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Scaling Up

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skreed01 said:
Unfortunately for me my mom and sister threw away my Commodore C64 and all of the Accessories. I had the full set too, the Dual 5.25 floppy drive, the Blazingly fast 2.4 baud modem cradle, and the 5 MB hard drive the Hard drive you will never fill. Sometimes I miss it, it was exceedingly flexible. But I do still have my first PC case. So there is that.
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Looking back on all that early day hype, from the perspective of even 10 years later it was laughable. Nowadays it's pretty cringe-y, isn't it. While I wont say my exact age I will say that I was born before 1990 and that when I was in school we learned how to type on typewriters rather than computers which were still fairly expensive and kinda niche at the time. I too had a Commodore 64 and even had the Ghostbusters game for it. But then I moved on to console gaming with the awe inspiring Sega Mega Drive on which I spent countless hours perfecting the various Sonic games.
 
There's a quote that's oft attributed to Bill Gates about 640k RAM being enough for anyone. It's probably not something Gates ever said, but he did say something similar in a recorded speech he gave in 1986. And I remember when I got a PS2 and my first PS2 memory card. It felt huge, like I'd never fill it up. It was only a few megabytes of storage, but it felt like it was impossibly large. Similarly, when I first heard of 1 terabyte hard drives, I thought "my god, who would ever need something that big".
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
There's a quote that's oft attributed to Bill Gates about 640k RAM being enough for anyone. It's probably not something Gates ever said, but he did say something similar in a recorded speech he gave in 1986. And I remember when I got a PS2 and my first PS2 memory card. It felt huge, like I'd never fill it up. It was only a few megabytes of storage, but it felt like it was impossibly large. Similarly, when I first heard of 1 terabyte hard drives, I thought "my god, who would ever need something that big".
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Then we entered the era of digital downloads, and suddenly you need all the extra space you can get.
 
jmcdavid said:
Then we entered the era of digital downloads, and suddenly you need all the extra space you can get.
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It's not even the digital downloads. Its the fact that programs are no longer anywhere near as well optimized as they use to be. Why is it an X-Box 360 era game with far more content and compatible graphics was able to fit on 1 or 2 DVD-Rom disks, maybe 3 at most with data storage of 4.7 gigs per disk. While a modern game with PS2 era graphics and less content can take 80+ gigabytes of space?
 
And they're horribly wasteful with updates, too. 50GB update? Bullshit. Maybe 1GB is actually updated.

I was pleasantly surprised with a couple recent games that rarely had patches more than a few MB.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
It's not even the digital downloads. Its the fact that programs are no longer anywhere near as well optimized as they use to be. Why is it an X-Box 360 era game with far more content and compatible graphics was able to fit on 1 or 2 DVD-Rom disks, maybe 3 at most with data storage of 4.7 gigs per disk. While a modern game with PS2 era graphics and less content can take 80+ gigabytes of space?
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It's more than just the graphics, but everything else inside it. Even with those graphics, a lot of games have a great deal more detail and run far smoother than they ever did on the PS2 because of that.

grommile said:
Uncompressed audiovisual assets. Levels of texture detail you'll never see unless you have your nose pressed against a 4k screen. Etc.
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Then again, the PS2 was designed with CRT in mind, not LCD or proper HD and was able to skimp on a lot of those details due to the fact that the scan lines hide half of what is on the screen.

gthesob said:
And they're horribly wasteful with updates, too. 50GB update? Bullshit. Maybe 1GB is actually updated.

I was pleasantly surprised with a couple recent games that rarely had patches more than a few MB.
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That's more laziness of the developer's parts, given that I haven't run into a game where a download that large actually increased the size of the game file that much save for very rare, and expected in the case of major content updates, occasions.
 
Forger - I know where you're coming from. I was born in 1964, and remember typewriters in the schools, and the fact that they didn't set up a PROPER computer lab until after I graduated in 1982. We had three Commodore PETs for the longest time, and I convinced the teacher in charge of them to let me work on them when they weren't being used as long as I vacated for one of his students when they needed them. (Basically, if three of his students came in at the same time, I had to get off the computer I was on.) This led to me being allowed to take a seniors-only class while a sophomore, because I was teaching the teacher just as much about the computers. (All those PEEK and POKE commands ... *laugh*) Once wrote a horribly inefficient program for the PET that, when you ran it, after it finished setting up all of the various arrays and such, left the user 4 bytes of memory to work with. No, that is NOT a mistype. 4 bytes.
 
@Kinsfire I'm not quite that bad although I will say that I was in my equivalent of my Freshman year when I first really got to play with computers and by that time Windows was a thing even though a lot of the stuff we were doing still involved the good old fashioned Floppy Disk.
 
Back in grade school, probably around 86 or 87, my class had an Apple computer. I think I remember it being an Apple II. If students behaved and did well in class, they were able to redeem "reward" points for 10 minutes on the computer on Fridays. I personally preferred playing Number Muncher, Word Muncher, a Pitfall like game (thought it was a PC version, but huh), and B.C.'s Quest for Tires (based on the Sunday comics strip).
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
Back in grade school, probably around 86 or 87, my class had an Apple computer. I think I remember it being an Apple II. If students behaved and did well in class, they were able to redeem "reward" points for 10 minutes on the computer on Fridays. I personally preferred playing Number Muncher, Word Muncher, a Pitfall like game (thought it was a PC version, but huh), and B.C.'s Quest for Tires (based on the Sunday comics strip).
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Probably an Apple IIe. I remember in HS that was what was used in the Computer Room (no lab, just a room). Of course, I used mine to program basic video games out of programming magazines and string said games together via code to make a multi-level game. Then again, one of the first computers we had was a Coleco Adam...then an off brand IBM 8088. Nearly everything was 5.25 floppies back then, and then you got the 3.5s later. I still have a small box of old 3.5s lying around in a closet. Not to mention some ZIP drive disks that we used for Art classes in College...
 
I have never used an Apple. I started out on computers pretty late, as my family was poor. In my early 20s, I bought an IBM PC/AT. Had fun with it, 5.5 inch disk drive and all. Called it "Computersaurus". Got pretty good at playing Tetris in greyscale. I still remember fondly the feeling of the keyboard, I've never used one since then that felt as good to me.
 
forklifter16 said:
I have never used an Apple. I started out on computers pretty late, as my family was poor. In my early 20s, I bought an IBM PC/AT. Had fun with it, 5.5 inch disk drive and all. Called it "Computersaurus". Got pretty good at playing Tetris in greyscale. I still remember fondly the feeling of the keyboard, I've never used one since then that felt as good to me.
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I tracked down the company that made the IBM PS/2 keyboards for IBM. They're still in business, still making that keyboard (and others for IBM terminal gear still in use). Corsair's K65 and K70 keyboards all use mechanical switches, and have a decent feel. I'm currently using a Corsair K95 Diamond keyboard with my workstation. Corsair's utilities and drivers are crap, though. There's an open source utility you can use to set the back lighting and macros on the keyboard.

Anyway, the first computers I was exposed to were a TRS-80 and a Cromenco Z-2 (a Z-80 S-100 bus based machine). Programmed a random number game in TRS Basic and took apart Hunt the Wumpus on the Cromenco (which had 64Kb of RAM).

Next up was an Apple II my friend Tom had; learned to program some more interesting things, including a version of life on a 24 x 24 grid in integer basic, and a basic sub shooting ships game.

First personal computer was a VIC-20. Had loads of fun with that machine and it's tiny amount of memory. Even programmed a version of pac-man for it. Then came my Tandy-1000, which was an IBM PC-Jr in a different case. When I was done with it, it had the 8087 math chip, 640kb of RAM, and a 20mb HDD. I got my intro to computer gaming, with games like Starflight, Kings Quest, Stellar 7, and a few others. Then came the 486-100 PC clone, with a Soundblaster Soundcard. It had 8 Mb of RAM and a 384Mb HDD, SVGA graphics, and sound. And DOOM. And a 3D Renderer and Modeling Program (POV-Ray and Moray).

I Basically kept upgrading to the i7-960 3.2 Ghz, 24GB Ram, and 4TB storage with a RTX 3060 GPU and 2 Aorus 2560 x 1440 monitors and Logitech 5.1 speaker system I have today. Woot! Would love to upgrade again, but I'd need to win a lottery prize to do so.

And yes, I still code. Basic, VB.Net, C#, Python, C, C++. Thought about Rust for a bit.
 
Kryslin, your making me feel old. I remember when the IBM PC first started hitting the market.

Before that it was all punch card machines and tape drives. Which is what I started learning on.
 
Remember the "Dude you're getting a Dell" commercials from the 90's? The annoying teen in those ads made it sound like getting a Dell computer was this great thing, even though they were pretty meh computers. But these days Dell's reputation would have that same teen going "Dude... you got a Dell?!" in a sad and confused way.
 
I gave up on Dell laptops when the one I got using my company's discount had the keyboard stop working - literally the day after the warranty was up. Bought a new computer, because at that time, buying a new keyboard for that model was more expensive than buying a new machine.
 
Dell computers are like compact cars; they do a decent enough job most of the time, but fall short for major tasks. (Limited payload and power for the car, limited processing power for the Dell.) If you just need something for basic "office" tasks (word processor, spreadsheet, database, e-mail, etc.) a Dell will do the job well enough for most. If you are into anything that will stress a computer's processing capabilities... well, there's a reason compact cars can't replace pickup trucks or race cars, isn't there.

Then again, like a compact car, mass production and lower cost components has driven the price of a Dell down compared to a computer capable of serious tasks. Even so, outside of laptops, I'd rather assemble my own computer from parts then get a Dell. Especially if I want to run a D&D inspired video game or two...
 
The 2nd PC I ever owned for myself was a Dell. And it served me well up until around 2009 when an idiot quite literally fried the damn thing by thinking he's an electrician and (badly) splicing in the cooling fan from my just replaced power supply in place of the cooling fan that the computer already had. You know, because the existing fan was "too noisy", in his opinion. He also refused to listen as I kept trying to tell him "don't do that". The cooling fan wasn't that noisy, in fact you could barely hear it when everything was closed up and the fan was running flat out. But no, he decided to remove the existing case fan, splice in the fan from the old power supply, and used scotch tape to secure his "twist the two ends together clockwise a few times" splice.

Note, the orientation of the wires for his "splice" was as follows:
_______ _______ instead of _____] [______
He didn't fold he ends into an L shape, twist the now L shaped parts together and fold it over to secure things. Instead he just laid them next to each other and twisted them together before applying cheap dollar store bought scotch tape. This, unsurprisingly, lead to his piss poor splice job disconnecting, the "whisper quiet" fan he set up not running, and the computer literally baking it's self... thus killing my Radeon X300 graphics card, the CPU, every RAM stick I'd added, and melting all the wires in the brand new 700 watt power supply I was installing so the computer could support said Radeon X300 graphics card.

Yes, I made the idiot buy me an entirely new computer, replacement RAM sticks, a new Radeon X300 card (I'd just bought it, and wasn't happy), a new 700 watt power supply, and pay a professional to install the power supply. I then was using that tower until 2020 when I got my current PC.

EDIT:
If you can't tell, even years later I'm still quite pissed about that.
 
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Balrog said:
Reading this made me cringe in horror. As some one whose job is to repair electronics every time I see a "I know enough to repair my own electronics...*BZZZT*" unit I start by looking up the price of a new/used one.
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I feel you. I know enough about computers to build one from parts but I especially know that I'm not good enough to do that sort of shit and if a part dies on me, just get a replacement part rather than try to fix it. Having seen a few people on YT do electronics fixes has made me even more determined to leave that sort of stuff to the professionals.
 
I've taken a course or two on computer repair in my lifetime. The first thing they tell you is NEVER OPEN UP THE POWER SUPPLY! Beyond that, there is no need for wire stripping, no need for splicing, and if you do any of these things you are wrong (and possibly dead; there's enough energy inside the power supply to severely injure or kill someone.)

A good computer repair kit contains some spare hardware, tweezers, four screwdrivers, possibly a nut driver and maybe a chip puller AND THAT'S IT. The only other tool one might need is a multimeter to check power supply output voltages. If anyone working on your computer reaches for any other tool, get them away from that machine. They will break it.
 
The only things I know about wiring come from watching This Old House in the 80's and early 90's. I know enough to know I don't know enough to do any sort of wire splicing safely. But I DO know the proper way to actually do said splice so that it doesn't pull apart due to gravity. I also am pretty sure that taking a fan out of a power supply, and using that to replace a case fan that is two to three times bigger is a bad idea when it comes to cooling the inside of a computer. I also know that if you are going to be doing a splice of electrical wires, you do not use scotch tape.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
I also am pretty sure that taking a fan out of a power supply, and using that to replace a case fan that is two to three times bigger is a bad idea when it comes to cooling the inside of a computer.
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Wait, you're telling me that this blithering moron decided to use a power supply fan to replace a case fan!!!!!!!! I'm sorry, but this is a level of stupid nearly on the level of getting a Darwin Award and you should tell him that. Not only are the two fans of different sizes but they have different power requirements to spin at specific speeds so even if he had successfully spliced it I'm betting it would have spun so fast it would've exploded inside the case anyway. If someone had even suggested this to me I'd have warned them that if they even tried I'd stab them and if they kept going I'd have had to follow through.
 
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