Off-Topic
I like the racing rig!
The case is quite unique - very cool. A little overkill having sleeves on each single core of wire, but gives it this monster appeal that's cool.
Your study is too damn tidy though. The last time mine was that clean was about 10 minutes before I moved in. I'm up to vertical stacking monitors now.. can't fit more than 3 across the desk. Not much room for mice either. Dirty coffee cups seldom make the journey 20 feet to the dishwasher :p..
and you think mine is still clean? lol
im the same, coffee addict here, cups everywhere, i refrained from more than one monitor as i used to run 2 myself but got over it, went to just one big one instead. a little overkill on the sleeving but the whole pc is overkill, its the only way i like my pc's. around $1400 in watercooling alone. but its look i wanted so i did it. the joys of living with mummy and daddy in the day, excess money. now days its baked beans and 2 minute noodles while paying of a house and playing with marine aquariums lol
Maybe we should change this thread title to "computers capable of viewing @leodb89 's tank journal. ;) I still can get over @Synodontis 16k Ram Module. Very special - Gold
Hahaha now that's more like it :P
I used to spend up on PC parts when I lived with the folks (and I had direct access to distributors). The fact that I've worked in IT since before I left high school in way or another, computers have become boring tools that need to serve whatever specific purposes I need them for and not much else. I don't do games, and I suck at graphics, so I'm quite comfy using my prehistorical dual core dinosaurs!
Wish I could find my old 8 bit 1MB XMS card (I think, that was about a lifetime ago... my XT juju is kinda hazy these days). That thing was worth more than a house back in its day - it was an upgrade to give machines with a few KB of memory what was an insane upgrade. It was a full length card too - packed full of ICs... all of which were removable.. and by full length I mean full length for XT class machines, which is a lot longer than most new computers :P
Shit hey, you had an XT that actually had a hard disk in it? In the mid 90s I used to collect them as businesses started throwing them out. My 486 only had a 120MB hdd in it, so I'd collect XTs with 20MB MFM drives, and stick Arcnet cards in them. I'd run a DOS based network system called Little Big LAN that required me to replicate the configuration file on every single machine over the network. Each machine had to have a node ID (set by DIP switches), then I'd have to load all of the drivers and configs on each machine. Every machine had to have the same config for each drive letter otherwise the whole thing didn't behave. Was a less than efficient way to get a couple hundred extra meg of hdd space, but it was a great intro to networking pre-TCP/IP. Arcnet was awesome at 4Mbps. Looked impressive when I had em stacked to the ceiling!
No Google and no internets, or too many shops or others around at the time to help out with any of that... had to do it all the hard way :P
It also wasn't hard to add the extra core into an XT power supply if you wanted to stick an AT board in the case. I managed to get 386s running off them + IDE drive + floppy without any issue.
I sold a box of very old parts in about 2002 for a few bucks... I think the majority of my old XT gear went in that pile. :(
I never got any game consoles. My parents let me have a couple of games when we got our first "family pc" which was a 486. Mostly I had to learn QBasic. I then managed to grab older machines to um.. experiment on. Our particular 486 required parity checking non-EDO SD RAM which was hard to come by.. and by hard, I mean $100 per MB. I found an old sound blaster with CD ROM and got it going with 8MB RAM long enough to install Win95, which wouldn't boot after installation. The ISP I worked for at the time had a couple of suitable 1MB modules laying around.. at 10MB I got the bugger to boot... after I ripped out that sound blaster and CD rom drive lol.
I later sold a guitar so I could buy a secondhand 500MB seagate hdd. That was a tough thing to do as a kid, but I needed Win95, and it needed disk space... All of my modems were donated until 1998. Prior to that I owned a 2400 baud I had been given, and later a couple of 9.6 and 14.4K modems that the ISP I worked for loaned me. The things some kids had to do to get internet access when they had no money and parents that didn't really want me doing it :P
i was pretty much in the same boat mate. i remember my father selling a heap of car carbies, holley 650's and so on to buy a second hand not working 286. my first soundblaster and cd rom came in a massive box and that was so exciting i think i pissed myself hahahaha. but we were the same, things like that only came on xmas day. we sold a lot to buy most of our pc gear. you did what you have to do. i remember as a kid my parents would go out and i would whip out the 2400 modem and dialup some bbs sites. before net was even cracking along. bbs was the shit back in the day! oh how sad lol
dont get me wrong, i like consoles too. but my missus isnt a fan of sitting there watching me shoot zombies or race around a track. so i mostly play on the pc. i am going to get a new bean bag and setup the 42" sony lcd in the bedroom that im not allowed to watch in the spare room of the house when gta comes out. problem is i dont know which console to buy it on. xbox or ps3. also need to buy another console so i can play online. both my consoles are modded. the ps3 is my media server with showtime and my xbox has got the RGH mod done to it. so to play online i will need to buy a 3rd console.
We weren't even really struggling - it just wasn't seen as a priority at the time as there didn't seem to be that much future in it. They were a little resistive when I first got a modem because it would tie up the phone line, but they got over it quickly. BBSes, various old data services you could dial into, and I started with the Telstra Bigpong at $7 an hour so I could get 13xxxx calls to it. The ISP I worked for had actually just become an ISP.. they'd previously been a BBS. My job funnily enough was to rebuild the BBS component of their business, and make its entire contents available via FTP to the internet as well.
56k modems were on the horizon, and owner had some foresight that he'd need to have ISDN lines installed to feed them, so he wanted.. as far as I could recall, me to build the BBS again, use an old bank of 28.8ks and grab a couple of analog lines to get it going until he moved to 56k, then I could just take over the 33.6s and their lines. Those were some fun times. The heart of the BBS was going to be a Pentium 166 - which at the time was the fastest computer anyone had ever let me at with a screwdriver :P
lol dave, its good to hear others that have played around like yourself, i talk to any of my friends about this stuff now days and they look at you stupid. they have no idea.
my father got into pc's for me as he knew there would be a massive market in it. he also told me to work in the plastics industry as in time everything will go plastic. he was right on both parts. needless to say i work in the plastics industry too. but that was a silly move lol.
ps: still waiting for rics on your site hahaha.
my father got into pc's for me as he knew there would be a massive market in it. he also told me to work in the plastics industry as in time everything will go plastic. he was right on both parts. needless to say i work in the plastics industry too. but that was a silly move lol.
ps: still waiting for rics on your site hahaha.
