 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| Valentine's Day Special: all of the computers I have owned by Ray of Light 02/14/2010, 12:33am PST | ||||
 |
 |
|||
| Commodore VIC-20: 1983. Paid for with my own money, I recall it cost less than $100 at Zellers. I spent another $1000 on the tape drive and cartridges.
C-64: 1987 or early 1988. Machine and 5.25" floppy drive were about $600 taxes in. I probably spent another $5000 (earned, again, at a job) on it, mostly in games and joysticks (the Epyx 500 XJ was a good value, but arrived on the scene relatively late). I had a Commodore 300bps modem. 386SX/16 w/ 2MB RAM, 40MB HDD and cheap 128KB "Super" VGA card: paid for in late 1990, took delivery in early 1991 (I remember because the GST came into effect that New Year's, and I avoided paying it). $2599 taxes & monitor incl., and modem (2400bps for $120?) and printer ($300) soon after that. I spent more on blank floppies than on software. 486DX/33 w/ 8MB RAM, 120MB HDD: summer 1993. Mobo upgrade only, the drive was a gift. Something like $640 for the RAM and $400 for the board and CPU. The guy who sold me the board bought my 386 parts for $50. 486DX4/120 w/ 16-40MB of RAM, bunch of HDD: 1994-1996 I upgraded in pieces, keeping the 386 AT case all the while. I don't remember the cost of everything but RAM was like gold and I do recall selling some (to buy Christmas presents!) once for more than I paid. 386sx/20 laptop from work which ran Linux and kermit with dial-up: 1997. I gave the 486 away and used this castoff from work for a while. Pentium 200 w/ Matrox Millenium II video card: 1998. I built this out of parts, it cost maybe $1500 for everything. This eventually became my first multimonitor setup, running Windows NT 3.51. Intel PII-550 w/ 384MB RAM and 9GB drive and TNT 2 video card: fall 1999, bought to play q3demo. I bought a Win98 license with this system, what a rip off! The P-200 enjoyed life as a Linux NAT gateway for a couple of years afterward. This would be the last time I would be able to buy a single hard drive much larger than my immediate storage needs. AMD 1GHz Thunderbird w/ 512MB RAM and GeForce II video: early 2001. I remember the video card was $600. Everything else was probably more than $1500 and less than $2000. PII-550 became the Linux machine and did the LAME encoding for all of my CD's. Total storage: 30GB. AMD Athlon 64 2800+ 1.8GHz: mid 2004. A bad purchase (dual-core came out just after this). It would be five more years before I'd actually upgrade to a 64-bit OS. This machine corrupted the transplant hard drive, and then corrupted the transplant's backup, killing an OS install that had survived since Win98 on the PII (though long since upgraded to XP). I bought 4x 250GB SATA drives with this, 3 of them still work today. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2200 MHz: mid 2006, in detail and with followup in Build my Computer: Summer 2006 edition. Total cost with taxes was $2500.10, not including a monitor. It took the OS transplant from the '04 model very well, and that install survived until pwnt by trojan in mid 2009. I liked this PC a lot but it could not run TF2 very well. It had 2TB of raw storage in it, until I moved that stuff to a junky Linux NAS. Intel 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo: bought in 2007 but used only for TF2 until 2009, when the Athlon's desktop performance faltered. $740 for case (Antec Sonata), mobo, cpu, and memory shipped from Newegg. I spent another $1000 on SSD, fast video card and 4GB of RAM. |
||||
 |
 |
|||
|
Valentine's Day Special: all of the computers I have owned by 02/14/2010, 12:33am PST  I wish the rest of you had added to this thread. NT by 03/06/2010, 1:30am PST Too embarrassing. :( NT by 03/06/2010, 2:09am PST Plus who's got that kind of a memory!? by 03/06/2010, 6:29am PST I'm very foggy on the details but here goes by 03/06/2010, 10:25am PST Re: I'm very foggy on the details but here goes by 03/06/2010, 1:05pm PST The term is "planned obsolescence" NT by 03/06/2010, 11:19pm PST At a basic level... it equals incompetence NT by 03/07/2010, 1:00am PST Re: At a basic level... it equals incompetence by 03/07/2010, 9:26am PST Valentine's Day Special II: International Women's Day Special by 03/08/2010, 2:15pm PST |
