35. Make sure that your kids have their own retro computers before they can walk 😉

I think I have done most of the things on the list. Including number 34.

I started out as a PC technician in 2000, worked my way up through network admin, consultant, telecomms manager, all the time I was always upgrading and chasing faster CPUs, more RAM. Last year I found an unopened 9 years old socket AM3 board in my loft and decided it would be a crime if it never got used at all so I started hunting bits out on eBay. Then I found an older Athlon 64 PC in a pile for recycling and rescued it. Then my friend gave me back my old student 486 that has been in his garage for 20 years... now the madness has really taken hold. The sad thing is that I am hunting around on eBay for old parts that I know for a fact I threw away 15 years ago!

I just enjoy assembling and tweaking machines and occasionally feel like throwing together something old to play some old games. The old hardware is part of the experience. I don't have all that big of a collection. Fits in a few storage drawers.

Having been on here for ages I've seen tons of people come and go, and topics tend to recycle almost weekly. Like this topic, actually. 😁

Sounds a little bit different from my... Lets say the story of a friend. 😜
But there's are quite a few similarities.

A long time ago my father have me his first computer: an IBM model 30. I liked it. Played with it a lot. Still got it.
From there he kept me feeding new stuff that got obsolete at work and had other people give me their obsolete stuff instead of just thrash it. As my stack grew on one side, I had to ditch them on the other side, as I could have only 5.

From there I went on about 10 years and got bored with it. Thrashed everything as there was no value in it except for metal scrapers back then. Except one particular IBM.

Some years later I found the IBM by surprise, as my father had loaded it onto his trailer to thrash it, as it was just eating tons of dust. So many memories, I could not allow this and took it home.

And from there... Well... Just one little seed can't do any harm... Right?

A and a second one, well I've got a spare room any way. Good for parts.

Other brands and other generations could be fun as well. Got a 486! And another XT! And another model 30, but a 286!

Okay, real fun becomes when there is one from every generation up to socket 370.

Darn, another 486 motherboard for to cheap. My fifth.

Oh my, that's a big stack for sale for almost nothing!

Oh this seller with his hobby and practically givers his stuff away for free.

Ok, no more, I got too much now.

Employer thrashed everything Pentium 4 and c2d, can I have them? I've got space in my storage unit anyway.

Let's pretend it hasn't got out of hand. I'm not a hoarder, right?

Mine is more of a camel:
- get first computer aged 4 (Sinclair ZX81)
- get access to first PC seven years later (my mother's PS/2 70, from her work at IBM)
- get first own PC seven years after that (P60)
- start studying, initiating a period where interest and knowledge far outstripped finances
- worked for two years at tech support (Packard Bell 😜 )
- while studying managed to get a house with cellar and shed for myself + one flatmate. Proceeded to fill both with exotic hardware that today would buy a small tropical island (SGI supercomputers and workstations, Sun, IBM and DEC RISC stuff, NeXT stuff, etc as well as just about every Voodoo out there).
- dropped out of uni after unexpectedly getting in the family way
- started work at large local ISP
- moved from house in backwater to small apartment in big city - and had to dump basically all vintage hardware. The SGI Origin 2000 got me a bottle of whisky...
- had more children, slowly compensated for lack of degree with work experience and specialization until now I'm a respected telecoms engineer.
- fast forward almost ten years - my son asked me: "How does a computer work, daddy?". So I had to show him.
- joined Vogons.
- regretted everything I'd dumped/given away/exchanged for booze a decade earlier
- started getting one or two bits for one system
- found that it was cheaper/easier to find rare parts by picking up big loads
- three times filled my entire car to the brim with parts
- did my best to get rid of what I didn't need, but always ended up with more
- of course found that what I did sell was the ideal bit for my next build
- decided 8 retro systems was about ideal
- built a huge setup with KVM switch, audio mixers and MIDI patchbay, with a pile of MIDI modules, a CRT and some nice IBM keyboards
- still trying - and failing - to reduce amount I have 😜

appiah4 wrote on 2020-07-28, 13:52:

26. Of course, by this point you have been impulsively buying and hoarding retro PC hardware that you had no use for and likely will never use.. but who cares, you have 100 ISA sound cards!
27. By this point you are having serious issues with storing your junk without pissing off your S/O so you start selling off some things.

I'm about here. Minus the SO. I even bought an FB-01 which reminds me how I get away with this every time I switch it on.

If they want to run this website like an IT help desk they should add ticket numbers to each topic.
And add a webpage with query fields.

I built my first PC around 1993 - a 486DX25 (or was it 33?) because I had accidentally deleted everything on friend's PC, and I wanted to find out how to make them do what I wanted them to do.
Over time, I started collecting x86 CPUs so that I could text my CPUID code
For several years, I bought and blagged sheds full of PCs, to strip down and scrap parts I wasn't interested in at the time (many of them I wish I had kept!)
Eventually started collecting motherboards and graphics cards
Never did get round to testing everything, but really hope I get round to it, as I have piles of boxes of everything except sound cards (no point starting a collection of them, as I'm deaf in one ear and tone deaf in the other 😀
I now buy anything I haven't got (although on my tight budget, there aren't too many rare and valuable parts)

debs3759 wrote on 2020-07-28, 23:10:

Never did get round to testing everything, but really hope I get round to it

oh I know that feel... my untested to tested ratio is easily 10:1... meanwhile I'm here buying test equipment and trying to make space so that I can start at least just start with that ^^

So where's the thread about the "LGR" experience where you happen to grow up watching his channel and getting super inspired.

Finally getting some money late into your teens to throw at the hobby.
Find it's more daunting then you initially thought.
Find Vogons. Read and soak information away
Then go down the rabbit hole of vintage PC building

Cuz'...that's basically me.

while I've been into retro PCs pretty much all the time LGR sure put fuel on the fire, yes.

For me it was Phil's YouTube channel instead. When I started getting back into PC retro gaming, I realized that my SB128 PCI had awful sounding FM synth. It wasn't how I remembered DOS game music from my childhood, so I started doing some research which led me to Phil and consequently Vogons.

Welp, all that research made me buy 5 different sound cards, 2 graphics cards as well as an entire retro rig because it had a particular sound card in it that I wanted. Thankfully, this didn't cost much, as I only buy from local classifieds and avoid unreasonably priced offers.

That said, everything that I bought was because I wanted to play my favorite childhood games in a certain way. For example, I can now replay my DOS favorites with either genuine OPL3 FM synth, AWE32 music or soundfont-based General MIDI. And for Win9x games, I can choose between EAX and A3D. This is something that I could only dream about as a kid, and being able to do so now makes me very happy.

Also, researching all this retro stuff, learning from everyone here and sharing my own experiences with you guys is pretty fun too.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-07-29, 03:38:

For me it was Phil's YouTube channel instead.

He was a big influence to me, too - especially when he made a video about that Opti 829c29 sound card - I had to get one and it hasn't let me down. Best sound card ever made.

As for the "Vogons experience": I've been...fairly good at resisting to buy hundreds of computers and parts just because they're mentioned here - but I admit, sometimes it's very tempting to get certain stuff.
I initially set myself the goal to assemble the perfect Tualatin machine and I still only have this one machine.

I did get various graphics cards, sound cards and I also have another ATX motherboard flying around here somewhere...and let's not talk about why I have three Voodoo II's now, but still...all of my retro stuff still fits (barely) into one drawer, so "it's not hoarding"! 😜

(And before someone goes back in my post history: The Windows 98 tablet and the Thinkpads came before I was registered here. So they don't count. They don't! 😜 )

This is so accurate in my case that it’s scary 😀, I am on step 23 now.

schmatzler wrote on 2020-07-29, 04:52:

He was a big influence to me, too - especially when he made a video about that Opti 829c29 sound card - I had to get one and it hasn't let me down. Best sound card ever made.

Heh, it's funny, the first two pieces of retro hardware that I bought were an OPTi card and a Yamaha YMF724, also based on Phil's recommendations. Still happily using both to this day.

And yeah, OPTi cards are underrated. I'm especially impressed with the sound clarity that they provide in WSS mode.

My YT discovery queue was Phil -> 8-bit Guy -> LGR. So Phil was a big influence on me as well, though I do not follow his channel as much anymore. His (and to a good extent Nostalgia Nerd's) content seems to have veered off my interest areas by quite a bit in the last year.

Lately I'm very fond of content by , off the top of my head, Jan Beta, Adrian's Digital Basement, Retro Man Cave, Perifractic's Retro Recipes, Modern Vintage Gamer, Retrospector, Tech Tangents, root42, This Does Not Compute, DaveJustDave. Some small and less professional channels have also been doing some great work, particularly High Treason, UncleAwesome (needs to up his production game), Ancient Electronics from quick recollection.

And some very promising channels I really enjoyed (Modern Classic, Victor Bart Retromachines, flash /me back, WaybackTECH) have basically stopped making content, sadly.

Ah, but I'm so bad at soldering I haven't been able to break anything.

And I only ever had one source for computer junk. Today, I actually have no idea where to get it. Probably nowhere. The stuff that gets thrown out today is probably newer than the system I'm typing this on now! Maybe a good thing, if I had a source of old hardware, I would probably be tripping over it in the bathroom and climbing over it to reach the kitchen sink.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-07-29, 06:21:

So Phil was a big influence on me as well, though I do not follow his channel as much anymore.

I still watch Phil's stuff, but I liked his content better when it was more about "hey, listen to this awesome 90s sound card" and less about "let's see how this 2011 CPU plays Fortnite".

I get that the latter brings in more views, even if personally I don't care about it.

I tried playing a game in dosbox and it didnt work. So I went ebay-ing pentium systems, was over my head in options, searched youtube and was hit over the head with a tonne of PhilsComputerLab videos...

I binged most phils videos and then at the end wanted to have that kind of fun for myself. I think the biggest part of it so far has been sound cards/audio. I never gave a shit back when I was a kid. I had a soundblaster 16 but didnt think it was that special (never experienced CQM until the AWE64 I got last year) and had on-board audio since '01. Now having experienced it all the "proper" way, it's worth it all to re-experience those games with super nice audio, or in modes i've never heard. OH and glide mode is actually quite nice.

I tried to buy an Asus TX98-XV motherboard on 8 Jan '19 - i think i messaged and cancelled the order when i found out about super socket 7 instead (sorry mr ebay seller)... and you can see my join date is a few days later...

appiah4 wrote on 2020-07-29, 06:21:

My YT discovery queue was Phil -> 8-bit Guy -> LGR. So Phil was a big influence on me as well, though I do not follow his channel as much anymore. His (and to a good extent Nostalgia Nerd's) content seems to have veered off my interest areas by quite a bit in the last year.

Lately I'm very fond of content by , off the top of my head, Jan Beta, Adrian's Digital Basement, Retro Man Cave, Perifractic's Retro Recipes, Modern Vintage Gamer, Retrospector, Tech Tangents, root42, This Does Not Compute, DaveJustDave. Some small and less professional channels have also been doing some great work, particularly High Treason, UncleAwesome (needs to up his production game), Ancient Electronics from quick recollection.

And some very promising channels I really enjoyed (Modern Classic, Victor Bart Retromachines, flash /me back, WaybackTECH) have basically stopped making content, sadly.

RMC is what I look forward to the most at the moment, he makes enjoyable videos about things i've never cared about (amiga/console computers). High Treason is a great lad too.

I think there's a limited "lifespan" of a retro youtuber, there's only so much you can cover until the content you're interested in basically drys up or you've experienced/reviewed it all. 25~ years of history is easy to sum up when you dont have to wait for the tech to be invented. Either that, or, they move on and get interested in other things.

Cheers for the other names you mention, I will have to have a look.