Where does the hardware "nostalgia era" lie for you?

[Middcore]

I wasn't really allowed to play video games as a kid, didn't start playing PC games much until college and didn't build my first PC until about 11 years ago. So there is no era I have "first-hand" nostalgia for.

 

If I I had to pick a past era that interests me the most though it would probably be the early 2000's. 3D acceleration had come into its own, we were past the era where you regularly needed to fiddle in DOS, online gaming had started to become a thing, and there were a host of outstanding titles released in that period. 

[Zodiark1593]

Playstation 1 and Game Boy Color through to GBA/DS and PS2 were the sort of hardware I used a lot. Special mention goes to the original iMac, which was often seen in classrooms and computer labs (I hadn’t heard this term in awhile) around 1999-2002, with a few in the library when I went to Middle school. 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

2 hours ago, Middcore said:

I wasn't really allowed to play video games as a kid, didn't start playing PC games much until college and didn't build my first PC until about 11 years ago. So there is no era I have "first-hand" nostalgia for.

 

If I I had to pick a past era that interests me the most though it would probably be the early 2000's. 3D acceleration had come into its own, we were past the era where you regularly needed to fiddle in DOS, online gaming had started to become a thing, and there were a host of outstanding titles released in that period. 

I'd also argue that there are some good games one has missed, that even without nostalgia, are fun to visit the first time even if you're years late.  I had NEVER played The Sims before in my life.  I just never tried that franchise.  Sunk lots of hours into it in the pandemic while working from home and having far more free time.

IMO, outside of indies, a lot of what passes or 'AAA' gaming has narrowed in focus, and there's entire genres that are not what they once were that are lots of fun to revisit classic titles.

[TetraSky]

I don't have such attachment or nostalgia for old hardware.

I'm honestly just glad whenever I upgrade, simply because it's so much better/faster.

I did start out my PC story at the Pentium 3 era, but I old nothing but bad memories from that craptastic PC that kept breaking (Packard Bell junk... I lost count how many times my parents sent it away for repair. Couldn't have been cheap shipping a whole PC through the mail either at the time)

[Sprawlie]

It was the year 2035.... and...

 

wait a sec..

 

Oddly, I don't have any era of tech I'm nostalgic for. I am always excited for whats next. I never ever go back.

 

Games or software era? maybe a couple, but hardware is always better going forwards. 

[whm1974]

Classic 8-Bit Home Computers like the Commodore 64 and Atari 800XL Systems.

[BondiBlue]

1 hour ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

I'd also argue that there are some good games one has missed, that even without nostalgia, are fun to visit the first time even if you're years late.

That's very true. There are plenty of games I never played for one reason or another that I'd like to go back to sometime. 

[8tg]

Early to mid 2000’s

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

iMac G3. More specifically, a Sage one because my elementary school had a few of these among the sea of beige PowerPC Perfoma, LC, and whatevers. At one point I thought to myself, I would love to buy one from the school when they retire them. Just something fun to keep around for word processing or something. And make sure it's the one with the green and amber power/sleep lights, not the boring white light the later DVs had. 

 

Pentium 4HT systems. That was the platform I used extensively... until the Southbridge heatsink flew off and the board subsequently burnt out months later. I had a janky solution of cooling it with a Antex Spot Cool. 

 

These ridiculous looking Philips "mini"  bookshelf systems. I loved the aesthetic of those VU meters even though purists would probably bang on how exaggerated they probably are. 

 

 

[Forbidden Wafer]

21 minutes ago, 8tg said:

Early to mid 2000’s

Hmm, how about this CoolerMaster Jet Turbine fan to match? xD

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

1 minute ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Hmm, how about this CoolerMaster Jet Turbine fan to match? xD

[8tg]

1 minute ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Hmm, how about this CoolerMaster Jet Turbine fan to match? xD

I owned one, it was terrible. But the ocz eliminator2 tmd was a dope cooler:

Tip magnetic drive fan, the housing is the motor, the center is just an axel 

it gets really fast, really loud, and barely cools anything 

[Forbidden Wafer]

8 hours ago, 8tg said:

I owned one, it was terrible.

I had the Aero and it worked just fine for my Athlon XP. I imagined they were pretty much the same.
 

[pipnina]

8 hours ago, 8tg said:

I owned one, it was terrible. But the ocz eliminator2 tmd was a dope cooler:

 

Tip magnetic drive fan, the housing is the motor, the center is just an axel 

it gets really fast, really loud, and barely cools anything 

Ah yes, the days when our CPUs could be cooled by a little finned lump of copper and a small fan. Compared to heatpipe 120 or 140mm monstrosities we have today lol.

 

7 hours ago, Caroline said:

Somewhere between the CBM 3032 and the IBM 5251 (in pic)

 

Everything (except for the specs?) in these terminals is great, I wasn't alive when these things were used yet I love them, clicky keyboards, analog switches, dim LEDs, amber/green monochrome monitors, weird boops and hard drive noises.

Here's the closest that I could find, it's from a game but most of the sounds are accurate.

 

I still use a CRT because of how nice the colours look compared to LED/LCD screens, it's bulky and enough to heat up my room during the harshest winters but nice in the end.

 

Been trying to find an early 80's terminal for a while and bring it back to life or refurb it with new parts, nothing high end.

 

When it comes to my likes I have a particular fondness for nixie tubes, 50's TV's and early 1900's appliances, I've found a couple interesting things in my own basement and I've been trying to restore them for a while, an old copper heater in particular that requires some -nowadays- custom parts, (the heating element itself), a box of old outlets/switches and other minor stuff.

I won't lie, I thought that was a keyboard attached to a microwave for a moment! lmao

 

Having a CRT would be great for some nostalgia. Though I'm sure a modern high end LCD would absolutely trash the best CRT today, they were very good at making low res images nice and soft to look at.

[Ragnarsdad]

For me it is everything from 286 through to p4 (as far as ibm clones go anyway). I am currently building a socket 423 system on a NOS intel board I picked up on a whim. 

 

Would love to pic up a 486 or socket 7 machine bit prices for parts are crazy, I remember when the millennium bug was a worry you couldn't give away 486 and earlier parts as people were worried about the bug.

 

I did have a nice dual cpu socket 8 system back in the day and most of my machines had scsi drives which are hard to get now. 

 

The first new pc I bought was a 486 sx25mhz and I still keep an eye out on ebay to see if I can find e the same model, even if I did have to pay £300 to get an external cd-rom drive for it.

[Spindel]

MOS 6502 to Motorola 68000 era. 

 

In big part because the limits in processing power meant that there was much more magic with some software and demos (from the demo scene) if you relate to the available processing power. 

 

I myself built my own computers in the P2 to Athlon XP era and have no real nostalgia for that era. It was fun and all but no real nostalgia.   

[Kilrah]

Mid 90s for me, Pentium 1 and macs with mac os before X.

[HanZie82]

Damn im feeling old now.
My nostalgia lies with the green and orange monochrome monitors.
I had turned on as an 8 year old boy way to long into the night trying all sorts of things.

I can remember mucking around in BASIC until like 2 in the am.

My dad busting in and shouting i should go to sleep, waking everyone else up ofcourse.

 

 

 

Also the 386 era is when i really started being interested in gaming. As in multiple(4+) hours a day.

 

 

 

I can remember paying for my first Pentium II (altho it was 2nd hand it was my first). Such much time has past.

 

 

 

Years later still bothering my parents staying up until its light out again, just because the Delta Force Black Hawk Down gamers where overseas. hahaha.

So many things i took for granted in that game that still TODAY are hard to come by.

You can prone, you can lean, there's 64 player servers, operate several vehicles and mounted weaponry, endless maps (like walk 15 minutes and still not be stopped), make you own maps (sort of), you can med/revive each other and you can even re-supply. It was such a great game, to bad gaming didn't really evolve from that besides getting more graphical awesomeness.

 

 

[abit-sean]

Definitely 2005 as I access to all the latest hardware and got paid to help people set it up. Also had contacts in OCZ, Corsair, seasonic, XFX, intel and AMD who always sent me there new stuff to check for compatibility.

Now I have buy new tech myself and use a boring dell box at work instead of a water cooled intel extreme edition engineering sample with 4GB OCZ gold edition memory!

 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

8 hours ago, HanZie82 said:

You can prone, you can lean, there's 64 player servers, operate several vehicles and mounted weaponry, endless maps (like walk 15 minutes and still not be stopped), make you own maps (sort of), you can med/revive each other and you can even re-supply. It was such a great game, to bad gaming didn't really evolve from that besides getting more graphical awesomeness.

I def think that in terms of game play *mechanics*, video games have largely stopped evolving.  Sometimes there's a neat new gimmick like games with more verticality (Titanfall) or new multiplayer modes (Battle Royal) but none of this is anything a video game couldn't do 15 years ago, it'd have been less pretty, but it'd have been mechanically the same.  Newer gaming tech no longer earns us new, more in-depth experiences, just prettier experiences.

 

And repeating what I've said before, I feel that some genres have largely taken a back seat as more and more games now are very 'safe' in their design because they are $100 million budget too-big-to-fail projects that must bring in half a billion dollars or 200 people will lose their jobs.  Gaming used to be neat, interesting, and experimental, now less and less games feel like that while more and more just feel like 'Yet another military scifi shooter'.

 

There are for sure exceptions to this, I'm more commenting on overall trends.

[Mooshi]

First PC was a POS HP with a Pentium 4. I was interested in building PCs when the Q6600 was the chip to have. First PC I ended up building was a bit later with a 2500k. :3

[LloydLynx]

Probably late 2000s early 2010s. My first laptop had some 1.83Ghz C2D with a gig of RAM and a 40GB hard drive. The next laptop I got had a 2Ghz 64bit C2D with 4GB of RAM and a 60GB hard drive. Then I was temporarily given this 2nd gen Pentium laptop with Windows 8, 4GB of RAM and I think a 640GB hybrid drive. I was actually able to launch games with it, even if I had to manually mod map files to get higher than 10 fps. I ended up having to give that laptop back.

 

Years later my mom bought me my own laptop with a 2nd gen i3, 6GB of RAM, and Windows 7. I was super excited because I could actually sorta play games again.

 

Many years later(today), I ended up going back to that 64 bit C2D laptop and installing a 500GB SSD in it with Debian MATE. It's what I'm typing this on right now. The thing is just so solid, I can't give it up. Plus, I got my gaming PC to do heavy lifting whenever I need it. I also got a Thinkpad to handle all the proprietary garbage and school stuff.

[da na]

On 9/10/2021 at 10:25 PM, 8tg said:

I owned one, it was terrible. But the ocz eliminator2 tmd was a dope cooler:

Tip magnetic drive fan, the housing is the motor, the center is just an axel 

it gets really fast, really loud, and barely cools anything 

Ah, typical OCZ. Innovative but either broken or pointless. Their RAM was pretty good but seemed like none of their other stuff worked as intended. 

[cacoe]

My first PC, mid-late 90's when everything was new, I had no internet, was pretty alone in figuring out how to do things. Most my software was from gaming/pc mag demo discs and most of what I learned was too, other than from trial and error. Just figuring how to run the shareware copy of doom that came with my PC was a massive achievement and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. 

 

I didn't know the hardware I was running was already old, I didn't really care, I was 12 and everything blew my mind when I got my first PC.

 

Kinda weird that getting a VR headset is the only thing that's come close to that since.

 

[atxcyclist]

My first computer was an IBM XT I put together from spare parts, this was in the early 90's so it was already an old machine. I would say building ~200mhz through AMD K7 machines was where most of my nostalgia lives.