who remembers

[The Batt?sai]

i have two actually. i remember once i learned what an agp slot was, that compaq pwned me and sold me a machine with 64 megs of ram and a 20 gig harddrive, with no agp slot LOL . that cost me like 1800 bucks . ah the price of computers 6 years ago.

the second was when i wanted to know if there was some kind of adapter i could use to let an agp card work in a pci (not express) slot. boy that was dumb LOL

 

[Linflas]

Trying to read back this basic program from punch tape with this teletype is a pain in the a$$.

 

[Saga]

I was 8 years old and on AOL back in the days when it came on a floppy. I blew my sound card and had no clue how to fix it, so I went into a tech chat room and started talking to the only guy in there. After a few minutes he determined that the card may just need to be pulled out and plugged back in, and the first thing I said was..

"Oh. Do I need to turn the computer off to pull it out?"

Now that I think about it, that guy must have had a lot of self-restraint to be honest and tell me that it would be best to shut it down first.

 

[Stumps]

hmmmm, I have to think back to 1992, when I got my first PC, an IBM PS/2 Model 70 (386dx20,4mb,60mb hdd, MCA/ISA BUS) I saw a new 486DX cpu for sale at a computer store and I asked the guy at the counter if it would work in my 386 mobo, IIRC the guy laughed at me and said "if you have to ask that qustion then you can't afford it"

 

[theknight571]

I remember being scared to remove the cover of my PC.... but I did it anyway. lol


I also remember my boss telling me that the internet/www is just a passing fad and that we souldn't be to concerned about it.... lol (he's no longer employed here)

 

[Axoliien]

I remember hwn I was 10 our computer wasn't working right, so I chatted to find someone who said that things could be put into the autoexec.bat file to make the computer work wrong. So I deleted the autoexec.bat file... and the computer stopped working altogether

My parents wouldn't let me touch the computer for a while saying it was always fine after they got it fixed and that I would just break it again. Now I'm a programmer, and know much better than to start messing with things if I have no way to get back up and running in a worst case scenario!

 

[amish]

asking myself: how the heck do i get tron to work in gwbasic?

that was a long time ago

 

[rudder]

I am remember getting an Atari 800 and thinking I would program all the games I wanted to play. Even had a big list and was ready to get started. That didn't work and I eneded up buying the cartridges for games instead.

 

[tfinch2]

I couldn't figure out why a 32-bit app for Windows 95 wasn't running on my machine that had Windows 3.11 for Workgroups

 

[NissanGurl]

Loooong time ago. As far as the computer was concerned, I thought that hardware meant that it was something physically hard (think 3.5" floppy disk, the case, etc.) and software was something physically soft (think the old 5 1/4" floppies - hey they were soft enough to flap around). Definitely newb thoughts there

 

[Linflas]

Originally posted by: rudder
I am remember getting an Atari 800 and thinking I would program all the games I wanted to play. Even had a big list and was ready to get started. That didn't work and I eneded up buying the cartridges for games instead.

I remember typing in those huge multi line Data statements full of numbers when entering programs from magazines on the Atari 800. What a nightmare that was.

 

[Chiropteran]

I remember waiting what felt like hours for a game to load from tape onto our commodore64. And I remember accidently shutting it off, and having to wait AGAIN to play the game.

I remember playing games on floppy discs and the floppy discs going bad because my younger cousins would touch the actual disk and ruin them.

I remember sundog, the original gauntlet, time bandits, mercenary, space raiders, and so many other old games on the atari ST.

I remember my dad downloading a program, and he was saying "it'll be here soon" so I went to the door to look outside to see if I could see it comming.

 

[jtvang125]

I use to think that the whole case was full of electronics and other gadgets. Then I saw what was inside and was shocked to see only a PCB board taking up only 1/4 of the case.

 

[imported_goku]

Originally posted by: Izusaga
I was 8 years old and on AOL back in the days when it came on a floppy. I blew my sound card and had no clue how to fix it, so I went into a tech chat room and started talking to the only guy in there. After a few minutes he determined that the card may just need to be pulled out and plugged back in, and the first thing I said was..

"Oh. Do I need to turn the computer off to pull it out?"

Now that I think about it, that guy must have had a lot of self-restraint to be honest and tell me that it would be best to shut it down first.

Thats not very noobish, it's understandable to ask if you need to turn something off. You'd think that if you could remove it so easily that you could just remove it with out turning it off, much like USB.

 

[manohartvs]

Back when DOS was big and Windows 3.1 came out, I thought Windows was a game. And MSPaint was friggin awsome!

 

[imported_goku]

I believe something that was less of a noobish thought and more of a noobish action. I remember when I first learned about 'installing programs', I'd literally install every program that I could find and install it into the computer, something about the process was a bit fun (most installations were on floppy). I then learned about Hard drive space and how you should conserve it so I then began to uninstall everything I could, I'd see how much HDD space there was and I'd keep deleting files, more and more.

I then found the windows folder and thought, 'this is a gold mine, awesome! I'll make tons of more space! Well that didn't end too well as the computer stopped functioning, I didn't get blamed for it, instead some tech claim a 'trojan horse' was the cause. So, like the typical people, my parents threw away (I think) the computer and we never saw it again.
Now that I'm older, it saddens me that my parents gave away our old computers as I'd like to have found out what kind of software was installed on those machines.

 

[pinion9]

Originally posted by: Chiropteran
I remember waiting what felt like hours for a game to load from tape onto our commodore64. And I remember accidently shutting it off, and having to wait AGAIN to play the game.

My parents bought a Commodore64 when I was very young (6, maybe?) My brother and I would fight over who got to play first. I remember one time my dad told us we each got a half hour. We would rotate. I let my brother go first. He picked the game and started loading it; I started timing him. When it finally loaded his time was up and I got to go....

Nothing like waiting 30+ minutes to play Cutthroat! I remember another game called Kong that was decent, and another where you were a mouse...pretty fun.

I have learned though that these nostalgic memories are best left as such. I wanted to play some old TurboGrafix 16 and bought one off of eBay. Bonk is much better in my mind than the actual game is...

 

[BobDaMenkey]

When I was a youngin back in 1997 and windows 95 started throwing illegal operation error messages at me, I freaked out and turned the computer off because I thought the cops were going to come to the front door and take the computer away or something. But I was like 9 at the time so I think that's kind of normal.

They really shouldn't have called them illegal operations, I know that's freaked out soooooo many people because they didn't know what an illegal operation was.

 

[remagavon]

Thinking it would be a good idea to alter config.sys in order to allow a workaround for Warcraft 2 cd music to play. I was around 11-12 years old at the time, and my dad made me basically write a new one becuase I screwed it up. It took HOURS becuase I had no idea what I was doing, lol.

 

[JulesMaximus]

Assembly language looks like gobbledy-guck...how can anyone make any sense of this?

 

[faenix]

I always thought the monitor was the 'computer' itself and I was really disillusioned when my father told me my little Packard Bell 75mhz box was actually the real 'computer.'

 

[Linflas]

Actually the most newbish thing I did with a PC was to plug a 9 pin EGA monitor into a Logitech mouse board that had a 9 pin female connector on it. Toasted the Logitech card very quickly.

 

[pinion9]

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus
Assembly language looks like gobbledy-guck...how can anyone make any sense of this?

Are you serious? It is just another language. Learn the syntax and grammar and it is easy.

 

[Pardus]

used to have a commodore vic 20 with a cassette player, took a good 30 mins for any game to load.. over the years, i accidently killed a few mb, one with a open can of coke.. you learn from those mistakes.

worst nightmare i had was with a card reader at a old job, i had a stack of punch cards and tripped on the way to the card reader, the punch cards flew everywhere, i spent the next 4 hours re-organizing them again.. oh, happy fun days.

 

[Cristatus]

Originally posted by: faenix
I always thought the monitor was the 'computer' itself and I was really disillusioned when my father told me my little Packard Bell 75mhz box was actually the real 'computer.'

Lol, my brother's friends (11 - 13 YO's) always thought that I had a Nokia computer because our monitors is a Nokia, and then they get even more surprised that I made the computer!

LOL.

Can't think of anything n00bish at the moment though.