Engadget 1985 and other historic events

August 22nd, 2005

I think my first CD ROM was Encarta 95 encyclopedia. If I remember correctly, Win 3.1, DOS and everything else my dad used for work stuff (AutoCAD 12 back then I think) was installed from floppy disks. Encarta was the first thing we had on a CD and we got a free CD with some shareware games as a bonus.

We got rid of that first computer a couple of months ago. Some friend needed to run a very old piece of software that could only run on a particular setup. It still worked just fine. Although it has been modied over time – MB, disks, CPU, RAM, modem… the only original piece of hardware still left inside was the sound card – Creative Sound Blaster 16.

Wow, this brings back some memories… I remember, me and my brother, constantly nagging my dad ever since a friend of ours got a ZX spectrum, then came a Commodore 64, a 286, a 386…. in the mean time even our school had some computers we could use so we already knew everything there was to be known about them (yeah right) and we felt sooooo left out of the whole show.

Finally the day came when he buckled under the pressure (come on dad, we’re the only ones without a computer!) and we received a brand new 486DX2 80MHz, 32MB RAM, 800MB HD, 16MB for the graphics etc. Oh boy… was that a long process, spanning at least two years with several “not yet” decisions on his part.

He justified it by using it for work (AutoCAD mostly), we were just happy to play games (Need For Speed baby!). Eventually it eveloved into its final state – 486DX4 100MHz, 2x 2GB HD, 64MB RAM, 32MB for the graphics etc. and it was in use untill about two or three years ago.

I stripped out as much as I could before sending it forward so now I have several spare parts I will probably never use again (nowhere to plug’em in)

I miss it already.