Hardware (or software) stories (good or bad)

total edit

so i guess i've reached the point of going out of my mind/boredom/impatience that i've started to reminisce about my old setups. which setup i had the longest and seemed to be invincibly stable. as i continued the post, and was going to pause for the night, i realized how boring it was. about blog-level interesting. so i think i shall wipe this discraceful post and maybe reformulate it. if it's 1% as interesting as Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, i shall revisit it and post it a new.

do any of you have stories of "your fave computer"?

in a nutshell, mine was the A7V333, a KT333. lasted about 8 years, i think. starting my interest in gaming and distributed computing. stored more music than one could spit at. kept me in contact with friends and schoolmates. got me through school. whereas KT133, 266 (non A), 400, 600 sucked, mine was trusty and stupefyingly stable.

Does the old Speccy counts as "Computer"? :icon_mrgreen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX_Spectrum


I had the 48K and 128K (ZX Spectrum +2) versions. It was the absolute best home computer of its time by far (1980's) and even now I sometimes still have fun with it on emulators! :)

It was times when the term "Personal Computer" (from IBM) was still coming to life, and not everyone could afford one of those. Plus they also required a monitor, unlike the old speccy that could be connected to any TV, just like a game console. Not to mention that it was also portable. Weighing half a kilogram or less, which is much less than nowaday's laptops, one could take it anywhere.

It was times when a resolution of 256x192 pixels, with 16 colors was considered high definition for games! And boy, were they amazing games at the time. I confess I had tons more fun playing the old simple games of the spectrum that nowadays overly complex and ultra realistic games, where you have more buttons to press than fingers available.

And when I said earlier "48K" and "128K", that was Kbytes of RAM memory! Yes, the spectrum ran applications and games at full speed with that much RAM memory, unlike nowadays that you need at least some 1000x more just to be able to boot the OS.

If a machine can change one's future, then I have to admit that the Spectrum did change my future. I learned to program on it when I was about 10 years old. It had built in BASIC programming language, that I loved to work with, and that knowledge led me to other computing languages (later on the PC), and nowadays I'm a programmer. :)

Ahh... the memories! I could be here on and on rambling about the good old Spectrum all day and night. There's just so many things that could be said about that wonderful machine that I wouldn't know where to start or end. :)