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How old am I?


Garda

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it just occurred to me as I was installing win98 into vmware, due to having an old game that refused to work on XP, that I may be a little old, especially compared to some of the guys that hang around here.

Now, this isn't intended to be a run down nostalgia lane where everyone goes on about their first computer... but my family's first computer was a P200 with win95.

Is there anyone here who has never used win95 cos they are to young to have ever touched a computer that long ago?

Seriously, I feel really old now that I think that there are some guys here who are 14 or something. 14 - 12 = 2 yo when win95 came out

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When I was 12 (about the year 98 or 99) I was graced with inheriting a computer that was as old as I was. The thing was pathetic. It had MS DOS 4.01 installed on it. As pathetic as the machine was I did have fun learning how to use GWBasic. I also learned some assembly back then(is it weird for a 12 year old to know assembly?). Windows 95 was new tech in comparison.

Now I'm 21 and can't really speak on behalf of the preteens of today.

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My first desktop was a Win95 machine. Got the disk right here.

In fact, we still have it on a few legacy machines at work that have been imaged for safe keeping because they are hooked up to hardware that wasn't meant to be used past Win95.(tape reels from the 70's, etc, that no one bothered to update the software for as well as need the hardware on some older machines that newer ones don't have)

We use it daily and it still runs fine and can see most of the network lan through windows explorer, and the ones it can't it just ftp's files around the lan back and forth. I know, Win95 is pathetic, but if it works then we use it. Most of our internal pc's are still running Win98 and we have been using hp-unix, sun and win2000 on the server end. They only updated to Server 2003 around a year ago. Maybe two years. There are no Mac's in the building and only a few people running linux as their desktop (mainly test machines and virtualization).

But yes, we still use 95 and I have been around long enough to remember Apple II's, Comadore 64's, Texas Instrument TI99 Personal computers(I think thats what they were called). We even used to use cassette tapes to load and save programs and 5 and 8 inch floppy's. Our check sorter machines from IBM(they are from the 60's) use the larger floppy and can even use punch cards to program it for different sort patterns and functions.(why we still have them I don't know because we have new image machines that scan the checks now)

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I had the Apple IIe one friend had a Commodore 64 my other friend had a 8088 clone from hong kong his dad got on a business tripwe write a prog in basic on one and the go over to the other 2 machines and try to write the same thing suxor'd for games shareing :(good ol day of lock smith copy program lol

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The first computers I used on a regular basis ran Microsft Windows (version 1, but there was no version number back then), but it wasn't until a few years later that I had my own computer that ran 3.1. When it came to 95 and 98, I used them, but mainly stuck to NT4.

What I find more weird is the kids who were born after 9/11. Most people who were born in the 80's or 90's got to see the soviet union fall and the west "win", where as todays kids younger than 6 have never known anything but a perpetual global war on Terror.

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My first machine was an 8086 clone made by Ericsson. Yeah, the phone hardware company. It came with MS Dos 3.3 or thereabouts. My first fooray into programming was creating menu programs using GWBASIC so that the rest of the family could easily start the programs they'd normally use. After that it was mostly exchanging the BASIC source code with a friend of mine down the street who owned a C64, and trying to get that to play nice with a PC. I skipped windows 3.1. Not sure why, but probably has something to do with the machine not being able to deal. I did get to play with it at school though. Once I finally upgraded to a 486-66 with a whopping 8 megs of ram I went on to OS2 Warp which was quickly replaced by Windows 95 due to incompatibilities. Before that I was allowed to toy a bit with some version of NT (3.51?) my dad had on his work laptop.

Due to costs I tried to upgrade to a system with a Cyrix P120+ which proved to be horrendously unstable for most Windows OSes I flung at it. Then I tried Linux which not only managed to play nice with the CPU, but even supported my ISDN card, which up until that point appeared to have been forged in the firy pits of hell, beautifully. Since then, the only time I use Windows is when someone else's machine breaks, or when I'm using VMWare to play with a program that doesn't have a Linux counterpart.

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Ok, so no1 here will talk about their first computer... Ahem... Well while we're on the subject, my first computer was a ZX Spectrum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum). I started playing with it at age 3-4. The thing was awesome, and the coolest part was that all the programs and games came out on audio cassettes, and you could order them by making a list of what you want and the good guys that worked at ... would "burn" them on a cassette and send you a compilation of all the best things out there :D Anyway, I did use win 95 but I didn't have a PC back then. My first PC had win 98 SE. Oh yeah, I'm 19.8 yrs now so go figure about the age thing :D

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Lets see, I'm 17 now, and the first computer I ever interacted with was a Commodore Amiga running Amiga OS 2.1 (later upgraded to an Amiga 2000 running OS 3.2 with Kickstart loaded onto the included 12MB hard disk). We still have both of our Amiga computers, still in working order, with all the peripherals (Monitors, keyboards, mice, genlock hardware for real time video editing) and a complete library of old software to go along with them...I learned to spell on that Amiga with Mickey and Friends when I was 3. I've hooked up the Amiga 2000 now and again for nostalgia purposes, god that's a fantastic OS they had, I wish the team developing Amiga OS 4 the best of luck on reviving the platform.

The first PC that I could actually call "mine" was an old Packard Bell that I got for $100 back in 1996. Came loaded with Windows 3.11, had a 486 with a math co-processor, 8mb of RAM, and a 500MB hard disk. As soon as I had it set up I went through the slow process of installing Windows 95 from a pile of 22 floppy disks, which brought it up-to-date enough for me to use it for the next two years.

So at this point my dad builds himself a new PC and he gives me his old one; I promptly set up the newer PC in place of my old Packard Bell (which eventually ended up getting thrown out). Dad had loaded Windows 98 SE onto this system before handing it off to me, it had an AMD K6-2 processor, 64MB of RAM, and a PCI Riva TNT 2 video card. (This very same system is still running today, serving as our Network Attached Storage box; It's running Windows 2000 and has 6x 500GB drives attached to it across three PCI SATA controllers for a total of 3TB of storage space shared with every computer in the house. Talk about built to last, sheesh!)

I used that system all the way up until Windows XP came out, at which point I built my first PC. AMD Athlon XP 1500+ (1.3GHz) with 256mb DDR RAM, a GeForce 2 Ti 400, and a 40GB hard disk. We loaded Windows XP onto it and I entered the world of modern PC gaming for the first time (Return to Castle Wolfenstien and Red Faction FTW). I threw in a GeForce FX5200 and brought it up to 512MB of RAM to keep it up to date for a while, but as soon as Doom 3 hit all bets were off. I tried to upgrade to a 6600GT, but the CPU bottleneck was so bad that I didn't gain anything over the FX5200. (I just recently fixed up this system and gave it to a friend of mine who was in desperate need of a new computer, brought it up to 1GB of RAM and overclocked the processor up to 1.8GHz to eek out the last bit of speed it had left in it).

Fast forward to a little while after the release of Doom 3, and I'm building a new computer from scratch again. Started out with a s754 Athlon 64 3200+, 512MB of RAM, a 6600GT, and a Soundblaster 2 (this was also my first LCD monitor, a 15 incher). I think I threw in 1GB of RAM and called it good for a while...then Oblivion came out and I was now stuck on AGP, with no way to get any of the performance of the GeForce 7x00 series.

You can probably guess what I did next; upgraded my motherboard to one that supported PCIe and SLI, and picked up a GeForce 7900GT (while sticking to the same CPU socket so I could use my old RAM and s754 processor). This was also around the time I upgraded from the olf 15" LCD to a 19" LCD (the 15" went to my younger brother, who's been getting all of my PC components second-hand before they finally end up being given to other people or repurposed to serve other tasks such as NAS and Smoothwall boxes)

I've since upgraded the processor to a s754 3400+ (Venice core which overclockes up to a nice speed of 2.7GHz), brought myself up to 2GB of RAM,  and I'm still rocking my heavily volt-moded and overclocked 7900GT...although the GeForce 8800 series is starting to look mighty tasty! In a strange turn of events, I now also have my 15" monitor back on my desk; I picked up a 22" Wide screen, handed-down the 19" it was replacing to my brother, and that left the 15" without a home...secondary monitor for me baby!

Holy cow, did I just write all that? And I didn't even hardly go into what happened to my stuff after I upgraded (mostly passed through my little brother before going anywhere else)! Heh...nice trip down memory lane...

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First PC was a 8086 IBM with count'em two 5 1/4" floppy drives, a green and brown monitor display with a whopping 4mb hd running DOS 2.x. It had a hercules onboard video and an Okidata raw printer.

Second was a Packard Bell 486 DX66 with 480mb hd and 8mb of ram and windows 3.1 for Workgroups. A nice 13" monitor with speakers, playing Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein all the time! OH YEAH!

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My first computer was a TRS 80 Color Computer 2, then I had a Commodore 64, then I got a Packard Bell with a Pentium 133MHz, 32MB of RAM, running Windows 95, after that I built 3 systems running Win95, 98, ME, 2K, XP, and several linux distros and now I have a new Dell running Vista.

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Spectrum 48k+ (the plus is important)

Spectrum 128+2 (with built in tape player)

Atari ST

Pc with dos 3.3 then 4.01, 5, 6 win 3, 3.1, 95 installed from floppies

and onwards from there but not as far as vista yet.

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