# For the older computer users



## Ice fyre (Oct 16, 2008)

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Midweek quiz: Old computers

This is a multiple choice quiz with answers at the bottom see if you can get a good score.

I remmber one or two of these models


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## TheEndIsNigh (Oct 16, 2008)

Six Ice. Most of them were to young for me.

Bring back Atlas and Colossus

I worked with a ICL 1906 used as an emulator for the MU5 and ICL 2900 range.

It had individual plug in chips DTL logic chips considered extremely advanced in its time and 32K of core memory.

At the time a friend of mine was seconded to the states and while there he visited the local computer museum. There was an Olivetti teletype on display with a card explaining everything about it.

The card also jokingly said it was believed that one still existed in the UK where it was still used commercially. 

It was true - it was the only method for initialising an uncommissioned Mainframe at ICL. The paper tape reader was the bootstrap reader.

Oh we laughed at the time.


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## mosaix (Oct 16, 2008)

8 out of 10.

My first machine was an NCR 390 - machine code with 200 words of 12 characters each - 2.4k in total!


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## TheEndIsNigh (Oct 17, 2008)

Pretty good stuff there Mosaix. 8k PDP was the smallest m/c I ever played with not counting the the SDK85 which I think had a 2K prom space though I may be wrong on that. Age, it'll get you eventually (unless the end gets you first)


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## Grimward (Oct 17, 2008)

Alas, I'll be playing pong (first home PC was a DX2 50 mhz).  Didn't get into the game stuff as much, so suffered there on this quiz.  Knew the PDP answer, though!


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## Pyan (Oct 17, 2008)

7/10 - fell down on the consoles and the Mac.

Is a computer still being sold in 2006 _really_ regarded as an "old computer" now?


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## dustinzgirl (Oct 17, 2008)

A bit OT but we moved to my grandma's for a bit to help out and in the basement guess what I found? An entire collection for a Commodore original dual floppy disk version as in, so old it doesn't have internal hard drives an original brother's electric cartridge typewriter, commodore cbm 80-50. Its fricking insane! I'm thinking of the next time my kids go "OMG  MOM THIS IS SO SLOW" I'm hooking up the old Comm and taking their computers away. 

5 1/4 in floppies! Its like being a kid at Christmas all over again! AND to top it off, WE HAVE ALL THE MANUALS!!!

Oh, and to make you old dudes drool just a little bit more... I have the original quebert cartridges. As in the snap in kind. Yeah. I'm a stud.


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## ktabic (Oct 17, 2008)

7/10, it was the real old ones that got me.


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## Highlander II (Oct 17, 2008)

Yeah - I think I got 3.

Our first computer was a TI cartridge thing.  The first 'real' computer I remember us having was an Apple //e!  5 1/4 in floppies and a dot matrix printer w/ the spooling paper that you had to tear the edges off of!


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## Talysia (Oct 17, 2008)

6 out of 10, and a few of them were guesses.  I did better on the old consoles than the computers, though.


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## Tillane (Oct 17, 2008)

9/10 - missed out on the Mac.  And I *really* need to get out more.


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## Wiglaf (Dec 24, 2008)

Highlander II said:


> Yeah - I think I got 3.
> 
> Our first computer was a TI cartridge thing. The first 'real' computer I remember us having was an Apple //e! 5 1/4 in floppies and a dot matrix printer w/ the spooling paper that you had to tear the edges off of!


 
I take it that you didn't have TI's expansion box upgrade.  The IIe was comparable to the 99/8 with the difference that Apple actually produced them.


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## Erunanion (Dec 24, 2008)

6/10, but to be honest it was luck on the older models, until we got up to the Sega Saturn - my auntie had one when I was really small, and its successor, the Mega Drive, was the first thing I ever saved up for.


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## Highlander II (Dec 25, 2008)

Wiglaf said:


> I take it that you didn't have TI's expansion box upgrade.  The IIe was comparable to the 99/8 with the difference that Apple actually produced them.



No, I don't think so - on the TI.  I remember we had a cassette recorder that you had to use for 'saving' things, b/c there were no disks for it. *g*

The IIe was a great little machine - my dad held onto the thing for forever (it actually may be up in the attic) - and it probably could've been improved to be better than what IBM was putting together (what we now class as PC's), but Apple thought they could be a big honkin' monopoly-computer-giant via isolationist practices.  So, they failed b/c they couldn't learn how to share. 

I remember the days of discussing 'IBM-compatible' machines vs. Apple.  I think our first desktop IBM-compatible machine was a Pakard Bell.  Wow.  That was a long time ago in the days of Windows 3.1.


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## chang1326 (Jan 27, 2009)

i gt 5/10...quite interesting quiz involving a lot of classical facts which increases my G.K. part as well....


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