If I could have done one thing differently, I would have backed up all the game levels, BASIC and Turbo Pascal programs, and everything else I created in the 80s and 90s.

While I did keep copies of some things, I didn't take as much care and lost some of those creations. I especially wish I had all the Doom and Duke 3D maps I made.

I was just a kid, but it would have been nice if I could have convinced my dad to keep our VIC20 and IBM PS/2.

But WinXP wasn't around in the 90's?
I actually still prefer Win2k to this day but have to agree XP is a bit more refined.

Would have upgraded from our 486/66 much sooner then 1999, but even then, I was begging my parents to upgrade so want from lack of trying!
Wish we kept our Apple IIe, Only sold it in a garage sale very late 90's for not very much, where now they are worth the big $$$

Thats about it really. Not having a PC till 95 then missing out on the Pentium/Early 3D/Late Dos era is my biggest regret.
End of the 90's early 2000's Had a decent enough PC by which time 3dfx was all but dead so don't feel like miss out on anything of the early Win9x era

You mean besides taking the money I spent on a corvette in 1999 and buying Apple stock instead?

I had a very good job in the 90's and purchased any computer equipment I wanted so I don't think I would have changed that much if at all. What I would have done is snagged rarities and collectable hardware that was cheaper then (I didn't start collecting until 2001). Stuff like a NexGen setup if I could find one. Pre Ebay and Internet you were stuck with whatever was local or mail order, so even if an Apple I was a few hundred bucks back then you would have no clue where to look. Post 2000 I would have done things very differently.

just backup a little more and avoid mmos

Keep things instead of tossing them the moment something better came along, or at least take some damn photos of the stuff that brought me so much joy.

ncmark wrote on 2024-04-30, 00:30:

If you could go back to the 90s, what would you do different (regarding computers)? […]
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If you could go back to the 90s, what would you do different (regarding computers)?

My list would be:

1. Avoid tape drives
(at least the ones I had, that use the floppy controller = way to slow)

2. Avoid K6-2 completely

3. Jump on WinXP way sooner than I did.

4. Stockpile some more of the "good" DVD disks - what I wouldn't give to be able to get some of those again!

just for computers... i would have kept things i threw away and i would have intercepted others trash to secure a good condition 286 and 486 for long term

just in general i would have taken more care of everything too!

I wouldn't have bothered with the expense of cd writing or zip drives, instead focus on backing up my code and documents only on good old floppy (at least three copies!) and keep the restore cd somewhere safe! 1gb usb sticks came around in 2004, a long wait so not sure if i would actually stick to it.

it might have been difficult to spend so much on ram etc when knowing it'll become cheap soon!

Surely you joke about the floppy disk thing? Even by the 90s they were becoming woefully inadequate.
I was an early adopter of CD-R, and I have always felt like that was very much worth the money

Something else I might do different - not mess with those internal/external hard drive enclosures (drive enclosure mounted in PC case and taking up an IDE slot) but with a removable drive. I had a couple. Problem is - they take up an IDE slot.
Better solution network the computers

In the 90s I was between the ages of almost 0 to almost 10. I probably wouldn't have done anything differently. Living in the rural parts of a country that just got it's freedom back after half a century of soviet occupation in a not particularly wealthy family even with all the knowledge about computers and the future history of retro computing I just wouldn't be in the position to do anything meaningful.

Maybe I could have gotten a somewhat better first computer and more obsolete stuff, through my father's job I could have had access to those, that's how I got my first PC and my retro starter pack parts as well, but I don't know how much trash could I convince him to bring home and tolerate. More than half of the 486-Pentium1 era stuff I had in the mid-2000s fell victim to him running out of patience with me storing trash in the basement and all I had was just 4 computers and a medium sized box of parts.

I feel mostly same, I think. Overall, I'm grateful for the little I had.
If I could, I would have spent more time being online, I guess, exploring CServe or the early internet.
My father always was a bit afraid of high telephone bills, so we didn't went online for amusement so often.

If I could I would have spent more time in magazine/video game stores or I would wave encouraged the family to go to VHS rentals more often.
Maybe go there with friends, borrow some video games or play them in a store. I always had been a bit shy here when it comes to such things.

Also, I should have gotten my own Mega Drive (Genesis) as second-hand back in early-mid 90s. The (S)NES was great, sure, but I've missed out on a couple of things without its rival.
To my defense, I had no idea at the time that the 16-Bit era would going to be one of the finest moments in gaming history.
Also, "you can't have everything" , people say..

Speaking of films, I would have spent more thoughts on VCDs and Laserdiscs, maybe.
It would have been fascinating to have experienced sci-fi series, blockbuster films or japanimation on such media when they were still fresh.
Maybe we should also have restored my father's amateur radio station much earlier than we finally did, so he could have had made new friends back then.

Aside from these things, I should have probably focused more on things that really mattered. Be kinder to my surroundings. Take more photos..
The years flew by with so many opportunities being missed.
I think it's such things that I sometimes regret when I'm standing in the garden at night, watching the few stars still visible.

Edit: Speaking of computers, maybe I should have had assembled a nice big tower PC from all the parts I had "laying around" at the time. A hot-rod 386 or a 486, maybe.
(I was collecting all sorts of old/broken PCs I've found at road side, I've also bought older ones being advertised in news papers.)

That being said, I'm glad for my humble old 286 back then.
The PAS16 with slow SCSI port and the weird Sony CD-ROM drive were fine in retrospect.
I would have kept them in a 386/486/586, even, if I had one.

The one thing I do regret a bit is that I didn't create myself a nice computer corner.
I could have made things much more usable and comfortable in retrospect.

Edit: Oh and I did miss out on the early emulation scene.
I should have gotten my hands on a SNES disk drive at the time and, err, try out some of those homebrew games..

Like others are saying, I would tell my 90's self to not clear out his hardware collection. Back then, I looked at it as "why am I keeping all this outdated junk" instead of "I'm collecting all of this soon-to-be classic hardware".

I got rid of far more than I could ever get back, and for pennies on the dollar compared to what it's worth today, and even more valuable in terms of nostalgia for myself personally. Though, I do admit, trying to convince my younger self all that hardware would one day skyrocket in value would be an adventure all on it's own, considering you could hardly give it away back then where I grew up.

Beyond that, I probably would not change all that much in terms of my tech usage. 😀

ncmark wrote on 2024-04-30, 12:34:

Surely you joke about the floppy disk thing? Even by the 90s they were becoming woefully inadequate.
I was an early adopter of CD-R, and I have always felt like that was very much worth the money

I look back now and every piece of data that has been important to me over the last 20 years, that i have actually used, has been on either 'professional' cds, external hdd, usb memory or online - plus a small amount on floppy

in the end there is nothing that i ever committed to cd-r that i have actually used. i couldn't have known that at the time, but i guess we can have hindsight (otherwise we wouldn't do anything different)

I find it strange in a way, i still have some those CD-Rs lying around with things i gathered, none of which i ever used or even transferred onto other backups because it was all still out there

well, there was a very short period when i tried linux and boot cds were important, but even then such things used to turn up on cover disks on magazines

i still have a tower of unused CD-Rs, they'll stay unused now i guess

ncmark wrote on 2024-04-30, 12:34:

Surely you joke about the floppy disk thing? Even by the 90s they were becoming woefully inadequate.
I was an early adopter of CD-R, and I have always felt like that was very much worth the money

I have the opposite opinion about CDRs and DVDRs. Mine got corrupted after a few years and I lost what was stored on them.

I'd know that adding a math coprocessor won't do a damn thing for games on a 386SX.

I'd reconsider our PCChips 486 build.

I'd reconsider my socket-7 upgrade path.

Buy lots of used consoles, games, and ISA sound cards at the end of the decade.

shamino wrote on 2024-05-03, 10:33:

Buy lots of used consoles, games, and ISA sound cards at the end of the decade.

yes, they would have been cheap as people got the PS1 and so on

as a means to making money though it might be better to buy some apple or Microsoft shares, depending on when you intended to sell them of course

but one could seek out a copy of 'stadium events' too 😀

When my dad bought my first computer I would've told him to not take the AMD K5 90MHz just because the PC case was black and beautiful, if I had known.
He didn't want to buy a beige computer, which is fine, but getting a Fujitsu PC with a CPU much slower than a Pentium and a BTX motherboard instead of ATX was very painful to upgrade later. Especially being a teenager without any budget.

My next computer was a bare motherboard sitting on a cardboard box for a while.

I also would've told my parents to get me a Sidewinder instead of a cheap joystick with suction cups that never centered probably. Playing Descent with that one was possible, but much more difficult.

schmatzler wrote on 2024-05-03, 14:28:

My next computer was a bare motherboard sitting on a cardboard box for a while.

i would learn to appreciate the cardboard box 'case' earlier 😀