My Computing History
- First PC in 1989
- Packard Bell “IBM PC Compatible” - 286 12mhz, 1MB of RAM, 64MB Hard Drive, EGA Graphics, MS-DOS 3.3, Windows 3.0
- 386DX 40mhz, 200MB RLL Hard Drive
- 486DX 33mhz, 1st CD-ROM Panasonic required special connector on the SB16 card, there were times when the 386DX 40 felt faster to me
- 486DX2 66mhz, probably one of the longest running processors ever, I ran this one for a while. Windows 3.11 w/Norton Desktop was primary OS for quite a while, Eventually I would upgrade to Windows 95 only to have my hard drive corrupted and move to NT 3.51 though hardware gets a little fuzzy during that period.
- Cyrix 6×86-P166+, probably one of the worst processors ever made. These guys were the first to do the performance ratings vs. clock speed. So while the chip claimed speeds equivalent of a Pentium 166 it really only ran at a clock speed of 133mhz.
- AMD K6-233mhz, AMD K6-300mhz w/3D! Now these were pretty good chips, cheap fast, reliable. As I recall I stuck withe K6-300 for descent amount of time. 3D! Now was AMD’s attempt at an MMX competitor.
- AMD K7-700mhz Slot A. Probably a close to owning a DEC Alpha as I ever came considering the Alpha engineering team, or a good portion of it defected from DEC to AMD to design the bus architecture for the K7 aka Athlon. I remember some of the capacitors on the motherboard I had for this chip blowing at one point and having a heck of a time finding a replacement Slot A board because AMD had already moved back to sockets.
- Athlon 1.2ghz another disappointing chip fraught with problems. The batch I had wouldn’t even run at the full clock speed without overheating and hanging or crashing the system, needless to say this one didn’t last very long.
- Things get considerably more murky from here out. I believe that after this I went to an Athlon XP 1600 for a while and then moved to an Athlon XP 3200+, which remained in my primary desktop for quite a while. The XP 1600 used one of the better motherboards I’ve ever used the ECS K7S5A an extremely reliable Socket A board used it in several systems I built throughout my college years without a single problem.
- Somewhere around 2004 or so I was going through a period of boredom with my system and I had been attempting to install Ubuntu Linux along side my Windows XP install. Through carelessness I ended up nuking my Windows XP partition and for about 3 months or so ran Ubuntu as my primary operating system. However I eventually switched back to Windows XP due to the fact iPod support was not up to part on Ubuntu at the time I was using it and I didn’t feel like owning a $200 brick for an audio player. The irony of it is that if the state of iPod support in Ubuntu or more accurately Kubuntu had been a little better at the time, or I'd been able to accept Gnome as the desktop environment, then I might very well have stayed with Linux and still be using it today.
- Shortly after switching back to Windows I purchased my first real Mac of any consequence, in April of 2006, one of the first generation Intel Mac Minis. It’s a Core Duo 1.66 w/a Gig of RAM, later upgraded to 2. Shortly after I began to switch to the Mini for everything and my Mac became my primary system. In November of 2006, on nearly the day they were announced, I ordered a Black MacBook Core2Duo 2.0ghz with 2GB of RAM and a 160GB Hard Drive. The rest as they say is history.
Current Setup:
- Primary Machine: 15″ MacBook Pro, Core2Duo 2.4ghz, 4GB RAM, 160GB HD, Santa Rosa Chipset, June 2006 revision.
- Media Center: CoreDuo Mac Mini 1.66ghz. Is currently connected to my TV and I used it mostly for watching movies or TV w/Front Row. and Plex (aka OSXMBC), with a Drobo for storage...DROBO ROCKS!!
- Portable Audio: IPod Photo 20GB, iPhone EDGE 8GB
The Good Old Days
So much from the good old days of computing has been lost. So here are some things I’ll never forget…
…first 2400 baud modem.
…first 9600 baud modem.
…first 14.4 modem.
…first 28.8 modem.
…first 56K modem.
…being 2nd in the town to have a cable modem installed.
…having to set jumpers on the motherboard to configure most hardware settings.
…having to hack your BLASTER environment variable in DOS to get sound to work at all.
…having to create custom boot disks to have enough RAM available to run that new game you just bought.
…the Diamond SpeedStar, the Diamond SpeedStar Pro.
…Vesa Local Bus being where it was at.
…Those oh so finicky Vesa Local Bus (VLB) slot pins.
…first mouse.
…first CD-ROM connected to the SB-16 via that special interface.
…EIDE interface card in a, you guessed it, VLB slot.
…Needing a special IO card to get things like a serial and parallel port because they weren’t on the motherboard.
…Finally having a 386 and being able to run Windows in something other than real mode!! Windowed “DOS Boxes” WOO HOO!!
…Dealing with SIMM memory.
…The genre of computer games known as “Adventure Games” (Where are you now Kings Quest?)
…Captain Comic
…Commander Keen
…CGA Graphics
…Seeing VGA Graphics for the first time.
…Having to save up to buy that next upgrade.
…Eight-in-One on the 286, a Word Processing, Spreadsheet, etc. app.
…Running OS/2
…Ditching the nasty OS that was Windows 95 for Windows NT 3.51 and then running the Shell Preview on it to fake NT4 before it came out with 95’s shell.
…Running NT4 as my primary OS and not being able to use USB or DirectX since they weren’t supported on NT.
…The first network at home of 10-Base2 and using a proxy server to share the modem on the network.
…First cable modem router, what a glorious device.
…Dealing with IRQ conflicts on an almost by the minute basis.
…Prodigy.
…Prodigy for windows, a DOS app wrapped in a window…quality.
…Norton Desktop 3.0 on Windows 3.11 - still one of my favorite UIs.
…Using Windows 3.0 on my 286 solely with a keyboard because we only had one mouse.
…Scandisking every 5 seconds because Windows 95 was bound to corrupt your data sooner or later.
…Hacking the Autoexec.bat and config.sys files to do things like start Windows when the machine started or create custom menus to launch the programs you wanted.
…Learning to type thanks to DOS, you were lost if you couldn’t type I assure you.
…Using Lynx to surf the web through your ISP’s shell account.
…Dialing into the BBS in Milwaukee once a week to download some new game from ID.
…When side-scroll games were where it was at.
…Not being able to conceive of ADs or junk mail on the Internet.
…Gopher sites.
…The UNIX talk command, what the cool kids used back in the day before AIM was even conceived of.
…Napster in its heyday.
…Downloading your first MP3.
…Floppy Disks. And not just 3 1/2 either I am talking 5 1/4…the only drive I had for quite a while.
…Low-Density Floppy Disks.
…Burning your first CD.
…Dot-matrix printers.
…The serial port.
…The parallel port.
…The game port.
…Dr. Spaitso from SoundBlaster.
…The Parrot from SoundBlaster.
…PC vs. Nintendo arguments. “Yeah but can your nintendo rock the spreadsheets?”
…The turbo button on the front of the PC case.
…Power supply from some guy named “Chin. C. Fan.”
…The zip drive being a mind blowing amount of storage.
…Trying to get the SCSI zip drive to work in NT and it requiring “sparrow.sys” for a driver which would inevitably bluescreen on startup.
…Blue Screen of Death in 9x
…Blue Screen of Death in NT
…The lameness that was the Intel Celeron.