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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2189 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 13, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What was your first computer?

Mine was a Commodore 64. I remember going to Sears with my dad to pick up the disk drive; finally we wouldn’t have to wait for a tape drive to load a program. It lasted us a good ten years, from Tooth Invaders and Frogger in elementary school to GeoWorks word processing in high school.

Our second computer was a 486-33 DLC: the math coprocessor was not integrated like an Intel 486-DX but was added to the motherboard. It had a Turtle Island sound card I ruined by running a text file through the DOS MIDI player.

Atari 800. I distinctly remember playing Learning with Leaper when I was very young.

I was born in 1988, one of my first memories is my dad reading out Zork on an Apple II while waiting for my suggestions around 1991. Later, I was allowed to use his 3.1/95 computers under his supervision, and with the 95 I was given a full 2 hours of encarta per day in the family den.

I was given my own pc, a Dell with Windows 98 for my 11th birthday, with the understanding that I could only use the dial-up internet service (AOL) when my mom wasn't using the phone. I made point and click games in powerpoint and played a ton of Civ II, and set up a geocities site for my friends to roleplay our favorite action cartoons- DBZ and Gundam Wing.

TI-99/4A, using the TV as a monitor and a tape cassette to save data. I did occasionally have access to some sort of terminal at computer summer camp which was largely spent playing Moon Lander. But there were many, many hours spent typing in BASIC programs.

My first family computer was a 486 DX2 that I think my dad built. I remember him bragging it had a screaming fast Vesa Localbus VGA card. Had some sort of Soundblaster 16 or compatible sound card. Although I remember it having occasional hanging note bugs, so I think it must have been a genuine SB16.

I played so many fucking games on it. My dad installed Wheel of Fortune, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Indianapolis 500. A buddy of mine installed Doom 2 and Quest for Glory. And I can't count how many hours I spent playing the shareware/demo's for Doom, Heretic, Warcraft 1 & 2, Command & Conquer. My sister and I even got goofy with the simple joys of recording ourselves using the SB utilities in Windows 3.11.

I couldn't tell you the model of my family's first computer, inherited from a grandmother who taught yiddish for six decades but apparently wasn't as old fashioned as that sounds and had a leftover 486 when she upgraded to a higher number.

She probably even knew what we were getting 486 of! I certainly can't remember what they were, although I do remember a shareware demo of Doom that's probably the same as you—and I definitely remember those SB utilities, and how much they made me wish our computer had a microphone installed!

The 486 was a great computer for a long time. For a good chunk of time, literally everyone I knew who had a computer had a 486 DX2. And it more or less ran any game that came out from 1993 to 1996. Then Quake happened and the rest is history. Between 1997 and 2000 things moved so fast, a $2500 (~$4000 in 2023 money) Pentium 233 MMX with a Voodoo or a Riva 128 from 1997 could barely play Unreal or Half-Life which came out in 1998, only a year later. You can write off 1999 almost completely except for a smattering of games with long development cycles or games which were still 2D.

You can write off 1999 almost completely except for a smattering of games with long development cycles or games which were still 2D.

Is this a contention? Are you are contender, contending me to contentious discussion? 1999 is the anno domini of video games. We got:

System shock 2

Freespace 2

Alpha Centauri

Age of Empires 2

Planescape torment

Pokemon Gold/Silver

Everquest

Unreal Tournament

Quake 3

Every single one of those sequels refines their base game into its ultimate form - in the 23 years since many of them have had additional sequels, but they never reached these heights again. In many cases they are genre defining too - would world of warcraft existed without Everquest? Probably, but shoosh.

I don't think you understood what I was saying. Look at the previous sentence.

I'm saying a Pentium 233 MMX with a Voodoo or a Riva 128 couldn't play most games from 1999 unless they were 2D, or had long development cycles. Like they were originally supposed to come out in 1998, and they had wanted them to run on 1997 hardware, then they slipped into 1999 instead. I was not saying 1999 had bad games. I was talking about the games you could expect to play on a 2 year old PC at the time.

Ah yeah I misunderstood lol. Thank goodness.

The clause "long development cycles or games which were still 2D" is doing a lot of work here, I think; "refines a base game into its ultimate form" from a creative standpoint is "long (multi-game) development cycle", a product that gets to reuse most of its source code, from a technical standpoint. Everquest still seems like a big exception, though.

I felt trolled too before I read the fine print. Please don't say such a thing! The drones need you. They look up to you!

Yes, apocalypse cancelled unfortunately, I misunderstood.

Oh, this takes me back. I think my dad beat Quake on a 486, or it was one of these pinout-compatible CPUs from Cyrix or AMD, but when Carmageddon came out, it was a slideshow without MMX. I think that Pentium 166 was the third upgrade I actually remember. The first two were:

  • the Sound Blaster card, easily the biggest upgrade in the whole history of upgrade
  • Matrox Millenium video card, because it was a flaky bitch that gave my dad headaches
  • a CD drive

Okay, fourth.

Anyway, the ten years after Quake were insane. In ten years we went from models that looked like this to models that looked like this. Compared to this leap (accompanied by a jump from 66 to 2500 MHz in CPU frequencies), the next fifteen years feel like running in place (cf Starfield and its staring eye models).

Come to think of it, a jump from Doom to Half-Life 2 (1995 to 2004) is even more insane. The latter feels like a modern game despite being 19 years old, while Doom was a living fossil just nine years after its release.

I do wonder what CPU he had in a 486 system to beat Quake. I never had one, but I guess AMD made a 486 compatible CPU that was the equivalent of a Pentium 75?

Then again, I beat plenty of games on enormously unpowered computers. I beat Unreal on a P120 in software rendering. It was a slideshow, but I had cheat codes!

Could've been a DX4 or one of the third party Socket 3 CPUs, I honestly don't remember. I remember he had to shrink down the viewport a bit to make the game playable.

She probably even knew what we were getting 486 of!

Nothing. 486 was the fifth CPU generation of the x86 family (hence "4"), which started with 8086, and 8086 was the first 16-bit microprocessor from Intel, the fourth chip in the totally logically named line of microprocessors: 8008, 8080 and 8085. I think they got rid of "80" around 80386.

My grandma bought me an off-white PC somewhere around 2002. It opened my eyes, I certainly played more than my fair share of games on it, the ones that could handle the absence of a dedicated GPU at least. Had a Pentium 4, 32gb of storage, about 128mb of ram, you know, SOTA. Or it might not be, it's not like I was perusing hardware catalogs at the time.

I kinda feel bad for resenting it so much, at leafy until I found out it was a gift from her, but you tell me how you'd feel if you couldn't properly indulge in your favorite hobby for almost a decade because your parents were convinced that a PC capable of playing games made after 2005 or having an internet connection would corrupt the youth. Ah, the amount of money I hopefully wasted on games I couldn't even run, let alone when Steam activation requirements made me only play HL2 about a decade after its launch. I wonder if I have the Orange Box lying around somewhere, or if I turned it yet more orange by lighting it on fire in my frustration haha.

My dad's work let him bring home a 286 laptop that he let me use sometimes. But my first computer was an AST 486, running at 66mhz if I recall correctly. I remember getting very good at memory management and boot scripting to get all my games working.

My favorite system was an HP pentium II workstation that was a corporate lease return in a previous life.

I don’t remember the first computer, but I remember the first GPU - Voodoo II, quickly replaced by an enduring and fondly recalled Nvidia Riva TnT2 Pro.

One of the Packard Bell Multimedia models. Windows 95. Had the Windows Entertainment Pack for Packard Bell installed (Dr. Black Jack, Fuji Golf, JigSawed, Rattler Race, Chess, SkiFree, Life Genesis, Rodent's Revenge) as well as Hover!.

Played a lot of JumpStart 2nd and 3rd Grade, SimTown, SimCity 2000, Spider-Man Cartoon Maker, Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Pinball, and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness on it. Dabbled with Myst, but didn't know what the hell I was doing as a child.

My brother and I wrecked a spacebar playing Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Pinball

Some kind of 386. Well, it wasn't mine, it was my parents', but that was the first PC we had at home. I want to say my current one is in a ship-of-Theseus way the same PC, but alas, no:

  • the first one was a loaner
  • then my dad cadillacked a 486 AT that we ended up upgrading all the way to a GeForce-based machine over the years, migrating over to an ATX case in the process
  • then in a moment of weakness I bought a made-to-order one in 2004 (I know it was in 2004 because they sold me a faulty GPU, which I noticed in Dawn of War)
  • in 2007 I got my first (big for a recent graduate) bonus at work and bought a new Chieftec case that was built like a tank and weighed a fucking ton and migrated into it. I hated the 2004 PC, so I consider this a new one. Or did I buy the case earlier and only the guts from some guy from nvidia in 2007?
  • it survived and evolved all the way to 2021, when I built a new mini-ITX PC and moved only the GPU and my data from the old one

P.S. The oldest files I have are my IRC logs from when I was in my early teens, so they are almost a quarter century old, coming all the way from the first PC we owned.

P.P.S. I sold the 2007 PC to an ex-colleague of mine who needed a build station last month. He probably thought I was weird about loading it into my car and driving just 500m to his house, but then he couldn't lift it out of the trunk on the first try. I hope it'll keep fooling people and making them look like wimps for a couple more decades.

The first computer that I remember using is a Canon Innova laptop with a beige case, a grayscale screen, and a floppy-disk drive. Lotus 1-2-3 was installed on it.

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