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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   1977 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 13, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What was your first computer?

Mine was a Commodore 64. I remember going to Sears with my dad to pick up the disk drive; finally we wouldn’t have to wait for a tape drive to load a program. It lasted us a good ten years, from Tooth Invaders and Frogger in elementary school to GeoWorks word processing in high school.

Our second computer was a 486-33 DLC: the math coprocessor was not integrated like an Intel 486-DX but was added to the motherboard. It had a Turtle Island sound card I ruined by running a text file through the DOS MIDI player.

Some kind of 386. Well, it wasn't mine, it was my parents', but that was the first PC we had at home. I want to say my current one is in a ship-of-Theseus way the same PC, but alas, no:

  • the first one was a loaner
  • then my dad cadillacked a 486 AT that we ended up upgrading all the way to a GeForce-based machine over the years, migrating over to an ATX case in the process
  • then in a moment of weakness I bought a made-to-order one in 2004 (I know it was in 2004 because they sold me a faulty GPU, which I noticed in Dawn of War)
  • in 2007 I got my first (big for a recent graduate) bonus at work and bought a new Chieftec case that was built like a tank and weighed a fucking ton and migrated into it. I hated the 2004 PC, so I consider this a new one. Or did I buy the case earlier and only the guts from some guy from nvidia in 2007?
  • it survived and evolved all the way to 2021, when I built a new mini-ITX PC and moved only the GPU and my data from the old one

P.S. The oldest files I have are my IRC logs from when I was in my early teens, so they are almost a quarter century old, coming all the way from the first PC we owned.

P.P.S. I sold the 2007 PC to an ex-colleague of mine who needed a build station last month. He probably thought I was weird about loading it into my car and driving just 500m to his house, but then he couldn't lift it out of the trunk on the first try. I hope it'll keep fooling people and making them look like wimps for a couple more decades.

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