Computers
My life around computers has been, well, interesting. I've had a succession of weird, odd and downright ridiculous computers.

Let's start back, wayyyy back with the ol' BBC Micro. For those of you too young to remember - Good! It was a big ol' pile of steaming, cow produced, grade A poo. But... It did have 32k RAM, that's right, 32k - for all you memory hogs, that was an astounding amount of memory then - but it did run "Elite", one of the finest games ever produced...

Moving on to my next computer - a ZX81. Oh yes, a ZX81 - plastic and expensive, but my God, it was cool. If you had big hair, big glasses and no friends that is.... But.... I did have a thermal printer **rubs-hands-with-glee** which was brilliant - apart from it's tendency to burst into flames - ah well, we must suffer for our art. My Mum threw it out - it was in pristine condition and was worth some money. I cried. A lot.

My next was a ZX Spectrum 48k. The rubber key jobbie - with a 3.5Mhz processor (that's NOT a typo, it really did have a 3.5Mhz processor). But, it did run and play Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. One of my catchphrases is still "We must perform a quirkafleeg" to this day...

I branched out into weirdness at this point and got an Amstrad **shakes head** with a 3" disk PCW6128 which was, well, rubbish. THe games were poor and, well, it had no redeeming features so when I got...

The PCW8512 - What the hell was I thinking there? It had 2 3" drives - double the pointlessness, double the crapness, double the uselessness. But... The 2nd drive could get up to 720k from a disk **without** turning it over...

**Shudder**

I don't think it got any better at Uni when I cannibalised some work computers (allegedly) to build up a machine capable of playing Doom2 - so I built the cutting edge, seat of your pants, DX4/100 beast. With 32Mb RAM - on riser cards. And 20Mb of disk space. And a 14" SVGA monitor.

My next new purchase was a Pentium 120 - hoo hoo hoo. It was pretty damned good, I can tell you - I spec'd it up myself from a store now closed in Sheffield, but it lasted me 4 years and some of Uni and I sold it on too :) This had 64Mb RAM (later 128) and 120Mb disk space.

It gets a bit boring after that as I got a Celeron 400 as a budget machine, but I spiced it up by adding a Righteous Orchid graphics accelerator card - an expensive secondary video card that waited for software to call it to enable, a few clicks and clunks later, the accelerator kicked in. Grand Theft Auto (1) needed, inexplicably, an accelerator card - I think the Orchid was one of the first.

The Celeron 400 did me well, I upgraded from 2000 to XP and even dual booted for a while, but when I dropped in a P3 450 processor - well, things took off. Well, sortof....

At about the same time as the P450 processor upgrade, I decided to build my own computer - So I bought a board, processor, memory and disk. Wired them all up, carefully, having followed the directions (really) - then turned it on. ***BANG*** and smoke and a genie appeared.

Well, no, but I was down £250 as I'd blown everything connected to that board.... Ah well, lesson leaned and all that...

Then I was allocated work machines that I'll just name:
Toshiba Portege - great laptop and light. Great if you liked it to fry your hands, desk and knees - but there was a pretty good chance you might be ok, as there was no way the battery would last that long
Compaq N610 - great laptop and light - shame I left the company and have to hand it back.

And now?

Well, I've a works dual core Vista laptop that's a special kind of shite

And a MacBook which is mine. All mine

So nerdy? Me? I'll let you judge....

Thanks for reading - if you got this far :-)
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 0:06, 6 replies)

I remember when our family bought our first computer
and my mother couldn't imagine us ever using all 10 floppy disks she bought at the same time.

Our first modem.......the only thing we could connect to was the public library.....to see which books they had in and which ones were checked out.
( flirting with badgers What? It sounded good at the time., Tue 11 Mar 2008, 0:15, closed)

I used to roll my own computers
Then I bought a Macbook, and I can honestly say I don't miss the sight of ports, chips and capacitors.

People talk about Mac users as 'smug'... but it's a warm, cosy feeling ;)
(Generator cannot be named for legal reasons, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 1:38, closed)

Elite
Yep, still one of the finest games ever created and one I still pay today.

Now THAT is nerdy.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Tue 11 Mar 2008, 10:09, closed)

didn't read one word of that
But feel , strangely, that I know what it says.
(frankspencer, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 10:21, closed)

Just out of interest
Why would you have gone from a BBC B (which were actually good machines, better than a ZX81 or the Spectrum. And I owned a Spectrum, so I'm not biased) to a ZX81 then a Spectrum ? I think you've got it the wrong way round...
( I_Was_Mordred, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 12:54, closed)

Honestly?
Well, I didn't really own the BBC Micro, it was a loaner type of thing.....

The Spectrum? I've no idea :-)
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 16:10, closed)