Kinda wished I was born in at least 1970 so I could experience the beauty of those old computers! I bet those vintage devices are now yellowed these days.
Best time period of gaming nostalgia for me. Worst computer purchase I ever made. It was really really disappointing. It did OK but it wasn't near the hype.
@smartalex61 yes it was a mail order only pretty sure. They had great ads in that newspaper like Computer Shopper, they had all different brands with big flashy ads. It was actually a good computer I guess I didn't know a thing about them and in those days you spent countless hrs on the phone to fix things.
@@skymaster9484 oh, I remember those days well, except the worst part is he couldn’t be on the Internet and on the phone at the same time! The only thing I don’t miss about vintagecomputing is dial-up ;)
The CDS 520 was the first computer I ever had, from 1994 till I gave it to a friends kids to play with in 2001. During that time I did some serious upgrading and turned it into a decent machine far beyond it's original specifications. I installed 64 MB memory, an Evergreen 586 Overdrive CPU that ran at 133Mhz, quite a jump from the original 66Mhz CPU and a 2Gb HDD using overlay software loaded at bootup to get round the 450Kb HDD limitation. The biggest upgrade was adding a 1MB graphics card to vastly improve the screen colors. This involved some major surgery, disconnecting the cable connecting the monitor to the inbuilt graphics chip and making a new cable that connected the monitor to the new graphics card. The last step was getting rid of the 1" black border round the display. Inside the monitor case is a row of potentiometers and by adjusting these I was able to get the image to expand to fill the entire screen. After all this upgrading my old CDS 520 ran Windows 98 very well and was a pretty good computer until I retired it in 2001.
Im 10 years late to this video but there is a strange almost euphoric feeling hearing that heavy button pressed and the immediate whir of the hard drive spinning along with the boot screen popping up. Takes me back a long way. That was the era that I built computers. Seems like a lifetime ago now...
A store in Madison Alabama sold quite a few of these. There was even a club and we would bring our portable Chameleons and trade software. Mine was pretty standard but some added extra memory and hard drives. I did change out some chips and actually got CPM to run. Later I had a Compaq portable and thought it was a lot more capable. But I wish I still had more old Chameleon, my first PC.
Aw, it was a lot cuter than I remember it. I remember my grandmother gave me one of these back in the early 2000s, I was too young to know how to use it but I just remember Paint, and it having a internal sound card maybe? Because I remember recording my voice without needing a mic or anything.. fun memories with a computer that was a few years older than me lol.
would a LC/Quadra/Performa 630 68k board work in a performa 5200, i don't have a 5200, just a desktop 6200cd but just wondering if a 630 board would work in a 5200
There is one in the "National Electronics Museum" www.google.com/maps/place/National+Electronics+Museum/@39.195738,-76.6848073,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipMrhE1slZJjD8gUZ0HBSuwdm6x0VsIbrS5XD-vH!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMrhE1slZJjD8gUZ0HBSuwdm6x0VsIbrS5XD-vH%3Dw203-h114-k-no!7i3264!8i1836!4m8!1m2!2m1!1snorthrop+grumman+near+Linthicum+Heights,+MD!3m4!1s0x89b7e28b16314dcd:0xd4f896c496f3eff9!8m2!3d39.1953638!4d-76.6837791
I was in the original startup in Annapolis and travelled to every possible computer show with the one "working" Chameleon. It has a huge mother board which flexed and cracked traces and also dislodged crystals. I would often be up all night before a show with an iron and a dead Chameleon..never failed to get it working. It was called Chameleon because it had both a Z-80 and an 8088 processor and could boot either PC DOS or CPM-86 by Digital Research. I may have some files in the archives including PC-DOS 1.0 Bob
yeah! there it was indeed finally.. on canon and apple products would agreed about this decision a better outstanding quality customer services forgiving but some hewlett packards desperate branding or rebrandings are just shit! unfortunately for you you will be happy to stick with canon products. hold on hp does have some reputation so does canon printers which they will be rebaged by apple if you modified those ink cartridges etc back in the 80s or 90s but we use ink tank now which it was cool.
I had one of those, but the older 486 66Mhz model. Loved it for DOS games. Lots of extra slots. I think I paid something like $2,000 for it at the time. Crazy expensive but well worth it back then. Thanks for the memories!
I have same system. I brought used meany years ago. my hard drive died. I add new one it don't see it. I don't' have setup disk get into cmos anymore because they went bad. any idea were i can I download disks . I hope get system up ruining again . none there any more support.hp.com/us-en/retired-products.
You describe the computer as being an IBM PS/2 aimed at education and school use. So my question is, does the computer have standard 16 bit ISA slots like a regular PC of the time period, or does it have MCA slots as the PS/2s did back then?
wow so if that Canon BJ 100 did came with your Packard bell computer or Compaq Presario 520/ what did that apple StyleWriter 1200 came with? i know macintosh computers. or gateway2000 etc the Microsoft windows pc. using parallel port or is it macintosh if serial port.
The 8088 was a crippled 8086 with an 8 bit memory bus.... Friend of mine had a 8086 AND 8087 with maxed out memory. My Headstart explorer was extremely slow and noisy compared to the 8086/8087 IBM clone...
