chinny22 wrote on 2020-10-30, 09:24:

In '94 I handed in an assignment created on the family Apple IIe and a Star Gemini II 9 Pin Dot Matrix, Cant remember which clip […]
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creepingnet wrote on 2020-10-29, 20:08:

I'm sure I was the laughing stock of the teacher's lounge. Here comes kids with computer written reports done in Microsoft Word 97' on a Pentium I or II running Windows 9x, in pretty fonts, and then here come's ole' Creeping Net, tearing the pinfeed edges off of his book report as he wanders into class.

In '94 I handed in an assignment created on the family Apple IIe and a Star Gemini II 9 Pin Dot Matrix, Cant remember which clip art software I used.
My teacher asked what computer was this created on with genuine interest which is why I can still remember it.
It defiantly stood out against the standard majority of MS Works document printed on ink jets.

Had that experience too. Had to write a short story for English class and my teacher told me all about his IBM PC AT he had in 1990 when he was going to Auburn University. That Tandy was really my gateway to this hobby, not four years later I was already rummaging thrift shops for 386's and 486's for $5-10 apiece and "kit bashing" them together.

I don't think I owned anything "modern" until 2008 when I built a really cheap gamer box - the Video Card on that thing was most of the cost (NVIDIA 8800GT)

Abit BH6, ASUS P2B + Celeron300A + RivaTNT as far as I can remember.
One of my buddies had the same setup and switched his V2 SLI for a brand new GeForce256DDR from Creative - pretty cool back then.

creepingnet wrote on 2020-10-30, 15:17:

chinny22 wrote on 2020-10-30, 09:24:

In '94 I handed in an assignment created on the family Apple IIe and a Star Gemini II 9 Pin Dot Matrix, Cant remember which clip […]
Show full quote

creepingnet wrote on 2020-10-29, 20:08:

I'm sure I was the laughing stock of the teacher's lounge. Here comes kids with computer written reports done in Microsoft Word 97' on a Pentium I or II running Windows 9x, in pretty fonts, and then here come's ole' Creeping Net, tearing the pinfeed edges off of his book report as he wanders into class.

In '94 I handed in an assignment created on the family Apple IIe and a Star Gemini II 9 Pin Dot Matrix, Cant remember which clip art software I used.
My teacher asked what computer was this created on with genuine interest which is why I can still remember it.
It defiantly stood out against the standard majority of MS Works document printed on ink jets.

Had that experience too. Had to write a short story for English class and my teacher told me all about his IBM PC AT he had in 1990 when he was going to Auburn University. That Tandy was really my gateway to this hobby, not four years later I was already rummaging thrift shops for 386's and 486's for $5-10 apiece and "kit bashing" them together.

I don't think I owned anything "modern" until 2008 when I built a really cheap gamer box - the Video Card on that thing was most of the cost (NVIDIA 8800GT)

I remember back in like ~1989-90 or so, I was talking with a girl in middle school and she complained that she had gotten points marked off of her report because of using all caps.
"My computer doesn't have lowercase letters!"
I assumed she had an Apple II+, but maybe it was a C64 or something.

Things changed a lot that year. My friends and I started playing counter strike beta 2 that fall, so the upgrades came pretty fast and furious as the year ended.

There were 4 working systems in my apartment by December--

• Celeron 300a OC @ 400 w/ Viper 770, 96MB Ram. I put this together in 1998 after reading about the wonders of this CPU on Toms and Anand. The ASUS P2-B motherboard was rugged as anything and this system punched way above its weight class. Was my first ATX system.
• K6-2 450 w/ ATI Rage Pro, 64MB Ram. I waited for a K6 processor I could love for such a long time. I was such an AMD fan boy. As it turns out, I was a very disappointed fan boy. Out performed by last year's Celeron. The FIC VA-503+ MVP3 motherboard was really quirky. Never quite stable. Got replaced with a Coppermine system in 2000. Was my last Baby AT system.
• Athlon 550 w/ Voodoo 3 3000, 128MB Ram replaced a Baby AT Pentium 166. Nearly went crazy trying to troubleshoot that system. I'd take it a part and all the pieces would test OK. Put it together and it was dead to the world. Turns out that this AMD 750 motherboard had a weird quirk where it wouldn't boot if a real PC-AT keyboard was plugged in. I'd test with a light weight cheap keyboard, but my desk had the old clickity clack. The FP/s on this guy was jaw dropping once I got it working. I think it was a FIC SD-11 mobo.
• Pentium MMX 233 w/ PCI Matrox Millennium 2, 32GB Ram. My room mate blew all of his savings on this computer in 1997. It was practically a door stop 2 years later and he was still broke for it. He used that system bitterly until 2004 or something.

I had an 128Kbs ISDN router with 4 ports to run everything. All 4 people could play great (Pings < 100ms) as long as no one used the phones. As soon as the phone rang, everyone would scream because the ping times shot over 400 when 4 people tried to play on a single 64Kbs.

We all smoked a lot back then and had cats to boot. CRT's needed cleaned like once a month. The back of the power supplies were black felt factories. All the fans needed cleaned twice a year or they would seize up. Great lan parties though.

douglar wrote on 2020-10-31, 14:27:

Things changed a lot that year. My friends and I started playing counter strike beta 2 that fall, so the upgrades came pretty f […]
Show full quote

Things changed a lot that year. My friends and I started playing counter strike beta 2 that fall, so the upgrades came pretty fast and furious as the year ended.

There were 4 working systems in my apartment by December--

• Celeron 300a OC @ 400 w/Viper 770, 96MB Ram. I put this together in 1998 after reading about the wonders of this CPU on Toms and Anand. The ASUS P2-B motherboard was rugged as anything and this system punched way above its weight class. Was my first ATX system.
  
  I had an 128Kbs ISDN router with 4 ports to run everything. All 4 people could play great (Pings < 100ms) as long as no one used the phones. As soon as the phone rang, everyone would scream because the ping times shot over 400 when 4 people tried to play on a single 64Kbs.
  
  We all smoked a lot back then and had cats to boot. CRT's needed cleaned like once a month. The back of the power supplies were black felt factories. All the fans needed cleaned twice a year or they would seize up. Great lan parties though.

Nice ! Had a P2-B that year and also had ISDN (only way to get a good Inet connection for gaming or usenet at that time at a house).
So what were you smoking and do you still have cats ? 🤣. I have a sort of new one, a rescue cat from a construction site that someone dropped off or got lost about 4th of July a few years ago. Lived under the work trailer for about 6 months while I fed it and tried to show that I was not a threat, took a long time to be able to get it into a car carrier and bring it home. She's is now queen of the house 😁

This may be of interest. I used to play a lot of QuakeWorld in the late 90s and early 2000s and kept a console log of my all my games. Occasionally people would type f_system and clients running proxies would report hardware information. A while ago I filtered out all of these responses into a separate file.

The early lines are from the 1999-2000 era. My machines are the "350MHz Intel Pentium II (Deschutes)" acquired early 1999 and "3069MHz Intel 00/02" acquired late 2001. All other responses are from other players.

Horun wrote on 2020-11-01, 05:23:

So what were you smoking and do you still have cats ? 🤣. I have a sort of new one, a rescue cat from a construction site that someone dropped off or got lost about 4th of July a few years ago. Lived under the work trailer for about 6 months while I fed it and tried to show that I was not a threat, took a long time to be able to get it into a car carrier and bring it home. She's is now queen of the house 😁

My last cat passed away died almost two years ago, but had one who moved into our backyard for July / August this summer. 1 yr old male, white with leopard spots. Pretty striking animal, very friendly / hungry. Stuck around until we went to visit my parents for a long weekend. He was gone when we came back. He took the chipmunks with him when he left, which was very kind of him.

Since 2008, I kept my desktop PC's in a cat free area of the basement and ran usb/hdmi to the other floors. Keep the fans clean and they sure are quiet when they are not in the same room.

This week I started cleaning up some old Silicon Graphics keyboards that I used around that time period. Got to play "guess the cat" as I nostalgically discarded lumps of sooty cat hair.

For most of the year, I had a custom built PC -

PC Chips M507 Socket 7 Motherboard (fake L2 cache)
IDT WinChip C6 200MHZ CPU (originally was a Pentium 100MHz, so the C6 was a cheap minor upgrade that year)
40MB RAM
850MB + 6GB HDDs
SIS 6326 4MB PCI Graphics (replaced this crap the following year with a Voodoo 3)
ESS AudioDrive 1868 ISA Sound Card
10Mbps PCI Ethernet Card
CD-ROM Drive (1x speed, caddy Mitsumi interface drive)

Running the first edition of Windows 98. I wasn't really much of a gamer and certainly didn't play many Windows games with that piece of junk graphics card. I still have all these parts, minus the 2 HDDs which died. The CD-ROM is dead too, it's controller card no longer recognises it.

My memory is a little fuzzy on my setup back then. I remember building an ATX mid-tower computer in 1998 with a used Pentium MMX CPU, and I'm sure that I continued to add to it during 1999. Unfortunately, I don't have any e-mail records from that time and I didn't keep much of the hardware or user manuals. Here's what I remember:

Generic Beige ATX Mid-tower Case with Power Supply (Probably 350W)
Pentium MMX 233 MHz
ATX Motherboard with an Intel 430TX Chipset (I forgot the brand and model, but probably an Epox board)
Probably 64MB of EDO DRAM
ATI 3D Pro Turbo (PCI with 8MB of RAM)
Western Digital 6GB Hard Drive
Creative Labs 5x DVD-ROM Drive
Creative Labs DXR3 MPEG Decoder (PCI)
Creative Labs Vibra 16 (ISA)
Generic 56K MODEM (PCI)
Generic 14" SVGA Monitor
Windows NT 4.0

It was a modest system for the time, but I recall feeling pretty satisfied with it. I would take the tower into my living room to watch DVD movies on my TV because I didn't have a stand-alone player just yet. I didn't game much on it (hello, Windows NT), but I did use it a lot for my master's program homework.

Amd K6 350 mhz, 64mb ram and a Riva TNT2 ultra. Some asus motherboard and a Aztech soundcard.
Windows 98.