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Nazo
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2002
- Messages
- 3,672
I mean the first PC you owned entirely for yourself, not your parent's family PC or whatever.
For me it was a 286 running at a blazing fast 15MHz with a whole 1MB of ram. I'm just kidding with the exagerations there, I never thought it was great since even then it was outdated. I was so dissapointed I couldn't play things like Doom on it (Doom requires a 386+ due to using the real mode or whatever it was called when they directly accessed all the ram, not the conventional first, then the rest, so you didn't have to always make your tsrs and drivers come out exactly perfect to clear that extra 2KB of ram needed to get this or that started.) Windows 3.1 had to be started in "standard" mode instead of enhanced mode, for which I had to write a batch file that added the /s for me lest I go insane doing it myself every single time. It took so long to start the Windows up that I would usually leave the room, find a snack, use the restroom, even sit down and read. I think around 15 minutes at least. And my printer, well, I'm not sure what it was, but it always used the IBM Proprinter driver (I'm pretty sure it wasn't really, merely compatible) and it would shake the printer stand so badly every time the print head moved. I could hear the thing printing from half-way across the house. Of course, with no internet access (there were only networks like aol and compuserve, or, if you knew them and didn't mind the cost of long distance since I never saw one hosted in Alabama, BBS servers,) I didn't have to print too much more than syntax guides and homework. At least my soundcard was tolerable. A Vibra 16 (that's a true Sound Blaster 16, from back when Creative Labs wasn't a pile of crap and they used real hardware instead of emulation and crappy resampling.) Ok, they had Gravis Ultrasound and various MPU401 devices that were positively lovely to hear compared to the stinking OPL3 I was getting so sick of, but those were beyond my means even if I saved up for years since I was just a kid after all. Not that any quality lacking in the DAC or whatever would have made a difference since few people really hooked up their PCs to a nice stereo system -- what was the point? (They didn't come out with these nice 2.1 and now more recently 4.1, 5.1, 7.1, and so on systems until much later than that, back then, if you weren't rich enough to have a super stereo system to hook it all up to, you had rinky dink little 3-6W multimedia speakers, often not even amplified and no treble-bass seperation or increase.)
Despite all this, I loved the thing. I discovered there were still quite a few games that one could play on a 286. I was so unhappy when the plug to my multimedia speakers touched the case and fried darned well near every component in the thing (and, now that I think of it, that's one HECK of a poor design considering that the adaptor was only providing something in the area of 9V with a few hundred mA -- at most, 500mA -- most of which was being used by the speakers themselves... I guess cases weren't grounded back then, though even so it should have handled such a small amount better.)
BTW, no, I'm not an old man. I'm only 21 d-: Needless to say, I grew up in the time where if you knew what DOS stood for, you were seriously looked down on -- if you were lucky... As much as it galls me to say it, I think we have the internet and porn to thank more than anything else for computers being "cool" today. With a little help from microsoft making Windows 9x and NT so idiot proof that if you aren't an idiot you can't hardly use it.
EDIT: Oh, forgot the HD. I had an absolutely incredible 40MB or so to work with if I recall correctly.
EDIT2: Oh, and I had a Trident 512KB VGA video card. I think these are the people who later became Hercules, but I'm not 100% sure. Either way, Trident wasn't half bad. Heck, you could actually upgrade the video ram as it had slots for more chips... Not bad for way back then when you had to work just at matching up the ram and everything.
EDIT3: Just remembered. The soundcard in that 286 was an Adlib. And not the gold version, but the original. Basically, just an OPL2 MIDI card. There was a trick you could do to get digital audio out of it, but it ate every free CPU cycle, so it just didn't work for gaming or whatever. (I remember playing Loderunner -- the sierra remake -- in Windows 3.1 with this trick. It was so funny because it would play the falling sound while the character was suspended in mid-air not moving, then, after the sound completed, the character would fall.) I remember the first time I got digital audio out of the pc speaker in a game called Heartlight (no one bothered to support the adlib thing really) -- which I now know was a Boulder Dash clone, I just thought it was the neatest thing in the world.
For me it was a 286 running at a blazing fast 15MHz with a whole 1MB of ram. I'm just kidding with the exagerations there, I never thought it was great since even then it was outdated. I was so dissapointed I couldn't play things like Doom on it (Doom requires a 386+ due to using the real mode or whatever it was called when they directly accessed all the ram, not the conventional first, then the rest, so you didn't have to always make your tsrs and drivers come out exactly perfect to clear that extra 2KB of ram needed to get this or that started.) Windows 3.1 had to be started in "standard" mode instead of enhanced mode, for which I had to write a batch file that added the /s for me lest I go insane doing it myself every single time. It took so long to start the Windows up that I would usually leave the room, find a snack, use the restroom, even sit down and read. I think around 15 minutes at least. And my printer, well, I'm not sure what it was, but it always used the IBM Proprinter driver (I'm pretty sure it wasn't really, merely compatible) and it would shake the printer stand so badly every time the print head moved. I could hear the thing printing from half-way across the house. Of course, with no internet access (there were only networks like aol and compuserve, or, if you knew them and didn't mind the cost of long distance since I never saw one hosted in Alabama, BBS servers,) I didn't have to print too much more than syntax guides and homework. At least my soundcard was tolerable. A Vibra 16 (that's a true Sound Blaster 16, from back when Creative Labs wasn't a pile of crap and they used real hardware instead of emulation and crappy resampling.) Ok, they had Gravis Ultrasound and various MPU401 devices that were positively lovely to hear compared to the stinking OPL3 I was getting so sick of, but those were beyond my means even if I saved up for years since I was just a kid after all. Not that any quality lacking in the DAC or whatever would have made a difference since few people really hooked up their PCs to a nice stereo system -- what was the point? (They didn't come out with these nice 2.1 and now more recently 4.1, 5.1, 7.1, and so on systems until much later than that, back then, if you weren't rich enough to have a super stereo system to hook it all up to, you had rinky dink little 3-6W multimedia speakers, often not even amplified and no treble-bass seperation or increase.)
Despite all this, I loved the thing. I discovered there were still quite a few games that one could play on a 286. I was so unhappy when the plug to my multimedia speakers touched the case and fried darned well near every component in the thing (and, now that I think of it, that's one HECK of a poor design considering that the adaptor was only providing something in the area of 9V with a few hundred mA -- at most, 500mA -- most of which was being used by the speakers themselves... I guess cases weren't grounded back then, though even so it should have handled such a small amount better.)
BTW, no, I'm not an old man. I'm only 21 d-: Needless to say, I grew up in the time where if you knew what DOS stood for, you were seriously looked down on -- if you were lucky... As much as it galls me to say it, I think we have the internet and porn to thank more than anything else for computers being "cool" today. With a little help from microsoft making Windows 9x and NT so idiot proof that if you aren't an idiot you can't hardly use it.
EDIT: Oh, forgot the HD. I had an absolutely incredible 40MB or so to work with if I recall correctly.
EDIT2: Oh, and I had a Trident 512KB VGA video card. I think these are the people who later became Hercules, but I'm not 100% sure. Either way, Trident wasn't half bad. Heck, you could actually upgrade the video ram as it had slots for more chips... Not bad for way back then when you had to work just at matching up the ram and everything.
EDIT3: Just remembered. The soundcard in that 286 was an Adlib. And not the gold version, but the original. Basically, just an OPL2 MIDI card. There was a trick you could do to get digital audio out of it, but it ate every free CPU cycle, so it just didn't work for gaming or whatever. (I remember playing Loderunner -- the sierra remake -- in Windows 3.1 with this trick. It was so funny because it would play the falling sound while the character was suspended in mid-air not moving, then, after the sound completed, the character would fall.) I remember the first time I got digital audio out of the pc speaker in a game called Heartlight (no one bothered to support the adlib thing really) -- which I now know was a Boulder Dash clone, I just thought it was the neatest thing in the world.
