I saw Linus showing his first gaming rig
and heck he is young (or more likely I am old) 🙂
since the only source of information I could get the specs from, was internet museums 😀
special thanks to my dad who brought this puppy home, without that I would most likely not get into computers and IT at all
the system looked approximately like this, except there was no 3.5″ floppy drive and the monitor was as shown to the right
D1326A HEWLETT-PACKARD-VECTRA
- released 1987, retired 1990
- 12 MHz Intel 80286 CPU
- came standard with 640KB RAM (who would ever need more, right?)
- 5.25 inch floppy, 20 MB hard disc, VGA card
- no mouse
HP D1181A Monochrome Video Graphics Display (14″) (points below from original advertising)
- plug-compatible with the industry-standard VGA
- designed for use with the HP Video Graphics Adapter (D1180A)
- choice of screen colors, including amber, green and soft-white
- resolutions varying from 320 x 200 to 640 x 480 and can display up to 64 shades of gray
- ideal for text, graphics and image applications
and hold on for the release price, it was apparently 3595 USD… beat that.
mighty MS DOS operating system, blue screens like Norton or Volkov commander, MS Basic
those were times…
- one of the first things I did after getting it was to format the hard disk drive by accident
- (attempt to clean the disk for more space)
- and on reboot infamous “no system disk or disk error” 🙂
- weeks spent not knowing how to revive it, thanks goes to Gatis working in Fortek for giving me a boot floppy
- also for introducing me to Fidonet, Sound Blaster and archive of games out of my imagination
- (he had a system to read/write from VHS tapes, which could store like 2GB of information)
- (which was freaking incredible for those times)
- months spent booting from a floppy not knowing how to make the HDD bootable and what autoexec.bat is for
- (thanks to this I learned a lot about DOS commands)
- after, killed the 20MB drive once by dropping it from not very high.
- again, months booting from a floppy
- and revived it by dropping it again also accidentally
- bringing home windows 3.1 (including the swap file :D) on some 40 5″ floppies (thank you Edgar)
- since there was no installation available
- unforgettable game titles like
- * prince of persia
- * diggers
- * paratrooper
- * the incredible machine
- fighting to free ram by memory managers to run the games 🙂