Geek/Nerd moments of the Past...

[Locut0s]

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)

The thing that got me was having to hand configure the various hardware channels in BAT and COM files. Remember DMA, COM, and IRQ "channels"?

 

[CrackRabbit]

The thing that got me was having to hand configure the various hardware channels in BAT and COM files. Remember DMA, COM, and IRQ "channels"?

Set Blaster=A220 D3 I7

It's been 15 years since I had to do that... I think I got it right

 

[gaidensensei]

Set Blaster=A220 D3 I7

I only remember 220 but I think I used a 5 somewhere in one of those.

Success the command brought this music to my ears:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZq0euNTO0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9QytJ7WoGs

I still listen to that stuff today.

 

[gaidensensei]

Oh yeah, and let's not forget one of the best..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6US5LqzIUQ

 

[thescreensavers]

downloaded the UT04 demo on dial up, what an awesome 24 hours

 

[yhelothar]

I had a copy of After Dark given to me and that was one of the reasons to get a real video card.

The toaster wings went from looking like geese to hummingbirds!

omfg... you just gave me hardcore nostalgia

 

[Sea Moose]

http://oldcomputers.net/

Site you guys might find interesting

 

[vshah]

i remember i took apart my dad's work laptop - 386 monochrome zenith with 2mb ram and an 80gb hdd. couldn't put it back together and he got in trouble at work...

 

[gaidensensei]

Countless weekends, friday nights spent on kitty1.stanford.edu, crctf.erols.net, hating.com, countless servers I can't remember them anymore.

Orange and white colored aliases, [ ] tags, gold colored numbers representing letters.

Wonder if anyone here knows where I'm coming from .

 

[Red Squirrel]

Set Blaster=A220 D3 I7

It's been 15 years since I had to do that... I think I got it right

Woah that brings back memories. I never really knew what that meant but I remember seeing it in the autoexec.bat file, and figured it was for the sound card but that's about it. Actually, that's another memory lane right there, the autoexec.bat file. I actually learned how to program with that file, oddly enough. I noticed that some of the stuff in there showed up at system startup. I soon figured out that those commands were commands that you can type in the console. So I started putting custom stuff in there like dir to see what it does to the system startup.

Then I discovered I can make my own .bat and execute it in windows, from there I evolved into real programming languages like C++. :awe: That was quite a few years back, around the time we bought our first computer, maybe within that year. I was a newb but was not scared to explore.

 

[arcenite]

I always used chkdsk as a system benchmark (back when it didn't really do much more than give you the details of the disk). I remember walking through bestbuy some years ago and running it on all of the machines... marveling at how much faster they were than mine

 

[CrackRabbit]

I only remember 220 but I think I used a 5 somewhere in one of those.

Success the command brought this music to my ears:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZq0euNTO0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9QytJ7WoGs

I still listen to that stuff today.

A was Address D was DMA and I was IRQ. You probably had a command of Set Blaster=A220 D1 I5

I actually had a SB16 IDE similar to the one pictured earlier in the thread.
Had to add MSCDEX to my autoexec file to get my new (at the time) 4x cd rom drive to work.

 

[arcenite]

A was Address D was DMA and I was IRQ. You probably had a command of Set Blaster=A220 D1 I5

I actually had a SB16 IDE similar to the one pictured earlier in the thread.
Had to add MSCDEX to my autoexec file to get my new (at the time) 4x cd rom drive to work.

Quake 2 Music > *

 

[SaDiZTiKStyLeZ]

I've played wow for 4 years. That's self explanatory.

 

[secretanchitman]

i watched my brother and his friend somehow download windows 95 through dialup for a long time (tons of hours). not knowing what they were doing, his friends mom picked up the phone to make a phone call and disconnected/interrupted the download. needless to say, my brother and his friend were extremely pissed off - screaming and yelling to the mom and how they messed up the download of the lifetime and how they'll never get those kinds of speeds again.

 

[alkemyst]

i wasn't really a nerd/geek since I was active during the day...however, in a counterpoint my brother sold an Amiga 3000T (I think) to someone living in the college town I was.

Carrier never collected the COD, this was back in 1993 or so when COD was the way things got done.

Guy stopped answering calls.

We showed up at his door one day for the money. He wanted to write a check, but we took him to the bank for cash.

It was an epic nerd win.

 

[alkemyst]

oh and I was a part in this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hacker_War

FBI and the Phone Company sitting in your parent's kitchen isn't a good way to come home from school.

 

[shortylickens]

I dont have any one nerd moment that was stronger than others.
I guess I forced myself into the life when I joined the Electronics club in high school. That sealed my fate I believe.

Also, when I was younger I busted my ass to get DOS games working. Setting up XMS or EMS memory was a byatch.
And I didnt know Windows 3.1 could even go up to 1024x768, much less at 32 bit color. Thats fucking news to me. But I do remember the short period when 2D accelerators were the rage and people had all sort of fun with them including Solitaire.

Our first system was an 8088 or 8086 as I recall, but I didnt start to get serious with gaming until Wolfenstein 3D on our 386-40.
Got even more hardcore with big games when we got a 486-100. I only had a pentium 100 for a short while before I joined the Navy. By the time I got back to shore duty I was building my own Athlon 750 system. It was amazing to actually be a part of all the computer advances from the mid 90's to 2000.

 

[illusion88]

oh and I was a part in this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hacker_War

FBI and the Phone Company sitting in your parent's kitchen isn't a good way to come home from school.

So what faction did you fight for?

 

[gaidensensei]

Holy crap, shortylickens' post gave me a flashback of the 286/386/486 mem /c /p command, himem.sys, trying to mess around with it and tweak more.

I recall as far as diddling with the memory banks as a 3rd grader on the 286.

 

[IronWing]

I dont have any one nerd moment that was stronger than others.
I guess I forced myself into the life when I joined the Electronics club in high school. That sealed my fate I believe.

Also, when I was younger I busted my ass to get DOS games working. Setting up XMS or EMS memory was a byatch.
And I didnt know Windows 3.1 could even go up to 1024x768, much less at 32 bit color. Thats fucking news to me. But I do remember the short period when 2D accelerators were the rage and people had all sort of fun with them including Solitaire.

Our first system was an 8088 or 8086 as I recall, but I didnt start to get serious with gaming until Wolfenstein 3D on our 386-40.
Got even more hardcore with big games when we got a 486-100. I only had a pentium 100 for a short while before I joined the Navy. By the time I got back to shore duty I was building my own Athlon 750 system. It was amazing to actually be a part of all the computer advances from the mid 90's to 2000.

I had to have a startup menu (I think it ran out of the config.sys file) for changing memory setting depending upon whether I wanted to run AutoCad or not as it had memory requirements that conflicted with everything else.

 

[Rubycon]

Holy crap, shortylickens' post gave me a flashback of the 286/386/486 mem /c /p command, himem.sys, trying to mess around with it and tweak more.

I recall as far as diddling with the memory banks as a 3rd grader on the 286.

Memmaker starting with DOS 6.0. Qualitas had 386Max but I never liked it that much and used EMM386. Well until QEMM came along. Quarterdeck Quickboot was the bomb! Its optimizer got the highest low memory ever! I think I had all TSR loaded and 634k free. Ha!

 

[alkemyst]

So what faction did you fight for?

I never got along with any of the MoD guys. There was a lot more side story than the official ones talk about. Even some of the places are wrong. The phone bridge that was used many times was not in the midwest. It was actually a local number discovered one day that was used to teach kids that couldn't come to school during the day.

The line that really started the war was meant to be delivered to another black guy (SN) and not Corrupt....MoD used to call the bridge and just play a radio into the phone loudly and other antics.

 

[shortylickens]

I had to have a startup menu (I think it ran out of the config.sys file) for changing memory setting depending upon whether I wanted to run AutoCad or not as it had memory requirements that conflicted with everything else.

Yeah I heard DOS AutoCad was a real bitch too.

As for games, it eventually got to the point I needed a boot disk for every one, just cuz I had to be sure I was not getting extra junk in the background when I played.
Rebooting your machine for every single game you want to play is so not fun.

 

[Dumac]

I remember when I built my first computer. I freaked out when it wouldn't turn on after I assembled it. Turns out I forgot to flip the switch on the PSU :O