Gosh your backstory sounds awfully familiar! My father was an early CAD adopter so I was lucky to have PCs around starting with 8 bits, and then things got really interesting when the 486 appeared, and then things got red hot obsession when he bought the rest of the family (but mainly me) a 486 of our own to maintain, tinker, and play with. Oh and some school work on the side.

I've been doing the retro thing for years now and yes the rose-tinted glasses came off pretty quickly when I realised that the 486 SX33 I lovingly re-created was actually quite primitive and limited, but it was a gateway into an endless list of things to learn and projects to complete. And with kids around you really can't beat a hobby that's cheap and you can do at home - the kids join in after a while so win win 👍

Doom, 1993.

kolderman wrote on 2021-03-24, 04:26:

Doom, 1993.

How could I forget? I played Doom (and Wolfenstein) at a friends house (he had a better computer than we did but I have no idea what it was) and was OBSESSED. Must have been 13-14 years old. Memories.

1990: Amiga 500/Monkey Island
1993: Intel 486DX/Doom
1995: 14.4Kbps Modem/OS2 Warp
1997: Intel Pentium/QuakeWorld
1999: 256Kbit Broadband/Ultima Online

pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-03-23, 12:45:

Then fast forward a few hazy years at university faffing around with girls, late nights and too many mind bending substances to around 2003-2004

surely you interrupted all that at least once to weigh in on the early pentium 4 vs mature pentium 3 vs athlon debate around 2000/2001 ?!!! 😀

or to argue on usenet about 'linux on the desktop'

or to talk about why 'Y2K' was stupid

nostalgia for old internet arguments... each period had them but that 2000-2003 time was fun too

as for defining moments, childhood fascination with the computers of the time - the mysterious deep potential they seemed to have (they did!). Computers, including PCs, became so common in many home during the late 90's that I wonder if they were objects of wonder for those growing up then in the same way as they were before

2 really big stand out moment's for me
Getting Command and Conquer around Easter in 95 or 96. I'd played the game before at a friends so already knew I loved it. That has such a lasting affect I get in the mood to play it round Easter every year.
Seeing the flashing police lights at night in NFS3 on my shiny new P2 400 with a 16MB TNT, It was such a huge jump from the dx2/66 with 2MB Mach64 I'd just upgraded from.

I was lucky in a way, We had the Apple IIe but I was never really interested in that but the 486 came along when I was 15 and starting to loose interest in my childhood toys like Lego.
As you say the more you think about it the more you remember, like using a BBS or Internet for the 1st time "my computer is talking to another computer, wow!" but that's become normal so doesn't have the same impact as that 1st great game you get or blown away by certain hardware improvement.

I am not really sure about the exact years as such. However I can tell the story of those moments....

My mother used to work at at company, were she would draw up blue prints on power lines. Not the average low voltage 220 household lines. Oh no. The real juicy stuff like kilovolt lines hanging in masts and transformer stations. Right before pension, she worked a number of years on the first Danish sea based wind mill farm. Anyway... To the point. The first computers that I saw in person, was the console/computer (too young to remember anything else than a monitor) at her desk. And then her explaining that it was connected to a server room. I asked her if I were allowed to see the room, and she took me down. Lo and behold. The room was packed with big blue metal monsters, and I was explained how they swapped out the big wheel's of tapes. How they would change the big platter storage, that were kept in giant semi-transparent orange plastic cartridges. It might have been eighter an IBM system or Digital system that were installed. Yet I was instantly hooked on giant noisy metallic monsters. I tried to tell the story at school, however nobody in my class would believe me. That there were such giant monsters that could do that. I guess they were only told about radio tube computers, from what their parents knew about. I was the early 1980's however, and nobody really knew anything about computer technology in my home town.

Fast forward a couple of years. And I was around 8, possible 9 years old. I remember it so well. It was just before X-Mas in 1985, and we had to visit my fathers little sister. Her son, my cousin, proudly displayed his new Commodore64 that he had bought for his own money the day before. He had the computer, a joystick and a datasette. He did not show many games, however he loaded up some kind of program. And I was hooked. The following year, he introduced me to: 1942, Winter Games and Super Cycle. The computer was put into the guest room and I always asked my uncle if me and my brother were alowed to play a game or two. That C64 experience cemented something deep inside me. I was actually wondering if it was possible to merge those big giant blue monsters to a C64. Well.... I have yet to see it specifically.

A year later, the son of one of my fathers co-worker had gotten an C64 as well. And everytime we visited them, I played games on that machine with him. He did a lot of piracy, and so I was introduced to the art of numbering Floppy Disks, and write the name of the games and disk content/numbers down in a book. The longer the list, the more respect you had from your fellow C64 owners. Yes. It was piracy, however the computer world in private homes, were kind of the wild west back then. Pirating games were kind of a sport back then, and nobody raised an eye brow. Even the children of police officers did it, and everyone knew about this. Ohh... Times have changed.

Next story is a couple of years later on... It might have been last half of 1987 or first half of 1988. Then that son of my fathers co-worker had a giant upgrade. Of course I knew nothing about it, because my parents did not care for computers at home at that point. I thought that I was to visit and play C64 games. Oh boy was I in for a treat. It was the day I was introduced to Amiga. He had sold his C64, and saved up for an Amiga500. Damn... I still remember seing 3.5 inch disks for the first time. The design of the physical machine it self were something completely new. The sounds of the drive. Yes everything. I must have spend the first 30 minutes to 60 minutes, just looking at the lines of that beauty. Not really caring about what was displayed on the television. And then I discovered the GFX, the sounds. Yes. It was that giant game changer, that rarely are experienced. Going from knowing the C64 as the absolute best and highest quality and then being thrown an Amiga500 at you!!! Oh boy....

Then a couple of weeks later, my parents bought their first computer. It was a Unisys PW/2 Series 300 computer. Complete with 3-button optical mouse, Cherry MX based keyboard, EGA monitor and Star LC-10 B/W matrix printer. The machine was a 286 8/10mhz, with EGA card, 640k Ram and 20mb Miniscribe Harddisk. (I am the owner now). Besides the printer not being at my place, I have the complete machine in original state. Still working, and all I ever had to do, was to change the battery and the floppy drive. Else it is original. I even have all the manuals in mint condition. Now. That machine and the Amiga500's were what shaped me in my teens. I have basically grown up, with 286 in my childhood home, and used Amiga500 just as much at friends houses. Our library even had computers. They started with a C64 setup around 1987 (first Model-C machine, that are also last longboard model) and then around 1991, they swapped it out with an Amiga500-Plus and then in 1992 they swapped that to an Amiga600-HD.

Then fast forward (again) to 1993, were I bought my first computer for my own money. It was a 486-slc2-50 machine. 4mb Ram, 120mb Conner HDD, ET4000, Floppy Drive and some kind of Sound Galaxy. Most likely a Sound Galaxy NX-Pro 16 card or something like that. The motherboard was one of those Alaris or leopard or something, were the resistor packs were these red ones and the CPU were soldered on. Yeah.... I was not really happy about it, so I upgraded the machine to a 486dx2-66 machine around Feb/Mar of 1995. I bought an Edom 486VL3H motherboard (still have the manual) an iWill Side Jr Pro VLB-Controller, CL5428-VLB and 8 mb Ram. Then a couple of months later my Sound galaxy died for some odd reason and I bought a Sound Blaster 16 Value Edition card instead. That machine served me well.

Then I discovered Unix, Linux, Os/2 and all the other Dos versions (IBM and so on) back in 1995. I even tested Win95 beta's and Test releases. Good times.... Good times.

The rest is more or less just history. Except for that fatal job, that made me drop interrest in everything computer related. That fatal job was between 2003 and 2006. I was hired for my dream job. (Or so I thought it was) The job was to build around 10 computers a day. (Or so I was told at the job interview) The job position were much more "sadistic". The demand was to build at least 12, preferable 15 machines a day, as a minimum. All parts were retail packed as the boss for some reason had negotiated a better deal that way on parts. Meaning everything had to be taken out of shiny colourfull boxes and so on. He bought semi-defect and low grade Ram, because that was cheaper. And we were demanded to first do Memtest86 and then do a complete test install of WinXp. No. Not unattended. A real install. Then blank the HDD and pack the computer in the case-box. On top of that, I was also given the task of handeling all phone support all day long as the only person in the company, and respond to all email support untill lunch. And no, if they called sales department and said that support was unavaliable, I would have a boss screaming into my ear. And if number of finished computers were not met at the end of the day, I would have a screaming boss in my ear as well.

Never the less. Income dropped in the company through feb 2006. And I was fired, because he was unable to pay me. And I became a mailman. Then I discovered Vogons around 2014 and all is hostory.

My sister got the C64 around 1985 and it was the real deal after all the Game&Watch handhelds we used to have up until then. Another on was when my friend got the A500 in around -89/90 and I first saw Battle Chess and Lemmings. The music, sound and smooth animation was something you hadn't seen before that. I think in the early 90's there was also a store demo of Epic or something, because it had a similar armada of filled vector space ships as the games intro and when I saw it in a store it just looked unbelievable at that time. Also Red Baron was something that really brought flight sims to another level. Other visually interesting games were Persian Gulf Inferno (digitized speech, smooth animation), Hunter (3D open world with tons of equipment) and Another World.

In 1989 my dad bought a 386 tower with EGA graphics for work at home, to noones surprise we kids jumped on it to play games ^^ so that was my first introduction to PCs and video games I was still pretty young at the time. Monkey Island and Lemmings were pretty defining titles for me at the time.

we kept using that PC and later upgraded to a 386DX-40 which was one of the longest runs any PC had in my history, we had that one until 1996, hence why I have a deep nostalgia for anything 386 and games that run on them ^^

I remember buying a magazine with a CD-Rom but had no ability to read it, so we got one shortly after, and I still remember playing CD-Rom games on the 386 was excruiatingly slow at times, in Command and Conquer we had to turn off CD music to even make it somewhat playable, but I even remember playing Descent on that machine, the latter eating up almost all of the 80MB MFM drive that was still the original drive from way back when.

Then came Duke Nukem 3D and it simply would not run on a 386, so I had to go over to a friends house to play it on their 486 machine, shortly after that we got our first major upgrade, completely skipped 486 and went straight to a Pentium 90 System, now with Sound Card! (if only I'd remember which one).
from there on out it was rather smooth sailing, after overclocking the Pentium 90 to 120Mhz iirc we later upgraded to a MMX chip.

later in it's life it got a Diamond Fire GL 1000... I think it was a handmedown from an office CAD machine our first 3D card, and shortly after I jumped on a Voodoo 2 8MB because that was what you had to get for games ^^

then came the time I actually bought my first own PC I didn't have to share with anyone from collected birthday money, I splurged and got a Pentium II 300 with a Matrox G200, AWE64 value and a whooping 6.4GB hard drive and also kept using the Voodoo 2... this is the next most defining era for me, hence my nostalgia for 1998 games like Half-Life and Unreal.
Later upgraded to a Pentium II 450 and TNT2 Ultra... went to a lot of lan parties with this machine.

everything after that was just the usual upgrade cycles went from the PII to a Socket A Athlon then Athlon 64 and so on... nothing what I would really describe as a "defining" moment anymore ^^

gerry wrote on 2021-03-24, 10:17:

surely you interrupted all that at least once to weigh in on the early pentium 4 vs mature pentium 3 vs athlon debate around 200 […]
Show full quote

pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-03-23, 12:45:

Then fast forward a few hazy years at university faffing around with girls, late nights and too many mind bending substances to around 2003-2004

surely you interrupted all that at least once to weigh in on the early pentium 4 vs mature pentium 3 vs athlon debate around 2000/2001 ?!!! 😀

or to argue on usenet about 'linux on the desktop'

or to talk about why 'Y2K' was stupid

To be honest, there was so much 'haze' around that time I don't think I paid much attention to PCs at all. I vaguely remember a socket 478 system (store bought, not built - the first and last time) and a 19' Ilyama monitor that I lugged halfway across the world from the UK to Hong Kong and then on to Australia for a second spell at university.

I only really paid attention to AMD with the K6-2 (but went with the Pentium II / III at the time). The next time they popped up on the radar was with the Athlon and Athlon XP but I didn't get behind AMD properly until the 3000+ Winchesters were out. Apart from the Q6600 hiccup, I've stuck with the underdog ever since...

Ah, Linux and the Y2K bug 😉 I wish I could remember those conversations but I can't...Linux for me has been a relatively new thing as well and I'm still very much a noob where that's concerned but I do love it from a security and stability standpoint. I have ElementaryOS (hey, I like pretty too), Xubuntu and Tails installed on a variety of machines from old MacBook Pros to ThinkPad X200s somewhere...

chinny22 wrote on 2021-03-24, 11:20:

2 really big stand out moment's for me Getting Command and Conquer around Easter in 95 or 96. I'd played the game before at a fr […]
Show full quote

2 really big stand out moment's for me
Getting Command and Conquer around Easter in 95 or 96. I'd played the game before at a friends so already knew I loved it. That has such a lasting affect I get in the mood to play it round Easter every year.
Seeing the flashing police lights at night in NFS3 on my shiny new P2 400 with a 16MB TNT, It was such a huge jump from the dx2/66 with 2MB Mach64 I'd just upgraded from.

I was lucky in a way, We had the Apple IIe but I was never really interested in that but the 486 came along when I was 15 and starting to loose interest in my childhood toys like Lego.
As you say the more you think about it the more you remember, like using a BBS or Internet for the 1st time "my computer is talking to another computer, wow!" but that's become normal so doesn't have the same impact as that 1st great game you get or blown away by certain hardware improvement.

Damn, how could I forget C&C! Some brilliant entire weeks spent on that and Red Alert later on 😉

The PADI dive shop where I did my Open Water and Advanced Open Water in Gozo, Malta had an Apple IIe that I was soo curious about. The slanted letters on the keys, the weird placement of the Shift and Ctrl keys (Command key!) and how that's strangely all become way more normal and intuitive than a Windows keyboard for me, so much so that I cannot actively get any work done using a PC keyboard anymore. Okay fine, there was a gorgeous girl doing the books at the dive shop and that's what really piqued my interest...

I see that I bought a 20 GB HDD in March 2001. This was the first piece of computer hardware I bought with my own money, and it it increased my computer's storage to 30 GB.

A few months later, I remember reading in amazement that some company (probably WD) was about to introduce a 200 GB drive. This blew my mind. Who could ever need so much space???

brostenen wrote on 2021-03-24, 12:14:

I am not really sure about the exact years as such. However I can tell the story of those moments....

Then I discovered Vogons around 2014 and all is hostory.

That was a great read, thank you for sharing 🙌

For me it's probably the time my dad showed me some tape-based game on a Commodore 64 or similar age Acorn personal computer thing (I can't remember it exactly), must have been when I was 4. I think it's a memory of a memory at this point. A vertical scrolling car combat racing game. That must have sparked my interest in computers because I remember being 5 or 6 and playing on already being hooked on PCs.

Next is getting Driver 1. I saw it in a catalogue with a single screenshot of a car getting some rad air in San Francisco and I really wanted it. This was about 3 months before Christmas so I had a long time to wait! It was worth it though once I figured out the tutorial level (impressive at 8 years old!). It was probably my first 3D accelerated game not that I knew what that meant, I just thought it looked incredible.

Next is probably autumn 2002 where a few things came together at once: we got dial-up internet, I was a year into highschool and started getting a few friends, and I realised I could talk to them over the dial-up internet using MSN messenger, and listen to music and "do homework" at the same time. We got broadband in 2005 (Tiscali 1Mb, 8GB Monthly limit). Talking to girls online, the weird mind games of having song lyrics as your current status things, "smileys" (not emojies!), talking to girls with flashing pink font, getting connections on Bebo from New Zealand, America etc.

I got my first own PC for my 18th birthday which was a big deal as it was the family non-gaming PC up until this point. Athlon x2 5200+, 3GB RAM and an 8600GT. I also got my first nerdy friend and I took this PC to his place to play Ghost Recon 1, MOHAA and COD 2. I think with him and his little brother over LAN - good times. I had literally never played a non-splitscreen PC game up until then! Good times arguing with the guy that an 8400GS was not better than a 7950GT just because it was a newer series of cards!

edit - Actually, buying my i7 860 / 8GB PC (With either a 9800GTX+ or a 4890 I already had I think?) in 2009 or 10 probably counts as a defining moment. No longer having to fight for CPU time and RAM. Seeing Windows 7 fly, but also supported XP. 8GB of RAM in 2009 was great and the PC is still completely usable today.

Completing Mass Effect 1 at 3am is probably the only defining moment from about 2008 until 2021... until...

...last month I tried VR for the first time; it's a game changer and has so much potential.

Of all the things I remember about computers in my life, the standout moments were:
- coming across the BBC Micros at school, and always wanting to spend more time in the computer labs with them but never being able to due to class timetables. They (and my friend's IBM XT) were much more compelling to use than my Apple II+ clone at home, with its green mono monitor. That didn't stop me from hogging the Apple though.
- the introduction of the Mac - sometime in 1984, the school had an information night for the recently released Macintosh 128k. It was just mind-blowing to look at and play with, in that moment when the world was very much CLI-driven; to me (7 y.o.) it was like alien technology. In some ways, we haven't moved that much far past that original interface in 37 years, it's just prettier now.
- getting my first x86 PC in 1991 - a 386SX. I'm slowly gathering up the pieces needed to recreate that original PC as best I can, shop logos and all ... nearly there with that project and when it's done it will be a good point to pause my hoarding ...

pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-03-24, 14:47:

Ah, Linux and the Y2K bug 😉 I wish I could remember those conversations but I can't...Linux for me has been a relatively new thing as well and I'm still very much a noob where that's concerned but I do love it from a security and stability standpoint. I have ElementaryOS (hey, I like pretty too), Xubuntu and Tails installed on a variety of machines from old MacBook Pros to ThinkPad X200s somewhere...

linux on the desktop was something being advocated by some linux 'fans' back in early 2000's, promoted on the basis it just works and you can have total control over it and that windows was thus doomed or at least in some way for cretins, there was an element of snooty nerdish superiority about some linux folk that spoiled it for the majority

however linux just didn't work most of the time, or rather it could install and run pre installed apps but usually lacked sound or other drivers reducing the usefulness - and of course it didn't run windows apps ('wine' at the time wasnt as good as now)

having total control contained a hidden implication - control as long as you are willing to spend lots of time adjusting settings in various config files and willing to chase down lengthy dependency branches or actually modify software code yourself. In other words it was out of reach for most people. At times it felt like having an OS in order to run an OS!

I tried a few distributions at the time and each had good points while faltering on drivers and running into problems if installing anything beyond the basics. I was disappointed but had a 'watch this space' sense at the same time

not sure if that was defining but it was memorable, and indeed linux on the desktop is more realistic in the last 5-10 years, the same issues exist but at much lower impact than before, i use it as an alternative to windows on sufficiently powerful PCs if they are for web browsing etc (eg where i dont have a license for windows, or windows is out of support but the PC can still manage etc)

Zork
DOS for good or evil it opened things up alot more.
Wolfenstein 3D
Doom
The hype over the FDIV bug (Not really defining but opened my eyes about how things get hyped)
Building my own computer for the first time. Suprisingly went very well due to troubleshooting and using computers for many years before.

Windows 95
3dfx Voodoo/Voodoo2

Both were milestones that paved the way for the classic PC into even the last households and decent looking games finally became a reality.
Playing games in 1024x768 (with Z-Buffer deactivated obviously) in early 1998 was just mindblowing at the time and put every console/arcade to shame.

Digger, my first PC game.
Alley Cat, my first multi-layered game.
Karateka, my first "non arcadish" game.
Tetris, my first puzzle game.
Grand Prix, my first first-person perspective game (and it was a blast!).
F-16 Combat Pilot, my first flight sim.
The Global Dillema: Guns or Butter, my first strategy game.
F-15 Strike Eagle II, my first playable flight sim.
King's Bounty, the first strategy game I actually finished.
Hero's Quest (later known as Quest for Glory), my first RPG.
Ultima 6, my first "real" RPG (QfG is adventure hybrid).
Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, my first survey sim.
LHX Attack Chopper, my first helo sim.
War of the Lance, my first wargame.
Star Control 2, the best hybrid game I've ever played.
TIE Fighter, my first playable Star Wars game (X-Wing sucks regarding playability).
Jane's ATF, my first SVGA texture-mapped flight sim.