What computer-related experience made you feel like a million bucks?

[Keatah]

What computer-related purchases or experiences made you feel like a million bucks?

 

One of the ones I hadn't thought about recently was one that took place on a hot & sweltering day at the Myoda Computer Center. It was a mixture of a mom & pop shop, warehouse, on-site server service provider, and whateverhaveyou. The store was mostly underground and was formerly a PrecisionVideo showroom. The place where I got my first CD. I was living IN THE FUTURE! Music on an optical disc that had rainbows inside? Utterly captivating. But. Anyways. Both places always looked unfinished, brown carpeting that became more brown because they never cleaned anything. Musty. Dank. Too much fluorescent lighting. Boxes and baskets of parts everywhere. It's like one warehouse consumed another. You get the idea.

 

Well I went in there and I asked the proprietor about Pentium II motherboards. The new Slot-1 jobbers. He said he happened to have one he got from somebody who knew somebody that pulled fast one over at Intel Labs. So he said he'd be right back and returned with a whitebox and inside was indeed a Slot-1 motherboard. With a real life AGP slot. And futuristic USB connections - for which nothing utilizing them existed yet. And right there. Right before my very eyes was the word "Intel SECRET" stamped on one of the newfangled BGA chips. This was turning out to be so cool. He spun me a plausible story about secret spies and how genetic code was hidden inside and that at some time later there would be a worldwide search and reward for this information that only existed in THIS motherboard. I looked carefully at the letters and they really were laser etched straight from the factory. I hemmed and hawed and caved in. I bought the board home and hid it under the bed for a few weeks till it cooled off. And god no, I never connected it to the internet for almost a year.

 

Eventually I came around and just relegated the whole experience to inexperience in a world about a billion times bigger than videogames in my bedroom. Was it worth the $200 price premium? For a while yes.

 

Some 3 years later Myoda did go out of business. The bank on top, the store underneath, both rotted away for years till they finally built McDonald's and something else there.

 

[Arnuphis]

When I finally got my setup of a Commodore 64C, 1541-II Disk Drive, MPS-803 Printer and a copy of Mini Office II on disk in 1987. I remember thinking 'This is it. My serious computer setup. I can write, print, do everything. This is the moment I finally get serious about computing. This is all I will ever need.'

[bluejay]

22 minutes ago, Arnuphis said:

When I finally got my setup of a Commodore 64C, 1541-II Disk Drive, MPS-803 Printer and a copy of Mini Office II on disk in 1987. I remember thinking 'This is it. My serious computer setup. I can write, print, do everything. This is the moment I finally get serious about computing. This is all I will ever need.'

That's exactly how I felt when I got my C128, 1571, 1902a, and Okimate 10 printer. Except the SID chip in the 128 was zapped, the 1571 broke, the 1902a was shattered during shipping, and the Okimate would barely print anything.

Obviously it turned out it wasn't everything I needed.

[Keatah]

Some years ago I wrote about the experience I had in 1992/1993 with purchasing a Gateway 2000 PC. It was almost as good as when I first got into the Apple II. It goes like this:

 

I remember how the guy at Gateway 2000 made me feel like a million bucks when he went through the choices of hardware I could get. And then even more like 2 million bucks when he helped me pick out some Microsoft software (Word 2.0a and Windows 3.1) to be installed especially for me! I was seriously in the big leagues now. A real business-class system was being built specifically for me! This was just too cool for school! Especially the school that threw me out of the computer lab.

So.. I wanted to transfer all my writing and journal files and BBS text from my Apple II to a new "modern-day" format. And this PC + Word + Dos + Win 3.1 made it work. It was so less frustrating compared to the Amiga. I instantly became a believer in Intel & Microsoft. I of course still have those files and once in a while read them for a nostalgic trip back in time.

Edited November 13, 2020 by Keatah

[zzip]

8 hours ago, bluejay said:

and the Okimate would barely print anything.

Sounds like it was working fine then! ?  

Sorry, I had an Okimate 10 too.  Seemed like the coolest thing when I got it, but it was pretty awful in retrospect, and didn't last long.

[MHaensel]

I started computing on a Commodore 64 with one or two game cartridges, connected to an old black-and-white television. My brother and I typed programs in from the C=64 manual. That was my introduction to programming! It was a start that my parents could afford at the time. (Thank you, mom and dad. Thank you, thank you, thank you.) But a lot of the things needed for a good computer experience were missing. Among other things, we had no way to save programs. If you want to run that program you typed in yesterday, well, type it in again.

 

A better monitor came early. Text was readable, and in color.

 

A floppy drive followed soon afterwards. OH MY GOD it was amazing being able to save your work one day, and the next day you could load it right back up!

 

The second floppy drive was an almost equally large improvement. Being able to easily make copies was another big step forward.

 

But the winner is probably when I bought a printer. I was literally shaking with excitement when it arrived. (Hey, I was a teenager. My friend said, "You're vibrating!") The computer could finally have an impact on the world outside my bedroom. Suddenly I could print homework assignments, type letters to friends, organize my VHS tape collection with nicely-printed labels, make signs for my bedroom and locker . . . Computing became useful, and not just a hobby!

 

And then the modem that let me call BBSs, and soon connect to the internet . . . being able to chat on IRC with people around the world was a lifeline for me.

 

I've posted elsewhere about upgrading from the Amiga to an iMac. That was an amazing jump too. :- )

[bluejay]

8 hours ago, zzip said:

Sounds like it was working fine then! ?  

Sorry, I had an Okimate 10 too.  Seemed like the coolest thing when I got it, but it was pretty awful in retrospect, and didn't last long.

Yeah, I have to admit that it was a brilliant idea to melt ink onto paper, but when the ribbon you have hasn't been used in more than 3 decades, you know it isn't going to work well. The layers of rolled ribbon had glued themselves to both each other and the cardboard protector sheet inside, and it took a lot of fiddling to get it free. When I eventually did, the ribbon was still pretty useless because the ink was all hardened and wouldn't come off the ribbon. There's also the fact that the printer had trouble dealing with A4 size papers because they didn't have the little holes through the sides like old printer paper.

Edited November 13, 2020 by bluejay

[Keatah]

I think it was a stupid idea, just like laser printer toner. Ever stack double-sided printouts from either technology? They fuck'n stick together and make this snapping sound when you pull them apart - tearing off complete letters and leaving imprints. Inkjet all the way babycakes! All the way..

[bluejay]

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

I think it was a stupid idea, just like laser printer toner. Ever stack double-sided printouts from either technology? They fuck'n stick together and make this snapping sound when you pull them apart - tearing off complete letters and leaving imprints. Inkjet all the way babycakes! All the way..

It was a brilliant in the same way the Sinclair computers were brilliant. Neither worked very well but it was usable and it was cheap. Also it was silent compared to noisy dot matrix or daisy wheel printers. It worked on any paper unlike normal thermal printers that required thermal paper. In retrospect it didn't work very well but back in the day I suppose it would have been an ok budget printer.

[Gamemoose]

Probably when I did my first hardware upgrade for my 8088. I wanna say it was an 8 bit SoundBlaster card I got for Christmas. I felt so techy cool and was thrilled when it actually worked! It wasn't long until I got a VGA card with a Mitac monitor. Suddenly I was doing upgrades for friends and even customers when I worked at Wal-Mart.

 

The ability felt like a gol-dang super power.  All from getting a single card for an already out of date PC.

[JamesS]

For me it was when I finally saved enough money to upgrade my 8088 in 91.  Bought a Computer Shopper, picked out all the parts I needed, went with a 386 DX/40 1 Meg of Ram (I think) and a new case.

 

The rest I transferred over from my 8088, had VGA, Soundblaster 1.0, 40 Meg RLL Harddrive, and something else I can't remember.

 

Got all the parts in, put it all together and turned on first time I tried it, was booting back into DOS (Unlike if you transferred a hard drive to a new machine today) and was back playing all my games, plus some new ones I had got that didn't run on the 8088.

 

Was an amazing time, and so glad that everything just worked.  

[MHaensel]

6 hours ago, JamesS said:

For me it was when I finally saved enough money to upgrade my 8088 in 91.  Bought a Computer Shopper, picked out all the parts I needed, went with a 386 DX/40 1 Meg of Ram (I think) and a new case.

Talk about a speed difference! 8-bit bus to 32-bit bus, 5-10 MHz to 40 MHz . . . it must have felt like a supercomputer.

[JamesS]

11 hours ago, MHaensel said:

Talk about a speed difference! 8-bit bus to 32-bit bus, 5-10 MHz to 40 MHz . . . it must have felt like a supercomputer.

Yes it did, and getting to play all the new games, those were the days, miss that old 8088 though.

[MHaensel]

On 11/13/2020 at 4:16 PM, Keatah said:

I think it was a stupid idea, just like laser printer toner. Ever stack double-sided printouts from either technology? They fuck'n stick together and make this snapping sound when you pull them apart - tearing off complete letters and leaving imprints. Inkjet all the way babycakes!

For laser printers, this sounds . . . wrong to me. When things work correctly, toner is fused to the paper and shouldn't be sticky. Duplex printing doesn't change that. Have you have this experience with multiple laser printers?

Edited November 16, 2020 by MHaensel
Typo

[Keatah]

Yes. It's not a fast thing. I put some stuff in a binder and then stuff on top of it. A year later pages were stuck where the toner was applied.

[zzip]

On 11/13/2020 at 8:22 PM, bluejay said:

It worked on any paper unlike normal thermal printers that required thermal paper. In retrospect it didn't work very well but back in the day I suppose it would have been an ok budget printer.

Well..  It worked best on glossy paper like photo-copier paper.   They did sell "thermal transfer paper" back then which was more expensive.  If you used common coarse computer paper, the quality wasn't so good because the waxy ink didn't stick as well.