badmofo wrote:

I'm 35 I think, haven't really been keeping track lately! I'm married with 2 kids, but I still find time for my computer fetish too so consider myself one very lucky man.

Basically sound like what I want to be in 14 years. Except for leaving my country.

archsan wrote:

memsys wrote:

I was born in the same year as commander keen 1 was released.
So i am probably one of the youngest members here 🤣 .

You probably are! Please tell us your story -- do you happen to be playing with Apple IIs when you were a toddler like cdoublejj? 😁

Hmm, you've just necromanced a two-year old thread -- I was 25 when KAN started revealing people's ages here...

Well around 1999-2000 we got our first computer (after I nagged my parents into submission 😈). That computer was an IBM XT (with an EGA card and monitor!) that we got from friends . I played commander Keen dreams and dark ages episode 1 a LOT . I still have the system , sadly the screen is dead . I think it's the power converter(or whatever it is called) and I do not have the original keyboard.

About a year later we got an 486 from another family ,that had upgraded to something better .It had a HUGE amount of games on it... Until I took the drive out for the next computer and deleted most of them... I can still punch myself for doing that 😵. There where some pretty hard to find games on it , like the billy the kid game that was on episode 50 of ADG .

After about 1 to 1,5 years later we bought a Pentium 2 from yet another family. That computer was one evil piece of crap! It killed 2 CD drives and 2CD burners. It also had the habit of deleting the printer drivers out of nowhere and other nasty stuff. When it died in 2005-2006 we took it to a big computer shop . Some dude opened it up, made a comment about it being very old/weird (Motherboard was AT form factor), hooked it up nothing happens except the fans started turning and said it was broken beyond repair!
I was a bit sad because now we had no computer but mainly happy because that piece of shit was dead .So we HAD to get a new one.

So after the P2 died we went to the father of a colleague from my mom (who runs a 1 person computer company )and talked about what system we wanted , that ended being a Pentium4 (I wanted an Athlon 64) that my mother uses to this day.

After 6 months to a year I got a laptop for school ; thanks to a government program (my hand writing could easily be mistaken for Arabic/Egyptian hieroglyphs and the other kids wrote 4x faster) and when the P4 went out of order for a few months thanks to a royal fuckup on my and it became my main system even when the P4 was fixed.

2 years ago I bought my current main computer (another laptop because I need to take it with me twice a week) . It runs most games at medium-high at decent framerates. However I'm sick of annoying issues, drivers never being updated and the royal pain in the ass when you need to open it up. My next computer will be a normal desktop, sadly I don't have the cash to get one nor can I justify it if I had.

Some time when we had the P4 I started to collect old computers, because I was no longer able to play my favourite old games. Fixing the old 486 was out of the question due to barrel-battery-acid-leak-of-doom™. I recently finished that project LINK

Fun fact ; the guy who we bought the P4 from (and both laptops) gave me the case for my 486 build along with an 386 and a XT clone.

So that is the history of the (main) computers I have used. I had used a computer before we got one , but I can't really remember a lot. The first one was probably running win3.x when I was really young in school .All I can remember about it is that I made something with paint.

Will be 32 next march. I was blessed to be born in 1981 and the later 80's personal computer experience as a child resumed to spending much more time loading games and or doing BASIC on the spectrum 48k than actually playing, also some XT monochrome gaming.
When I was 9 yo though, my family moved from the big city to a small village and every friend I made there had a different PC, one of them had a 286, I had a 25MHz 386 with 1MB of video, another friend had his 33MHz 386 with 2MB video, but there where also Amstrad CPC, Commodore Amigas, Schneider Euro-PC, and 486 with sound cards and CD-ROM! Also some NES, Megadrive and SNES! I was pretty happy! (to be part of this, being a teenager sucked as for the most part of us)
When was time to go back to the big city to start college the nineties where ending and I had a Pentium II with a 56k modem!

So the 90's are my favorite time for nostalgia, 8 bit and 16 bit flavour are the best! 😎

I'm forty-two. Balding, been wearing glasses since I was about 21/22, I've recently had to get BOTH reading glasses and distance glasses, don't have a fraction of the energy I had in my teens, and I hate modern music...

25. There's a ring on my finger and two kids at home.

38 at the time of this posting. Still feel young. Being a manchild seems to help.

^ True that i guess, Im 30 but I still make funny faces in the mirror each morning, just like i did when i was 12, hahaha

laxdragon wrote:

38 at the time of this posting. Still feel young. Being a manchild seems to help.

MaxWar wrote:

^ True that i guess, Im 30 but I still make funny faces in the mirror each morning, just like i did when i was 12, hahaha

That's what I call youthing -- keep the stem cells fresh! hehe

Thirty-four, when we first created these forums I was twenty-three. Don't feel any different. 😁

35. Single and enjoing it, as long as my parents do not come to visit, which for some unknown reason (and my despair) was almost weekly for the past 3-4 months.
They always complain that I play games/music too loud and I will bother the neighbors (Like those bastards give a shit about my ears...)

30, married, no kids here. My wife doesn't just put up with my retro hardware obsession, she sits right beside me on her own retro PC and gets down on the good old stuff.😀 She plays the new stuff too on our modern machines, but, like me, she's getting more and more upset at the garbage being released as of late. 😖

34...one adopted kid and one dog. (Since everyone seems to disclose such details).

26 And single, but looking alas have not found a single lady who shares/tolerates my interests, hence why I am starting to think that I will be single for a very very long time...

My father was in the construction business but also did computers as a side line so basically theres always been a computer in the house since I was born, always got his hand me downs when he upgraded his computer with lots of parts that I could use to teach myself computing.

Could navigate dos before I went to school and learned to read properly.

Fav era was when I had a 200Mhz MMX, with a Voodoo 1 , and a Sound Blaster 16, cant remember the rest of the specs though.

38 in one week. Married, one child, second child due in march.
I don't really have time to game but occasionally I play adventure games together with my wife, last one was Tales of Monkey Island. (A few years ago we played Monkey Island 1 using ScummVM on a HP iPaq - very cozy.)
She is not especially into retro gaming but starts up Caesar III every few months.

If I find the time I'll probably experiment with the hardware I got (and maybe get some additions) rather than actually playing that much. (I have got some ideas what to try with my Rendition card - recently rediscovered it on my parents' attic.)

PowerPie5000 wrote:

I'm also 27... another relatively young one :happyhappy: […]
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Gemini000 wrote:

27... damn I feel young now. 🤣

I'm also 27... another relatively young one 😁

I'm living with my girlfriend who enjoys a bit of modern gaming (PC, Xbox 360, DS and Wii) and retro gaming to some extent (Sega Master Sytem and Megadrive, Saturn etc..).

We don't have kids but are always busy looking after our pets... It's like a zoo here 🤣

2 x Sudan Plated lizards
1 x Saharan Uromastyx lizard
1 x Corn snake
1 x Cockatiel
2 x Chinchilla's
5 x Cats

Wow! i posted this a couple of years ago when i was actually 27.... I'm going to be 30 next month 😮.

A few things have changed since my original post:

1 x Saharan Uromastyx lizard
1 x Corn Snake
2 x Chinchillas
4 x Cats
1 x Daughter (11 months old) 🤣

Oh, and i've now been made redundant by the missus within the last month after a 5 year relationship (i'm now single in other words).

I just realized that this thread was necromanced and should have been locked a while ago.

kao wrote:

I just realized that this thread was necromanced and should have been locked a while ago.

This is hardly a necro thread, to be honest. What usually qualifies as a necro thread here is when some newbie comes along, usually through a Google search, and bumps a 6-7 year old thread asking for help with some problem instead of starting a new thread. This thread is a bit different because it's more so the type of thing that members on here add to as time goes along, so to speak. 🤣

Then hopefully nobody will mind if I add a post: I'm 34, single, no pets, live with a roommate in Queens and work in NYC as a novice attorney. My family got its first computer in 1991 when I was 13, a 486DX-33 that was used extensively for AutoCAD, Microsoft Word, and Chuck Yeager's Air Combat 😀

But my very first experiences with computers were during the mid-80's in grade school, where we used Apple II and IBM PS/2 systems to learn to touch-type, compose letters, and print them with loud, slow dot matrix printers. In high school we had a technology lab with a network of about twenty 486-66 systems plus a LaserJet 4 and a large E-size HP DesignJet pen plotter. It was lots of fun to load up a complex drawing in AutoCAD and watch that plotter spend the next half-hour tracing it line-by-line with its multicolored pens.

In the early 90's I loved visiting Babbages and CompUSA to check out the latest systems and games. I fondly recall being mesmerized by the X-Wing demo at the Babbage's storefront, and I got friendly with a salesman at Sears who let me hack around and play games on their Packard Bell and AT&T machines. I also remember when inkjets and "multimedia" first arrived on the mass-market around 1992-1993: these were the days when software publishers didn't even bother copy-protecting CD-ROM games because there was no way to duplicate them, and before printer manufacturers started chipping their ink cartridges to prevent them from being re-used. Back when AOL was an innovative, groundbreaking company with an exponentially-expanding user base.

It was an extremely exciting time because the entire industry was evolving so quickly and there were so many different retail outlets that carried computer-related merchandise. Major retail giants like Sears and Macy's and Price Club had dedicated computer sections, plus there were major specialty retailers like CompUSA and Babbage's, plus all the mom & pop shops. There was even a store a few towns over that actually rented software, but as you can imagine it didn't stay in business for very long. Flash-in-the-pan technologies came and went like the 3DO, minidisc players and DAT tapes. Creative risk-taking was the order of the day.

These days there are maybe two or three brick & mortar sources for computers, and they all carry the same lineup of virtually-identical Chinese-made shiny plastic bricks. Apple was the only retailer to do something exciting in the past decade, but now that Jobs is gone their innovative spirit is already beginning to falter. I guess computing just isn't as exciting as it used to be, which is a major reason my focus has turned to retro hardware & software. Retrocomputing is slowly but cheaply satisfying all my unfulfilled childhood wishes 😀

Or maybe I'm just getting old, psychologically if not physically (yet). Perhaps it means you're over-the-hill mentally when you stop anticipating the future with wide-eyed optimism and start reminiscing about the past with misty-eyed nostalgia.

SiliconClassics wrote:

Or maybe I'm just getting old, psychologically if not physically (yet). Perhaps it means you're over-the-hill mentally when you stop anticipating the future with wide-eyed optimism and start reminiscing about the past with misty-eyed nostalgia.

A bit of both I think. I've been hit hard with nostalgia over the last couple of years (age = 35), and although I don't hang out with youth much so can't talk for them, it seems to me that there isn't much wide-eyed optimism going around these days. But when I read computer mags from the 90's there is reverent discussion of this mystical new thing called the world wide web, and the mind blowing possibilities of "multi-media" (CD-ROMS).

I think we're a bit spoiled these days; it's all too easy. The possibilities are endless, and information, entertainment, etc is constantly flooding in. I have an increasing need to unplug and take a break from it all, which is where retro computers come in.

Wow, I am getting old!

A bit of both I think. I've been hit hard with nostalgia over the last couple of years

I am always careful and restrained in that regard because I do not wish to become one of those deranged cane-waving "BACK IN MY DAY" old guys. I find those kind more sad than funny.

and although I don't hang out with youth much so can't talk for them, it seems to me that there isn't much wide-eyed optimism going around these days.

There isn't. The economy is trash and well...I'm not going to get into politics because this is not the place for it, but they're also a disgrace and a shame.