Retrospective: Why Did Old PCs Have Key Locks?

The Antec case that I got 13 or so years ago has a lock for the side door. Never used it.

I remember when I got that case I was really exited by the custom PC build pictures on here this was before there were 'gaming' style consumer computers being offered so it was rare to have a window or side and top vents, if you wanted them you had to put them in yourself. I put a big window in my door along with a 120mm fan (huge at the time! wow 120 was so big I thought) and a 90?mm fan hole on top. I cut the vent in the front and used a piece of dryer ducting that goes from 4" to 3" and the 3"

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was pretty perfect for the 80mm intake fans. It looked like a cool ram air intake or something like that.

I painted the whole case 2 tone with that hammered paint silver and black and it came out looking pretty cool. I also had some cold cathodes in it, and unlocked my processor of course. I still regret never posting pictures but I guess I never thought it was ever done. I had a custom switch panel I made too to control the fans and I took the covers off of all the drives to paint them to match the case, I even painted my keyboard haha. Fun hobby too bad it's so expensive I would love to do a build or two every year.
 
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Romeomium said:
LOL. For some reason, this reminds me of what I thought security was when I was young. When I was younger, my "security" involved me making a bunch of shortcuts on a floppy drive, and burying programs etc. in a million folders with weird names. I'd pop the disk in the PC, and use the shortcuts to get directly to them.

This was all to prevent my younger siblings and parents from finding/messing with my Rom/Emulator collection...among other things. Damn I miss Win 3.1/95 and the birth of the internet.
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I still use a floppy drive for this very reason.




No, not really.
 
r00k said:
^ The poor man's BADONG!
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it was more like this

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And I trimmed it so that it was flush with the front of the case. The back end had the standard 80mm intake fan. From the front like I said it was trimmed to the contours of the case so it looked pretty legit. A cold air intake of sorts :)
 
RAM was stupidly expensive in the old days.

I found an old quote I wrote up about 30 years ago for a 386 system - it's about $4k in 2017 dollars.

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Never mind the keylock, anyone remember the turbo button? Did you ever turn it off? I think I pushed it by accident once and swore at my pc for a week until I realized it was user error slowing it down. ^.^
 
viscountalpha said:
One game in particular squeezed everything it could. Zone 66. I still loved that game and wish I could have finished it properly.
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I was never able to play Populous 2 with the sound card because it needed too much.

HOWEVER......

We just happen to have a Pentium Classic 100Mhz at that time and I (on accident) discovered that I could put a small table radio next to the computer and tune it to 100Mhz FM and actually get the game sounds.....really shitty....and really staticy......but by god it worked!
 
DoubleTap said:
RAM was stupidly expensive in the old days.

I found an old quote I wrote up about 30 years ago for a 386 system - it's about $4k in 2017 dollars.
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It wasn't so much that it was expensive, but that the bastard ads would always say something like "8MB for $80" or something....but you probably had a motherboard that required you to buy 2 SIMM's....

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My stepfather's XT had a keylock; my mother and he used it to "control" my computer access while I was home alone after school. It disabled the keyboard so the system wouldn't boot, it just hung up on a no-keyboard error. Of course I soon wired a reed switch in parallel with the keylock so I could unlock it by placing a magnet in the right spot of the plastic front panel, and kept on using the computer after school anyway.
 
westrock2000 said:
It wasn't so much that it was expensive, but that the bastard ads would always say something like "8MB for $80" or something....but you probably had a motherboard that required you to buy 2 SIMM's....
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SIMMs? Try DIPP packages plugged into sockets directly on the board. Plus even that ad was way later(well into the 90's). Take a step back into the late 80's/early 90's:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/...he-entire-computer-industry-ran-out-of-memory
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Take it back even further and yeah, this is a 64K module for $1495 plus shipping:
extensys.jpg

Logan321 said:
Never mind the keylock, anyone remember the turbo button? Did you ever turn it off? I think I pushed it by accident once and swore at my pc for a week until I realized it was user error slowing it down. ^.^
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Yeah, there was the occasional need to turn it off. Lazy programmers would tie application speed to clock speed sometimes, and the end result could be a program that runs too fast to be usable
 
Still remember the memory kit hanging on the wall in the tech department at my first computer job.
The kit was for upgrading a PC with 16KB to a full 64KB. Price was $210.

When they first started shipping the 265kbit chips. (18 chips will bring your memory card up to 512KB!).
Some PC's where shipping with 128KB, and if you used 256kb chips you could upgrade to the full 640kb right on the motherboard :eek:
Our vendor had a limited supply available for only $50 per chip, or $900 for a 512KB upgrade.
 
My generic XT and AT PCs had keyboard locks back in the day.

First computer mod I did as a young whippersnapper was to rewire the lock wires going to the motherboard.
I wasn't going to let my parents "locking" the PC stop me from using it :p
 
My Amiga 3000T has a keylock, I never used it but I think it locks out the keyboard.
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Zepher said:
My Amiga 3000T has a keylock, I never used it but I think it locks out the keyboard.
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Nice silicon graphics machine. Donkey Kong Country was rendered using a silicon graphics machine to pre-render the 3D models into 2D sprites or something like that that's how the game looked so much better than others at the time. Those programmers were really cutting edge and so were some of the SG machines like the Indigo. Incredibly advanced for the time you had to have a fortune to own one.
 
Merc1138 said:
.....

Yeah, there was the occasional need to turn it off. Lazy programmers would tie application speed to clock speed sometimes, and the end result could be a program that runs too fast to be usable
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Yup, anybody play Stunt Driver back then (like Hard Drivin or Race Drivin)? Lol, pushing the turbo button was good for some laughs though as it was impossible to play the game.
 
sirgallium said:
Nice silicon graphics machine. Donkey Kong Country was rendered using a silicon graphics machine to pre-render the 3D models into 2D sprites or something like that that's how the game looked so much better than others at the time. Those programmers were really cutting edge and so were some of the SG machines like the Indigo. Incredibly advanced for the time you had to have a fortune to own one.
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thanks. I never got this one operational. A friend of mine used to buy and sell stuff from Government auctions and I saw this machine in his storage locker and and wanted it badly since I was always a fan of SGI.
I really wanted to get into 3D graphics, which is the main reason I bought a Video Toaster 4000 card so that I could use Lightwave 3D on my Amiga. That card was $2400 in 1993 and required $800+ in upgrades to my Amiga to use it, added a 345MB HD and 12MB of ram.

I did buy another SGI box that I was going to make into a PC since I saw a converted one years back. I just never got around to it, it's sitting in the attic now just waiting.
sgi.jpg
 
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