Philips NMS 9100 – our first PC
Posted on 10 March 2011
A wee bit of nostalgia today – I found a few pictures of what was our first home PC. It was a PC/AT compatible 286, running at 8MHz.
As seen in the image below, it came with 768kB of RAM. If I remember correctly, at some stage we upgraded it to 2MB.
On it, I played such immersive games games as “Dark Heart of Uukrul”:
And wrote up school projects in WordPerfect:
Now I can look at stuff like this with the phone in my pocket. The CPU in my phone is (at least) one hundred times faster, has more than 250 times as much RAM. It can tell me where I am using satellites in the sky. I feel old:
8 responses to Philips NMS 9100 – our first PC
Oh, DOS prompt, how I miss thee!
This was my PC until 1992. So portable! http://bit.ly/edwCG9
I have terrible memories of misplacing the CMOS setup floppy, which was the only way to change BIOS settings. Like choosing the HDD ‘type’ which was a list of predefined head+cylinder+sector numbers.
Love retro computing. I remember when my family upgraded from the Apple IIe to the new-fangled(?) Macintosh Classic, that was cool. But $4000-odd? It had the 9″ monochrome screen, a mouse(!) and a 10MB external hard drive that sucked serious juice out of the mains.
It wasn’t ’til I started hanging out with you, Cam, that I saw the deep, dark nasty screen of the DOS prompt. Until that point, my whole world was GUI.
So, who’s got the oldest working computer? I was working in a studio not long ago that had a Mac ‘Performa’ G2 PPC in the corner. You know, back when Macs were a strange off-white.
I’m sad to say that I haven’t got any old working computers at all. I could probably build a ten year old PC out of all the leftover parts that my parents probably wish I hadn’t left in their cupboards.
Ten years isn’t old enough. I still use a PC laptop from about then for electronics simulation. Haha. I really want something that uses tape. 1″ tape. And only runs on 3-phase power.
Still I have Philips NMS 911 computer! It works properly but I lost the disk to boot it up :(…. I was looking for a disk but I couldn’t find one. I might just sell it !
That’s quite a bind! It’s still possible to buy floppy disk drives if you want to make a new boot disk: http://www.amazon.com/1-44MB-USB-External-Floppy-Drive/dp/B000M3GODW/ref=pd_sim_sbs_e_1
That was my first PC too! I still keep it, in a box in my basement along with an (even older) Amiga 2000 I got from a friend.