Stories of inappropriate visuals...
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@TheCPUWizard said:
Remember, "being a youngin" is a self curing situation...
Spose I'm not that young (22) but I always feel that way when I see you guys throwing around stories about computers with KILO-bytes of RAM. Frankly I'd love to get my hands on some of that old stuff just to play with it.
I remember that Gateway was so slow, if you filled an empty Paint document with color, you could actually watch the color slide down and up from wherever you clicked. I used to draw mazes and then fill the color at one end, and then watch it "flow" around the lines I'd drawn. Frickin COOL. Course I was ten at the time, everything with computers was cool...
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FWIW, there are reproductions of many machines available. Check out SpareTimeGizmos.com for two of my favorites!
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@Cad Delworth said:
Case in point: when my wife worked for a life insurance company in the 1980s, they got hosed for £150,000 (which I believe is about 300,000 of your dollars) because of a single character error in a letter. Instead of the final sentence stating "We are not prepared to accept your claim." the letter was sent out stating "We are now prepared to accept your claim." (I added the bold attributes, the letter didn't originally have any highlighting, being typed in the days before word processors.)
So how much money do you have riding on this forum? £10,000? £25,000?
Or maybe, just maybe, just the smallest iota of probability, context matters? Maybe... maybe a goofy forum about bad programming consisting primarily of trolls is a different context than a legal document with thousands of dollars riding on it? Maybe?
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Well the problem is in this media, all we get to go on is text. Context is hard to transmit without voice, and most of inter-human communication is lost in text (something like 93%). Therefore, I always take care to make sure that what I type is legible and understandable to what I'm trying to say.
Unless it's something like instant messaging or text messaging, because I know those people and they know me, so we can usually interpret each other pretty easily.
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@Master Chief said:
My first computer was a hand-me-down from my step dad, a Gateway with a blazing fast 400 MHz processor and 32 meg of ram running Windows 95. I played Hover! to DEATH on that when I upgraded to Windows 98.
Why did you wait until Win98 for Hover? It was included on the Win95 CDs :)
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Am I the only person who read that as "The first hard drive I worked with was 32 kilowatts"?
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@ender said:
@Master Chief said:
My first computer was a hand-me-down from my step dad, a Gateway with a blazing fast 400 MHz processor and 32 meg of ram running Windows 95. I played Hover! to DEATH on that when I upgraded to Windows 98.
Why did you wait until Win98 for Hover? It was included on the Win95 CDs :)
I would swear on a stack of bibles I didn't get it until the Windows 98 Plus disk. Could be 95 though, my memory isn't great.
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@Master Chief said:
I remember that Gateway was so slow, if you filled an empty Paint document with color, you could actually watch the color slide down and up from wherever you clicked. I used to draw mazes and then fill the color at one end, and then watch it "flow" around the lines I'd drawn. Frickin COOL. Course I was ten at the time, everything with computers was cool...
That would be insanely slow for a 400MHz machine!? I remember my 386 (40MHz and 4MB RAM, so an order of magnitude slower/smaller) being like that with Neopaint for DOS - it would take a few seconds to do a maze-flood-fill. I remember first playing with Neopaint: previously I had thought the 386 could only do VGA (640x480, 16 colours) but really it could do 800x600 with 256 colours! WOW! (The card could even do 1024x768 in 16 colours but the 14 inch monitor didn't like that idea)
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@Zemm said:
That would be insanely slow for a 400MHz machine!? I remember my 386 (40MHz and 4MB RAM, so an order of magnitude slower/smaller) being like that with Neopaint for DOS - it would take a few seconds to do a maze-flood-fill. I remember first playing with Neopaint: previously I had thought the 386 could only do VGA (640x480, 16 colours) but really it could do 800x600 with 256 colours! WOW! (The card could even do 1024x768 in 16 colours but the 14 inch monitor didn't like that idea)
And yet with the advent of LCD monitors and Windows XP, many users had to be forcibly dragged, kicking and screaming, away from 640x480.
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@Zemm said:
@Master Chief said:
I remember that Gateway was so slow, if you filled an empty Paint document with color, you could actually watch the color slide down and up from wherever you clicked. I used to draw mazes and then fill the color at one end, and then watch it "flow" around the lines I'd drawn. Frickin COOL. Course I was ten at the time, everything with computers was cool...
That would be insanely slow for a 400MHz machine!? I remember my 386 (40MHz and 4MB RAM, so an order of magnitude slower/smaller) being like that with Neopaint for DOS - it would take a few seconds to do a maze-flood-fill. I remember first playing with Neopaint: previously I had thought the 386 could only do VGA (640x480, 16 colours) but really it could do 800x600 with 256 colours! WOW! (The card could even do 1024x768 in 16 colours but the 14 inch monitor didn't like that idea)
Well it was an old beaten horse by the time I got it, the old school beige tin can. Hell, it was the only computer I ever saw where the entire case was metal, no plastic anywhere but the floppy drive. I'm not sure about the processor speed, but it just barely ran win 95, so it couldn't have been very fast at all.
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@Zemm said:
I remember first playing with Neopaint: previously I had thought the 386 could only do VGA (640x480, 16 colours) but really it could do 800x600 with 256 colours! WOW! (The card could even do 1024x768 in 16 colours but the 14 inch monitor didn't like that idea)
Sounds like my 286 - had a Trident with 512kB VRAM, and I found one program that could use 320x200 mode with 24bit colours (and 640x480 and 800x600 with 256 colours and 1024x768 16 colours interlaced on a 14" monitor). And speaking of painting, I remember that both Dr. Halo and ZSoft PaintBrush were very nearly instant at flood fills, but some other program I also used (which actually worked as TSR, so you could save screenshots from games with it) was not only very slow, but also couldn't fill certain shapes properly.
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@ender said:
Dr. Halo
::eyes go misty with nostalgia::I never saw it in color, though, just dithered b&w. Those days were a long time ago...
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@Zadkiel said:
Oh, thanks for the correction
So, an example of correct usage would be:
"2003 called, it wants ITS meme back, you pedantic little shit"
Right?
Zadkiel
Yes, that's correct. Did you think it was wrong?
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@ender said:
Sounds like my 286 - had a Trident with 512kB VRAM
Probably the same card: A TVGA 8900 or 9000 - my school's 286s had the same card but only B&W monitors, but then we only used text mode programs there (Year 9, 1994). That was also my first experience with computer pornography - luckily I didn't get caught! (Probably would have been instant expulsion) A year 12 student handed me a disk and said "here". On it was a file called BUNNY.FLI and an EXE player. Of course being a 13 year old meant I had to see what it was, thinking it was a game or something. "Bunny likes to go to the beach. Bunny likes to play on the sand and get wet. Something Something something. But she really likes it when HE DRIVES HER HOME!" (I'm sure you can imagine some of the visuals) Quite sophicated almost-video running on a 286.
When I got to senior (Year 11) that lab was upgraded to P166s or similar with Windows 95.
@ender said:
I found one program that could use 320x200 mode with 24bit colours
I seem to remember playing with a small Linux distro (in 1998/99) and it trying to run X in that mode!
@ender said:
and 640x480 and 800x600 with 256 colours and 1024x768 16 colours interlaced on a 14" monitor
I got 1024x768 in 4(!) colours working on my monitor, though 800x600-256 worked 800x600-16 didn't.
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Ah... all this talk of computers of yore reminds me of my first introduction to computing.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p><o:p> </o:p>It was the Teletype in the backroom of my math class in High School. It was this hulking yellow Typewriter like thing with yellow roll paper connected to some unseen mainframe computer in some unknown location<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p>Interesting tidbits:<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p>- Communication to the mainframe was via a 110 baud modem (about 10 characters per second) versus a 56Kb modem (the primary modem in the 90's) which operated at maximum 5600 baud (over 5000 characters a second)<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p>- You programmed in the most Basic of BASIC; line numbers were REQUIRED<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p>- Deleting of mistakes were denoted not with an erase of the character, but through the use of a backarrow character (<-) printed after the character to be erased. Multiple back arrows = multiple characters to erase.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p>- 80 characters was the maximum that could be printed on one line of the paper, but commands could exceed 80 characters - you would just keep typing blindly over the 80th character again and again until you were done<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p>- Games were the rage, from 'Hunt the Wumpus' to 'Star Trek' numerous trees were killed in the pursuit of this 'Type' of recreation.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p><o:p> </o:p>Only in my last year of High School did we get the first true micro computers. A Radio Shack Model one, with a cassette tape back up system, and a Commodore Pet.<o:p></o:p><o:p> </o:p>Oh the memories!
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Whenever I think back to the old days I remember creating a specialy designed boot floppy disk for EVERY SINGLE GAME and start appreciating the current days a lot more.
