71–80 of 90 posts
I can’t help but notice the ship date on both the keyboard and the main unit. It looks like you had already bought the keyboard before the pc itself arrived.
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,…
Did you take a photo of that marvel by any chance?
https://theandrewbailey.com/article/262/So-Few-Monitors.html
It's still there, and worked the last time I tried turning it on.
When I had a Timex Sinclair 1000, I wanted a VIC-20. When I had a Radio Shack MC-10, I wanted a Color Computer 2. When I had a Commodore 64, I wanted a Commodore 128. When I had an Atari 130XE, I wanted an Atari ST. When I had an Atari ST, I wanted an Atari Mega STE. When I had an Atari Mega STE, I wanted a 486. I now have all of these!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the same Cyrix cpu and all I remember is that FPU performance was terrible in Quake.
I had a Cyrix 6x86MX and it was good enough for Quake (I played Quake originally on a Pentium-60, and it was fine). The Quake code was designed to take advantage of the fact that the Pentium could have one integer and one FPU instruction in flight at the same time, thanks to optimizations by an even bigger space-alien wizard than John Carmack -- Michael Abrash. The Cyrix CPUs... couldn't dual-issue instructions like…
https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/bf4ac424ce754894ac...
486, Cyrix, K5 were stopping until previous instruction retires, and even AMD up to late K6-2 revision couldnt do 0 cycle FXCH.
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…
Can confirm - I recently built an AT system from fully disassembled case, as the case was gross and all parts/screws/plastics needed a bath. My hands were very rough by the end, lots of small cuts!
My teen dream machine was a Pentium 3 with a Voodoo 3. Luckily, this is a machine I now own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> However this sort of self-assembly of PCs has long passed us by. How so? From my recollections, building a Pentium-era PC was very similar to building a PC today: case, PSU, motherboard, CPU, RAM, video card, and storage. Most components could be upgraded independently. Granted, any meaningful upgrade of the CPU is probably going to involve the motherboard and RAM as well. That is pretty much the same as today. The…
Take a look at one of the best boards of the era — ASUS P2B. All of the above would be needed.
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 t…
I tried to get my kids into computers, but it didn’t stick. It’s not the same today as it was then.
My entry was the mentioned 486DX2-66Mhz. Double speed CD-Rom and Sound Blaster. Norton Commander was great, Doom and Pirates Gold where my games of choice. Also started programming on this one with QBasic and then moved to Turbo Pascal 7 (because I needed a .exe file to be called from autoexec as a password protection vs. my sister which I couldn't do with QBasic :) Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying…
The double-speed CDROM in mine was a SCSI. The SoundBlaster 16 card was also the SCSI controller card. Fucking weird piece of hardware. Many years later I found another one that ALSO had a 16kbit modem on it, in addition to being a sound card and SCSI controller O_O
Also, your quest of creating .exe's was cleaner than mine. I scoured the non-internet that was available to my rural country town for QuickBASIC, which had a couple of of syntax differences to QBASIC but it COULD compile .exe's!