About computers

A Little Bit of History

My first computer was a Commodore 64C, the beige one with the SID 8580. But the very first computer I touched and played on was an x86 running DOS. I can't remember details because I was three years old. The owner is a cousin of my father living in a neighbouring city, whom I call "uncle," and he is always into technology. He was typing the paths and names of the game executables, and I was pretending to play for hours. My favourites were Alley Cat and Mach 3, both with CGA graphics, and of course, I learned the titles of games years later when I got my first x86. Later, my uncle upgraded his machine, and it was running Windows. Now I could really play games, and my favourite was Disney's Aladdin.

My second computer was an IBM PS/1 system. A YouTube channel named Epictronics made videos about one of them, which even contained the unboxing process. Here is the link: IBM PS/1 486 Unboxing. So, I bought this system from a friend's father's office; it was used, but luckily it was upgraded. The original CRT, 12 MB of RAM, and 133 MB of HDD were a big upgrade for me. Keyboard and mouse were connecting from PS/1 ports, and a keyboard that I bought with it and produced by Olivetti served me well literally for decades. I was still using it when I built my first AMD FX-6300 system in 2014. I played many DOS games on it and a few Windows ones. I found a GW-BASIC book and a diskette containing its interpreter from a relative who took some computer courses in the 80s, and I tried to resurrect my BASIC codes from the Commodore 64 era. I probably read all the text and help files in a standard Windows 95 installation for more knowledge, and I think it helped me a few times in the years to come.

At about the same time, an educational NGO reopened its branch in our town and started free trainings again, and one of the courses was computer literacy. Dad registered me immediately, and I never skipped the class. The second week, I went to the course centre with bells on; the weather was snowy. I arrived at the building and rang the bell; interestingly, no one was playing in the garden. My computer teacher opened the door and looked at me with confusion. He said the class was cancelled because of the snow and asked why I came. I didn't hear the news; please consider that this was before the mobile phone era. So I told him, and instead of sending me home, he invited me in, made coffee, and we chatted a bit before going to the computer room. He was repairing some computers and listening to music from the new computer (we had eight Pentium-era IBM desktops and one new, "cool"-looking OEM machine as a server). He was murmuring about a problem related to two IBMs, and I asked what it was. He plugged the power cord in and powered it again. There was a giant 3.5-inch floppy animation on the screen (here is an example from random image search). He said he tried everything but couldn't even enter the BIOS settings. He pressed a few more keys again in frustration and gave up. I asked if I could take a look. I opened the case, removed the power cable from the floppy, and powered it up. Now that Windows is booting, he asked how I do it, and I gave him the details. I was already dealing with an IBM PS/1 at home, and without any documentation or help, this was my personal solution for this problem, as you may remember from the previous paragraph. After a boot without a floppy drive, this problem disappeared, and connecting the floppy again didn't generate the same error. I still don't know what this error is or why it's happening on IBM systems randomly; later in my life, I encountered the same error on some Aptiva systems and on my Thinkpad T23 (which never has an internal floppy drive). If you know anything about it, please share with me.

This little adventure really helped. I earned some trust, access to the computer room, and the chance to sit and talk with my computer teachers. They showed me many things, not just about computers, for which I am still grateful.

Later, I upgraded my system to a used OEM AT box with a Pentium 75, 16 MB of RAM, and an 800MB Western Digital HDD. I learned DOS and installed it on my old PS/1's HDD; the main OS was still Windows 95. AT wasn't a good experience after PS/1; the AT keyboard and serial mouse were problematic, and I upgraded again in a short time to HP Vectra VL with a Pentium 166 MMX. 96 MB of RAM and a 4 GB HDD, I installed Windows 98, and this machine served me for years too. When Windows XP came out, I installed and used it for a while without a problem; before XP, it was running Windows 2000. I wrote my first HTML tags in this era on these machines. My first Linux installation was working on this Vectra, which is Mandrake Linux; later, I installed Red Hat 5 or 6. I can't remember exactly. Famous Windows game titles like Age of Empires, Diablo, and Quake ran on this machine. I discovered the emulators for the Commodore 64; like CCS, VICE, and Frodo. And the MAME. I bought an old Amiga 500 with 1 MB of RAM in this era too, and Amiga systems really changed my point of view about computing, home computers, and technology.

The next one was a kind of urban legend: a Celeron 300a with an ATI 8MB AGP video card and 192MB SDRAM. Bought used again from an internet cafe and cleaned and refurbished. The first thing I did, of course, was clock the CPU to 366 MHz and later to 466 MHz. My PS/1's CRT died, by the way, and I bought a used 14" monitor from a TV repair shop. I installed Windows XP on a 20-gig HDD and later bought a broken 40-gig Seagate from a repair shop for the price of a glass of water. The power port's four pins weren't connected to the board, and my best friend, who has always been good with fine work, soldered it in minutes, and it worked. This 40G disc was my playground for every alternative operating system; I distrohopped a while, found Debian, and settled. I bought my first mobile computer, a used Toshiba Satellite with a Pentium 120 and 48 MB of RAM. I can't remember any more details at the moment. It was a solid machine, and my uncle used it for a long time for surfing and casual gaming. At some point, I bought a more modern Nvidia card from a flea market and added it to my desktop. My handy best friend and I played too many games; we were moving our desktop computers between two homes (yes, including CRT monitors), and we stayed up all night in our tiny LAN party organisations. Diablo II, Age of Empires II and all expansions, Half Life and Counter Strike, Quake II and Quake III, Postal, Warcraft III, Max Payne, GTA III and Vice City, Mafia, Medal of Honour, Call of Duty, Age of Mythology, Midtown Madness, Need for Speed, Driver, etc. His dad bought a dream system for him: a Celeron 2000 with 256 MB of RAM and a 40G + 40G HDD, a Geforce FX5200, a 17" Philips Flat CRT, and a CD-RW. This opened another era for us; we started to archive things. After a dialer disaster with dial-up connections, his dad got DSL, and we experienced broadband for the first time. It was just 64 kbps down with 8 kbps up, but it's a real revolution for a teenage couple who grew up with expensive dial-up connections.

This new computer and fast connection changed our lives. We learned about online communities and joined them. He was into music and had a guitar; he downloaded many tabs, sheets, and software about it. We were listening to various music styles from everywhere. When he was exercising with the guitar, I was using the computer to get more information about computers. I joined IRC and ICQ. I was buying used computers for cheap, repairing them, and selling them. Proudly, many people from my social circles and relatives got a free computer and technical support with my help. Especially kids and elders. They weren't the best machines, even for the time, but nobody complained, as far as I know. In 2023, at least one of these machines still be working in a carpenter's shop, helping with technical drawings of furniture and playing music during business hours.

When Intel's Centrino became widespread, I was looking for a new computer, and it should be mobile because I was going to go to university. I bought a used IBM Thinkpad T23 with 256 MB of RAM and a Pentium III 1333 MHz CPU and the WiFi was external via PCMCIA. I installed Windows XP and Slackware on this machine. Debian wasn't supporting my WiFi card. It was already a well-known fact, it was a rock-solid machine. I bought it from a system administrator friend I met online, used but looking like new, and I couldn't have scratched it much more during my nomad life in my university years. However, at some point, the PCMCIA WiFi card physically broke. I sold this machine for the same price I bought it for, years later. For a while, I was saving money for a new computer, and with some help from my cousin, I bought an HP Core2Duo notebook in installments. The same weekend, a relative of my father who is living abroad called me and invited me to his house in our country. This nice family gifted me a brand new computer, an Acer Extensa bought from abroad, with a cute sleeve. It was running a Debian derivative, probably specialised by Acer, which was a good sign of compatibility in my book. I can't find the exact CPU model, but it was maybe a single-core Celeron. I can't remember if it supports HyperThreading, or maybe it's a dual-core Celeron without HT support. But it was supporting DDR3 memory and SATA 3.0, whereas HP with the T5xxx Core2Duo wasn't, and when I installed Ubuntu, everything was faster and more responsive than HP. I sold the HP and paid all the installments in one go. This Extensa was a well-built case, but when I moved to another city and a different university, I had to sell it for a bit more money. As a minor personal detail, I recently switched to Chrome beta during those days and got a sticker from the developers to put on the back of the screen. Okay, firstly, I was naive and young; secondly, G**gl* looked like a civil-libertarian and supporter of free and open technologies, which later everyone understood was not the case. Btw, in those years, I didn't play games much. I worked for some IT companies, mostly on part-time errands like flashing routers with the company's special firmware, installing devices in the field, and providing technical support.

Then I moved to another city and another university and started to study another major. A tiny house has Ethernet cables in every room for broadband, but ten flats are sharing the same 8 Mbps connection and 512 kbps upload. I didn't care in earlier days because I didn't have a computer. But when I was visiting my family, I bought a cheap netbook from our carrier. It was branded by a local company but was actually a decent Clevo machine. The CPU was an Atom N455, the RAM was 1 GB, and a 320 GB HDD ran Windows 7 "Starter Edition". I just installed Ubuntu, and everything was a breeze. Despite the 10.1" screen and low resolution, I watched too many movies and series on it and played some Counter-Strike. I produced banners and posters for an organisation with Photoshop and Corel Draw and even earned some money. Later, another good man handed me a HP Compaq NC6220; these things were like Thinkpads, business-oriented and solidly built. I upgraded it with junk parts from everywhere and made it my main computer. It was a 32-bit machine, but with Lubuntu, it works like a brand new one. Later, I bought an IDE-to-CF adapter from China, and with this poor man's SSD solution, battery life and speed were great. A friend in my hometown started a company at the same time and asked me to join him when we bumped into each other. I mostly worked part-time for a little money and without benefits. Built a dozen horrible static websites with HTML and CSS for local craftsmen and storekeeper customers, repaired computers, and went to customers' homes and offices for support. Built two different unsuccessful but functional e-commerce sites for locals, one with PHP and the other with the new "cool tech" ASP.NET. And a primitive point-of-sale system with C# and SQL Server for a local market. All of these projects were done on the old HP laptop, at least the web and PHP ones. For Microsoft things, I was connecting to the company server's desktop. But business was bad, and the company collapsed a year later. I went back to my student life, and my boss went for a consulting job in another city. However, it was a great time for me. When the evenings were cold, I was grabbing my beers, slacking, and working alone in the office with my friends.

I moved to another house, this time with some friends. It was far from the city centre and my university, but it was huge and near the forest. The connection infrastructure was great; it was broadband cable, cheap, and freakin' reliable. But my old HP and netbook were dying; I gave the netbook to a relative, and the HP's case was broken because of a chair accident. I disassembled it, mounted the LCD panel on the wall, put the innards on my table, connected a wireless keyboard and mouse set, and made my own poor man's smart television.

But I didn't have a decent computer, and I was on a tight budget. I found a cheap desktop on a local Craigslist-like site. I bought the machine with a 17-inch CRT. It was a Core 2 Duo E4500 with 4 GB of DDR2 RAM and a 20 GB HDD. Later, I saved some money and bought a GT420 for it, just for an online game. It was mostly running Windows 7, and I wasn't using it for any productivity but just for games and browsing. Later, I saw an Athlon FX6300 Black Edition in a bargain bin and upgraded this machine with DDR3 RAM and an 80G HDD. It is still running and being used by one of my relatives.

I bought an used iBook G4 15" with 640 MB of RAM and 60 GB of disc space for almost free. The battery wasn't great, but it was enough for my needs. I was using it for reading and simple programming, scripting, and writing tasks. Or I was watching things when I was in bed. It was a special machine for me, and if upgrading this boy wasn't that hard (disassembling this machine is some kind of nightmare, and the plastic of the case deteriorates badly over time), I always wanted to use it as a writing machine, like a more skilled typewriter. But I was and still am lazy; a few years ago, I donated it to recycling. Replacing the IDE drive with a CF card and upgrading the RAM to max would be great, and I would probably install OpenBSD on it. RIP.

My next workstation, of course, because of my iBook experience, was an Apple Macbook Pro mid-2010. Core2Duo P8600 CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a 250 GB HDD This machine was a workstation for me; I used it for years. I changed batteries three times, twice from official support, and the last one was from a third party. I upgraded the memory to 16 GB, added an SSD for the main drive, and when I added a second drive to the optical drive port, I replaced the main one too. When I sold it a few years ago to an academician, it was running High Sierra without any problems. In the same years, I was using another machine just for Linux; it was a Dell Latitude E4300, which is basically some kind of interpretation of Thinkpads by Dell. The build quality was solid, and the Core 2 Duo SP9400 was a great CPU for a mobile computer. I upgraded it to the max too, and it served me well with Debian. I donated it to a cousin just before the sale of the Macbook Pro 2010.

In 2016, I bought a Retina Macbook Pro Early 2015, the CPU was a Core i5 with 8GB of RAM. It wasn't upgradeable, but every other specification was okay. I used it for work mainly, but next year I sold it and bought a used Thinkpad X230, which still works as my main laptop.

At the end of 2020, I tried to return to the Apple ecosystem for the last time, but I couldn't manage. The iPhone SE 2020, which replaced my iPhone 5S, was actually good, and I bought a Mac Mini M1 with base specs. Because of new chips, maybe things would be great again with ARM, and I could catch the PowerPC era's soul. But it didn't happen for me. After over-IOSization and over-servicisation of macOS, things got worse for me. Yes, M1 was a powerful machine, but macOS wasn't Mac OS X anymore. So I left the Apple ecosystem for the last time with disappointment. I sold the M1 and iPhone, bought an Android phone that supports alternative ROMs, and a Raspberry Pi 400.

Today, I am still using my Thinkpad for mobility and my RPi 400 for any desktop task; with an external SSD, it just works for me. But I want to build a real desktop if I can decide on a good configuration and find some decent prices.

Lastly, except for these personal machines, I used so many different computers at work. I don't even remember most of them. Also, even in high school, I was hoarding hardware from anywhere, and at one point there were thirteen ATX cases and two servers in my room. All of them have gone to people who need a computer or are recycling them after a cleaning and repair process. One more thing: I was always fond of home computers and collected too many, but later sold and/or donated them because I was already living in another city and my parents never liked these junks invading their home.

As you may guess, my parents are not much into computers and, until the social media/smartphone era, never cared about them; nowadays, both of them are looking at their tablets and constantly scrolling to hell. Still, I can't be sure they couldn't or wouldn't pay for a computer when I was a child. Yes, we were always counting the pennies but never starving. Mom's excuse was always school, and dad's was the price of a computer. So, I always worked and scraped money for my computers, which also explains why I bought almost all of my hardware used and outdated, most of the time unwillingly.

Here is a poorly written history of my personal hardware, but I am still grateful. I always found a way to work on these junks, and this somehow made me qualified. I hope I helped the people and learned a few things about computers.