How Many Of These Microsoft Computers Have You Been On? (Poll)

[tlarkin]

OK, when you say used the OS, do you mean installed it and booted it a few times or actually used it for day to day tasks? I used Windows 3.11 and up since I was like 12 or 13 when it came out on a daily basis.

I mean if you want to talk about OSes you have installed, booted, and used for a week my list will be way too long to write.

 

[wolfeking]

I think that he is talking about microsoft only (as per the list). Going from this, I dont think your list can be that long, as they were pretty much DOS only from the 70's up to 19985. then its still a short list to get up to Windows 7.

 

[tlarkin]

I think that he is talking about microsoft only (as per the list). Going from this, I dont think your list can be that long, as they were pretty much DOS only from the 70's up to 19985. then its still a short list to get up to Windows 7.

You are half my age, meaning when you started using Computers at best Windows 98 was the standard OS out there. I just don't think a lot of the younger people actually used the older OSes. They may have played around with them, but not used them.

Though I guess the poll says been on, which is pretty vague.

 

[mep916]

I only voted for those that I've installed/purchased myself and used on a regular basis. I've messed around with every version listed in the poll in VMs and whatnot.

 

[bomberboysk]

I've owned and used computers with versions from 3.0 and up (Believe it or not, where i used to go to school there were a number of PC's running 3.1 and 95 still in regular usage). Additionally, i've used mobile versions of windows, CE, and multiple server versions (03, 08, various NT versions).

 

[tlarkin]

I've owned and used computers with versions from 3.0 and up (Believe it or not, where i used to go to school there were a number of PC's running 3.1 and 95 still in regular usage). Additionally, i've used mobile versions of windows, CE, and multiple server versions (03, 08, various NT versions).

Wow, your school had Windows 3.1 and you are still in high school? That is just nuts. The oldest OS at both schools I worked for was XP, and was XP since like 2003ish.

 

[mihir]

Dos,95,98,2K,XP,Vista,7

 

[strollin]

You are half my age, meaning when you started using Computers at best Windows 98 was the standard OS out there. I just don't think a lot of the younger people actually used the older OSes. They may have played around with them, but not used them.

Though I guess the poll says been on, which is pretty vague.

LOL, you're twice as old as him, and I'm probably 20+ years older than you. I have been using MS OSes since the early 80's. In my job as a software engineer I bounce around on a daily basis amongst Win 2000, 2003, 2008, XP Home, XP Pro and Win 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit). Also regularly jump around amongst Office 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010. We used to have physical machines setup with all these OSes but recently have moved away from physical machines and have converted almost everything to VMs.

 

[Jonathan1990]

LOL, you're twice as old as him, and I'm probably 20+ years older than you. I have been using MS OSes since the early 80's. In my job as a software engineer I bounce around on a daily basis amongst Win 2000, 2003, 2008, XP Home, XP Pro and Win 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit). Also regularly jump around amongst Office 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010. We used to have physical machines setup with all these OSes but recently have moved away from physical machines and have converted almost everything to VMs.

Yes I can see the only member on here that's been on the very first microsoft windows 1.0 computer is you Strollin. Do you know where I could find 1 of these very first microsft windows computers today or if any still exsist?

 

[wolfeking]

try ebay.
I dont think you will find one that works still, but you could probably get a copy and install it on a computer that you have (probably 0 SATA support).

 

[tlarkin]

LOL, you're twice as old as him, and I'm probably 20+ years older than you. I have been using MS OSes since the early 80's. In my job as a software engineer I bounce around on a daily basis amongst Win 2000, 2003, 2008, XP Home, XP Pro and Win 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit). Also regularly jump around amongst Office 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010. We used to have physical machines setup with all these OSes but recently have moved away from physical machines and have converted almost everything to VMs.

I was a teenager when 3.11 was in production. Before that when I was younger in the 80s we used Apple IIe computers and a few of the first Macintosh at my schools. Though like every school had like 1 or 2 computers. Then we moved on to 386 and 486s.

When I was a freshmen in high school is when windows 95 came out. Heck I remember when we got our first Internet connection at school and all you could do is use web crawler and hit up BBS.

I haven't touched 2000 or any 9x kernel machine in years, probably 7+ years. I don't plan on doing it either.

 

[strollin]

Yes I can see the only member on here that's been on the very first microsoft windows 1.0 computer is you Strollin. Do you know where I could find 1 of these very first microsft windows computers today or if any still exsist?

In order to install Windows 1.0 you will need a copy of DOS installed first since Win 1.0 ran on top of DOS. You would need DOS version 2.0 or above but if you want support for a hard drive you would need at least DOS 2.1. There are machines available on Ebay that could run Win 1.0, look for IBM, Dell or Compaq machines from the mid 1980's. I'm not sure how hard it would be to actually find a copy of Win 1.0 to install.

An alternative to buying an old machine is to install DOS + Win 1.0 on a Virtual Machine on your modern computer, something like VMWare player (free) would enable you to do that.

 

[strollin]

I was a teenager when 3.11 was in production. Before that when I was younger in the 80s we used Apple IIe computers and a few of the first Macintosh at my schools. Though like every school had like 1 or 2 computers. Then we moved on to 386 and 486s.

When I was a freshmen in high school is when windows 95 came out. Heck I remember when we got our first Internet connection at school and all you could do is use web crawler and hit up BBS.

I haven't touched 2000 or any 9x kernel machine in years, probably 7+ years. I don't plan on doing it either.

I was 31 years old when I got my first PC in 1984. Never had computers in grade school or HS. In college I used a time share computer system in an RPGII programming class and an HP 3000 mini computer in a Computer Repair class.

My first internet connection was a log in to a Unix system that I could dial in to using a terminal program and everything was text based.

 

[tlarkin]

I was 31 years old when I got my first PC in 1984. Never had computers in grade school or HS. In college I used a time share computer system in an RPGII programming class and an HP 3000 mini computer in a Computer Repair class.

My first internet connection was a log in to a Unix system that I could dial in to using a terminal program and everything was text based.

Well now I don't feel so old.

I also use headless systems with no GUI all the time. In fact a lot of my systems that run services I prefer no GUI. I also still heavily use the command line every day on my work computers which is why I am not so fond of working with Windows machines.

I think my fondest memory as a kid was figuring out how to control the modem from the DOS command line using the 'at' commands to start a network session with my neighbor so we could play versus Doom II and Duke Nuke'em games.

Video games definitely were my gateway into computers.

 

[Dngrsone]

Well now I don't feel so old.

Nor I. I was 17, graduating HS in 1984. Our computers were TRS-80 model III consoles each with a single 512MB Floppy drive networked together (though the server machine had two floppy drives). The advanced computer class had remote terminal access to the mainframe at USF down the road.

Working for the military, though, I got to play around with '60s and '70s era mainframes and such-- my specialty was the Harris H100 mainframe: a 24-bit processor on a 24"x28" board plugged into a mainframe backplane with a four-card (Arithmetic Logic Unit) floating-point math co-processor sub-frame installed (a fifth card interfaced the ALU with the mainframe), two 218KB memory cards, and a second backplane paralleled for the peripheral interfaces.

Among the peripherals attached were a punched card-reader and two HP7906 hard drives. These consisted of a single 18" fixed and an 18" removable rigid-platter disks, each having a capacity of 5MB per side. Between the two drives, I had nearly 40MB of hard storage. I got to repair those bad-boys, too: replacing and aligning the platters and heads, among other things.

We calculated it out and I think we determined that the processor clock speed was somewhere in the vicinity of 3Mhz.

Man, it's been better than a decade since I worked on that stuff and I still remember all this...