Very similar story to mine all the way through to the first PC, mine was a 486 DX2 66 also 4mb RAM IIRC
64yo, first computer was an Atari 800Xl back in the mid 1980s, first pc was a packard bell 8088 in 1990, got a 486sx-33 in 93 from a local pc shop and been upgrading/building ever since. Was a field service tech in the vending/amusement industry from 81-99. Got to play and work on all the great video games and pinballs. Sam
^^^You lived the dream my friend, imagine unlimited access to real arcade games and real pinball tables.......i am green with envy, must have been a amazing and very interesting job.
Was the store tech for a couple Chuck E Cheese locations from 81-84. One game we tried out was a coin op that had an Apple II computer, a 10mb Winchester hard drive and ran a few Penquin Software text adventure games. Sam
Joined in 2004 when I was sold a supposedly top end pc, always remember the mx 440 gpu with it's 64mb of ram in there. This site helped me build many pc's over the years and is always a source of reference for me.
Been here on forums since 2005 but i knew about this site before then. I remember playing games like doom, castle wolfenstein,duke nukem 3d on my old pentium system. My older 286/386/486's struggled to play those games but my pentium back then worked great. But i have been building pc ever since i was in 10th grade in school (1998). My computer teacher was awesome and had family that had upgraded and built pc's so i had alot of help. It was great and i still do it today. I usually build a new one when a game i love and can't play on my hardware forces me to upgrade.
My wife and I are both PC gamers. She turned 68 on Dec. 22 2018. On Jan. 2nd of 2019, I will be 77. Both of us like the same games too. First Person shooters.
I would have loved to have went the electronics path career wise in the mid 80s, that would have been my dream job, but i left school at 16 and fell into the railway, and in reality i was never going to be anything but manual labour for me as i never even got a sniff of anything remotley close to electroics at school ever, closest i got was seeing a Commodore pet in the teachers lounge one day, where they were playing that snake game on it. ha
The Geforce 4 MX series screwed so many of us over. It was basically a Geforce 2 Ultra and didn't even support DX8.
I wish I knew who it was if he was still here. I think he used to do articles way back in 2001. Started with a G, though I'm honestly not sure. All I remember was he was on a GeForce 3 Ti 200 128MB back then. He must have been in his 30's back then? He was staff as well I think.
Guys, do any of you remember the ATX computer cases made by Globalwin? A series called YCC? The models were YCC-801 and YCC-802, plus some others. I managed to dig up an article on them from an old site called speedy3d. These were my favorite cases back in late '99-'00. They were well built, tool-less, and the backplane and rear slots were one-piece so you could slide the whole tray out the back without having to remove any peripheral cards from the motherboard. http://www.speedy3d.com/reviews/globalwin_ycc802_case/ Anyhow, I still own a YCC-801 (which I liked better because the front bay covers were flat, not all curved and proprietary, and it didn't cover up the 3.5" floppy). I haven't been able to find one of these for sale anywhere, so I'm contemplating putting it up on ebay for an appalling price to see who grabs it Found one more: https://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/cases/YCC802_1.html
Been here since 2003. Was rocking an Athlon XP 2000+ and an FX-5900 video card that turned out to be a turd.
Ah yes, you can thank the Great MS-Nvidia Xbox dispute for that. Then you can pat Valve and ATI on the back for jumping on the pile and villifying Nvidia. Then you can thank that hacker who stole the HL2 source and forced the game to be delayed a year. Then you can thank Nvidia for the 6000 series and its superior scores on HL2 when Valve was finally able to release it. It's one of my favorite stories in PC gaming history. Sorry I'm really tired right now
Dad was in the industry starting in the 60s, I remember driving on his lap in silicon valley when it was nothing but concrete pads and parking lots....so yea...you could say I'm an old timer...I've got a bunch of original games, even have an apple 2 and an E around here somewhere...still have a great Barton core xp...intellivision, coleco, had it all. Remember the original Wizardry? on 5 1/4" ? I do! fight fight fight- parry parry parry enter! I have been here since 2004, thanks to all of you who have helped my obsession grow to where it is today! Happy New Year GURUS!
It's so great to see so many "old" gamers around, still enjoying their beloved hobby, I'm truly happy for you. It also makes feel more optimistic about my gaming future, since I'm so freaking sick and tired of the stigma I get all the time around here for being "too old for gaming", "time to grow up" etc. etc. (and I'm close to 30...) Anyway, I've too have been visiting guru3d for several years before finally registering for the forums in 2005. It's around the early 2000s that I started building my own rigs with assistance at first, since I didn't dare play around myself. The information I had was limited to magazines at first since internet was so crap. I did spend a lot of times in internet cafes though and guru3d was very known in the "scene" here even back then. My very first contact with PCs was in the mid 90s (played all the classics like Doom, Wolfenstein etc. at my cousin or some family friends), but I only started having my own pre-built second hand crap boxes just around the time Half Life and Counter Strike launched. And it was suuuch a pain to play in lowest settings, haha, but again internet cafes came to the rescue with the better PCs and dedicated GPUs (with the awesomeness of LAN on top of it). I really miss those early days, games had more soul, developers more passion. Hardware was also evolving exponentially every year. Now it's like everything stagnated, or moves at a way slower pace. And the games themselves, AAA ones in particular are with few exceptions utter microtransactions riddled, shallow and unmemorable crap titles (CDPojekt RED huge exception). Same thing with indie/kickstarter games, a sea of crap (with some gems, Obsidian for example). Basically mobile games have taken over, and you can see how so many are trying to bring everything that is wrong there to console/PC gaming. And if gamers "cry"/"revolt", just pay off some more twitch teen "influencers". On a good side though, people are starting to catch up on that, so... To sum it up, to the good old days and to better new days!