Anyone miss the old computer days of the 90s?

ChrisMusic

Or 32 mins of mental game play, takes me back   >-)

ChrisMusic

Oh, and if you really must make sense of it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llamatron

I spent some time way back with Jeff Minter, it's creator, lovely chap.  He made a great light synthesiser package for the Amiga too.

JezWynd

Running After Effects 3.1 on a Mac Performa 5300, making postage stamp sized 3D movies in Bryce that took 24 hrs to render. Happy days.

martinw

Anyone remember a screensaver called Castaway Pete or something like that? 
Wasted many a minute waiting to see what would happen next, rather than stop the screensaver  and do some work  

BigBearKris

My first computer was PC 386DX2 with 4mb RAM and 40mb HDD. It ran on Windows 3.1 and I used Norton Commander for copying, transferring etc (no drag&drop then). It didn't even have any games, but I had a Map of Europe application with all the roads on it - you could check the distances and plan your journey between cities etc... not that much fun.

...but then came DOOM on 5 floppy disks...

thomasross20

I still prefer the older games, too.

TheBigDipper

My first computer (in 1975) was an IBM 370/135 (well, once we'd finished the overnight jobs I sometimes stayed on and used it for other things). 

My first personal computer was a Compaq something-or-other running an 8086 processor and MS-DOS on a green screen.

I feel old, now. :-) 

Danny1969

My first PC was an IBM 386sx with 4mb of ram and a 40mb hard drive. That thing got me interested in computers and within a few years I was building them and selling. I started a company with another guy and we went from selling from my dinning room to occupying 2000 sq feet of business premises and being valued in the millions 

The big advantage we had was being electronics guys by trade. This enabled us to buy faulty laptop boards for peanuts and sell them for hundreds once we fixed them. Then we sussed out IBM,s supervisor password system which at the time seemed uncrackable. The password was stored in an Atmel EEPROM on the board, originally we used to flash in an image but I eventually realised by  deciphering the KB scan codes I could read the password. This technique made us a fortune when we brought hundreds of ex lease BP passworded Thinkpad 760 laptops for £100 each and sold em on for £400 plus VAT

Wayback machine has only got pages of my site back to 2001 but I can see I was still selling those Thinkpads for more than 3 times what we paid for them 5 years later

https://web.archive.org/web/20010331082916/http://www.clonesuk.com/notebooks.htm

Building desktop machines required a bit more skill in the nineties too .... setting the IRQ's on the cards, setting bus speed and multiplier .... booting from a floppy, loading a CD rom driver, using FDISK .... I mean not rocket science but there's literally no skill at all in PC building now

I don't tend to do that many laptops or desktops anymore. it's mainly phones and tablets mainly but there's neither the money or the fun in those jobs. Whats changed the most is the size of the chips and the pin spacing and the move to BGA. Things are still fixable but it's all under huge magnification now and it's all heat gun rather than soldering iron.