What was a landmark moment for you with hardware?

Windows

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My landmark moment

by jck · 11 years ago In reply to What was a landmark momen ...

Really was when I got my first PC...a Commodore 64. That's when my programming life began. Programming BASIC from the Commodore 64 Programmer's Guide, then joining the local Commodore 64 Users Group, getting C and assembly and FORTRAN and Pascal.

Of course, another moment was when I upped my first pre-built PC I bought from 16MB to 64MB...then, I later found my old Seagate ST-251 MFM drive and controller card in a box...and realized...my PC now had more RAM in it that the first hard drive I ever owned had.

Now, I have USB flask disks with 64 times that capacity.

Ain't life grand.

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When I think back to that stuff

by jdclyde · 11 years ago In reply to My landmark moment

it is the amount of ram on VIDEO cards that amaze me compared to just a few years ago.

5 years ago, 256M ram was good for your system, and now the video cards come CHEAPLY with more than that? :0

Funny how the response of my old 386 didn't have me sitting around any more than my current system does. thanks for the eye candy and bloatware Microsoft! B-)

If it takes so much more to run at the same time for the end user, have we REALLY advanced?

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bloatware and its impact

by jck · 11 years ago In reply to When I think back to that ...

Have we advanced? From the hardware aspect and the speed at which it operates...of course.

Has Microsoft advanced? I think (some might argue otherwise) that Microsoft really hasn't advanced. Maybe they made the interface look prettier or cooler or whatever, but what strides in operations have they made? Have they implemented parallelism yet into their OS? Do they really have true multi-tasking yet?

I think that Microsoft really would be best served by re-working their core, rather than making 3d effects and window translucency that impress people with "cool effects".

Oh Lord...10:40am and I'm already on a rant about MS on a Monday. Not gonna be a good week. lol

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Memories...

by JackOfAllTech · 11 years ago In reply to What was a landmark momen ...

The first time I opened up an IBM AT to add a 5" x 18" board to take the memory up to a whopping 1MB and replace the original 5MB hard drive with a cool, new 10MB drive.

Yeah, I know. I'm old.

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My first tech work

by jdclyde · 11 years ago In reply to Memories...

was working on a college campus, and the labs were all double floppy systems.

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My first memory upgrade

by NickNielsen · 11 years ago In reply to What was a landmark momen ...

Removing four banks of 1 x 128 chips (9/bank) and replacing them with 1 x 256 chips. Gave my Zenith 8086 a whopping 1M of expansion RAM.

I also learned the importance of using a chip inserter while doing that job.

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Installing Windows 3.1 via floppies

by netforce · 11 years ago In reply to My first memory upgrade

Remember that, and you'd get near the end of installing Windows and you would receive errors or defective floppy.

So I'd have to say the ability to install Windows via CD's.

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Installing Windows 95 via floppies

by jdclyde · 11 years ago In reply to Installing Windows 3.1 vi ...

I remember computers didn't even COME with CD roms for a long time. :0

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I remember the first CD roms

by JamesRL · 11 years ago In reply to Installing Windows 95 via ...

On Macs they were usually external SCSI devices.

PCs were IDE.

I installed Windows 95 once from floppies onto a Mac - running SoftPC. It worked but was very slow.

I recall installing win 3.1 on 5 1/4 inch floppies....fun fun fun.

James

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20-something 3.5-inch floppies

by NickNielsen · 11 years ago In reply to Installing Windows 95 via ...

Of which you only needed about 15, if I remember. The rest were all driver disks.

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