A Look Back to 1993 - the pick of the computer hardware

[Goose]

Damn it! Ignition doesn't run in Windows 7 (or any compatibility mode).

[christaylor]

If you can grab me a copy of that I'd be hugely grateful!

Ok I've got a copy of the soundtrack here, where's the best place for me to upload it?

[DarhkFox]

plenty of fire sharing websites, ie megaupload, 4shared etc although depending on the size you might have to split it into a few files.

[88h88]

Ok I've got a copy of the soundtrack here, where's the best place for me to upload it?

Oh you absolute star. I've found http://www.mediafire.com/ to be the best place for uploads.

I owe you an entire evening's drinking or my first born...

[christaylor]

Thanks guys, used Mediafire: http://www.mediafire.com/?s4pddv5lad4qisv

Not used MF before, so lemme know if that URL dunt work.

mp3s ripped at 192kbps.

[88h88]

Well I got round to downloading it and a million and one memories came flooding back. I still knew the tunes and most of the words and while it was a short set of tracks it was massively enjoyed. Thank you very much sir.

[Asura]

There seemed to be a raft of them that all came out at similar times.

Shortly after Wolfenstein came out, other developers scrambled to produce similar engines or to licence existing ones. That was what led to the likes of Blake Stone, Rise of the Triad, Quarantine; even Heretic and Hexen.

[mash]

Shortly after Wolfenstein came out, other developers scrambled to produce similar engines or to licence existing ones. That was what led to the likes of Blake Stone, Rise of the Triad, Quarantine; even Heretic and Hexen.

That's not quite right though. Heretic and Hexen came after Doom. In fact Heretic used a slightly modified version of the Doom engine which allowed the player to look up and down.

Rise of the Triad also came after Doom, and despite it looking like Wolfenstein, actually required a mammoth 8MB RAM to run properly. I know this, because I forked out a massive £99 on a 4MB RAM upgrade for my DX2 66 circa 1995.

[Goose]

God, I remember my 8mb of memory costing me a whopping £300. 260mb HDD? £290!

Every other week memory seemed to rise, and every time you asked someone they'd say "Ahh, well there's only two places in the world that produce RAM, and one of them burnt down last week". I must have heard that story for the next six years, so god only knows who their fire-safety guy was.

[ScouserInExile]

God, I remember my 8mb of memory costing me a whopping £300. 260mb HDD? £290!

Every other week memory seemed to rise, and every time you asked someone they'd say "Ahh, well there's only two places in the world that produce RAM, and one of them burnt down last week". I must have heard that story for the next six years, so god only knows who their fire-safety guy was.

The one that always sticks in my mind is that our first dual speed CD-ROM drive cost us £99. And this was just a reader, not a writer. When I build my last PC a few years ago, a DVD burner was something like £9.

[DarhkFox]

Every other week memory seemed to rise, and every time you asked someone they'd say "Ahh, well there's only two places in the world that produce RAM, and one of them burnt down last week". I must have heard that story for the next six years, so god only knows who their fire-safety guy was.

LOL im sure i read that in a magazine years back and assumed it to be true fact..

The one that always sticks in my mind is that our first dual speed CD-ROM drive cost us £99. And this was just a reader, not a writer. When I build my last PC a few years ago, a DVD burner was something like £9.

I remember buying one of the first cdrw drives on the market. Thing it was 1998 and it was a Mitsumi 2x CDRW drive. Cost £120 i think. I remember buying a load of cdrw discs and never getting them to work properly but i got some CDRs at some computer fair for like £1 each and had loads of coasters.... dont think the tech was great at the time!

[Mr Monday]

Every other week memory seemed to rise, and every time you asked someone they'd say "Ahh, well there's only two places in the world that produce RAM, and one of them burnt down last week". I must have heard that story for the next six years, so god only knows who their fire-safety guy was.

I remember Edge saying the same thing about the Kobe earthquake in 1995!

[Goose]

The one that always sticks in my mind is that our first dual speed CD-ROM drive cost us £99. And this was just a reader, not a writer. When I build my last PC a few years ago, a DVD burner was something like £9.

I know that feeling! I can't recall when I got my first burner but it was a Ricoh Two speed type, cost £299 from a computer fair. Blank TDK CDs were £1.10 each but you could get a box for £10. I scrapped tonnes of them and then a really helpful guy on a forum somewhere (messiest forum layout ever) told me to upgrade the firmware. Worked like a charm but you'd still sit there for 30 minutes as tense as buggery! I used go for a walk and then creep up the stairs so the computer wouldn't know I was back so wouldn't feel the need to bugger it up :lol:

[Butane Bob]

The one that always sticks in my mind is that our first dual speed CD-ROM drive cost us £99.

The one thing i remember about getting my first cd burner was how unreliable it was. I had to close every single program, set it to burn at the slowest possible speed, and then hope to god it didn't get to 90% and then just fuck up for no apparent reason. Causing me to throw out the now unusable cd.

[DarhkFox]

The one thing i remember about getting my first cd burner was how unreliable it was. I had to close every single program, set it to burn at the slowest possible speed, and then hope to god it didn't get to 90% and then just fuck up for no apparent reason. Causing me to throw out the now unusable cd.

Yeah, it uses a lot of processing power. I too remember the days you would stick a cd on to burn and basically had to leave your pc as everything else was unusable and you didnt want to risk a coaster anyway.

[Mr Monday]

The first CD-Rom I used was at school around 1993. It was one of those newspaper archive CDs and you had to put it in the caddy then slot that into the drive. You could search all the newspapers articles using some crappy DOS interface.

[DarhkFox]

The first CD-Rom I used was at school around 1993. It was one of those newspaper archive CDs and you had to put it in the caddy then slot that into the drive. You could search all the newspapers articles using some crappy DOS interface.

Same here, although they were for the macs we had in our school library. Huge caddy type things.

[WibbleWorldGiddy]

My first Windows PC was a Pentium 2 300 with 64Mb RAM, 4GB hard disk (a huge 5.25 device), 2D graphics card and a 3DFX card. I had been pricing different spec machines up for two months and eventually bought it towards the end of 1997 for just under £2000. The addition of USB to the motherboard felt like a huge leap forward in technology, though I didn't buy anything that used it until years later. I remember the click sound that the machine made when it switched from the 2D card to 3DFX and amazement at the smoothness that the 3DFX gave to many games. I was amazed at the Glide versions of Quake and Quake 2 and completely blown away when a friend showed me UltraHLE running Mario64.

I couldn't afford any software and spent the first 6 months watching the 3DFX demos and playing a trial version of

. I bought a few PC magazines, but the need to install coverdisk software soon killed my interest. It was a huge annoyance to have to install software, test it, uninstall it and clean up the mess that had been left behind, after the convenience of the Amiga. I would buy an issue of PC Format or PC Review and try, maybe, one or two applications that looked interesting. By comparison, I'd buy the latest issues of Amiga Format & CU Amiga and go through every single application and game on the CD-ROM. The experience of buying a magazine has never been the same.

Sadly, the machine was killed in April/May 2000 by a trojan that flashed the BIOS and corrupted the hard disk. I can't remember the virus or virus checker I was using at the time. Only that the trojan was configured to activate on a certain day and the virus checker (a rubbish one that had been given away on a coverdisk) didn't catch it. Although it was costly to replace and a huge annoyance I felt lucky that it hadn't struck a few weeks earlier when I had been working on my uni. dissertation. I lost some work on a paper, but was able to re-write it before the submission deadline. I managed to retrieve the content of the hard disk a few years later and was amazed at the slow speed and small capacity of the disk.