For all the millenials - Why Quake slowed down CPU development, and why AMD/ATi got their start - Page 3

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - For all the millenials - Why Quake slowed down CPU development, and why AMD/ATi got their start (Page 3 of 5)

Posted: 9/28/2017 3:20:21 PM EDT

[#1]

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Why do people always bag on the TRS-80?

The TRS-80 was an excellent computer that came out in 1977 and helped usher in the PC age, it was an excellent machine for $600.

By 1979, the TRS-80 had the largest selection of software in the microcomputer market.

Until 1982, the TRS-80 was the best-selling PC line, outselling the Apple II series by a factor of 5 to 1.

That computer was a big deal back in dawn of personal computing.

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My dad taught me to code on a trs 80 when I was 5, basic and we made simple games, random number generators etc.
My school library actually had books full of programs in basic to code games. Slap that on a 5" floppy or the tape drive and away we go.

I liked it better than the apples the school had though they did have Oregon trail at school.

Now I just buy a laptop, erase the windows garbage and slap some flavour of Linux on it.

Somewhere in my junk pile I have ms-dos disks for version 1.1. Os2 warp v2 and a voodoo 3 card amongst other pieces of obsolete nostalgia

Posted: 9/28/2017 3:22:00 PM EDT

[#2]

Anybody remember SGI?
Still have an Indy, an O2, and a Fuel.

ETA

Irix FTMFW!

Posted: 9/28/2017 3:22:28 PM EDT

[#3]

Quote History

Quoted:
When I first got a cable modem I used to scan my neighborhood for folks who had netbios turned on.

Then I'd password crack their machine, login, and change that BMP to something a little less pleasant

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Quoted:

Quoted:
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.

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

When I first got a cable modem I used to scan my neighborhood for folks who had netbios turned on.

Then I'd password crack their machine, login, and change that BMP to something a little less pleasant

Microsoft's NetBios has never been secure. If you were playing a game, and somebody came in you didn't want, you'd send the Ping of Death, which locked up their system with a single packet. Microsoft's "Propietary File Sharing" NetBios has been the continual easy target for 25 years now, with EternalBlue being the latest in a long and prodigious list of exploits.

ZIP drives were the bomb when they came out. There was a big lag before you could move 100 Megabytes that fast any other way. Too bad they generally worked only with the drive that wrote them, so you had to carry the thing and a parallel cable with you to move the porn.

Posted: 9/28/2017 3:26:39 PM EDT

[#4]

Quote History

Quoted:
Anybody remember SGI?
Still have an Indy, an O2, and a Fuel.

ETA

Irix FTMFW!

http://www.edgeloop.se/all_sgi.jpg

View Quote

I used a Silicon Graphics Indigo Indy 2 a lot in 1996, I think. Irix was nice, and they did have a great window manager and a lot of speed for their time. Just for the certifications I collected (AIX, HP-UX, Irix, SunOS and Solaris) It was easy back then, you learned Berkley and System V, and after that, they were easy since they were various mixes of those two.

Posted: 9/28/2017 3:30:39 PM EDT

[#5]

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I remember all this stuff from back when I was like 12. I used to look at the CompUSA (another forgotten name!) flyers and watch the clock speeds go up on the computers when I was a kid.

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 still have that quake disk and the cheat code.... damn this thread is bringing back memories.....

Posted: 9/28/2017 3:31:40 PM EDT

[#6]

Quote History

Quoted:
Anybody remember SGI?
Still have an Indy, an O2, and a Fuel.

ETA

Irix FTMFW!

http://www.edgeloop.se/all_sgi.jpg

http://i25.tinypic.com/317cy2w.gif

View Quote

DUDE those were tits. Very nice condition too!

Posted: 9/28/2017 3:49:17 PM EDT

[#7]

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My experience was with a HeathKit H100 with an 8088chip. We were ROCKIN' at a whole 5-7 MHz!

And yes, I had to keep punchcards in a shoebox at one time, bound in order with rubber bands.

All you guys complaining about feeling old, top THAT!

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Posted: 9/28/2017 3:56:25 PM EDT

[#8]

Quote History

Quoted:
Anybody remember SGI?
Still have an Indy, an O2, and a Fuel.

ETA

Irix FTMFW!

http://www.edgeloop.se/all_sgi.jpg

http://i25.tinypic.com/317cy2w.gif

View Quote

Damn those O2's were sexy. The "boss" got one and I had a hand-me-down HPUX machine. UI was positively clunky compared to IRIX.

Posted: 9/28/2017 4:13:27 PM EDT

[#9]

Quote History

Quoted:
Back in the 90s I owned an ISP with a few other people. We had a Quake II server with lithium mods on our backbone for testing latency. We had 2 or three DS3 uplinks at the time. If you played Quake II around that time, pretty good chance you played on our server. It was pretty damned fast.

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I played a lot of QII during that time. I was a member of the PiMP (Poetry in Motion Platoon) clan, the leader ran his own ISP too, wow, cant believe I remember all that...

This thread is bringing back memories...

Posted: 9/28/2017 4:18:07 PM EDT

[#10]

Quote History

Quoted:

https://68.media.tumblr.com/1c5cf60f14cc0de8b3fa5b6c6f3e3fab/tumblr_o0g3tqIbrU1tqzrm7o1_1280.jpg

http://lamcdn.net/hopesandfears.com/post_image-image/WY_bSKw5Q9wNt1oO6Ej5Vw-wide.gif

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Hack the planet

Posted: 9/28/2017 4:23:35 PM EDT

[#11]

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Those are some good ones. I don't miss floppies or IRQ errors.

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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Funny thing - I just found a stack of Zip drive back up disks in a box while unpacking?.

I can remember a shopping trip at the government supply store (SSSC) asking if I should get just one single-sided 5 1/4" disk, or should I get a box. My supervisor came over, picked up the box & said "why would anyone ever need to store that much data?"
(Mind you, these were 360k floppies, so the the whole box could hold about 3 MB.)

Posted: 9/28/2017 4:50:57 PM EDT

[#12]

Syquest EZ135 Drive > zip

Posted: 9/28/2017 5:38:46 PM EDT

[#13]

Quote History

Quoted:

OpenGL was/is a standard from *nix X Window terminals, many video cards supported it natively. Then Microsoft had to do what they always do and create their own proprietary standard, but this was way later in the scheme of things.

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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It still had its quirks well into the 2000s. I remember having to edit the xf86config so many times. I almost gave up on Linux over it a couple times. I got pretty proficient at it in time though. Now it's a breeze. It practically configures its self these days. I think the only time I had to edit my xorg config in the last 5 years or so was to get my Nvidia cards working and that was just a minor edit.

Posted: 9/28/2017 5:43:23 PM EDT

[#14]

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Quoted:
It still had its quirks well into the 2000s. I remember having to edit the xf86config so many times. I almost gave up on Linux over it a couple times. I got pretty proficient at it in time though. Now it's a breeze. It practically configures its self these days. I think the only time I had to edit my xorg config in the last 5 years or so was to get my Nvidia cards working and that was just a minor edit.

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Quoted:

Quoted:

OpenGL was/is a standard from *nix X Window terminals, many video cards supported it natively. Then Microsoft had to do what they always do and create their own proprietary standard, but this was way later in the scheme of things.

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.

[color=#ff0000Trying 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.[/color]

It still had its quirks well into the 2000s. I remember having to edit the xf86config so many times. I almost gave up on Linux over it a couple times. I got pretty proficient at it in time though. Now it's a breeze. It practically configures its self these days. I think the only time I had to edit my xorg config in the last 5 years or so was to get my Nvidia cards working and that was just a minor edit.

Yeah, we did too good. If you were running X on Linux in the 90's, you were among the 1337 crowd. Especially if you hacked another card driver's source to match the spec sheet for the $300 card you just bought.

Some standard changes made everything simple and now any schmuck can run Linux X GUI now. *points nose in air*

Posted: 9/28/2017 5:44:26 PM EDT

[#15]

Attached File

Posted: 9/28/2017 5:46:01 PM EDT

[#16]

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Quoted:
Yeah I remember that. EMM386 to load some TSRs in extended. Especially for Nascar.exe, that thing wanted something like 610k of conventional.

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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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...

Yeah I remember that. EMM386 to load some TSRs in extended. Especially for Nascar.exe, that thing wanted something like 610k of conventional.

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).

Lol, I learned all that trying to get Star Trek to load.

Posted: 9/28/2017 5:48:19 PM EDT

[#17]

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Quoted:

That image doesn't quite fit. When you were done using a computer, you just hit the damn power switch. There wasn't a "shutdown" until Windows 95.

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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Congrats! You just crashed you MFM drive. Park.exe...

Posted: 9/28/2017 5:52:12 PM EDT

[#18]

Quote History

Quoted:
When I first got a cable modem I used to scan my neighborhood for folks who had netbios turned on.

Then I'd password crack their machine, login, and change that BMP to something a little less pleasant

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Quote History

Quoted:

Quoted:
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.

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

When I first got a cable modem I used to scan my neighborhood for folks who had netbios turned on.

Then I'd password crack their machine, login, and change that BMP to something a little less pleasant

I printed instructions to turn file and printer sharing off on their printers.

Posted: 9/28/2017 5:52:27 PM EDT

[#19]

Quote History

Quoted:
Yeah, we did too good. If you were running X on Linux in the 90's, you were among the 1337 crowd. Especially if you hacked another card driver's source to match the spec sheet for the $300 card you just bought.

Some standard changes made everything simple and now any schmuck can run Linux X GUI now. *points nose in air*

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Quote History

Quoted:

Quoted:

OpenGL was/is a standard from *nix X Window terminals, many video cards supported it natively. Then Microsoft had to do what they always do and create their own proprietary standard, but this was way later in the scheme of things.

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.

[color=#ff0000Trying 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.[/color]

It still had its quirks well into the 2000s. I remember having to edit the xf86config so many times. I almost gave up on Linux over it a couple times. I got pretty proficient at it in time though. Now it's a breeze. It practically configures its self these days. I think the only time I had to edit my xorg config in the last 5 years or so was to get my Nvidia cards working and that was just a minor edit.

Yeah, we did too good. If you were running X on Linux in the 90's, you were among the 1337 crowd. Especially if you hacked another card driver's source to match the spec sheet for the $300 card you just bought.

Some standard changes made everything simple and now any schmuck can run Linux X GUI now. *points nose in air*

Linux can still be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. I run gentoo on my laptop at home, and it certainly has its head on desk moments. It has a Radeon card in it and it took me a while to figure out that the catalyst driver was not going to cooperate. I wound up just going with the open source driver for it.

Posted: 9/28/2017 7:16:59 PM EDT

[#20]

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Be careful, it is pitch black, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.

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Quoted:

Quoted:
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.

Be careful, it is pitch black, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Ya'll are giving me flashbacks to the 80s, actually.

Posted: 9/28/2017 7:33:53 PM EDT

[#21]

Quote History

Quoted:
Anybody remember SGI?
Still have an Indy, an O2, and a Fuel.

ETA

Irix FTMFW!

http://www.edgeloop.se/all_sgi.jpg

http://i25.tinypic.com/317cy2w.gif

View Quote

I think I've posted it before, but I've got an SGI Onyx Challenge L in storage. Not sure exactly what I'm going to do with it when I get it back in a couple of months.

Posted: 9/28/2017 7:55:00 PM EDT

[#22]

I had one of these and it actually printed pretty well for a dot matrix

They are asking $1874 for one!!

Posted: 9/28/2017 8:05:18 PM EDT

[#23]

I cut my *nix teeth on Debian and Slackware!

Thanks for your contributions!

Posted: 9/28/2017 8:05:24 PM EDT

[#24]

Quote History

Quoted:
Anybody remember SGI?
Still have an Indy, an O2, and a Fuel.

ETA

Irix FTMFW!

http://www.edgeloop.se/all_sgi.jpg

http://i25.tinypic.com/317cy2w.gif

View Quote

I still have two SGI O2's and an Octane2, a NeXT turbo color slab and a quad hyper-sparc Sun SPARC 20.

Those were the days.

-k

Posted: 9/28/2017 8:30:54 PM EDT

[#25]

Quote History

Quoted:
I had one of these and it actually printed pretty well for a dot matrix
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2084/1875/products/41WMR7D591L_1800x.jpg?v=1501703483

They are asking $1874 for one!!

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I had one of those, too. Okidata was The Printer to have, but they were more insanely priced. I had the 9 pin little brother for my Atari when I was a teen.

Wonder why they are worth so much? I have a working vintage 1998 system with the Beta Linux on it with that Number Nine card in it, and another one with Win 95 with the 3dfx Voodoo video capture card collecting dust in the basement. I also have a 1992-ish 486 motherboard that is without a case, that board is bigger than the outside dimensions of a modern tower system.

It's pretty insane to compare the motherboards that cost $300 back then to one that costs $85 today and does insanely more.

If all the Nostalgia fans in here have a chance, you'll love the book/audiobook "Off to Be the Wizard!". It's more fun than Ready Player One for flashbacks.

Posted: 9/28/2017 8:38:37 PM EDT

[#26]

This thread needs more Castle Adventure and OG Leisure Suit Larry

Posted: 9/28/2017 8:42:17 PM EDT

[#27]

Thread needs more math co-processors.

Posted: 9/28/2017 9:09:36 PM EDT

[#28]

Quote History

Quoted:

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 went from gaming to working and spent two years in the 90's using Linux full time without the luxury of X Windows, as xfree86 did not play well with the Diamond 64 VRAM.

Posted: 9/28/2017 9:15:48 PM EDT

[#29]

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I am 99% sure you banned me from a Vegas based CS server. lol

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I in fact probably did.

Team Zebra?

I would drop in as admin under alias of "Tactical_ted"

Posted: 9/28/2017 9:24:26 PM EDT

[#30]

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Quoted:
This thread needs more Castle Adventure and OG Leisure Suit Larry

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I learned history in order to pass the original Leisure Suit Larry age verification.

Posted: 9/28/2017 9:31:53 PM EDT

[#31]

Quote History

Quoted:
I went from gaming to working and spent two years in the 90's using Linux full time without the luxury of X Windows, as xfree86 did not play well with the Diamond 64 VRAM.

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Quoted:

Quoted:

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.

I went from gaming to working and spent two years in the 90's using Linux full time without the luxury of X Windows, as xfree86 did not play well with the Diamond 64 VRAM.

Diamond documented their APIs very, VERY thoroughly, and would send you a copy for free if you asked. You should have done that and started with the other Diamond driver to boost the support base.

My code was pure sex. Drunken, fast,sloppy and without comments. In fact, I'd be looking at some code later and think "wow, that's a very clever trick to do that", and keep reading only to realize I wrote it, but somebody else commented it for me.

Posted: 9/28/2017 9:38:18 PM EDT

[#32]

Quote History

Quoted:
Diamond documented their APIs very, VERY thoroughly, and would send you a copy for free if you asked. You should have done that and started with the other Diamond driver to boost the support base.

My code was pure sex. Drunken, fast,sloppy and without comments. In fact, I'd be looking at some code later and think "wow, that's a very clever trick to do that", and keep reading only to realize I wrote it, but somebody else commented it for me.

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Quoted:

Quoted:

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.

I went from gaming to working and spent two years in the 90's using Linux full time without the luxury of X Windows, as xfree86 did not play well with the Diamond 64 VRAM.

Diamond documented their APIs very, VERY thoroughly, and would send you a copy for free if you asked. You should have done that and started with the other Diamond driver to boost the support base.

My code was pure sex. Drunken, fast,sloppy and without comments. In fact, I'd be looking at some code later and think "wow, that's a very clever trick to do that", and keep reading only to realize I wrote it, but somebody else commented it for me.

As best as I can recall, the DRAM model worked with xfree86. The VRAM model didn't, or at least I wasn't able to make it work.

It was for the best. Spending over two years of non-GUI life was a good experience. I had irc and lynx to keep me entertained, and a SLIP connection to a SunOS box on a fat pipe.

Posted: 9/28/2017 10:01:30 PM EDT

[#33]

what is taking a tourist to level 24?

Posted: 9/28/2017 10:07:17 PM EDT

[#34]

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Quoted:
what is taking a tourist to level 24?

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I played for 15 years before winning with a Wizard. Haven't done it since.

Angband is a souped up pretty version with more features, but it has the same early level death curse, in addition to the mid level one, and having to discover what everything means by yourself, and only starting a game when the moon is at a quarter phase, and....

Posted: 9/28/2017 10:52:35 PM EDT

[#35]

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Syquest EZ135 Drive > zip

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I agree. I had the Syquest in IDE and the Zip in parallel and SCSI formats.

Posted: 9/28/2017 10:56:02 PM EDT

[#36]

Some of you guys were obviously more hard core about your hardware than I was. My first computer was a Sinclair Z81 with 2k of memory. It was faulty though, had to send it back for refund. Next was a timex-Sinclair T1000 with a 16k memory module. Used my tape recorder as storage then. Then it was the Atari 400, 48k of memory. First a tape drive (the 1010), then a single side drive, then a aftermarket double sided drive-I was really excited to find a 10 pack of double sided drives for 10 bucks at a ham radio show!
Moved up to the Atari 512 with 512k of memory.
Kept that a few years until it died in 1993 and I bought my first PC. Don't remember what it was. It was also the only desktop I didn't build myself. MS-DOS until I was forced to get windows 3.1 to run programs I wanted.also tried OS2 Warp, was pretty good.
Lots of the same games you guys mention.

I tried to learn programming more than basic, assembler and C, but while the manuals told you what a command did, it never explained why you needed to do that or when.

Good times. Local BBS', computer cluns, compuserve and GEnie, then kicking and screaming onto the Internet

Posted: 9/28/2017 11:02:28 PM EDT

[#37]

Quote History

Quoted:
I had one of those, too. Okidata was The Printer to have, but they were more insanely priced. I had the 9 pin little brother for my Atari when I was a teen.

Wonder why they are worth so much? I have a working vintage 1998 system with the Beta Linux on it with that Number Nine card in it, and another one with Win 95 with the 3dfx Voodoo video capture card collecting dust in the basement. I also have a 1992-ish 486 motherboard that is without a case, that board is bigger than the outside dimensions of a modern tower system.

It's pretty insane to compare the motherboards that cost $300 back then to one that costs $85 today and does insanely more.

If all the Nostalgia fans in here have a chance, you'll love the book/audiobook "Off to Be the Wizard!". It's more fun than Ready Player One for flashbacks.

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Quoted:

Quoted:
I had one of these and it actually printed pretty well for a dot matrix
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2084/1875/products/41WMR7D591L_1800x.jpg?v=1501703483

They are asking $1874 for one!!

I had one of those, too. Okidata was The Printer to have, but they were more insanely priced. I had the 9 pin little brother for my Atari when I was a teen.

Wonder why they are worth so much? I have a working vintage 1998 system with the Beta Linux on it with that Number Nine card in it, and another one with Win 95 with the 3dfx Voodoo video capture card collecting dust in the basement. I also have a 1992-ish 486 motherboard that is without a case, that board is bigger than the outside dimensions of a modern tower system.

It's pretty insane to compare the motherboards that cost $300 back then to one that costs $85 today and does insanely more.

If all the Nostalgia fans in here have a chance, you'll love the book/audiobook "Off to Be the Wizard!". It's more fun than Ready Player One for flashbacks.

It's supply and demand -- there are systems out there that still use them, and probably no new ones manufactured.

Posted: 9/28/2017 11:05:36 PM EDT

[#38]

Quote History

Quoted:
Some of you guys were obviously more hard core about your hardware than I was. My first computer was a Sinclair Z81 with 2k of memory. It was faulty though, had to send it back for refund. Next was a timex-Sinclair T1000 with a 16k memory module. Used my tape recorder as storage then. Then it was the Atari 400, 48k of memory. First a tape drive (the 1010), then a single side drive, then a aftermarket double sided drive-I was really excited to find a 10 pack of double sided drives for 10 bucks at a ham radio show!
Moved up to the Atari 512 with 512k of memory.
Kept that a few years until it died in 1993 and I bought my first PC. Don't remember what it was. It was also the only desktop I didn't build myself. MS-DOS until I was forced to get windows 3.1 to run programs I wanted.also tried OS2 Warp, was pretty good.
Lots of the same games you guys mention.

I tried to learn programming more than basic, assembler and C, but while the manuals told you what a command did, it never explained why you needed to do that or when.

Good times. Local BBS', computer cluns, compuserve and GEnie, then kicking and screaming onto the Internet

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My first computer was also a "Some Assembly Required" ZX81 ! A circuit board and bags of parts. I soldered it together and then used it until I saved enough lawn mowing money to get an Atari 400. Then I learned how to type, and upgraded to an Atari 1200XL as soon as they were available.

As far as all the various programming keywords/functions, and when to use them, it's sort of like Harley Riders: If you have to ask, you probably wouldn't understand, and wouldn't want to anyway.

The tape drive was awesome! I was the only kid in my town to learn Assembly and C on a 6502 1Mhz processor. I was really rocking with an Indus GT floppy drive, which I still have. The stupid C compiler cost over $100, which was real money back then. I also learned Assembly on the Z80 after assembling it physically, but that damn membrane keyboard was too slow.

I finally got a Commodore 64 with a composite monitor in about 1986, which also had the 6502. It was a bit easier to code, and the memory mapped I/O translated perfectly to the Intel systems which were thousands of dollars out of my budget until Student Loan.

Posted: 9/28/2017 11:20:43 PM EDT

[#39]

Quote History

Quoted:
Those are some good ones. I don't miss floppies or IRQ errors.

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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Quoted:

Quoted:
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

Those are some good ones. I don't miss floppies or IRQ errors.

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?

Zip drives were great until you got the click of death.

Posted: 9/28/2017 11:25:44 PM EDT

[#40]

Quote History

Quoted:

As soon as AMD became viable, and even beat Intel in all areas for a CPU generation, they've been in one lawsuit after another from Intel. I don't see it ending.

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.

View Quote

Hey, don't talk too much shit about the cartridge CPUs.

I had one of the first home based computers that'd get over a GHz thanks to those things. Mine were P3 though. P3 550s to be exact. I can't even remember where my buddy found it, but he came up with a dual processor server board from some place for me.

That thing started out with a whopping 192MB of RAM. Eventually upgraded it to 384. It was a gaming *monster* in those days.

Had to run NT just to get the OS to even recognize the dual processors and multiprocessor support really wasn't all that good back then anyway.

I did it because I could, not because there was much benefit to be had.

Posted: 9/28/2017 11:29:50 PM EDT

[#41]

Quote History

Quoted:
I cut my *nix teeth on Debian and Slackware!

Thanks for your contributions!

View Quote

I started on Slackware as well.

Then Red Hat was all the rage in certain circles. I didn't really get into messing with Debian until later.

Posted: 9/28/2017 11:29:55 PM EDT

[#42]

Quote History

Quoted:
I had one of these and it actually printed pretty well for a dot matrix
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2084/1875/products/41WMR7D591L_1800x.jpg?v=1501703483

They are asking $1874 for one!!

View Quote

The local landfill still prints their receipts on a dot matrix.

Posted: 9/28/2017 11:34:31 PM EDT

[#43]

Quote History

Quoted:
Hey, don't talk too much shit about the cartridge CPUs.

I had one of the first home based computers that'd get over a GHz thanks to those things. Mine were P3 though. P3 550s to be exact. I can't even remember where my buddy found it, but he came up with a dual processor server board from some place for me.

That thing started out with a whopping 192MB of RAM. Eventually upgraded it to 384. It was a gaming *monster* in those days.

Had to run NT just to get the OS to even recognize the dual processors and multiprocessor support really wasn't all that good back then anyway.

I did it because I could, not because there was much benefit to be had.

View Quote View All Quotes

View All Quotes

Quote History

Quoted:

Quoted:

As soon as AMD became viable, and even beat Intel in all areas for a CPU generation, they've been in one lawsuit after another from Intel. I don't see it ending.

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.

Hey, don't talk too much shit about the cartridge CPUs.

I had one of the first home based computers that'd get over a GHz thanks to those things. Mine were P3 though. P3 550s to be exact. I can't even remember where my buddy found it, but he came up with a dual processor server board from some place for me.

That thing started out with a whopping 192MB of RAM. Eventually upgraded it to 384. It was a gaming *monster* in those days.

Had to run NT just to get the OS to even recognize the dual processors and multiprocessor support really wasn't all that good back then anyway.

I did it because I could, not because there was much benefit to be had.

I had a Pentium Pro with 2GB of RAM. Totally useless except in Linux, but it did run DOS games pretty good if you used DR-DOS (The best DOS, but they didn't go into the GUI market). It loaded the EMM386 memory manager automatically, and there was another program, which I TOTALLY forgot the name of, which let you run MULTIPLE PROGRAMS in DOS that you could switch between. With that extra memory, and DR DOS and that multi-tasking-ish software, I could run WordPerfect to get my papers written, AND flip to a game holding either shift or alt with the Page Down key to switch programs.

In college, I wrote most of my homework in LaTeX (typesetting language) on AIX, printed on a holycrapexpensive HP LaserJet because I worked at the university computing center. The teachers were so impressed by the inline formulas and awesome typesetting that I think I got A's just because of that, rather than the actual content of the paper.

Posted: 9/28/2017 11:37:37 PM EDT

[#44]

Quote History

Quoted:
I had a Pentium Pro with 2GB of RAM. Totally useless except in Linux, but it did run DOS games pretty good if you used DR-DOS (The best DOS, but they didn't go into the GUI market). It loaded the EMM386 memory manager automatically, and there was another program, which I TOTALLY forgot the name of, which let you run MULTIPLE PROGRAMS in DOS that you could switch between. With that extra memory, and DR DOS and that multi-tasking-ish software, I could run WordPerfect to get my papers written, AND flip to a game holding either shift or alt with the Page Down key to switch programs.

In the end, I wrote most of my homework in LaTeX on AIX, printed on a holycrapexpensive HP LaserJet because I worked at the university computing center. The teacher's were so impressed by the inline formulas and awesome typesetting that I think I got A's just because of that, rather than the actual content of the paper.

View Quote View All Quotes

View All Quotes

Quote History

Quoted:

Quoted:

As soon as AMD became viable, and even beat Intel in all areas for a CPU generation, they've been in one lawsuit after another from Intel. I don't see it ending.

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.

Hey, don't talk too much shit about the cartridge CPUs.

I had one of the first home based computers that'd get over a GHz thanks to those things. Mine were P3 though. P3 550s to be exact. I can't even remember where my buddy found it, but he came up with a dual processor server board from some place for me.

That thing started out with a whopping 192MB of RAM. Eventually upgraded it to 384. It was a gaming *monster* in those days.

Had to run NT just to get the OS to even recognize the dual processors and multiprocessor support really wasn't all that good back then anyway.

I did it because I could, not because there was much benefit to be had.

I had a Pentium Pro with 2GB of RAM. Totally useless except in Linux, but it did run DOS games pretty good if you used DR-DOS (The best DOS, but they didn't go into the GUI market). It loaded the EMM386 memory manager automatically, and there was another program, which I TOTALLY forgot the name of, which let you run MULTIPLE PROGRAMS in DOS that you could switch between. With that extra memory, and DR DOS and that multi-tasking-ish software, I could run WordPerfect to get my papers written, AND flip to a game holding either shift or alt with the Page Down key to switch programs.

In the end, I wrote most of my homework in LaTeX on AIX, printed on a holycrapexpensive HP LaserJet because I worked at the university computing center. The teacher's were so impressed by the inline formulas and awesome typesetting that I think I got A's just because of that, rather than the actual content of the paper.

QEMM & Deskview 386 were what I normally found for DOS multitasking.

Posted: 9/28/2017 11:50:20 PM EDT

[#45]

Quote History

Quoted:

My first computer was also a "Some Assembly Required" ZX81 ! A circuit board and bags of parts. I soldered it together and then used it until I saved enough lawn mowing money to get an Atari 400. Then I learned how to type, and upgraded to an Atari 1200XL as soon as they were available.

As far as all the various programming keywords/functions, and when to use them, it's sort of like Harley Riders: If you have to ask, you probably wouldn't understand, and wouldn't want to anyway.

The tape drive was awesome! I was the only kid in my town to learn Assembly and C on a 6502 1Mhz processor. I was really rocking with an Indus GT floppy drive, which I still have. The stupid C compiler cost over $100, which was real money back then. I also learned Assembly on the Z80 after assembling it physically, but that damn membrane keyboard was too slow.

I finally got a Commodore 64 with a composite monitor in about 1986, which also had the 6502. It was a bit easier to code, and the memory mapped I/O translated perfectly to the Intel systems which were thousands of dollars out of my budget until Student Loan.

View Quote

My z81 was preassembled, cost $200 direct from sinclair. Really had to beg my dad to get it.

As far as programming went, I knew what I wanted to do, but couldn't find info on how to make the graphics, how to move them, etc.

Posted: 9/28/2017 11:55:15 PM EDT

[#46]

Quote History

Quoted:
My z81 was preassembled, cost $200 direct from sinclair. Really had to beg my dad to get it.

As far as programming went, I knew what I wanted to do, but couldn't find info on how to make the graphics, how to move them, etc.

View Quote View All Quotes

View All Quotes

Quote History

Quoted:

Quoted:

My first computer was also a "Some Assembly Required" ZX81 ! A circuit board and bags of parts. I soldered it together and then used it until I saved enough lawn mowing money to get an Atari 400. Then I learned how to type, and upgraded to an Atari 1200XL as soon as they were available.

As far as all the various programming keywords/functions, and when to use them, it's sort of like Harley Riders: If you have to ask, you probably wouldn't understand, and wouldn't want to anyway.

The tape drive was awesome! I was the only kid in my town to learn Assembly and C on a 6502 1Mhz processor. I was really rocking with an Indus GT floppy drive, which I still have. The stupid C compiler cost over $100, which was real money back then. I also learned Assembly on the Z80 after assembling it physically, but that damn membrane keyboard was too slow.

I finally got a Commodore 64 with a composite monitor in about 1986, which also had the 6502. It was a bit easier to code, and the memory mapped I/O translated perfectly to the Intel systems which were thousands of dollars out of my budget until Student Loan.

My z81 was preassembled, cost $200 direct from sinclair. Really had to beg my dad to get it.

As far as programming went, I knew what I wanted to do, but couldn't find info on how to make the graphics, how to move them, etc.

I wrote some HOWTOs, and far better ones were posted to BBS's. You must not have had an awesome 300 baud acoustic coupling modem and the right phone numbers for your parents to rip you a new one up one side and down the other because of the long distance bill.

(I did learn Beige Boxing after that, and then LD costs were zero, which confused my parents....)

Posted: 9/29/2017 12:31:27 AM EDT

[#47]

I had a direct connect modem, microbit peripheral products 300 baud modem, until I got a 1200 baud modem from DAK

My mom was not pleased about the long distance phone calls to Columbus, OH to connect to compuserve before I found the local number...

Posted: 9/29/2017 3:20:43 AM EDT

[#48]

Quote History

Quoted:
Be careful, it is pitch black, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.

View Quote

My favorite

Posted: 9/29/2017 3:54:11 AM EDT

[#49]

I was introduced to BASIC programming on a borrowed TRS-80 with 128k RAM.

I still have my first system. A Packard Bell XT clone with a 10 MHz 8088, 640k RAM, 30 MB. HDD and CGI color graphics. I added a 1200 baud modem later.

I learned Pascal and 'C' on that bastard. It had one 5 1/4" floppy and the HDD.

Nothing is more fun than programming the 8250 UART on an XT. IIRC, that bastard didn't have a FIFO. Thank God for the 16550 UART.

I also have an original Pentium 90 with the Pentium FDIV bug and the original letter from Intel offering to replace it. I didn't replace it. I never throw anything away.

Posted: 9/29/2017 9:20:21 AM EDT

[#50]

Quote History

Quoted:

As soon as AMD became viable, and even beat Intel in all areas for a CPU generation, they've been in one lawsuit after another from Intel. I don't see it ending.

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.

View Quote

Some of the fun stuff we did was bumping VESA bus stuff to 40mhz from 33. Some cards would do it, others wouldn't. DX4-120 was pretty good. Some EISA boards would allow us to run the cpu clock to 50mhz, but no good video cards :(

I learned a lot about the intel compiler thing while running Chip design and simulation tools. We had a bunch of badass AMD boxes, but they performed like shit due to the tools being compiled with the intel compiler. Last I heard they were talking about moving to GCC from intel, or offering specific AMD binaries, but that didn't help us with the old tools we ran. Locked us into intel cpus for the compute cluster.

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - For all the millenials - Why Quake slowed down CPU development, and why AMD/ATi got their start (Page 3 of 5)

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