I feel Old

Blogged this the other night on MySpace, felt it would go well here, I know I am not the only person over 29 in here

~C

 

Yeppers . . . I'm a tad over 29 . . .

This reminds me of the very first computer I ever used (and I use the term 'computer" as a kindness). It was at my work, and they went out and bought Macintosh units - they had monitors with built-in 3.5 floppy drives, and 40MB external hard-drives. The sales guy told us we would NEVER use all that space . . . and to be honest, he was pretty much right - we never did on most of the units. I have no idea now how much RAM they had . . .

It was pretty much a glorified typewriter (they weren't even on a LAN) - but I knew then I was hooked. I was made a training guy, so I was given one to take home. They had this neat little program (sorta like Paint, I guess) that I was able to use to make diagrams and representations of our equipment for my training manual. All in all, seemed like high technology to me at the time.

Calltaker, you went and made me nostalgic . . . lol

 

I don't even remember the specs on the first mac I had. It was one of those door stoppers, very nice and handy little machines. Never failed me though, ever!

My second machine was a very advanced Macintosh Performa, with 8 MB of ram (and with the virtual memory, a total of 16, damn that was fast!), and a hdd that was gosh, maybe a few hundred megs, I have no idea, but there was an echo inside them! That machine was pretty reliable, only thing was... Once when I was running a few applications at the same time (word, solitair, browser...) and my cat took a stroll over the keyboard, something very bad happened to it, and I had to learn how to reinstall it!

I shouldn't talk so much, when it comes to hardware, the current baby is rather archaic as well...

I've come to realise, in most geeks homes, there is a puter they cherish and tend to like it was a family member, but somewhere you will find a slip of paper (or a text doc) with the specs of the dream machine!

http://members.chello.se/solange/smileys/jump.gif

 

Very true, Solange. This thread has reminded me that everything is relative to what a person is used to - at least where computers are concerned.

Friends come to me with older PC's and ask me what can be done to upgrade them. I used to have a plethora of old ISA cards, memory, and such - also given to me by folks who felt the equipment was outmoded and thus useless (for their needs, the stuff really was). I clean and upgrade these venerable computers to the best of my ability, and send them back - the owners have always been happy with what little boost I could give their systems. Sometimes I get old computers that a friend of a friend of a friend was going to just throw out - I tweak and clean these PC's and then give them to folks who have never had one, or couldn't afford a new one right then, but wanted to check PC's out - and they are always pleased to get them.

I remember spending $1800.00 for my first PC - a 166MHZ Cyrix with 32MB of ram and a 2GB hard-drive, running Win95 . . . I STILL can't bring myself to junk its gutted carcass . . .

My favorite success story concerns a friend who brought me two older Pent one systems ( both 'throwouts' - a 166mhz and a 200mhz) with 1 and 2 GB harddrives - as I recall they had 93MB of ram between them. She asked me to make one PC out of both for her daughter, who had several games that had run on a similar platform that was no longer available. I did so and tossed in bigger drives and some RAM I had in stock . . . It's been two + years, and that creation is still running (I did replace the CPU fan several months ago - it was making noise) and serving a usefull purpose.

I may be a romantic, but I feel computers like to be used . . . outdated or not. After all, I've been feeling a bit outdated myself, of late . . .

I actually had a point for this litany . . . but it escapes me now (they say that memory is the first to go . . . which is a mercy, I think. After all, when you start to lose the other stuff, you won't recall you had it to begin with! )

I think it's off to bed for me . . . I'm getting maudlin . . .

 

I'm not over 29, but I remember playing Police Quest and Kings Quest games using about 5-10, 5.25" floppies. Almost forgot Leisure Suit Larry, lol. Ultima was the best, though. Don't remember what kind of puter it was. I kept it until we got a puter with win98 on it then gave it to goodwill or something.

 

Wow that brought back from memories. My first computer was a 486DX 33MHz with 4MB of RAM and 104MB hard drive. I was running DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0. Some of the upgrades I had were a 2x cd-rom, 4MB Ram (8MB total), Sierra VooDoo graphics card, logitech 16-bit sound card, DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. I remember thinking The 7th Guest was such an awesome game! Back then 1MB of RAM was $50

 

I kept my performa till last year when I started living with someone, and there just wasn't enough space anymore! It had been collecting dust in the basement for almost 10 years by then...

Outdated? You? Never!

My current comp originated as my mom's old Pentium 166... When she got rid of it, I had some help from dad and a friend to update it with a new case, cpu, mobo and graphics. Over the years, I have changed some more things, added more memory, changed the hdd, so right now, only the floppy drive and the old cd drive (which I never ever use, for some reason my new one is a little faster...) are the only "original" pieces. When I finally get something better for myself, this baby is going back to my mom! That will be a vast improvement to what she's got!

So yeah, I agree with you, puters should really be re-used to as great an extent as possible!

 

First of all I agree %100 to what Calltaker blogged. Pull the plug and live life directly, not through bits and bytes. That being said, my first rig was a 8MHz 286 with 640K RAM and 384 K extended memory with a 20MB drive and a 16 colour EGA screen. This was a demo model as my company was closing sales offices and I got it for $1200 along with an impact printer that was so loud my ears rang after a page print! Around 1985 and this was meant as a business machine.

I remember getting all my SW from the company for a good employee's discount and free tech service and help as I knew most of the techs. Played most of the Sierra Quest games and LSL of course. Oh, that VGA screen was a godsend as they tried to pawn off a CGA 4 colour screen with that ugly lavender type colour. Yech! Had a lot of fun with that though it's long gone now.

 

My first desktop was a Tandy Model 1 with cassette "hard drive". 4K of RAM if I remember rightly.

My first "laptop" was a Tandy Model 4P (mid to late '80's).
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/trs80-4p/index.html

Hardly a laptop, more like one of those early portable sewing machine cases when packed up. Twin 5.25" floppy drives, no hard drive, but I used it a lot.

Tandy machines were really big in the early 80's but they kept their own proprietary OS's and the IBM PC, and IBM clones, eventually rolled them. Bazza

Bazza

 

LOL... never thought that this would really create a thread like this. Is kina nice to rehash memories like old PC Parts


~C

 

29-I have grandchildren almost there, way to make me feel bad,