The Random Crap Thread 2: It Hits the Fan.
- Thread starter North_Ranger
- Start date
@Squidleybits thinks that keeping tacos in your pocket to offer to people is strange. I say pocket tacos are awesome!
I also seem like an appropriate person to ask weird age-technology questions to.
Buddy at the cell phone store wanted to know if they had computers back when I went to school. He had seen my age when I had to present ID to change my account.
WTF.
Buddy at the cell phone store wanted to know if they had computers back when I went to school. He had seen my age when I had to present ID to change my account.
WTF.
Buddy, we've had computers since at least right around 3000BCE. What're you tryin' ta say?
--Patrick
Probably meant the question for Dave.
Buddy sounds like a dick.
Back in the day I had an apple 2+, a timex Sinclair 1000, and TI 99/4A.
We got the 2+ in '79 as a family machine. But I wanted my own machine. So I got the TS1000 for xmas one year. But it was so junky, I ended up saving all of my allowance and birthday/xmas money and got my own ti 99/4a. Years later, when I got a job, I ended up getting my own apple 2c. Shortly after moving out on my own, I wanted to run a BBS and get a hard drive. A 20 meg hard drive for the 2c cost $800 in Computer Shopper magazine, whereas I could get a whole PC compatible with hard drive for $800. I switched then and have never bought another apple computer (discounting the very out of date ipad I got on the cheap and currently use for Square) since.
Back in high school, I knew one guy with a 2e, one guy with a commodore 64, and one guy with a TRS 80, and as far as I knew, those (and mine) were the only home computers in a 3 neighborhood radius.
We got the 2+ in '79 as a family machine. But I wanted my own machine. So I got the TS1000 for xmas one year. But it was so junky, I ended up saving all of my allowance and birthday/xmas money and got my own ti 99/4a. Years later, when I got a job, I ended up getting my own apple 2c. Shortly after moving out on my own, I wanted to run a BBS and get a hard drive. A 20 meg hard drive for the 2c cost $800 in Computer Shopper magazine, whereas I could get a whole PC compatible with hard drive for $800. I switched then and have never bought another apple computer (discounting the very out of date ipad I got on the cheap and currently use for Square) since.
Back in high school, I knew one guy with a 2e, one guy with a commodore 64, and one guy with a TRS 80, and as far as I knew, those (and mine) were the only home computers in a 3 neighborhood radius.
TRS-80 and a Win 3.1 PC (not sure about brand) were the two family PCs. My first purchase was a win95 packard bell.
When I worked at Best Buy in 2002, we kept a hammer behind the desk that was labeled Packard Bell Tool. They were so bad we refused to work on them.
GasBandit
Staff member
Which is ironic because when I worked at Best Buy in 1997, they metaphorically held a gun to my head to make me SELL those same horrible Packard Bells.
The one time that we made an exception to the rule, I was assigned to make a DVD of all the word documents, videos and photos that old PackBell. The directions from the original tech were vague. So I called to find out where she saved her files. She was super evasive to all my questions. So I just searched all the popular file formats and just copied them into photo, video, and document folders. I set the disc aside and called the user to come get it.
Then a couple of days later there was a woman SCREAMING at the GM that I put porn on her computer. She was trying to get me fired because I sabotaged her family laptop with several pornographic pictures. She was going on about how she was sitting with her child on her lap going through the DVD. Then BOOM graphic, hard core, porno....
A coworker took the DVD and put in our PC and started going through the photos. He stared at the monitor, looked at the customer, back to the monitor, back to the customer...
He interrupted her tirade and asked, "Hey isn't that you in this photo?!"
She took her disk of porn and left.
[Warning: Text]
Wow. Well, it's been a journey.
Growing up, computers were things other people had. Nobody in my family ever used* a (real) personal computer until after I left college, when I finally bought one for myself. Until then, I had to content myself with the (infrequent) opportunities to visit one of the handful of Apple ][+ machines around my school. An actual computer class finally gave me access to Apple //e's. A friend of mine owned a TI-994/A, which I remember using to play Hunt The Wumpus and also to try and program the drum track to Micheal Sembello's "Maniac" with some degree of success. I wanted a //c so bad, but my parents, possibly sensing my affinity for tech, instead got me a TS-1000 for Christmas one year, along with the 16kb expansion pack which they could not find for several months after (they were purchased separately and, well, got separated). The TS-1000 had some electronic problems which caused the video to flake out once it heated up. Attaching the 16kb pack helped, but there was something wrong with it which would cause it to disconnect and crash the machine unless it was allowed to hang suspended off the back of the unit, the gravity helping keep the contacts connected or something. I don't know, I tried to fix it by fixing the obviously poor soldering inside of it (some of the components weren't even fully connected!) but didn't really have much success. My father owned a Commodore VIC-20 for a while but never really did anything with it besides play a couple of (cartridge-based) games. That was really it for computers until college.
In college, I really cut loose. College was where I finally got essentially 24/7 access to computers. The PC labs were limited to business hours, a Mac room full of SEs and one SE/30, and a PC room full of (Color!) '286 machines, one of which also had a '287 FPU installed for the math students. None had internal HDDs, it was all about floppies. For me, it was mostly about Dark Castle and The Bard's Tale. But the thing I probably spent the most time using was the campus mainframe, which was a DEC VAX 11-750 running VMS accessible via any of a number of VT100 terminals around campus. I am not kidding when I say that I probably spent more time learning how to use that computer than I did in my actual classes, and got recruited to be on the campus IT squad only three months after I started college. I still maintain that they did this more out of self-defense to keep me where they could see me rather than because they liked the cut of my jib or whatever. The Mac lab later got upgraded with a IIfx and the PC lab got upgraded to '386DX machines (FPUs for everybody!) and the VAX was eventually replaced with an IBM RS/6000 running AIX (yay, UNIX!). Then I graduated, and shortly afterwards bought my first computer for myself, which was a Mac SE with a nice V.34 modem and an AOL trial subscription.
And then I was a broke post-college guy who couldn't afford to buy another computer for almost five years. This was the dark ages, where anything I couldn't do via the SE ended up being something I had to do at a friend's house or, a few times, at the library or community center computer lab they had set up for job seekers. I was eventually able to scrape up enough to buy a Mac IIvx (what a mistake that was, but at least it was color) which I eventually sent in to have the guts changed out to rebuild it into a 7100/80, later upgraded again with an AV card and a G3 accelerator card (which was quite an upgrade, let me tell you). I later upgraded to a full-on "Beige" G3 minitower.
Now I know I talk about Macs a lot, and I know there are plenty of Apple haters on the forum, and I'm sure you have your reasons, but I've left out that I was also using SoftWindows (at first) and later add-in OrangePC expansion cards to run DOS and even Win95 OSR2 natively alongside MacOS on the same machines. In 2000, I built my first "from scratch" PC based on SS7 (Soltek MLB, AMD K6-III CPU, TNT2 Ultra GPU) for Win98SE and it's been back and forth ever since as I've tried to make up for all that "nobody in our family can afford a computer" time back during my youth. I won't go into all the details, but let's just say I still own most of the computers I've described above, and I've left out plenty more that filled in the gaps or that people have generously donated to me "because you're that computer guy" and so far as I know, the majority of them still work. Some computer museum is going to have their hands full when I die, because some of this stuff is genuinely difficult (if not straight up impossible) to come by these days, especially ones that are working.
--Patrick
*Owned, I guess. Used? Not really.
Wow. Well, it's been a journey.
Growing up, computers were things other people had. Nobody in my family ever used* a (real) personal computer until after I left college, when I finally bought one for myself. Until then, I had to content myself with the (infrequent) opportunities to visit one of the handful of Apple ][+ machines around my school. An actual computer class finally gave me access to Apple //e's. A friend of mine owned a TI-994/A, which I remember using to play Hunt The Wumpus and also to try and program the drum track to Micheal Sembello's "Maniac" with some degree of success. I wanted a //c so bad, but my parents, possibly sensing my affinity for tech, instead got me a TS-1000 for Christmas one year, along with the 16kb expansion pack which they could not find for several months after (they were purchased separately and, well, got separated). The TS-1000 had some electronic problems which caused the video to flake out once it heated up. Attaching the 16kb pack helped, but there was something wrong with it which would cause it to disconnect and crash the machine unless it was allowed to hang suspended off the back of the unit, the gravity helping keep the contacts connected or something. I don't know, I tried to fix it by fixing the obviously poor soldering inside of it (some of the components weren't even fully connected!) but didn't really have much success. My father owned a Commodore VIC-20 for a while but never really did anything with it besides play a couple of (cartridge-based) games. That was really it for computers until college.
In college, I really cut loose. College was where I finally got essentially 24/7 access to computers. The PC labs were limited to business hours, a Mac room full of SEs and one SE/30, and a PC room full of (Color!) '286 machines, one of which also had a '287 FPU installed for the math students. None had internal HDDs, it was all about floppies. For me, it was mostly about Dark Castle and The Bard's Tale. But the thing I probably spent the most time using was the campus mainframe, which was a DEC VAX 11-750 running VMS accessible via any of a number of VT100 terminals around campus. I am not kidding when I say that I probably spent more time learning how to use that computer than I did in my actual classes, and got recruited to be on the campus IT squad only three months after I started college. I still maintain that they did this more out of self-defense to keep me where they could see me rather than because they liked the cut of my jib or whatever. The Mac lab later got upgraded with a IIfx and the PC lab got upgraded to '386DX machines (FPUs for everybody!) and the VAX was eventually replaced with an IBM RS/6000 running AIX (yay, UNIX!). Then I graduated, and shortly afterwards bought my first computer for myself, which was a Mac SE with a nice V.34 modem and an AOL trial subscription.
And then I was a broke post-college guy who couldn't afford to buy another computer for almost five years. This was the dark ages, where anything I couldn't do via the SE ended up being something I had to do at a friend's house or, a few times, at the library or community center computer lab they had set up for job seekers. I was eventually able to scrape up enough to buy a Mac IIvx (what a mistake that was, but at least it was color) which I eventually sent in to have the guts changed out to rebuild it into a 7100/80, later upgraded again with an AV card and a G3 accelerator card (which was quite an upgrade, let me tell you). I later upgraded to a full-on "Beige" G3 minitower.
Now I know I talk about Macs a lot, and I know there are plenty of Apple haters on the forum, and I'm sure you have your reasons, but I've left out that I was also using SoftWindows (at first) and later add-in OrangePC expansion cards to run DOS and even Win95 OSR2 natively alongside MacOS on the same machines. In 2000, I built my first "from scratch" PC based on SS7 (Soltek MLB, AMD K6-III CPU, TNT2 Ultra GPU) for Win98SE and it's been back and forth ever since as I've tried to make up for all that "nobody in our family can afford a computer" time back during my youth. I won't go into all the details, but let's just say I still own most of the computers I've described above, and I've left out plenty more that filled in the gaps or that people have generously donated to me "because you're that computer guy" and so far as I know, the majority of them still work. Some computer museum is going to have their hands full when I die, because some of this stuff is genuinely difficult (if not straight up impossible) to come by these days, especially ones that are working.
--Patrick
*Owned, I guess. Used? Not really.
That same card is what i used to wean my 2nd wife off of her mac and onto PC when I got tired of having to tech support her machine
The only card I've ever used that had close to as many hydra cables coming out of the back of it as that thing is RME's HDSP 9632, but that's probably because I haven't had to work with any camera video capture devices.That same card is what i used to wean my 2nd wife off of her mac and onto PC when I got tired of having to tech support her machine
--Patrick
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Hold on... *does mental math* ... Pat, are you in your 50's?
I've already gone on record as saying that I got to see Star Wars (now retitled "A New Hope") and Airplane! in theaters, and that I'm privileged to predate the USA moon landing. I didn't join up with AOL until they started giving away ten hours free, though. I passed on getting in on the ground floor when they were still only offering five.
*sighs* I really miss not needing glasses to read fine print. It seems like so long ago (it was 7 years).
Try to remember, though, that most of my technology purchases are on Kurtzian "Gamer Savings Time" or whatever it's called, where I don't get to buy stuff until it's already been supplanted, so that might skew your calculations a bit.
--Patrick
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The worst part about the packard was that I bought it used and paid way too much. I was young and didn't know what I was buying.
My next PC was self built and awesome for Y2K. I had tons of fun on that machine.
My next PC was self built and awesome for Y2K. I had tons of fun on that machine.
I didn't see ANH in a theater until February 1997. Almost 20 years after the first time I saw it... in a drive-in with one crappy speaker barely hung into the driver's side window. Even with the stupid added scenes the 1997 experience was much better.
As far as computers go, I didn't have a computer of my own until fall 1988. A company that my father-in-law worked with was changing out all their desktop computers, my wife was attending LSU while I was in the Air Force, and he picked up a "cheap" used IBM 8088 that used either 5.25" or 3.25" floppies that was housed in a thin case (it was between 2.5" and 3" thick) that we built a containment box for a 4" thick 20mb hard drive (had it's own fan we put in that box! ) that we made some small alterations to the case to allow us to run a ribbon cable between the two. Also had a super slow dot-matrix tractor feed printer. Came with a 14" green screen monitor, so there wasn't any game playing on this little thing. I worked for long after she finished LSU. I didn't get a 286 processor until 1993 or 1994.
Ah, that's right, forgot about re-releases. I meant that I saw both films during their first run. We waited in long lines. They actually sold programs for it, probably worth some money now if younger me hadn't ruined it.
--Patrick
figmentPez
Staff member
Count me as another victim of Packard Bell. I think it was a Pentium 66 based model that we had. The weirded part was that it defaulted to their own GUI instead of standard Windows 95, and that was really weird interface, with a ton of video tutorials on how to do things. Then the HDD died, and we had to reinstall Windows 95 from floppy discs. We had a CD ROM drive, but we only had Windows on floppies for some reason.
I understood, I wasn’t trying to say you didn’t, sorry if that came across that way. By that time that I saw ANH in theaters I had actually become friends with many of the actors from the movies. David Prowse, Jeremy Bulloch, Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker, and several Jawas, Stormtroopers, rebel pilots and puppeteers. My most special memories from all Star Wars was seeing Phantom Menace at a private theater with lots of the cast of the original trilogy and when I was finally able to meet Carrie Fisher before Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis in 2002, and watching all the faces that had gathered after Carrie arrived from the airport and the first thing they all heard her say was “I need a cigarette and I have to piss.” It was quite the sight.
I wasn't implying you were, I had just completely forgotten that rereleases were a thing and could be used to technically tell the truth while simultaneously misrepresenting it.
--Patrick
