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BraveRobot

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Jul 12, 2008
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Hi everyone. I'm trying to figure out what kind of computer I had growing up but since I know nothing about vintage computers, it's proving rather difficult. I know we had a 386 and before that we might have had a 286 (is that even a computer? shows you how little i know.)

Are there some pictures somewhere that I could browse through? I remember that it ran DOS but I can't remember what version. I think there was a word processor with a blue background. I'm sure that doesn't help... Maybe if I look around some more there will be something that will jog my memory.

As a kid I was mainly interested in the games. I can't remember how many colors the computer was capable of but it wasn't many and a lot of the games were monochromatic. And most of the games were ASCII games. Hmm, what do you guys think? I'll try to remember some more revealing information.

Thanks.
 
Yes, the (80)286 was a computer and any little thing you could remember about the computer you are trying to recall, such as shape, colour, separate or built in keyboard or monitor and things of such a nature may help us narrow it down from the hundreds of possible computers.
 
Ok. The keyboard and monitor were separate. The tower lay horizontally and It was maybe 5 inches tall. It was either beige or gray. Arrghh. Stupid drugs and alcohol. I can't remember. I'm sure more will come to me later.
 
Ok, now we know it was a desktop and it wasn't an All-In-One.

If it was grey, it could have only been a Tandy TRS-80 Model I. If it was beige, it could have been any kind of clone 286 or an IBM PC jr.
 
I'm thinking it must have been some kind of clone. I found this somewhat pointless video: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6ty-7B4HqI4 And all of that is looking real familiar. It looked just like that. Power switch was in the same spot, bootup screen looked the same too.

Maybe I should start a new thread for this, but is anyone here into games for these kinds of machines? I had so many 5 inch floppy games as a kid. I got them from the bookstore. They were 2 for 5 dollars or something. I didn't know anything about any of them as a kid so I would just pick from the names and sometimes they were great and sometimes I would get home and they wouldn't work or they would just be terrible games.

I remember I had a game called Xonix, there was another game where you were trying to get out of prison (i think-- the graphics were pretty awful), and i remember a few others but they were mostly ascii games.
 
Hmm...it's been a long time and the memory is a bit rusty but didn't WordPerfect 5.1 (a word processor) have a blue background/white letters default display? If it was WordPerfect it was definitely a PC clone of some sort.

Tez
 
tezza said:
Hmm...it's been a long time and the memory is a bit rusty but didn't WordPerfect 5.1 (a word processor) have a blue background/white letters default display?
Click to expand...
Yep, and so did Word for DOS from memory, and I think Wordstar did too.

EDIT: Yup, Wordstar 7 to be exact, as well as MS-DOS edit and QBASIC, also QuickBASIC used the same colour scheme, but I doubt that would have been installed, lol
 
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tezza wrote:

Hmm...it's been a long time and the memory is a bit rusty but didn't WordPerfect 5.1 (a word processor) have a blue background/white letters default display? If it was WordPerfect it was definitely a PC clone of some sort.

I had a First Choice Word Processor which had a Blue Background, not sure though the lettering and pull down menus had yellow in them (or they turned yellow when you'd formatted them or something. Unfortunately it seems many Word Processors had Blue backgrounds (including DOS EDIT and the T (Tiny Editor)! as well). Another Word Processor I've used a little bit is IBMs DisplayWrite 4 Version 2 - which might use Blue as well! :-o I don't recall WordPerfect having a Blue screen though I was using an earlier version of it which might explain why it was different (it didn't have any Pull down Menus I remember that, or if it did you have to use a key sequence to bring it up!)
 
I'm trying to remember what color screen Leadin Edge Word Proseesor(LEWP) had, but I'm drawing a blank.

Edit: Never mind. I found LEWP 1.3a on Dan's 20th Century Abandoneware. It was black background. After scanning a bit more it seems there were a lot of word proccesing programs with a blue background.
 
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