The General Technology Thread

[ArcadiaGP]

I feel pretty good with my mobo/ram/cpu upgrade this year. The CPU is a Ryzen 7 3700x. The RAM is Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200MHz C16 LED.

I can't forsee having any performance issues for a couple years.

Considered going with a more "free" version of Windows... like an NTSC/NTSB type that doesn't require constant updates. Enterprise or something, since I have it available to me.

 

[wtburnette]

Back when I'm talking, there wasn't 1080P. This was in the late '90s. My TNT2 card was something like $350 as it was and the 3DFX Voodoo add-on cards were like another $350. I had just spent $2000 building the entire PC as it was. I threw in the towel and bought a Playstation 1.

Your logic seems to be good for about the last 10 years, but I was so turned off by having to build what amounted to an entirely new PC every 2-3 years, for a couple grand a shot, that I walked away. PC gaming now seems much less budget intensive, but I really do like the simplicity of the consoles. Just turn it on and go, most days.

Oh yeah, I understand. I remember running the first Voodoo card, then the second. Got lucky and sold my Voodoo I card to a buddy so I had about half the money for the Voodoo 2 card. I hated using a console controller, so I just sucked it up and spent the extra money on PC gaming hardware...

I'm still rocking my 4+ year old MSI 990FXA MB with 32 meg of ram with a 8 core AMD FX 8350 chip, 1TB SSD and a Nvidia 9600 OC/5meg DDR5 ram.

I plan updating by adding a PCI Express NVI M.2 adapter card and dropping a 2TB SSD chipset on it to make it my new boot drive

My Nvidia runs everything at full blown max re with no problem.

One thing I did when I built this was go with a liquid cooling system, this baby runs whisper quite. Back in the day I used to have a Intel 300a Celron over clocked to 450
thau I had to have 7 fans moving air in and out to keep it from over heating. Ah ya, pre 2000 days, when there was no internet and BBS's, AOL and Compuserve was the rule.

I bet I can still listen to a 56k modem and tell if there is going to be a connection or not.

My buddy and I used to have a competition where we'd see who had the better system. We called it the PC Cold War and it went on for about 15 years. Sometimes mine was better, sometimes his was better. Was a lot of fun though. My ring tone for him is still a modem connection...

I feel pretty good with my mobo/ram/cpu upgrade this year. The CPU is a Ryzen 7 3700x. The RAM is Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200MHz C16 LED.

I can't forsee having any performance issues for a couple years.

Considered going with a more "free" version of Windows... like an NTSC/NTSB type that doesn't require constant updates. Enterprise or something, since I have it available to me.

Very nice setup! My son just upgraded his system a couple months ago and it really tempted me to do the same, but it would be a waste of money for me. I rarely game and my 10 year old system (for most of the parts) is still running fine and doing what I need. I'll upgrade when a component fails or I can't run a game.

 

[IndyBeerman]

My buddy and I used to have a competition where we'd see who had the better system. We called it the PC Cold War and it went on for about 15 years. Sometimes mine was better, sometimes his was better. Was a lot of fun though. My ring tone for him is still a modem connection...

I can relate to that, me and my buddy used to do the same thing, back in the day I was always on the cutting edge and he was playing catch up on everything but modem speeds. When he moved to southern Indiana for his
current job we stopped the cold war pc battles. Heck where he lives at now it is horrible for everything. No cable, has wireless internet that is slower than most snails, he's lucky to hit 3mbps, while I'm screaming at 350mbps+ most of the time.

 

[wtburnette]

I can relate to that, me and my buddy used to do the same thing, back in the day I was always on the cutting edge and he was playing catch up on everything but modem speeds. When he moved to southern Indiana for his
current job we stopped the cold war pc battles. Heck where he lives at now it is horrible for everything. No cable, has wireless internet that is slower than most snails, he's lucky to hit 3mbps, while I'm screaming at 350mbps+ most of the time.

I couldn't imagine. I switched to AT&T Fiber a couple of years ago and am now pretty spoiled. I do need to upgrade my wireless at some point though due to downstairs streaming occasionally not doing well, but otherwise my internet speeds are screaming.

 

[maxwelhse]

Ah ya, pre 2000 days, when there was no internet and BBS's, AOL and Compuserve was the rule.

Says, you, peasant...

I've been on the internet since 1995 and high speed (cable modem) since 1998. I had a BSD shell account with Fort Wayne Internet so I could pull down completely legal software over their T1, then I'd sneak into IPFW as if I were student (which is funny, because later on when I became one I realized no one would care anyhow) find a logged in PC in the labs, and empty my shell account on to zip disks via their T3. So... I kinda had a T1 internet connection in the mid-90s, sorta.

But yes, I for sure did my time with the POTS modems. Started out at 2400 baud. It sucked!

 

[DoggyDaddy]

Says, you, peasant...

I've been on the internet since 1995 and high speed (cable modem) since 1998. I had a BSD shell account with Fort Wayne Internet so I could pull down completely legal software over their T1, then I'd sneak into IPFW as if I were student (which is funny, because later on when I became one I realized no one would care anyhow) find a logged in PC in the labs, and empty my shell account on to zip disks via their T3. So... I kinda had a T1 internet connection in the mid-90s, sorta.

But yes, I for sure did my time with the POTS modems. Started out at 2400 baud. It sucked!

2400 baud?! Talk about spoiled! Mine was 300 baud. You would literally watch the screen get "painted in" a line at a time. Of course it wasn't web pages. It was green lettering on a black background.

 

[maxwelhse]

2400 baud?! Talk about spoiled! Mine was 300 baud. You would literally watch the screen get "painted in" a line at a time. Of course it wasn't web pages. It was green lettering on a black background.

2400 baud is basically the speed I read at now from having been "raised" on it... Call that a blessing or a curse.

 

[IndyBeerman]

Says, you, peasant...

I've been on the internet since 1995 and high speed (cable modem) since 1998. I had a BSD shell account with Fort Wayne Internet so I could pull down completely legal software over their T1, then I'd sneak into IPFW as if I were student (which is funny, because later on when I became one I realized no one would care anyhow) find a logged in PC in the labs, and empty my shell account on to zip disks via their T3. So... I kinda had a T1 internet connection in the mid-90s, sorta.

But yes, I for sure did my time with the POTS modems. Started out at 2400 baud. It sucked!

At my old house, in Mooresville finally got cable Internet from Comcast in 2002, not near the speeds I get today, but anything faster than dial up was a blessing.

You have not lived life until you morph a Tandy 1000 EX with a expansion card to increase memory from 128k to 1 meg, add a 300 baud modem and a external 10 meg HD and 1.44 floppy drive that also included a upgraded V20 chip for improved processor speeds. I was using zip and .bat files to save space on the HD for my games with the update switch, the files were hidden and deleting visible files after playing the game.

Sometimes I think back to those days and relate to Fred Flintstone chiseling granite tablets. We got it pretty good now. Maybe Churchmouse will come along and let us know what the letter per hour chiseling rate
was back in the dark ages. ROTFLMAO

 

[IndyBeerman]

2400 baud?! Talk about spoiled! Mine was 300 baud. You would literally watch the screen get "painted in" a line at a time. Of course it wasn't web pages. It was green lettering on a black background.

Procomm and TelComm was the norm with ANSI screen writes, with gaming consisting of Tradewars, plus a variation of RISK and a few others. I used to rule TradeWars. Heck I've forgotten more than I can ever remember from those days. I did at one time run a Wildcat BBS called Prime Cuts for the old Brooks Micro System Computer store in Plainfield.

 

[maxwelhse]

At my old house, in Mooresville finally got cable Internet from Comcast in 2002, not near the speeds I get today, but anything faster than dial up was a blessing.

You have not lived life until you morph a Tandy 1000 EX with a expansion card to increase memory from 128k to 1 meg, add a 300 baud modem and a external 10 meg HD and 1.44 floppy drive that also included a upgraded V20 chip for improved processor speeds. I was using zip and .bat files to save space on the HD for my games with the update switch, the files were hidden and deleting visible files after playing the game.

Sometimes I think back to those days and relate to Fred Flintstone chiseling granite tablets. We got it pretty good now. Maybe Churchmouse will come along and let us know what the letter per hour chiseling rate
was back in the dark ages. ROTFLMAO

My original Comcast cable was actually faster than what I'm buying from them today. There was almost no one on my node since I adopted so early, and there was no throttling, so I had pretty much the full capability of their trunk lines at my disposal most of the time. My Napster would routinely download 5-6mb songs as fast as I could click them, so, probably 3-6mb/s. i was lucky that for whatever reason they put the NE side of Fort Wayne on the New Haven node originally, which I don't think had even nearly as much traffic as the other FTW nodes, so it was like me, myself, and I just murdering warez.

My actual first setup is more terrible than your Tandy. TI 99/4A, peripheral expansion box with (I think) 128kb memory upgrade, 3 double sided standard density 5.25" drives, no HDD, and no modem. That was all before my time really, so I wouldn't say I actually knew how to "use" it, but that's where I started. Well, I started with just the 99/4A, then the other stuff came later.

Our first "real" PC was an IBM PS/1 in probably 1992 or 93. Big pimpin' as compared to your Tandy. 386 SX/16, 2MB of RAM, 80MB HDD, 3.5 1.44MB floppy, 2400 baud modem, no sound card or game port, etc. It was utterly terrible, and I too was constantly out of disk space (there's never enough, ever... not even now). That was the family PC. Within a couple of years I had built my own from used parts bought as cheaply as I could afford from buddies. 386 DX/40 with a Cyrix math co-processor, 4mb RAM, 540MB HDD (for $1/MB... took me a year to pay for it), some total garbage video card (Tseng 4000?), 2400 baud modem for a little bit, then a USR 28.8 that I was very proud to own (again... it was like $300 and took forever to pay for)...

and on and on it went for the rest of that decade. After dropping about $5k as a teenager just trying to play video games, I bought a Playstation.

Ahhh... Good times!

 

[maxwelhse]

Procomm and TelComm was the norm with ANSI screen writes, with gaming consisting of Tradewars, plus a variation of RISK and a few others. I used to rule TradeWars. Heck I've forgotten more than I can ever remember from those days. I did at one time run a Wildcat BBS called Prime Cuts for the old Brooks Micro System Computer store in Plainfield.

If you ever played Tradewars on a Fidonet, or otherwise shared system, I'd just about bet money that we rubbed elbows at some point. I used to love that game. Played quite a few door games back in the day though I'm hard pressed to remember any of them now.

 

[WebSnyper]

A

Sometimes I think back to those days and relate to Fred Flintstone chiseling granite tablets. We got it pretty good now. Maybe Churchmouse will come along and let us know what the letter per hour chiseling rate
was back in the dark ages. ROTFLMAO

 

[IndyBeerman]

If you ever played Tradewars on a Fidonet, or otherwise shared system, I'd just about bet money that we rubbed elbows at some point. I used to love that game. Played quite a few door games back in the day though I'm hard pressed to remember any of them now.

Never Played it on Fidonet or a shared system. Just the local BBS's.

My best friend is a programmer and after eading the documentation to the game one day we found out that for each player a ASCII text file was created that showed all the sectors you had visited, what type of port it was and what was trading there. He wrote a program to input the ascii file and compile info to show the best trading ports, 1 through the max hops to each port and indicate what every sector connected. To get that info you had to either visit that sector/port, or have probe go through it. We got so good at info collection from it that we could stroll into a game that was 3+ months old and dominate in under a week.
My character name was usually Tom Slick or Gerty and my ship name was the Thunderbolt Greaseslapper.

Ah yes those was the days, I still think that Tradewars lives on in the internet world, been a very long time.

 

[Phase2]

COVID-19 Pushes Up Internet Use 70%, Streaming More Than 12%, First Figures Reveal

 

[maxwelhse]

Never Played it on Fidonet or a shared system. Just the local BBS's.

My best friend is a programmer and after eading the documentation to the game one day we found out that for each player a ASCII text file was created that showed all the sectors you had visited, what type of port it was and what was trading there. He wrote a program to input the ascii file and compile info to show the best trading ports, 1 through the max hops to each port and indicate what every sector connected. To get that info you had to either visit that sector/port, or have probe go through it. We got so good at info collection from it that we could stroll into a game that was 3+ months old and dominate in under a week.
My character name was usually Tom Slick or Gerty and my ship name was the Thunderbolt Greaseslapper.

Ah yes those was the days, I still think that Tradewars lives on in the internet world, been a very long time.

Gerty looks familiar for some reason. I would have been playing on FTW BBSs though and I think maybe a handful that were FIDOnet shared.

I did just happen to remember I played a ton of Solar Realms Elite and Barren Realms Elite. Haven't thought of those games in ages.

 

[jedi]

COVID-19 Pushes Up Internet Use 70%, Streaming More Than 12%, First Figures Reveal

Mmmmmmoooorrrreee power scotty!!
Give us 130%!!!

 

[Phase2]

Mmmmmmoooorrrreee power scotty!!
Give us 130%!!!

She can't handle the stress, Captain!

Radio Listening Booms While Music Streaming Stalls

88 Out of Top 200 US Cities Have Seen Internet Speeds Decline This Past Week

Phone Calls Are Back in Fashion

 

[maxwelhse]

She can't handle the stress, Captain!

Radio Listening Booms While Music Streaming Stalls

88 Out of Top 200 US Cities Have Seen Internet Speeds Decline This Past Week

Phone Calls Are Back in Fashion

Millennials finally get to feel like the rest of us do during a real service outage.

 

[ArcadiaGP]

We regret to inform you that Zoom is a ‘privacy disaster’ and quite possibly a danger to national security

 

[T.Lex]

We regret to inform you that Zoom is a ‘privacy disaster’ and quite possibly a danger to national security

Oh snap.