[mjg]

Started out with collecovision
next was a commodore 128

actually both were my sisters, i was already enamored by age 6/7, astonished by the games of them, and seeing that mathew broderick can cause a nuclear by playing "thermo nuclear war" on one... Scary...

My first "pc" Was a tandy 1000 286, 10 mhz, 640 kb ram... 20 megabyte hard drive....


Didn't get a 386, but a 486 sx 25 came along soon. One day, About 12 i believe,
i had ordered a tower case from computer shopper, swapped it in... I pretended to be sick to do this... Wow i felt so impressed with myself...

Eventually got the "Overdrive" chip, piggy back processor, this was before ziff sockets of course, u had to push these in and pry them out, ahh the modern conveniances .... So now i was rocking a dx2 50... WIng commander looked bad arse, i remember being able to play 7th guest, and felt like i had the best gaming system, sega genesis couldn't touch this thing... (began learning programming back then, but didn't take it seriously...)

I had a 486 dx2 66 after that, and hosted a BBS for a few years... this was just into the internet bloom of around 1994ish as everyone with AOL now could use the web etc....


Oh yea, worthy to mentio my first modem was a 2400 baud cardinal external modem, I still remember all the s register thingies and the AT commands.

ATDT//

ATH
ATA

AT$V

look at those skills, have i impresed u guys yet??? ; )
I had prodigy also when i got the modem... Later on i tried out compuserve, it was too expensive... Before aol was available in windows it was for geoworks, i tried it out when it was a fewer then 10,000 user network. I alwasy thought it sucked, they kicked me off for swering in chat rooms, how stupid.oh man, i miss this stuff, prodigy, compuserve, renegade bbs software... Later i had sierra network, was obsessed with those games... Space quest 4 was this shiznit. To bad sierra got bought out by vivendi and dismantled. Al lowe rules.

Oh yea another thing that AOL screwed up. I hate how people say LOL and all that stupid crap.. It started on aol way back when, first mainstream online service really. It took me years to accept "smileys" and even now, that they got stupid gesture icons u can put instead, i rather put a space in to avoid those stupid things. They make online discussion and chatting really stupid if u ask me.







Anyways, did i give anyone nostalgia? Speak up.

 

[apnk]

Dell Dimension 2100, 20gigs, 128mb ram way back in 2001.

Now I have a Dell 1100 notebook with a 30gig hd, 256mb ram and a Dell 600m 40 gig with a 64mb vid card and 1gig of ram.

 

[Kirosia]

pIII 64mb ram 533mhz Win98 27gig HD (I know, compared to what some of you old timers had, this was a beast)

I had it til about a month or so ago.

Even after the 8 billion viruses, hourly crashes, inability to have more than 2 low ram programs at once, and the loudass system noise, I still liked the person. I haven't thrown the tower away yet, and I salvaged the HD.

For a period of I think 2 yrs (of like 5-7, can't remember exactly when I got it), I rarely used it. While everyone else was playing fast pc games, livin alternate lives on the internet, and dling lots of illegal s**t; my pc was getting dust. I was one of the few teens who didn't grow with computers in away, only started "getting into it" a few years ago. (head-fi was like the first or second forum I joined and actively participated) Let's just say internet people scared the bejesus outta me, and actually gave me less faith in humankind.

Also, never chatted using aol or msn or anything til a few months ago, when these two girls I met online asked me to. I had no idea what to do, they mocked me for asking a girl for help! With the slow PC, using messenger was a b**ch, especially if I was talking to two people at once.

Now I have a pretty up-to-date PC . . . and I don't know what to do with it. I'm so behind man, it's all blurry.

 

[mjg]

Man,

you guys are making me feel old or something. Have any of you played a video game that only had vector graphics? No color, just stupid color slide thingies to put over them???

How about pong? Come on.

My first PC had windows 3.0 and like dos 4.6 on it. I didn't even have enough memory to load a mouse driver, it had EGA graphics... I also couldn't use 386 enhanced mode what a drag : / Man i can't forget how impressed i was about the first time i heard an adlib sound card. I felt like trash with my pc speaker.... First time i heard midi file i was blown away, and now u got these cheesy midi files on cellphones haha.

Desqview rocked... Do you guys remember desqview? Qemm memory manager, and all those dos shells like 4dos.

I remember writing this huge stupid batch file so when i turned my computer on it had a little menu at the end of autoexec.bat so i can pick programs out... I was such a little geek.

It's so ironic, i was liek a dos warrior, and when my friend gave me linux, i hated it... By then windows 95 got me and i dumbed down for a few years.

Yet now look at me! HAH!

 

[Kirosia]

don't worry mjg, I know the really young kids laugh when they see our pc specs. I've seen twelve year olds who pretty much live online, with super decked out computers, games, and misc. hardware.

Hey, anybody remember supermunchers! That was the s**t!

 

[Wmcmanus]

An IBM pc with "dual 5 1/4" floppy drives"! Wow, was that ever "the best" at the time, circa 1983. This was in the days before hard drives, or even 3 1/2" discs. I've got fond memories of that old tank because with it I wrote the first draft of a college-level accounting textbook that is now going into it's 7th edition and still going strong!

 

[MrSlacker]

my 1st comp was in 1997. PII 266, dont remember any of the other specs

 

[Claus1100xx]

286 with a green screen. Very nice and played prince of persia. Had one of those big floppy drives, and I think a whopping 256 or 512kb of ram. Also had a huge hard drive for its time of 20mb. It almost ran Windows 3.11 when it first came out, but I stuck with DOS and NORTON COMMANDER.
I felt so organized with the commander and was in heaven. Word and Excel were things never heard of at that age in time. Internet? What's that? We still had the pulse telephones.
Also the first time I heard my dad's sound card in his ultra modern 386 I was blown away. I remember the first time I heard it was playing Lemmings and I was like "where's this sound coming from"?

AAAAHHH I loved it. Technology is moving so quickly it's almost scary, but very exciting.

 

[Homeless]

a 486 something or other....which i kept up until i got a pIII 800 mhz..lol...you can imagine how amazed i was...now i have a p4 3.2 160 gig HD,blah blah blah...

 

[JMT]

386 w/ 4MB RAM (later added an additional 8 MB) and a 120MB Hard drive. No speakers (except the PC speaker), no CD-ROM, no modem, 13" (I think) monitor, 3.5" floppy drive. Cost around $1400 in 1985.

 

[Homeless]

it's funny that you wouldnt be able to get 14 bucks for it now...lol

 

[mjg]

did anyone here have an amiga?

God i was envious of those things... Next to a Neo Geo, it was the most pimp gaming system of it's time (late 80's).


To see turrican on an amiga 1000 back in 1988 was a treat, especially when home consoles were nintendo at best.

Did anyone have a video toaster?

JMT's system, for back in 1985 was really the best PC compatible to be had...
That was alot of money for a PC back then... I think that 386 processor became available that year, or 1984 i forget.

It was a huge step up, the math coprocessors used to be considered an option, doing floating point arithmetic used to be very slow...

Also, true 32 bit bit bus, and E-ISA card slots, those were so impressive...
Did you have a windows accelerator vga board? What kind of graphics chip/board i'm curious, was it a tridant, cirrus logic, ATI? Just wondering?

 

[Claus1100xx]

video toaster?

 

[redshifter]

1980
apple ][ - no hard drives back then
CASSETTE TAPE drive
green phosphur monitor
paddle game controller (with the dial and the little red button on the side)
wrote programs in basic and integer, played "night driver", "little brick out" "pong" and "applevision" and games i wrote myself in basic.

later upgraded to 2 five inch floppy drives. anyone remember the noise they made? zip! chugachugachuga! zwipzwooop, zwwweweet!

later had the portable apple (g?) which i loved (played "sea dragon", "zork", "beer run", "lode runner", "bolo" and others). then in the mid '80's got the "macintosh", which was the first computer with a mouse, etc. played "dark castle", "crystal quest" and did a lot of schoolwork on that. i miss the old black & white os.

 

[mjg]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Claus1100xx video toaster?

People used those to capture live video back then... You could manipulate the video and make tapes/bootlogs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

Redshfiter; damn man, u my hero... Apple ][, U OLDSCHOOL. haha
I used an apple II when i learned a bit of basic, i remember learning basics, nothing advanced, just how to print stuff out, itteratives, basic procedural programming concepts GOTO..

We used it to make text based games. I didn't see programming again until i saw Pascal and C. By that time i got really bored...