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Figured a release valve was needed for the PVP thread.

I don't recall what I used before AltaVista. I do recall reading about google as a research project, but not using it until a few years into its life when I was using both and found that it was producing results as good as altavista. Eventually I switched to google after I found that the results were so much better that there was no longer any point in going there.

Never did enjoy or use yahoo. At the time they were trying to get people to categorize and curate the internet, and while a noble goal, ultimately it simply didn't scale. Internet content was being created at a rate faster than curators could manage it.

I first used the internet via a dial in to a library, which had lynx that you could use remotely. Prior to that I was accessing a few BBS's, and accessing fidonet and compuserve via a university dialup.

Of course, before BBS's we had computer magazines and "shareware" discs. Lots and lots of time wasted on old DOS games.

First computer was a timex sinclair zx-81, with a cassette tape interface so you could type in a loooong program from the computer magazine, then save it to tape so you didn't have to type it in again. Fiddling with the tape player to get the correct volume, etc was an exercise in frustration, but it was on this system that I wrote my first program, which was a text rocket flying up from the bottom of the screen and off the screen.

Well what good is starting a new thread if you're going to win the thread in the first post, then?

I just remember my childhood being wasted on trying to avoid that damn yeti in ski free. My mom could bring home one of those old luggable computers to do work at home, and we would snatch it away whenever we could.

It was something like this.


I also had the unfortunate job of tech support for dialup users pre-windows xp. I still have nightmares of being half way through rebuilding a customers tcp/ip stack when they find out their 95 disc has a scratch on it. I was still doing internet support when xp first came out, and the blaster worm hit. Holy hell that was horrible. We had pages and pages of call backs to work through.

I was working at Best Buy when Blaster hit... I learned so damn much patching and fixing that worm/virus. And I made a lot of overtime then.

Most users dropping their computers off would accuse Best Buy of writing Blaster.

For my first real exposure to the internet, I was limited to Prodigy dialup. I just used their interface, so my exposure to the internet as a whole was limited.
When I went to college, that all changed. I gorged myself on porn. I even created an open share on the campuses network for people to browse my horde and take as they pleased. I called it the giga-porn, because I just got a fancy new 4 gig drive and wanted to see if I could collect a full gig of just pictures. That was no small feat back then. Needless to say someone was always connected to my computer, and as soon as I tried to reboot I'd start getting calls.

I joined AOL right about the time they went from "5 hours free!" to "10 hours free!" and my dial-up has fluctuated between AT&T Worldnet, Flash.net, Covad, Copper.net, and AOL.
Once I went high-speed, it has all been Covad and Uverse. I have never had cable Internet. At college I discovered how to access my buddy's account in Ohio via the Merit network, which allowed me to use his FTP acct to download shareware to his account, chop it up into 2k pieces, email the pieces back to my account, reassemble them, and then un-archive them into actual useful software (until we finally got FTP access at my college).

I also started with a ZX-80 Sinclair, still have my cables, too. My computer was assembled poorly, the video output would go corrupt if it was left on too long. I found an unsoldered capacitor on the motherboard (seriously, one leg just never got soldered in) and soldered it back into its hole, and that helped make the video last longer, but it would still drift once it got hot enough. My first computer program was on ][e, where I took the BASIC programs from the ends of the chapters in my 6th grade math textbook and put them all together into one big program (which I then couldn't save to floppy because I hadn't booted to floppy to start).

My search engine of choice was Lycos or Dogpile, until Google made them all pretty much obsolete. Now I go between the big three (Google/Bing/Yahoo) until I get what I'm after.

--Patrick

I had the dubious "honor" of infecting my campus network with a nasty virus. I called IT to try to warn them, but they didn't believe me until it was too late... which was stupid because I used to work for them and knew most of the members personally, including the faculty oversight manager. The stupid thing came from the install disk for a network card, which the idiots at the computer store refused to believe had happened because "hardware can't give your computer a virus." Well no shit you morons, but the install disk that you've made hundreds of copies of on your own in-store PC certainly can. The same store also sold me a 3 volt CPU for a 5 volt motherboard and insisted that there wasn't going to be a problem. It worked long enough to post, then died forever.

As for first computers, mine was a Tandy 8088 PC, with a turbo button to increase the speed of the CPU from, I believe, 9 to 13MHz. I remember how nice it was when we first installed the 25MB hard drive and the 3.5" floppy drive, so it no longer had (only) two 5.25" floppy drives. And it had a bitchin' 512K of RAM. Sadly, I lived in the middle of nowhere when the internet came out, so I didn't actually get started in my internet misadventures until Yahoo was well on their way to failing to curate the internet. The only use I had for BBSes was to play games, and the rest of my time was spent reading through the Humor section of Yahoo, or playing MUDDs

I didn't really get into the internet until college in the early 90s. Before that, I had a Commodore 64 and an 80286, which I upgraded to a 486DX. I learned Commodore's BASIC in the mid 80s, and C and (unstandardized) C++ in high school. I actually had to unlearn some things Borland had in their C++ compiler, if I recall correctly, when the ANSI standard became widespread. In college, I always had the college's dialup, or nothing at home. Wasn't worth it. I did dial into one BBS in high school, but it was lame. I remember playing Space Wars.

The best thing about the free AOL discs was the entertainment value of putting them in the microwave.

I remember when my dad brought in an external modem that DOUBLED the speed of the internal one our PC had!! IT WAS A WHOLE 56k!!

Man, back when we still had the internal 28k modem I remember visiting the Power Rangers site and letting it load for literally as long as the show lasted on TV. Good times.

Before altavista I used webcrawler, and I think for a while before google I used metacrawler. Like stienman, yahoo always seemed like a poser, a pretender, an upstart. My first internet access was provided via Los Alamos National Laboratories, where I briefly had a login to their Cray XMP supercomputer which in turn could access the internet and send this newfangled stuff called electronic mail. Of course, long before that I had been using 2400bps dialup to get on BBSes which had fidonet, which was kind of a poor man's internet where message delivery was always at least 24 hours.

Much like Shakey, my earliest PC memories involve a compaq luggable computer, though it belonged to my grandfather and previous to that I had also used a commodore 64 (one my grandfather had, and one an uncle had. CRUSH CRUMBLE AND CHOMP) and some of my early grade school classrooms even had the commodore PET, though most sported at least one Apple 2, on which I taught myself the basics of, well, BASIC. The first computer my parents got us for in the house (to help with your homework, and the household accounts, if your father ever works it all out) was another compaq, called a deskpro, an 8088 with an amber monitor and 640k of ram! It was the most powerful computer among all my friends. It looked like this:



Man have I got good memories of that machine. And then after that, came the tandy 1000. That was even better. Gaming. Freakin'. Heaven.

Anyway, when I was about 12 or so, my folks finally got me my own computer for christmas, also a compaq, this one an 80386sx-16 (meaning 16 mhz processor speed) with two megs of ram. Thus did I enter the windows era. That was the machine, also, that I pulled my first all-night-gaming-session on, playing Civ 1. It was also the first computer I took completely apart to components and then put it back together (taking it apart took 1 night, putting it back together took 3, and thus was my future career path set). An uncle got me a math coprocessor for it (thus changing it from SX to DX) the next year, and I also put more ram in it myself.

My parents were very nervous about letting me have a modem. They directly referenced the Matthew Broderick movie "War Games" as to the source of their unease. I promised not to start global thermonuclear war. Thus was begun a tense 3 year long battle for the telephone which ended only with them capitulating and getting me a second line.

Meanwhile, I built my first computer from parts my freshman year in high school, thinking I was very clever for putting a 386dx-66 in an old IBM-XT case. That was also when I got that LANL cray account, when I took part in the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge.

Incidentally, if you want your kids to have strong instruction in computers in school, move to new mexico. Thanks, Mr. Spradlin.

When the challenge was over, naturally, my account was closed >_< But it wasn't long after that that the world wide web actually became a thing, and I got a dialup account through UCCS (I had moved to colorado springs). Then I built myself a blazing fast, amazing 486dx4-100, which I took to college with me.

Man, I'm really pinpointing my age for the tech-savvy, aren't I?

Anyway, I celebrated my first IT job by building myself my first overclocked machine - a Celeron 333a overclocked to 500mhz, which was a big freakin' deal at the time. Got my first voodoo card in that sucker too... remember when those things were just a 3d accelerator, and you had to pipe your regular 2d matrox or whatever video card THROUGH it using an extra cable? Wild shit right there.

And then, Everquest. Which is how I met the little woman. I was a shadowknight, she was a paladin, ours was the love that could not be. Well, actually, it was early in the beta on the PVP server (Rallos Zek, back then there weren't any baby zeks), and level 4 me saw that level 2 her had wandered WAY too far from town and was getting eaten by a bear. For some reason I'm still not entirely clear on, I chose to kill the bear instead of her... the rest is history.

Yes, it definitely means that you're older than I thought. I thought you were pretty close to my age, but from this, I'd say you were a good 5-7 years older, if not a bit more.

My first computer was a Commodore I think. After we got older I used that Commodore monitor as a TV for like 10 years.

I remember one of our computers literally had a "go faster" button (I think it was called turbo). We also had some kind of Compaq where they supposedly welded the RAM in. I never had a good thing to say about that company since.

Necronic said:

My first computer was a Commodore I think. After we got older I used that Commodore monitor as a TV for like 10 years.

I remember one of our computers literally had a "go faster" button (I think it was called turbo). We also had some kind of Compaq where they supposedly welded the RAM in. I never had a good thing to say about that company since.

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Ha! Yeah, one of my grandfather's computers had a turbo button. I could never figure out why anyone would ever turn turbo off... I mean, it didn't cause it to overheat or anything. Although, thinking about it, I think I remember it made some ascii-based games run TOO fast. Like Friendlyware PC-Arcade, a game so old it didn't need an operating system.



A lander launches as the titles scroll up.

Title screen

The main menu

Brick Breaker

Eagle Lander

Eagle Lander - the screen zooms in as you are closer to landing.


Eagle Lander - Oops, I crashed.

A side-scrolling shooter (called Starfighter)

Ascii Man, a Pac-Man clone

Hopper, a Frogger clone

Horses racing in PC Derby.

Robot War, a Berzerk clone

A shooter (called shooter, oddly enough)

NEVER HIT THE TURBO BUTTON WHILE PLAYING F-19 STEALTH FIGHTER!!!1!!!!

seriously you have an hour flight time to the target, hoping to speed it up a little I hit turbo... the damn plane did cartwheels all the way across Poland in a matter of minutes.[DOUBLEPOST=1357859391][/DOUBLEPOST]I bought a "BLUE DOT" shareware of a Mandelbrot set. I wasted so much time making those 16 color sets, and zooming to damned near infinity... limited by 256k ram.

sixpackshaker said:

NEVER HIT THE TURBO BUTTON WHILE PLAYING F-19 STEALTH FIGHTER!!!1!!!!

seriously you have an hour flight time to the target, hoping to speed it up a little I hit turbo... the damn plane did cartwheels all the way across Poland in a matter of minutes.

Click to expand...

Generally for those games, I found you were fine if you already had turbo on when you ran the EXE file. Then, turning OFF the turbo button mid-game gave you slow-mo!

Yeah a lot of the older games didn't have an internal clock to control time, it was just based on the CPU speed.

Also I REMEMBER PC DERBY! My dad had one of the early laptops back in the day for work. Thing was huge and just ran DOS iirc. BUT IT HAD PC DERBY!

Necronic said:

Yeah a lot of the older games didn't have an internal clock to control time, it was just based on the CPU speed.

Also I REMEMBER PC DERBY! My dad had one of the early laptops back in the day for work. Thing was huge and just ran DOS iirc. BUT IT HAD PC DERBY!

Click to expand...

Did it look like this?

What lap would THAT fit on!?

My first PC:

Well of course we had it tough, before working down mill at 6 pence a day and leaving my sisters as collateral to bring home the PET 2001, my computer was a Curta. And after I finished rewriting the logarithmic charts for the next days work, my knuckles were nothing but exposed bone my father would cutting me in two with a bread knife.

I was always amused that the audio "tracks" for those old games didn't have their own clocks either, so if I booted up Might & Magic and hit the turbo button, the music sped up too.

First computer I ever owned was a ZX-80 by Timex/Sinclair.

First one I used on a regular basis was an Atari 400. Our HS computer lab had Apple ]['s of various types and Atari 800's.

At college, I did most of my "coding" on AT&T PC's. Then, I met and fell in love with the Macintosh SE.

After getting an LC used from a friend, I bought a Performa 6360 - back in the days of Mac Clones, before Jobs returned from NeXT to save Apple. That was eventually replaced by a clamshell tangerine iBook, which was later replaced by my iBook G4 (which is still my only Mac).

My first PC was courtesy of a friend of mine who worked at a Radio Shack. In mid-2000, I bought a Compaq Presario from him, with the option orange faceplate for the front of the computer. About a decade ago, Gateway opened a store near my home in Waukesha - ironically, about half a mile north of the Azana Spa in Brookfield. I bought my first PC there, at what used to be an old car dealership. I'm now on my third Gateway PC.

GasBandit said:

Anyway, I celebrated my first IT job by building myself my first overclocked machine - a Celeron 333a overclocked to 500mhz, which was a big freakin' deal at the time. Got my first voodoo card in that sucker too... remember when those things were just a 3d accelerator, and you had to pipe your regular 2d matrox or whatever video card THROUGH it using an extra cable? Wild shit right there.

Click to expand...

Those early celerons were nuts. Especially when they put them back into sockets and you could run dual cpu's. Some of the best overclocking processors ever.

I grew up with an apple lisa that lasted to 1995 to a 166 that lasted until 2004, now I change my computer on a yearly basis and put it together myself because I'm spethel.

The_Khan said:

I grew up with an apple lisa that lasted to 1995 to a 166 that lasted until 2004, now I change my computer on a yearly basis and put it together myself because I'm spethel.

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You are the first person I've ever met that actually had an Apple Lisa. Those mythical machines are very rare these days.

stienman said:

You are the first person I've ever met that actually had an Apple Lisa. Those mythical machines are very rare these days.

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my father had it. He lives the iLife. Makes fun of me because i dont use iproducts like my cool older brother.

(except for an ipad and a gen1 ipod.)

my current comp collection is

Mini itx lan rig

i5 2500k
8gb ram
gforce gtx 560
liquid cooled
cold stone case (beutiful, 10mm thick aluminum front plate. makes me want to put it under a cnc)

main computer
i7
16gb ram
quadro card
antect 300

Home server
pentium
16 gb ram
4 tb storage
installed services
-own cloud
-some four letter initialed media server, too lazy to look it up right now

three laptops 1 programming with ubuntu installed 1 for work trips and 1 for semi gaming

1 assus vivo tab windows 8 rt
1 samsung galaxy tab 7.7
1 ipad 2

phones
galaxy nexus
htc onex
samsung omnia 7
samsung galaxy note
an early android motorola
motorola atrix with laptop dock

I buy/ am given way too much electronic junk in the last year. I should probably work on getting some kids so I have other kinds of shit to worry about.

I went from a 386, to a 486 (it played X-wing and TIE fighter so much better) to a (at the time) bleeding edge 450 mhz Pentium II and a 128MB video card, which I later upgraded to 256. From there it was on to a single core laptop, to a dual core laptop, to a dual core alienware m15x, to my now quad-core dual video-SLI enabled m18x.

AND I STILL WANT MORE.

My first computer was the awesome Tandy TRS-80.

This bugger:



DUNGEONS OF DAGGERATH MOTHER FUCKERS!

My first computer with the internet was a pentium on cable internet. We were poor when I was younger and couldn't afford anything before I was almost finished high school.

I thought this thread was going to be about someone upgrading to a brand spanking new blazing-speed Internet connection. It's actually the opposite. Whaddya know.

There was a time when I thought this was the pinnacle of gaming:

First, there was AOL.



Then came Comcast.

Zappit said:

Then came Comcast.

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The trouble is getting people to keep plenty of tension on all the lines to keep it working. This is why they keep you tied up with so many calls to tech support.

--Patrick

AOL? Younglings. I was there for QuantumLink. When RabbitJack's Casino opened, you had to request a second floppy disc to be able to access it.

GasBandit said:

Did it look like this?

Click to expand...

It might have been that one. It's been ages since then so I don't really remember. I just remember that it had PC Derby and some Rogue-like on it.

I also vaguely remember two crazy old Commodore games, one was a basketball game where you played as the basketballs themselves. I think it was called Spike and Mike or something like that. The other was one where you were some kind of grasshopper. It was like a side-scroller exploration game. I vaguely feel like you may have been in space.....

The roguelike I played the most was Larn. Your child was dying and you had limited time to buy the drug to save them, but it costs so much money that you have to clear two dungeons to get the items needed to sell to buy the drug.

It only occured to me later that if you were able to clear even a level or two of the first dungeon, the shopkeeper who had the drug would be no problem whatsoever.

Still, there were no built in save points (you had to back up the directory if you wanted a save point) and there were no extra lives, so it was exciting.

I don't think I ever completed it actually. The closest I got was halfway through the second dungeon, then ran out of time and my kid died.

That is one of the more confusing and disturbing choices for character motivation in a game I have seen before.

That looks like an old ASCII D&D game I had 15 years ago.

Necronic said:

That is one of the more confusing and disturbing choices for character motivation in a game I have seen before.

Click to expand...

I get disturbing, but what's confusing about needing medicine for your child as a motivation?

Reminds me of Moria/Angband, aside from the sick kid thing.

Calleja said:

I get disturbing, but what's confusing about needing medicine for your child as a motivation?

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It seems...contrived.

--Patrick

At the time, it wasn't.

The first computer we owned was the Tandy Color Computer(TRS 80).

Ooooooh.

Bowielee said:

The first computer we owned was the Tandy Color Computer(TRS 80).

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My brother!

I, too, had a trash 80.

And Zork.

Ah, zork!

Every once in awhile I think, "Man this machine only has 4GB of ram, this sucks." or "This machine has 16GB of ram, this is awesome!"

Then I think back to machines measured in single digit megabytes of memory (yay for extended memory managers!) and that was in the early 90's - just two decades ago.

In 2030 my kids will be having families of their own, and their computers will have memory measured in terabytes, hard drives measured in hundreds of petabytes, and their phones/PDA/portable devices will be 100 times more powerful in computing power and 1000 times more storage space than the best computer I have at home.

I cannot begin to imagine why they would need that much space and computing power - but the reason we don't need that much space now is because no one has it, and thus no one has come up with cool uses for it.

And here I thought Nyan cat was the pinnacle of technological progress - it was all leading up to this, but it's only going to get better, faster.

It boggles my mind.

Just like nyan cat.

I expect convergence will handle that. The GPU and CPU will merge into one processor, RAM and storage will just be different regions of the same space (once storage speed reaches that of RAM), graphics and sound will exceed what we can perceive (for most, they already do), and with IPv10 and a good mesh network topology, the ISPs and telcos will all be footnotes in history.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

with IPv10 and a good mesh network topology, the ISPs and telcos will all be footnotes in history.

Click to expand...

Which governments do you expect to back that?

stienman said:

Which governments do you expect to back that?

Click to expand...

The Planetary Defence Council, of course.

--Patrick

Bowielee said:

The first computer we owned was the Tandy Color Computer(TRS 80).

Click to expand...

Hells yeah.

Did you have that game where a red Trex and a blue Trex fought? Or that weird oil tycoon one. Or Puyon? I had the cassette version of Puyon.

My best friend had a Coleco Adam. Buck Rogers on a cassette tape drive rocked.

Still have my Intellivision II, my NES, my SNES, and my PS2. Kati still has her N64, and would still have her Sega Master System if only she hadn't let an ex borrow it.

--Patrick

I have an NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, 3 PS2's, xbox, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Nintendo VirtualBoy (yeah...), Sega Gamegear, Sega Dreamcast, Gameboy Advance SP, Nintendo DS, Nintendo DS lite, Nintendo 3DS, Wii, 360, PS3...

...

Goddamn I've got a lot of shit sitting in a closet.

The SNES has never been disconnected from a TV though. It's still in my bedroom, with Street Fighter 2 Tournament Edition and an arcade stick attached.

The only game console I've ever sold was my Sega Genesis, along with all of my games for it. I sold it as a kid to be able to buy a Virtual Boy, which I was certain was going to be totally awesome.

The trauma of that experience is probably why I've never sold one since.

This is the first computer we had in the house...

DarkAudit said:

This is the first computer we had in the house...

Click to expand...

I remodeled my room as a kid so I would have room for one of those. And when I say "remodeled," I mean "removed the wall between the two closets without asking my mom" just so we could have a separate computer room.

She wasn't happy.

I never got one.

--Patrick

I fell off the console bandwagon after the NES, but the Dreamcast got me back on - and when I later could get one cheap on ebay (and a mod chip and pirate the games) I got a PS2. But I liked the dreamcast better.