they used to. :-)