themaritimegirl
Experienced Member
My name is Trent, and i'm not only one of the newest, but probably one of the youngest members to join this forum as well, at the age of 17. In that case, i'm probably one of the youngest people with an interest in vintage computers, as well! I'm probably into vintage computers because of the following story below...
The first computer we ever owned was a Tandy 1000 EX. Nobody is sure anymore how we acquired it, but we believe it was originally my grandmother's. At any rate, my family acquired it in the early or mid 1990's, and I was probably 2 or 3 when I started using it. I remembered we had a Tandy color monitor, a Tandy dot-matrix printer that didn't work, and one or two Tandy joysticks with it. Besides the built in 5.25" floppy drive, we had a second 5.25" drive that connected probably to the serial port. To my knowledge, it had no hard drive. I no longer remember if it automatically booted from ROM or if we had to stick in a boot disk. I know one thing, it ran MS-DOS 2.1, because I still have the original Tandy MS-DOS Advanced Applications book, which speaks of 2.1.
We must have had at least a couple dozen floppy disks for it, all games. Ones I remember in particular were Wheel of Fortune, an Alf math game, and a VERY low resolution monochrome drawing program.
Until I started school in September of 1999, this was the only computer I had ever known. I had never heard of Windows, CD-ROM drives, the Internet, 3.5" floppy drives, or even of a mouse! My elementary school at the time had a mixture of computers running Windows 3.1, 95, and 98. It was all brand new to me, and it was fascinating!
We bought our second computer, our first modern computer, in late 2000, a second-hand Packard Bell running Windows 98. We subscribed to the Internet shortly after, I believe it was 28.8K down.
All the while, the Tandy 1000 EX, now given to me and residing in my bedroom, still enjoyed occassional use from me, playing the various games we had for it.
In 2002 or 2003, Dad sold the Tandy and all it's equipment to a local computer shop. I don't recall it's departure being a blow to me, so I can only guess that we got rid of it because I stopped using it and it was taking up space, or we were offered a good sum for it.
I still miss that computer. Especially to think what I could do with it today, with my knowledge on computers now, and the resources I could have used, like this web site.
The Tandy 1000 EX would be the only vintage computer I ever had the pleasure to use, until almost 3 years ago, when I started high school. My (now former) Math teacher had in the corner of his classroom, what I could only guess was a 386 or 486 computer. I did a double take when I saw the 5.25" floppy drive - something I hadn't seen in 4 or 5 years. Examining it, it was an Epson Apex Plus. It had with it an Apex keyboard, Apex CGA color monitor, and an Apex dot-matrix printer, as well as the documentation and some extra cables. Upon asking my teacher, he explained right off that it was an 8088 with 640K of RAM! (And was probably surprised when I didn't ask him what that meant, lol.) He invited me to go over and power it on - hardly anybody had touched it in 10 years, he said.
I hit the power button, and the hard drive clunked it's way into MS-DOS, then to a password-protected menu system. He had long forgotten the password, so that's as far as I ever got. (I one day saw a student animating a stick figure in BASIC. How he got past the menu, I don't know.)
So, occasionally I booted it up and attempted to get past the menu, to no avail. Until one day, probably two years ago, the hard drive quit working. (I didn't know it at the time - I thought it just wouldn't boot for some reason.) I made an unsuccessful attempt to boot it from the 3.5" floppy drive. (Turns out it was only able to boot from the 5.25" drive, anyway.) My teacher recalled having some 5.25" diskettes for it, but he didn't know where. So, I ignored the computer.
About a month ago, my teacher found four boxes of 5.25" diskettes - 41 diskettes altogether. He gave them to me to try with the computer, and among them I found the original Epson MS-DOS 3.2 boot disk. I pushed it in, flipped the lever (something I had not done in 8 or 9 years) and it booted! I tried logging on to C:, which only gave me an error. Upon running FDISK, it said "No fixed disks present".
I gave my teacher the news - the hard drive was dead. His response truly surprised me - he said in that case, I could have the computer! I was overjoyed, but humble as I am I suggested that the computer was still fully usable with just the floppy disks. He said it didn't matter - I was the only person to show any interest in the computer in 10 years, so either I could have it, or it would go to the dumpster.
So, two weeks ago I took it home! I had previously gotten a Trident TVGA8900CL video card working in it, so I took everything home but the monitor and printer. Equally as surprising, after I took it home, the hard drive started working again! I told my teacher about this; he said it didn't matter anyway.
So, that's my story (novelette?) on my adventures with vintage computing! I joined this forum because I've been having some fun with the Epson and have noticed a couple of quirks I've been trying to work out with it. Everyone on this forum is very knowledgeable, and I thank them for their help!
I consider myself knowledgeable on computers in general - I am a Cisco Networking Academy student and recently acquired my IT Essentials certificate, and within the next couple of years I aim to get my CompTIA A+ and CCNA certs.
-Trent
The first computer we ever owned was a Tandy 1000 EX. Nobody is sure anymore how we acquired it, but we believe it was originally my grandmother's. At any rate, my family acquired it in the early or mid 1990's, and I was probably 2 or 3 when I started using it. I remembered we had a Tandy color monitor, a Tandy dot-matrix printer that didn't work, and one or two Tandy joysticks with it. Besides the built in 5.25" floppy drive, we had a second 5.25" drive that connected probably to the serial port. To my knowledge, it had no hard drive. I no longer remember if it automatically booted from ROM or if we had to stick in a boot disk. I know one thing, it ran MS-DOS 2.1, because I still have the original Tandy MS-DOS Advanced Applications book, which speaks of 2.1.
We must have had at least a couple dozen floppy disks for it, all games. Ones I remember in particular were Wheel of Fortune, an Alf math game, and a VERY low resolution monochrome drawing program.
Until I started school in September of 1999, this was the only computer I had ever known. I had never heard of Windows, CD-ROM drives, the Internet, 3.5" floppy drives, or even of a mouse! My elementary school at the time had a mixture of computers running Windows 3.1, 95, and 98. It was all brand new to me, and it was fascinating!
We bought our second computer, our first modern computer, in late 2000, a second-hand Packard Bell running Windows 98. We subscribed to the Internet shortly after, I believe it was 28.8K down.
All the while, the Tandy 1000 EX, now given to me and residing in my bedroom, still enjoyed occassional use from me, playing the various games we had for it.
In 2002 or 2003, Dad sold the Tandy and all it's equipment to a local computer shop. I don't recall it's departure being a blow to me, so I can only guess that we got rid of it because I stopped using it and it was taking up space, or we were offered a good sum for it.
I still miss that computer. Especially to think what I could do with it today, with my knowledge on computers now, and the resources I could have used, like this web site.
The Tandy 1000 EX would be the only vintage computer I ever had the pleasure to use, until almost 3 years ago, when I started high school. My (now former) Math teacher had in the corner of his classroom, what I could only guess was a 386 or 486 computer. I did a double take when I saw the 5.25" floppy drive - something I hadn't seen in 4 or 5 years. Examining it, it was an Epson Apex Plus. It had with it an Apex keyboard, Apex CGA color monitor, and an Apex dot-matrix printer, as well as the documentation and some extra cables. Upon asking my teacher, he explained right off that it was an 8088 with 640K of RAM! (And was probably surprised when I didn't ask him what that meant, lol.) He invited me to go over and power it on - hardly anybody had touched it in 10 years, he said.
I hit the power button, and the hard drive clunked it's way into MS-DOS, then to a password-protected menu system. He had long forgotten the password, so that's as far as I ever got. (I one day saw a student animating a stick figure in BASIC. How he got past the menu, I don't know.)
So, occasionally I booted it up and attempted to get past the menu, to no avail. Until one day, probably two years ago, the hard drive quit working. (I didn't know it at the time - I thought it just wouldn't boot for some reason.) I made an unsuccessful attempt to boot it from the 3.5" floppy drive. (Turns out it was only able to boot from the 5.25" drive, anyway.) My teacher recalled having some 5.25" diskettes for it, but he didn't know where. So, I ignored the computer.
About a month ago, my teacher found four boxes of 5.25" diskettes - 41 diskettes altogether. He gave them to me to try with the computer, and among them I found the original Epson MS-DOS 3.2 boot disk. I pushed it in, flipped the lever (something I had not done in 8 or 9 years) and it booted! I tried logging on to C:, which only gave me an error. Upon running FDISK, it said "No fixed disks present".
I gave my teacher the news - the hard drive was dead. His response truly surprised me - he said in that case, I could have the computer! I was overjoyed, but humble as I am
I suggested that the computer was still fully usable with just the floppy disks. He said it didn't matter - I was the only person to show any interest in the computer in 10 years, so either I could have it, or it would go to the dumpster.So, two weeks ago I took it home! I had previously gotten a Trident TVGA8900CL video card working in it, so I took everything home but the monitor and printer. Equally as surprising, after I took it home, the hard drive started working again! I told my teacher about this; he said it didn't matter anyway.
So, that's my story (novelette?) on my adventures with vintage computing! I joined this forum because I've been having some fun with the Epson and have noticed a couple of quirks I've been trying to work out with it. Everyone on this forum is very knowledgeable, and I thank them for their help!
I consider myself knowledgeable on computers in general - I am a Cisco Networking Academy student and recently acquired my IT Essentials certificate, and within the next couple of years I aim to get my CompTIA A+ and CCNA certs.
-Trent
