Computers I have owned

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

1) The IBM PCjr. Purchased the Christmas before they pulled the plug on them by my father. I think it was Christmas 1984. His getting this was the single decision that changed my life forever as it gave me a background in MS-DOS which is responsible for me gaining employable computer skills. This, along with him bringing home a surplus modem, made this... all of this... possible.

Underrated as a gaming system. Had the best version of King's Quest, for instance. Sure, lots of crap wouldn't run but more than enough did. Expanding the thing, to add RAM, seriously impacted the footprint of the machine, which is always a crowd-pleaser.

2) The IBM PC XT. Purchased by my dad, and the last computer he purchased while I was living at home. We sort of ran with the PCjr as long as we could, so we were quite happy to see games run faster on this thing. We had a CGA monitor for this thing's life. This ultimately ran the original dial-up version of Jolt Country when I got the system below.

3) A 286 clone. Purchased for $900 by motherfucking me after working the entire summer at the Driving Range and saving every penny I could. Never actually saw the $900 cash, as it was given to a co-worker of my dad's who built computers at work and I guess I let him withdraw the money or something. Details are fuzzy.

I bought an amber monitor for it and we stuck the XT with it and gave the CGA to the faster computer. When Dad bought an EGA monitor it was one of the greatest moments of our lives. I mean, CGA was a fucking step backwards from what the PCjr could do.

3) A 386-DX clone. You have to like being forced into making a non-decision between the 386-SX and the 386-DX. Any time you can insert a "u" into a model number and get SUX you know well to avoid it. This was also along the same time the Pontiac SUX was depicted in Robocop. Very handy. This was the first time I had to move the "turbo" button to "off" to run old games, because there wasn't a lot of cycle checking going on when they were making games like Flightmare.

4) A Pentium-75. I skipped the 486 generation, that's right. As a matter of fact, I was going to buy Loafer Girl's brother's 486 but it fell through for whatever reason and I got the P-75 instead. The thing had an LED readout for speed and I guess we eventually stuck a faster processor in there. Chris Freemesser was over at the apartment that Walrustitty and I shared and we realized that the LED could display a "1" (or nothing) and then 2 full digits. We also realized we could make it say whatever we wanted, so long as it adhered to that limitation. What could fit in there? "I C J" of course! The thing read out "I C J" instead of "1 3 3" or whatever till the day I sold it. As far as I know it still says that. Purchased by a man we called Captain Kickass.

5) A Cyrix-133. This was before Quake came out and the Cyrix chips sucked at "floating point arthimetic." Fantastic. Fuck id.

6) Atari 800 XL. Formerly owned by Diamond Dave the Love Slave. (Thus, I got it very late, as far as Atari computers go.) This is actually in Colorado, but I need a power supply and floppy connector for it.

7) An Intel Celeron 300, Overclocked to 464. Everybody had one of these. If you were a gamer in the 90s it was expected that you had one of these things. I bought mine in late 1998, IIRC. They WOULD NOT DIE. Dayna was using this thing until a month ago as her main PC. It's actually right over here, just waiting for me to stick it in a case and do other neat things for the next 8 years.

8) An Intel Pentium 4. This was my primary computer for years. About 1.1 GHZ, I think. It's now Dayna's main computer.

9) Vectrex. Not technically a computer, but if I have created and executed code on it, fuck it - it counts. Still the most fun system for its size ever made.

10) Two AMD Systems That Motherhead Gave Me From Caltrops. I was actually able to resurrect one that I thought was on the way out. I do not deserve computers this nice.

JZ Denizens... tell me about YOUR computers!

[Lysander]

I had a long post about this but the BBS ate it so fuck it. It wasn't that terribly interesting anyways. Cliff notes: Pentium-60, Gateway Pentium-300, Pentium IV 2.something, one suck laptop, one marginally good laptop, and the current system, an AMD3300+ with a Plextor and LiteCD drives, Mia MIDI sound card and, er, S3 UniPro graphics. Whatever. I could have bought an nVIDIA6200 for 50 dollars but figured there wasn't really a point, right. Anyway, the first system was my favorit because it could and would run everything I threw at it that ran in DOS. It didn't actually die until the summer of either 2002 or 2003.

[AArdvark]

I will include dates here to incorporate the 'scene' of computing.

1) Commodore 64.
This was in the midst 1983 right after my best friend got one and we played Super Huey like there was no tommorrow. The big hardware rivalry at the time was the TRS-80, the Atari 800 something and the IBM pc. Actually the Trash 80 was on the way out but they still had them at school, so there was the typical debate (also known as flame wars)
Not having a big commie users group around, I would show up at the Atari meetings once in a while. Always nice to be humbled.
Anyway, that machine lasted to about 1993. Ten years is a good run. On the way I also got hold of a C=128, which is similar to two C64s stuffed into the same biege plastic box with a sledghammer. Which goes a long way towards telling you about the functionality of the 128.

2) Pentium II
Making the jump to windows 98 in 1994 was no big deal for me at home because we used IBMs at work and I had lots of practice with windows 3.1. The thing I had trouble with was the hard drive. As all know, commies don't have hard drives. (well, they do exist, but to get one you have to send away to a small fishing village in Denmark or Sweden).
Now here is a new and improved file system that works like nothing Commodore has. Took a while to get the hang of DOS. i mean you can't use windows for everything, right? RIGHT!!
The machine was 300 mhz and had a bunch of bells and whistles that became useless very quickly. I still have the mobo in a box of junk in the attic. That's where all the obsolete stuff goes. I have two or three phone modems up there and a couple ASA serial cards, heh heh heh. ASA!

3) 1.8 Ghz
This was around 2001.
Now the machines don't have names anymore, just little puffy stickers known as jewels that proclaim the speed and processor type. AMD 1800+ (which is not really 1.8 GHZ but close enough)


to be continued...

[AArdvark]

(from the previous)

It was from the computer show that used to come around once a month at the dome center. So it was built by the Chinese and assembled by the Russians. Or the Czechs or whatever eastern Euro-trash those guys were. It was and is a great machine.

4) Hp Pavilion 9/2006

Athlon 64 dual core 3800+
19'' flatscreen monitor
All the other candy.

great machine. I had to remove all the HP garbage and remove all links to the media center. Using the MC would lock up the keyboard for some unknown reason. I don't particularly like it anyway, I use media player.

THAT'S IT
SO FAR
AARDVARK

[hygraed]

1) Some kind of Tandy DOS machine, owned by my father. I used this in elementary school to type things and play Earl Weaver Baseball, which I got quite good at. It had no mouse and two disk drives (5.25" and 3.5"). I wish I could remember what kind it was, but that was a long time ago.

2) Some kind of Windows 95 machine built by a local shop called Magix Computers. My dad owned this one too. This was our first Windows machine, which we bought in 1997. It had a 166 MHz Pentium processor, 32 MB of RAM, and it cost us $800. I played many marathon sessions of Microsoft Golf and Lego Island on this baby.

3) A Dell Dimension 4550, owned again by my father. We got this in 2002 to replace the aforementioned Pentium machine. This one was quite nice for the time period: 2.4 P4, 512MB of RAM, Nvidia GeForce 4, etc. My parents still use this one. I remember being excited as all get-out because I could finally play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (I owned no consoles at that point).

4) A Toshiba Satellite old-as-shit laptop. My mom got this one from her work for $75 as a gift to me in the summer of '03, just before my freshman year in high school. 266 MHZ PII, 64 MB RAM, 4.5 GB hard drive. I loved this one, until my little sister tripped over the power cord and pulled it off my desk. Ironically, she killed my first PlayStation in the same way.

5) A Toshiba Satellite L25 laptop as a 17th birthday gift from my dad in 2005, and what I am using to type this. 1.4 Celeron M, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon Xpress 200M. I've basically raped this one playing Grand Theft Auto and Half-Life 2, both of which it is just barely able to handle. Also the video card is a huge piece of shit which steals system RAM instead of having a decent amount built-in, so at any given time I have 446 MB of usable RAM instead of the full 512. But it's the only computer I will have for the net couple of years, so I make do.

[co]

Commodore Vic 20 - saved my money to buy this myself, actually enjoyed programming on this thing, making sound and graphics by peeking and poking

Commodore 64 - christmas present which moved my trusty vic 20 into the closet. Stopped working mysterously a few years later.

Apple IIe - motherfucker never ever worked right but autoduel rocked on it. Probably one reason I'll never buy a macintosh (the other is Steve Jobs).

Packard Bell 386sx - bought new in 92 at SILO, came with widows 3.0 on this laggard, I learned the fine art of wipe and reinstal with windows 3.0 and 3.1. I was the laughing stock of RIT for purchasing such a thing.

Emachines P1 - The first time i've had to call the vp of customer service to get satisfaction when this arrived not working at all.

Compaq Armada 1750, PII 400 or so - I didn't pay for it but my job "let" me keep a couple of these. Heavy as hell, the cover laches all broke off, and both laptops ended up "not being able to post" whatever that means.

Compaq e500, pIII 500 or so - lighter and more powerful, ended up being destroyed by a furious woman

Dual processor PII server - came DOA as shipped by my job using UPS. The IT guys raped it for the expensive hard drive and memory but gave me the rest which I shared with my friends (processor, case, and various other pieces)

Soyata Pentium III (800ish?) - My job let me keep the server which the IT guys bought to replace the dead dual processor server. Still my main work computer and will likely be for some time.

Micron PIII - bought an entire refurbished system for $75 from some guy in Irondequoit who sells them out of his house. Stole the memory out of it for my main computer and it's sitting unused in the corner.

Dell Latitude D400 - not really mine and i'll probably not luck out and be able to keep it after I leave this job. My first wifi laptop so finding hotspots around town is still new to me.

[Worm]

10) Two AMD Systems That Motherhead Gave Me From Caltrops. I was actually able to resurrect one that I thought was on the way out. I do not deserve computers this nice.

He's GIVING you those?

#1. A Tandy. It ran Kings Quest III, my dad could never get past the brambles to the witches garden, he would play each day up to that part, try everything, and quit. I almost want to put it on his current computer to torment him.

#2. A Persario Desktop. This was for UO and Quake.

#3. My brother's Persario tower. It's a PIII 500mhz and I've got it running XP on the minimum requirements still. It's a pretty decent machine.

#4. My generic barebones system that I threw my drive form my Persario into. I also threw this across my room to prove to my brother that dropping a computer will not necessarily break it. I upgraded that generic system with a new motherboard and kept it together for a long while.

#4.5. My brother's alienware I told him I could make him the same machine for 1500 dollars. He now realizes this. It was a dual processor Pentium thing. Good times.

#5. Cyberpowa pimp machine, as seen in the semi-famous pictures of my filthy basement dive. Currently on this. Hoping to upgrade the motherboard sometime.

Oops, if I was older my list would be cooler, I swear.

[Bugs]

Tandy 1000HX, Something else, Compaq Presario Desktop, Compaq tower, computer a friend built for me (main desktop now), Kingie's old ThinkPad, new Toshiba satellite.

[bruce]

So, for my "main machine" at any point in time, that being the box that I had on my desk and did most of my work at:

Vic 20
Apple //e
Gateway 386-25
->upgraded to 486SX-40
->upgraded with coprocessor
K6-2 300
P2 300
Some Pentium Somethingorother
Dual-Proc P3-833
G4 Powerbook (the very machine I'm working from right now in a hotel room in Maryland, in fact)
G5 iMac

But then there are all the other machines:
TI-99/4A
TRS-80 Mod 3
Atari 800, 800XL
C64s (many)
Vic 20s (many)
Apple II+s and //es (many)
Roody's //gs
Various P4 boxes as Winboxes and the MAME cabinet and the fileserver
Mac SE
Mac Quadra 950
Mac 68040 Powerbook
G3 iMacs in Bondi Blue and Pink
C-One
2xP2-400 (currently my mailserver)
P/390 (IBM S/390 on a PCI card)
Integrated Server (IBM S/390 in a dorm-fridge-size enclosure)
Mac Mini (media box)
Psion 3A
Olivetti Quaderno
Thinkpads of various flavors
....probably a bunch of other things I can't think of at the moment.

...and then there are the boxes that aren't really computers but were sorta tricked out to be:

The PDAs: Palm 3, Handspring Visor Deluxe
Game consoles sorta-turned-into-computers:
Atari 2600 with BASIC Programming cart
PS2, XBox, GameCube all running Linux

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I was telling Vark about the PCjr in Oklahoma and I mentioned that it did not have a direct memory controller. I didn't explain what that is very well. All it does it let the CPU do other things if it is waiting for slow shit like disk drives, keyboards and modems to do their things. I would assume that it is one of the fundamental requirements for multi-tasking. If your disk was being read on a PCjr, well, that's all the computer was gonna be able to do.

I assume this meant that joystick input wouldn't work when loading from the disk in King's Quest, but I can't say for certain if that was true. Probably?

[Flack]

I am so, so glad you bumped this old thread. I love reading things like this. I feel like I know you guys a little better now. This is awesome! May I?

01. TRS-80 Model III: After seeing our neighbor's Model I, my dad went down to Radio Shack to buy one, but was told that the Model III was just a month or two away, and got put on the waiting list for one of those instead. We got the first one in Yukon. This was in 1980, when I was 7 years old. We did not have floppy drives ($799 each back then) or a hard drive (unfathomable) so we used an old cassette player that ran at 500 baud.

02. Franklin Ace 1000 (Apple II): Two years later, after the price of TRS-80 floppy drives had dropped from $799 to $499, Dad sold the TRS-80 Model III and bought this, the Franklin Ace 1000. It was 100% Apple II+ compatible, mostly because Franklin had simply dumped and cloned Apple's ROMs. (Google "Franklin Ace 1000 lawsuit" for more info.) Our Franklin had Lobo brand floppy drives, which had tiny holes in the side so that you could stick a screwdriver in there and adjust the speed of the drive without disassembling it. Thoughtful.

03. IBM PC Jr: At this point in time, the stereotype was that Commodores and Ataris were for playing games, Apples were for education, and PCs were for business. My Dad bought the Jr. and like Robb mentioned, immediately had to add two side cards to the thing. I know we had a modem, additional RAM, and a mouse, all of which took add ons, but I think two of them might have been combined into one card.

04. Commodore 64: This was the first computer that was mine. Got it in 1985, from my Uncle. The sound (SID) chip had blown out, so we had to replace that right off the bat. I used this computer from 1985 until 1993ish. I have owned dozens of 64s over the years but I still have this one. ICJ and 'Vark, this is the same one I had set up when you guys came over and that I took to OVGE. It's still kicking.

I'm not exactly sure of the order of the next few. Hang in there.

05. IBM PC XT: It became pretty evident that the XT form factor was the future, not the Jr, so Dad bought one of these. One night in the middle of the night, my Dad woke me up and said we had to hurry and go get a hard drive from a guy that he was selling. 5 meg, $200. So this was the first machine that we owned that had a hard drive.

06. Commodore SX-64: This is the portable, "executive" Commodore 64. They were around $2k new and included a 5" color screen and a floppy drive.

So at this point (1985), my parents opened a computer store. The PC Jr, the Commodore SX-64 went up to the store to serve as "demo" computers. (There was also a Laser 128 up there, another Apple compatible.) The XT and Franklin Ace 1000, along with my personal 64, all stayed at the house. The store was in business for just over a year. When it closed, they sold the PC Jr, the SX-64, the Laser 128, and the Franklin Ace 1000. That left us with (I think) the XT and my 64.

07. IBM 286: My Dad's PC, and the main machine of the family (the 64 was always in my room; it was mine). It was a 10 Mhz machine, 12 with turbo. 20 meg hard drive, I think.

So this is where we quit talking about "family" computers and just talking about "my" computers.

08: IBM 386/25: It was okay, but not very fast. I could run older software, but nothing modern. I don't think I had this very long. I'm pretty sure this had a 40 meg hard drive and that I ran Stacker on it to "double" the size.

09. IBM 386 DX2/40: A screaming 386 -- all my friends were jealous. I upgraded so that I could play Mortal Kombat. I had a 120 meg hard drive that would only spin up every other time in this thing. This is the computer I bought with a blank check intended for my wife's college tuition.

10. IBM 486/25: I don't remember where I got this from (I think maybe a friend gave it to me). I never used it as my main machine.

11: Packard Bell 386/16: A customer brought this in to Best Buy under the 4 year warranty and it was dying. I couldn't fix it (bad CMOS battery) so they gave her a new machine and told me to throw this one away. I took it home and ran my BBS off of for 2 years. The only down side was, every time the power went out I had to redo the CMOS drive settings.

Also, this case was designed to hold 2 floppy drives (one 5 1/4 and 1 3 1/2 and one HD) and by the time I was done with it, it had 4 hard drives (some were duct taped in place) and an external SCSI 6 disc CD-Rom changer. The power supply was proprietary-shaped (long and skinny) and when it died I didn't feel like having an external power supply to I ended up trashing it.

12: IBM 486 DX4/100: This was my main machine for quite some time. It was in a tower that was like 3' tall and had enough bays that, if I still owned it, would still have free space to add more things. This is the first machine I installed Windows 95 on. I seem to remember having a 486 DX2/66 as well that I kept for DOS stuff. I dunno. I had a lot of computers, man.

13: Pentium 133: I had that 486 way, way longer than I should have. When I mentioned this to a friend of mine he said that his company was throwing some away and that we could just go get one. So we go up there and it became obvious to me that we were just stealing a computer. The only things missing were gloves and ski masks. Wait, we wore gloves. But that P133 became my main work machine for many years.

14. A bunch of p200/p233/p266 machines: I got caught up in the processor upgrade game for a while. Whatever new processor came out, you could get the old one w/mobo for like $100, so I was doing that for a while. Some were Cyrex, some were AMD ... whatever was on sale is what I had.

15. eMachine 700: I got tired of everybody I new having new computers and me having old pieces of crap that I was always upgrading, so I decided to buy a brand new eMachine p3/700. What a mistake. That thing ran like at half speed and was always chugging.

Things get fuzzy from there. I know I had a one gigahertz machine for a long time that eventually became a MAME machine. After that I bought half a dozen Dell machines from Craigslist. They all kind of became interchangeable.

What I have now:

- P4 3GHz: My server. Quad-core w/8 gig of RAM. Running Server 2k8 and hosting multiple virtual servers. Currently has 16tb of drive space, and I'm about to add another 8tb.

- P4 2.?Ghz: My workstation. Assembled from a pile of TigerDirect parts. Fastest workstation I've ever owned.

- Acer Laptop: S'okay, but I bought cheap and wish I had spent a bit more. Came shipped with XP, so that's how old it is. The screen is starting to show some weird stuff, a couple of the keys don't work well, and it has a few other issues. I will most likely replace this in the neat future.

- Acer Aspire One Netbook: Gets 0 use and I'm not sure where it is.

---
Retro Stuff Hooked Up:
---

- Amiga 1200
- Commodore 64
- Apple IIc (hooked up yesterday)

Then there are a zillion old machines not hooked up but sitting on shelves, in boxes, tubs, or other hidey holes.

[AArdvark]

Going into Flack's garage is like walking into Aladdin's Cave of Wonders.


This list will be easy for me cause there haven't been that many machines.

1 ) Commodore 64. An older model with the yellow F-keys. My buddy was going into the army in a couple of days after HS graduation and he didn't really use it that much anyway. So he gave it and the drive to me. It only came with six or seven programs. (OOoo Magic Desk, how exciting!) The video chip crapped out less than a year later so I went and bought:

2) Commodore 64c. Geos 2.0 and everything. I had to buy another 1541 cause one drive wasn't cutting it for me. And a monitor, and a modem. I picked up a 1571 drive at a Salvation Army for six or seven bucks and I was king shit for a while. Until I looked around and saw that everyone else was better, faster and hard-drived-up than I was. that could only mean one thing:

3) 350 MhZ Pentium II from the monthly computer show.
Windows 98, baby! Upgraded to Me after a year( look an internet, over the phone!)

4) Uh.. another PC, 1.5 Mhz AMD, off brand. Actually, I think it was an HP but it got mongreled out so there was nothing original but the mobo and processor by the time it died of too much tinkering with the overclocking.

...which brings us to now

5) PC, AMD 3.0 Ghz with everything else thrown in there, but it's plenty fast for recording music and video editing. Kinds sad how faceless these modern PC computers are. Originally I was gonna put the blue lights in the case and trick it out generally, but it sits in my desk behind a door, so what's the point.


THE
ON THE SHORT LIST
AARDVARK

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yeah, the era of being excited about a computer died about the time Cyrix failed to release competitive chips. It then just became a slog of upgrading the shit you have in one case after another. I think the DVD writer of mine has been in 3 or four different computers.

Sometimes a new game comes out that would work like shit on my present computer, and I'll do the dance where I get a new CPU, motherboard, RAM and video card for around $400.

I mean, it is better this way, sure. It's cheaper, the systems do what we want and we don't have to worry about the BIOS being different and stuff not running. And I guess we COULD buy an Alienware or a Dell PC or something, if every third-party assembler of computers didn't overprice their shit by a ridiculous degree. But we lost something, didn't we. We lost something we'll never get back.

[AArdvark]

Wow, this thread was from so far back I posted pretty much the same list twice, but with different dates and machines. How's that long term alcohol abuse plan working for me?


THE
WTF
AARDVARK

[AArdvark]

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2012062 ... ostalgia/1

[Flack]

That article brings up a good point. What computer or gadget that has been released in the past 20 years will become collectible in the future?

[bruce]

That article brings up a good point. What computer or gadget that has been released in the past 20 years will become collectible in the future?

First generation iPod.

First generation iPhone.

Wii.

XO.

Raspberry Pi.

[Tdarcos]

In a different article I'll tell the story of the computers at work and the incident where my boss and I agreed we were off by 1c in balancing her checking account, we didn't really care about the missing penny, but we needed to know why we were off by one penny and that it would be worth paying me for about 4 or 5 hours of time - call it $20 - to find out why we were off by that one cent.

The first computer I ever owned was an XT clone, 640K, two floppy disk drives, and cost $750 - which was about what whitebox clones made by local computer stores cost back around 1985 - and the only reason I could afford it was my boss bought it as a bribe to get me to be willing to do some work at home and she charged it to me by docking my pay $10 a week for the year and a half.

My boss later got me a modem and I entered the fascinating world of BBSs. Originally I got permission from her to call a few while I was at work (because the computers we had there had them), I actually did use it on occasion to call a BBS and ask a question related to work.

I had that for years, I even brought it with me when I moved to the Washington, DC area. Found out later it didn't have an 8086 in it, it had a V20, which is NEC's 8086 clone that has an 8080 coprocessor built into it. You could actually run CP/M stuff for the 8080 natively if you could find the software.

I had a really cheesy telecom program called Bitcom, which is generally considered the worst telecom program there is. It works, which is about all you can say about it, and it works on low-end hardware. It was a bitch to use, crashed from time to time (but I got used to its quirks) and while it had problems I knew how to work around them.

I tried a lot of different terminal programs and didn't like any of them. Except one. Telemate, a $50 shareware package from a guy in Canada. Was great, supported Z-modem directly, and even did its own multitasking, you could read a document, write a text file, and download a file from a BBS at the same time.

But you couldn't run it on a 4.77 mhz machine, it was just too slow. so back to the bitch I went.

I later got another machine, when I got it home, a piece was slightly loose, I pushed it in and fried the motherboard. I had to wait 2 months before I could afford to get it fixed. I tried moving a few components to the new machine but I salvaged one that was damaged and it fried that motherboard the first time I booted it.

That was the last time I ever recycled components from a dead machine.

So I got an 8mhz XT clone, this one had both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2" disk drives, and I was able to run Telemate, it was fantastic. I didn't even wait the full 30 days on the shareware time limit, I actually sent the guy a check within two weeks. I got my registration code that allowed it to say "Registered to Paul Robinson" and to eliminate the nag screen.

I later needed a separate machine as a fax monitor so I could be using one machine and the other to be sending out faxes when I was looking for work. (This was long before Windows 95 and multitasking.) So I see an ad in the paper for a guy out near Annapolis who's selling a computer and monitor for $30. I either had a car, was able to borrow one, or I was renting one for some other purpose at the time and added his errand to the things I was renting the car for. So I leave him a message on his machine that I'd like to see it and I'll buy it if it works.

Well, a guy calls me on the phone because I was interested in buying his Hyundai. Well, I said, I think he made a mistake, I was not interested in buying a car. No, the computer he's selling, it's a Hyundai. I go out there, and sure enough, it is a Hyundai computer. (At a later place I work at we had Hyundai monitors.)

I use that machine to send out lots of faxes and eventually I get a job. I kept that machine around when I had to send and receive faxes until I moved a few years later.

Used my main computer for years until...

Wolfenstein 3D comes out, and requires at least a 286. Well, I can't afford a color monitor, so I buy it and run it in monochrome. Eventually I spend $200 to buy a 15" VGA monitor and it was nice to see Wolf 3d in full color.

This was fine until Doom came out. That requires at least a 386. Well, if you've been paying attention, you'll know at that time I was a member of the Bull and Finch Pub BBS, and as it turned out, <s>pinback</s> I mean <s>Ben</s> err I mean Don Rogers was selling his computer which was a 386DX with a math coprocessor, 8 or 16 meg of memory and probably a 20 meg hard drive. He wanted $800 for the computer, which was in line for a used computer of the specs his was. He wanted the money because he'd just bought a 486, I think and didn't need two computers.

So I made him two offers because I couldn't come up with $800 all at once, either he could sell it to me on 90 days same as cash, or I would pay him $200 a month for four months. He agreed on monthly payments, so he brings it over. I have the money order upstairs for the first $200, so I take the computer, either walk or run up the stairs, I trip, and I drop the son-of-a-bitch! I haven't even gotten to use it and I've dropped it! I plug it in and it won't start. I think I wanted to cry. But, a deal's a deal, I gave him the first money order.

I open the box up, discover a memory bar was loose, push it down, turn it back on and low and behold, it worked! I had dropped the machine on the empty side, there was nothing but skin there, everything important was on the other side.

Had that for several years, then Duke Nukem 3d comes out and it requires at least a 486. I decide to go ahead of the curve and have a white box Pentium tower made by a local computer store. To save money I salvaged a few things from the 386 then threw it away, it was nothing but a shell and a stripped hulk, a shadow of its former self.

Windows 95 comes out, and I need to upgrade. So I didn't go buy a computer. I went to the computer store, bought a book, all the parts, and built one myself. An interesting tower computer in turquoise. Screwed the parts together, installed the motherboard, salvaged a few items from the Pentium, plugged it in and... It worked the first time! I'd done everything perfect.

I then discovered a particular process I called "The Death Penalty" because it was "the ultimate penalty." The re-installation of Windows 95. If things got really bad, you ended up having the death penalty imposed on you and you spend the better part of 2 hours re-installing Windows 95.

I bought 6 cheap computers for around $40 apiece because I was going to try setting up a Linux cluster. Or something. I never got around to it - and it probably would have been too big an undertaking for me if I had tried - because of a guy named Alexander Evans.

I never met Alexander Evans and I don't know what he looks like. I think he was 17 years old, when he decides to go joyriding in my Jeep, and I walk out to find it - and my computers - have been stolen. By dumb luck the Jeep was fully insured so if it was gone for 30 days the insurance company would have covered it. Stupid son-of-a-bitch gets caught 3 weeks after he stole my car. But eventually as part of his punishment he gets a job and I get a check from the county for the damage to the jeep and the lost computers.

MSN was holding a special, take 3 years of their online unlimited dialup service at $19.95 a month and they pay the first $200 of an eMachines 333Mhz PC with 4GB of disk space and 128 meg of memory, so I can get a nice, new computer for $100 (I had to take an on-line service anyway.) I still have it, it's in the closet.

A while later I bought a new machine because it was an inexpensive 64-bit machine with Linux installed and no floppy drive; I figured I'd get my feet wet with 64-bit computing, but I never did much beyond use it as a second Windows 98 machine. I still have it.

I ended up buying another eMachines for my sister. They were nice computers despite what people say about eMachines.

Now, if you want to talk about crap computers, my girlfriend Geannie had a Packard Bell machine. They bought it at Sears.

When East Germany was still in existence, the finest automobile that Communist engineering could produce was a Trabant, a car that makes a Yugo look like a Mercedes Benz by comparison. Worst piece of garbage in the world; tourists to East Gernamy could trade a pair of brand-new Levis for a Trabant, the seller was delighted to get it, would sign the title in front of you and walk away, and the tourist was probably getting the worst part of the deal.

Packard Bell's machines are the Trabant of the Computing world. Difficult to open and fix anything and almost every part in the machine was proprietary so almost anything you'd want to change required you buy it from Packard Bell. But by the time I was seeing my lady friend, Packard Bell had more or less gone out of the computer business and their machines were orphans.

My first really nice computer was a Hewlett Packard Pavillion A305W. I bought it reconditioned, and over the years, eventually replaced the CD drive with a DVD drive, bumped the memory to the max the machine could handle, 1 GB, and a 160GB hard drive. I still have it, it's one of the machines that I have on my 4-way KVM.

I wanted to get a multi-core so I went on eBay and bought one, it was a dual-core machine which I think was homemade, it was in a lexan case with a handle on it. It was exactly as it was promised except for a mistake I made. It was a dual core 32-bit machine; I should have known I couldn't get a dual core 64-bit for $100. But it's not a bad computer; I have it as one of the KVM connected machines, I stopped using it for a while because I had to steal its wireless adapter for another computer and it had no way to connect to the Internet.

I got to the point I wanted a better machine, and since I'd made some extra money from being an election judge, I went to Micro Center and bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex 740, a 64-bit processor running 32-bit Windows XP Professional. I eventually boosted the hard drive from 80GB to 2TB. (I lucked out on the price, it was only $89 for an internal SATA 2GB, and I also lucked out on the drive, I mistakenly bought a SATA drive then discovered had I bought an IDE I would have had to take it back.) I also pulled the DVD drive and got a Blu-Ray writer for under $100. It's also on my KVM.

Duke Nukem Forever was going to require a minimum dual-core 64 bit machine. As with the Pentium box I decide to get when I needed at least a 486, I decide to get a refurbished Acer Inspire X1420G which is a Quad Core 64 bit machine at 3.1Ghz has 1TB of disk space and 4GB of memory with (fortunately) Windows 7 instead of Vista. Only problem is the video is below the minimum for the game and it runs too slow. Well, I wanted to go to something nice. That machine is also on my KVM and is the one I'm typing this message on.

A couple months ago I bought a 1 TB Buffalo network storage device for about $115, and I use it to store all my media files - music files mostly - so that I can access them from any computer. It plugs into the router as a wired device, is assigned an IP address as well as a machine name. Works perfectly and looks like another computer. It's the size of a paperback book and just has two wires, one to the wall socket and one for an ethernet cable to the router.

[pinback]

Where have you gone, Tsummary? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you!

[RetroRomper]

Would it be possible to force Tdarcos to add a "tldr" with each of his posts?