20 Companies And Products We Remember Fondly

[boletus]

What a stroll down memory lane. When I met my wife, she was a key punch operator at a local university; the term Personal Computer did not exist. Years later, I remember getting a 66 mhz cpu and getting really stoked. You could play the Jetpack demo for hours, and it wouldn't freeze up!

I don't miss AOL or dial-up, but I do miss the feeling I got when hearing the modem connect and start its squealing conversation with the servers. And I don't miss floppies (although I've still got a box sitting on my desk for some reason), but I really miss the sound of a program loading from floppy... beep beep beep, beep beep click click beep beep... knowing that in a short time something really cool was going to happen.

But it seems like so long ago, whereas everything else about my years of yore seem like just yesterday. I can still feel my infant daughter in my arms (in 1986) to this day, and wonder where the time has gone. But when I read about the TNT graphics card, it seems like a century ago that I was looking to replace my Rage Pro with a TNT2.

So are we getting more out of our time with computers, or are they just aging our minds prematurely? Or has time been turned on its ear? Or am I just getting soft in the head? (Don't answer that last question, please).

 

[jimmysmitty]

Datasettes.... Floppy (big and small)....ewww...... But you did forget ZipDrives. Amazing at the time since they could give you 100x the Floppy storage but wait theres more!!! It also included a data erase feature at absolutley no cost. Yep. Just like Floppies, it could magically erase data.

I had a backup of my Windows 95 PC when I first set it up and it was about 27 disks. Had to reinstall due to a corrupt sound driver and guess what.... the disl with the sound driver was bad.

Then I did a reinstall of Windows XP and backed up some data on the ZipDrive. Well the one that had the important documents was magically blank.

To be honest, I don't miss em. I thank them for what they did but man everything we have now is better. They had their day. Now I destroy floppy drives and laugh at people who still use Zip drives.

 

[rockstone1]

[citation][nom]jimmysmitty[/nom]Datasettes.... Floppy (big and small)....ewww...... But you did forget ZipDrives. Amazing at the time since they could give you 100x the Floppy storage but wait theres more!!! It also included a data erase feature at absolutley no cost. Yep. Just like Floppies, it could magically erase data.I had a backup of my Windows 95 PC when I first set it up and it was about 27 disks. Had to reinstall due to a corrupt sound driver and guess what.... the disl with the sound driver was bad.Then I did a reinstall of Windows XP and backed up some data on the ZipDrive. Well the one that had the important documents was magically blank.To be honest, I don't miss em. I thank them for what they did but man everything we have now is better. They had their day. Now I destroy floppy drives and laugh at people who still use Zip drives.[/citation]
A Floppy drive is a floppy drive- I'm going to take one from an Old Dell and put it in my machine.

 

[matobinder]

Great article, one thing I wanted to disagree with a bit. To quote...

"But where would we be without Creative? The company set the standard decades ago, and showed the general consumer and hardcore gamer that PCs were capable of generating more than beeps and boops from chassis-mounted PC speakers."

Come now, if your talking hardcore gamer, the Gravis Ultrasound blew away the Soundblaster. I remember back in college people being blown away by audio from Doom and X-wing when using my beloved Ultrasound.

The Ultrasound was to the Soundblaster as the Soundblaster was to the PC mounted speaker..

 

[matobinder]

Great article, one thing I wanted to disagree with a bit. To quote...

"But where would we be without Creative? The company set the standard decades ago, and showed the general consumer and hardcore gamer that PCs were capable of generating more than beeps and boops from chassis-mounted PC speakers."

They may have set a standard, for compatibility.

But if your talking hardcore gamer, the Gravis Ultrasound blew away the Soundblaster. I remember back in college people being blown away by the audio from Doom and X-wing fighter when using my beloved Ultrasound.

Don't forget the demos back then... ahh the gold old days.

The Ultrasound was to the Soundblaster as the Soundblaster was to the PC mounted speaker..

 

[sna]

How could you miss MAC OS ?? what Windows ???

and how Could you Miss Amiga ? at the Time of Amiga no Gamer looked at PC.
even by today standards Amiga Games and Music are super ...

and the 3D and Visual effects on Amiga without 3D hardware were super also at that time like 5 years ahead of any PC .

 

[Guest]

Does anyone remember AOL fondly?

 

[Guest]

I remember my old 300 bps modem! OLD OLD thing that you put the phone on.. the upgrade from that to 2400 modem was such a upgrade!

I remember getting wolf3d for the first time.. a upgrade on my 286. I had a 386DX with separate math copro I had that for gaming and programming in c++ 3.0 none of this visual programming

I remember learning dos for the first time.. finding the fdisk command.. "whats this do" 5 mins later "DOH" !

 

[LordConrad]

Anyone remember the game "7th Guest"? It was the first CD-only PC game and was the main reason my friends and I decided to purchase a CD-ROM drive. I had a 1x CD-ROM drive that used caddies.

 

[belardo]

Error: 3Dfx's first 2D-3D video card was NOT the Voodoo3. It was the Banshee, $100MSRP. I replaced my Voodoo1 with such a card... it wasn't as fast as a Voodoo2, but it could do 1024x768... we'd piss off Voodoo3 owners by calling them "Banshee2" cards. Actually, if I remember right - Tomshardware started out as a voodoo/banshee support type site.

 

[jitpublisher]

[citation][nom]TA152H[/nom]There are quite a few mistakes, and probably wrong impressions. I could go on and on ...[/citation]

Well most of us are glad you didn't, you apparently don't have the facts either.

 

[teaser]

I still have a Voodoo 2,Voodoo 3...and the dual gpu voodoo 5

 

[Guest]

My fondest memory would have to be the Amiga 1200 and Frontier Elite II- what a combination. I literally got YEARS of enjoyment out of that game. Back then money was a lot tighter so only one or two games got bought every year, so FE II was perfect for that time. Today I have the opposite problem- too many games and not enough time to play them

Other fond memories of the Amiga include split-screen deathmatch in Gloom (the Amiga's answer to Doom), the Settlers, Sensible Soccer and Monkey Island II.

I also fondly remember my first PC, a Pentium 120 with 16MB of RAM and a Voodoo 1 GFX card. I was amazed by the graphics at the time in games like Doom, Duke and Quake and also the fact that you could create and load custom levels. I spent a lot of time back then making Doom levels in DCK and Quake maps in Worldcraft. Quake mapping took patience, because back then building a decent sized Quake map could take several hours to do all the lighting...

Ah them were the days

 

[eodeo]

totally loved this article. well done

I wouldn't mind starcraft brood war instead of the duke nukem ending it, as that would have been more relevant in my case, and it would have a happy end since sc2 is almost out.

 

[fadirocks]

The only time I had to sign up for AOL, was just to connect to internet for my uncle's computer to get some updates. On the same day I called back and closed my account LOL

Floppy 3.5, I hated this crap I lost so many days of work just of unreliability of such media

 

[vjsoto]

I was 7 when we got our first "computer"/game console - a Magnavox Oddessy 2 that had an intel 5.37 Mhz 8048 CPU and 64 bytes (yes, I said BYTES) of RAM in it. We also owned an Apple IIc, a Tandy Color Computer "CoCo" 2, and the C64 complete with 5.25" floppy and green monochrome monitor. It really is nostalgic for me to see this old hardware.

I also just recently sold my old dual Voodoo2 SLI setup just last year on eBay. I'm glad to see I'm not the only nostalgic gamer out there!

 

[drwho1]

ha ha I'm still using AGP cards on both of my computers.
(not counting my brand new notebook with a 1GB PCIx)

I don't miss windows 3.1 but I do miss MS-DOS

Don't miss cleaning the mouse

Love Wolfestein 3D didn't care about Duke Nuken 3D

you forgot "Tandy" from Radio Shack

I still have the Win95 CD, Win 98 CD, Windows XP DVD

Overall I enjoy this article

 

[Guest]

i remember and used (and in some cases still actually have) all of these products as well, including the cassette drive, but it wasn't the c64 it was for a TRS-80 model III. and i'm only 34 years old... Thanks jtt283 for the TOH to desqview! ah, the days...

 

[vjsoto]

[citation][nom]rockstone1[/nom]I heard about that. I also heard that NASA had to buy some 8086s when they stopped producing them. I know that some of the toys in my house older than 2007 would probably use 8086s. For the B2 bombers- Which type of Pentiums?[/citation]

The military loves the old processors because they are much less susceptible to electronic interference and are more reliable. You also have to remember that all that software that they wrote in the 80s is not compatible with newer chips. It's easier to maintain hardware than it is to rewrite software to work with a new chip architecture.

 

[flyhne]

I had the trs80 (trash80)the first floppy drive for it was $1500
it was a big step up from the tape drive, and just incredibly fast )
next step was an altos with a 10MB hard drive $30,000 just for the hard drive
things have sure gone down in price

 

[drwho1]

my first hard drive had 20MB I paid $600 I will never forget.
I thought at the time that I would never fill that thing...

time has told another story.
Now I have a PC with (2)2TB, (2)500MB (1)1TB and smaller drive (my boot drive is only 160MB) I'm going to replace 3 of this drives by the end of the year because of lack of space....

 

[deadlockedworld]

What, no macs?

 

[jitpublisher]

[citation][nom]fadirocks[/nom]The only time I had to sign up for AOL, was just to connect to internet for my uncle's computer to get some updates. On the same day I called back and closed my account LOLFloppy 3.5, I hated this crap I lost so many days of work just of unreliability of such media[/citation]
ha! My first PC had a 3 1/2 AND a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive.........woot!

 

[kortsen]

I still remember my VIC20 and the C2N Datasette. And the joy when I found the Turbotape program in Byte magazine that make my Datasette 'as fast as a floppy drive.' (Commodore floppy drives were notoriously slow too) And then I discovered that Turbotape could copy a game cartridge to tape and reload it to a 8 MB memory cartridge. Yarrrrrrrrr!

 

[kortsen]

[citation][nom]kortsen[/nom]I still remember my VIC20 and the C2N Datasette. And the joy when I found the Turbotape program in Byte magazine that make my Datasette 'as fast as a floppy drive.' (Commodore floppy drives were notoriously slow too) And then I discovered that Turbotape could copy a game cartridge to tape and reload it to a 8 MB memory cartridge. Yarrrrrrrrr![/citation]

I don't believe I wrote 8MB. Make that 8K.