Just an observation in passing; a bit over 20 years ago in 1994, on an impulsive lark, I bought my very first computer thinking that it would be a nice thing to have with a growing son (at the time only approaching 2, not yet with any siblings). Having never even touched a computer before, I primarily bought the thing as a potential school or educational tool for him, who had just barely learned to speak in full sentences. At the time, it was considered very much the top of line, an Intel Pentium 90 with a huge Western Digital hard drive with an almost unheard of 529 MB capacity. I paid about $ USD 3,500 for it from a small cutting edge company called Quantex (since defunct). Fast forward to about two weeks ago, when I got a back up WD pocket drive through Amazon, rated at 2 TB for little over a hundred bucks, and really "plug and play" as advertised. In essence, that first computer was probably the best money I'd ever spent as it opened up a whole new technology world of which I had known nothing. I was allowed to grow with the industry, learning how to build computers, install software, and use applications for the betterment of our lives and knowledge, not to mention that computers have become the de facto entertainment systems of our household. All I have to say is, what a truly incredible ride -cool2
I literally grew up with technology. My first memory of using a computer, was playing a NASCAR PC game on like Windows 2000 or something. Then of course I remembered Windows XP to Vista to 7 to 8. Then when my family got a newer computer with XP pre-installed, the pre-loaded games were fun as hell. The pinball and the spider card game. I used to ask my parents all the time for a better computer, and I would also never get it as expected. Few years later, I learn the art of building your own computer and I did. I've been using it for 3+ years now and I haven't upgraded anything apart from RAM (my graphics card still runs fine). I would say technology may have been improved drastically over the last decade. It's crazy because when I get a blackout of electricity, I then realize how much I depend on technology.
I remember the old 'eight dot three' and conventional memory limitations, and one had to configure a machine to use extended memory or else some games couldn't run; those were the days. I'd started with DOS and Windows 3.11 (windows for work groups); then moved up to W95, heralded as the new Plug and Play standard. Of course, it was all hype and wishful thinking back then, but it was a idea of the direction that we should go in, and it eventually happened, even if it took another decade. I agree, that technology is so important to us in today's world; the planet would stop without it.
all i remember is back in early to mid 90s, i was using this thing that resembles a TV/typewriter....and the brand was an apple.
I got my first computer in the year 2000 and at that time, it cost about $1000. I got excited to play Neopets because everyone at my school was playing it.
yea.. well try downloading a 50mb porn file back in the day on a 56k modem.. you had to pre-load your porn if you wanted to watch it following week..
was that even a thing? streaming... damn back in the days those pentiums and compaqs.. I was fortunate to have a computer and internet at a young age though. Really prepared me to understand more about computers and how to troubleshoot them. I think there's people still out there who have the assumption that you can get viruses downloading porn..
i had a 486 dx 66 mhz back in 1994 with like 120 megs, the 4x cdrom addon cost about $300.... it was like $2500 for the pc. I got a sound card a couple years later and a pentium 133, it didn't really make a difference in speed but it was so badass just to hear sound (the first mp3 i downloaded back in 1997 was men in black) and then watching movies on your computer was like a mind blowing experience more then watching avatar in imax lol. Glad i got one as a kid, probably my best memories were learning dos and loading up random demo shareware cd games and experiencing wolf3d/doom/quake and duke nukem 3d over 14.4/28.8k/33.6/56k modem. I remember downloading Sim City thinking 35 mins was freaking forever (it was only 5 megs!) and my friend had to bring 27 floppy disks to copy duke 3d along with 25 for windows 95... there's also a 10 disk version for windows 95.. i still have an offical 4 disk floppy version for windows 3.1 ... going from that to windows 95 was mind blowing too.. playing the first Civ 1 and then c&c/warcraft 1/2 over the modem was so damn awesome. but most of all nothing beats logging in the BBS... that was the internet be4 the internet lol... the first time i chatted with someone over that live i was thinking "god this is the future!" and then some BBS had 4 way chat, it was like PA but with all text. and Ralph i remember the EMS memory.. oh god you had to write like 2 lines of dos code just to get ems to work correctly along with sound card commands lol.. some stuff i'd given up on loading because of EMS memory it was too complicated for me. Does anyone here remember the Commander Keen games?
Those 56K modems; wow... remember that they sounded like? [video=youtube;p8XKhCfsTts]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8XKhCfsTts[/video] And at Hadouken, true that, the BBS (for the uninitiated, "Bulletin Board Service") and usenet forums was my first foray into community chat. Wow... that all seems a lifetime ago, LOL... Another interesting piece of technology that was promising but soon over taken by better ideas was the LS120 Super Disk Drive. I remember paying about $200 for the first ones out, as they were able to read both 1.44 MB floppies as well as the 120 MB super disks (20 more MB than the iomega Zip Drive, which it was trying to replace). I still have both in the closet somewhere, LOL...
That Duke Nukem with the pixel titties and Warcraft 2.. damn those were the games.. talking about floppy discs.. I just saw a news article.. they now have 128gb microsd card.. now hows thats for a trip. Size of a finger nail and holds more than anything yall had back in the day..
Indeed, the areal density of computing storage has gotten phenomenal; it's like they're dimensionally bending space just to make more things physically fit where it could not ordinarily do so. I remember those iOmega zip discs at 100 MBs each, was a standard with the photographic retouching industry as it was just starting to become computerized. Each disc contained one scanned photograph at about 70 MB size; that was high resolution in those days. Not only aren't those discs used anymore, but professional retouching has been co-opted by cheap and easy to used software; regular folks can easily do their own retouching. That caused the shuttering of a lot of post production image manipulation and their related industries. So true too, about SD cards. They now have more computing memory than most company systems back then. One can only wonder what the next quarter century holds?
I'm going to show my age a little now - I had a 486 that was clocked at 66Mhz but it had a 'turbo' button that would make it slower (down to 33Mhz). This was because all the DOS games would run like a mofo and you couldn't play them and so only clocking down would give you any chance of shooting the bad guys. Anyone remember "Syndicate" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicate_(video_game) ?? Best game for the 486!
I remember doing that with my 2400 modem and using something like telnet to connect to other universities and stuff around the world to download shareware games and playing text games online called "MUDs" Used to have to use special software to make my download speeds go twice as fast (ie. 150-200b/sec) and I would hog up the phone lines for hours on end with my brothers. I don't remember Syndicate, but I do remember the Keen series (and all those old companies that used to make shareware games like Epic, Apogee, id) Mind you, I was in elementary school. I think I had a 486 dx4 running at 100Mhz with 120mb of disk space. It was mind blowing when I installed Ultima 7 on my hard drive and literally ate up 1/4 of the space. My first computer was sth like an 8088 processor that ran at 8MHz, with everything running off bigger 5 1/4 floppies (360k per disk) running DOS 3.2 and playing stuff like Kings Quest, Wizardry, Zaxxon and Silpheed. Oh, and those text-based Infocom games. Anyone still remember Legend of the Red Dragon on BBS?
