PC Memory Lane
Some of the best times I remember as a young geek were spending nights with my cousin in Tennessee who owned a Packard Bell personal computer. We used to wear that little machine out. My favorite games were Commander Keen and Scorched Earth. This was an early Pentium machine, but it was not my first experience with computers. I was introduced to computers by playing with old hand-me-downs people passed along to my family. We had an old Commodore 64 and even an old 8088 IBM PC clone.
I remember playing games in text-mode. Then, i was able to play CGA and EGA games. You had to use your imagination a lot more in computer games back then. Some of the fun wasn’t just found in gaming, but also in writing long programs copied from huge code books. These programs, in the end, would do nothing more than dance a sprite or two across the screen, but as a youngster, I thought this was awesome.
I know that some of you could tell even more interesting stories, but can you believe that my first hard drive was only 60MB. Not only that, but I had it partitioned into two partitions of 30MB each. I had utilities on one and games on the other. I also had a batch menu that ran on start and allowed you to choose which program you wanted to start.
And, oh, I remember the first taste of the Internet. Well, it wasn’t called that then. I remember using AOL v2.5 to crawl FTP and Gopher and thinking all the time that it was so much cooler than my time spent on BBSs. Then, I remember when AOL v3.0 came out and I had to upgrade to Windows 95 from 3.1 to be able to access the real Internet. I spent so much time on Webcrawler and Lycos searching for interesting articles. I also remember playing GL Quake for hours each night.
And it all went down hill from there. Ever since, I have fought to go from that old 2400 Baud Hayes modem connection to something much faster, like my current 7MB cable connection. Now, I am always on the computer when I am not spending time with my family of five, soon to be six. To borrow from an old phrase, “Geeking” ain’t easy!
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bbs that takes me back to the early 90s.