Fond Memories

Nixy

Nixy

Elimi-nistrator
Staff member
I wanna hear fond memories of your old computers, you can also tell us where those computers are now.

Our first computer, Pentium 133 running Win 95 then 98, now in a landfill. I remember sitting up til insane hours talking to brainsoft and posting on the boards when he first introduced me to them. I remember him asking me out over the internet. I remember running the Xibase Active List on ICQ.

My next computer (which we used as a family machine from the time I got it til I moved out). HP Pavilion Celeron 400 running WinXP, now my brother's computer. I remember all of the days and nights I spent on it in my first year of University in my dorm room all alone while I was trying to find out who I was and where I was going.

My laptop, Athlon XP 1600+ running WinXP, still mine. I remember getting it and being so happy cause I had ALWAYS wanted a laptop. I love being able to take it from here to Brampton with me so I always have net access. I am looking forward to looking at this screen and reading an email which will hold a job offer for next year, hopefully that will happen in the next few months.

Some of you may think it's weird to have feelings about a computer but I can connect each computer with times in my life and usually the computer played some sort of role in those memorable times...be in bringing good things my way through the people I used it to communicate to, or be it help getting through a bad time through the same means.

lovecomp.jpg
 
My old computer was very pretty, it had a bead mosaic of dolphins jumping in waves on one side, a jumble of other assorted bits on the other, another bead moasic with a mardi gras theme on top, and a beer bottle cap with fabric roses design on the front. The monitor was customized as well. Although it was pretty it was a glorified calculator and my current computer is much more powerful but not as pretty....but I am slowly working on it.
 
My original comp ended up in HomeLANs hands as a low-ebb machine for years. Now it has apparently been refurbished and is in the hands of hs brother... someone that actually uses a computer strictly for emails and such. He didn't need anything all that powerful.
 
I was given a 386 years ago... and upgraded a part at a time from that. My main system, the 2.8GHz P4, has no parts in common with that system, but it has parts in common with parts that were in common with parts that were in common with that 386, I think. It's sort of the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" thing.
 
TRS-80 Model IV. Dos 3.3. The world was a simpler place then. I donated it to a school when I upgraded to a Pentium 200 in the late 90s.
 
My first computer was this computer. The first time I attempted to go online, and it worked, it made my tummy tingle. Oh the joy.
 
First machine was a Packard Bell Pentium 133. 1100 bucks. It was a faithful box until about 1997. At that point, it was giving me issues (had to reset the BIOS via jumpers about every third boot), and I upgraded to a P2 266 from Microcenter. That was also the last computer I ever bought "off the shelf". All the others, I built myself.

From there, I went to a AMD K6-3 450. Then I stepped up to Unc's Athlon Classic 750. Then a Athy 1.2 GhZ. Then an XP 1700+. Then to a Athy 64 3400+, which is what I still use.

The K6-3, Athy 750, Athy 1.2 and Athy 1700+ are all still in use by someone, somwhere. The Pentiums are landfill fodder.

Interestingly enough, I also took a step backward. I run a Pentium 75 strictly to play old DOS based games that you can't keep up with on anything faster.
 
Time to go into the way-back machine!

It's 1984...the thought police are nowhere to be seen.
Sitting on my desk is the Adam computer system from Coleco. 64k RAM, audiotape storage, daisy-wheel printer, no OS and smartBASIC :D

Loudest damn printer on the face of the earth...neighbours used to complain.
Slow machine in retrospect and it never did get off the ground with actual software, but it was fun!

It's in a dusty box at my folx place.

Went to a Comodore 64, then an 8086, etc etc, until now I'm playing with a P IV 1.5ghz on XP.
 
You know, I was waiting for someone to go further back; before Pentiums! Coleco was best known for their games round here, not so much their computers.

We had a Commodore 64 that my Dad bought to type his articles for this Union's monthly newsletter. I was his proof reader and his spell-checker. And yes, another daisy wheel that made unholy noise.

But we had Print Shop on it and I was always making signs for my room and stuff. We also had the "Summer Games" which was all olympic based. Turns out, I met one of the programmers of that game not a month ago.

We also had my favorite game, Eliza. You could tell Eliza your problems and she would answer you semi-intelligently. Once I figured out how to look in the code, I saw all the keywords that dictated how she answered. Then it kind of lost it's allure for me. :D

My first non-family computer was a Compaq and I too would spend ungodly hours and hours on aol chatting and emailing and playing Slingo.

The experience of troubleshooting that piece of shit after I compressed the HD (not a good idea) made me realize how much I liked computers. I went to computer school and then decided I would build my own pc. On 9/1/2001, I looked up a tutorial on Hardware Central and found a link to JJR512.com in Justin's signature. From then on, I was hooked on these boards. And I'm still using the same computer, although I've upgraded the motherboard, CPU, memory and hard drives over the years.
 
My first online presence was on the General Electric text-only site. GEnie.

Had a Text-RPG on there that hooked me silly. $3/hour and my money started dissapearing fast!
 
Hmm, well the first computer that I owned was the Patriot CyrixII-MMX sitting under my workbench... it still works great for internet access and emails ok. I upgraded it with an 8 MB PCI Graphics card and 128MBs of EDO Ram, way back when. It has '98 running on a 2.1MB HDD. The only PC I ever bought ready built.

I then built myself an AMD Athlon 1GHz T-Bird... now sitting on my desk overclocked @ 1.33GHz with a massive CoolerMaster Copper heatpipe heatsink and 80mm led silent fan. Has had various bits in and out over the years and it's in it's 2nd case, but at the moment it's got an ABit KT7a Rev.1.3 mobo, 512MB of Crucial PC133 SD-Ram, a 40GB Maxtor HDD, a 7500 ATi Graphics card, 5.1 Soundblaster Live, a Belkin nic, a side window and pwiddy lights. Runs nice and cool at 42C. I could fit a AMD Athlon Palmino 1900+ in it if i could get a decent one and I felt inclined.

Then I built an Athlon XP 2200+, but the ABit KD7e mobo died on me so I bought my present mobo and my Thermaltake Xaser 1000A supertower case. Had the 2200+ running in it for about 6 months then upgraded to an AMD Barton 2500+ with 1GB of Corsair 2700 DDR-Ram, the present config includes an ABit KV7 mobo with Coolermaster Jet 7 heatsink and fan running @ 40C, 2x 40GB Maxtor HDDs and 1x 80GB Maxtor Sata HDD. Nothing special about it just a nice reliable PC. (famous last words)

I also built Katie a 1 GHz Athlon, the guts of which I just sent to my brother in Germany to repair his. So now it has ABit SE6 mobo with a Coppermine 900 MHz cpu running '98. That's in my bedroom.

And finally I bought my Acer Aspire 1642 laptop last year. Sadly I can't play with it cos it's under warrenty for another 2 1/2 years, but it's a great little laptop and I just got a bluetooth usb adapter for it so I can use it with my headset (Jabra BT200) and a bluetooth phone when I get one, when i'm out and about. :)

So yeah, I still have 4 PCs... and I have very fond memories of building them and swapping things around... amazing to think how far PC architecture has come when I only bought the Patriot in early '98... :D
 
MrBishop said:
My first online presence was on the General Electric text-only site. GEnie.

Had a Text-RPG on there that hooked me silly. $3/hour and my money started dissapearing fast!
Click to expand...
I used to belong to a couple of BBSs in Tucson. From there I learned how to call other BBSs around the country without incurring certain normal costs... The goose that laid that golden egg finally died.

All at 9600 baud and I had to keep an old style phone to put in my modem. Of course, I had a monochrome screen so there were basically no graphics.
 
chcr said:
I used to belong to a couple of BBSs in Tucson. From there I learned how to call other BBSs around the country without incurring certain normal costs... The goose that laid that golden egg finally died.

All at 9600 baud and I had to keep an old style phone to put in my modem. Of course, I had a monochrome screen so there were basically no graphics.
Click to expand...
I went over to local 'basement BBSs' about 1 year afterwards...GEnie at 1200BAUD and BBS's at a blazing 4800BAUD and eventually 14.4 :)

Aah...winsock
 
i really dont have any fond memories of any computer. couldnt even tell you what old computers i've owned. as a matter of fact, if i had taken the sticker off this machine i wouldnt be able to tell you what this one is.
 
First computer was a Commodore 16, the computer itself looked like a big keyboard. You had to connect it to the TV. We had no extra accesories, so no floppy and no cool games. All you could do was write your own programs in BASIC and run them. That was my first programming experience. The computer must be lying around, it still turns on but the keyboard doesn't work.

A bunch of years later we got an Acer 486 DX2/66 with 4MB of RAM, soundcard, 2x CD-ROM drive and 400MB of HDD. It came with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Being able to watch videos on it was something that left people impressed. I remember when I upgraded the RAM, a 4MB SIMM costed nearly USD$200!! But at least I could play DOOM, damn, I miss that game so much. And then I scrapped the crappy soundcard it had and put a SoundBlaster 16 pnp :D :D

After a while I upgraded the RAM to 32MB (max it could hold) and the HDD to 4GB (using diskmanager), now it could manage win95 just fine. I gave this puter to my uncle, and he still uses it for word stuff.

Then I built my own: p3 500, tnt2 ultra and 64MB of RAM. This puter is still in use by my sisters, but now it has 60GB of HDD, 384MB of RAM and a 17" monitor. It has windows98, win2k pro and Linux Mandrake 8.0.

For the moment I use a HP laptop, P4 2.4GHz, 512MB of RAM and 60GB of HDD. At home I use an external soundcard connected to a 7.1 speaker setup. Running winXP and Ubuntu Linux.
 
Apple II LE !!!!

I remember when my grandpa bought a color monitor for it so we now had a computer with COLOR!!!

Then came our IBM 386 with Windows 3.1... it was amazing!!!!!!!!! I played Civilization on that machine until my eyes nearly dried up.
 
Bish, GEnie was $4 and hour, wasn't it? Unless you got a better deal than I did. And a premium for 14.4 on top of that. Not having a 14.4 I never went there, but I recall Tellurian et al logging out from 2400 and coming back at 14.4 whenever they wanted to fight, or move a lot of jobs.


Sam wouldn't appreciate the lost bandwidth or diskspace a full recount of my machines would entail.
 
Oooooh we had a commodore 64 too. It lived in my room cause my brother was to young for it. I played games and made signs with paintshop on it. That was one fabulous machine.
 
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