Been There Done That... trying to relive my old Enthusiasm here at TE

Status
Not open for further replies.
V

vincy24

Inactive
Contributor
Hey fellas,

Good to see a lot of gadget and impulsive upgraders here on Tech Enclave.

I have not been an active poster but an avid reader none the less.

MY tryst with gadgets started back in the early nineties when I ripped open our Philips stereo when it started eating magnetic tape pasta. I was never scared to open up anything that has little or no usage value left. I was always a gadget freak since my childhood.

My real entry to this world of computer started when my Dad got a Cyrix DX 80Mhz 486 running on 16MB ram, a 540MB HDD, a 14inch Monochrome monitor and Whoa Baby - a mouse. My school machines just had a floppy disk and having a computer at home leave aside a "huge and spacious†HDD was next to owning a BMW and had super flaunt value.

I flaunted my box disk of 5.25" floppy disks in school with cool games and Qbasic to end up being teased with comments like" Hey Vineet what running in your CPU." The school kids used to be real mean and say rude things like “I will crash you hard disk†instead of “ I will break you head†And Murphy was listening

A Long story beckons

Read ON..
 
My HDD conked off soon ( I have my doubts that I was fooled into a used HDD) and I went for the first time to my Mecca Lamington road to pick up a new 1GB HDD for 5.5K ,sound card , 10x CDROM drive and speakers (nothing was included in my first build) for a total damage of 9.5K :@

Still running a super tweaked and mostly naked 486 at home, I got an excellent chance to dirty my hands on better hardware in my college. That was roughly 250 machines.
• plain jane diskless remote booting machines ,
• 40 odd bloody expensive machines running the LAATESHT PIII 450mhz with miniscule 32MB ram in those times
• ok ok Linux boxes running p2 with a sis 6215C ( the most dreaded PCI graphics card for Linux ) that ran Q2Lin quite well
• a dual procesor PIII 550 on a Asus P2D mobo running 128 megs of RAM, a Creative Banshee Graphics card with 16megs of dedicated ram a 20GB SCSI HDD a 17" Samsung Monitor - Nicknamed Diablo for its dual Heads (PIII 550):clap:
• An IBM X-series 220 server with hot swappable RAID 1 2x20GB SCSI HDD's and modular server chassis.

Ok I wrote a lot of specs but I can see the smile on you face when you read this. Read on.

And we are still talking of the years 2000 to 2002.

A gang of 6 geeks/nerds/freaks spent hours crimping the hundreds of RJ 45 connectors on the CAT5 network cables mostly found under the table, (OW , O , GW , Bl , BlW, G , BrW , Br. the crimping color seq. for CAT 5 is etched in my mind ever since) running around to find HDD IDE cables, Philips head screws ,writing complex scripts to ensure your love interest get the weirdest flashy blinking romantic messages when she logs onto that one special terminal with THE COLOR monitor you reserve for her during practicals.:hap2: .Evenings went ‘dd’ing OS’s from one master machine around to the whole college network and managing to maintain some decent uptime on the college labs in spite of the crazy stunts and R&D. Who the hell was in mood to install and configure Red Hat Linux 6.2 on 100 machines?
Oh and btw the way I was one of those who only had access to the "root" of all evil. Not money but the admin and root passwords of the whole college network. Chuck it. Let the labs go to hell anyways who cares about the PC's if they are up or not, let’s frag some bad ass in Q2. Most of our free time in college (ok most of our time) was spent playing Q2 on Linux.
When College gave us access to an LCD Projector for the first time ever in 2001, games, movies or x-rates stuff was never the same. 60" of pure pleasure. Oh I meant viewing pleasure on the big screen. THe late night college session turned into overnight frag meets that ended early morning when the lab-assistants used to come the next day to see the labs open and we dozing off on the tables / chairs/ floor covering ourselves using warm blankets, while the a/c blared all night .

These times spent in college gave me so much knowledge and experience, doing the most basic but inaccessible stuff in a time when opening up those 4 dreaded screws behind your CPU was Taboo. Parents used to scream." I spent 50 thousand of my hard earned money and you stupid person want to open it up and see what’s inside. Dare you open that white dabba".

Who would know the best technique to replace a RAM module? Hands trembled when doing it the first time, grounded ourselves a hundred times to remove all static off us and not fry the RAM chips. But what if you change 60 SDRAM modules of 64 Megs to 60 SDRAM modules of 32megs in two days flat. I bet on GOD that the next time you do it it’s a piece of cake. 60 instances of RAM downgrade. Not fair. Ok that was for swapping the RAM into the PIII's so that we could extract more FPS in the Q2 frag sessions that would happen after wards.

That was the story back in college but at home I still ran my trust 486 on Win 95 (coz Win98 was resource hogging on the 486) and RHL 7.2 with the first kernel supporting USB v2.4 on a pc that didn’t know anything faster than a 56KBps modem connected over a 9pin RS232 serial port.
 
vincy24 said:
These times spent in college gave me so much knowledge and experience, doing the most basic but inaccessible stuff in a time when opening up those 4 dreaded screws behind your CPU was Taboo. Parents used to scream." I spent 50 thousand of my hard earned money and you stupid person want to open it up and see what’s inside. Dare you open that white dabba".
Click to expand...
:lol: surely remember that one. Did not happen to me thankfully but had seen it at all my friends.

Welcome to TE. A refreshing intro after a long time. :ohyeah:
 
Well there is more to the story.Was waiting for my last post to be approved

Many stunts on my old 486 rig and about 5 years since I bought it, I upgraded to an AMD Athlon. 1 GHz with holy moly 256 MB ram back in 2001. (My college servers then ran on 128MB ram). This machine was a true workhorse and ran multiple OS’s, multiple VM's and the latest trail versions and apps. Upgraded the onboard Via graphics to a Win fast Leadtek Geforce 5200FX with 128MB ram and ran some truly interesting games. My favorite being the NFS series.

My 486 meanwhile was safely disassembled, packed and tucked for hibernation in my cupboard.
Did open it about an year ago, Assembled it up with the ISA Graphics card and booted it up with a 5.25" floppy drive loaded with DOS 6.22 and it booted up beautifully a little slow nonetheless. :bleh:

Note: Looks like there is a limit on how many Characters I can type in max in one post. So have to break it up into multiple posts.

Read on in my next post to find what stuff I own currently.
 
nukeu666 said:
nice
since you are cutting edge back then, what do you have now?
Click to expand...

Wait for the last part of my intro story. Nothing out of this world. mostly functional.

damn said:
New benchmark in Introductions.

Welcome!
Click to expand...

Thank you but you making me go :ohyeah:
thetoxicmind said:
Welcome to TE! :)
Click to expand...

Thank you. Have some more part remaining in my story .
Sei said:
Simply brilliant!! A very warm welcome from my side!!! :)
Click to expand...

Thank for making me feel in good company.

Renegade said:
:lol: surely remember that one. Did not happen to me thankfully but had seen it at all my friends.

Welcome to TE. A refreshing intro after a long time. :ohyeah:
Click to expand...
Thanks. Just wanted to put down my story over the years. Miss those good old times.
 
Fresh out of college I started working with one of the oldest software firms who gave my first hard earned money and power to buy gadgets that I dreamt about and could now afford.

However work in a software company started leaving me too less time to spend on my passion - computer hardware and networks.

Linux partitions were formatted to FAT32 to make way for more space to keep mp3's and movies.

The geeky Linux terminal screen gave way to user friendly as/400 black and green screens in office and WinXP at home.

Weekends spent on trying new games and configuring VMware VMs gave way to afternoons spent watching friends episodes on my desktop and time with my girlfriend ( now wifey ).

A few years later ,I tricked my dad into upgrading my home machine and donating my AMD Athlon 1Ghz for his office work ( Wow!! hard earned money from his office goes into upgrading my home desktop and he gets a 2 year old pc) so much for my love of Gadgets.

I still have the AMD Athlon XP2800+ running on 1gig RAM and about 4 harddrive connected. I earlier used this as my primary download rig but the Desktop used way too much power and Load shedding and power cut used to put a lot of strain on the invertor. Now Dad uses this desktop as his primary machine at home.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom