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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

Hah, you had it great! My first PC was a 286, which IIRC either had no HDD, OR. 20MB HDD (might be mixing it with our next PC, which was a 386).

I'm pushing 40, and still shake my head in wonder sometimes about just how much is possible at such small scale and cost.

But this is now turning into "when I were a lad..." :)

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Oh, you kids!

My XT had an 8088 @ ~4mhz in it, and we pushed it uphill to school both ways, in the snow!

It was multi-functional though. The power supply was inefficient enough to heat the room, while simultaneously being heavy enough to bludgeon large creatures for sustenance.

Something inside me misses the radiant heat, sitting here on a cold day with my chilly metallic laptop.

My Heathkit H89 had a Z80, 16K of RAM and a built in cassette interface. And we liked it.

I just flipped a bank of 16 switches by hand with vacuum tube gates and core memory...punch cards are for sissies!

You had a computer? Back then I wrote C programs on paper, then executed them by hand...

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

C? All I had was a single book on MS-DOS, so I wrote batch files on paper, then executed them by hand.

(Not even joking, by the way - literally how I got into computers and programming.)

oh kids! i used to crank the wheel by hand on my analytical engine that my hacker friends and me built after there was a leak of babbage's plans! he never knew!

you kids and you petabytes of ram! back in my day....

(i'm looking forward for these comments to be commented on a certain website i'm not supposed to name)

you kids. We calculated with charcoal on the cave's wall while the adults were out hunting for wooly mammoths...

ZX81: Z80/1KB RAM... more recently though PIC12 (C501 IIRC) ...

I'm slightly surprised nobody has yet linked https://xkcd.com/505/

Or https://xkcd.com/378/

There's a website where people make fun of HN comments? Is it Twitter?

The prime directive of said website is to never name it on hacker news. But I'm pretty sure you can Google the prime directive itself and figure out where it comes from. As a hint, it starts with "ng".

more hints?

Webshit, once a week. I won't go further :)

Start a few Electron apps and it'll warm right up

Few? You can only run 1! We have to yet invent the technology to run two, let alone a few!

I honestly thought you were gonna reference the Four Yorkshiremen sketch by Monty Python after the second line!

Predates Python by a couple years. It’s from “At Last The 1948 Show” from the 60s.

Didn't know that. Thanks for sharing.

Run a threadripper with the window open!

laughs in 6502 dances in 68k cries in 486

Mine was too, albeit 40MB had and a CD tom!

Ran windows 3.1, Civilisation (VGA graphics), railroad tycoon, Star Trek 25th anniversary - and could have them all installed at the same time. Other programs included championship manager 93, and I think day of the tentacle.

But it wouldn’t run Linux - 386 and above.

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