Archaic Computing

About 12 years ago, my father built a computer for me and my brother. Being a kid in 2nd Grade who could say he had a computer in his home was one thing, but a computer in my room was something else.
Affectionately called Frankenstein, it was big, loud, and grey. A red switch the size of a matchbook flipped horizontally, which is how the computer would sit atop our desk. Components of the machine that I still don't know about couldn't be vertical. It was mysterious and wonderful. Windows 3.1 was installed and barely used. I had an infatuation with DOS.
Parts of this machine were moved into later machines. All of which my father would build. I'd watch him blow dust out of metal boxes and push black ribbons into the back.

Parts of this machine are in the machine I use today. The core of it, actually, is the same. An Intel motherboard with a Celeron Processor running at about 400 MHz. A SoundBlaster of some sort offer me audio. I've gone through a number of monitors, but my video card can only run in a maximum of 1280x1024 in 24-bit color. I stick with 1152x864 just for the sake of running it in 32-bit.
I've been content with this. I find it silly to hear 15 year old kids on YouTube (which I can barely watch now because of the CPU it takes to run the flash content) complaining about their new computer having a processor running at 2.26GHz when their other one runs at 2.56GHz. I cannot even fathom what that would be like. I would imagine they cannot fathom what ~400MHz would be like.
A few months ago, my maximum harddrive capacity was 13 GB split on two drives. Seven, the C: drive, and six, the D: drive. Yes, up until September of 2008, and iPod had more hard drive space than my computer. After the C: drive sputtered and quit, a 320 GB IDE drive was purchased. This was an anxiety attack for everyone involved. I didn't know if W2K could support drives that high. I was quite lucky that after a few registry edits, I could partition it into three drives.
Until around this time last year, it ran Windows 98 SE. Now I'm proud to say that it is running a bit more recent operating system. Windows 2000 Professional. Updating from an operating system that is ten years old to an operating system that is eight years old was quite climactic.
Were you aware that Windows incorporated transparency into the desktop? Quite the nice effect on the context menus. Hold on hold on, I can make the taskbar hide and jump back when my cursor goes down for it. Wait wait, the cursor has a shadow? This is too much.
But with my happiness comes anger.
It's a bit frustrating not being able to nurture my casual gaming needs with newer games(what in the hell is OpenGL?), being able to edit video together in something other than VirtualDub(I do love this program) and being forced to use outdated versions of anything you're using now. "I can has multi-tasking?" No, you may not has multi-tasking. Two programs running at the same time is okay. Three is pushing it. After a while, closing one program doesn't mean it's closed. I am actually so used to it by now, that I ctrl+alt+del after I close any program just to make sure it isn't still running. iPod? Don't have one. Couldn't use one if I did. No drivers exist for W2K nor would iTunes run on this beast.

C'est la vie.
I'll keep recording songs in Cool Edit Pro(bought by Adobe and is now Audition) and editing video as it gets closer and closer to a time when I will have to update this machine and take its drives out and put them in a new box. But until then, Frankenstein will keep putting along and try and keep up with me shoving all kinds of software at it while it goes "lol, I see what you did there! Windows XP please!". I'll keep ctrl+alt+deleting my way back to the desktop and having time to eat a snack while it starts up each day, making meals while it installs new software and thanking any and all websites not made intirely out of flash. There has been an exponential growth in technology in the past eight years and I haven't kept up. But, again, I am fine with this. It has been a lot of fun(?) trying to find drivers for my sound card and getting Blue Screens of Death on a monthly(if I'm lucky) basis.

Tags: 2000, adnrew, andrew, dos, ghz, mhz, old computer, processor, windows, xp

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Comment by Susan Midlarsky on December 2, 2008 at 8:03pm: Oh boy... I remember our first computers clearly. The one at home was a Kaypro II (CP/M, anyone?). Programming in Basic was lots of fun. Then my dad got an IBM PC at the office. Amazing! He brought it home when the office got both an XT and an AT - wow, actual hard drives! And the journey goes on. Guess I've worked on just about every flavor of DOS/Windows and Mac OS, along with some other obscure OSes and, of course, Linux and other UNIX types.

The oldest computer currently in use for me is a Tibook (G4 Firewire).

Comment by Shtanto on December 1, 2008 at 6:10pm: Rik van Riel explains this well

A few rather awful numbers for us all:

# Time to read the whole hard disk:

* 1990: 10 MB disk, 180 kB/s = < 1 minute
* 2003: 160 GB disk, 40 MB/s = ~ 1 hour

# Time to write all of memory to disk (very optimistic, does not count seek time):

* 1990: 640 kB, 180 kB/s = 3.5 seconds
* 2003: 2 GB, 40 MB/s = 50 seconds

# (more abstract) Time to read data from RAM:

* 1990: < 1 clock cycle, systems commonly used lookup tables to avoid doing calculations of > 20 clock cycles.
* 2003: 200-400 clock cycles, doing expensive floating point calculations is often faster than a single cache miss.

So in fact, computers are getting slower and are going to continue to get slower.

I'll see if Rik wants to join geeks. I'm sure he'd love our anecdotes. :)

Comment by SphereCat1 on December 1, 2008 at 1:58pm: My fastest computer is currently about 600mhz, running WinXP. Not a pretty combination. I'm upgrading to a Mac soon, which will solve (i hope) all my computing problems.

Comment by Eric L. on December 1, 2008 at 11:28am: I relate to WKnight, in having to know every file that was on the computer and which ones were ok to delete. Several reformats and reinstalls of DOS 6.22 and windows 3.1 on my old IBM 386 I quickly learned to leave .dll files alone. The computer was given to me by my sister who got it from a collage that was upgrading their computers and had all these 386's in a dumpster (before they knew that computers were bad for landfills) in order to get me in the computer field. The computer was like I said an IBM 386, pci tridend video card, 250mb HD, 8mb of RAM, a cheap sound blaster audio card, an external 14.4K Zoom modem, an 4x CD-ROM drive, and a 15in. color monitor.

It lasted about a year before it I was getting into more intence programing and needed to upgrade a little, So I when to a computer store (before there was a staples) and bought a 56k internat modem, and a 48x CD-ROM drive. I brought the stuff home, installed it and the whole computer stopped working. I tried to get it working for days, talking to this one and that one for advice, finally on one of the many times I had it apart, I took the new stuff that I bought, out of it.... opened the office window...and threw it out. It just so happens that outside the office window was the driveway, so I went out... got into my truck and ran the damn thing over repeatily, all the while saying how much I hate computers, I don't need them, don't want one...and a few other choise words, never to have one in the house again. That lasted all of 5 hours until I was on the phone with computer stores tring to find a new one, up to date, with all the bells and whistles and yet still could afford.

With my new compter I got certified to tech them, got an entry level tech support job at a nation wide ISP (not aol), worked my way up to network engineer. I since got tired and bored with working on computers and became a truck driver, still dabbling in computers when the time arriases. However, to this day I still tell people that I understand their fustration, to remember that it's only metal and pastic and not worth loosing any sleep over, and I tell them the store of when I was new with computers...got P*ssed...threw it out the window and drove over the stupid thing.

I hope that someone can relate and/or get a chuckle out of my somewhat long story, maybe you have something that you share. I'm usually always online and reachable one http://geeks.pirillo.com/profile/EricLaPointe and don't forget to join the geeks.pirillo.com website.

Comment by WKnight on December 1, 2008 at 7:00am: I had to go back to the top of this post to find out what year it was posted in. It sounds perfectly reasonable for 1999. Sorry to hear about your plight Andrew.

My first rig was an IBM 286 with microchannel architecture and a 20MB hard drive. This was a huge leap from my Commodore 64. I was also enamored with DOS which is really what dragged me into the PC world I suppose.

I often refer back to the days of the 20MB hard drive when I see people wasting gigs and gigs of hard drive space on junk that they don't even know about. Back in the day, I had to know what every file was in every directory on that drive to conserve space. Anything non-essential was put to floppy or deleted. readme.txt? deleted.. license.doc? deleted... You really learn to respect disk space when you've only got 20MB.

I wonder what the bootup time for a 286 to MS DOS 6.22 would be compared to a quad-core with vista?

Comment by Jeff Muniz on December 1, 2008 at 4:39am: I do remember my first PC. This does not count my TI-99 4a with the Tape recorder to load programs. My first real PC was an IBM PC -XT with 2 full height 360K floppy drives and a EVGA video card. I believe I started out with a whopping 256k of memory then I got an 384K memory expansion card. I had a true IBM monitor that I don't remember the model number, but it weighed a ton. Next upgrade was a spacious 10meg hard drive that I could never possibly fill up!! Ahhh the old days.

Comment by Fyre Vortex on December 1, 2008 at 12:38am: Wow, nice.

Comment by Aryeh Goretsky on December 1, 2008 at 12:31am: Hello,

Given the age of your computer, I would imagine you could install more memory and a faster CPU in it for only a few dollars. You may need to do a bit of research to determine what the largest amount of memory is that your motherboard supports, as well as the fastest CPU.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky