Your first ever computer + an embarrassing story

[lxskllr]

Was I the only one who was confused by the ribbon cabling for hooking up floppy drives? I remember the terminators not being keyed, so you had to figure out the orientation by trial and error.

The cable is colored on one side for orientation.

 

[Fritzo]

The cable is colored on one side for orientation.

Weren't on of the corner holes square too? Been a while.

Damn kids an' their USB an' SATA cables...

 

[lxskllr]

Weren't on of the corner holes square too? Been a while.

Damn kids an' their USB an' SATA cables...

That I don't remember. I haven't used a floppy in ages. I know it was possible to plug it in backwards, but I don't remember if it took force to do so.

 

[BUTCH1]

Vic 20 in the 80s. I wrote a random number generator program and used the results to buy a lottery ticket and won $400. LOL

My first 86 PC was a Packard Bell 486sx25, that's embarrassing enough.

I bought a MS Dos 6.1 brick at the time and read every pages and actually enjoyed it......

I had the VIC too but realized (as we all did) that the 64 was the machine to have so I got one and finally a 1541 floppy disk drive, the datasette tape storage was ok if you had a tape in perfect condition, sometimes I'd type in machine code from "Run" magazine only to find the save failed due to a dimple in the tape!. My first PC was a 386-sx 16Mhz, from there on in homebuilts. Back in those days Mobo's did not "autoconfig" when a new processor was dropped in, you had to hand set numerous jumpers to set it up properly, make a mistake, POOF, bye bye CPU and they were not cheap back then at all..

 

[PingSpike]

I used to keep a little bag of jumpers, and would lose it when I needed it. So I'd end up stealing them from other devices.

Was I the only one who was confused by the ribbon cabling for hooking up floppy drives? I remember the terminators not being keyed, so you had to figure out the orientation by trial and error.

Nope, based on experience several manufacturers of floppy cables and drives were similarly confused as they added keying that prevented correct installation of the cables. I shit you not, I had a floppy drive I specifically had to find non keyed cables that were missing the blocked pin so I could install them "backwards" to get anything besides the solid activity light. I'd never seen a similar fuck up with IDE cables or drives before.

 

[biostud]

The first in the house was something with an EGA screen with a whooping 16-color screen, from my dads work.
The first we bought was a 386SX-25, 2Mb ram 40Mb HDD in two partitions, with great games like Rick Dangerous, Commander Keen, Dune II, Sensible Soccer and Civilization.

My first was a Pentium 75.
And I couldn't get the floppy drive to work, so I had to deliver it to service. And the floppy cable was just put in the wrong way.

 

[CZroe]

I wish my memory was better, I really thought I was into BBSs before Prodigy and AOL.

You probably were. AOL's BBS was there for people to get AOL and never BBS again, but it worked the exact opposite for me.

A year later my friend was all about MUDDs on the same PC I got AOL for DOS running.

 

[CZroe]

I used to keep a little bag of jumpers, and would lose it when I needed it. So I'd end up stealing them from other devices.

Was I the only one who was confused by the ribbon cabling for hooking up floppy drives? I remember the terminators not being keyed, so you had to figure out the orientation by trial and error.

It often had more to do with the connector not having a shroud, the cable being keyed for one and the PCB not having a notch for the correct orientation, and pin 1 not always being marked or standardized (should be toward the power connector). The cable could go on and miss a column of pins and you couldn't tell because it was on the other side of a mounted drive.

Also, some floppies had a jumper or switch for designating it as A: or B: and some didn't (required the cable with the twist after the first connector). Because most had the twist cable later on you had to make sure your floppy was designated as the A: drive if it had that setting.

Putting a floppy drive cable on backwards would usually just make the access light stay solid, but I did ruin a drive or two like that.

The bigger problem was the power connector. It didn't have a shroud and the pins would easily flex enough for it to slide on wrong despite the keying. When that happened your PSU would smoke instantly at power-up and one of the wires going to the floppy would be charred. I saw this many times.

 

[JoeyP]

It often had more to do with the connector not having a shroud, the cable being keyed for one and the PCB not having a notch for the correct orientation, and pin 1 not always being marked or standardized (should be toward the power connector). The cable could go on and miss a column of pins and you couldn't tell because it was on the other side of a mounted drive.

Also, some floppies had a jumper or switch for designating it as A: or B: and some didn't (required the cable with the twist after the first connector). Because most had the twist cable later on you had to make sure your floppy was designated as the A: drive if it had that setting.

Putting a floppy drive cable on backwards would usually just make the access light stay solid, but I did ruin a drive or two like that.

This was what I was thinking about, going back to around 1987-89. They started standardizing keys, notches, cable twists, etc. around 1990 IIRC, but I remember having to "convince" parts to get along with each other.

Yes, ribbon cables did have one of the lines color coded, but that meant you had to figure out which edge of the PCB had pin #1. They weren't always clearly labeled, and difficult to see if already installed.

 

[marvdmartian]

First computer was a Pentium 200MMX, with a 6 GB hard drive, and 64 MB of ram. The video card was a Matrox Millenium card (if I remember right), with 4 MB of W-RAM on it. I remember I bought it from some dotcom computer manufacturer in Ohio, from an ad in Computer Shopper magazine (back when it was an inch or more thick!), and paid ~$2500 for the computer, a 17" CRT, and a flatbed scanner with SCSI interface card (that also included Photoshop 4.0). I lived in Guam, at the time, so shipping was a bit steep!

My embarrassing story involves my absolute lack of understanding about the Windows operating system. I had never owned a computer previously, and way back in high school, our computer programming classes were pre-Windows! I had no idea that (gasp!) you could actually create new folders!! Remember the old "My Briefcase" folder? I filled that sucker up with so much stuff, that was so disorganized, that it was totally ridiculous!

It wasn't until about a year after buying my computer (and just before buying a newer one, that ran Windows 98), that I discovered the "new folder" ability! LOL

 

[Ichinisan]

First computer was a Pentium 200MMX, with a 6 GB hard drive, and 64 MB of ram. The video card was a Matrox Millenium card (if I remember right), with 4 MB of W-RAM on it. I remember I bought it from some dotcom computer manufacturer in Ohio, from an ad in Computer Shopper magazine (back when it was an inch or more thick!), and paid ~$2500 for the computer, a 17" CRT, and a flatbed scanner with SCSI interface card (that also included Photoshop 4.0). I lived in Guam, at the time, so shipping was a bit steep!

My embarrassing story involves my absolute lack of understanding about the Windows operating system. I had never owned a computer previously, and way back in high school, our computer programming classes were pre-Windows! I had no idea that (gasp!) you could actually create new folders!! Remember the old "My Briefcase" folder? I filled that sucker up with so much stuff, that was so disorganized, that it was totally ridiculous!

It wasn't until about a year after buying my computer (and just before buying a newer one, that ran Windows 98), that I discovered the "new folder" ability! LOL

You never looked at File > New from an Explorer folder window? Never right-clicked anything? Not even by accident? Does not compute.

 

[MotionMan]

You never looked at File > New from an Explorer folder window? Never right-clicked anything? Not even by accident? Does not compute.

Based on my experience with helping family and friends, I completely believe him.

It is a scary sad world filled with people who lack the basic skills of observation and problem solving.

MotionMan

 

[JimmiG]

First computer was a Commodore 64 (1 MHz CPU, 64KB of RAM, tape drive).

When I was about 10 I got an Amiga 1200 (14 MHz, 2MB of RAM and floppy disks, but no hard drive).

Having never used or seen a mouse before (the C64 didn't have one), for the first few months, I had the mouse rotated 180 degrees (the cable pointing towards me rather than away from me), clicking with the palm of my hand. I got so used to the inverted up-down movement that when a friend showed me how to hold it properly, it took several more weeks before I got used to it.

I also accidentally formatted the main Workbench (Amiga OS) floppy disk. The C64 only had casettes that didn't need to be formatted, so I had no idea what the command did. I was just trying out stuff to see what would happen. Fortunately, the previous owner of the computer had made a backup copy of the disk which I used until I learned how to copy a floppy disk some time later so I was able to restoer the original floppy disk.

 

[CZroe]

You never looked at File > New from an Explorer folder window? Never right-clicked anything? Not even by accident? Does not compute.

This, coming from you?! We did not know that you could change pages in the 7-item-per-page item list of Super Mario Bros 3 even though all you had to do was press up or down. We never even accidentally did it. It took us ages to beat the game (probably over two years) and we still didn't know, even though we knew there were multiple pages. We already knew that the max reserve item count was 28 because we had reached the maximum many times and saw that the last item would be replaced with each new item. We should have known it wasn't a limitation of the game because we always got a peek at the last page of items any time we obtained a new item. Even so, we went on even longer after that, doing things like wasting the Magic Wings (P-wings) that the game rewards you with after beating the game so that we could access the items we earned since starting over (use items up to bring items onto the first page).

 

[Ichinisan]

This, coming from you?! We did not know that you could change pages in the 7-item-per-page item list of Super Mario Bros 3 even though all you had to do was press up or down. We never even accidentally did it. It took us ages to beat the game (probably over two years) and we still didn't know, even though we knew there were multiple pages. We already knew that the max reserve item count was 28 because we had reached the maximum many times and saw that the last item would be replaced with each new item. We should have known it wasn't a limitation of the game because we always got a peek at the last page of items any time we obtained a new item. Even so, we went on even longer after that, doing things like wasting the Magic Wings (P-wings) that the game rewards you with after beating the game so that we could access the items we earned since starting over (use items up to bring items onto the first page).

You don't think it was remarkable that neither of us ever accidentally figured out how to change pages in the Super Mario Bros. 3 item list? I think it was remarkable.

Actually, we did eventually figure it out. Don't remember if it was when we read the manual for the 20th time that it finally clicked. Maybe we discovered it accidentally one day. When I noticed that it was in the manual we had read multiple times, I was dumbfounded.

 

[IronWing]

We bought a new computer a few years ago and thought we would watch a DVD. So I went and rented a DVD. Everything worked great except that the movie stopped working ten minutes in, the screen just went black and the sound died. I thought to myself "It was working fine so I know the PC works therefore it is a bad disk." So I took the movie back and rented another one. Same thing happened, about ten minutes in, the movie died. I though "This sucks." We live a long way from the movie rental anyway so I kind of just dropped the subject. A couple years later the DVD drive died so I replaced it with another brand and decided to try another movie. Ten minutes in the movie died. I searched on line to see if anyone else had this issue with Dell XPS of that vintage. Nothing.

And then like a bolt of lightning

Out of a clear night sky

It hit me

I clicked on my setting panel

And turned off the power saver mode.

The one that told the computer to sleep after ten minutes.

 

[CZroe]

We bought a new computer a few years ago and thought we would watch a DVD. So I went and rented a DVD. Everything worked great except that the movie stopped working ten minutes in, the screen just went black and the sound died. I thought to myself "It was working fine so I know the PC works therefore it is a bad disk." So I took the movie back and rented another one. Same thing happened, about ten minutes in, the movie died. I though "This sucks." We live a long way from the movie rental anyway so I kind of just dropped the subject. A couple years later the DVD drive died so I replaced it with another brand and decided to try another movie. Ten minutes in the movie died. I searched on line to see if anyone else had this issue with Dell XPS of that vintage. Nothing.

And then like a bolt of lightning

Out of a clear night sky

It hit me

I clicked on my setting panel

And turned off the power saver mode.

The one that told the computer to sleep after ten minutes.

Uhh, what DVD playback software is stupid enough to not override that setting automatically during playback? The failure was theirs. Some software lead person deserves to be fired.

 

[CZroe]

You don't think it was remarkable that neither of us ever accidentally figured out how to change pages in the Super Mario Bros. 3 item list? I think it was remarkable.

Actually, we did eventually figure it out. Don't remember if it was when we read the manual for the 20th time that it finally clicked. Maybe we discovered it accidentally one day. When I noticed that it was in the manual we had read multiple times, I was dumbfounded.

I'm saying it similarly "does not compute" so I can totally see something like it happening to a pro.

 

[IronWing]

Uhh, what DVD playback software is stupid enough to not override that setting automatically during playback?

Whatever came with Dell XPS systems in 2004.

 

[lxskllr]

Uhh, what DVD playback software is stupid enough to not override that setting automatically during playback?

Good software will give you the option either way. I guess his defaulted to screensaver on.

 

[randomrogue]

1986 Mac Plus. I deleted the finder which was stupid. I also fried the whole thing trying to upgrade the memory from 1MB to 4MB and that was a very expensive mistake. I can't remember anymore but the computer cost like $3000 and I think getting it fixed was over $1000.

 

[CZroe]

Good software will give you the option either way. I guess his defaulted to screensaver on.

Considering that the users' intentions were clear based on the purpose of the application, it defaulted to the wrong setting. I remember in the '90s when DVD playback was new and I had to check a few settings but that was back when you couldn't expect the latest DVD to work without an updated RealMagic Hollywood+ player update that broke as many movies as it fixed.

Yes, all the idiots ripping Blu-ray for "updates" saying that they "don't remember having to update their DVD players" simply weren't jumping to premature conclusions back then because they weren't such early adopters as they imagine themselves to be.

Oh, and Sigma Designs eventually got it right and their Hollywood player would prevent entering sleep. This was all before PowerDVD and ATI brought software and partially-accelerated DVD playback to the masses.

 

[Angel2]

Always use a registry cleaner tool to make your computer super fast.