Remember when graphics cards looked like this?

Cool, and no problem, I can understand German. :slightly_smiling_face::+1:

Cool! :+1: I had a C128 as a boy, then moved over to an Amiga 1000. It inspired me to become a professional game designer for about 10 years.

The first computer I had was a Mac Quadra and I used the on-board video for that. My first PC was a Compaq 386 and it used an ISA video card - I can’t remember the make or model. I then graduated to an S3 ViRGE when I got a Pentium 150, then I added a 3DFX Voodoo 1 card to that.

Later on I had TNT Vantas in my machines (which was an Nvidia card by the way). I too had a few bad experiences with trying to play accelerated Quake II on early ATI cards and vowed never again. I switched over to Matrox cards for a while till they stopped being relevant.

Ah my first video card was a Voodoo 3 3000. I (well, the family) got a Pentium 2 350Mhz PC for Christmas in 1998. I remember playing Half-Life on it in ‘Software’ mode. Then in late 1999 I got a Voodoo 3 for my birthday and it changed my PC gaming world.

I was: Vic-20 > C64 > Amiga 500 > Amiga 1200 > 486 DX2 66mhz - Then onto a long list of PCs

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It seems like the age of inspiring computers gone, now that changes happen way to fast, we do not get to enjoy them like we did with those C64s and Amigas for a long time.

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My trip was very similar :slight_smile:

Commodore PET > Timex-Sinclair 1000 > Vic20 > C64 > Amiga 500 > Amiga1200 > Amiga 3000 > PowerPC Mac > then to a long list of Linux machines.

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“First computer?” Koff, koff …

I also have an original Apple-1 motherboard that is not for sale. … :smiley:

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You were very steady with your upgrades

Well, people wonder how I got that motherboard. Ummm, I bought it. At a store. :smiley:

And I still get a kick out of watching people these days playing with “Arduenos.”

“Here we are, forty years later, still playing around with circuit boards …”

(And doing stuff, with tools like Blender, that no one could have imagined, in the day.)

I know a German dude that made an OS with GUIs , multitasking, internet and video support.

What’s the big deal ?

He made it for my first computer , Amstrad CPC 6128. 4mhz of CPU power and an amazing 128kbs of memory. His OS uses only half that.

Fun Fact: People are making better games for this almost 40 year old computer , than it’s company and major game companies at the time were making. Yes it was a very popular computer at its time, the second most popular. It has also a very active community and a ton of emulators if one does not want to bother with buying the hardware.

Fun Fact 2: A respectable processing power for its time but that computer now is only 3 million times slower than an average pc.

Fun Fact 3: Most people do not realize that even raspberry pi, costing 40 euros/dollars would enough to cause World War 3 , if you took it back in time for more than 3 decades. All the money in the world of the 1980s would not be enough to buy a raspberry pi, to give you a perspective that “causing World War 3” is not exaggeration at all. Imagine buying all the countries in the world selling a raspberry pi :smiley:

Meh! I had one of those too! 3dfx Voodoo. First PC I’ve built! :laughing:

This sounds similar to argument that Saddam could have used PS2s (of that time) to change the power balance around the region (they implied the Ps2 could have used for fast missile calculations), well at least that was the news headline I read in early 2000s. That was sily because anyone could have used PS2s to change any power balance they wanted to change if they wanted such thing.

I agree. Even the humble bread knife can be used to make a delicious sandwich… or stab people. Equipment and technology do not make wars, people do.

Fun fact: the first run of the Amiga had the B52s Rock Lobster etched onto the back of the main board, and the main chips were named after the core teams wives & girlfriends (Agnes, Paula & Denise).

Make love not war. I totally get the Microsoft developers standing up at the moment over the Holo Lens military contract. I hope it works.

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Good info! I did not know that. This is like Debian ( Wikipedia: The word “Debian” was formed as a portmanteau of the first name of his then-girlfriend (later ex-wife) Debra Lynn and his own first name)

Btw I meant PS2 not PS3

Well who knows, maybe the world would lie in ruins now if Saddam hadn’t been such a Nintendo fanboi :slight_smile:

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yeah my argument was about the money worth of the technology not to be actually used as technology. One could replace it with whatever could buy him the planet at the time.

Nice! Other Amiga models had B-52 related easter eggs - the designers where huge fans.

Always makes me giggle when I read Terry Pratchett - Theres a fictional band in his Discworld novels called “They Could Be Dwarves” which was a parody of the real world band “They Might Be Giants” which was his favourite. He also used about 8 screens on his computer to write his books… I could use that many to do 3D!

Nowadays, instead all we get is Spectre and Meltdown easter eggs :slight_smile:

Chip bugs were used to improve the performace back then. Now they force us to dowgrade the claimed cpu performances. We should ask all our money back from Intel since they literally downgraded our cpu performances with their latest patches.

They do it anyway, bug or no bug. Most chips can ran faster then the box says. They play it safe and lock it as high as they dare. It’s down to the batch of silicon, no two batches are the same, some can go lots faster, some can go a little faster so they slap 3ghz on the box knowing you will definitely get that speed out of it (but you can probably squeeze a little more out through overclocking).