You know you're a sad old geek when.....

[SYNACK]

Eep, I remember most of these, someone, get me my cane...

[BKGarry]

ahhh, a black and white TV with dials for tuning rather than buttons, in the kitchen with my dad Spectrum 128k (in 1994/5) at the end of the week for an hour (after the items have loaded) if I didn't get any warnings or break/lunch school detentions all week in juniors :-)

[X-13]

ahhh, a black and white TV with dials for tuning rather than buttons,

 

Up until a few years ago, I still had one of those. It worked perfectly fine.

[CESIL]

Actually it occurs to me that "You know you're a sad old geek when....."

 

Most of the reminiscences of other people still seem like new fangled technology that will NEVER catch on...

[Dos_Box]

Having to learn NetBUI and NWLink IPX/SPX for my NT4.0 MCSE.

Yeah, thanks for that. That's 3 days I'm not getting back again!

[Rawns]

I remember the first proper upgrade i bought for my PC, saved up all my pocket money for weeks and weeks to buy a 3DFX Voodoo3 PCI card....to play the original version of Thief...worth every penny

 

Voodoo cards! YES!

 

I did exactly the same but wanted it to play Kingpin: Life of Crime. Loved that game!!!

 

Before that, I played Half-Life in software rendering mode and loved it. When I realised I could play it again this time with 3D rendering, I wet myself! It was like playing a whole new game!!!

[elsiegee40]

Ah yes, typing code onto punched tape and then making a mistake right near the end several feet of tape later...happy days...NOT!

In no particular order:

 

Submitting a pile of punch cards an inch thick only to discover, two hours later, there was a mistake and trying to find the single card to correct knowing it was going to take another two hours to resubmit. Maybe that's why I became such a good proof-reader.

 

Playing a quest type game on a Commodore Pet that my Dad used to lug home from work occasionally. No graphics, you had to build the images in your imagination and responded only to sentences on the screen.

 

C15 and C30 cassettes.

 

Phone calls in the middle of the night because the batch run had failed. Trying desperately to explain to the operators how to fix it over the phone. Giving up and driving in to work. I could handle calls after 4am OK, calls between 1am and 4am were a nightmare. Remoting in was a distant dream.

 

The excitement of my physics teacher showing the new school computer to us in my final term at school... the first one. I still wondr what led me, a few months latr, to choose Computing at university as my third subject. I certainly didn't anticipate it being my career!

[budgester]

5 1/4 in floppies having an amazing speed of data access on the C64.

 

Then later on buying 100 * 3 1/2" floppies and a 1/2 meg upgrade from my Amiga 500 from a computer fair in some obscure part of london.

[SpuffMonkey]

Clubbing together at work to buy blank CDs so we could get an order for over 100 to get the price down to £2 a disk..

[ben604]

Computer Fairs!

[Netwacky87]

I posted last night on Facebook that I felt old, look in the Top 10 and see how many Artists you recognise?!!!! Ahhhh yes im 25 and remember doing all of those!! The good old days!!!

[sparkeh]

Youngsters have it too easy today, when I was young you had to have sworn, thrown some things around the room and nearly thrown the damn machine out of the window before you could even hope to play a computer game.

Made you appreciate it

[ben604]

Youngsters have it too easy today, when I was young you had to have sworn, thrown some things around the room and nearly thrown the damn machine out of the window before you could even hope to play a computer game.

Made you appreciate it

 

I don't know about that...there're some pretty unhappy people about, having serious trouble with the new Tomb Raider...Gaming PCs are just as annoying now as they've always been!

[BKGarry]

and that is why we have consoles :-)

[reggiep]

At least back in the day, simcity used to work.

[ben604]

and that is why we have consoles :-)

 

Well, if you're happy with SD graphics...

[sparkeh]

I don't know about that...there're some pretty unhappy people about, having serious trouble with the new Tomb Raider...Gaming PCs are just as annoying now as they've always been!

lol, yeah you do have a point there

[unixman_again]

DOS 6.22

CONFIG.SYS & AUTOEXEC.BAT FILES

PCI cards

5 1/4 floppies

C64,ZX81, etc

 

What is all this new fangled technology?

 

When I started in IT, we had to manually identify the sectors on the mass storage device where you wanted the file to go, and then write the file to the device. These self-indexing floppy disks made is far to easy.

 

Here is a real input device, ; not of your electronic VDUs. This was back in the days we were "in computing", never "in IT".

 

For the pedantic, this is the actual input device

[jinnantonnixx]

I love old fangled stuff.

 

I have a small collection in my loft, all enfangled in the '70s and '80s.

 

Commodore PET, several working Spectrums (48K rubber keys & Spectrum+), lots of Spectrum software and accessories, two Cambridge Z88 laptop-ish things (both broken), working Sinclair QL, Apricot F1 (twin 3.5" drives), several Psion 3 (these were great).

 

I have have no idea why I'm keeping them, perhaps I'll open a museum.

[BKGarry]

I have been playing Gabriel Knight (2) The Beast Within on my Mac in Dosbox, very badly compressed FMV game, but it has a great plot (6 CD-ROMS though)

[localzuk]

I dunno, you lot with your old fashioned PCs...

 

My first home computers were:

 

Acorn Archimedes

Apple Color Classic - which we had the internet on! Setting up a Mac OS 7 machine to use the net was not very simple, especially as you had to get everything off magazine disks!

 

Then I got my own computer - an Apple LC III.

 

We then replaced the family Color Classic and my LC with a Performa 5200.

 

After that, my dad started receiving a work laptop (Compaq), and I saved up and bought myself my first desktop PC - an Athlon 1Ghz in about December 1999. And when Windows ME came out, I put that on it.

 

At school, I ran a great network consisting of some 386s, 486s and a couple of Pentium I 133Mhz machines (which I got hold of by asking a load of local companies for donations), all running on 10Base2. With our fancy machine made by Mitsubishi (266Mhz P2!!) in the corner with its own dedicated 64kbs ISDN line for sending work to the local college to produce on their CAM machine. We used them for playing GTA.

 

Ah, those were the days.

[cobra427col]

"Try telling the youngsters of today that - an' they'll not believe you"

 

(can't believe I was the first to post that oldie from MPFC)

[6Foot2]

At least back in the day, simcity used to work.

 

Link: A SimCity Update [EA apologizes for problems with new SimCity release with a free game]

[Norphy]

I remember getting my first SVGA monitor. It was a 14" AOC model. I used to run that thing at 1024x768@60hz. In hindsight, I'm amazed that my eyes still work.

[CHR1S]

Remember the 'Turbo' buttons?

 

Didn't the turbo button actually under clock the CPU?