You kids have it so easy these days in building a computer....

[mr moose]

Yeah, I won't do it again I promise... :lol:

 

Though it is true, I did use to program Basic on my Commodore 64, you know making a ball bounce across the screen, text repeat etc etc.

Oh it's also where I pirated my first game after buying the floppy disk addition.

me too,  I was always fascinated with how they copied the disks.

[slightlyjaded]

OH YOU WANNA MAKE SOMETHING OF THIS!?

 

Yahoo was decent too. And Ask Jeeves!

Infoseek FTW....Until lycos brought it out, and turned it into an unusable pile of horse manure.

 

Wonder if that's where microsoft got source code for bing?

[othertomperson]

Infoseek FTW....Until lycos brought it out, and turned it into an unusable pile of horse manure.

 

Wonder if that's where microsoft got source code for bing?

 

Not sure, but MSN search was at one point powered by Yahoo, which is an interesting reversal.

[Ertman]

Um, yeah so? onboard nics where around in the late 90's doesn't mean majority of enthusiasts had access to them. It seems you are trying to dismiss his experience (and by the look of it, the experiences of many enthusiasts of the time) because you had better hardware and internet back then.

Its hypocritical of you when you are being dismissive of my experiences. Doesn't really matter what I say, or tell you of my slow dial up or the hardware used, you're just one of those people, and your going to just keep doing what you do.

[alicskysareblue]

pssh... my  first real pc was a computer running windows 95....this was back in  2005, I dont know the specs the only thing I used it for was internet browsing and watching porn, and it was terrible at both, got caught one too many times when the browser would freeze up just as  my parents got back from grocery shopping.

 

point is kids  if your families computer is over ten years old  DONT use it to watch porn.

[slightlyjaded]

Wow 56k modem, try 9600bps... :rolleyes:

I remember my first PC 286dx, 512kb ram, 20mb hd, 5:25" FDD and Dos 5.

Cost us around $3000 back then, no internet, we had ASCII based Bulletin Board Systems.

 

Man I'm old...

(cough) acoustic coupler.....I think the first real modem I saw was 2400 BAUD.

[slightlyjaded]

This one's a bit older than OP's post. But does anyone remember having to go line by line through autoexec.bat and config.sys to stop anything nonessential in windows or dos from accessing that first 256 KB of ram so that your brand new program would actually run?

 

I definitely do not miss the split conventional/extended memory.

 

Although I do still use .pif files a lot more than anyone else I know.

[Schoolofmonkey]

(cough) acoustic coupler.....I think the first real modem I saw was 2400 BAUD.

 

Yeah I saw one of them, had a friend who had one, we played with it one day, made 9600 look like ADSL...lol...

 

Funny thing was I had this disk for my Commodore 64 which allowed it to go online, looked a lot like the first variation of AOL's software.

I could never find a modem for the C64 in Australia though, not that there were ISP's here and the number the software dialed was international...

 

Oh you guys remember Sierra On-Line, how it had it's own dial in system build into their games, it allowed you to register you software, but again international number at per minute rates..lol

[Michael McAllister]

I feel old.  I remember when HotBot was popular.  My sister and brother had HotBot e-mail as well.  I had 56k into my teens.  I feel for those who experienced 28k.  Mother of god was 56k slow!

[Freaksmacker]

Wasn't such good old days, was it? lol

[mr moose]

Its hypocritical of you when you are being dismissive of my experiences. Doesn't really matter what I say, or tell you of my slow dial up or the hardware used, you're just one of those people, and your going to just keep doing what you do.

 

How can I be hypocritical?  I haven't dismissed any of your experiences.   All I have done is ask why you are trying to dismiss the op's experience (and before you say you haven't I'll point you back to your post where you detail everything he said and counter it likes it's not true).  As far as I and many others are concerned what he has posted is quite reflective what was involved from 93 to 2003,  Just because you came in on the tail end of that and didn't find it to be as hard doesn't mean he is wrong. 

[BloodySinner]

Thank you.

[DimasRMDO]

Damn I miss Commodore 64, it was very complicated.....

[Guest]

Stop whining, it's called evolution.

[Dabombinable]

Stop whining, it's called evolution.

Locked CPU are not an evolution. And the same goes for expensive motherboards that don't actually meet the ATX/mATX standards properly, HDD that all look the same and have no where near the build quality of older ones. Need I go on some more?

[Ertman]

How can I be hypocritical?  I haven't dismissed any of your experiences.   All I have done is ask why you are trying to dismiss the op's experience (and before you say you haven't I'll point you back to your post where you detail everything he said and counter it likes it's not true).  As far as I and many others are concerned what he has posted is quite reflective what was involved from 93 to 2003,  Just because you came in on the tail end of that and didn't find it to be as hard doesn't mean he is wrong. 

You are hypocritical and ignorant apparently. I have no idea why you keep bringing up 1993-1999 era, since I clearly state early 2000's several times as indicated by the OP? I am unsure if it is a reading comprehension thing as this is the third time I where you have not read or understood something posted, or it could be something else entirely. I bolded a part from your last post,  you are being dismissive. You know nothing of my personal history or experience with computers (starting well before 2000 by the way), yet you feel that you must marginalize it with assumptions based on no known facts in an attempt to rationalize to yourself that my opinion and experience which is contrary must be invalid. You did the same thing in your previous post.

 

I have a contrary experience to the OP, something I share with friends that are far more enthusiasts then myself of the pre 2000 era. I never said that the OPs experience was wrong, just not as difficult as he discusses, hence a point by point discussion instead of blanket statement. You do realize the whole title of the thread is "You kids have it so easy...", and I am only stating that I believe that it has been easy for longer then the last several years.

 

I am literally, right now, tinkering with and upgrading an old computer of mine from that era (for fun), running windows 98. Its has only been marginally more difficult then it is now because not all the manufacturers still have legacy drivers. I had a couple of problems and old posts on forum 2001, cleared that up in a few minutes.

 

While things are easier now in comparison, operating systems like Windows 9x and the adoption of the internet made things far easier, and those things predate 2000. People still have many (not all) of the same type problems they did back then, the forums are full of these posts.

[PlayModeOn]

I still use a 80GB hard-drive.

Infact I only have a 120GB SSD and 2x 80GB HDD. And they are all mostly full.

[ThomasD]

Ha! 

 

I built my first computer in 1986 - a 286.  Wanted a 386 SX, but it was too expensive.

 

It didn't even have a hard drive to start, just two 5.25" FDDs.  Spend a week trying to get the thing up and running, and I was on the campus of a major university.  But I'd ask a question and get three different answers.

[Dredgy]

I still maintain the best thing to happen to PC building in the last decade or so is the cushioned IO shield.

It's weird now, still having fingers after I've finished a build.

[Stazy]

Yeah i remember the good old days too. I started with a amd athlon 1600+, single core cpu which was clocked at around 1.2 ghz. My motherboard was an asrock via KT series, also monitor was at first a 15..then a 17 then a 19 inch CRT. I remember when my cd blew up in my cd-rom drive.

Once i had to change the hole case and i had problems with the MOBO because nothing was labeled, and i mean nothing and the color was a military green, also with the ATA hdd, o boy , had to buy like 3 ata connector strips(ide cables) of those a year because they would burn out and it would not boot up, also had to be careful with jumpers, i would always lose those suckers and had to buy a new one.

I actually still keep that pc up to date, it has windows xp on it, it also has 768 ddr 1 and a amd radeon 290x with 64 bit bus i think it was nice but now if i run any video higher than 720p it freezes the image, when i had issues with the mobo..o boy...i really needed the manual at that thing and it had like 60 pages with detailed information, at these new modern mobo, don't need such a thing everything is labeled 

Actually until last year i was using ATA drive as my boot drive, when everyone was moving to ssd i was using ATA )

[bcredeur97]

I will say there are some things in there that I have experience with even though im only 17. 

 

The kids that are <10 years old though I feel terrible for They missed so much and arent even going to know!

[VenkiPhy6]

My utmost respect .....

[Arct1c0n]

Wow!!! I had no idea this would turn into such a well liked thread! I just thought it be funny to do show these young rascals how it used to be and how much has changed since I starting building my own rig lol. It's been a really fun experience hearing other people's stories here.

Do I get some kinda special avatar for reaching 100 likes? Lol

[The Gaige]

One of the best damm threads on the planet, you sir are Awesome! 

[VerticalDiscussions]

Yah building a pc in this decade is pretty easy, manuals are complex with lots of information, positioning schemes come with most cases and psu's cable management, so yah. In the future hopefully everything would be like the modular smartphone concept, applied to computers, where blocks and squares would be the way to connect each piece. Now that would be a bliss.