Sure, I do that a lot. It's pretty normal, people associate different locations and moments with certain faces, patterns or objects.

Pop culture is common to measure by. When I had a 486 it was FRIGGIN DINOSAURS EVERYWEHRE YOU LOOK. Sometimes it's also the whirr of specific hard drives and cd-rom drives that can set the stage. My 486 had Mitsumi and Conner....

Some people measure time by vehicles they were driving at the moment. Sometimes I do that, I had two over last 5 years and it's fairly easy, especially where I come from. You can't forget how many winters you went through with your car, since winter is a hard time for both cars and driving.

I finally got rid of an old k6-2/50 system I built for this very reason - I remember where I was and what I was doing at the time it was built. But at this pint I have far better P3 machines from about the same era - and just too many computers

Some nostalgia yes. But I do not spend a lot of time remembering / looking back. But I have very limited time to do so anyway. 😀

I can easily associate memories of my life that are related to my old computers. It's like a picture album in my head. And it's pretty amazing to think how much time has come by. Fun times.

I do this a lot, not just with computers. I am a very retrospective person......

Am I the only one who felt time passed faster in the old days? In early 1990s, we had 320x200 and 256 colors, and Sound Blaster FM sound. Not long after, we had wavetable synth and CD ROMs. Then came 3dfx, and we suddenly had hi-res SVGA in 30 frame per second. Soon after, we had FSAA, pixel shader, bump mapping, reflective surface, and the likes. And take a look at the processors. In 1994, the most common processor was probably 486 DX2-66. In 1997, we had Pentium Pro. Two years later, Athlon. Then about three years later, we saw Athlon XP and Pentium 4.

Now things feel slower. Eight years ago we had Core 2 Duo, now we have i7. Yet, the difference doesn't feel as significant as that between Athlon XP (2002) and Pentium 60 (1994).

PeterLI wrote:

Some nostalgia yes. But I do not spend a lot of time remembering / looking back. But I have very limited time to do so anyway. 😀

Some of us just have relatively less time remaining than others. That is true enough 😲 How we choose to spend our time says a bit about us though.

I spend way too much time tinkering away at my retro builds to worry about it all. Bottom line is that I enjoyed (miss?) the old times enough that I choose to invest a portion my current (remaining?) time in recreating a bit of it. And I have to say, I am "generally" having quite a lot of fun in the doing of it! The beginning of the "home" computer age remains hugely interesting for me personally.

I do miss the excitement of those days- the fluid rapidity of change, the developing technologies stumbling into one another almost monthly- made time fly past. It was a wildly exciting time if you had an interest in such things. For me, (like Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman) it was the decade of the nineties.

Just saying- the relationship between our "life stages" and corresponding computer "technology stages" of the time may be something that is more likely to occur in personality types like those who frequent this particular site. Shared interests may improve the likelihood- thus spoiling any scientific sample? 🤣

Know what I mean? Then again, I may just have issues? 😊

You know... I never really thought about any of this before...

...and now that I am I find I have difficulty separating the memories of what's really happened in my life to the memories of things from my dreams. I mean, I know which were real and which weren't, but they're all clumped together including both the old and the new thoughts.

...I'm going to guess that my mind orders things by relational events rather than chronologically. :P

Also...

leileilol wrote:

When I had a 486 it was FRIGGIN DINOSAURS EVERYWEHRE YOU LOOK.

Truth. :B