What is your age?

similar thread

1. --
2. IBM 5160
3. Seeing bilinear filtering at 60fps in 1996, I never thought bilinear filteirng would be possible in full speed real time. And also the 3d REVERB!!!! on AWE32.

ratfink wrote:

What is your age?

similar thread

Well, I'll just skip the age thing then 😜.
My first computer was a PII-350, ASUS P2B rev 1.10 (but with support for Coppermine), 128MB PC-100 SDR, Viper V550 (Riva TNT), SB128 PCI and an annoyingly loud Quantum Fireball 6.4GB with an even worse Windows 98FE install on it (I saw more blue on my own screen then on a bright sunny day).

I had many moments that sorta impressed me, but I can recall 2 moments I can remember when playing at my friends house (he had a Pentium 1, I didn't have a computer back then), he played a game of Command&Conquer, playing some mission as NOD. He build some buggies and started doing some recon, came across a bridge and tried to go past it...only to see it guarded by this BIG TANK with 2 barrels and that tank destroyed his little fleet of buggies!
I was impressed, holy shit man!!

And the second moment was at the same computer, but maybe a couple years later. My friends brother had gotten a burned disk with this game "Total Annihilation". I watched him start a game in skirmish and build a solar panel and I was hooked! The nanolathing looked so cool! Instead of a pixelated cartoon when constructing something, you could see that solar panel slowly appearing and getting denser until it was complete...after which it folded open, man I loved it!

Solar panels....yummy 😁

😜

I always pictured leilei as being one of those crazy cat ladies. 😜

Anyways:

1. 24
2. Toshiba T4600C laptop, 486SL/33, 4 MB RAM, 320MB HDD, 640x480 (256-color) TFT LCD, MS-DOS 6.22/Windows for Workgroups 3.11. No sound card though; wasn't too impressed with that, but it was supposed to be a work laptop anyway - this was before the whole "Multimedia PC" trend really took off.
3. When I finally got a graphics card that was capable of running Quake 2 in OpenGL rendering mode, at a smooth frame rate. It was very much like playing a whole new game. And when I got a printer that had the ability to print in color. Oh and Doom - that damn game got me hooked on the FPS genre.

1. 26
2. 486SX-25, 4MB RAM, 200MB HDD, Trident ISA video card, no sound card, DOS6.2. bought in 1993 I think.
Was upgraded to 8MB RAM, CD-ROM drive and an Audio Galaxy NX-Pro 2.
Battery leaked on the sound card so we ended up replacing it with an SB16.
Stuck with that until about 1998 when we finally upgraded to a P2-266 on an LX motherboard, 32MB RAM, AGP S3 Virge GX2 (I asked for a 3dfx card- wasn't happy), 3.2GB HDD, Win98.

3. Hmmm, milestones... I remember playing on my cousins computer years when I was really young, poker, lemmings and some ghostbusters game but I can't remember what computer it was. I think it was an Amiga of some sort but I can't be sure. My school also had apple IIe's which I used to play on before we got our own PC.

I think one of the biggest milestones was getting a sound card, it blew my young mind hearing speech from the PC. Especially the text-to-speech feature of the SB16's Win 3.1 apps.

I remember playing Blake Stone at a friends house (I never got to play Doom until much later - we didn't have the internet or BBS) and was blown away by the 3d world. I went and bought the shareware version after that and played it to death. Even today Blake Stone is probably the only game I've been so immersed in that I was leaning left and right on my chair to peek around walls. I think its an 'uncanny valley' thing as even with today's realistic graphics I don't find myself doing that.
The next may have been getting a 3d card, I stuck with that Virge GX2 for years, I never got it to work right in hardware mode with a single game. Finally managed to get a second-hand AGP TNT2 Vanta and the difference was amazing. I stuck with that until about 2002 when I bought myself an Athlon XP 1800+ machine. (I tried upgrading the Pentium 2 but the LX board didn't like Coppermine celerons and I never managed to track down a Mendocino).

1. 31
2. First PC I ever owned (not used) was a 286-12mhz my Dad bought in 1990. 1mb of ram, MS-DOS 4.0 and a 40meg HD.
3. Dunno about "impressed" but as far as impressions:
Visiting someone elses house when I was 7? and seeing a computer with graph paper and a map which was for the game Zork 1.
Dialing into a BBS and playing DOOR games.
Hearing music come out of a PC Speaker (Mean Streets, Links Golf and that sound driver for Windows 3.1)
Seeing Wolf3d and Doom when they first came out. (and going to the store, bypassing the presentation demo running on windows 3.x and playing Doom at the store because I only had a 286 at home. 😉 )

1. 25
2. IBM 5160 with green monochrome screen
3. There are so many! For example: Getting Need for Speed: High Stakes to run on a 486 DX2 (I can't remember if it was a 66 or 80 MHz chip) Cyrix. Building my first PC (Athlon XP 2100+ irc, which ran very cool considering it's reputation). Seeing just how fast Windows 95c could boot on a 486 66 MHz CPU when tweaked (a friend came over and stripped it down so it booted into windows in less than 10 seconds, don't remember the exact time)... so on and so forth.

1. 28 (5 when I first had access to a home computer, 10 when I started programming)

2. This question is paradoxical for me because I currently own all but one of the computers I grew up with, however the first computer I owned myself wasn't the first, second, third or even fourth one I grew up with access to, but the FIFTH.

In terms of access:
1st System: My Father's Tandy 1000 SX
2nd System: My Mother's 486DX2/66 8MB RAM, eventually upgraded to a P120 24MB RAM
3rd System: My Father's Packard Bell 486DX2/66 4MB RAM
4th System: My Father's Gateway P3/600 64MB RAM (He gave this one to my sister because I already owned the next one)
5th System: My Mother's AMD Athalon 1.0 GHz 256MB RAM (First computer I owned, even though I own all but the 4th one now)

My current system is completely different: An AMD Athalon64 Dual-Core 2.0 GHz with 2GB RAM. Nothing too impressive, but it suits me.

3. None. I started learning to program when I was 10 and after that, computers just felt "normal" to me. There's not really been any advancements that have really stood out to me as impressive; they all feel like a natural progression of technological advancement.

That said, it's hard to remember what it was like without optical mice. ;D

1. 30

2. 286/16MHz, 1mb RAM, 1.2mb fdd, no hard disk, vga monochrome monitor...

3. The first time I used a pc, an Amstrad 1512 at school when I was 8 years old
The first time I saw a mouse working, 1.5 year after I bought my pc
A few years later, when I saw the first Need For Speed. One school friend, whose father owned a computer shop so he always had the best pc, used to invite us to his home after school. There we organizex a small "championship", trying to beat each other's best time.

Speaking of current systems, I'm using a dc7100 USDT by HP (I got it with 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD, 2.8GHz 1M-cache Prescott and DVD-ROM, and upgraded it to 3GHz 65W 631, 1GB RAM and 250GB HDD), but I think I'll again follow a path that I took several times in the past...

That is, I get a system, upgrade it with whatever goals in mind (like best performance, lowest noise or power consumption, smallest size, etc) then decide it's too much for what I usually do with it (pretty old games, surfing the net, playing MP3s, a movie every once in a while) and downgrade.

This time I concluded that the dc7100 is way too much for Age of Empires and Half-Life, so I'm building a dual P3/840 machine (1000 underclocked from FSB 133 to 112). Will hopefully post pics and ask for advice in the relevant thread when it is almost done...

1. 32

1. 286-16MHz, 1Mbyte RAM, 20Mbyte HD, 1.44 FDD, 256Kbyte VGA, MS-DOS 4, no sound. Still have the motherboard!

3. A couple....
Wolf3d. "Wow! 3D scrolling!"
X-Wing. Playing a mission and then hearing the imuse soundtrack change to the Imperial March when a Star Destroyer arrives on the scene!
Day of the Tentacle talkie-CD .... very, very funny 😀
Doom. With a soundblaster. Killing imps using the chainsaw. Well, it was just awesome.

1. 17

2. Pentium 1 - 133 MHz, 16MB RAM, S3 Virge, 1GB HDD, Windows 95
(it belonged to my brother & dad at first, then just my brother and then in 2000 I finally got it 😁, I was 6 at the time!!!)
A year or two later my dad got me a Celeron 900 MHz and he made it look as if Santa Claus got it for me! He left the box outside the house and rang the bell! 😁

3. Way too many... But I'll list some :
a) Seeing Far Cry run for the first time, it had unbelievable graphics at the time!
b) Walking in to my friend's room and watching his brother playing a game I only had a demo of and wanted for years (Broken Sword II)
c) The first time I ran kkrieger and learned what the demoscene really was
d) When I installed a Voodoo 1 on my retro PC. I was blown away by the fact that games I had been running on software mode for years where finally 3D accelerated and looked amazing. Fifa 98, Quake 1&2 and Need For Speed 2 SE where the first games I tried! No other Voodoo card managed to amaze me so much.
e) Replacing my SB16 with an AWE 64 Gold. I had never before heard midi music come to life like that! Doom was the first game I ever tried I think. It was an incredible change from FM Music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2kBgPB0RUU&pl … 35A0A616A130E4A
f) Listening to what a real MT-32 sounded like. It was the second time I was completely blown away by DOS Midi music!!!
g) Watching a friend of mine play Schizm: Mysterious Journey. It totally had me hooked!

1. 27
2. IBM XT Clone 8mhz (in 1987)
3. Playing Unreal for the first time on a Compaq Pressario (AMD K6-233)

1. 18
2. Well, the first PC I owned was a Gateway G6-450 (PII/450, 64MB RAM, 14.4GB hard drive, STB Velocity-- I believe Riva TNT based graphics card, Win98 FE) that was bought in 1999. I was a Mac owner before then, with my family buying a Macintosh Performa 600 (68030/32, 4MB RAM, 160MB HDD, System 7.1P2) when I was a year old. However, I had access to a PC long before we bought one, in 1995. It was a Packard Bell Legend 204CD (486DX2/66, 8MB RAM, 518 MB HDD, WfWG 3.11) and to be honest I spent more time with it, at my grandmother's, than any other computer. Most of my computing life stems from it, so I consider it my first PC.
3. The first time I started exploring the internet... it was just amazing. I've been so inspired by what I've discovered online.
Also when I first started using my current rig-- I've been used to low/mid range machines before now and then I set this up, my first really high-end rig, and ran some games I already owned at full settings... I've never been so impressed.

1) too old, too cold

2) 1986 or 7: generic "turbo" XT clone (don't know cpu type, probably 8MHz 8088 though) - 2x 360kb floppies, no HD, CGA+MDA compatible video, green monochrome monitor, "clicky" XT keyboard, DOS 3.20.
Later upgraded w/ genuine EGA, hard drive, modem.... served me well until it was replaced by a 386 with all the bells and whistles.

3) could name a few...
- getting into game "modding" with Lode Runner's editor... long before Wolf3D and Doom!
- using our first 1200bps modem (around 1990) and discovering BBSs, playing door games and making ANSI art in exchange for access
- Autodesk Animator - really got me started on computer graphics at age 13
- playing Star Control II
- discovering the demoscene, getting my first Sound Blaster Pro, downloading Scream Tracker 2 and making music in 25-row pure text mode...

1. 46
2. IBM PC junior w/256k
3. The day Doom come out and Need for Speed build a 486DX2 66 with 256k and 8MB memory, ET4000W32P 2MB
what moments impressed me the most the day 3Dfx Voodoo come out I end up testing there hardwre for them my name back then was shs or shs-3dfx also shs-sblive.

1. 37

2. Laser Turbo XT 10mhz, 640K ram, 40Mb hdd, VGA 8bit, and an original Sound Blaster 8bit. 14" VGA monitor. Purchased in 1990, it was outdated, but I got it cheap.

3. Oh soooo many!

* Playing Commander Keen on the above machine (I was amazed how smoothly the game played with the Gravis Gamepad).

* Hearing FM midi on the Sound Blaster for the first time (Space Quest III and Monkey Island both had amazing music!).

* Hearing digitized speech in Stellar 7.

* The fantastic graphics, sound, and gameplay of Wing Commander (I wet my pants a little the first time that orchestra came on screen).

I could go on and on and on. But, I will just limit this to some of my early ones.