The 286/12, with its 1MB memory, 60MB RLL Hard drive, and 5.25" floppy... oh and the VGA card and 14" 256 color VGA monitor, and the Panasonic KXP-1180i. It was October 1988. My Dad's boss financed it through the company, and brought it over and set it up for us. And offered 13 year old me the opportunity to call him any time I needed help. And that I did. Between the computer purchase, the endless phone calls, and then a year later ending up on Prodigy's excellent discussion groups, I learned huge amounts.
It wasn't until much later in life that I properly appreciated how much of a sacrifice it was for my dad- a man who could barely read, worked 12-14 hour days, and came home covered in mud and grease regularly- to buy a $3300 computer in 1988. That's about $8000 in today's money.
I don't know if I ever got the chance to thank him properly for it. He died when I was in my mid 20's, self absorbed and busy with my new family.
> a man who could barely read, worked 12-14 hour days, and came home covered in mud and grease regularly- to buy a $3300 computer in 1988. That's about $8000 in today's money.
The best way to celebrate that kindness is to pass it down to people around you.
Love the image of the monitor showing Battle Chess! As a side note to all like-minded people that love old DOS games, check out the library of DOS games on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games
My first x86 was acquired in 1997: a 200MHz pentium MMX with 32 MB of RAM, a 2.0 GB harddisk, a 2 MB S3 ViRGE as video card, Aztech Labs AZT-R 2316 sound card, a 33.600 bps winmodem and 28X (I think) CD-ROM. I soon wanted to install Linux on it. It ran minilinux, a small distro that could be launched directly from DOS without partitioning, relatively well. I also downloaded Debian and prepared the 10 floppies to install it but never got ahead because it didn't support my keyboard layout (ABNT2) out of the box. I eventually installed Conectiva Linux 3.0 (marumbi), a RedHat based distro, on it. It worked somewhat beautifully but had no support for the modem and soundcard.
As my relatives and siblings updated their computers, I inherited their spare parts. My machine got some very interesting upgrades. It got 2 floppy drives (very rare at the time), 2 harddisks, a cd-recorder unit, RAM was upgraded to 64 MB and the modem was replaced by a ne2k compatible network card. I also had a Linux-supported Canon BJC 4200 and a SANE-supported TCE table scanner. Still, I couldn't get the SoundBlaster that my brother had and, sadly, my machine continued without sound support on Linux.
At around 2006 I replaced it with a new self built computer which had better compatibility with Linux than with windows-xp and then this new computer became my first dedicated Linux machine. I found out that Linux eventually got support for AZT-R 2316 at around 2007, but the last time I tried my old computer, it displayed "parity error" probably from oxidation in the memory connectors. I then just gave up on it.
Later on I thought about if it would be possible to install a graphics card with OpenGL support and USB port on one of the remaining PCI ports. I certainly wouldn't be able to install a modern Linux distro on it, but certainly it would work with one of those specially crafted for old computers like TinyCore. With recent kernel changes, swapping maybe smart enough to be usable on SSD with SATA to IDE adapters even in that computer. Now, that would be a dream machine.
Most of the PCs I had access to growing up sucked in some way, so I have no nostalgia to recreate any of them as entire systems.
In 2013[0], I built a PC with the loose goal of being the best the 20th century had to offer, at least as far as core components were concerned. (I considered 2000 as part of the 20th century for the purposes of this build.) I ended up with a Pentium 3 600 MHz, 256 MB RAM, Geforce 2 Ultra, 52x CDROM drive, and crappy "multimedia" speakers. Somehow, I still had the same Yamaha-based soundcard I grew up with, so that's the only original part of this nostalgic ship of thesis. I threw in a 40GB hard drive, and later upgraded to 250 GB. The 17" CRT, keyboard, and ball mouse are early-mid 2000s and Dell-branded (the PC case is beige and unbranded). The only thing that would complete the build would be a modem, but no one liked dial-up, ever, so I have a fast ethernet card instead. The clock noticeably drifts out of sync by a few minutes every month, so I have an NTP client.
I installed Windows 98 on it, and promptly started playing games I loved growing up, and later, others: Starcraft, SimCity 2000, Road Rash, Chips Challenge, Fallout, and Diablo. It barely runs the original Warcraft 3 (but Frozen Throne refuses to install).
The part about buying a misleading CPU really hit home with me. Man all those small retailers in the 90s were living the dream with their unaware customers.
My parents bought an AMD 486 100mhz at the end of 1995, it was still a viable low end machine for that time but they paid as if it was a Pentuim. Had to somehow make it work up until 2001 with that machine. Don't know if I had a career in tech if I wasn't forced to tinker with it.
The very moment I saw the letters ‘MMX’, a long forgotten part of my brain woke up and said, “I know what that smells like!”
Which is bizarre. But to me it is (apparently) the small of new electronics, plus perhaps the ‘hot dusty things’ smell. It also comes with the memory of playing Pod (a racing game), by Ubisoft (I think). Good teenage memories!
I did that a few years ago, with the 1990 computer that I lusted over as a teenager: the IBM 8595 AKD (European reference - it is 85950KD in North America)... 486 DX, XGA display, 320 MB SCSI, 64 MB RAM... At that time my computer was a 1988 Olivetti PC-1 (512 KB 8 MHz Nec V40 with CGA and a floppy drive)...
I was awed by the beast... Everything about it screamed over-engineering - even the case was incomprehensibly robust and the power switch had a satisfyingly loud motion... I could even touch its legendary tangential fan... Touching the 20 years-old dream was an emotional moment - I'm glad I did it... The ultimate Windows 3.0 host !
But it had to go after a little while: my two-room apartment was too small for so much awesomeness, so it went to another fan.
My entry was the mentioned 486DX2-66Mhz. Double speed CD-Rom and Sound Blaster. Norton Commander was great, Doom and Pirates Gold where my games of choice.
Also started programming on this one with QBasic and then moved to Turbo Pascal 7 (because I needed a .exe file to be called from autoexec as a password protection vs. my sister which I couldn't do with QBasic :)
Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D
That's a pretty familiar configuration... it wasn't a COMPAQ was it?
The double-speed CDROM in mine was a SCSI. The SoundBlaster 16 card was also the SCSI controller card. Fucking weird piece of hardware. Many years later I found another one that ALSO had a 16kbit modem on it, in addition to being a sound card and SCSI controller O_O
Also, your quest of creating .exe's was cleaner than mine. I scoured the non-internet that was available to my rural country town for QuickBASIC, which had a couple of of syntax differences to QBASIC but it COULD compile .exe's!
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It wasn't until much later in life that I properly appreciated how much of a sacrifice it was for my dad- a man who could barely read, worked 12-14 hour days, and came home covered in mud and grease regularly- to buy a $3300 computer in 1988. That's about $8000 in today's money.
I don't know if I ever got the chance to thank him properly for it. He died when I was in my mid 20's, self absorbed and busy with my new family.
Thanks, Dad.
The best way to celebrate that kindness is to pass it down to people around you.
I tried to get my kids into computers, but it didn’t stick. It’s not the same today as it was then.
As my relatives and siblings updated their computers, I inherited their spare parts. My machine got some very interesting upgrades. It got 2 floppy drives (very rare at the time), 2 harddisks, a cd-recorder unit, RAM was upgraded to 64 MB and the modem was replaced by a ne2k compatible network card. I also had a Linux-supported Canon BJC 4200 and a SANE-supported TCE table scanner. Still, I couldn't get the SoundBlaster that my brother had and, sadly, my machine continued without sound support on Linux.
At around 2006 I replaced it with a new self built computer which had better compatibility with Linux than with windows-xp and then this new computer became my first dedicated Linux machine. I found out that Linux eventually got support for AZT-R 2316 at around 2007, but the last time I tried my old computer, it displayed "parity error" probably from oxidation in the memory connectors. I then just gave up on it.
Later on I thought about if it would be possible to install a graphics card with OpenGL support and USB port on one of the remaining PCI ports. I certainly wouldn't be able to install a modern Linux distro on it, but certainly it would work with one of those specially crafted for old computers like TinyCore. With recent kernel changes, swapping maybe smart enough to be usable on SSD with SATA to IDE adapters even in that computer. Now, that would be a dream machine.
In 2013[0], I built a PC with the loose goal of being the best the 20th century had to offer, at least as far as core components were concerned. (I considered 2000 as part of the 20th century for the purposes of this build.) I ended up with a Pentium 3 600 MHz, 256 MB RAM, Geforce 2 Ultra, 52x CDROM drive, and crappy "multimedia" speakers. Somehow, I still had the same Yamaha-based soundcard I grew up with, so that's the only original part of this nostalgic ship of thesis. I threw in a 40GB hard drive, and later upgraded to 250 GB. The 17" CRT, keyboard, and ball mouse are early-mid 2000s and Dell-branded (the PC case is beige and unbranded). The only thing that would complete the build would be a modem, but no one liked dial-up, ever, so I have a fast ethernet card instead. The clock noticeably drifts out of sync by a few minutes every month, so I have an NTP client.
I installed Windows 98 on it, and promptly started playing games I loved growing up, and later, others: Starcraft, SimCity 2000, Road Rash, Chips Challenge, Fallout, and Diablo. It barely runs the original Warcraft 3 (but Frozen Throne refuses to install).
[0] https://theandrewbailey.com/article/120/Project-Twentieth-Ce...
https://theandrewbailey.com/article/262/So-Few-Monitors.html
It's still there, and worked the last time I tried turning it on.
My parents bought an AMD 486 100mhz at the end of 1995, it was still a viable low end machine for that time but they paid as if it was a Pentuim. Had to somehow make it work up until 2001 with that machine. Don't know if I had a career in tech if I wasn't forced to tinker with it.
Which is bizarre. But to me it is (apparently) the small of new electronics, plus perhaps the ‘hot dusty things’ smell. It also comes with the memory of playing Pod (a racing game), by Ubisoft (I think). Good teenage memories!
Played this a lot on my families Gateway computer in early 90s.
I was awed by the beast... Everything about it screamed over-engineering - even the case was incomprehensibly robust and the power switch had a satisfyingly loud motion... I could even touch its legendary tangential fan... Touching the 20 years-old dream was an emotional moment - I'm glad I did it... The ultimate Windows 3.0 host !
But it had to go after a little while: my two-room apartment was too small for so much awesomeness, so it went to another fan.
Also started programming on this one with QBasic and then moved to Turbo Pascal 7 (because I needed a .exe file to be called from autoexec as a password protection vs. my sister which I couldn't do with QBasic :)
Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D
With a friend we destroyed the msdos 622 installation on the new 40 mb hd of my family 386 when deleting tmp files...
The double-speed CDROM in mine was a SCSI. The SoundBlaster 16 card was also the SCSI controller card. Fucking weird piece of hardware. Many years later I found another one that ALSO had a 16kbit modem on it, in addition to being a sound card and SCSI controller O_O
Also, your quest of creating .exe's was cleaner than mine. I scoured the non-internet that was available to my rural country town for QuickBASIC, which had a couple of of syntax differences to QBASIC but it COULD compile .exe's!