Ever give up on a computer hobby?

[+OLD CS1]

I gave up on the TI back in the 80s.  It was too expensive for me to upgrade and I could no longer simply pop by Target, Service Merchandise, or the BX and pick up software I wanted or needed.  Though I would not have called it a hobby back then as I used my computers for school, whether or not the school was ready for me to do so.

[Tursi]

Given up on the TI, Amiga, Genesis, NES, and Apple2, most repeatedly. And yet I keep going out and rebuying the same stuff... Usually for more money. I've bought Thunder Force 3 so many times I have a standing rule that I am not allowed to ever sell it again

[Keatah]

Man that's nuts, but I get your drift dude..

[adamchevy]

Given up on the TI, Amiga, Genesis, NES, and Apple2, most repeatedly. And yet I keep going out and rebuying the same stuff... Usually for more money. I've bought Thunder Force 3 so many times I have a standing rule that I am not allowed to ever sell it again [emoji6]

I’ve done this 3 times with the PS3, but now they are so cheap! I just can’t pass up quality hardware and software at such an extreme discount.

[wierd_w]

20 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

I gave up on the TI back in the 80s.  It was too expensive for me to upgrade and I could no longer simply pop by Target, Service Merchandise, or the BX and pick up software I wanted or needed.  Though I would not have called it a hobby back then as I used my computers for school, whether or not the school was ready for me to do so.

 

Heh...  That last bit I totally dig.  I had an old Compaq Armada 1530DM in the mid 90s that I brought to school for schoolwork. I was faster at typing than I was at hand-writing notes, and it kept me from having to spend so much time in the computer lab. It was the first true laptop I ever purchased, and I was very proud of it in the day and age.  All the other kids felt it cemented my status as a hardcore nerd though.

 

The teacher staff however--- They were nonplussed about having an "Electronic Device" in their classrooms. LOL.   These days kids have school issued ipads and chromebooks.  Oh how times have changed.

[Omega-TI]

Back when I was taking classes I used an NEC PC8201A, which was similar to a Radio Shack Model 100 with 2 banks of 32K.  I eventually removed the second bank or memory, because the third-party brand of memory I purchased (Purple Computing) was too tall and kept cutting out, which led me to lose a couple of days of class notes.

 

Back in it's day it would last quite a while on it's rechargeable AA's.

 

[wierd_w]

Sadly I was crawling around on the carpet at that period.  I missed out on the first round of home PCs and portables.  I cut teeth well into the IBM PC age.  I had to get a summer job and buy my own laptop, because my folks refused to spring that kind of dough. (Somewhat amusingly, that summer job was fixing PCs. I got *A LOT* of experience doing that. Had my hands in everything from XTs all the way up to AS400s and beyond. I can make those old DOS machines dance, and was the bane of the computer lab staff at school. They were terrified of me. They insisted on giving me a chaperone after I noticed several outstanding problems with how they set up their network, and politely pointed them out after class.)

 

Like so many people then, they did not appreciate how computers were going to change the world, and felt my fixation with them was unhealthy.   Really, it just gave me a heads-up on the current world.  I wish there were more opportunities to share the experience with others besides my co-workers back then.  I am kinda sad that there aren't any local groups in my area; KC is a 5 hour drive from here, and I JUST learned about it tonight.

 

 

 

[MHaensel]

I have a reverse story! I moved from an older system I loved to one that did much less for me.

 

I had a Commodore 64 from roughly 1984-1990. I learned to program in BASIC, COMAL, and a little machine language. The GEOS word processor had bitmapped fonts and graphics and worked with my printer. I had games for days. Listening to SID music . . . I loved to watch that little band play. The system was small, but I understood it and knew how to make it sing.

 

Looking back, I could have gotten a few more years out of it with a REU and a 3.5" floppy disk drive . . . ?

 

The next computer was an IBM-compatible 386DX-25. The hardware was fantastic. Sharp graphics and text, 101-key keyboard, a printer that hammered out a dot matrix like nobody's business . . . but

• I had no source of pirated software. That made the machine much less useful. No more free games! (In fact, almost no games that I recall.)
• Word 1.0 for Windows came with the computer. It didn't work. My assignments came out in _{teeny tiny type} and I was never able to fix it.
• For that and other reasons, I had to use a cheap text-based DOS word processor. That was a big step back from GEOS!
• An expensive machine-language assembler package didn't work for what I needed.

I was glad to be rid of the 386 when the time came. But the Commodore 64 will always have a special place in my memories.

[Keatah]

I think having a network of pirate buddies was big-time important back then. It was certainly one downfall I had with the Amiga - no software available. A few purchased games, Terrorpods, Flight Simulator II, Jet, F/A-18 Interceptor, a few more. Some rental copies. A MarbleMadness demo - a DEMO for chrissakes! Of all the impudence! Even BBSes didn't help much. Nothing like the Apple II. On the II it required heroics just to keep up with knowing what was coming out. So. Much. Stuff.

 

With the PC there like 7-10 BigBox stores within just a few miles and no matter which way I took home from school or work I would always pass by 1 or even 2 of them. And each had hundreds or even thousands of titles. Then there were BBSes. And Newsgroups & Usenet. And the rest of the burgeoning internet.

 

So transitioning into a PC from the Amiga (hardware wise) felt like going backwards for a while. But that changed fast. The PC was on a crazed upgrade cycle back then. New processors were coming out seemingly every couple of months. And graphics kept getting better. SoundBlasters hit the scene. And Doom and Quake and Raptor, along with Tubular Worlds, WhackyWheels, and Tyrian and Comanche were all hit games easily surpassing anything on the Amiga.

 

I loved the downtempo moodiness of the OPL-3 FM music in Stellar 7 and Nova 9. Especially on the dead silent sub-zero nights here in the Northern Hemisphere. A surreal experience.

 

The whole "first PC" deal was a good thing. It was fun installing the graphics card and every board thereafter, like the SB-16, WaveBlaster MIDI board, PracticalPeripherals 14.4K modem, 2nd parallel port. 2nd and 3rd hard drives, and special E-IDE Max board. CD-ROM. Zip-Drive. Yes. Upgrading it was fun and very much like the Apple II, as I upgraded the hell out of that too.

[Keatah]

On 9/29/2019 at 5:23 PM, jhd said:

I have never been inclined to collect vintage computer hardware (primarily because it is extremely difficult to find at local retail, but also due to the steep learning curve), so I have never abandoned the hobby.

I don't think I actually collect for the platforms I have, TRS-80 Pocket Computer 1,2, and 4, Vintage PC, and Apple II. I mean I have them and stuff and the spare parts to keep them running for decades to come. It's more about remembering and re-experiencing the good times.

 

It's doable with a few platforms, but not 10's or 100's like I (and others) tried doing earlier. It literally became un-fun. But with focus it's awesomesauce.

[zzip]

On 12/5/2020 at 6:16 AM, Keatah said:

With the PC there like 7-10 BigBox stores within just a few miles and no matter which way I took home from school or work I would always pass by 1 or even 2 of them. And each had hundreds or even thousands of titles. Then there were BBSes. And Newsgroups & Usenet. And the rest of the burgeoning internet.

 

So transitioning into a PC from the Amiga (hardware wise) felt like going backwards for a while. But that changed fast. The PC was on a crazed upgrade cycle back then. New processors were coming out seemingly every couple of months. And graphics kept getting better. SoundBlasters hit the scene. And Doom and Quake and Raptor, along with Tubular Worlds, WhackyWheels, and Tyrian and Comanche were all hit games easily surpassing anything on the Amiga.

And there were Computer Shows/Fairs where a lot of vendors would bring the latest stuff and compete with each other on price.   I remember my friends and I would take road trips to these shows many weekends to see what upgrades we could score.

 

[Arnuphis]

So, like a few people, I caved a bit. Got a Mac SE/30 and Apple //e Platinum. Plus a Sharp MZ-80b as I was looking for one of those for ages. Still given up on the Amiga though. The insane price of the flaky hardware plus a visit to the Amiga forums convinces me I am not missing anything regarding the 'next gen' machine either. Emulation is all I need. I actually get more pleasure fixing stuff up these days.

[Keatah]

On 11/30/2019 at 4:23 PM, OLD CS1 said:

I gave up on the TI back in the 80s.  It was too expensive for me to upgrade and I could no longer simply pop by Target, Service Merchandise, or the BX and pick up software I wanted or needed.  Though I would not have called it a hobby back then as I used my computers for school, whether or not the school was ready for me to do so.

I never called it a hobby then either. Not in the 70's, or 80's, or 90's. Only when "vintage" & "classic" & "retro" became important descriptor words did I think of it as a hobby. And that means 2010'ish.

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

And there were Computer Shows/Fairs where a lot of vendors would bring the latest stuff and compete with each other on price.   I remember my friends and I would take road trips to these shows many weekends to see what upgrades we could score.

I hadn't done too much of that. Was busy struggling to buy shiny sterile stuff from CompUSA. Wasn't knowledgeable enough about PCs yet to effectively shop at a computer fair. And I was into games, the latest games. Busy trying to learn MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. And I just wanted stuff to work. No fixing, no cleaning, documentation required, warranty required. Impression of low-quality dirty crap was another deterrent. Pre-conditioned to buy only new stuff. Expensive stuff.

 

53 minutes ago, Arnuphis said:

So, like a few people, I caved a bit. Got a Mac SE/30 and Apple //e Platinum. Plus a Sharp MZ-80b as I was looking for one of those for ages. Still given up on the Amiga though. The insane price of the flaky hardware plus a visit to the Amiga forums convinces me I am not missing anything regarding the 'next gen' machine either. Emulation is all I need. I actually get more pleasure fixing stuff up these days.

Gave up on the Amiga because of no support and no warez in my area. And fact that everyone was moving into PC hardware. Probably for the best. But I continue to enjoy it from time to time through emulation. For nostalgia only.

 

I never had reliability issues with my Amiga 1000 or 500 bitd. But how well would it have held up to now?

 

And yes it IS indeed fun buffing up the old hardware.

 

 

[zzip]

5 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I hadn't done too much of that. Was busy struggling to buy shiny sterile stuff from CompUSA. Wasn't knowledgeable enough about PCs yet to effectively shop at a computer fair. And I was into games, the latest games. Busy trying to learn MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. And I just wanted stuff to work. No fixing, no cleaning, documentation required, warranty required. Impression of low-quality dirty crap was another deterrent. Pre-conditioned to buy only new stuff. Expensive stuff.

My friends and I weren't that knowledgeable yet either.   I had a friend who read PC Magazine or something and he would impart what he learned there on me, and I would teach my other friends.   We made it work.    We went to the shows knowing what we were looking for.   The stuff there was mostly new from the PC vendors.   Some shows had people selling used stuff like the annual show in Trenton, but that wasn't the norm.   Some of the vendors did sell shady stuff from the far-east..  like no-name modems with big bold claims on the box.  We generally avoided that stuff and bought brand-name parts.    If you wanted games and software, they also had vendors selling tons of CD-ROMs, usually at prices lower than the big-box stores.

 

And DOS was like a black art to me even then.   Didn't know what half the stuff in config.sys meant.  Struggled with TSRs and memory, was making special boot disks for various games so they would have enough memory to load.   Then one day someone told me about Memmaker,  a program included with DOS that analyzed your config.sys and autoexec.bat,  and rewrote them to make most of the TSR memory management pain go away!

[desiv]

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

Gave up on the Amiga because of no support and no warez in my area.

Wow...

Piracy on the Amiga was all over...  There were some good BBSes.  Mail (yeah, you could trade disks via the mail) and FIDONET for contacts/info...

And then there was pre-internet...  (Well, it was the internet, but just not that popular yet)  I seem to remember tut.fi having some warez FTP???

It's been awhile...

Oh, and compuserve! (Not for the actual warez, but for information on where to get them.)

Since 3.5" floppies were more expensive than the 5 1/4"s I used to have for my C64, on the Amiga, I always had fewer disks handy than available games.

 

Even tho I was in Oregon, there was even some decent support.  A computer store in Medford Oregon (The User's Corner) was my favorite, and then some places up north towards PDX.  Although I never needed hardware support.  And mail order had lots of great hardware...

 

As for the OP, I have done that a couple of times.

I use the "when did I last use it" test to decide whether or not I should keep it.

 

I did that first with the Coleco Adam.  I always wanted one back in the day, but never had one.

Then, someone gave one to me (20ish years ago) and I set it up and had fun with it.

Then, after some time passed, I was taking inventory and realized I hadn't used it since I had gotten it.  Yeah, the initial rush, and it was fun.

But I wasn't going back to it...

 

So I traded it for a 1084S monitor.  Better for me (my Amiga 500 at the time was using an s-video homebrew card with composite (I didn't have any TVs that did s-video then ? )) and better for the Adam, as it went to someone who was going to use it a lot more.

 

I then did the same thing with a TI 99/4A and a 520STf.  (The ST would have been more interesting, but I didn't have an ST monitor and never got around to making a cable for it to connect to anything I had).

 

There are some times I think back on those systems a bit, but never the "man I wish I had kept them."

That said, it wasn't a spur of the moment decision.  I took my time in each case.

 

The only system I gave up on (so to speak) was my A1000 that had developed some hardware issues (it was acquired in tough shape already).  I donated that one to Adrian Black (Still waiting to see a youtube video of him getting it working again!!!).  The repairs were just beyond me and I couldn't justify the cost of getting it repaired.  I do miss that system a bit...  But I'll feel better when I see it repaired and happy again.  

Edited December 7, 2020 by desiv

[Keatah]

12 hours ago, desiv said:

Wow...

Piracy on the Amiga was all over...  There were some good BBSes.  Mail (yeah, you could trade disks via the mail) and FIDONET for contacts/info...

And then there was pre-internet...  (Well, it was the internet, but just not that popular yet)  I seem to remember tut.fi having some warez FTP???

It's been awhile...

Oh, and compuserve! (Not for the actual warez, but for information on where to get them.)

That may very well've been the case. Simply not in my area. I didn't have the money to rack up more $400 phone bills for dial-up. So anything remotely good (no pun intended) was not much of an option. 

 

The Apple II warez gang was still together and getting into the Amiga felt like starting all over again. The old leather thing you know? And I just didn't see sticking with the platform that long after having it for a few years. It felt stagnant compared to the leaps and bounds of PC.

 

I always wonder if I would have gotten as good a start in computing had I had the Amiga or PC as a first machine? Thing about the Apple II was its accessibility and documentation. And it wasn't as big a system as the other 16-bit and later platforms. It was possible to know every aspect of the machine - leading to a well rounded education in all things hardware.

 

When it came time to grow into PC, all I had to do was apply solid conceptual knowledge and just chase after the specifics. The syntax. Reference manuals, you know..

 

12 hours ago, desiv said:

Since 3.5" floppies were more expensive than the 5 1/4"s I used to have for my C64, on the Amiga, I always had fewer disks handy than available games.

Understand that.. I had a few boxes of PD & demo disks and at least 5 more boxes of gifs and such. That was prohibitively expensive. That was it.

 

I was also (10 years) used to the much smaller files on the Apple II. I was still farting around with it up to the very early 90's.

 

 

[desiv]

6 hours ago, Keatah said:

I always wonder if I would have gotten as good a start in computing had I had the Amiga or PC as a first machine?

Now, THAT is an interesting topic...

I've wondered that myself, but more on the GUI vs non-GUI area.

I'm er... um... aged enough ?.. to have started long before GUIs, where understanding how the computer works was important to me...  (Required back then)

So by the time I got my Amiga, my first fun was opening the CLI and poking around.

Yeah, the GUI was nice (ish.. well, nice for the time...), but at least early on (Workbench 1.x) you really needed to spend time in the CLI to get the most out of the system.

I think it is the same for PCs..  I think there is this pre-Windows (or Pre-Win9x?) time that really gave people an edge in understanding the system, because they had to...

 

As an IT manager currently (still not sure giving up being a tech and going into management was the right call, but.. ), I have run into more and more staff who can be really good at their specific job, but just don't understand how things work.  I have great Windows server guys who think Linux is this bizarre technology that they could never understand...  Growing up, the more Operating Systems I could touch, the better...

 

And it is weird because now, it's not necessarily a bad thing... 

I mean, if they are good at what they do..  If they are getting things done, does it really matter?

Part of me (the "get off my lawn" part) has trouble with that at times...    How can a Windows developer not want to understand how the system works???  Wouldn't that make them even better, etc...

 

But...  they are getting things done...  Business is happy...  So....

 

But I agree with you.  I'm glad personally that I grew up when you HAD to learn how the systems worked if you wanted to do anything...

Now, if I grew up in the GUI era, wouldn't I still have dug in to figure those things out because that is interesting to me???

.. I think/hope I still would have... 

 

Edited December 8, 2020 by desiv

[zzip]

7 minutes ago, desiv said:

I've wondered that myself, but more on the GUI vs non-GUI area.

I'm er... um... aged enough ?.. to have started long before GUIs, where understanding how the computer works was important to me...  (Required back then)

So by the time I got my Amiga, my first fun was opening the CLI and poking around.

Yeah, the GUI was nice (ish.. well, nice for the time...), but at least early on (Workbench 1.x) you really needed to spend time in the CLI to get the most out of the system.

For me starting on a 6502 meant learning on a system that is practically a different breed of computer by todays standard.   Very low on resources,  efficiency was the name of the game, and if you wanted to do anything special, you pretty much needed to learn assembly language.  Learning Assembly meant learning how the CPU worked, more or less.   So you have a much deeper understanding that someone who gets into coding via Java or Python today.   I've met many programmers in my career who had no idea how a machine functioned, they just knew how to code in the language they knew and that was about it.

 

12 minutes ago, desiv said:

I think it is the same for PCs..  I think there is this pre-Windows (or Pre-WIn9x?) time that really gave people an edge in understanding the system, because they had to..

pre-win95 probably.  Back then Windows was not much more than a glorified application shell, and completely optional to run.   Starting with 95, it really wanted to take over your system.

 

14 minutes ago, desiv said:

As an IT manager currently (still not sure giving up being a tech and going into management was the right call, but.. ), I have run into more and more staff who can be really good at their specific job, but just don't understand how things work.  I have great Windows server guys who think Linux is this bizarre technology that they could never understand...  Growing up, the more Operating Systems I could touch, the better...

 

And it is weird because now, it's not necessarily a bad thing... 

I mean, if they are good at what they do..  If they are getting things done, does it really matter?

Part of me (the "get off my lawn" part) has trouble with that at times...    How can a Windows developer not want to understand how the system works???  Wouldn't that make them even better, etc...

There's always been some with that curiosity, and some without.   Even in college I could see it.   Some kids only wanted to learn what they needed to pass the course(s) and land a job and nothing more.   They would actually get annoyed when class discussions moved into areas of tech that weren't going to be on the exam.

[The Usotsuki]

I think the Apple ][ is the one machine I really feel like I *know*. Because when you've figured out enough intimate details of the gories of the system to create a solid emulation, you pretty much know it like the back of your hand.

[Keatah]

At what point did it become impossible to know everything about a machine?

[desiv]

16 minutes ago, Keatah said:

At what point did it become impossible to know everything about a machine?

I wonder about what zzip said about 6502 assembly...  That's not a path I went down (wish I did, but), so I never got to that level myself.

But I think the machines where there was a lot of assembly were the machines that people knew everything about.

Definitely 8 bits... 

And even some 16-bits...

ST/Amiga had people who knew those machines inside and out...  Still do...

Although you could see it changing in that era, I think...

Less so the Macs (not saying there weren't some people, but) by design of that system...  Assembly/knowing the machine was discouraged there..

 

I think it probably died with the 16 bit machines...

 

PC was kind of like the Mac in that area.  Not that they were similar.   But that most coding was done in higher level languages.

Although the early PC, you had to have a good understanding of the architecture even to get things like printer ports and hard drives set up, so....

 

As the machines got fast enough to do things without users having to know the insides, you had fewer people doing that.

And that goes back to your point about wondering what if the more advanced machines were our first...

Edited December 8, 2020 by desiv

[zzip]

49 minutes ago, desiv said:

I wonder about what zzip said about 6502 assembly...  That's not a path I went down (wish I did, but), so I never got to that level myself.

But I think the machines where there was a lot of assembly were the machines that people knew everything about.

Definitely 8 bits... 

And even some 16-bits...

ST/Amiga had people who knew those machines inside and out...  Still do...

Although you could see it changing in that era, I think...

Less so the Macs (not saying there weren't some people, but) by design of that system...  Assembly/knowing the machine was discouraged there..

 

I think it probably died with the 16 bit machines...

 

PC was kind of like the Mac in that area.  Not that they were similar.   But that most coding was done in higher level languages.

Although the early PC, you had to have a good understanding of the architecture even to get things like printer ports and hard drives set up, so....

 

As the machines got fast enough to do things without users having to know the insides, you had fewer people doing that.

And that goes back to your point about wondering what if the more advanced machines were our first...

In the early days it almost felt like you needed to know everything about the machine to get anything done.

 

Then as the machines got more complex, it felt overwhelming.  "How am I going to learn all this?"

 

Then came the realization that I really don't need to know everything.   When I code a game for a modern system, I just need a few cross-platform libraries, such as SDL.    I code to the library, then it's pretty simple to get the same code running on Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi, MacOS, etc.     I don't need to know the Windows API,  I know very little about ARM processors, but my code runs on both with just a few tweaks.

[Keatah]

Having to understand everything about a system becomes more and more true the further back in history you go. Early rigs simply didn't offer enough processing power and memory to run software that could guide the user and make suggestions along the way. Let alone do much visual prompting beyond simple (y/n)?
 

The evolution of user interfaces has constantly been moving forward since the days of punchcards or earlier. At some point there was mass adoption because of ease of use. I say it happened with the smartphone. Some say it was the original MAC, others say Windows 3.1 / 95.

 

 

[zzip]

14 hours ago, Keatah said:

The evolution of user interfaces has constantly been moving forward since the days of punchcards or earlier. At some point there was mass adoption because of ease of use. I say it happened with the smartphone. Some say it was the original MAC, others say Windows 3.1 / 95.

I'd say it was Internet/Email.   That was when I'd see the kinds of people who formerly had no interest in computers suddenly want one.

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

I'd say it was Internet/Email.   That was when I'd see the kinds of people who formerly had no interest in computers suddenly want one.

This.  Internet, AOL, and e-mail, pushed the normies to jump on-board.  We had the hobbyists, work-at-home and business types, programmers, college students, gamers, porn aficionados, &c., but I saw Mom, Grandpa, and family in general jump into the computer arena once mass communication and information acquisition became easier.