I Only Meant to Stay a While
Feb. 5th, 2006 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolariThe Archaeological Dig that was Cleaning Jenn's Room.
Back in the day, 486 chips came soldered onto your motherboards. It was pretty much impossible to take off (unless you felt like unsoldering some 250 pins, then resoldering them). Intel and IBM though, got sneaky. They added what they called an "Overdrive" socket to their computers. So you COULD upgrade their computers...but only with a specialized chip provided by IBM and/or Intel. A really expensive chip. My 486/33 was a dinosaur by 1994, and a friend told me to upgrade it. When I told him all it had was an Intel Overdrive socket, he said "Well. We can't have any of that!"
A few weeks later in the mail came this monstrosity with the instruction "Plug this in your Overdrive Socket. If it starts to smoke, turn off your computer."
He had managed to find out what every pin on that overdrive socket did, and found out it was just a standard 486 socket, with a few of the pins moved around so a real 486 chip wouldn't work. He grabbed the AMD equivalent of a 486/100 and meticulously added layer upon layer of pinouts, channeling wires through and individually soldering about 20 or thirty pins on one layer, and another ten or so on a second layer.
And what the hell! It WORKED! I had a fully functioning 486/100, which lasted me from 1994 to 1997, and never smoked once. :)
All the DVDs FINALLY put in their place after being strewn around the room in piles for months. You'd thing those three turntables would fall, but they haven't.
And yes, they're all legal. I put them in jewel cases cause they dont' take up as much room.
I got this lovely PCJr in 1985, my very first real computer...unfortunately IBM had discontinued the line in late 1984 and the store they bought them from was clearing out their inventory by huckstering my parents into buying this. Mind you, in the beginning it was only the bottom most segment with 128k RAM. We got that printer (a thermax fax-paper printer!) a year later from another closeout company.
I credit all my Computer Saavy to this computer. It was so obsolete and limited and INCREDIBLY modular, that I learned how everything ran all together and how stuff worked inside.
In 1988 my mom mentioned she had bought another computer. YAY! SOMETHING REAL THIS TIME! Then she told me she got it for $1. It was ANOTHER PCjr. However, this one had two bays on it, and according to the guy she bought it from was shot. And it was. Very shot. I took it apart and reassembled it onto the old PCjr and it turned on (the other wouldn't even post). However it had a bad memory chip in it.
Back in these days, there were no memory sticks. Just chips. Stuck in slots. I ended up pulling EVERY memory chip out till the error stopped popping up. Then put all the chips back in, and bought a replacement chip from Altex in San Antonio (when they literally were a radio parts store that just happened to carry various chips). Popped that baby in and WHAM! Working PCjr with TWO drive. I got a copy of Windows 1 cheap for it. :)
WARNING TECHIE NOTES AHEAD: The neat thing about the PC jr is that it dynamically structured memory around, always using the top 300some KB for system usage. In today's 486/Pentium world, that's why you only have 640k of "Conventional Memory." The computer uses the first 640 to run programs, and the next 364 for Upper Memory. Well, the PC jr ALWAYS took the top for it's memory no matter how much was in there. Most computers, you're stuck with 640 conventional memory, even today. The PCJr could get 720. Ooooooohhhhhh....not that that's very impressive anymore, but back in the 80s, the more KB you got, the happier you were. TECHIE STUFF OVER!
I used that computer to 1992 when I got that 486/33. This still works, although parts have gone missing. And I swear that printer used to be the same color as the computer. :)
This pristine baby holds a whopping 360k. 720 if you turn it upside down. It's vintage 1980s. A coworker found a sealed brand new box of these in 2003 behind a bookcase, and gave everyone one. It still has that plasticy smell. :)
Doesn't work, needs to be opened and cleaned out because of that damned toaster tray it has.
All that's left of the mighty Dolari Gaming World. I used to have a LOT more games for these systems, but had to sell them all off over the years. And I havne't seen my Atari 2600 in a decade.
There's two Dreamcasts and a 3DO on the cabinet to the left of the Genesis. The black box to the right of the now yellowed SNES is a Sega Nomad, which got a LOT of use back in the mid 90s, when all you had for a portable was Game Boy. The Nomad is a Portable Genesis machine. Made for good times waiting at night for newspapers.
There's a story behind the Genesis. That's Dean's. You see, one day, while taking the garbage out, he spied a Sega Genesis in the dumpster, with games and controllers and power cords. So he fished it out, and it worked just fine...whoever threw it out, obviously threw it out simply because he got an XBox or something. I STILL have a 3DO. Don't throw those babies away if they have GOOD GAMES!
Ah, the memories. In the US, the Gameshark was very neat little cheating machine for the Playstation 1. But if you lived in the UK, this little thing was called a Pro Action Replay...and with a little PC add-on became this incredibly powerful Sony Playstation Debugger. You could divine your own codes, download the video memory to your PC, play with the memory registers, it was GREAT. But you couldn't get it from Interact, who licensed it for the US. Interact, in fact, would only get you new codes if you subscribed to their newsletter and you had to buy upgrade disks.
Thankfully, the parent company, Datel had no such qualms. They kept putting up new codes for free including codes from folks with the PC Comms Link add-on who made their own codes at home. After talkig with one of the Datel developers (the early days of the internet...you could TALK to people who were big wigs on their level just by writing to them), I managed to buy a PC Comms Link, downloaded the new BIOS for it, and now I had the worlds most powerful Gameshark. At least in the US (I found out later, only about 10 or 20 people ever bought a Comms Link in the US, while thousands had been sold in the UK).
I made a bajillion codes. You can still find them on the net out there if you look hard enough. Interact was not happy with me. :)
Laugh. Go on. Laugh. Really. Let me help:
A gift from my best friend Steph. It's actually kinda cool if you ask me. :D
That's a cordless screwdriver. Get your minds out of the gutter.
Here's why I replaced the DVD burner. This spattering pattern is what I've been getting a lot of lately when burning, on top of read errors on regular disks. At first I thought maybe it was some kinda schmutz on the disks but they're clean, and occasionally a burned DVD will get a completely straight line of no data right through the disk. The lens is prolly going out. Either way, a few months ago, I got my first spattered DVD, and now one in about 5 looks that bad.
* Name a CD you own that you think no one else on your friends list does: Julee Cruise - Floating into the Night
* Name a book you own that you think no one else on your friends list does:
Einstien's Universe by Nigel Calder
* Name a Movie/DVD/VHS that you think no one else on your friends list has: Dot and the Kangaroo. On DVD no less!
* Name a place that you have visited that you think no one else on your friends list has: Just One?! The Big Joshua Creek Waterfall. The old Edge Falls Water Resort. Fredericksburg and Northern Railroad Tunnel. Royer's in Round Rock. Should I go on?
* Name a tool/piece of technology that you think you use in a way no one else on your friends list does: See the "Overdrive CPU" article above.
Back in the day, 486 chips came soldered onto your motherboards. It was pretty much impossible to take off (unless you felt like unsoldering some 250 pins, then resoldering them). Intel and IBM though, got sneaky. They added what they called an "Overdrive" socket to their computers. So you COULD upgrade their computers...but only with a specialized chip provided by IBM and/or Intel. A really expensive chip. My 486/33 was a dinosaur by 1994, and a friend told me to upgrade it. When I told him all it had was an Intel Overdrive socket, he said "Well. We can't have any of that!"
A few weeks later in the mail came this monstrosity with the instruction "Plug this in your Overdrive Socket. If it starts to smoke, turn off your computer."
He had managed to find out what every pin on that overdrive socket did, and found out it was just a standard 486 socket, with a few of the pins moved around so a real 486 chip wouldn't work. He grabbed the AMD equivalent of a 486/100 and meticulously added layer upon layer of pinouts, channeling wires through and individually soldering about 20 or thirty pins on one layer, and another ten or so on a second layer.
And what the hell! It WORKED! I had a fully functioning 486/100, which lasted me from 1994 to 1997, and never smoked once. :)
All the DVDs FINALLY put in their place after being strewn around the room in piles for months. You'd thing those three turntables would fall, but they haven't.
And yes, they're all legal. I put them in jewel cases cause they dont' take up as much room.
I got this lovely PCJr in 1985, my very first real computer...unfortunately IBM had discontinued the line in late 1984 and the store they bought them from was clearing out their inventory by huckstering my parents into buying this. Mind you, in the beginning it was only the bottom most segment with 128k RAM. We got that printer (a thermax fax-paper printer!) a year later from another closeout company.
I credit all my Computer Saavy to this computer. It was so obsolete and limited and INCREDIBLY modular, that I learned how everything ran all together and how stuff worked inside.
In 1988 my mom mentioned she had bought another computer. YAY! SOMETHING REAL THIS TIME! Then she told me she got it for $1. It was ANOTHER PCjr. However, this one had two bays on it, and according to the guy she bought it from was shot. And it was. Very shot. I took it apart and reassembled it onto the old PCjr and it turned on (the other wouldn't even post). However it had a bad memory chip in it.
Back in these days, there were no memory sticks. Just chips. Stuck in slots. I ended up pulling EVERY memory chip out till the error stopped popping up. Then put all the chips back in, and bought a replacement chip from Altex in San Antonio (when they literally were a radio parts store that just happened to carry various chips). Popped that baby in and WHAM! Working PCjr with TWO drive. I got a copy of Windows 1 cheap for it. :)
WARNING TECHIE NOTES AHEAD: The neat thing about the PC jr is that it dynamically structured memory around, always using the top 300some KB for system usage. In today's 486/Pentium world, that's why you only have 640k of "Conventional Memory." The computer uses the first 640 to run programs, and the next 364 for Upper Memory. Well, the PC jr ALWAYS took the top for it's memory no matter how much was in there. Most computers, you're stuck with 640 conventional memory, even today. The PCJr could get 720. Ooooooohhhhhh....not that that's very impressive anymore, but back in the 80s, the more KB you got, the happier you were. TECHIE STUFF OVER!
I used that computer to 1992 when I got that 486/33. This still works, although parts have gone missing. And I swear that printer used to be the same color as the computer. :)
This pristine baby holds a whopping 360k. 720 if you turn it upside down. It's vintage 1980s. A coworker found a sealed brand new box of these in 2003 behind a bookcase, and gave everyone one. It still has that plasticy smell. :)
Doesn't work, needs to be opened and cleaned out because of that damned toaster tray it has.
All that's left of the mighty Dolari Gaming World. I used to have a LOT more games for these systems, but had to sell them all off over the years. And I havne't seen my Atari 2600 in a decade.
There's two Dreamcasts and a 3DO on the cabinet to the left of the Genesis. The black box to the right of the now yellowed SNES is a Sega Nomad, which got a LOT of use back in the mid 90s, when all you had for a portable was Game Boy. The Nomad is a Portable Genesis machine. Made for good times waiting at night for newspapers.
There's a story behind the Genesis. That's Dean's. You see, one day, while taking the garbage out, he spied a Sega Genesis in the dumpster, with games and controllers and power cords. So he fished it out, and it worked just fine...whoever threw it out, obviously threw it out simply because he got an XBox or something. I STILL have a 3DO. Don't throw those babies away if they have GOOD GAMES!
Ah, the memories. In the US, the Gameshark was very neat little cheating machine for the Playstation 1. But if you lived in the UK, this little thing was called a Pro Action Replay...and with a little PC add-on became this incredibly powerful Sony Playstation Debugger. You could divine your own codes, download the video memory to your PC, play with the memory registers, it was GREAT. But you couldn't get it from Interact, who licensed it for the US. Interact, in fact, would only get you new codes if you subscribed to their newsletter and you had to buy upgrade disks.
Thankfully, the parent company, Datel had no such qualms. They kept putting up new codes for free including codes from folks with the PC Comms Link add-on who made their own codes at home. After talkig with one of the Datel developers (the early days of the internet...you could TALK to people who were big wigs on their level just by writing to them), I managed to buy a PC Comms Link, downloaded the new BIOS for it, and now I had the worlds most powerful Gameshark. At least in the US (I found out later, only about 10 or 20 people ever bought a Comms Link in the US, while thousands had been sold in the UK).
I made a bajillion codes. You can still find them on the net out there if you look hard enough. Interact was not happy with me. :)
Laugh. Go on. Laugh. Really. Let me help:
A gift from my best friend Steph. It's actually kinda cool if you ask me. :D
That's a cordless screwdriver. Get your minds out of the gutter.
Here's why I replaced the DVD burner. This spattering pattern is what I've been getting a lot of lately when burning, on top of read errors on regular disks. At first I thought maybe it was some kinda schmutz on the disks but they're clean, and occasionally a burned DVD will get a completely straight line of no data right through the disk. The lens is prolly going out. Either way, a few months ago, I got my first spattered DVD, and now one in about 5 looks that bad.
* Name a CD you own that you think no one else on your friends list does: Julee Cruise - Floating into the Night
* Name a book you own that you think no one else on your friends list does:
Einstien's Universe by Nigel Calder
* Name a Movie/DVD/VHS that you think no one else on your friends list has: Dot and the Kangaroo. On DVD no less!
* Name a place that you have visited that you think no one else on your friends list has: Just One?! The Big Joshua Creek Waterfall. The old Edge Falls Water Resort. Fredericksburg and Northern Railroad Tunnel. Royer's in Round Rock. Should I go on?
* Name a tool/piece of technology that you think you use in a way no one else on your friends list does: See the "Overdrive CPU" article above.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 08:55 pm (UTC)Got it. :-)
Cheers,
Gwen Smith
no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
* Name a CD you own that you think no one else on your friends list does:
World Domination or Death Volume 1, a compilation of bad taste Icelandish music. I believe I tried listening to it a grand total of once, about 15 years ago.
* Name a book you own that you think no one else on your friends list does:
_The Solution as Part of the Problem,_ an edited collection blasting the mindset of the mainstream solution to perceived problems with education in the 1960s, which was quite effective compared to what we have 40 years later. If you remember the Far Side cartoon about 'Part of the Problem 25th Anniversary Reunion,' it's talking about the same declaration of 'if you aren't part of the [simplistic and misguided] solution, you're part of the [incorrectly perceived] problem.'
* Name a Movie/DVD/VHS that you think no one else on your friends list has:
Nothing I want to admit to having or used to have had. Lame, waste of money, time, and storage space, grabbed on impulse because AAFES* was dumping it. More than one dust gathering and long misplaced VHS cassette falls into this category.
>Dot and the Kangaroo. On DVD no less!<
I actually remember that movie...
* Name a place that you have visited that you think no one else on your friends list has:
The Roman gate at Trier, north of Bitburg. Alas, it's the only surviving Roman structure at the ancient city of Trier. If I wanted to cheat I could say behind the flightline at Zweibruecken AB in a small bunker (I don't remember how many there were or how many I visited or what the specific reasons were) where they stored the Mission Readiness kits for the RF-4Cs. If you didn't have a flight badge, you didn't get behind the flightline without getting arrested and/or shot.
* Name a tool/piece of technology that you think you use in a way no one else on your friends list does:
I used to have a Harris 286/25; does that count? Admittedly I never actually used it. Harris made the fastest 286; AMD made the fastest 386 and 486; Intel broke the pattern and made a 300 MHz 586 long after everyone else had stopped making 586s, a pattern they may have maintained ever since, although I have no clue what generation Centaur is in. Anyone have a guess?
SL
* Army and Air Force Exchange Service. I have very few nice things to say about AAFES-Europe circa 1990.
Dot and the Roo
Date: 2006-02-05 11:09 pm (UTC)Don't have it exactly, but I've watched my local library's copy! You know this was based on a kid's book? I read that, the Wizard of Oz, and Blinky Bill when I was young.
Re: Dot and the Roo
Date: 2006-02-07 12:18 am (UTC)Re: Dot and the Roo
Date: 2006-02-07 07:46 am (UTC)Re: Dot and the Roo
Date: 2006-02-11 07:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 02:39 am (UTC)* Name a CD you own that you think no one else on your friends list does: Yello - The Race/ Oh Yeah CD single from 1988. (The second CD I ever bought, iirc.)
* Name a book you own that you think no one else on your friends list does: How To Make Good Recordings (copyright 1940 Audio Devices, makers of Audiodisc recording blanks)
* Name a Movie/DVD/VHS that you think no one else on your friends list has: Hmm... I'm not much for collecting movies - most of the stuff I've taped off Moviechanel is pretty commonplace, but I do have "Kitchen Party" (a Canadian indie movie) taped off CityTV.
* Name a place that you have visited that you think no one else on your friends list has: the old Kinsol railway trestle west of Shawnigan Lake
* Name a tool/piece of technology that you think you use in a way no one else on your friends list does: The old battery charger for a bike light system was reborn as the power supply for the heated stylus on my record lathe.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 12:11 am (UTC)I dunno what happened to that printer AND the SNES...they were both in complete darkness in a closet, and turned nasty yellow....
no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 07:39 am (UTC)On to your meme, since everyone else is answering it:
* Name a CD you own that you think no one else on your friends list does: "The Dark Side of Utah." A live recording of Phish, in Salt Lake City, doing *all* of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." A very good, straight-on cover - except for the rather unique interpretation of "Great Gig in the Sky."
* Name a book you own that you think no one else on your friends list does: Taking a cue from
* Name a Movie/DVD/VHS that you think no one else on your friends list has: I'll have to go with "Fail Safe," one of my Cold War-era faves.
* Name a place that you have visited that you think no one else on your friends list has: The WWII landing beaches in Normandy, France. Quite a sobering experience.
* Name a tool/piece of technology that you think you use in a way no one else on your friends list does: I've got a Yamaha ProMix 01 audio mixer on my desk, serving as the main audio I/O for my Mac. Overkill? You bet. But it sounds darn good, and I like what the built in comp/limiter does to my voice.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 12:05 am (UTC)Wow. Okay! Sure!
Actually, I'd been meaning to ask about your Star Wars laserdiscs. I'd love to borrow them (and your player) to record them to DVD. Or, conversely, I could go over there with my PC and encode them myself. :)
And THANK YOU for the KOKE-AM pointer. I love that place. Now if they'd play Art Bell over night, I'd have no reason to dig around on the net to NOT listen to KLBJ. :)