You know your too old when .....

[etech]

You know you're getting old when you remember...

standing in line to get to the key-punch machine in college.

waiting at the printer and praying that that 200+ pages of paper it's spitting out is not your job of 1 page, (dang infinate goto loops)

dkozloski, yep, I remeber programming a PDP-8, flipping 16 switches to enter the machine code in. I could read hex very quickly back in those days.

Writing the code to play "lunar lander" on a 6502 processor.

Wire-wrapping an entire 6802 computer. Cassete tape program loading, output on a TV.

Reading reviews at Toms and Anands trying to decide which was the best super seven motherboard.

Interfacing an Apple IIE to a process at work to record tempertures of an experiment.

 

[IBhacknU]

.... you remember saving on an audio cassette

 

[NoFish4U]

Amber monitor...I wish!!!

I had to plug my Sinclair ZX-81 into my black and white TV!!!!!

 

[Noriaki]

Hey I had a C64 and I'm only 20!

You actually had an amber monitor.



<<
You remember getting excited about managing to free up more than 600k of your 640k low level memory.

You remember when &quot;Performance Enhancement&quot; meant tweaking your autoexec.bat and config.sys.

You remember when you owned programs that didn't support a mouse.

You remember when XTree Gold was a valid alternative to MS Windows 2.

You remember when you booted into the DOS Command Shell.

You remember when you had to manually copy device drivers from a floppy to your hard drive and add the appropriate line to your config.sys.

You remember when you had to manually copy device drivers from a floppy to your boot floppy and add the appropriate line to your config.sys.
You remember when games didn't need the CD in the drive to work.

You remember when games came on multiple floppy disks.

You remember when games came on one floppy disk.

You remember when motherboards didn't come with disk drive controllers or ports build onto them.

You remember the 60Mhz Socket-4 Pentium.

You had a copy of the DOS version of PK Zip.

You had a registered copy of the DOS version of PK Zip.

You remember when Digital was Digital Electronics Corporation.
>>




Damn...am I really that old? I&quot;m 20...
I guess if anyone bitches as much as I do about no DOS mode in WinME they have to be old...

 

[Maverick]

You remember when you could buy the game on CD with voices and CD music, or the floppy disk
version with subtitles and MIDI music.


Wing Commander is the classic example of this. I tried to boot it up in windows 95 three years ago and I died on the first level cuz the ships fired too fast when running the game on a P133
*sigh* its just sad.

 

[DZip]

Your old when you paid $159 for a 32k memory card for a TI 99/4a P-Box. This would take you all the way up to 48k.

Your old when you paid $200 for a 92k ram disk you had to build yourself for your TI 99/4A P-Box.

Your old when you paid $450 for a TI 855 9 pin dot matrix printer. This was an upgrade from a $250 4&quot; wide thermal printer.

Your old when you had over $1500 in a computer system with 4MHz 16 bit processor,48k of ram, RS 232 for a 300 baud modem, and composit TV video output.

Your old if you think you can get $50 for all of this now. Every thing still works.

 

[Soccerman]

Dulanic:
&quot;You know your old when you actually used to know what the hell your PC was doing.&quot;

exactly.. it's why I hate MS software.. it's too dumbed down!

Shiva112:

&quot;Wing Commander is the classic example of this. I tried to boot it up in windows 95 three years ago and I died on the first level cuz the ships fired too fast when running the game on a P133&quot;

LOL.. I actually have had that experiance! hehe.. I may be only 17 currently, but I actually had many of the experiences that you all had, simply because I only started with an XT/8086 (it was free!) I think 5 or 6 years ago!

I had a C64 a while before it (when I was really young, it broke multiple times! grr), but back then I wasn't interested in computers, just the games. though I did fiddle with programming it later on (when we had the XT I think).

but I don't feel old yet, I forgot much of that programming stuff.. too bad, cause it is a real good excersise for your brain!

 

[Johnny Gringo]

You know your too old when .....

Instead of getting reading glasses you just keep buying larger monitors.


heh, guilty as charged

 

[Jhhnn]

Nah, worse than any of that is when attractive young women call you &quot;Sir&quot;....

 

[ledzepp98]

great response. i'm 22 and in 5-10 years we will be posting messages like: remember when we were proud of overclocking over 1ghz. or remember when 2 30gig drives in raid-0 was hot sh!t.

 

[bluemax]

<< P.S. I still can't believe they didn't call the OpenGL version of Doom &quot;GLoom&quot;. >>



That was the AMIGA version... Gloom. Not bad, either... not that I ever had an Amiga 500 until it was well past its day.

I'm glad there was a fellow TI99-4/a person in here! That's where I got started in computer music... playing around in Basic with 3-note chords. I find it funny that the ol' TI had better graphics and sound than the PC for years.

I remember Bill Cosby was the spokesman for the TI99! Wish I still had the TI Catalog- E$bay it!

Fortunately for me, my first PC was the Tandy 1000SX, ***50% faster than the IBM PC!*** Woohoo! 7.14 Mhz! I was the envy of my friends with 16 colour graphics and 3-voice sound... Those Sierra AGI games blew them away!

It was a big deal to get a second floppy drive! Then I could leave the boot disk in A: and run off B:

A 10MB internal hard drive cost $1000, and you could even get an external 10MB for $1200...

I bought the Adlib sound card 2-3 years before it ever got support in games.... then came my very first Adlib game experience... Leisure Suit Larry 2. Wow... life was never the same again.

The Roland MT-32 was bought a few years after that... MIND blowing... I still have it even though the games no longer use it... still good for music making today!


I'll tell you- if I was around for the puch card days, I wouldn't LIKE computers!

 

[BreakApart]

-you used to have to &quot;KNOW&quot; the exact settings for the hard-drive or it would not boot after a CMOS battery failure.(no autodetect)

-you had 596k free, but the game required 602k, so you spent 3 hours juggling the memory settings so you could play the darn game...

-you paid $200 for 4mb of memory, then realized the game still wanted 604k free, and it did not care about your new 4mb ram... Grrrr

-it took 2 1/2 hours to load MS-Office on 24 floppy disks...

-#20 of those 24 floppy disks went bad you began to cry, knowing -you had to start from scratch tomorrow after you find another copy of OFFICE...

-you remember typing letters without a spell checker, but it was still better than that old typewriter...

-the entire wordprocessor program, and 35 documents all fit on (1) floppy...

-you had (3) copies of that floppy, just incase...

-you remember power-supplies used to blow the hot air into the case... (WOW, that was stupid)



LoL... Ohh the good-ole-days...

 

[tontod]

I remember when I was excited about DOS 5.0 coming out and having the undelete feature. I remember accidentally deleting the system directory for win 3.1 and guessing the 1st character of all the files and recovering them all successfully. There are way too many files and directories now.

 

[cavingjan]

Amber....I wish! I had the old green screen. hated that thing.

You started out using punch cards and tape. I'm glad that audio tape came along. I still have some punch cards floating around this office somewhere.

I had an IBM PC that I used to play Flight Simulator on. I think it was version 2 but I could be wrong.

 

[Teatowel]

Hey, I still get excited when I free over 600k of base memory! Had to do it a while back to get Frontier: Elite2 to work.

And I still occasionally use the DOS version of PKzip cos I still know all the flags.

Anyone here know how to fix a busted ZX Spectrum 128k +2? Not sure what went wrong, but it just didn't start up a couple of weeks ago. Maybe it was old age but can it be resurrected by anyone?

Cheers

 

[superbaby]

You know you're old when some kid calls you old, sigh and I'm 19.

I didn't know jack about computers when I was 8, it was that my mom bought this top of the line 386SX for like $3000. I was interested to know why it was so expensive. And here I am today!

I used to be a whiz at DOS, everything was DOS, I averaged 110WPM spooling out DOS commands - BBS-ing ruled but after I racked up a $2000 long distance phone bill I never touched a modem again.

BTW what's with WinME and DOS mode? Start -> Run -> command.com - DOS MODE!!!! You can also bootup with a recovery disk to get DOS as well.

 

[Maverick]

I used to have this game on an IBM 8088 called Navy Seals.
Our 8088 didn't have a hard drive, so everytime you wanted to play a game, you had to boot it off of a floppy. Navy Seals had 4 disks. Everytime I wanted to play Navy Seals, I'd have to insert disk 1, then take it out and insert disk 2...and so on. How hard drives have changed our lives.

 

[Bleep]

One of the weird things I remember is the question one person would ask the other. &quot;Does your printer have true decenders?&quot;
Bleep

 

[Noriaki]

<< BTW what's with WinME and DOS mode? Start -> Run -> command.com - DOS MODE!!!! >>

That's not DOS mode. It's a DOS prompt running within windows. Windows still has protection over all it's files and stuff. If you shut down to native dos mode you can delete Win.com if you wanted to. And I've needed that before. I was trying to install a new driver set or a new version of the software, but I couldn't overwrite the old one becuase it was in use (even Remove program didn't get rid of this one file) granted it was probably a glitch. But in Win98 it was as easy as ALT-F4, shutdwon to MSDOS mode and a del commmand and then hit the reset switch. Sure windows b**ched about a missing file at boot up, but it got replaced when I installed the new version.

I just don't like having control over my computer taken away from me becuase some dumb ass end user gets confused if he can't use a mouse for 5 mintues. So I don't like WinME, maybe alot of people don't care, but that's fine, I'm me and you are you, we are allowed to have different opinions

 

[Rigoletto]

No Noriaki we are not allowed to have different opinions in the way you describe, because you simply abused other users.

 

[Playitagainsam]

I just wanted to mention the punch cards as well - thousands of them for a program!

Jeez! Someone is still playing ELITE for ZX Spectrum? wow! and I thought... whew! boy, are we old or what!

I guess the ZX Spectrum was the most copied (cloned?) microcomputer ever... everyone and their brother had a version. Especially in Eastern Europe, there were like 20 versions of it. In 1990, some Romanians (who followed a Russian idea, I believe) put out a version of the ZX Spectrumn which actually used 3.5&quot; diskettes!

 

[velvtelvis]

A few I didn't see mentioned:

YKYOW:


All your friends once thought you were insane for investing in a 5 meg winchester drive for your vector-graphic CP/M box. There is no need for that kind of space.

You remember your mom gettting mad at you for running up the phone bill calling out-of-state warez bbs's on your C64.

You still have no tea.

You rember the following: The Coleco Adam. Herculeas graphics. Then plural of &quot;vax.&quot; Citadel BBS's. Tradewars BBS game. The chiclet keyboard. Rouge/hack. Infocom's cornerstone bbs program. wordstar.

You think adventure games were better without graphics.

You've ever run a C64 or AppleII emulator on a PC.

You wish Woz would go back into the buisness.

 

[Dravic]

I'm only 26 but, got an early start, been programming(BASIC) since I was about 10 or 11.

My first computer was the tape driven ADAM computer built off the commodore.

Learned to program on the Tandy's with the DUAL 5 1/2 drives on the right.. hehe

geez i remember fighting and rebooting my way to more extended memory, and being pissed when a game had the nerve to ask for more then 600 extended memoery..

LH this, LH that.. lol

I cant complain about the dos prompt though. I live for the command line functionality, I guess thats why i becam a Unix Admin.. Sometimes point and click just don't cut it.


Oh, yeah.. I have yet to meet any young PUNK who can take me at video games.. With the Money I've poured into Technolgy and computers.. I'll be damned if now, as things are getting good, I let myself get whooped.. lol

 

[Stealth1024]

Steel Thunder was an awesome game for the C64... The coolest thing was you could open up all of these programs you had on disk and look and the code and have fun changing it. I remember this one slot machine game that I had fun rewriting... I think I set the highest score ever. hehe

 

[Syborg1211]

How about this:

You know you're too old when you can sit back and think about what to add to this thread