How I broke my computer at 12 years old


  • Banned

    @lb_ said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @the_quiet_one I also broke a family computer at a young age.

    I had just discovered how to compress files. Compressing files made them take less space, right? Why not compress everything? So the entire C drive got compressed. Cool! But I noticed there were still some uncompressed files. If you compressed the folder they were in, they got skipped. You had to actually go to just their specific properties and compress them. Tada! Everything was compressed.

    One restart later...
    0_1506033645673_9f14380f-0fa4-441e-88dd-128f5f95ebfa-image.png

    Yep. There was a reason it normally skipped those files when compressing everything...

    Back when I was working at phone/computer repair shop, my boss has once did exactly that. On the only computer we had that was capable of making and restoring backups of phones. Also, the laptop was probably a decade old, and had only 120GB HDD - enough for about six backups.



  • @blakeyrat said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @karla I had GeoWorks on the C-64.

    You could set the mouse tracking speed to zero. (Yes, zero.)

    It saved its settings of the disk permanently.

    There were not enough keyboard shortcuts to turn the mouse tracking speed back up.

    I broke that too.

    You are the first other person I know to have used GeoWorks.



  • My dad worked as a computer repair technician for several years, so he was able to teach us how to avoid most of the gotchas that afflict newbie super users. The store he was at had a policy that the employees could take home whatever software they wanted, but no hardware, so we got most of our first computer games that way, including Math Munchers, Thinkin' Things, Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, Putt-Putt Enters the Race, Freddie Fish, Crayola Coloring Book, Command & Conquer, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Age of Empires, and Mechwarrior 2. Sometimes we even had both the DOS and the Win95 versions. We even got a copied CD of Starcraft, but it was the multiplayer only "Spawn" version, so we mostly just played with the map editor with that one.

    He also got lots of computer hardware by repairing computers for family and friends or by helping them set up new systems (they'd give him their old one). He taught us how to turn those into usable systems and how to upgrade them, so while we usually only had one or two computers (until we started acquiring our own), they were constantly evolving to be only one or two years behind current technology.



  • @karla said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    You are the first other person I know to have used GeoWorks.

    I didn't really "use" it. I got it on a disk, then made that disk useless like a half hour later.



  • @timebandit said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    My first computer that I ran Windows 1.x on was a PC-XT clone with 640kb and two 5.25" floppy drive. And a Turbo button to make it go to 8MHZ !

    Windows weenies!

    My first computer my family owned ran MS-DOS 5.0 with a bunch of apps and shareware games. It was a 386DX40 with 4MB RAM, 80MB harddrive and a dot-matrix printer. State of the art in 1992. It was much later it acquired Windows 3.1, a CD-ROM, soundcard and a network connection, along with a second harddrive and more ram. It got on the Internet in 1998 through Ethernet and my (secondhand purchased) 486 running Linux provided ipmasq sharing dialup (best available at the time).

    Fun fact that 486 had a full height 1GB SCSI harddrive. When it started the whole table wobbled. I ran thin coax Ethernet between my three computers. It also was a ppp server for a laptop that connected through null-modem serial cable. By 2000 I had added wireless networking using a 802.11b PCI card and my new secondhand P166 laptop with a pcmcia card; the "server" was a P100 by that time.



  • To post in response to the OP, I would have have been about 15 when a friend suggested I run Norton Utilities on my 386 machine to clean up a bunch of things and make everything faster. One thing we didn't realise was the version of Norton we had wasn't updated for MS-DOS 6.22 and my use of DriveSpace. It knew about MS-DOS 6.20 and DoubleSpace but DriveSpace was almost, but not quite, completely different. I learnt the hard way about software compatibility. At least I thought it was fun to reinstall everything from floppy! Only lost a few things.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @dcon said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    I remember playing with my Dad's TRS and programming a Mandelbrot generator...

    On a ZX Spectrum I drew concentric circles of different colors. That's close enough, right?

    Did anyone else get blown away when they first heard a soundcard?
    I used to launch Arkanoid II just to hear the song.

    I may or may not still play the new level jingle in my head when I enter a new room (assuming the Curse of Monkey Island chapter change music doesn't take precedence)... 😐



  • My first computer was an Amstrad CPC 6128 with green screen. It didn't even know what hard drives were.


  • Considered Harmful

    @zemm said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Norton

    I keep forgetting that Norton used to mean anything non-shit.

    When I was feeling bored I used to connect to an IRC network, paste the EICAR string into a very populous channel, and watch everyone using Norton AV time out.



  • @thegoryone said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @dcon My first PC had a 6.4GB (1998) dual spindle 5 1/2 inch hard drive called the "Quantum Bigfoot".

    0_1506008888656_ed306522-e903-4101-9ba7-8e5c103cf0ce-image.png

    I have one of those too — got it about a decade ago from a very old computer. I’m sure I posted a picture of it here once, but finding it again is proving somewhat difficult.



  • @blakeyrat said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @the_quiet_one said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Windows 95 crashes a lot. Especially when you push it to the limit. It relied heavily on swap space and paging since you had 8-16 Mb of memory to work with, but hard drives of the time had 512MB, sometimes as much as a GB if you had something higher end.

    ... you sure?

    Our home computer of that era had a 160 MB HD, and we considered that large. 512 MB seems more like a Windows 2000-era thing.

    Within maybe a month of Windows 95 being released, I bought a 100 MHz 486DX, with 8 MB memory (about double what came as standard at the time) and a 540-MB hard drive. That drive failed less than a year later, and I got it replaced under warranty plus a small extra charge by a bigger one — though I don’t remember what size that was.

    Edit: Let’s just add a full list in chronological order, like I see in a few other posts.

    • Commodore PET (owned by my father’s office, but could be borrowed for use at home by employees — and I don’t actually remember it)
    • Sharp MZ 80 K, heavily modified and expanded by my father
    • Apple II-clone of a brand I don’t recall
    • ZX Spectrum+ (in parallel to the Apple II)
    • ZX Spectrum 128 (later expanded with DISCiPLE disk interface plus 3.5″ drive)
    • Laser 8086 XT-clone with MS-DOS (probably v3.3 initially)
    • 486/33MHz built from parts, with Windows for Workgroups 3.11
    • The aforementioned 486DX-100 (first computer I bought myself) with Windows 95
    • Upgrade to the 486DX by replacing the motherboard by a Pentium-powered one from a Compaq my father used at the time but replaced, running Windows 98
    • Another upgrade to the same machine by replacing the motherboard with one with an AMD Athlon Thunderbird, running Windows 98 and SuSE Linux as dual-boot
    • New home-built machine with an Intel Celeron and again Windows 98 plus SuSE Linux
    • iMac G5, 1.6 GHz/17″ with Mac OS X 10.3–10.5

    And then we get to about ten years ago, which seems a good cut-off point for a list like this. Though I feel I still need to mention the Spectrum 48K, Amiga 500, Macintosh Plus, iMac G3, 8088, Psion Series 5, and Commodore 64 I obtained since then :)


  • BINNED

    I got my first PC when I was 10 or 11, in 1998 or 1999. A Pentium III at 450 MHz (overclocked it to like 517 or some weird number like that), 32 MB of RAM (later upgraded to 64), a 6.4 GB HDD, and an nVidia Riva 128. It ran Windows 98 SE, and it was expensive as hell. Oh, also it came with a 15" Yakumo CRT monitor that made this really loud clicking sound when it changed resolutions.

    Some time later my mom saw a computer magazine that came with a Mandrake install CD, so she bought it for me. I heard about that Linux thing before, so hey, let's try it, right?

    From what I remember the installer was actually pretty easy to use, even for a little kid who had absolutely no idea what he was doing. The problem was, I had absolutely no idea what a partition was, and the 6.4 gig drive was already completely filled with a Diablo 2 install that took like 4 GB alone... so yeah, I totally just got rid of the Windows partition and lost all my saves. I think I actually even tried to do the right thing at first and shrink the Win partition first, but it was really full, so I guess I just freed space by getting rid of it.

    I might have even been OK with that, Mandrake ran pretty fine and it was new and interesting, but shortly after realizing I don't have Windows anymore I also found out that there was no Linux driver for the modem (I was on dialup back then), so I couldn't even go online. At the same time, Tux Racer ran like absolute garbage, Freeciv and Nethack were too complicated for me, and there's only so much Solitaire a little kid can play before getting bored, so after a few days I gave up and dug out the Windows install CD again, and I haven't really touched Linux for over a decade after that.

    I wonder what my life would have been like if that modem worked and I stuck with Mandrake from the age of 11.



  • @blakeyrat said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @karla said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    You are the first other person I know to have used GeoWorks.

    I didn't really "use" it. I got it on a disk, then made that disk useless like a half hour later.

    Close enough. 🤷♂



  • @blek said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    I wonder what my life would have been like if that modem worked and I stuck with Mandrake from the age of 11.

    You would have never got out of your Mom's basement 😛



  • @zemm said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Windows weenies!

    That was not my first computer, it was my first computer that I ran Windows 1.x on



  • @timebandit said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    that I ran Windows 1.x on

    My tongue-in-cheek comment was more the fact you mentioned running Windows but not the DOS that was the "real" OS at the time. Same with @dcon.

    Back in the day, I managed to break himem.sys without Windows at all!



  • @karla said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @blakeyrat said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @karla I had GeoWorks on the C-64.

    You are the first other person I know to have used GeoWorks.

    I also started with a Commodore 64 and (eventually) had GEOS. Did a lot of assignments in GeoWrite thanks to its "amazing" font support. Much better than getting points marked off because your "7-pin" MPS-803 had a one-pixel difference between the lowercase version of a character with a descender and the capital version.

    Around the release of Windows 95 I worked at an OfficeMax where one of the pocket computers we sold ran GeoWorks. At the time I thought they were pretty cool.

    My list:

    • Commodore 64
    • Tandy 1000 TX (my stepdad's computer)
    • Commodore 128D (but never a monitor for 80-column mode, sadly)
    • Halfway decent PC clone I bought from work.
    • A long succession of Windows computers I built myself.

    Mixed in with the clones:

    • Red iMac.
    • Commodore SX-64. (Portable!)
    • Dell Inspiron 9300 (My one high-endish laptop.)
    • Samsung NC10 (Often mistaken for an Apple product because it was white.)
    • Asus Transformer Infinity (an Android convertible)
    • Asus Transformer Book T100 (a Windows convertible)

    You might even include these, given they're powerful enough to emulate the early entries on this list:

    • LG Optimus V
    • Galaxy Nexus
    • Nexus 5

    Too much stuff. :)



  • @gąska said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    I wish I knew the specs of my first PC.

    4004 Processor 128 bytes [256x4 bit] Ram 512 Bytes Ram....A bunch of switches and some leds.....


  • Considered Harmful

    @thecpuwizard said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @gąska said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    I wish I knew the specs of my first PC.

    4004 Processor 128 bytes [256x4 bit] Ram 512 Bytes Ram....A bunch of switches and some leds.....

    A box that didn't go 'bing'.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @gurth said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    New home-built machine with an Intel Celeron

    :wtf: Was Celeron not the ultra-low-end hardware it is today?


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @pie_flavor said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @zemm said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Norton

    I keep forgetting that Norton used to mean anything non-shit.

    When I was feeling bored I used to connect to an IRC network, paste the EICAR string into a very populous channel, and watch everyone using Norton AV time out.

    I kinda wanna try that now! Shirley our newfangled web 3.0 technologies have solved for that!


  • Considered Harmful

    @tsaukpaetra said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @pie_flavor said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @zemm said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Norton

    I keep forgetting that Norton used to mean anything non-shit.

    When I was feeling bored I used to connect to an IRC network, paste the EICAR string into a very populous channel, and watch everyone using Norton AV time out.

    I kinda wanna try that now! Shirley our newfangled web 3.0 technologies have solved for that!

    Doesn't work now, unless they haven't updated in many years.



  • @pie_flavor said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    I keep forgetting that Norton used to mean anything non-shit.
    When I was feeling bored I used to connect to an IRC network,

    Norton did used to be good, but this was disk Utilities rather than antivirus.

    Talking about IRC, my university used to offer 28.8kbps dialup modem access to students, but there was a small bug in the firmware. Entering "+++ATH" would hang up their connection. The three plusses put the modem into command mode: it should have ignored them as there wasn't a time gap either side. When they upgraded to 56k this problem stopped.



  • @dreikin said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @gurth said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    New home-built machine with an Intel Celeron

    :wtf: Was Celeron not the ultra-low-end hardware it is today?

    It was. I didn’t have much money to spend (or possibly didn’t want to), but it must have been an upgrade at the time. However, this machine turned out to be a bit of a POS (USB support was very flaky, for example — I could hardly get it to work under Windows, never mind Linux), hence the purchase of pretty much the opposite kind of computer a few years down the line.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @karla said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @blakeyrat said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @karla I had GeoWorks on the C-64.

    You could set the mouse tracking speed to zero. (Yes, zero.)

    It saved its settings of the disk permanently.

    There were not enough keyboard shortcuts to turn the mouse tracking speed back up.

    I broke that too.

    You are the first other person I know to have used GeoWorks.

    I had it on the C-64, too, though like Blakey, I didn't really use it. It took me longer to eventually break it.



  • @blakeyrat said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    ... you sure?
    Our home computer of that era had a 160 MB HD, and we considered that large. 512 MB seems more like a Windows 2000-era thing.

    I have to disagree. After we got married we needed our own computer (instead of just using my dad's); we bought a Windows 95 system in early 1997 with a 1.2GB HDD, and that was a mid-range system. (I don't now recall whether the top-end systems had significantly larger disk, or if it was just e.g. faster and better processors than the 150MHz Pentium we had, more memory than our 32MB, etc.)

    @zecc said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Did anyone else get blown away when they first heard a soundcard?

    Yes! Or more specifically, the first time I played Star Control 2 after installing it (which, realistically, would probably have been a matter of minutes, maaaybe a few hours) and heard the Ur-Quan theme after getting stopped by the drone. Really gave the threatening words a lot more impact. (I should note here, for those who haven't played it, that Star Control 2 actually did a really amazing job of reproducing the intended sound through PC speaker if you didn't have a soundcard, unlike any other game in my experience. So I wasn't expecting the soundcard experience to be so much better for that game. But it was.)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @zecc said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Did anyone else get blown away when they first heard a soundcard?

    I remember I used to load a music player into high memory so that I could listen to fairly high quality music while playing (original) Civilization. 😁



  • @dkf said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @zecc said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Did anyone else get blown away when they first heard a soundcard?

    I remember I used to load a music player into high memory so that I could listen to fairly high quality music while playing (original) Civilization. 😁

    I remember I used to randomly try all IRQs (I had no idea what that meant) until I found one that gave me vaguely audible sound.

    Civ was nice, though...



  • @izzion said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @the_quiet_one
    I hereby nominate "breaking the himem" as the term for losing your Computer Wrecking Virginity.

    What makes this truly brilliant, is that it would only happen if you were too heavy-handed and didn't know what you were doing.




  • 🚽 Regular



  • @blakeyrat said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    You could set the mouse tracking speed to zero. (Yes, zero.)

    "Fuck you, mouse!" - blakeyrat



  • @the_quiet_one said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    At first he thought something corrupted Windows. Or perhaps it was some kind of hard drive issue. That is until he interrogated me. Eventually I fessed up. He was flabbergasted. His solution was to get a recovery boot disk, and tediously copy the .sys files from his own computer to the family computer, each time booting it up to see what else was missing. It took hours, and because the version of Windows 95 he had in his office didn't perfectly match the version in the family room, he had his doubts the computer would ever run the same ever again.

    I did that.

    Yeah, I fixed it the same way too.

    Fortunately, I was older so I was able to figure it out. Good thing, since I was the "computer guy" for my family.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @zecc said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @r10pez10

    Edit: Also Town.mid:

    And flourish.mid !


  • 🚽 Regular

    @tsaukpaetra E_NO_PASSPORT 🛂

    Edit: why is the audio clip player disappearing intermittently for me?


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @zecc said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @tsaukpaetra E_NO_PASSPORT 🛂

    Awe man, apparently that one didn't make it into my personal conversion archive. Also, most browsers can't embed midi files using the html5 <audio> tag. ;)

    How about onestop.mid?

    Edit: Converted Passport.mid:

    No, I didn't just spend the last 17 minutes resurrecting an XP VM, installing AC'97 drivers on it and using my Thinstalled GM timidity conversion app, why do you ask?

    Edit edit: Re-converted onestop.mid


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @tsaukpaetra said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Thinstalled GM timidity conversion app,

    No, I didn't just spend an hour hunting down my copy of Thinstall 4.7 to create a shell container that would load up the .dat files from said app so I could extract the files from it.

    0_1507019130240_gm.7z

    This expects to be in C:\gm , there are two conversion batch files, you can drop a .mid files on one to convert just one midi, or a folder on the other to do a whole folder at once.

    No copyright infringement intended. ;) Pretty sure the patches are free though, I forgot how to tell...



  • @tsaukpaetra

    and now, the moment you've all been waiting for
    we proudly present for your viewing pleasure
    The Microsoft Windows 95 Product Team!

    Also your OneStop cuts off about 30 seconds early.

    Filed under: title.wma


  • :belt_onion:

    My Tandy 1000 HX was still very much alive when I handed it over to my 8 years younger sister long time ago.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @twelvebaud said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Also your OneStop cuts off about 30 seconds early.

    Awe shazbot, you're right. NFC what happened there, but now that you mention it it's the mp3 itself. I'll have to dig up the source for a re-render...



  • @tsaukpaetra said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    @twelvebaud said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Also your OneStop cuts off about 30 seconds early.

    Awe shazbot, you're right. NFC what happened there, but now that you mention it it's the mp3 itself. I'll have to dig up the source for a re-render...

    Hurry.

    This is history we're talking about. It must be saved!!!


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @xaade said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    It must be saved!!!

    I'll have to get my archive copy of it up and unarchived though....


  • :belt_onion:

    @xaade said in How I broke my computer at 12 years old:

    Hurry.

    This is history we're talking about. It must be saved!!!

    See, this is what happens when you volunteer for stuff: you get more work on your plate. ;)


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