[olug] "I remember when..."

[Amy Mason]

I fear I am a youngling too.  My dad brought home an old 286, (and it was
old at the time).  It had an 80mb hard drive (till that crashed and was
replaced by a second hand 30mb drive.).. He upgraded video to Super VGA and
bought a "top of the line" 14 inch crt for it.  It had a 5 and a quarter
inch disk drive as well.  I loved that machine till the motherboard went
belly up 2 or 3 years later. (This machine probably showed up in 91 or 92.)
The oddest quirk was that the cmos battery was shot from the get go, so
everytime we started that beast we had to go in and set all the hardware in
the bios.  Bios's are so much simpler now...

When the beast finally died we got a 486 with a one gig hard drive and a
copy of Windows 3.1.. We honestly didn't use Windows for much but word and a
handful of windows only games, but that was a faithful friend around our
home until at least the year 2000, at which point my friends and I saw first
hand how the Y2K bug worked.

My first computer that was actually "all mine" though, was a whitebox
Pentium II with a 6 gig hard drive and Windows 98.  I wish I had known then
what I know now.. I would love to get inside of any of these computers and
take a look around, I think it would be a blast.  Sadly they have all moved
on from our home, but they were fun machines, and fond memories are had when
I think on them.

I wish I remember what the memory was on these, because it would be scream
to see that now.

My first Linux was in May of 2007.  Ubuntu 7.04 dual-booting on my Dell
Inspiron 600m laptop (512 mb memory, 40 gb hard drive) It was good.. so
though I haven't ever made the complete switch, I have usually found a way
to have Linux floating about somewhere in the background, and I love every
minute of it.