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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   1972 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.

My first family computer was a 486 DX2 that I think my dad built. I remember him bragging it had a screaming fast Vesa Localbus VGA card. Had some sort of Soundblaster 16 or compatible sound card. Although I remember it having occasional hanging note bugs, so I think it must have been a genuine SB16.

I played so many fucking games on it. My dad installed Wheel of Fortune, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Indianapolis 500. A buddy of mine installed Doom 2 and Quest for Glory. And I can't count how many hours I spent playing the shareware/demo's for Doom, Heretic, Warcraft 1 & 2, Command & Conquer. My sister and I even got goofy with the simple joys of recording ourselves using the SB utilities in Windows 3.11.

I couldn't tell you the model of my family's first computer, inherited from a grandmother who taught yiddish for six decades but apparently wasn't as old fashioned as that sounds and had a leftover 486 when she upgraded to a higher number.

She probably even knew what we were getting 486 of! I certainly can't remember what they were, although I do remember a shareware demo of Doom that's probably the same as you—and I definitely remember those SB utilities, and how much they made me wish our computer had a microphone installed!

The 486 was a great computer for a long time. For a good chunk of time, literally everyone I knew who had a computer had a 486 DX2. And it more or less ran any game that came out from 1993 to 1996. Then Quake happened and the rest is history. Between 1997 and 2000 things moved so fast, a $2500 (~$4000 in 2023 money) Pentium 233 MMX with a Voodoo or a Riva 128 from 1997 could barely play Unreal or Half-Life which came out in 1998, only a year later. You can write off 1999 almost completely except for a smattering of games with long development cycles or games which were still 2D.

Oh, this takes me back. I think my dad beat Quake on a 486, or it was one of these pinout-compatible CPUs from Cyrix or AMD, but when Carmageddon came out, it was a slideshow without MMX. I think that Pentium 166 was the third upgrade I actually remember. The first two were:

  • the Sound Blaster card, easily the biggest upgrade in the whole history of upgrade
  • Matrox Millenium video card, because it was a flaky bitch that gave my dad headaches
  • a CD drive

Okay, fourth.

Anyway, the ten years after Quake were insane. In ten years we went from models that looked like this to models that looked like this. Compared to this leap (accompanied by a jump from 66 to 2500 MHz in CPU frequencies), the next fifteen years feel like running in place (cf Starfield and its staring eye models).

Come to think of it, a jump from Doom to Half-Life 2 (1995 to 2004) is even more insane. The latter feels like a modern game despite being 19 years old, while Doom was a living fossil just nine years after its release.

I do wonder what CPU he had in a 486 system to beat Quake. I never had one, but I guess AMD made a 486 compatible CPU that was the equivalent of a Pentium 75?

Then again, I beat plenty of games on enormously unpowered computers. I beat Unreal on a P120 in software rendering. It was a slideshow, but I had cheat codes!

Could've been a DX4 or one of the third party Socket 3 CPUs, I honestly don't remember. I remember he had to shrink down the viewport a bit to make the game playable.

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