by "Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To" (murdersofa)
Published 04/30/2017 at 19:08
by "Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To" (murdersofa)
Published 04/30/2017 at 19:08
Tags: old puters
STARS: 6
My old 486. Getting it ready to be put up for sale. 66mhz 486DX-2, 5 1/2" and 5 1/2" floppy drives, 12MB of RAM, and a 3GB hard drive. Aww yiss.
You can use a mouse with the BIOS! This feature more or less disappeared from computers until its recent re-indroduction as the worst way to possibly use a BIOS. This UI is glorious compared to modern graphic BIOSes and their hideous amount of menus.
The settings are wrong for the floppy drives. Oops. RTC battery has long since left this planet.
BOI. BOI
IT’S SO DAMN PRETTY
Unfortunately when I went to reinstall MS-DOS 5 and Win3.1 I realized that disk 1 of my floppy set has become unreadable so now I’m having to dig out all of the old tools I used to use to manage floppies and figure out how to get this shit working under windows 10. Joy.
"MM54" (mm54mk2)
04/30/2017 at 19:25, STARS: 1
I’m jealous. 5.25" floppy AND windows 3.1??
"doodon2whls" (doodon2whls)
04/30/2017 at 19:54, STARS: 2
This is amazing and brings back memories...
I grew up on Atari 600XL’s, 800XL’s, 130XE’s and Toaster Macintoshs in the 1980's....
My first true “PC”was a Laptop computer. It was a 1995 AST Research Ascentia 900N with 9.5" TFT Active matrix LCD screen. 486-50DX2, 8MB RAM, maybe 340MB HDD. Mind Blown !
When the 100MB ZIP Drives came out I thought that was the biggest media format EVAR !
Needless to say, every year since then, I have been blown away by each successive increase in processor speed, number of cores, and storage capacity in RAM or HDD or now SSD.
Moore’s law has been in full effect...
"fintail" (fintail)
04/30/2017 at 20:00, STARS: 0
12MB and 3GB? Must have been upgraded a few years later.
I remember my first PC from that same year. Similar speed, but I think it had 4MB (I shit you not) and maybe 200MB. Who could fill that? It also had the 2 floppy drives, and no CD.
"Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To" (murdersofa)
04/30/2017 at 20:10, STARS: 0
It was a bare chassis when I got it 4 years ago. I tossed in a 3GB drive since, well, it’s what I had at the time and I wanted a mostly-period-correct machine that could handle playing ALL of the early-90s DOS games.
"fintail" (fintail)
04/30/2017 at 20:12, STARS: 1
That makes sense. If you had 3GB in the mid 90s, you were the shit.
I remember in the summer of 96, a friend of mine got a new Pentium Pro machine, 200 mhz, 32 GB, I forget the rest (couldn’t have been more than 3-4GB no doubt), but I remember it was $3500 - insane.
"Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To" (murdersofa)
04/30/2017 at 20:17, STARS: 1
I’ve got some interesting laptops. Toshiba 400CDT is probably the most pedestrian of which, being a Pentium 1 laptop with a mono speaker, little backlit color LCD, trackpoint-style pointer mouse (no touchpad!), floppy drive, and an impressively good battery for its age. Runs Windows 95 like a champ but it doesn’t have any networking abilities.
Also have a Canon laptop called the “notejet” that has a built-in monochrome printer and a 486 DX-2 with a monochrome backlit LCD. Stick paper under the keyboard and it comes out the other side with 16-bit porn on it. Wonderful. Well, it would have been. I’ve never gotten all the pieces together to make the printer work and with a completely dead battery my interest in it waned quickly.
I have a laptop made by DEC, as well. It also has a dead battery but it is one of the most perfectly-sized notebooks I’ve ever used in my life. I believe it’s a HiNote of some description, another early Pentium machine.
Getting quite a bit older I have my Tandy TRS-80 Model 100, the grandaddy of laptops. Not the first, but the first commercially successful laptop. Monochrome non-backlit LCD, no clamshell, displays I believe 8x40 characters and runs BASIC in-ROM for programming. Programs are loaded either by manually typing them in from the GLORIOUS full-travel keyboard (with no “pop”, totally linear mechanical action) or by loading them via tape. Floppy drive? Sure, the “twiggy” existed but those have long since stopped working due to a design error that makes the drive belts melt. Oops.
Right now I’m going through all my mid-90s beige boxes trying to piece together some “retro” windows 95 or MS-DOS ‘gaming’ systems to sell on eBay as that sort of thing seems to be selling for roughly $260-ish, whereas this was all free e-waste when I got it and not even an enthusiast would think otherwise.
Hell, even two years ago I only got $120 each or so for my IBM PS/1 and PS/2. The PS/1 was complete with manuals, disks, and factory printer, even! The PS/2 was a model 30 and ended up bought by a machine shop in Wyoming to run their CNC machine.
"Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To" (murdersofa)
04/30/2017 at 20:20, STARS: 0
First computer we had was a Gateway 486 pizzabox my dad bought in ‘94 with a CD player. A CD PLAYER!
"415s30 W123TSXWaggoIIIIIIo ( •_•))°)" (415s30)
04/30/2017 at 20:28, STARS: 0
My aunt has worked for Compaq since the early days, I used to get various things from my dad. I have a suitcase computer somewhere, has a nice tiny monochrome screen.
Now I use Toshiba widescreen laptops, never had one fail. I did get an Asus ROG gaming rig, best thing I ever had.
"fintail" (fintail)
04/30/2017 at 20:40, STARS: 0
High tech! I remember seeing my first CD-ROM and being amazed by the graphics it could produce.
I also remember spending ~$150 for a 33.6 modem in 1996.