Geek/Nerd moments of the Past...

[datalink7]

Went to a LAN party instead of the prom

 

[Locut0s]

Went to a LAN party instead of the prom

Meh proms are overrated anyway. I didn't go to mine because I was/ am social phobic.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Went to a LAN party instead of the prom

You win er.. lose?

 

[Locut0s]

Actually that would be cool, just a small platform you put your phone on and it charges through the magnetic field. Is there actually phones like this?

I remember when MS announced a special table that had a screen in it, and you could just put your camera on it and it would transfer pics from it. I don't think they ever made it, it was just a concept. But something like this to even charge items would be neat. If everything used a single standard you could even charge stuff like power tools like this. Just put it on the table and it charges, and the circuitry would know when to stop charging. heck, houses could receive their power through induction. Ok maybe I'm taking this too far, and this is probably how Tesla died. :awe:

They are working on wireless power. Soon you may be able to run lots of devices, even high powered ones, from wireless power transmitted through the air

 

[marvdmartian]

Well, I won't be a pretender, as my first PC was a 200MHz Pentium MMX, back in 97.

But I did first get into computers back in high school, in the days before desktop systems. We had a combination keyboard/printer (dot matrix), no monitor, and a phone cradle modem next to a rotary dial telephone. We would dial into the county school district's mainframe, and time share on there, writing our programs in BASIC language. Man, those were the days! God help you if you wrote a long program, cuz you'd type it in (one line at a time), then run it to see if it worked. Doesn't work? Is it your programming, or your typing that was off? Print it out, look for typos!

A number of years ago, one of the video card companies was offering a rebate if you bought one of their cards, and sent them in an old video card for trade in. I didn't want to give up any of the cards I had laying around, but luckily had an old ISA video card, and sent that in. Sucker must have been 14" long!! Barely fit it into a padded envelope to mail it in!!

 

[Perknose]

I remember FORTRAN on punch cards in College.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

I remember FORTRAN on punch cards in College.

My first 'hard drive.'

 

[zanejohnson]

i got into yearbook in high school for the sole purpose of them letting me build a fileserver for yearbook pics...

the server had 3 nics... one for regular yearbook purposes, which got an ip address on the regular school network... one to have an ip address on the subnet the admins/teachers could manually configure there nics to use, which did not have the content filter the rest of the schools network was limited with.. and the third to use internet connection sharing, to share the unfiltered access to another subnet that me and a select group of friends new about...so anywhere in the whole school we could manually configure any machine to pirate the unfiltered shared internet access..

good times...

 

[zCypher]

omg, nibbles and gorillas FTW!
i remember discovering what I would soon learn was known as "overclocking", playing around with those little jumpers on the 486 DX2/66 system, bumping it up to 83MHz. i swore i could tell it was a lot faster. lol

tried the same thing on the cyrix , 166 i think it was... it didn't OC too well.

then we have the dialup nightmares. 33.6k us robotics sportster modem for the longest time, although the fastest it would connect was 31.2kbps, often 26.4 or 28.8. Seemed to top out around 4KB/s if I was lucky though. can't believe I'd actually try downloading stuff.. *shudder*. things would go on forever and ever, then at 99% the modem would drop or something. grrr

then 56k came out and it sucked almost as bad. thank god for high speed and not-aol ISP.

first 'real' video card was the voodoo banshee, was all excited then realized that i still needed a better video card to play the latest games. UT did seem to look a lot better with the voodoo drivers as opposed to opengl or d3d.

the rest is more recent and doesn't really matter

 

[Rubycon]

omg, nibbles and gorillas FTW!
i remember discovering what I would soon learn was known as "overclocking", playing around with those little jumpers on the 486 DX2/66 system, bumping it up to 83MHz. i swore i could tell it was a lot faster. lol

tried the same thing on the cyrix , 166 i think it was... it didn't OC too well.

first 'real' video card was the voodoo banshee, was all excited then realized that i still needed a better video card to play the latest games. UT did seem to look a lot better with the voodoo drivers as opposed to opengl or d3d.

the rest is more recent and doesn't really matter

That was glide...

Hmmm reminds me of playing the trombone. Or was that slide?

Never was into (playing) horns but loved to grind on the organ.

 

[lokiju]

I bought a zip drive

 

[Rubycon]

I bought a zip drive

I had the competitor - SyQuest Syjet 1.5GB SCSI. Iomega's version was the 1GB Jaz. All of the drives failed and (Syquest) went bankrupt shortly after.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

I had the competitor - SyQuest Syjet 1.5GB SCSI. Iomega's version was the 1GB Jaz. All of the drives failed and (Syquest) went bankrupt shortly after.

Should have got the Orb drive, I've still got it.

 

[Pliablemoose]

I remember getting the floppy drive for my C64 thinking it was pretty cool.

 

[JJChicken]

i got into yearbook in high school for the sole purpose of them letting me build a fileserver for yearbook pics...

the server had 3 nics... one for regular yearbook purposes, which got an ip address on the regular school network... one to have an ip address on the subnet the admins/teachers could manually configure there nics to use, which did not have the content filter the rest of the schools network was limited with.. and the third to use internet connection sharing, to share the unfiltered access to another subnet that me and a select group of friends new about...so anywhere in the whole school we could manually configure any machine to pirate the unfiltered shared internet access..

good times...

lol good work

 

[iGas]

My best friend & I sleep on the floor in front of his Apple IIe waiting for it to complete drawing out the first Mandelbrot screen that we coded in pascal. A few months later we coded it in assembler, circa. late 80s.

 

[gaidensensei]

Seems like the golden age of computing is over.. wouldn't you guys agree? It's different from the 90's to the 00-05's.

The road's now set on the race to make the first mecha robot now, first company to create this spells disaster for the rest of mankind.
I bet it'll be Intel core powered and motherboard components from one of the major motherboard comapnies.

 

[Rubycon]

Seems like the golden age of computing is over.. wouldn't you guys agree? It's different from the 90's to the 00-05's.

The road's now set on the race to make the first mecha robot now, first company to create this spells disaster for the rest of mankind.
I bet it'll be Intel core powered and motherboard components from one of the major motherboard comapnies.

Certainly not over just different. I certainly would not want to be using a 486 or Pentium today!

Oh and if they have a CPU named Peg watch out! Put that in an Asus board and you have a flying horse!

 

[Aluvus]

Actually that would be cool, just a small platform you put your phone on and it charges through the magnetic field. Is there actually phones like this?

Palm Pre with Touchstone. There are also general-purpose charging pads, but they basically require you to connect a dongle to the device to be charged (until you have devices with the technology integrated), which is quite a buzzkill.

 

[Locut0s]

I had the competitor - SyQuest Syjet 1.5GB SCSI. Iomega's version was the 1GB Jaz. All of the drives failed and (Syquest) went bankrupt shortly after.

I bought a zip drive then soon after got the infamous click of death. Never did get a refund for that.

 

[gaidensensei]

Certainly not over just different. I certainly would not want to be using a 486 or Pentium today!

Oh and if they have a CPU named Peg watch out! Put that in an Asus board and you have a flying horse!

Peg sounds like a codename that Cyrix would choose. If only they were still around.


That makes me think - I also have wondered, what if Cyrix was still in the CPU market today. 3dfx still alive and making cards with the competition.
Maybe things would be a little more interesting.

 

[Rubycon]

Peg sounds like a codename that Cyrix would choose. If only they were still around.


That makes me think - I also have wondered, what if Cyrix was still in the CPU market today. 3dfx still alive and making cards with the competition.
Maybe things would be a little more interesting.

If Cyrix had Peg Al Bundy would be the chipset!

 

[BoomerD]

You still can do that for SPDIF passthrough. Some video cards require this to pass this through HDMI. My 295GTX was like that.

I believe Windows 2000 ended the need for hooking up the analog cable from the CD rom to the sound card. But for years OEMS shipped those cables. They piled up on tech's benches like AOL CDs piled up in everyone's mailbox!



Spion!

I think I still have a handful of floppies that came in the AOL mailers in the 90's...rip the labels off, reformat, and free floppies!!

I bought a zip drive

I still have a Zip 250 in my current machine (left over from a previous incarnation) and a stack of the Zip 100 media. 100 mb? awesome!

 

[Locut0s]

I think I still have a handful of floppies that came in the AOL mailers in the 90's...rip the labels off, reformat, and free floppies!!

Didn't everyone do this?

 

[CrackRabbit]

The thing I remember most was setting jumpers. EVERYTHING had jumpers that needed to be set and some of them had rather complex patterns.
The other thing is OVERDrive CPUs. My first computer was a 486sx-33 that I had gotten has a hand-me-down. I ended up getting a DX-4 overdrive chip that ran at 100mhz. It was really fast for it's time. Beat the everliving snot out of my friends Cyrix "pentium" class chip (I can't remember if it was a 5x86 or a 6x86 now)