one of my friends had an early Sinclair with a tape drive so I thought "f***, that looks nifty" and around the same time I saw some early vector graphics on tv that I thought were cool, and wanted to do something like that. So i got into fiddling about with bits of old computers and consoles, BBC Micros and that telly programme we used to d'load crappy bitmaps from, then when i joined the Navy I got to mess with REAL computers. After I left it ebcame a hobby again until the early CAD stations came out, then i started to get more heavily involved with hardware/os/networks for DTP/CAD/CAM at work, there being no-one else who could or would , then after i got made redundant in the early 90s from my job as a designer, i went into 'puters full time.

gaming came along as a consequence of even the earliest puters I used. I got a tape for the BBC-B that was a Roman Empire statistical simulation, and i was hooked. Actually the game wasn't much of a game, no graphics apart from a small array showing you what provinces you had and how many legions you had in each. But it was enuff to hook me on the historical strategy genre.

I had a very early Pong console, but one of my flash m8s had a later one with Space Invaders, Defender, Missile Command and Scramble on. I never had anything that good, so I used to go down the penny arcade and play stuff like Super Battletank and Galaxian (!) and Solvalu (think Gladius III)

I didn't get a PC of my own to use for gaming until the late 80s, a 386SX-20 with a whole 1mb RAM and a 20mb hdd, on which i played Wolfenstein 3-D, Paperboy (mind those sewers!) a bizarre Crusader tyoe game called D-Gen, Wing Commander, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, an early Mig-29 sim, Megafortress, oh q a few old games i was addicted to way back then. I couldn't get enough of WC so upgr to a 386DX-50 so that I could play WC2, Doom, RoTT, and Terminal Velocity (think Descent). And thus was the course, of my future and current life, set.




Edited by - Radio Free Tawakalnistan on 9/4/2004 4:11:16 AM

i never really was into computers until my dad bought a (one time best) pentium 1 some time back, dont remember the date but atleast 10 years or so & the thing that got me absolutely in the box was a game called DAVE...i dunno if any of you lot heard of it. but since then i was obsessed with pcs. i infact have all of the pentiums from 1-4 & celeron. & gonna get a centrino soon my current laptop sucks. its a slow pentium 3.

i got into computers in 1997 (not so long ago)(think Zimbabwe)
when my dad bought a PC from a friend who built them...

it was a celeron 2, with no cache at 130Mhz it was stonkingly fast
and it was coupled with the latest carp to come out of Microshiite,
Windows 98! (this was in 1997) it also had a 3Gb HDD (which i still have)
and 16Mb of ram, Whoo Boy, it was maybe the best PC in the country
at the time, which wasnt hard, i first got hooked on it when we got our first internet connection, at 7Kbs which was SLeeeW (think Eeeeww).
Because the 'net was so slow, i took the computer apart to "fix it" (this was
here in England) and saw all the Cool bits inside (including the Cartrige celeron)
since then i was hooked, and i got my PC for my Bar Mitzvah (that's my 13th
B'Day to you) and loved it ever since

I remember those no cache Celerons; they didn't last long before Intel brought out a version with 128k cache. I had 300 of them that I ended up selling on in a very *shady* deal.

funnily enough the other day i was asked to repair something similar for some guy, who wanted a "PC health check" (sucker) because this *uber* P2-300 with 64mb of RAM wouldn't play Doom3 for his kid. 4.3gb hard drive too, he'd barely even install D3. When i told him the unpleasant truth that he was several years behind the times he got all p*ssy and said he'd paid a lot for this computer *back then* and it couldn't possibly be out-of-date. and that i was trying to rip him off. He got booted out the door pretty dam quick, with his super-computer following him forthwith. @sshole.

I never had a P2 slot 1 configuration, i hated them; it was the one time I went for AMD cos I still had an AT case, ran a K6-2-500 until Intel switched production back to sockets, then I got a P3-500. Still had to change to ATX though. I still have that AT case, it's full of old bits to play DOS games like Crusader and P2.

That guy's computer was *quite* a machine! You should have offered to buy that beast off him... fifty pounds would have done the trick .

that is actually about what something like that goes for now if you have a monitor, kb & rat with it what a t*t.

It can be hard working with the plebs can't it Taw?

only when I choose to, from now on, Esq.

Hated those Slot 1's. At the time it seemed as arrogantly controlling of Intel as anything MS ever had done. I was glad to see the little upstart chip makers trotting out their goods then, Cyrix, Transmeta and, of course, AMD. There was another but I don't remember who.

IDT, the Winchip. And there were proper IBM/Cyrix from IBM, not the cheapo Cyrix ones. But the IBM ones were hard yo get hold of.

hmm, glad I wasn't the only one to indulge in a touch of schadenfreude when Intel were forced to abandon Slot production and go back to Sockets.

Yes. In fact, I kind of like to root for AMD simply because they've gotten very good at poking Intel in the eye.

I am leaning toward putting together an AMD 64 machine next. Now that I've "fixed" my D*ll and turned into a far more beefy iteration of its former self, an acquaintance of mine got me a deal for one of those Powerleap cpu upgraders, he let me have his for $75 (used of course for all of about 1 week, I think), convereted my 423 pin socket into a 478 @ 3.0gHz. Sandra says that if I upgrade my video card (currently a GeForce 4 4600) I'll basically match true 478 pin equivalents. I was pleasantly surprised by that.

But I have a heat issue at the moment. Not debilitating but I'm running at about 112F on the cpu. I'll not be able to swap out the heatsink/fan assembly very easily (stock Poweleap aluminum finned setup) so I'm thinking of adding another case blower up top to vent out directly upward. Problem is I'd have to cut a hole in the case and I've never been that good at metal working.

Edited by - Indy11 on 9/7/2004 8:49:09 AM

if you've got heat problems now, you'll get worse if you use what you're planning to use.

Here's CoCo -
but I recall having a computer as well that was smaller, like 9x9 or 10x10 that ran only basic.

My first time with computers hmmm..... Well, the first time I ever played anything on a computer when I was at a friends house and played Doom the first time. It was really fun and It stayed in the back of my mind for another 2-3 years before I decided it might be a good idea to buy one of my own, at this point I didnt know they could be used for music and movies and messaging and internet and all that. In any case, I bought one and was pleasently surprised at the ease of use versus the things you can do with one. That was about.......... 6-7 years ago.

"I'm still an atheist, thank God."



Edited by - Comont54 on 9/7/2004 10:53:31 AM