Jolt Country

Tdarcos wrote: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.

Tsummary wrote:Over the years I have purchased many cheap machines, including some Linux machines that I could not get to work