In cleaning my closet out this weekend, I have the Toshiba laptop in the picture above.

Awesome write. The first pc I had was a 486 with a Turbo button.
It was pretty cool for the time:-)

Good thing I wasn't around when this ancient hardware was the in thing.

I always hear it said that "in the future" we will have super-small computers that won't take up any space at all. We'll be able to have all our processing power in a pen.

I disagree. We'll always fill the space available; hell, I'll use the ATX formfactor and maybe even more, because if I can get that much computing power, hell, I'm gonna get it-- there will always be more ways to utilize that power. As computing power increases to be able to accomplish tasks like factoring semiprimes, more power will be needed to discover larger and larger primes; display resolutions will just get bigger, and 1080p will seem like low resolution; thus our 3D renders will take longer, and we'll need a full-tower again.

I don't think things will change nearly as much as we think they will.

I was 6 years old in 1988. A year earlier in 1987 we got our first computer. An IBM-Clone Turbo XT 8088-2 4.77/8Mhz computer equipped with 640kb of ram, an ATI EGA Wonder, and 2x5.25" floppy drives. It had a little red button in the front that was labeled "turbo" and my father told me never to touch it. C'mon....you know what I did. I pressed the damn thing and it booted up almost twice as fast (4.77 to 8Mhz is a 60% overclock!). All my games ran faster so I pressed it any time he wasn't around. In a few years my brother and I collected a bunch of Sierra games like the Conquest of Camelot series and others. I even bought M1 Tank Platoon (software 3D) in the early 1990s. As far back as I can remember I wanted upgrades. Even with the nice EGA Wonder, my frame rates were too damn slow for me (maybe 2 or 3FPS). I asked, but my father never put in the cash for an 8087 math co-processor, 20mg hard drive, Creative Sound Blaster, 3.5" floppy drive, or modem.

I knew something was wrong so I had my dad buy a computer mag when I was 8 or 9. What the hell!!?!?!? These mags showed me 286s, 386s, and even some 486s a while later. VGA had been out and Super VGA was on the way. I was gaming on 16 colors when the rest of the world had 256. My dad took me to work with him for Career day in the early 90's and I brought along M1 Tank Platoon. It ran at like 60fps+ on his 486 25mhz computer and I even could use the single 3.5" floppy! I begged my dad for a new computer for a few years and he finally gave-in in 1997 (yea, took a while, huh?) and bought a $3500 Sony VAIO 200MMX with 32mb of ram. Two months later Pentium 2s came out.

I vowed never to get behind in hardware news again, so here I am today.

I'll save you the stories but I had an awesome time during 88' to the mid 90's both with games and hardware. I tested the first nVidia card, Voodoo1, Playstation 1 and several other amazing hardware (I was a game tester) The flood of games was incredible as well as the hardware choices at the time.

Thanks for this post and links (CGW archives!!!!!) brings back memories.

I had that Logitech mouse, and it was great (for the time). My first computer was a Commodore 64 in 1982, but I got my first PC when I was 18 in 1988 (a Zenith Data Systems 8mhz 286), and it didn't have (or really need, with DOS apps) a mouse, which was my Christmas present that year. Mine was a bus mouse that interfaced through an ISA card. The mouse was so good that I used it for two generations of PCs I built myself before succumbing to the PS2 port.

Twenty years from now we'll look back at the fact that we have these physically massive "ATX" computer cases and super-hot 65-watt processors, and need to use physical Ethernet cables and cable modems or DSL to get high speed Internet access. We'll laugh and reminisce while reading the story on our iPhones, which contain a massively parallel array of 5GHz CPUs needing under 1W of power and an always-on gigabit wireless broadband connection built-in, and which you can just plug into a docking station when you get home that has a keyboard and mouse and larger display and it is your computer.

Computers as we know them are about to become obsolete in a really cool way. I'm looking forward to it.

I love the idea of a turbo button, that's awesome. They should totally make them now.

I remember busting out Spinrite software to make sure my 20meg Seagate ST-225 MFM drive was properly interleaved at 1 to 1 so I could get faster disk reads and writes. This was on my first PC 286-12mhz with 256k of RAM. I had finally moved off my Apple IIE with two 360K 5.4 Floppy drives. Load runner in 4 color was the bomb on the IIE:)

I ran Norton Utilities "speed disk" for DOS probably once a week. The yellow and blue application with the little square boxes moving on the screen during a defrag.

Man I think back to all the stuff I have tossed over the years.

When you think I started with a TI994a in 82 or 83. TRS-80s, Apple IIs, Macs, 286 ps/2 on a token ring network in HS, to building my first PC in 91. Who can forget when MB didn't have squat on them and you had to buy, sound, network, video, IO, and anything else you wanted as an addon card. and VESA local bus was the bomb!!

LOL. This stuff always brings back memories and reminds me someone, somewhere owes me something for all the ridiculous amount of money I've spent.

cool history lesson :)

at least i saw enough early 3d accelerator cards to appreciate this: http://www.fractographer.com/propaganda/bitchinfast3d.jpg

I was negative 6 months old in 2008, and damn glad too.

I'm getting old Mike. I meant 1988.

Aye, makes me feel old...

I'm almost 20, trying to imagine I've been around for 20 years now..

More importantly, the technology displayed here is hilarious.. How far we've come... my my...

damn. 20 years ago I was toilet trained I think...O.o This is a blast from the past and good for nostaliga and laughs! Thansk!

btw, had a bottle of mead. booze, disney and old computer magazines! perfect day!

How about typing in 3 pages of hexadecimal (I think that is what is was called) code into an Atari 800 to play the "game of the month" from a popular Atari magazine? If even one A-F or 0-9 was off, no game. And staring at a TV screen to de-bug (translated: finding that one bad character) would make you see spots for a week.

I would wait for a friend to type it all in, save it on a cassette drive (!!) and copy the complete code from him. Sometimes, we'd just alternate who got the torture of inputting the code. And sometimes, after you were done, the game would turn out lame anyhow.

Those were the days!!

Any reason why the mail:to link isn't working?

My first thought when reading the headline was:

Sgt Pepper taught the band to play!

My parents still have a Compaq luggable and a TI-80 with accessories (external floppy drive) hiding in the basement. The luggable probably still works. I wonder if they'll be worth some serious cash some day.

I'm 16 today, so this was done exactly 4 years before i was born?

Haha, old people (j/k)

Anybody remember Boot Magazine?

I think I still have some Boot Magazines somewhere around here. I even have the old Demo discs from the late 90's that came with them. I load up Final Reality with every new GPU I get just to see how far I've come. Apparently my 2900XT is either too fast or completely incompatible because it won't calculate the scores. My old 7900GT was the last one that worked with it.

For more reminiscing I suggest you look through some of the old issues of Computer Gaming World at the CGW museum. There are a lot of old ads like those mentioned and original reviews of now-classic games.

http://cgw.vintagegaming.org/

Oh boy, I remember having a monster ISA VGA card that supported dual outputs! It even dwarfed the HD 3870X2!

Just imagine what's going to happen in just 20 more years... WE'll be looking back laughing at the current intel quad-core processors saying "what a monstrosity!" hey... we might even need to switch to a 128-bit operating system by then since 16 exabytes might not be enough.

Thanks for sharing! Having been the ripe old age of 4, I missed a lot of this fun. I didn't get into computers till 1997 or so, but I always enjoy looking back and seeing what I wouldn't miss about computers.

Keep 'em coming. I'm looking forward to a 30 years ago today blog...

Believe it or not, but Microway is still in business and is still using "Quadputer" as a brand name.

http://www.microway.com/quadOpteron.html

Wow.. those things are older than I am...

Wait, so you're saying that gramophones are outdated now? What am I going to play my Edison cylinders on now?!

it boggles my mind to think what we used to put up with back in the day...

Wow, it's like Art. Fits on the head of a pin now a days, not a full length ISA slot. :)