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==every single ID game ever... View Quote |
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Nah, those were run of the mill kids. Smart kids drew a sharp diagonal line across the top of their cards. Yes, I've entered the boot code on a PDP-11 with dip switches and the damn clock key to get it to load from tape. I don't miss those days when I have a supercomputer (relatively) go from power off to login in under 10 seconds... View Quote Until recently, I still had a couple of RK05 disks sitting in my garage. They're gone... |
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Lots of good old names there. Sometimes I think back to how games have progressed when I am playing something modern on (an already outdated) GeForce 1060.
Started with a VIC20 typing in games from the back of a magazine. If you knew BASIC, you could mess with it! Cool. Commodore 64, Amiga 1000, first 386 (Wolf3D demo over and over) but one time I remember my jaw really dropping to the floor was when I saw Quake 2 on an OpenGL system (at work, on an expensive CAD system ). I spent way too much money I barely had on a Voodoo 3dfx slave card just to get there. Interesting OS/2 came up. When I was in CSci in the 90s IBM was giving out copies of Warp to students, we were all obsessed with running Linux or OS/2. I was all jazzed to have obtained a copy of NT 3.51 (wow, remember PowerPC?). Now I need to go plan for a winter rebuild of the gaming rig... |
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I guess not everyone can appreciate a quality game. I put down Descent 2 and my Sidewinder 3d pro to play Quake. Quake owned, to use 1997 l33t speak. Multiplayer sucked at first until they came up with client/server with Quakeworld. Then things got even better with TeamFortress. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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==every single ID game ever... Did anyone else have a literal box of floppies or 3.5in boot disks with custom autoexec.bat and config.sys files just so you could run certain games? |
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That would happen when people overclocked. It's not like overclocking today where you put a water cooling block on your CPU, Memory, and Video card. The CPUs in the 90's HAD NO HEATSINK. Overlclocking involved adding a heatsink with fins and a fan, de-soldering the 25.000Mhz Crystal, and replacing it with something from the TV World. 34Mhz and 37 Mhz were common. Remember, the memory back then was NINE DIPS by NINE ROWS, or a shitload of motherboard real estate. We'd put a sheet of aluminum on those as well, and a 26" standard box fan blowing on your contraption. The boost from 25Mhz all the way to THIRTY FOUR MEGAHERTZ was awesome! We'd do benchmarks with FractInt, a fractal generation program, and share them over FTP or dialup BBS's. Today's overclockers have it easy. Just drop the whole damn thing in mineral oil and set the BIOS to the max clock possible and set a record. Worse case, it fails and reboots in safe mode. Worse case back then was "You Just Turned $5,000 of hardware into smoke". Today's overclockers are pussies and sadly can't push their creations further without the basic tenets of physics breaking their clean clocks. They can only run at Liquid Nitrogen temps around 8 Ghz, That stupid c being a constant is a slap in the face. At room temp, its the reason we haven't broken the 4Ghz Wall. The 300Mhz wall was before designers could mass produce micro-strips and timings at the right length. Now we're down to fundamental laws of Physics limiting air cooled systems. Only processors can get more efficient. No more getting faster, barring a big breakthrough. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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I had a cyrix catch fire in the shop once. That's about all I can say about them. Most computers I worked on in the mid-late 90s were intel or amd. It's not like overclocking today where you put a water cooling block on your CPU, Memory, and Video card. The CPUs in the 90's HAD NO HEATSINK. Overlclocking involved adding a heatsink with fins and a fan, de-soldering the 25.000Mhz Crystal, and replacing it with something from the TV World. 34Mhz and 37 Mhz were common. Remember, the memory back then was NINE DIPS by NINE ROWS, or a shitload of motherboard real estate. We'd put a sheet of aluminum on those as well, and a 26" standard box fan blowing on your contraption. The boost from 25Mhz all the way to THIRTY FOUR MEGAHERTZ was awesome! We'd do benchmarks with FractInt, a fractal generation program, and share them over FTP or dialup BBS's. Today's overclockers have it easy. Just drop the whole damn thing in mineral oil and set the BIOS to the max clock possible and set a record. Worse case, it fails and reboots in safe mode. Worse case back then was "You Just Turned $5,000 of hardware into smoke". Today's overclockers are pussies and sadly can't push their creations further without the basic tenets of physics breaking their clean clocks. They can only run at Liquid Nitrogen temps around 8 Ghz, That stupid c being a constant is a slap in the face. At room temp, its the reason we haven't broken the 4Ghz Wall. The 300Mhz wall was before designers could mass produce micro-strips and timings at the right length. Now we're down to fundamental laws of Physics limiting air cooled systems. Only processors can get more efficient. No more getting faster, barring a big breakthrough. Three GPU's modded together, LN2 cooling. https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/72t1bx/xpost_rpcmasterrace_the_first_ever_r9_290x_with_a/?st=j84lwnnu&sh=9af9bca0 |
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i miss my Number Nine Motion 771 and 3dfx cards... the thunk of the 3dfx card taking over when starting a game was always fun
and fuck cyrix cpus, i had more problems with those than intel, i used to steer people away from them like mad when i was selling machines back in '96-'98 |
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The ancient machines in my typing class freshman year ran Cyrix processors. They were slow as shit.
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Anybody remember getting a Voodoo and spinning up Unreal using the glide api and watching jaw dropping 3D goodness? I miss those good ole days...
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she was so fucking hot in that movie
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seems appropriate for this thread
Ryox - Earth and Sea/A new departure (Shenmue '80 Remix) |
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http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/17900000/It-s-now-safe-to-turn-off-your-computer-random-17927884-500-313.jpg Y'all Negroes are now posting in a comfy 90s computer thread. View Quote |
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Cyrix.... http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/19/198b968cebd2ed226d5fc6ba7d620bf53e8059c40a33c5f7c310564e36d86f6e.jpg View Quote I remember having one or two of their chips. Ran hot IIRC. Also fuzzy on details. Maybe it was Quake, I remember performance not being up to par with the Intel chips. Didn't they also have a pretty nasty bug that caused crashes? Anyhoo, remember ditching them and going with Intel afterwards. |
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Your post makes me feel old.
I remember all of that stuff and a bunch of stuff you ignored |
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https://memeguy.com/photos/images/mrw-agents-of-shield-mentions-something-from-the-film-series-52433.gif I had one of these, too. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e2/b9/99/e2b99960fb8e568aa16b090b3c81ce04--interactive-fiction-pin-button.jpg View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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Be careful, it is pitch black, you are likely to be eaten by a grue. I had one of these, too. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e2/b9/99/e2b99960fb8e568aa16b090b3c81ce04--interactive-fiction-pin-button.jpg |
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These young whippersnappers will never know the pain of creating boot disks just to have enough conventional memory to run your favorite game.
Also, whatever happened to Origin? I remember a time when their latest game always needed a CPU that wasn't out yet to play it. EDIT: Lastly, I was thinking on the way to work this morning, while listening to The Prodigy's Fat of the Land, how I miss Fastracker for editing music. Damn, I'm old... |
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This post makes me smile. My first personally owned home computer was an IBM PS/2 Model 30... 286, 12mhz with 1mb of RAM and a 30mb hard drive. My Dad and I added the math co-processor ourselves so that I could run AutoCAD. I was living large!
It snowballed from there, though. Upgrading and building computers (to play the latest and greatest games) is what changed my focus and eventually got me into the IT field. I owned Cyrix based machines and AMD based machines. I even did a stint as a contributor on a 3DNow! related gaming site (blogging before it was called blogging). I lived through all of the good stuff. Voodoo cards, Voodoo II cards, Voodoo II SLI setups, Nvidia's first TNT cards, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Halflife, Unreal... All of it. I tested/ran/played it all. I eventually started my own hardware review site in 1999 that specialized in higher end workstation and server hardware and, in its hey-day, generated several million page views per month. |
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These young whippersnappers will never know the pain of creating boot disks just to have enough conventional memory to run your favorite game. Also, whatever happened to Origin? I remember a time when their latest game always needed a CPU that wasn't out yet to play it. EDIT: Lastly, I was thinking on the way to work this morning, while listening to The Prodigy's Fat of the Land, how I miss Fastracker for editing music. Damn, I'm old... View Quote Or 3.5s dying randomly. Lost some school papers due to that. That's when I started emailing them to myself with yahoo mail instead of using floppies (1998 iirc). |
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Anybody remember getting a Voodoo and spinning up Unreal using the glide api and watching jaw dropping 3D goodness? I miss those good ole days... View Quote |
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This post makes me smile. My first personally owned home computer was an IBM PS/2 Model 30... 286, 12mhz with 1mb of RAM and a 30mb hard drive. My Dad and I added the math co-processor ourselves so that I could run AutoCAD. I was living large! View Quote |
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http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/17900000/It-s-now-safe-to-turn-off-your-computer-random-17927884-500-313.jpg Y'all Negroes are now posting in a comfy 90s computer thread. View Quote Win 3.11 did hold up pretty well for getting killed randomly, but that was too flashy. DOS was where it was at for games until Win 98 |
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I remember around 97 or so when I first started repairing computers that a good number of PCs (windows/dos) came through the shop with weird errors, crashes, hard stops, etc. Almost every time it was a Cyrex CPU... Never trusted those things and told everyone to stay away from them. Those and Quantum Bigfoot drives were the two big items we had issues with. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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I had a cyrix catch fire in the shop once. That's about all I can say about them. Most computers I worked on in the mid-late 90s were intel or amd. Those and Quantum Bigfoot drives were the two big items we had issues with. |
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this. Also started the OpenGL vs direct3d feud. Graphics cards became the hallmark for old people to say "I just want something that can send an email" Goddamn I'm all nostalgic this morning. Quake was such a milestone in gaming View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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That was way before any of that stuff mattered for gaming. Quake showed the world the expanding possibilities for modern gaming. Quake proved how crappy the Cyrix chips were. FPU performance especially. Also started the OpenGL vs direct3d feud. Graphics cards became the hallmark for old people to say "I just want something that can send an email" Goddamn I'm all nostalgic this morning. Quake was such a milestone in gaming DOS Games wrote directly to the video card, all the image layout was done on the CPU, the video card was only there to turn it into signals the monitor could display. It wasn't until Matrox/Number Nine/3dfx et al jumped in with a "Video Coprocessor to display games at OVER 20 frames/second!" The problem is, none of them talked to each other on how programmers were supposed to tell the Video Card what to process. There were some very nifty and fast video cards available (from the X Windows world) that never caught on because they weren't popular enough sellers in PC to have code written for them in DOS. When Win95 was developed, the VESA standard for talking to video cards was created, and Microsoft Made DirectX 'Standard', so all the video cards optimized their processors to use DirectX commands instead of their versions. Trying to get X Windows running on a Linux box in the 90's was a total PITA, had to at minimum edit a 2000 line config file about 4 dozen times, rebooting because it would lock up when you got it wrong, then repeat. |
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I remember the same thing w/ the Cyrix processors. They were great in theory and cheap, but I had far more than what I would expect of issues from them. Bigfoot drives were another crashing piece of shit. View Quote |
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Trying to get X Windows running on a Linux box in the 90's was a total PITA, had to at minimum edit a 2000 line config file about 4 dozen times, rebooting because it would lock up when you got it wrong, then repeat. View Quote There was some level of satisfaction in using the OSS version of everything. Had XMMS, some AIM client, web browser, some gnutella client, Kdevelop worked almost as good as Visual C++, only thing missing were the games. Though I will say gimp sucks |
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What's sad was when I graduated high school in 2000, our computer lab still was 75% 8086 workstations. They had 5 486 machines, one (sx25) took 6 minutes to load Netscape Navigator, we timed it. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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This post makes me smile. My first personally owned home computer was an IBM PS/2 Model 30... 286, 12mhz with 1mb of RAM and a 30mb hard drive. My Dad and I added the math co-processor ourselves so that I could run AutoCAD. I was living large! |
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PC Jr. Here. Wish I would have kept it but I was trading women so often I didn't have time to keep up with computing along with my shotgunning drinking boating fishing and hunting habits while working 80+ hours a week.
I didn't get back in until The Pentium 100mhz and Windows 3.1 iirc. I would have loved to have been younger by 15 years and had the time to spend in that era of computing. |
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LOL this. I remember having one or two of their chips. Ran hot IIRC. Also fuzzy on details. Maybe it was Quake, I remember performance not being up to par with the Intel chips. Didn't they also have a pretty nasty bug that caused crashes? Anyhoo, remember ditching them and going with Intel afterwards. View Quote Gaming magazines used to have the demo CDs with them, and one I had, for whatever reason (bug?), had the whole Quake game on it... (to play the later levels you just had to enter a cheat code) But it had the Mechwarrior 2 soundtrack (which was pretty rad lol) probably part of the bug that somehow let me play the whole game. |
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I'm not sure who would have wanted a Cyrix. For business, the AMD K6, K6-3d and K6-2 were decent processors. Didn't quite have the FPU of the PII, so it wasn't the gamers first choice, but a decent chip overall. The Cyrix just wasn't attractive. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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I remember the same thing w/ the Cyrix processors. They were great in theory and cheap, but I had far more than what I would expect of issues from them. Bigfoot drives were another crashing piece of shit. I'm not saying they were awesome and fast, just that they created an entire paradigm shift to CPUs with microcode to fix issues, even Intel started doing that after their FDIV bug Pentium processors. It was similar to IBM being The King through computing history, underestimating the possibilities of desktop/home PCs that gave rise to Microsoft. I guess for the people today, imagine a small startup company creating something so new and groundbreaking that it unseated Microsoft as an OS choice for current hardware. That was how big of deal it was for IBM to lose some lawsuits and allow "The PC Clones" to explode. The only thing I can think of is Google/Android making Microsoft a minor player in mobile phones and portable devices. |
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All I can add is that I recall playing Quake for the first time, for several hours. When I went to bed and closed my eyes, the water effect was stuck in my head and I was nearly sea sick.
One of the top games ever. I still love it and play Quake Arena on my phone. |
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I only build computers with AMD CPUs just to support the little guy and avoid a monopoly.
My frequency of one every five years really makes a difference! |
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My senior year of highschool (89-90) I was a co-op/intern at an architectural firm as a draftsman. We still did the majority of our drawing on the table back then because regenerating a single AutoCAD drawing could take HOURS. I remember working on the site plan for a retirement home/community... we drew everything fullsize in AutoCAD and the plotted it to scale... I got stuck with the slowest 386 back then and had some regens that had to run overnight. View Quote |
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@brass don't forget that AMD is still fighting Intel over the fact that the intel compiler won't support advanced features on AMD cpus, even those with same features as the intels.
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Cyrix allowed AMD to get into the market and got Intel CPU prices down into the sane range. I'm not saying they were awesome and fast, just that they created an entire paradigm shift to CPUs with microcode to fix issues, even Intel started doing that after their FDIV bug Pentium processors. It was similar to IBM being The King through computing history, underestimating the possibilities of desktop/home PCs that gave rise to Microsoft. I guess for the people today, imagine a small startup company creating something so new and groundbreaking that it unseated Microsoft as an OS choice for current hardware. That was how big of deal it was for IBM to lose some lawsuits and allow "The PC Clones" to explode. The only thing I can think of is Google/Android making Microsoft a minor player in mobile phones and portable devices. View Quote AMD with their Athlon K7 was the first to dethrone the king. |
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Wow, so many things I had buried in the past that you guys helped me re-live in this thread
Few things I didn't see mentioned: Loading 20+ floppys just to install Windoze or even 10 floppys just to install IE 1.x Getting ISDN installed (using an Ascend Pipeline modem), rocking ridiculous low ping for Quake multiplayer Many hours wasted trying to,resolve IRQ errors Circuit City, CompUSA, and BestBuy - waiting for the Sunday mailers showing the free items (after rebate) like bundles of RW CD blanks |
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Wow, so many things I had buried in the past that you guys helped me re-live in this thread Few things I didn't see mentioned: Loading 20+ floppys just to install Windoze or even 10 floppys just to install IE 1.x Getting ISDN installed (using an Ascend Pipeline modem), rocking ridiculous low ping for Quake multiplayer Many hours wasted trying to,resolve IRQ errors Circuit City, CompUSA, and BestBuy - waiting for the Sunday mailers showing the free items (after rebate) like bundles of RW CD blanks View Quote Arcades... I miss the Arcades of my youth. Radio Shacks that actually had cool shit in them. This thread is now a nostalgia thread. |
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@brass don't forget that AMD is still fighting Intel over the fact that the intel compiler won't support advanced features on AMD cpus, even those with same features as the intels. View Quote AMD created the first 64 bit x86 with a solid instruction set. Intel had to make their 64 bit Instruction set just a little bit different, giving us AMD64 and Intel's x86-64 aka IA64. AMD ruled the 64 bit arena for several years since there wasn't a desktop OS that could use it, while 64 bit Linux took off and got into the Top 500 supercomputers, at which point, Intel introduced theirs. Still, Microsoft loves Intel, so to this day Windows software is optimized for IA64 with AMD64 an option that gives you some better instructions, but with the clock speeds we're at, I don't see it significant unless building a high performance cluster which wouldn't run Windows anyway. Overclocking today is so easy, when I started, it involved unsoldering the oscillator from the $600 Motherboard and soldering in a socket, then getting a box of Oscillators of various frequencies until I got my 386 running at 36.something Megahertz! CPUs didn't have heat sinks back then, you had to add one if you were going to overclock. Intel didn't come with a CPU heatsink until their stupid "Cartridge" Pentium 2s came out. |
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Because I mostly shitpost?
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I'm not sure who would have wanted a Cyrix. For business, the AMD K6, K6-3d and K6-2 were decent processors. Didn't quite have the FPU of the PII, so it wasn't the gamers first choice, but a decent chip overall. The Cyrix just wasn't attractive. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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I remember the same thing w/ the Cyrix processors. They were great in theory and cheap, but I had far more than what I would expect of issues from them. Bigfoot drives were another crashing piece of shit. |
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https://68.media.tumblr.com/1c5cf60f14cc0de8b3fa5b6c6f3e3fab/tumblr_o0g3tqIbrU1tqzrm7o1_1280.jpg http://lamcdn.net/hopesandfears.com/post_image-image/WY_bSKw5Q9wNt1oO6Ej5Vw-wide.gif View Quote I built my first computer in 2002/2003 on an AMD K8 Athlon 64 Spent several years prior to that experimenting with any computer I could get my hands on 286/386/486, slotted pentiums, anything. I could install dos, win95 and win98 all by myself by age 11 |
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http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/17900000/It-s-now-safe-to-turn-off-your-computer-random-17927884-500-313.jpg Y'all Negroes are now posting in a comfy 90s computer thread. View Quote I drew dicks on them with MS Paint in the school's computer lab in 7th grade |
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Fun fact, That was an image stored plainly in the windows folder on 95/98 machines. I drew dicks on them with MS Paint in the school's computer lab in 7th grade View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/17900000/It-s-now-safe-to-turn-off-your-computer-random-17927884-500-313.jpg Y'all Negroes are now posting in a comfy 90s computer thread. I drew dicks on them with MS Paint in the school's computer lab in 7th grade Then I'd password crack their machine, login, and change that BMP to something a little less pleasant |
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My neighbor had a small computer company. He actually gave me a 286 for my high school graduation in 92. It was something in his shop they had rebuilt out of parts. I remember him saying it was a "screamer" at 16 mhz iirc.
My parents had just bought a 386 with a 256 color monitor. It was a step down, but I was just happy I had something to write my college papers on. I'd had a taste of the typewriter age and that shit was for the birds. I beat on that 286 for 3 years till it crashed and burned on me. I cobbled some money together and bought a demo mac because I needed it to go back and forth with the mac's they had in the journalism lab at school. It was a jump up for what I could afford, but it seemed like all my friends had new $1000+ machines with the latest and greatest stuff. Never seemed to catch up. When I took my first job, we had Pentium 166 machines running Interleaf which was a heavy duty book publishing package. I was putting together tech manuals for a computer company who did their own maintenance. Those 166's choked on Interleaf and I kept getting refurb 166's from the company shop. I finally started marking them with a sharpie marker just to make sure I was getting a different computer in the swap and not the same shit with the same problem. |
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Wow, so many things I had buried in the past that you guys helped me re-live in this thread Few things I didn't see mentioned: Loading 20+ floppys just to install Windoze or even 10 floppys just to install IE 1.x Getting ISDN installed (using an Ascend Pipeline modem), rocking ridiculous low ping for Quake multiplayer Many hours wasted trying to,resolve IRQ errors Circuit City, CompUSA, and BestBuy - waiting for the Sunday mailers showing the free items (after rebate) like bundles of RW CD blanks View Quote I remember when the company I was working for in the late 90s got an ISDN line. We would stay after hours and do some serious damage with the low ping. Anybody ever rock a Zip drive? |
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