My first "real computer" that was solely mine and used was a hand me down i486-66 DX2, in a fine large tower. Sadly, it was around for less than a year. One day it simply wouldn't turn on. Seemed like a power issue; back then I was clueless and had no idea what to do including asking for help. Because it was technically a "toy" of mine, not a mission critical thing. It was also our internet connection. 14.4Kbps! It taught patience 🤣
So, faced with a "broken computer," I just took it completely apart, salvaged what I wanted (pretty much everything but the case and power supply I imagine, but this is 2000 we're talking about - I don't know what the hell I did). The case and power supply went in the garbage! The other parts began my "vintage parts pile," never to be used again. I always regret doing that. If I had even left it alone, broken that would have been so much better...it's only original once, who knows what it was like?
Seems to me like I must still have the hard drive. But I have a lot of hard drives now, and my stuff is not in a well organized state. I *may* have thrown out the motherboard too. *sigh* I know I saved the modem though 🤣
On the other hand, that thing was definitely on the tedious side. It did work. Back then ANYTHING could go on-line and participate, stuff just loaded slower. Games, sure. I couldn't play the best stuff, but I definitely played a lot of Civilization II, Colonization, SimTower, DOS games, that kind of thing. I think I even tried Age of Empires on it (not...good). But it really needed more disk space/memory. It was much slower than it should have been because there was no cache space and probably 16MB memory.
Heck, it would have been trivial to triple the internet speed, and simple to speed it up with a little memory, less trivial maybe a bigger hard drive. But I didn't know crap about crap. So, we ended up buying a used computer to replace it - a far better, yet still disappointing one! I have a story about that too.
More stories later.
imi wrote:unfortunately my dad cleared out a lot of the old computers I had collected from our house 10 years or so ago 🙁.
What a monster.