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Back in My Day: Tech Edition

JAW96
By JAW96
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I never really got to work with old PC's, we used to have a Windows XP machine, and i used to play Rollercoaster and A2 Racer alot. We also only had a little bit of time to use a PC, since it was the only one we had. Also crt-displays were all we had in this household until 2011, my parents didn't think upgrading would be worth it till then.

Asus B85M-G / Intel i5-4670 / Sapphire 290X Tri-X / 16GB RAM (Corsair Value 1x8GB + Crucial 2x4GB) @1333MHz / Coolermaster B600 (600W) / Be Quiet! Silent Base 800 / Adata SP900 128GB SSD & WD Green 2TB & SG Barracuda 1TB / Dell AT-101W / Logitech G502 / Acer G226HQL & X-Star DP2710LED

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IDE jumpers.

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Dell Inspiron 3147

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HTC One M8 64GB, Droid Razr M

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My very first computer is an Atari 65XE I had when I was a kid.

Specs:

 

CPU: 6502C, 1.79 MHz Memory: 64K RAM, 24K ROM Operating System: XL Operating System Input/Output: Cartridge Port, two joystick ports, composite video output, serial bus connector for floppy drive or printer Resolution: 320x192 max, up to 256 colors, 40x24 text

 

It has no HDD, not even a floppy drive, and I had to save data into audio cassettes. Gave me my first experience with programming.

HOSHUNMK2

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For the 90s people:

 

  • 5.25" floppy diskettes
  • Diamond Multimedia - They made GPUs and apple Emulation add in cards (yes, you could emulate an Apple 2 on a pc)
  • 3dfx - GPUs
  • Matrox - GPUs
  • S3 - GPUs and chipsets
  • Getting a $900 phone bill for leaving the modem on your computer on. Yikes! (This happened once to my family).
  • Not having a POTS modem switch and not being able to take calls if you did not have a 2nd POTS line.
  • Usb 1.0/1.1 
  • Serial for everything! You had to turn your pc off when plugging in peripherals, none of it was PnP like we have it now.
  • Actually knowing how to use an CLI. These days, ask someone to partition a drive via a CLI, and they draw a blank expression.
  • AGP, PCI-X, and even the occasional ISA bus would show up every so often.
  • Fax
  • Dot Matrix printers - you'll occasionally still find these around in offices, businesses, and schools that haven't upgraded their invoice printing systems. Paper was hole punched along the long edge and was continuous feed.

▶ Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. - Einstein◀

Please remember to mark a thread as solved if your issue has been fixed, it helps other who may stumble across the thread at a later point in time.

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Back in my day, there was not the gigantic gap in the disparity between PC and Console graphics. Also floppy disks were floppy

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Back in my day, to upgrade RAM you had to pull the chips out of the board and replace them. Had a few people at my job ask me what a chip puller was/is for. I keep one on my desk as a conversation piece.

Also banging on top of a machine to reseat mem chips when it wouldn't boot.

 

First personal computer, I don't remember the specs, it was over 20 years ago. Had Wolfenstein 3D on it, Windows 3.11x, and got me addicted to PC gaming and first person shooters.

 

EDIT: I forgot to add that my very first discrete video card was a Voodoo, I'm pretty sure it was a Voodoo5. I know it had 2 fans on it, and used a 4 pin molex to connect. The thing was freaking massive too. This did not go in the machine with Wolfenstein on it, I was playing TFC by this point.

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Back in my day.

 

-You had to buy cards for any ports you wanted for your PC other than the keyboard port.

 

-30 MB was too much to fill with data.

 

-You couldn't just connect any card you wanted, you had to first check which IRQs and DMAs were available and change the bunch of jumpers all cards had to set them up in a system.

 

-CPUs did not had a heatsink.

 

-When you turned the PC off, it WAS off.

 

OMG I am so glad you don't have to mess with IRQ's anymore.

“Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.”

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IDE drives. If you've never had to set a jumper on a HDD or ODD count yourself lucky, they're not actually that far in the past.

 

IDE jumpers man, they're a doozy.

Seriously though, newer mobos used cable select so other than the fairly simple task of setting cable select everything could be done in the bios.

 

For the 90s people:

 

  • Actually knowing how to use an CLI. These days, ask someone to partition a drive via a CLI interface, and they draw a blank expression.
Sorry, but the fact that you said command line interface interface is annoying me, just like pin number(personal identification number number)

The computer I use daily is an old hp workstation with dual single core (ht) xeon and ports that include IDE, pci(-x too), serial, parallel and a non uefi bios to top it off.

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IDE jumpers man, they're a doozy.

Seriously though, newer mobos used cable select so other than the fairly simple task of setting cable select everything could be done in the bios.

  Sorry, but the fact that you said command line interface interface is annoying me, just like pin number(personal identification number number)

The computer I use daily is an old hp workstation with dual single core (ht) xeon and ports that include IDE, pci(-x too), serial, parallel and a non uefi bios to top it off.

Oops, missed that part. Edited and fixed my post. It was early in the morning when I typed that  -_- .

▶ Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. - Einstein◀

Please remember to mark a thread as solved if your issue has been fixed, it helps other who may stumble across the thread at a later point in time.

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IDE Master/Slave Jumpers

IRQ Jumper assignment

800x600 16-Bit color CRT's

Hardware dialup demodulators (modems)

Cyrix Processors

Acorn Computers

"1 of 24" Floppy Disk installs of Windows

3DFX "3-way SLI" Voodoo Graphics

1MB EDO-Ram Chips

Pentium 3 breaking the "1Ghz" barrier

Emergence of the magical "USB" interface

Motherboards with onboard video & sound

 

I'm sure many many many more things.

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**in grandpa Simpson voice**

 

Back in my day, you plugged your gamepad or joystick into the sound card. The case Fan didn't really cool your system, it just collected all the dust and/or rodents. We had these things called floppy disks, but then they made a smaller version that weren't floppy at all, but held twice as much data, but people still called them floppy disks. We had these hard drives that sounded like a pillow case full of walnuts falling down a flight of stairs. Displays were heavy, like a block of cement, and would make a weird vibration sound for a split second when you turned them on, and they flickered and gave old people headaches. Online gameplay required you to dial someones phoneline with your modem, and connect to their modem. Warcraft 2 would always crash just before you won. and then we wou...ZZzzzzzz....

R9 3900XT | Tomahawk B550 | Ventus OC RTX 3090 | Photon 1050W | 32GB DDR4 | TUF GT501 Case | Vizio 4K 50'' HDR

 

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back in my day computers had switch on the front similar to a giant light switch you flipped to turn them on.

DeuxPS2.jpg

I had one just like this back in the early 90's

"Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response."

Arthur M. Schlesinger

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I got into computers around and AMD Phenom series. However I owned a single core AMD laptop at one time.

People that got into computers around the same time as me still wonder, wth was so great about the 9600GT. We see it mentioned everywhere.

LinusGGtips

Build It. Mod It. Customize It.

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Back in my day...

 

IDE cables made cable management impossible.

We had master and slave drives.

People used to care about motherboard front side bus.

80mm fans were standard.

Pentium processors were great.

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Back in my day...

 

IDE cables made cable management impossible.

We had master and slave drives.

People used to care about motherboard front side bus.

80mm fans were standard.

Pentium processors were great.

but i still love IDE nonetheless. There weren't really cases back then that really had case management.

"If it has tits or tires, at some point you will have problems with it." -@vinyldash303

this is probably the only place i'll hang out anymore: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/274320-the-long-awaited-car-thread/

 

Current Rig: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, Abit IN9-32MAX nForce 680i board, Galaxy GT610 1GB DDR3 gpu, Cooler Master Mystique 632S Full ATX case, 1 2TB Seagate Barracuda SATA and 1x200gb Maxtor SATA drives, 1 LG SATA DVD drive, Windows 10. All currently runs like shit :D 

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but i still love IDE nonetheless. There weren't really cases back then that really had case management.

Yeah, IDE was still cool. None of the cases I had back in the day had cable management holes to hide cables behind the motherboard, you just had to cable tie everything. 

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  • UEFI
  • LCD Screens
  • Broadband
  • USB Windows Installations
  • No need for special driver disks.
  • Very few IDE cables

 

Most of these would have been a lifesaver when I was working at a computer shop a few years back!

 

D3SL91 | Ethan | Gaming+Work System | NAS System | Photo: Nikon D750 + D5200

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MS-DOS and i are the same age...

                                        

 

                                                 

 

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For the 90s people:

 

 

  • Getting a $900 phone bill for leaving the modem on your computer on. Yikes! (This happened once to my family)

 

My family got a $200 bill once, and we were like, uhhh NO.

 

Anyways, to contribute to the thread. The only computer we had in my 3rd grade class had Oregon Trail on it, and only a couple kids per day got a chance to play it. Ohhhh..... 3 second skip protection walkmans..... ahhh those days!

CPU i5 3570k MOBO Asus Maximus Gene V GPU Asus DCUII 670 CASE Corsair 350D (windowless) SSD Crucial M550 256GB msata CPU COOLER Noctua NH-D14 RAM Corsair XMS3 8GB 1600mhz PSU Corsair AX750 Display Asus PB287Q 4K (my review on it http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/380533-journey-into-4k-goodness-asus-pb287q-review/) & Asus VH236H 1080P

Keyboard Logitech G710+ MX Brown Mouse Logitech G502 (my review on it http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/299464-logitech-g502/ )

Proud owner of a BlackBerry Q10.

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Back in my day, people wanted to know if they could run crysis and they weren't joking.

CPU : Intel Core i7 3960X, Mobo : X79-UD3, Memory : 4x4GB Vengeance Black Memory 1600MHz, GPU : Asus GTX 970 Strix, Case : Switch 810 Matte Black, Storage : 256GB Samsung 830 SSD, Seagate Barracuda 1TB, PSU : Thermaltake 750W 80+ Bronze, Displays : 3x Asus 1080p Screens, Cooling : Corsair H100i, Keyboard : Logitech G710+, Mouse : Madcat Cyborg R.A.T.7, Sound : Sennheiser HD598, V-Moda Crossfade LP, Logitech Z-5500, HMD : Oculus Rift CV1

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Back in my day phones would actually wake you up when you just set the alarm.. Missed the day setting on my phone and the alarm did not go off. Because obviously i wanted to wake up next wednesday... Pointless piece of crap.

We also had proper alarm clocks. But that was earlier..

====>The car thread<====>Dark Souls thread<====>Placeholder<====
"Life is like a raging river, Its gonna get rough downstream. And people's gonna piss in it" 

"Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he THINK he was doing at the time?"

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Used MSdos. Had to type everything in to do anything.

 

5.25 inch floppy discs that were actually "floppy".

 

Only used a mouse when running AutoCAD.

 

Cassette players and boom-boxes were cool.

 

Mobile phones were the size and weight of a brick.

My Systems:

Main - Work + Gaming:

Spoiler

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F@H Rig:

Spoiler

FX-8350 // Deepcool Neptwin // MSI 970 Gaming // AData 2x 4GB 1600 DDR3 // 2x Gigabyte RX-570 4G's // Samsung 840 120GB SSD // Cooler Master V650 // Windows 10

 

HTPC:

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Laptops:

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WIFE'S: Dell Latitude E5450 // 14" 1366x768 // i5-5300U 2.3GHz Dual-Core HT // Intel HD5500 // 2x4GB RAM DDR3L 1600 // 500GB 7200 HDD // Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon

 

EXPERIMENTAL: Pinebook // 11.6" 1080p // Manjaro KDE (ARM)

NAS:

Spoiler

Home NAS: Pentium G4400 @3.3 // Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3 // 2x 4GB DDR4 2400 // Intel HD Graphics // Kingston A400 120GB SSD // 3x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200 HDDs in RAID-Z // Cooler Master Silent Pro M 1000w PSU // Antec Performance Plus 1080AMG // FreeNAS OS

 

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