What are your"Coolest" all-time components/tech you used?

[UsandThem]

While it seems many of the long-term members here have moved on to greener pastures, there are still quite a few of us who have seen the PC change quite a bit since we first got into this 'hobby'.

I could make a big list of "cool" things I have used since getting into computers around 1994, but I'll limit it to my "big four" that really stand out to me.

1. CD burner - I bought my first one around late 1997 or 1998 ($300), and I was able to make copies of my CDs so I wouldn't scratch the originals up while using them in my car CD player, or I could even make my own custom playlist CD.

2. Internet (AOL on 28k modem) - Wow. The internet. And very creeped out in the chat rooms at the time (any women here?)

3. 3dfx Voodoo video card (Diamond Monster 3D) - After installing that and firing up Quake II, I just sat there staring at the awesomeness. For some video card nostalgia, look here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-accelerator-card-reviews,42-7.html

4. Windows 95 - Of course looking back now and realizing how many crashes and instability we dealt with Windows 95 compared to say Windows 2000, Windows 7, or Windows 10, it loses a little of its luster. But man it was a big deal when it launched and I remember how much $$$ Microsoft spent advertising it:

 

[Markfothebeast]

I thought the CD-recorder drive was amazing. I was finally able to get one and I thought, "Why not copy Playstation games?". So than I started copying everyones Playstation games and would use the little adapter deal to play "backups". Those were the days.

 

[Thebobo]

One device to rule them all, One device to record them...

And in its awesomeness astound them.

 

[JackTheBear]

Celeron 300A. 50% overclock with no additional cooling required. Just change the fsb from 66mhz to 100mhz. I had a Voodoo2 too. I used to fire up benchmarks just to watch the graphics.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Define "cool" I guess.

I had a Kyro II graphics card, because screw normalcy.

 

[UsandThem]

Define "cool" I guess.

I had a Kyro II graphics card, because screw normalcy.

Easy. You decide what "cool" is. If a floppy disk floated your boat, or if it was SLI 1080ti cards, it's your call.

And that Kyro II card was pretty competitive against the 'big boys' for a time:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/735/10

 

[corkyg]

Way back in the mid-1980s, we were running PCs with 5.25-in floppy drives and along came the Plus Development Hardcard 20, 20MB hard drive, 8-bit ISA. That was my first big game changer.

The next step was a Samsung CRT monitor in COLOR! That replace the old green on black IBM screens.

 

[Markfothebeast]

Way back in the mid-1980s, we were running PCs with 5.25-in floppy drives and along came the Plus Development Hardcard 20, 20MB hard drive, 8-bit ISA. That was my first big game changer.

The next step was a Samsung CRT monitor in COLOR! That replace the old green on black IBM screens.

Those 20MB drives were absolutely enormous.

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

 

[deustroop]

Well very early modems were problematic and very susceptible to on-line noise, interrupting transmission. When the 56K baud came out, it had the power to send the data uninterrupted and, Gee Wiz Pop, look at'er fly. Way way back then,my main computer time, until 3D, was spent logging on computer BBs.

Then 3D video cards began to animate computer graphics in games. When Matrox released the G200 board, it was the start of a whole new way to avoid homework ,and as we can recall, DooM ruled.

 

[UsandThem]

Well very early modems were problematic and very susceptible to on-line noise, interrupting transmission. When the 56K baud came out, it had the power to send the data uninterrupted and, Gee Wiz Pop, look at'er fly. Way way back then,my main computer time, until 3D, was spent logging on computer BBs.

Agreed. The 56k modem was a game changer. I remember trying to play Team Fortress Classic and Unreal Tournament on one (lag was too bad most of the time). But man could it download updates and programs so much faster (still took all night to download the launch day patch of Half-Life when it came out).

 

[Smoblikat]

I had a 4X array of 150gb Velociraptors in RAID0 once, pretty fast.

 

[UsandThem]

I had a 4X array of 150gb Velociraptors in RAID0 once, pretty fast.

That's probably the one thing hardware-wise I've never done. I came close to ordering it a few times, but I have never run drives in any RAID level. Now with NVMe drives, I probably never will.

 

[Ajay]

In no particular order
1) 3DFX Voodoo2 - brave new world in terms of games
2) Media One cable internet - brave new world in terms of internet usage (gone was the hideously slow 56K modem).
3) Multicore CPUs - wow, my systems ran so much smoother under Windows XP. Quads lead to seeming seamless multitasking.
4) SSD's - start up times, load time, transition between levels in game - amazing!

 

[UsandThem]

4) SSD's - start up times, load time, transition between levels in game - amazing!

Very true. Once you use one for your OS drive, you will never be able to tolerate using a HDD as one again. Load times/responsiveness are unbearably slow.

 

[HutchinsonJC]

I remember how exciting something like a Best Buy/Circuit City ad in a newspaper was. "wow! 800MHz now!"

So many things in the tech world were exciting to me growing up.

If I had to give some kind of Top Coolest list and in no particular order:

I guess USB 2.0 would be up there. I feel like it was a game changer as it really opened the doors to external storage and peripherals in general.

SSDs and the incremental increases since they came out.. where you basically get yesteryear's RAID performance on a single drive.

Core Duo, I was pretty excited for this to come out and watched the news around it pretty closely.

I haven't purchase anything toward this end, yet, but the news and excitement created around it has been some of the most fun for me in the world of tech news in some several years.. Ryzen and variants.

 

[Ajay]

Very true. Once you use one for your OS drive, you will never be able to tolerate using a HDD as one again. Load times/responsiveness are unbearably slow.

Very true - I used to have Velociraptors in RAID and thought they were a big improvement - nothing in comparison to SSDs.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I've seen and owned a lot of cool things in my life, but one thing is head and shoulders above the rest - the Commodore Amiga. I remember when it was released in 1985 and completely blew me away. IMO, there hadn't been a system that far ahead of its competition up until that point and IMO, there hasn't been one since.

 

[lakedude]

I've had dozens of computers over the years and I barely remember most meanwhile others were memorable. Many cool things have already been mentioned. Memories:

The Amiga was awesome, especially paired with a DCTV, Opalvision, or Video Toaster.
MechWarrior (original), especially the opening scene.
Those early 3dfx stand alone video cards. Glide anyone?
GLQuake, mindblowingly looking better and running smoother at the same time.
Certainly the CD burner, maybe even more than the DVD burner. So cool to be able to copy your own music for the car without risking the originals.
Compression (divx, etc.) that makes it possible to get a full length movie a CD that previously could record an hour or two of music only.
The internet of course including broadband, wireless, shopping, social media, AltaVista in the day, Google, Wikipedia, Netflix etc.
The steady progression of the CPU has been amazing to witness. The Cel 300A was perhaps most memorable, along with BX mother board that lasted several CPU upgrades.
Has anyone mentioned the optical mouse? Optical mice are wonderful, especially the darkfield mouse that can be used on almost any surface.
I've preferred fast HDs starting with some very expensive SCSI drives. The 10k RPM Raptor was memorable and now we have SSDs. CPU don't matter if you are I/O limited.
Modern automatic BIOS with no need to know much about your hardware. No need to specify sector/cylinder etc. No need to set up IRQs and that nonsense.
Software wise not so much in Windows, maybe Portal, Bioshock, and FarCry. I kinda miss those campy games like Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior.
The tiny Linux distros like Puppy and FatDog. It is absolutely incredible how much software they pack into such a small fast running package.
Oh gosh I almost forgot. Coolest thing I've seen lately is room scale VR.

 

[bbhaag]

I remember how exciting something like a Best Buy/Circuit City ad in a newspaper was. "wow! 800MHz now!"

Me to. I loved flipping through the BB adds. Looking at the latest hardware releases was exhilarating. I still remember wanting to upgrade my Packard Bell 386SX from 2mb to 4mb of ram but the price tag was too steep.

Anyway, to get back on OT.
1.My first lan card was amazing! I schooled so many of my friends playing HL and D2 over our "local area network".
2. Jumping fro 2gb of ram to 8gb. Thank you AMD for helping usher in the 64bit OS and the programs that followed.
3. DOOM. yeah I know this isn't hardware but this little game changed everything. It's the one enduring piece of software that actually challenged hardware manufactures to get their asses in gear. No single piece of software since has had a greater impact.

 

[Ancalagon44]

Probably my 8800GTS 640MB.

That was in the first gaming computer that I ever paid for and built myself. Once I got my first job, I was able to pay for my own computer. Before that, the gaming hardware that I had was always dependent on what my parents were willing to spend, which obviously was not that much.

But this 8800 GTS - man it was a champ at the time. Powerful enough for me to max out pretty much anything that I threw at it. It was a huge upgrade for me.

 

[Thebobo]

Agreed. The 56k modem was a game changer. I remember trying to play Team Fortress Classic and Unreal Tournament on one (lag was too bad most of the time). But man could it download updates and programs so much faster (still took all night to download the launch day patch of Half-Life when it came out).

Lol I use to play EQ on my Supra 56K modem.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Not sure about "all time", but I got two awesome freebies from Kyle @ [ H ] a couple of weeks ago!

OG Killer NIC

BFG Dustbuster (aka 5800 Ultra)

 

[Charlie98]

Not a PC... sort of...

How about Web TV? My brother bought a WebTV unit and I was floored with this thing... I just couldn't fathom the internet and all the websites that offered 'free' information and function. Wired into the back of the TV, using the dial-up phone line (that disconnected about every 15 minutes,) and a wireless keyboard... I would stay up 24 hours at a time on my days off, careening through the internet.

The other two honorable mentions would be the SSD (my first was a 60GB OCZ as an OS-only drive) and my first real GPU... a GTX560Ti 448.

 

[IronWing]

Programming game graphics on the Kaypro II in BASIC. The Kaypro had a text only display so graphics had to be done with $CHR strings to reposition characters and refreshing the screen.

Running X-Windows on a Win 3.1 machine to be able to pull windows from an AIX workstation. It allowed one to run programs remotely on the IBM RISC workstations while doing other stuff on the PC.

Learning and using LabView for instrument control and data acquisition. Even by modern interface standards, LabView's graphical programming language is Star Trek level stuff. Adding TDR (cable radar) to the mix was even more awesome.

Running Mosaic on AIX (before it was ported to the PC). Five minutes in, I knew the world had changed.

First home flat bed scanner. I used the heck out of it for years.

Non-computer: First time out with a GPS unit and using a handheld XRF unit, we do live in a Star Trek universe.

 

[UsandThem]

I remember how exciting something like a Best Buy/Circuit City ad in a newspaper was. "wow! 800MHz now!"

I did the same thing, but ogling at the CompUSA ads starting when they were in the 150 Mhz range. "I must have that blazing fast 300 Mhz K6-2 with 3d Now!" "Oh, that Cyrix CPU looks nice, I bet it is comparable to a Pentium II at a fraction of the cost".

The next step was a Samsung CRT monitor in COLOR! That replace the old green on black IBM screens.

True. I really didn't have access to computers when I was young, but I remember playing 'Oregon Trail' on some type of MacIntosh around 1983 or so. It was so amazing, I remember it to this day.....even if it was all just green blocks (and square bullets).

Then in late 1998 / early 1999 I remember going to the local store where I was stationed at the time (Nebraska Furniture Mart), and seeing the plasma TV for the first time I had read so much about online. I just stood there staring at the picture. I probably stood there for 15 minutes staring at it. Having only used tube TVs my whole life, it was a "game changer" moment. Now if I could have only been able to afford the $20,000 price tag they had attached to it.

Now people can enjoy all these different types of flat-screen computer monitors that rival any TV (or exceed it in some cases).