I recently upgraded my current PC’s graphics card and it kinda made me reflect on my history of owning computers and the sheer ammount of time over the years I must have spent glued to a square box of light tinkering away on a game or some code or browsing the Internet etc…
I thought it might be interesting to do a blog post (more for me than anyone else) to do a little time line of the computers I have owned over the years, so here goes:
1. Acorn Electron - Late 80’s - early 90’s?
The Acorn electron was a bit like those old BBC Micro’s you used to get in schools if you were born in the early 80’s. If you were not born in the early 80’s you might wanna skip down the page a bit as you’ll prob have no idea what these clunky looking boxes are.
To be honest the Acorn electron was second hand, and in the late 80’s it was very out of date! but back then PC’s were not cheap like they are now and my parents were not exactly loaded so these things combined resulted in mr electron.
I’m glad I got it in retrospect because it opened the past up to me without it ’seeming’ like the past if that makes sense. I was pretty young so I didn’t know a whole lot about computers but it defo set me on the path to where I am now. This little bad boy was so old you loaded up games from a tape! Many sunday afternoons were spent playing such classics as frogger, repton!, and the old old school classics like pac man and space invaders.
This was probably one of the last generations of Micro computers and to put it in perspective it could store and any one time 32K of data, These days a single MP3 is like 3000K plus! truly this machine is olde!
2. Amiga 1200 - Mid 90’s to Late 90’s
So after the electron I spent a few years being a console kid (like most teenagers do) until my folks decided I needed to learn more and do homework as well (poor misguided fools) so they bought me an Amiga 1200. Amiga were a family of computers that exisited in the 80’s and 90’s. They were produced by a company called Commodore and were separate from PC’s in their hardware and software (kinda like macs today).
The Amiga had a cult following back in the day, people loved them and I was no exception. At this time I even had a lexmark inkjet printer, truly I felt rather grown up. I dabbled with programs like painting apps and word processing. The operating system was called Workbench and was fairly similar to Windows so it kinda set me up with a basic understanding of files, copying pasting and all that stuff.
Needless to say however at such a young age I was very much a fan of the games! (still am) and I literally had about 100 Amiga games. Games like ‘The Setterlers’, ‘Frontier Elite 2′, ‘Alien Breed’, ‘Monkey Island’, ‘Cannon Fodder’ ‘Syndicate’… the list goes on and on and I played them a lot! I feel a bit sorry for people who didn’t grow up with these kind of games/experiences because its so easy to take technology today for granted. These games were on floppy disks, the Internet was but a novelty… no one was actually ‘on it’, these were times when life was simple and I miss it sometimes.
3. PC: Nick1: 1997/8 - 2001
Woooooooo my first ‘PC’ computer with the Nick name (I’m on Nick5 now but we’ll get to those later). This was a intel (dum dum dum dum) pentium 166Mhz with a whapping 32meg of ram and a 2GB hard drive. It came with windows 95 and sported that classic off white case colour along with it’s 14″ monitor. This PC was another pressie from the folks for school and what have you. A bit more grown up now I did tend to use it for such things but of course games were never to far away, at last I could play Doom 2! which I did for months.
I have fond memories of this machine but its funny looking back as to how times have changed in 10 years. To put things in perspective my current MP3 player stores 32 times! as much data as this PC’s entire hard drive did. Imagine what that was like, you had to be really careful about what you stored. My current PC has 4GB of ram which is 125 times more! Crazy just crazy.
The biggest impact this machine had was my own personal connection to teh Internetz. My mate John had had a similar new machine and was tinkering about on the Internet already and we used to have teenage nights of fucking about in chat rooms pissing off rednecks and other long forgotten shenanigans.
The Internet was a different beast then, still with a mild sterotype of geekyness and no where near the integration it plays in life today. No Facebook, Google was just some new search engine a few folks used, Old sites now purchased and sucked into coporate machines existed like eGroups and CDNow, everything was very basic and fairly new still and I feel really proud to of experienced this time, its kinda like some weird digital history… like remembering your old house or old friends.
Back then I had a 36k modem which without going into the technicals, was slow. Webpages were a lot smaller (try loading facebook on a 36k modem now) so it wasent all bad and really thats all we had ever known so that long pause for a page to load was fine back then, now of course everyone uses broadband and you’d never expect one web page to take 30secs-2mins to load, you’d be ringing up ye isp!
Since I was on a modem back then it cost per minute to use the Internet like a normal phone call! Needless to say some tears were shed by my moms when a certain quaterly phone bill came in and was about 300 quid. Anyway going off topic, if you wanna checkout what the internet used to be like go here.
4. PC: Nick2: 2001 - 2006
Off to university now and this is the first PC I bought all by my self, almost actually grown fully up! This was an intel (dum dum dum dum) 1.5mhz pentium 4 with 512meg of ram a 32GB hard drive and a 128meg graphics card and Windows XP.
For its day it was not really top of the line but a significant upgrade on what I had before, I was a student afterall! over the years I think i upgraded it to 1gb of ram and put in a more powerful graphics card and a second 250GB hard drive. Played the likes of Half Life and GTA III etc etc…
This PC lasted me a Looooooong time. Partly owing to being a poor student for 3 years but also due to the XP plateau. The XP plateau is an effect where by a PC just does what you need it too with no significant reason needed to upgrade. This is generally the case with PC’s that run Windows XP, they do everything you want and even to this day I would imagine that a significant number of desktop PCs running today are more or less the same as this one from 2001.
I could still be doing with a fair speed most of what I use a PC for on this machine with no issue, however I am a gamer and a geek and once I got an actual actual job it was time for an upgrade.
PC: Nick3: 2006 - Now
I decided to get a new PC in 2006 really for gaming and to have a bit of a speed boost all round. I went for a intel (dum dum dum dum) core 2 duo 2.67mhz, 2GB of Ram and an Nvidia 7950GT 512meg graphics card, 75GB raptor hard drive and a 300GB storage drive.
The silverstone case is a beast and it as about a million fans and dvd writers usb ports and ports I cant actually figure out to this day. Again not the highest spec pc of its day but respectable and decent at running newer games from Doom3 up to Crysis. I have added a 32″ TV to my desk and plugged that into it, I also have added a 19″ wide screen monitor. Inside I have bumped the ram up to 4GB and have added a more up to date graphics card.
I started out on old faithful windows XP, then had a brief fling with vista but we got divorced and now i’m fucking her sister windows 7 and life is gooood.
Hard to have nostalgia about this machine as its fairly new and not much to say about it as most folks know what modern PC’s are like.
Here is how my desk looks today:
I have upgraded this enough to keep me going a couple more years I think. Come 2010-2011 I think i’ll get another machine, problem is the case etc I have now are great quality, There isn’t really a need to go full whack and buy a totally new machine, methinks it will be more the case that Nick3 will just keep getting face lifts until he’s something totally different, bit like the late MJ.
Nick4/5
I was gonna write more but this post is getting far to bloody long (again!). Nick4 is a little asus eee netbook I bought that I never use because the times i’m out I wanna forget about pcs! lol. And Nick5 is a little desktop machine I have on 24/7 as a server so I don’t have to have my main machine chewing up power and dust.
