Atheist wrote:
But I wonder.....
I don't go to pc boards, do people reminisce about that oh so special 286/386, ms-dos 3.1/4.0 or sound/graphics card over there? Do ya think?
I've been using PCs since 1995; and I can tell you (at least for myself): yes!
I very fondly remember my Voodoo-II card I bought in...what was it, '97? '98? I got it the week it came out. I picked it and Quake-II up. Set me back about $350! That'll teach me to buy retail.
I also remember my first "fast" CD-ROM drive. At the time, a 4x Creative which was pulling about 360k/sec cost around $150. Then Turtle Beach came out with a 4x for $99 and performancewise it blew the doors off of the creative. What a great drive that was! The only reason I gave it up was because it couldn't do Digital Audio Extraction, and I needed that feature to make mix CDs for my wedding.
Which brings us to the next piece (which I still have): my first CDRW from HP. A 7200i, it cost $300 and burned at the blazing speed of 2x/2x! However, I was the first person in my office to own one. You wouldn't
believe the line of people backed up to my desk asking for me to burn stuff! This was back when CDRs cost about $1 each retail, so folks were lining my pocket. I think the drive just about paid for itself. This was in late 1998.
My first PC soundcard I had for
many years; it was a Creative 8-bit Soundblaster Pro. What a little trooper that card was.
OS-wise...hm, well, due to money problems for many years my system was crippled in the HD area (a whopping 270mb Connor that probably ran at 1000rpm!), so unfortunately once I left the DOS/Win3.11 arena (and the commensurately small games such as
DOOM and a few others) and attempted to go to Win'95, things got ugly. It wasn't until I got my first "real" HD, a 2.1gb maxtor, that anything "felt" right, unfortunately.
My first PC joystick was a Suncom Talon - a big, huge flight sim stick that's an exact replica of an F15 control stick. It finally gave up the ghost in early 2001, but I replaced it with a new one and the SFS throttle (an equally imposing replica of the F15's throttle). I just found out yesterday that Belkin makes a DB15 to USB converter, so when I build the new system in October, I'll keep my flightstick rig!
