• BigTurkeyLove@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I had this computer. I was pirating everything on Limewire & Napster on average at like 5-40 kilobytes per second. Had a hidden porn folder my family couldn’t find because of course this was the family computer. I was chatting it up with girls on AOL messenger and myspace, blogging the most cringe and emo crap on xanga, and checking slashdot and digg everyday. I was playing all kinds of wild and comically shitty themed Starcraft & Warcraft pvp custom maps and spending hours upon hours on Runescape getting the stupidest skills leveled up with macros and luring people into the wilderness to gank em. I was making Dragon Ball Z anime music videos to Linkin Park, Incubus, Rancid & Rage Against the Machine songs. Printing off hundreds and hundreds of pages of guitar tabs, 90% of which I would never play because I wasn’t that good, printing out game guides, cheat codes, gameshark codes, and let us not forget mapquest directions. Was making shitty JavaScript gundam games. Downloading cracks and keycode gens for all kinds of software. I was responsible for at least one virus that made us reimage. Burning all my favorite songs on cds and making mix tapes for friends. I had that sick 3D pipe & 3d maze screensaver. Drinking surge and eating pizza bites.

    When this computer was retired as the family computer it became my first Linux PC.

    What a time to be alive.

    Edit: I keep editing when new memories pop up.

    • theOneTrueSpoon@feddit.uk
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      2 days ago

      Did they honour the “upgrade to the fastest model every 2 years” bit? If so, are you still getting a new pc every 2 years for $99?

    • Dempf@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      Can we please go back to those times? I don’t know if I like the modern world.

    • craigers@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Bro this is 100% my experience. Some major upgrades that occurred during this time period: we got the app that let you answer phone calls while you were online, because before you couldn’t use phone and net at same time. And then eventually I got the kind of Walkman that let you play mp3 files on disc, so you fit 100s of songs on a CD. With the tape deck car adapter naturally. Trying to sneakily download porn was really tricky with how fucking loud that dialup 56k was.

      • TomMasz@piefed.social
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        3 days ago

        Not quite. You have to take the number of years since this was made, divide by 2, and then multiply by $99.

        • enkers@sh.itjust.works
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          3 days ago

          That’s a Pentium III Coppermine CPU in there, placing it around 2000 to 2001, so that means it’ll be $1,200.

          If you inflation adjust it, judging by current food and housing prices, it’s probably closer to $10k. 🙃

          • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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            2 days ago

            It’s definitely 2000-vintage, but where are you getting Pentium III? It clearly says celeron on the sticker. The Pentium III’s with a comparable clockspeed had a 50% higher FSB and twice the L2 cache.

            • enkers@sh.itjust.works
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              2 days ago

              Sorry, I should’ve been more specific. Its a Pentium III Coppermine-based Celeron. Its the only chip Intel sold that ran at that clock speed.

  • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 days ago

    LGR made a great video about this PC and the company’s history, y’all should definitely watch it on Youtube.

    • addie@feddit.uk
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      3 days ago

      I have the same gigabytes of ram as that has megabytes and my graphics card nearly the same storage as the hard drive. Oof.

      I used to have a PC like that, though, as an upgrade from an Amiga 1200. Amiga was a great gaming and coding machine, but struggled a bit for ‘office’ work and was more suited to bulletin boards than websites. A PC like that thing got me through university, though - able to do it all. I don’t remember the internet as being much worse, back then - more limited, but so much less shit on it. And if you get a list of the best RPGs of all time, it can probably run three-quarters of the list.

      • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Yeah, I had a Sinclair spectrum, then a BBC B before I got my first PC (386, 33mhz!). The BBC was a cool machine, a great version of basic to learn on, and you could compile assembly on it too. The spectrum had better games though.

    • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      What feels even weirder is that my CPU-caches added together (yes, I know that they contain duplicate information) are larger than the dram.

      • greatwhitepapertiger@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        Ours was a custom build, Pentium 1 75MHz, 4MB DRAM, 1.19 GB HDD rocking Windows 3.1. My parents believed the salesman when he said it had all the storage they would EVER need.

  • laranis@lemmy.zip
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    3 days ago

    I can smell this picture.

    Hear me out. I was a computer tech as a part time gig and people back then smoked in their homes a lot more than they do today. Well, maybe. I don’t actually know. But, they did smoke in their homes and the inside of these things would get this greasy, fuzzy, yellow, putrid smelling film on the inside.

    I guess it wasn’t just eMachines, but this image has just the right amount of yellowing to trigger that core memory.

    • Aimeeloulm@feddit.uk
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      3 days ago

      I repaired a neighbours computer about 15 years ago, he was a heavy smoker, inside was horrid, black or dark brown gunge and sticky dust all over case, fans, morherboard…well all of it, ended up accidently cutting my right leg on edge of case and I got a wart from it, after that I refused any more jobs from him 🙄

      • laranis@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        That’s a horrifying tale. I wouldn’t want that shit entering my body by any means.

  • ramble81@lemmy.zip
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    3 days ago

    Man I feel old the fact that I know every single term on there and remember these systems.