ahh.. the good old days ;)

hehe.. i also remember my first computer -- c64. i didn't get a modem for it, but i programmed my first couple of programs in c64 basic. and i sure played a lot of nice games. giana sisters (however that is spelled), and Zack McKracken where probably two of my favorites.

yeah, i was hooked for life . i went trough 286, some 486, p1/200 and now pII/500.

i think before pentium time, and before AMD and Cyrus (anybody remembers them? ;)) things where simple and i could stay in the game. i was never much of a "hardware guy" (or expert like you cow ), but there was only one processor at any time, one motherboard (nobody even talked about them), one monitor, a hard disk and maybe a printer. and a new processor come out only once in a couple of months, and that was it. no 2 different processor makers, no 3 different processors every month, no 40 different motherboard makers and no 500 different motherboards every month. no to mention no graphical/network/musical/modem/firewire/scsi/whatnot cards.. none of them.

now, even if i was into hardware, i don't think i could stay in the game. so i don't. my p2/500 is good enough for me. i don't need nothing faster. no (sane) current program needs more than 500mhz, and i don't play games that much. sure i could compile my kernel a bit faster, but i don't do that too often (and i don't want to anyway ;))


about sw: well, i programmed (borland) turbo pascal on dos, and when i saw Delphi I on win 3.1 i was hooked again. (btw, i think win 1.0 and 2.0 never made it to the public -- i think they where internal to m$).

i also resisted to w95 for a long time. now i don't remember why. maybe it all seemed too "fancy" for me. nice makeup, but.. (probably like i resist winXP now ;)). somewhere in the middle of that linux come into game, and it was all wonderful and interesting, but w2k is still my primary OS. maybe it is because i need to know how my sites work in ****ty IE, or i am just a slave of habits, but there it is..


oh, never mind that.. zombie must be getting old too...


one more thing. this is serbia, so internet come here a little bit (too) late. so, when i stepped onto the net, there where already millions of sites, and my mind dazzled with knowing all that sites exist. i wanted to know everything, to read every single site, and then visit every site that site pointed to. (and if any of them was good, read all they pointed to, and...)

now, with google and blogs, i feel good about internet, and i am excited (in a good way) again. google is for looking up smth quickly. blogs on the other hand are for expanding my knowledge. i read blogs of ppl who have similar interests like me (but often know more than me ;)). they point to new articles i might want to read, and new sites, and sometimes they even write smth nice themselves. that works great for me.. (i only wish more smart ppl woudl start their blogs...)

this makes me feel old. My first computer was a TI99a or something like that, it must have been 1979-80 and I taught myself TI basic and played a lot of games and even wrote a few. I never had a commodore because my dad worked for texas instruments and we had a computer in the house before C64 was around. In highschool I learned a language called focal on a machine that was larger than my car, had tubes, and 4k ram split between 4 teletype terminals with no monitors. We definately learned to optimize our code. Storage was done on paper tape. My machine at home was much more powerful than my highschools computer, that had a boot routine which included configuring switches. In college I first learned cobol and was submiting code on punch cards. Don't ask me about the time I slipped in a snowstorm on my way back to my room and dropped my cards. My second year of college introduced me to C and monochrome workstations on a VAX/UNIX system. I wrote possibly the most widely distributed game for the TI PC (TI tried to keep their PC's separate from IBM's and had TI DOS, and TI Basic that were different from IBM's) TI wanted their computer to be "serious" so they didn't encourage any game development and the only games available were games written by TI engineers in their spare time. I wrote a football game that displayed opposing plays as "overlays" and allowed you to play an entire season or even multiple seasons with players aging, drafting etc. Some engineers from TI told me a few years later that game wound up in more than 10 countries and probably on the hard drives of 5,000 engineers. A little pascal and Assembler thrown in in the mid eighties when I was getting out of college and then I mostly left computers as I took my computer engineering major and started working as a project engineer for a construction company. I used a 286 for estimating construction work but didn't really write code for about 5 years. When I joined the Navy I was injured and on medical hold for about half a year and I bought a 386sx and started up again. I did some collateral work on PC's in the Navy including writing some webpages for a shipwide intranet and then I went to work for Intel when I left the Navy. Spent my time at Intel repairing robotics and teaching classes on computers and robotics and building web apps in ASP. Started a computer training/web development company on the side and eventually left Intel when it became too large to do both. My ex-wife owns that company now and I'm starting a new one... I really only got into PHP as my three hosting companies grew and I got more and more into the open source products that I was running on my web servers. Wow that was long, and darn I'm old.

I really don't remember my first computer which was a C64. It was mostly used by my big brother. I was allowed to bang the keyboard with my hands, I had just learned how to stand up

Then the computer I remember. 486/DX2, 32MB, 2xCD-ROM, 900MB hard disk (well two hard disks equal to this size), DOS & Win3.11 if I remember correctly. Even the newest games worked in it.

Now the computer I use today. PII 450 MHz, 64MB, 32xCD-ROM, 6GB hd, Win98. I've had to upgrade it a bit, today it has 512 MB, 16xDVD-ROM & 2x2x4 CD-RW, 6GB hd & 20GB hd, Win98, ADSL. It's getting slower every day. If anyone knows a good way of telling my parents that I really really really need a new computer, please post it here. I want to test it.

Now to the excitement. If something is exciting, it must have something new and weird. I've always used DOS or Windows, so if I want to have some really exciting stuff with computers I should install Linux. Too bad that no-one sells computers cheaply (no, not the ones below 350MHz.)

My first computer was an acorn, extremely slow, couldnt hold much, but i loved it because i could play the lemmings on it, all 3 of them dam i loed that game

Now, my second computer, which is a Athlon AMD, 450 MHZ, 60GB hard drives ... better but still pretty crappy ... and the new one my dads buildin, shootin to 3.0 ghz

Rather than type something new, I am going to cut and paste a few paragraphs from a essay I wrote for school a couple years back

The year was 1984; the era of the personal computer had just begun to rise a few years earlier. I was ten years old and wanted nothing more in life than to have a computer of my own. I had never even touched one, but I just knew that computers would be an integral part of my life. When my fascination first began, I am sure my parents thought it would pass. Little did they know that their son was completely determined that he would have a computer. For six months I begged and pleaded. I promised more than I could ever deliver. As Christmas approached I sensed that all my hard work had paid off. I could almost smell the computer in the house. I dreamed of sitting in front of that technological wonder and typing in my first program. I could barely contain myself. Then it happened.

Early Christmas morning, I arose before anyone else. I quietly made my way to the family room where I knew all our presents would be. As I went through the slated, double doors that stood between me and the family room, my heart leapt with joy. Right in front of me was a brand new Texas Instruments TI-99A complete with a cassette tape drive for storage. It was all I could do to stop from screaming with delight. Sitting right next to my beautiful new computer was a book on how to program in BASIC. As there was still a couple hours before anyone else would be awake, I sat down and powered the computer on and began the first lesson in the book. If I wasn't hooked on computers before that day, there was no doubt I was after I had touched that computer.

At first, my parents thought the computer was great. They saw how happy it made me, and they felt it was a good educational tool. But as time went on, and I spent more and more time on the computer, my parents' attitude towards it changed. As I became more technically advanced, so did my computer needs. I eventually upgraded to an Apple //c. With this new computer came the BBS scene. Immediately after coming home from school, I would tie the phone line up at the house for hours. If I wasn't dialed into a BBS and searching for information, then I was busy programming something new on my computer. I was always on the computer. Even while I was away from the computer at school, I thought about the computer. During class I would write down programs on paper to type in when I got home. I was trying to accumulate every ounce of information I could. There just wasn't enough time in the day to learn as much as I wanted and felt I needed to.

All this time on the computer aggravated my parents to no end. They would complain that I was using the phone line too much. The educational tool they bought me became such a nuisance to them that they began to restrict my use of it. This is where my rebellion towards my parents began. There was simply too much to learn to allow my parents to keep me from it. I began to sneak out of bed to use the computer. I would place pillows against the door to muffle the sounds of my keystrokes. Occasionally I would fake illness to stay home from school so that I could use the computer. This went on for some time and I can honestly say that I don't regret a moment of it. I learned so much about computers and how they work during this time that I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Then I entered high school. With the influx of new friends I slipped away from my computing habits. Rather than come right home after school to work on the computer, I started hanging out with people from school. Friday and Saturday nights were now spent partying all night rather than pulling an all-nighter on some project I was working on. I regret these times. Sure, they were fun but they didn't serve any purpose except to take me away from my first love, the computer. I'm sure that at this point my parents would have been happy to see me back on the computer tying up the phone line than out partying with my friends.

One day I finally shaped up. High school was over and I realized I couldn't party for ever. I went and bought myself a new computer as my old one was quite out of date. This provided a huge amount of new learning opportunities. The new computer was an IBM compatible, a whole new architecture to tinker with. Since then, I have been striving to learn all I can about computers, from hardware to software. Programming, databases, web development, you name it I've dabbled in it. Sometimes I feel that I am still that ten year old sitting in front of the computer for the first time. I still just stare at the screen in awe sometimes.

Well, I wasn't quite as lucky as some of the other folks who had comodores. My first 'computer' was a ZX Spectrum. I remember I had to plug it into the TV everytime I wanted to use it. I remember the 'joys' of loading a program. First I had to find the programme I wanted to use on the tape, Connect the tape recorder, push play, then go away for about 30 minutes while the tape recorder makes a lot of screeching noises. When I get back (and all went well) I could do what I wanted. I learnt basic programming on the ZX and I think I've still got a manual for it around here somewhere.

My next computer was a 386. What I can't understand is how I managed with only 50MB harddisk space and 1Meg memory

Regards,
Thilo

matt did you ever play a game called tunnels of doom on the 99a?

that is pretty much what my c64 days where like... plug into tv, tape, loading, load errors, again...

This makes me feel young, I got hooked on computers when my dad bought the family a 486, I guess I was about 6 years old. My dad used linux some at work, so he was a fan of the DOS interface, so I learned how to use DOS at the ripe age of 6. By 7 I was ding the closest thing I could imagine to programming, writing batch files to automate atupid little tasks. I used computers just as a user for quite a while. When I was 10 was probably when I got really into it. My cousin's girlfirend(Now his wife) had herself a webpage on geocities, and that was teh coolest thing ever, I wanted it so bad, so she taught me the basics of HTML, and I had myself a pitifulk looking website. But from thee, my fascination with computers and how they worked grew, I wanted to know everythomg, I started getting into programming via Javascript, eventually moved to PHP, now I'm working on C++ and Java.

I remember the first game I ever got for our old computer, SimCity. It came in a pack of 3, SimCity, SimAnt and SimLife. The hard drive couldn;t handle all 3 of them being installed at the same time. I remember my first internet, we used AOL(and my parents still use it)From AOL version 1. I remember how slow the internet was, which is why I never used it much, there just wasnt that much cool, it took like 20 years to load, and by then I didn't care what was on it.

Computers today just don't excite me, there isn't a whole lot new, a faster processor, a bigger hard drive, I want something new an innovative, the most eciting thing to me in the last several years was firewire, 10000000x faster than USB. Seriously, I notice barey any difference in the speeds of my high processor demand games(solitare) from the 486 to the 3 GHZ machines they have now, I actually think it ran beter on Win 3.1, less bloat. Its just not as cool anymore, it was awesome before, always something new, now its just, speed speed speed

Why didn't you guys use diskette drives? Those did exist in the c64 era and you could trust more in them.

didn't i mention. this is serbia.. my father got my c64 from a business trip to germany. when he got it, he didn't know better to take disk unit right then, and didn't want to go all the way to germany to get it later :-P

and since i didn't do much more than play on it, he didn't want to spend any more $$ on it..

Not that I can remember...I don't even remember having any games. I only remember coding my own and typing things in from magazines

Wow.. You guys have experienced everything.. I'm not lucky enough that much though.. My first PC which is the one I'm still using A Pentium III with 256MB RAM and 16MB VGA and stuff.. I really had a go @ computers when I was 19. When I was schooling around @ the age of 16 I think I used to play those DOS games like Prince, Doom, CommandoIII in those 486, PentiumI PCs @ school. I was even punished for playing games during school hours by not going for classes ontime.. I really wanted a PC @ that time itself but my father was too afraid to buy one.. He atlast bought me and gave the one I'm using now when he felt that I'm good to go with it..
My favourite game is of course is Need For Speed Porche Unleashed one.. Also like playing the 3D Cricket games specially Brian Lara Cricket..
Now of course I don't get that much of a time to play games.. Wish I had time..

Matt! How much marks did you get for that Essay???