Your most memorable computer moments

Which hardware, software made a big impression on you during your life's history of trying to be one with computers?

One thing I particularly remember is bying the Diamond Monster 3D video accelaration card with a whopping 4mb of memory. There were only 2 games that had it supported by software at the time (Quake and Tombraider).

BUT boy, did a 3D card make a difference. I can still remember sitting behind the computer thinking for hours, this looks SOOOOooo good. Also there was a dramatic increase in speed (which i needed since i had a cyrix processor at the time).

I never had that moment of course with any other videocard, because it was a revolutionary moment for me, and everything that came after that was merely incremental in improvement, instead of a giant leap.

http://www.geek.com/gaming/gamerevs/video/monster.htm

You had to connect the video accelerator card to your proper video card via a cable on the outside...haha...good old days...

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I remember maxing out my 486 dx100 by purchasing 32 meg of ram, giving me a whopping 64 meg. Cost for 32 meg of ram $600.

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Heh, I remember those cables. My first real 3D accelerator was a Voodoo card. That thing made Quake run so smooth. Before that, I didn't know there was a such thing as fps, lag, pings, and all that because I figured all the skipping and choppiness was normal. I remember playing Doom on my 386 where I'd sway left and right soooo slowly and the chaingun would shoot slow too. People would complain about how slow a game ran and I looked at em like they were nuts and wondering what they were complaining about, lol. It wasn't until that graphics card that I became a speed freak.

And 64 megs of RAM in your 486? Damn, you had more RAM than I had total hard drive space. I had a 35-40 meg hard drive, with 4 sticks of 2MB RAM.

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That's the reason why I still don't use huge hard drives. My gaming rig uses two 36 gig raptors and one drive is for games. I was so used to deleting a game to make room for a new one that I wanted to play, lol. I couldn't believe that Doom II took up a whopping 13 megs when it came out. It took forever to make room for it, lol.

Although my first major memory shocker was when the Pentium 90mhz first came out, there was a flight sim called Bombs Over Baghdad or something similar. It said the game was over 500 megs and I was like damn, that's the size of a whole CD-ROM! I don't think I owned, or heard of, a game at that point that was more than 40 megs.

Oh, and first finding out about defragging in DOS was cool too. I didn't know much about DOS and all that as I just hopped into it without reading anything so I figured it all out on my own as time went by. Some guy installed some DOS memory program so we used that to delete games as opposed to just "del c:\doom" for example, I had to delete each file individually and kept the directory there because of the restore file feature which I didn't know how to restore the deleted stuff unless the directory was still there, heh, so yeah, I would delete the files one at a time and see how slow it went. When I found out how to defrag, I was amazed how fast it just zipped through when I held down the delete key instead of it deleting one file every second, lol. Sooooo sloooow.

Another cool memory was how I used to always look forward to the latest Computer Gaming World (also Computer Gaming and Electronic Entertainment or something similar) since that was basically the only real PC gaming magazine in those days. The first demo/review CD that came with mags was pretty cool too but when they first came out, my system couldn't run it since my graphics card was only 256 colors, heh.

- N

 

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My first computer:

Intel Pentium 1 166mhz
8MB RAM
ATI Rage 2 4mb Graphics Card
1.86GB Hard drive
4x Cd-Rom
33.3k Modem

Total Price Brand New: $3,100

I remember when I bought Alien vs. Predator and wondered why it wouldnt run. I had no clue that the comp was a piece of crap. I also had Microsoft Golf, I thought that game was the shiz.

 

I had a 445Mhz (or summin') processor once, which was the fastest on the block. I was da king of the PCs.

 

It would seem to me every time I upgrade my PC I get a kick out of how much better it becomes. I recently put in a new 256MB Raedon and SATA HD with a ASUS motherboard and it really makes things allot easier and FASTER!

 

Compare what I have now: a 2.6 GHZ processor, gig of 3200 ram and Radeon 9800 pro 128mb, to what I had then. WOW! I still have that old computer. Ahhh the memories.

 

My first computer was a Mac SE:
8MHz processor
1MB RAM
40 MB hard drive
floppy drive
9" monochrome screen
and that's it! This is also a computer I still own, and it runs perfectly still, and it's at least 16 years old.

 

My first computer was a 486 Packard Bell. And the most memorable moment was going into dos and discovering the command line for the first time. It was like a beautiful black hole. Powerful, yet mysterious.

My most memorable hardware moment happened while playing one of those dos games, called F-18 raptor (great game.) After playing for many many hours, the monitor experienced a huge explosion. Like a big pop and flash of light. I'm not sure if it was a static discharge or what, but I rebooted and continued to play into the night

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Never had problems with the monitor again.

 

my first computer cost $3000 and had:

intel P2 266mhz
32mb pc66
3gb HDD
14" screen

my current computer cost $1200 and has:

AMD XP 2200+ (clocked to 2800)
Radeon 9600se
512mb DDR400
52x Burner(i only need one compter on the network with a DVD so, meh)
19" flatscreen proview
80gb seagate
a helluva lot of fans
900w soundsystem

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car neon duct-taped inside

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My first computer was one my parents bought when I was about 8 years old:

25MHz CPU (not sure what brand)
512K RAM
128MB HDD
DOS with a custom made menu to access programs like Commander Keene and Monopoly!
3.5in Floppy
No CD-ROM, No sound card, No 3D card, standard VGA out

About a year later, my dad bought a multimedia upgrade kit at Costco which included a 4MB 3D card, a sound card, a 2x CD-ROM, speakers, and a 4MB RAM upgrade. Don't know how much it costed. We upgraded to Windows 3.11 eventually, and we had it so long, we even got to put Windows 95 on it. It took 4 hours to install, LOL.

Compared to my system currently:

Intel Pentium 4 550 (3.4GHz) @ 4.02GHz
1GB OCZ DDR2, PC5300
ATI Radeon X700 256MB PCI-Express
Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS 7.1 Sound Card
2 74GB WD Raptors in RAID-0
3 250GB WD Caviar RAID Edition 7200RPM SATA HDDs
1 160GB WD 7200RPM SATA HDD
1 External 250GB 7200RPM USB2.0 HDD
12x DVD Burner

Quite a step forward in 15 years!

 

a memorable momente, removed the protective cover from a old HD filled it with a flamable liquid and turned it on, light the liquid and watched the fireworkd

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.

 

Speaking of golf, heh, I remember when Links first came out. Whatta ya mean it's made of real pictures? Wow, that's cooooool! That was probably the most played game everyone played at my place as a kid. My dad and his friends would come over on the weekend and we'd have a huge hotseat gaming BBQ day and watch golf while doing so. We have some friends that are pro golfers so we'd pick the same course on Links that they're playing in real life and try and compete against em, lol. Links, Empire, and the original Warlords were the games of choice.

Links was also the first game I actually played on the internet. When I found out about online tournaments, I was all wow'd. I mean I played Doom on Kali and other similar games and connections, but it technically wasn't the www internet back then. The Links tournment forums was also the first message board forums I've ever read too.

- N

 

lol my first computer was a radio shack special a Tandy if anyone remembers them I forget how slow the thing was

 

I had a 486...uh with something like 200mhz...There was only 32 megs of ram and no 3d accelerator, just an intergrated video/sound card. LOL. Then I upgraded! Now that was fun. The first time I opened up a computer! I gave it an extra 16 megs of ram, a 233 mhz petium processor, and a whole new mother board, something that had and AGP slot. Boy o Boy was I in heaven when that thing started up! LOL. The whole time, I only had something just over 2 gigs of hard disk space, and I thought that that was HUGE!! LOL. Man, how things change so quickly!

 

A special software moment was when I was playing Tornado, a hardcore flight sim. I played it on my first computer, my trusted DX-40, 4mb memory, harddrive size I can't remember but it can't have been more than 120 mb. And a trident 1mb Svga videocard. No soundblaster at that moment. I was stil playing with computer beeps. A 14 inch screen. with a horrible refresh rate above 640-400, because all games were still played in DOS. In fact, I had a special startup disk for Tornado, otherwise I wouldn't have the required 640kb of memory.

Tornado and Simcity2000 were the first games I ever bought. Not that my computer had been without games before (copying them over by splitting them up in 1.4mb partitions and transferring them to floppydisks. Sometimes 20 of them). But apparently these were games that 'hardcore' teenagers didn't circulate.

Tornado came with a hefty manual and I did lots of training and it was all extremely interesting. And then I went to a campaign. THe desert campaign (they added because of the first gulf war). I was to attack the runway of an hostile airbase deep in enemy territory. The tornado is made for low level attacks, flying 100-200 feet above the ground. From this height it is to deliver the special runway bomb, JP??? something. It dispenses many smaller submunitions and mines during a flight over a runway. So you have to fly straight over a runway for several seconds which was really easy in training.

But then a real mission. It was a night mission (the lights in my room were off too). I took off, crossed the front without too much trouble, having a close look at the fortifications. I started to approach the target area and started lining up with the runway via waypoints. And then all hell broke loose. Tracers from AA guns went up and my AA warning system started beeping like mad. AA missiles were launched. I could see the runway. I had to line up, or fail the mission. I panicked of course...trying to line up and dodging AA was too much for me at this point.

I died before I could reach the runway. Shot down...burned to a crisp.

And it was an exilerating experience. A game that was not easy.

I tried over and over. I changed the payload of my plane, and took some HARMs with me to take care of some AA units. And at one time I finally managed to complete this mission impossible...I hit the runway almost in a straight line. Some of the submunitions missed, but it looked good anyhow to me. I dodged the AA placed on my exit route from the target area...and flew home and made a good landing (landing also used to get me killed until I could do them even without engines, which sometimes really happened).

The mission debriefing screen loaded and YES...I had destroyed the runway.


I NEVER had such a moment in any flightsim coming after Tornado. Nor did I ever have a fulfilling campaign after that. You could really plan your stuff in Tornado and the outcome would matter.

 

i think i remember the game you are talknig about, is it the one where you select a plane, select your weapons, then go bomb targets by pressing spacebar or something? all in a 3rd person view from above

 

Hmm, classic software. Picking just one from each platform, on the Mac would be Shufflepuck Cafe, and on the BBC it is undoubtedly POD.

 

I miss the huge and informative manuals that used to come with games, now it's all on the damned CD. I also miss the goodies you'd get too. With Ultima IV I got a huge cloth map and of course with every other Ultima, the lil stone too. I have another kickass map of Middle Earth (I mean, awesome! The best I've ever seen!) that came with War in Middle Earth. That's probably the thing I miss the most compared to games nowadays.

Flight Sims? I was never into them except for one called ATF: Advanced Tactical Fighter. Was awesome, you could make your own detailed scenarios, and had a lot of information on various aircraft. Since I wasn’t into playing them, I’d go to my friends house and would create detailed scenarios for him. I think the most fun one was when the base was getting raided at night and right as you take off , a bunch of bombers fly in and bomb the runway; perfect timing and all.

- N

 

No, it wasn't. It was a hardcore flightsim. You had a cockpit view.