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Building my childhood dream PC

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Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#51

Post by AStonesThrow »

p_ing wrote: post #23
AStonesThrow wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 486 generation was fraught with bus wars and the motherboard market was rather fragmented. I once visited a college buddy who had a genuine EISA system, and I believe that I left flecks of drool as I admired the superior electronics and engineering invested in that EISA bus. Of course, nobody seriously purchased EISA if they expected to be compatible with stuff. My father had a PS/2 50Z, which unfortunately saddl…

The days of nearly-full slots was great. While by the time I had my first computer, a 386SX (12Mhz?) IDE and floppy controllers had made it to the motherboard, we still had a sound card, modem, video card, potentially game card if no game ports on the sound card, and awhile later in PCI land a 3Dfx card. Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a p…

TFA is a great read, although the PS/1 being a turnkey system, the author didn't need to piece together a lot of compatible accessories to make a great system.

"LEGO for Adults" is a very apt analogy I began to hear recently, about PCs in those days. It was an exhilirating feeling of self-determination and control for aficionados, that you could walk into a huge Fry's Electronics and there may be an entire wide aisle dedicated to sound cards, and most all of them would be compatible with your system -- the same situation with video cards, disk controllers, anything on PCI, not to mention the RAM and other accessories.

A desktop tower PC in those days was like a blank slate. I purchased my 386 "barebones" and upgraded piecemeal, because what better way to spec out the perfect system, and spread out the costs, than waiting a few months in-between expansion cards or accessory purchases? It was sort of a miracle that I upgraded the 386 so extensively, that by the time it was time to purchase a 486 system, all I needed was a motherboard and a disk, because the rest of the spare parts were all duplicated from past upgrades!

However this sort of self-assembly of PCs has long passed us by. Another interesting inflection point for me was reached in 2018. I decided I had no need for a desktop machine, and during the purchase of my ThinkPad, I was able to go direct to Lenovo.com, and spec out every detail of the machine to my heart's desire, building a truly custom system just through their website's storefront interface. It was custom-built and shipped direct from China, built to last like a battleship. Perhaps those days are bygone as well, at this point.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#52

Post by sthuck »

The part about buying a misleading CPU really hit home with me. Man all those small retailers in the 90s were living the dream with their unaware customers.

My parents bought an AMD 486 100mhz at the end of 1995, it was still a viable low end machine for that time but they paid as if it was a Pentuim. Had to somehow make it work up until 2001 with that machine. Don't know if I had a career in tech if I wasn't forced to tinker with it.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#53

Post by Waterluvian »

somat wrote: post #47
Waterluvian wrote: post #28

In Part 2 the photo immediately after “It seems IBM integrated it to the motherboard” completely fooled my brain into believing that I’m looking at the side wall of a garage. The garage door to the left. The opener equipment top-right. And I’m just immediately fixated on this whole vibe of a life-sized tinkering workspace that’s the inside of a PC case.

makes me think of the IBM AN/FSQ-7 built into the SAGE air defense stations, the largest computer ever built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7_Combat_Direction_Cent... While realistically I understand it was just a bunch of racks and consoles, due to the permanent nature of the installation and the way it was integrated into the building I like to imagine the operators and technicians scurrying around admits bu…

> Weight 250 tons

So that doesn’t qualify for free shipping, I imagine.

I absolutely love the aesthetic of a big classic telephone receiver attached to the end.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#54

Post by karon »

Must have been an amazing journey, thanks for the great writeup! I also have a DELL 2007FP, now I'm thinking about getting an AMIGA 1200 again (which I coded on in assembly), and a 1997 Pentium as well :)

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#55

Post by myth_drannon »

tos1 wrote: post #4

Love the image of the monitor showing Battle Chess! As a side note to all like-minded people that love old DOS games, check out the library of DOS games on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

Or download eXodos torrent, 600gb with most of the DOS games ever released already comes pre-configured to run in Dosbox

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#57

Post by II2II »

p_ing wrote: post #30
cesarb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' Made worse by the video cards being ridiculously fat. As an example, the one I have is two slots wide, and protrudes over the third slot; my motherboard has a PCIe x1 slot there, which is made unusable by that. The fourth and last slot of my motherboard, a PCIe x4, is clearly intended for the Thunderbolt card (there's a special connector nea…

Yep, I have a 4090. It runs adventure and zork like no one's business.

No such luck over here. I have noticed a huge degradation in imagination fidelity since upgrading to a more powerful GPU.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#58

Post by jdshaffer »

Reminds me of my first computer... a 386 20Mhz black and white laptop. Ran DOS by default, but you could jump into Win 3.11 with the lovely "win" command. laugh I remembering so wanting a color monitor so I could play games...

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#59

Post by theandrewbailey »

Most of the PCs I had access to growing up sucked in some way, so I have no nostalgia to recreate any of them as entire systems.

In 2013[0], I built a PC with the loose goal of being the best the 20th century had to offer, at least as far as core components were concerned. (I considered 2000 as part of the 20th century for the purposes of this build.) I ended up with a Pentium 3 600 MHz, 256 MB RAM, Geforce 2 Ultra, 52x CDROM drive, and crappy "multimedia" speakers. Somehow, I still had the same Yamaha-based soundcard I grew up with, so that's the only original part of this nostalgic ship of thesis. I threw in a 40GB hard drive, and later upgraded to 250 GB. The 17" CRT, keyboard, and ball mouse are early-mid 2000s and Dell-branded (the PC case is beige and unbranded). The only thing that would complete the build would be a modem, but no one liked dial-up, ever, so I have a fast ethernet card instead. The clock noticeably drifts out of sync by a few minutes every month, so I have an NTP client.

I installed Windows 98 on it, and promptly started playing games I loved growing up, and later, others: Starcraft, SimCity 2000, Road Rash, Chips Challenge, Fallout, and Diablo. It barely runs the original Warcraft 3 (but Frozen Throne refuses to install).

[0] https://theandrewbailey.com/article/120/Project-Twentieth-Ce...

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#60

Post by geocrasher »

The 286/12, with its 1MB memory, 60MB RLL Hard drive, and 5.25" floppy... oh and the VGA card and 14" 256 color VGA monitor, and the Panasonic KXP-1180i. It was October 1988. My Dad's boss financed it through the company, and brought it over and set it up for us. And offered 13 year old me the opportunity to call him any time I needed help. And that I did. Between the computer purchase, the endless phone calls, and then a year later ending up on Prodigy's excellent discussion groups, I learned huge amounts.

It wasn't until much later in life that I properly appreciated how much of a sacrifice it was for my dad- a man who could barely read, worked 12-14 hour days, and came home covered in mud and grease regularly- to buy a $3300 computer in 1988. That's about $8000 in today's money.

I don't know if I ever got the chance to thank him properly for it. He died when I was in my mid 20's, self absorbed and busy with my new family.

Thanks, Dad.

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