Back in the day

A

Audiochris

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 23, 2000
Messages
1,290
Anyone else remember the early days of case modding? Athlon processors were on daughter cards and were topping out at 850MHz, a 40GB hard drive was huge, and a GeForce 2 with 32MB of RAM was a top of the line card. Modding you case was not a mainstream activity like it is today. If you wanted a window you went to home depot, bought some lexan and got some rubber molding from an auto parts store, grabbed a dremel tool and hacked away. Rounded ide cables? Couldn't walk into a computer store and buy them, you had to make them yourself. Fan controller? Nope, that was a custom job as well. Water cooling? Good luck. I miss those days. Damn, I'm getting old.
 
back in the day... darn youngsters. I rember not even having a hdd in my home computer, but as far as case modding I would say it started around the TNT/Matrox Mystique/Voodoo video card era.

hell I rember having a Matrox Mystique and it being one of the better vid cards of the time and if i rember right there was a slot on it to upgrade the ram.

also had a Voodoo "SLI" setup.

this was about the start of having fancy looking internal parts and I rember seeing modded cases even this far back.
 
...the good old days when you had a 2d graphics card and a 3d Accelerator card.

...the good old days when you stared at the 33.6 kbps modem box for 20 minutes in the store dreaming about how much faster it would be vs your old 28.8 kbps modem.

...the good old days when you upgraded your "slow" 8MB of fast page RAM to 16MB of EDO RAM and said "whoa!"
 
Haha... 40 Gb HD ,I remember my first computer had a 4Gb drive and I wondered if I would ever fill it up! Needless to say, times have changed and it is a constant struggle to keep adequate space free.
 
Installing a large game that had 9+ floppy disks (I'm talking to you ultima 9 part 2 serpents isle) but had to return the game 7 times becuase of bad floppy disks .


Playing the DOS himem game. Dang this game needs the lower 640 k of ram free to run. Ok let's disable mouse drivers, change the config.sys and autoexec.bat try the NEW highmem386 to see if it frees up 640k. Nope I am at 638k. Now what. Omg playing games back in the dos days was fun to even start them up.
 
bobstone said:
Playing the DOS himem game. Dang this game needs the lower 640 k of ram free to run. Ok let's disable mouse drivers, change the config.sys and autoexec.bat try the NEW highmem386 to see if it frees up 640k. Nope I am at 638k. Now what. Omg playing games back in the dos days was fun to even start them up.
Click to expand...

Take out DOSKEY, that's 5k right there!
 
I dont remember DOSKEY, was that the one that let you use the up and down arrows to retrive prior cmds ??

been so long since I used dos, I rember making coustom cmd prompt layouts in the autoexec tho, that was fun.
 
I think you're right. I had a brand new TNT2. Now that I think about it my specs might be too high. 1998 was the year I was referring to. I was a senior in high school. Before that it was plain beige cases.
 
I have been thinking of building a Voodoo 2 SLI setup for a while. A nostalgia rig to play Quake 2, and some Unreal.

One of these days I will rock it... one of these days.
 
I remember when Virtual-Hideout had the sweetest case mod gallery... I think I was on page four. :cool:
 
Audiochris said:
I think you're right. I had a brand new TNT2. Now that I think about it my specs might be too high. 1998 was the year I was referring to. I was a senior in high school. Before that it was plain beige cases.
Click to expand...

That's about the right time frame. I used to install car stereos back in the 80s and early 90s and a LOT of the exact same trends for both cooling and style/looks/bling began to take hold in computers (and are still developing) that had already occurred on the automotive front.

I can remember very distinctly watching the [H] burgeon into one of the early scenes for system modding back in the days of Alpha heatsinks, circa ~1998-2000 so and soon we had the original guys who did fully submerged liquid cooling using the expensive 3M goop as well as the earliest users that I can recall playing w/ liquid nitrogen. I also remember that we used removable hdd cages for our lab at school, and the size of our hdds was humongous for the time, 8GB whoa look out! I still have both of mine (yes, a total of 16GB, I was a storage god) w/ old ass powerpoint lectures 'n' school projects.
 
Remeber having to use jumper settings to get the machine even working, far less overclocking?
 
shawnoen said:
I remember installing Windows.....with a huge handful of floppy disks. :)
Click to expand...

WFWG 3.11 had 8 floppies and 3 floppies for DOS 6.2.......still have them right in the desk drawer....can't believe I hang onto this stuff :)
 
Cajunheat said:
Haha... 40 Gb HD ,I remember my first computer had a 4Gb drive and I wondered if I would ever fill it up! Needless to say, times have changed and it is a constant struggle to keep adequate space free.
Click to expand...

My first computer had a 120meg SCSI hard drive and 6MB ram (2MB Chip and 4MB Fast).
The next year a bought an expensive video card and had to add a hard drive so that the software would fit and more memory, added 8MB more. the software was about 120MB and was on floppies.
My computer was an Amiga 3000 and the video card was a Newtek Video Toaster 4000.
 
Ya'll are losing the point... case MODDING :)

I think my first mod was drilling holes in the front of my PII 400 machine to improve airflow... a plain jane beige case... oh so boring!
 
ATLPIMP said:
I remember when Virtual-Hideout had the sweetest case mod gallery... I think I was on page four. :cool:
Click to expand...

Totally. I had a couple cases on there.

I think my first mod was drilling holes in the front of my PII 400 machine to improve airflow... a plain jane beige case... oh so boring!
Click to expand...

Same here except it was an AMD K62
 
my first rig was a packard bell with a p75 that i oc'd to 90 and it had 2 2x cd roms.
 
@mashie

That cooling rig is *still* awesome. In a contest, I'd give 1st place to that over any of the prefab rigs so commonplace today. Back then, watercooling didn't just take a huge pair, it took fab skills as well. Ah, memories...
 
Met-AL said:
Water cooling takes a huge pair, now?
Click to expand...

Depends on how crazy you wanna get.

I'd say the risk is far less now. You can pretty much buy anything you want now, while before you were looking at some time spent milling in the garage, or checking out heater cores at the local auto parts store.
 
I remember boot disks for everything on my apple IIgs. I hated all my friends with their IBMs that could play games that weren't educational. Leisure suit larry and such.
 
Power5 said:
I remember boot disks for everything on my apple IIgs. I hated all my friends with their IBMs that could play games that weren't educational. Leisure suit larry and such.
Click to expand...

They could all get the clap, whereas you could only die of dysentery. :p
 
I'm going to need to see if I can find any of my pictures of old systems... I had some good ones back in the day :)

If I can find it, the creme of the crop for me was my TEC cooler PIII w/ evaporative cooling system!
 
I still have my first computer, a Packard Bell. It came with a P1 75MHz, 8MB of RAM, a 14.4k modem, and an 850MB HDD. I still use it to play old DOS games. I remember upgrading the CPU, HDD, and RAM and thinking how utterly fast it was.

LOL

Then I remember my first cast modding experience. I built a dual P3 800MHz system. I painted the case and and I cut and installed my own window. And I installed blue and white LEDs back before everyone was. I really miss those days when I actually did case modding.

Front.jpg


LEDs.jpg


Side.jpg


WiresBefore.jpg


WiresAfter.jpg


justbsn2 said:
Sorry mashie. I dont think 2001 qualifies for "Back in the day" Nice Rig though.
Click to expand...

Considering how fast computers age, 2001 is pretty old in my book.
 
And the cable routing is top notch, along with the sleeving.

Just messing with you.

My computers in my sig are my first non-prebuilt, so I have nothing constructive to add to the thread. Biggest mod i have done is the painted interior on my 900 with cable hiding. Next is a hot swap HDD mod to my HTPC.
 
My first computer was the commodore 64 and a tandy 1000... so back in the day...
 
aggr1103 said:
OMG.

My first comp was a tandy 1000 RL. All I ever did on it was play hangman and epyx games that could fit on 3.5 floppies.
Click to expand...


hehe, it has been a while but I think I was playing "Space Quest 1" and "Zork" on mine.
 
justbsn2 said:
WOW! How many years back was that?
Click to expand...

As was pointed out, early Tandy computers didn't have hard drives. Really early ones didn't even come with a floppy drive! I remember, back in 1981, a guy on my first (navy) ship that had a Tandy, and he loaded the game he played with an audio cassette player! Yep, stick the cassette tape in the player, turn on the computer, and hit PLAY on the cassette machine.......then wait upwards of HALF AN HOUR for the game to load!! :eek:

And since your machine had no hard drive, when you were done playing, you turned off the machine, and couldn't save it! :rolleyes:

Anyone remember, back in 1997, when video cards came with different lettered ram? I remember I had a Matrox Millenium video card with 4mb of W-Ram! :D
 
tandy 1000 for me, played castle, Microsoft Flight Simulator, hangman, and a ton of text based games. Even programmed my own "choose your own adventure" game. of course I was 7. When I really got into computers it was when I was 10 and we got a Pentium 166(Sony Vaio) with windows 95. I remember when it booted my dads jaw dropped and said look at those graphics...and that was just on the desktop.lol I played Mechwarrior 2 on that system... its what I attribute my current obsessiveness to.
 
I remember trying to silence those Delta fans that seemed to come standard in every power supply back in the day.
 
Paying $400 for 8 megs of RAM so i could run photoshop 3 on a 486
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top