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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.

My grandma bought me an off-white PC somewhere around 2002. It opened my eyes, I certainly played more than my fair share of games on it, the ones that could handle the absence of a dedicated GPU at least. Had a Pentium 4, 32gb of storage, about 128mb of ram, you know, SOTA. Or it might not be, it's not like I was perusing hardware catalogs at the time.

I kinda feel bad for resenting it so much, at leafy until I found out it was a gift from her, but you tell me how you'd feel if you couldn't properly indulge in your favorite hobby for almost a decade because your parents were convinced that a PC capable of playing games made after 2005 or having an internet connection would corrupt the youth. Ah, the amount of money I hopefully wasted on games I couldn't even run, let alone when Steam activation requirements made me only play HL2 about a decade after its launch. I wonder if I have the Orange Box lying around somewhere, or if I turned it yet more orange by lighting it on fire in my frustration haha.