Sentimental scribblings

Well, we all have them I suppose. Those sentimental moments that creeps up on you
from time to time and pounce on you when you least suspect it, and I had one today.

I was, as usual, sitting at my computer doing nothing important when I started thinking
if my very first “real” PC. The first I bought for my own money was a shabby ole 386
with a whopping 200 Mb harddrive, 1 Mb graphics card from cirrus logic (E-ISA of course!)
and it even had a soundcard AND a CD ROM. It was operating at a whopping 33 Mhz and
frankly, I enjoyed that machine to the fullest. I could play Doom on it if i just lowered
the windows size just a tiny bit. I didn’t have windows on it because anything that I wanted
to do, I could do from MS-DOS with about as little hassle as from windows, and I didnt
need windows 3.1 to clutter up my harddrive.

You may think that 33 mhz is little, but keep in mind that the processor clock frequency has
increased very fast with the coming of the first pentium CPUs. For a while, there was a heaven
of hardware spewing out on the market and whenever you turned around, there was a new
processor out that had a slightly higher frequency and also, new types of RAM came.

The days when new hardware came, you where always enthusiastic, and to be frank, I still
get like a kid at christmas when I know I have new hardware to pick up. I can hardly wait
til I get to shred the wrapping and plug it in and see what the baby can do.

I fondly remember my first major upgrade. I bought a Pentium 166 (no, no MMX on that one) and it had
a mindboggling 64 megs of ram, and pieced with that, was a catchy OS with the catchphrase
“Where do you want to go today” Well. I soon learned that the catchphrase SHOULD have been
“You are not going anywhere today” seeing as bluescreens became a part of everyones day, but
despite that, suddenly I had a computer that could handle the new and Ultra Cool “Duke Nukem 3d” from 3D Realms.

The fun we had with that game at lan parties, hooking up our BNC network and terminating it and just
spewing ballistic projectiles at eachother to our hearts content and that was fine, until one day, I think
it was Marcus Agehall, or pherhaps Anders Lindahl who brought us a demo of what would soon be my
new and major addiction. Quake by ID software, the same company that had made sure I lost as much
sleep as possible while playing Doom. Oh my dog! That game was off the map!

Quake became a part of my everyday life, and I also measured my computer to better performance
using that game. I even bought my first Voodoo card and suddenly, even getting killed was wonderful!
And on top of that, the graphics was stunning and mindboggling.

Alas, nowadays people have become spoilt rotten for graphics. I am not sure if that is a good or bad thing,
but I still return to play quake 1 and 2 on occasion and I stil enjoy it.

My current addiction is one of those games with the great graphics, If you havent played the game
“Bioshock” yet, I urge you to do that. Here is a little teaser screenshot:

Now I am off for another game of Quake tho.

Take care