Geek/Nerd moments of the Past...

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Possessed Freak

Diamond Member
Nov 4, 1999
6,045
1
0
I remember my dad bringing home a 10 meg external hard drive for our televideo 8088. This was so he could work from home on occasion. He said, son we will *never* fill this drive up.

I remember when I upgraded my 486 to 16! megs of ram and impressing all my friends in HS at the time. Then I built my first machine, a p120 overclocked to 133. I had a 2meg Trident card that could somehow display 1600x1200 on a 14 inch Packaged Hell monitor... just so I could get in edge in a game called Subspace.

The first CD-Rom game I played was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game) I still hum the main tune even though I have not played it in 17 years.
 
secretanchitman

secretanchitman

Diamond Member
Apr 11, 2001
9,352
23
91
Possessed Freak said:
I remember my dad bringing home a 10 meg external hard drive for our televideo 8088. This was so he could work from home on occasion. He said, son we will *never* fill this drive up.

I remember when I upgraded my 486 to 16! megs of ram and impressing all my friends in HS at the time. Then I built my first machine, a p120 overclocked to 133. I had a 2meg Trident card that could somehow display 1600x1200 on a 14 inch Packaged Hell monitor... just so I could get in edge in a game called Subspace.

The first CD-Rom game I played was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game) I still hum the main tune even though I have not played it in 17 years.
Click to expand...

loom is a fantastic game. i remember getting that, monkey island 1, and a lot of other games with this 4x reveal cd-rom drive that we bought...or was it with the sound blaster speakers? lol i dont really remember.
 
QuantumPion

QuantumPion

Diamond Member
Jun 27, 2005
6,010
1
76
Possessed Freak said:
Then I built my first machine, a p120 overclocked to 133. I had a 2meg Trident card that could somehow display 1600x1200 on a 14 inch Packaged Hell monitor... just so I could get in edge in a game called Subspace.
Click to expand...


gahahah subspace ftw. now that brings back memories.

I remember playing Descent over Kali, man that was a nightmare to get working. Trying to play old games that only supported IPX multiplayer over the net using a pppoe bridge over 56k dialup, now that is hardcore!

Way before that I remember back in the early 90's, before facebook, before myspace, before geocities even. There was teh BBS! Me and my friends all ran BBS's and played all those cool text-based games like Tradewars. Good times.
 
K

Kev

Lifer
Dec 17, 2001
16,367
4
81
Making a boot disk so I could play mechwarrior 2 on my 486

Playing a text based MMORPG on AOL

Convincing my mom that I hacked NORAD by showing her some fake DOS app and pretending to panick that they were tracking me

Dialing in to my friend's pc to play 1-1 Doom 2 multiplayer over a 9600 baud connection. That was painful
 
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leeland

Diamond Member
Dec 12, 2000
3,659
0
76
Oh the memories...

I recall setting up my computer and the neighbors computer on a LAN I had a 486 DX2 66 Mhz and he had a pentium 100 Mhz...

He would host C&C and we would play again and again!...my college roommates thought it was the SHIT to play a LAN against someone on the computer...and it would regularly cause arguments who was 'in line' to play next...

Also, I had a Omega zip drive (100 mb) that I used for college files...that was until I found Napster back in the day...

I had some POS free dial-up service...I believe it was Net Zero (in its earliest form)...which sucked ass for speeds...

I used to go to the schools computer lab, download napster, install it and download all the music I needed...copy it to my zip discs and transport it home...

I remember always feeling like it was Mission Impossible...when the files were copying over...waiting for a R.A. or some admin to walk over getting ready to kick me out for DL music...
 
PepePeru

PepePeru

Diamond Member
Jul 21, 2005
3,846
0
0
Around 1999 or 2000, my Riva TNT2 video card only had passive cooling. So I found a site on the net that had a DIY cooler solution, which involved a cardboard tube, cut in such a way to fit over the heatsink with a fan at the other end of the tube.

My first build, (k6-2 400 mhz with the aforementioned Riva TNT2) I was so concerned over static electricity I put it together in the bathroom on the tile floor in nothing but my tighty whities.

Around 97, when I first learned of Mp3, I'd go to the computer lab at my school, get on IRC, download 1 or two MP3s, archive each mp3 on to 3-4 floppy disks and take it back home.

Now, that was perseverance....
 
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JeepinEd

JeepinEd

Senior member
Dec 12, 2005
869
63
91
I remember how exited I was when I first found out that you can punch a notch on the side of a single sided 5.5" floppy and you can then store data on the other side. It cut my floppy disk expenses in half!

I also remember sitting in front of the Vic-20 with my buddy ad a copy of Compute! This magazine had pages upon pages of BASIC code for games. He would read the lines of code and I would enter them in to the VIC. After hours of data entry and debugging, we would wait for about 5 minutes, while the program was saved to the tape drive. Then it was game on! I still have the magazine, the VIC and the games. Don't know if the data in the tapes is still good, though.
 
D

DaveSimmons

Elite Member
Aug 12, 2001
40,730
670
126
I used my Atari 800XL as a 6502 assembly cross-compiler to work on C=64 game ports for Adventure International and KrenTek.

Mac/65 was just easier to use than any of the C=64 assemblers, even with the extra time to transfer the 6502 code between them. I did use a native C=64 debugger to test the code, and its microassembler to patch in fixes.
 
M

marvdmartian

Diamond Member
Apr 12, 2002
5,444
27
91
Here's a good one. Back in 98, I had a Sony Mavica camera with a 3.5" floppy disk drive. Instead of storing pictures on the camera's memory, it wrote them to a floppy disk. Each disk would hold 6-8 pictures.

I went on vacation one time, and ended up hauling home a box of 100 floppy disks, with pictures on them! Damn memory weighed more than the camera!! :rolleyes:
 
A

AkumaX

Lifer
Apr 20, 2000
12,648
4
81
Possessed Freak said:
I remember my dad bringing home a 10 meg external hard drive for our televideo 8088. This was so he could work from home on occasion. He said, son we will *never* fill this drive up.

I remember when I upgraded my 486 to 16! megs of ram and impressing all my friends in HS at the time. Then I built my first machine, a p120 overclocked to 133. I had a 2meg Trident card that could somehow display 1600x1200 on a 14 inch Packaged Hell monitor... just so I could get in edge in a game called Subspace.

The first CD-Rom game I played was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game) I still hum the main tune even though I have not played it in 17 years.
Click to expand...

i miss subspace
 
ultimatebob

ultimatebob

Lifer
Jul 1, 2001
25,134
2,450
126
I was the president of the "computer troop" in my hometown around 1995. One of our "lessons" was an introduction to the Internet... imagine a dozen teenagers scarfing down pizza, playing Doom, and downloading porn of the local hospital's T1 line. Good times :)
 
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