25th anniversary of the Web

heisenberg

Earl Grey

Overmind One

GateFans Gatemaster
Staff member
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YJ02

Well Known GateFan
I went online for the first time in 1996 with Compuserve, and when it was bought by AOL I went with Prodigy. Dialup! I built my first 386DX and it had 64mb of RAM. A true powerhouse at the time! It had a Fireball 540mb spinning at 5400rpm and the parts cost me about $1100.00. Look how far we have come!

if you had that machine today, would it even get anywhere/do anything net-wise if you plugged it in to the internet?
 
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Overmind One

GateFans Gatemaster
Staff member
if you had that machine today, would it even get anywhere/do anything net-wise if you plugged it in to the internet?

Probably not. :) Even the cheapest, least powerful smartphone on the market is more powerful. There is more power available on the $35.00 Raspberry Pi than that machine. But I played Duke Nukem on it and made MIDI music and even printed shit with it!
 

Tripler

Well Known GateFan
I think it was about the same time for me . I remember a big thing at the CN Tower were there was a huge Windows 95 Banner almost as tall as the tower hanging off one side and the Stones music screaming Start Me Up . Huge deal Win 95 . Thankfully XP came along a few years later and vid games and sims began to improve .
I still have my Voodoo5 5500 AGP 3Dfx card . I believe there was even a 6000 version before they were bought out . Keeping it for posterity . The rest of my older systems have gone to recycling .


;) ;) ;)
 

YJ02

Well Known GateFan
there is a certain model of a brand (now owned by another company) of PC from the 80's that if intact is worth a hell of a lot of money to collectors

it starts with a "c" i believe (not compaq)-know which one?
 

Overmind One

GateFans Gatemaster
Staff member
there is a certain model of a brand (now owned by another company) of PC from the 80's that if intact is worth a hell of a lot of money to collectors

it starts with a "c" i believe (not compaq)-know which one?
Commodore? A mint condition one goes for about $300.
 

heisenberg

Earl Grey
I went online for the first time in 1996 with Compuserve, and when it was bought by AOL I went with Prodigy. Dialup! I built my first 386DX and it had 64mg of RAM. A true powerhouse at the time! It had a Fireball 540mb spinning at 5400rpm and the parts cost me about $1100.00. Look how far we have come!
I got my first computer in 1996 too. It was a pentium 1 166mhz with a whopping 16mb of ram. That thing to this day was working to this day but the computer got too old. Believe it or not, the older a system is, the more secure it is...which is why you don't see the usa military upgrading their computers
 
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YJ02

Well Known GateFan
Commodore? A mint condition one goes for about $300.

that may be it

like 10yrs ago i saw an article somewhere online in the vein of "check your garage for gold" type of thing

whatever it was commodore or whomever, it was a rare issue and mint it was worth (of course worth is only valid if one can find the right rube to put cash to that worth) a couple thousand

but like other things, amazon and ebay probably brought that price way down also
 

YJ02

Well Known GateFan
so this is just a wee little bit off topic
(hey, what would life be without me to take things off topic? :) )

never used a computer of any type before i went into the army

as a artillery surveyor-we were trained-exhaustively-in our mos trng to do manula comps of survey data using logarithms, anti logs, and other big brainiac math

we had several books with pages and pages of log tables and emphemeris' for doing astronomical surveys which we derived positions and direction from

we also had to train on this 1960's P.O.S. that was nearly absolutely useless

the M18 FADAC

affectionately known as "freddy"

upload_2016-9-6_22-38-24.jpeg

then we --thankfully--went to the very handy back up computer system. a chip driven handheld texas instruments machine-which is STILL in use today as a component of the far more advanced AFATADS computer

fig12-1.gif


I didn't have a PC in my home until about 16 yrs ago--does it show through my outstanding lack of knowledge on the subject?!

you got to admit though-after having to go through the nightmare of freddy fadac and some other choice instruments- WHY my faith in computers didn't take hold till later in life
 
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