Longlynx
05-27-2005, 04:58 PM
This is my story, what's yours?
My first Personal computer was a broken 8088. It weighed about the same as a bag of cement, and had about the same processing power! When I got it, the hard drive wasn’t working – which made it about as useful as it was graceful. Well a quick (quick?) removal of the cover revealed that the drive cable had come off the controller card (yes – drive controller card, no such thing as IDE back then!) I plonked the cable back in the right place, replaced the lovely beige cover (steel plate I think), and switched on.
The lights dimmed briefly all over town as this monster booted, wow, Dos 2! Now I could word process or play a text based dos game, hmmm.
My next machine skipped two generations (8086 and 80286) it was a sleek 80386, or 386 as they had become known. Now this was a sweet piece of kit! Light, elegant- a 3.5” floppy drive and…… a colour monitor! This beast had a 40MB hard drive and 2MB of ram. Now that’s what I’m talking about! I could even run a gui based OS. Ahh my introduction to windows 3.1. This machine could even render full screen images in 16 colours, and in under two minutes! Now I could word process or play arcade games, hmmm.
It was at this stage that I decided that the only way to get a good computer was to build one, now let’s see, computer shops in the Kerry area in the early nineties, hmm.
Mail order it is then! CPC in England for a barebones 486 system with case.
The first system that arrived was DOA and had to be sent back, but the replacement worked fine. Now I was the proud owner of a 486 33Mhz pc with 8 Mb Ram a soundcard, a separate graphics card and purchased separately, a 500MB hard drive.
Now I could use Windows 95, wehey!
Now I could play DOOM with a soundcard!!
This soon got too slow so I started tweaking. Upgraded the ram to 16MB and upgraded the processor to a 486 DX2 66Mhz. There were also empty cache ram sockets on the mobo (no L2 cache then!), which I populated with matching 16 pin DIL cache ram modules from another mobo. Now I was motoring, DOOM hardly stuttered or jittered at all!
Well from that point on I have been building PC’s for myself and friends. Pentium was a great achievement breaking the 100Mhz barrier, and with the advent of MMX extensions I could at last play DOOM flawlessly.
These days I’m using a Pentium 4 2.53Ghz which is overclocked to3.01Ghz.
1 Gig of ram, 180 gig 7200 rpm hard drive and a couple of 80gig SCSI drives for video editing. 5.1 surround, and a DVD burner keep me happy.
There are a couple of other PC’s scattered about which are networked up to the main machine. I use these mostly for storing music and video.
Next step is to upgrade the processor and mobo again, something that’s 800 fsb and a hyperthreading cpu. Possibly bluetooth as well, and I’d like to compare SCSI to SATA, ooh and an onboard firewire port for DV editing…. I could go on and on.
No, I don’t play DOOM anymore.
>>LonglynX<<
My first Personal computer was a broken 8088. It weighed about the same as a bag of cement, and had about the same processing power! When I got it, the hard drive wasn’t working – which made it about as useful as it was graceful. Well a quick (quick?) removal of the cover revealed that the drive cable had come off the controller card (yes – drive controller card, no such thing as IDE back then!) I plonked the cable back in the right place, replaced the lovely beige cover (steel plate I think), and switched on.
The lights dimmed briefly all over town as this monster booted, wow, Dos 2! Now I could word process or play a text based dos game, hmmm.
My next machine skipped two generations (8086 and 80286) it was a sleek 80386, or 386 as they had become known. Now this was a sweet piece of kit! Light, elegant- a 3.5” floppy drive and…… a colour monitor! This beast had a 40MB hard drive and 2MB of ram. Now that’s what I’m talking about! I could even run a gui based OS. Ahh my introduction to windows 3.1. This machine could even render full screen images in 16 colours, and in under two minutes! Now I could word process or play arcade games, hmmm.
It was at this stage that I decided that the only way to get a good computer was to build one, now let’s see, computer shops in the Kerry area in the early nineties, hmm.
Mail order it is then! CPC in England for a barebones 486 system with case.
The first system that arrived was DOA and had to be sent back, but the replacement worked fine. Now I was the proud owner of a 486 33Mhz pc with 8 Mb Ram a soundcard, a separate graphics card and purchased separately, a 500MB hard drive.
Now I could use Windows 95, wehey!
Now I could play DOOM with a soundcard!!
This soon got too slow so I started tweaking. Upgraded the ram to 16MB and upgraded the processor to a 486 DX2 66Mhz. There were also empty cache ram sockets on the mobo (no L2 cache then!), which I populated with matching 16 pin DIL cache ram modules from another mobo. Now I was motoring, DOOM hardly stuttered or jittered at all!
Well from that point on I have been building PC’s for myself and friends. Pentium was a great achievement breaking the 100Mhz barrier, and with the advent of MMX extensions I could at last play DOOM flawlessly.
These days I’m using a Pentium 4 2.53Ghz which is overclocked to3.01Ghz.
1 Gig of ram, 180 gig 7200 rpm hard drive and a couple of 80gig SCSI drives for video editing. 5.1 surround, and a DVD burner keep me happy.
There are a couple of other PC’s scattered about which are networked up to the main machine. I use these mostly for storing music and video.
Next step is to upgrade the processor and mobo again, something that’s 800 fsb and a hyperthreading cpu. Possibly bluetooth as well, and I’d like to compare SCSI to SATA, ooh and an onboard firewire port for DV editing…. I could go on and on.
No, I don’t play DOOM anymore.
>>LonglynX<<