ATOT: What made you start coming to AT in the first place?

[JM Aggie08]

Synthdude2001 lured me in. I wanted to build my first PC and had no clue what I was doing. Athlon 64 + 512mb ram + TNT Ultra (lol, later upgraded to Nvidia 6800), 160GB HDD. Good times.

I feel like it used to be more fun around here, though maybe I'm looking at the past through a rose-tinted lense. All there is today are novelty/troll account, threads on tipping and circumcision, and other BS. Meh.

 

[shortylickens]

Anand was writing articles for CPU magazine and I noticed he always had a lot more insight than anyone else, so I visited his website, read even more and better articles, and generally liked what I found.
Assumed the forum was more of the same, so I lurked a bit, reading helpful and not-so-helpful tips in the hardware section.

One day a guy asked a question about fiber optics and I knew I could help him, so I finally signed up for an account.
(He didnt understand the difference between TOS-link and miniplug, and that had also confused me for a few years before I finally figured it out, so I knew it was a real pain in the buns.)

 

[BurnItDwn]

Yes originally with the classic 300A@500 overclock for a few months, then i sold it to my bro and went with a socketed mobo the BM6 and a celeron 366@550.

Just couldn't beat those old school celeron overclocks.

Agreed,
I kept my bh6 and replaced the 300a@450 with the coppermine based celeron 533 and ran it at 112FSB for a number of years at 896mhz ... that was a badass mobo

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Anand was writing articles for CPU magazine and I noticed he always had a lot more insight than anyone else, so I visited his website, read even more and better articles, and generally liked what I found.
Assumed the forum was more of the same, so I lurked a bit, reading helpful and not-so-helpful tips in the hardware section.

One day a guy asked a question about fiber optics and I knew I could help him, so I finally signed up for an account.
(He didnt understand the difference between TOS-link and miniplug, and that had also confused me for a few years before I finally figured it out, so I knew it was a real pain in the buns.)

Talk about a slippery slope! You're always here

 

[rh71]

hardwarecentral and sysopt forums were getting stale - I spent a lot of work hours on forums.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Anand was writing articles for CPU magazine and I noticed he always had a lot more insight than anyone else, so I visited his website, read even more and better articles, and generally liked what I found.
Assumed the forum was more of the same, so I lurked a bit, reading helpful and not-so-helpful tips in the hardware section.

One day a guy asked a question about fiber optics and I knew I could help him, so I finally signed up for an account.
(He didnt understand the difference between TOS-link and miniplug, and that had also confused me for a few years before I finally figured it out, so I knew it was a real pain in the buns.)

And then they saw the light.

 

[JulesMaximus]

For me it was the free sex shows in Old's basement that hooked me in.

 

[ctbaars]

What's the difference between TOS-link and miniplug?
(Today I'm using Multi-mode/SC)

 

[shortylickens]

TOS link has a square adapter but if you look closely the small round part in the middle is pretty much exactly the same as miniplug.

A buddy of mind once had a laptop that used miniplug and we had a heck of a time trying to find miniplug cables and adapters so he could use is high end audio system. This was before Monoprice.

 

[Chaotic42]

I got banned from Ars for being a Linux/open source elitist and bashing Microsoft (I was going a bit too far at the time, I suppose) so I looked for another high traffic tech forum and came here.

Holy crap. Getting banned from Ars for being too much of an OSS elitist? That took some doing.

 

[Ruptga]

Same as most all of you, this place had some of the best hardware information at the time. Now, I'm here because I don't have anything better to do and it's sometimes amusing.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

For me it was the free sex shows in Old's basement that hooked me in.

Sounds fun, but I was getting my student loans paid off by showing the goods to you people.

 

[brianmanahan]

The year was 1999. I was telling a friend of mine about egghead.com (auction site) that I had sourced a bunch of refurbished stuff from, including a Kenwood Dolby surround sound system and a 29" CRT display that I had in my dorm room. He told me about AT Hot Deals and BigBigSavings as his favorite sources for computer part deals. I lurked for a bit, then eventually joined.

aww yeah, egghead was great at the time. much much better than tigerdirect.

 

[brianmanahan]

Hot Deals then one day I ventured into Off Topic and the rest is history.

https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...irl-includes-breakdown-on-date-costs.1354121/

"Janet... (short pause cause my mind blanked).. Umm, i'm gonna try something now, but if you don't like it, let me know." ~ ME

"Uh ok..." ~ Her

"Stick out your left hand." ~ ME

priceless work of art, this post

and it hits especially close to home

 

[highland145]

I was told there would be no South Carolinians. I feel cheated and demand a refund.

You're still mad about the deposit I gave you? Sheesh, it was only the tip.

 

[Aves]

I've long since forgotten.

 

[RossMAN]

Synthdude2001 lured me in. I wanted to build my first PC and had no clue what I was doing. Athlon 64 + 512mb ram + TNT Ultra (lol, later upgraded to Nvidia 6800), 160GB HDD. Good times.

I feel like it used to be more fun around here, though maybe I'm looking at the past through a rose-tinted lense. All there is today are novelty/troll account, threads on tipping and circumcision, and other BS. Meh.

I miss Synthdude2001, he had a wicked 'fro. Are you still in contact with him?

 

[BW86]

I wanted to know if upgrading to SATA was worth it.

 

[Squisher]

Came here in '98 after a recommendation about the Hot Deals forum from one of the computer newsgroups. (I'd been reading the front page and hot deals for months when Anand posted that he was turning 16 and was going for his driving test. I was floored, I figured him for a college student.) I was such a lurker I didn't even register until 2000.

 

[Mayne]

Ars Technica/Hard OCP/FORCE3D all banned me and here too, back in the day. I figured it was okay to resub here after 20 years.

 

[BurnItDwn]

I wanted to know if upgrading to SATA was worth it.

So did you upgrade at the time? or wait until mobos no longer had PATA ports on them?

 

[BW86]

So did you upgrade at the time? or wait until mobos no longer had PATA ports on them?

I actually upgraded - mostly because of how much smaller the cables were compared to the ugly ribbon cables.

 

[BurnItDwn]

I actually upgraded - mostly because of how much smaller the cables were compared to the ugly ribbon cables.

Nice, I was late to the SATA game, I still to this day have some PATA drives and PATA controllers .... I don't use em generally ...... but, if I ever run out of space on all my modern 4TB drives and what not ... I have like 5 or 6 TB of space on old old old PATA drives

 

[hanoverphist]

started lurking here back in early 2000 when i was thrown under the server bus and had to figure out what the hell i was doing. here i am two accounts and 17 years later, still dont really know what im doing.

 

[kranky]

Was going to replace an aging PC with a custom build, and I knew nothing about how to build a PC other than I knew the pieces needed to be compatible. Probably used AltaVista to search for info and AnandTech popped up. I think it was right about the time Celeron overclocking was all the rage. Was lurking for a while, then the forum database crapped out and everyone had to re-register, so I signed up then. One of the 10-9-99'ers, member ID 945.