What was the worst computer you ever bought and why?

[Leonard Smith]

As a kid, I was grateful just to have a computer.  
However, my parents weren't in a position (or fully understood) to buy all needed accessories, so my computing was rather limited.

 

My mother bought us all a Vic-20 (just the computer, no tape or floppy disk drive), so while it was cool to dabble with BASIC and a few cartridge games, it was all a hollow experience since you couldn't ever save anything which meant BASIC programs were limited to what you could type in a few hours, only to lose it all after powering down.

 

We had the Vic20 and Timex Sinclair or whatever it was called.  I can't say they were the worst computers, just that I couldn't full utilize them and I came away rather soured from the experience.  

I've had some really dire passive matrix display Apple Powerbooks that certainly take the top crown for the worst computers, lol. 

[zzip]

9 hours ago, H454 said:

Does anybody remember COMPUTER SHOWS!?! AT YOUR LOCAL FAIRGROUNDS! FRIDAY TROUGH SUNDAY ONLY!

Crappy clone motherboards with no cache.

CYRIX 586

Crappy video cards

Used to hit the computer shows quite a bit in the 90s.   You could get name-brand parts if you knew what you are looking for.   Yeah they sold lots of no-brand cheap stuff, but we knew enough to avoid that ?

[H454]

5 hours ago, zzip said:

Used to hit the computer shows quite a bit in the 90s.   You could get name-brand parts if you knew what you are looking for.   Yeah they sold lots of no-brand cheap stuff, but we knew enough to avoid that ?

Well I didn't.

I was I fifth 6th grade in '96. I saw a special on PBS about computers and figured any idiot can build their own computer.

And until getting 4-5 years experience / knowledge, I was one of those idiots.

[wierd_w]

It very much depended on the generic, if I remember correctly.

 

Modems? NEVER GENERIC.

CDRoms? Depended-- Some were quite nice- others, pure dog doo. Market research on item prior to purchase.

RAM-- Never Generic.  Even some namebrand had issues. Market research prior to purchase

Hard drive-- Model specific. Same as today. Some generalities with brand and class, but very model specific for failure rates.

Motherboard-- Try to stick with more reputable generics, like MSI, TDK, etc.

Soundcard-- Assuming you dont want or need wavetable synthesis, you could get a lot of mileage out of a sound galaxy washington.

Floppy drive-- Really now, stick with NEC and other respected brands.

System chasis-- As long as the screw locations are in the right spots, and the form factor cutout is proper, it doesnt matter. At worst, you will have to deburr parts of the case.

PSU-- You get what you pay for.

Graphics Card-- Much like today, there were dozens of generic cards built on specific chips. There were some name brand cards, like ATI Wonder, and pals-- which were especially more common in the late 80s and early 90s, but by the heyday of BYO system craze, generic cards were common. (All the different Voodoo based cards, et al.)

 

 

[Keatah]

10 hours ago, H454 said:

I was I fifth 6th grade in '96. I saw a special on PBS about computers and figured any idiot can build their own computer.

As a middle-schooler I was totally unaware of the awesomeness hidden in the 800 pages of documentation that came with the Apple II. Learned a ton without realizing I was learning! Good hand holding through and through. Good explanations. Tons of technical stuff that stretched my head. Yet there were introductory paragraphs and clear-cut examples understandable by a freshly minted teen. Or pre-teen.

 

And fortunately I learned PC OS'es like DOS and Windows on a turnkey GW2K.

 

But unfortunately my PC building experience started out with too many overclocking sites as a guide. Or mis-guide. All they taught me was to spend more money on diminishing gains - to be #1 for a shining moment that no one gave a rat's ass about.

[wierd_w]

I got into the pool a bit later than everyone else here it seems.  Part of being an 80s brat.

 

I really got into computers in the early to mid 90s. Folks were insistent that computers were just too expensive prior, and felt there was no need (at all!) to indulge the desires of their children's expensive tastes.

 

The first family computer (Dad had a PCjr for work related things in the late 80s, but that was "FOR WORK", despite having the swanky not-quite EGA graphics, and Tandy 3-voice audio synthesis capabilities. The only game was the one that came with it-- KQ1.) was an AST Advantage 486sx-33, with cirrus logic video.  Did not come with sound hardware. Came with 4mb of RAM, and a teeny tiny hard drive.  I think the year was 1993-ish?

 

Mom finally decided that maybe, I should be allowed to indulge technical work as a vocation, after catching me with that thing in pieces, doing a clandestine ram and sound upgrade. 

 

Unlike computers of Yore, machines of that era did not come with a comprehensive whitepaper.  I had to pick up tricks and skill-sets the hard way.  Thankfully, my time at the Mom&Pop place mom scored me a summer job at later that year, paid lots of dividends when it came to gaining that skill and knowledge-base.  Saw and dealt with all manner of shenanigans.  Also got to see all manner of generic hardware, both good and bad.  (which is how I tended to select which generic hardware I would buy for myself...)

 

I remember, sometime around 1996, we got a shipment of generic HSC Winmodems.  They were the worst kind of host software controlled modem you can wrap your head around, if you dared to try imagining something that awful.  I remember they were "Genica" brand. I would off-handedly refer to them as "Junkica modems" or "Generica".  While billed as 56k with v90 and USR communication standards, they could barely connect (on VERY clean phonelines!) at 33.6k.  They often caused bluescreens and other shenanigans. Total garbage.  I hated them so damn much.

 

 

 

 

[zzip]

10 hours ago, wierd_w said:

Modems? NEVER GENERIC.

So many cheap "Winmodems" back then.   It paid to do your research.

 

10 hours ago, wierd_w said:

System chasis-- As long as the screw locations are in the right spots, and the form factor cutout is proper, it doesnt matter. At worst, you will have to deburr parts of the case.

Yeah I've bought some cheap cases back then.  The worst had build materials that felt only slightly better than aluminum foil, sharp edges, and slightly misaligned holes.   But I never found one that was unusable!  They were just annoyances

 

10 hours ago, wierd_w said:

Graphics Card-- Much like today, there were dozens of generic cards built on specific chips. There were some name brand cards, like ATI Wonder, and pals

In the 90s before 3D, chipset didn't seem to matter as much.   You probably wanted a local bus card (VLB, PCI) rather than ISA though for higher bandwidth.  When it came to DOS gaming they roughly performed similarly,   I'm not sure how many DOS games actually used the accelerated features of those chipsets.  

 

 

[wierd_w]

the namebrand cards were specific feature purchases.

 

Take the ATI EGA wonder, for example. It was one of maybe 3 cards on the market that were a drop-in upgrade replacement for the mcga card inside a compaq portable II luggable.  It had the 4 wire header, and operated at the correct refresh rates, to drive the portable II's internal monochrome composite monitor. (It was also faster in its data transfers to/from memory than IBM's EGA cards, did not suffer snow in the CGA modes, etc... But the BIG FEATURE was that it had that connector, and could do the drop-in replacement role.)

 

A later one, was the Matrox Millenium. One of the very first "dual-head" graphics cards for driving two monitors simultaneously.  It did not have any 3D capabilities to speak of, but it could do the kinds of office tasks people often utilize multiple monitors for today: Spreadsheet in one monitor, wordprocessor in another--- or email in one monitor, work in another-- et al.  It was one of the very first cards to offer this function, as typically, it was necessary to have two discrete graphics cards installed to drive two monitors. (A common solution was to have a decent graphics card with 3D features for the primary, and an S3 Virge or Trio as the secondary in a PCI slot.)

 

After about 1993, ATI really started shying away from special, namebrand, specific feature cards (IIRC, the last of the special feature cards was the ATI ALL-IN-WONDER) and towards generic cards based on their Rage chipset. (ATI had not yet been bought by AMD, and had not become the seed for Radeon graphics yet.)  nVidia and 3DFX very soon really pushed the market toward generics, with their chip licensing models, which saw lots of MSI and EVGA generic clone cards of both Voodoo3/banshee, and TNT/TNT2/RIVA128 chips.

 

It really came into its own as a land of generics after about 1996, iirc.

 

[MrMaddog]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

In the 90s before 3D, chipset didn't seem to matter as much.   You probably wanted a local bus card (VLB, PCI) rather than ISA though for higher bandwidth.  When it came to DOS gaming they roughly performed similarly,   I'm not sure how many DOS games actually used the accelerated features of those chipsets.  

 

 

I think VESA LocalBus video was made more for Windows because using a VGA card on ISA makes the screen redraws painfully slow.

 

I wouldn't think it was too bad for DOS games since VGA resolution is much lower than what Windows usually uses, but then again everyone was trying to squeeze as much performance out of Doom as they can...

 

[wierd_w]

1 minute ago, MrMaddog said:

I think VESA LocalBus video was made more for Windows because using a VGA card on ISA makes the screen redraws painfully slow.

 

I wouldn't think it was too bad for DOS games since VGA resolution is much lower than what Windows usually uses, but then again everyone was trying to squeeze as much performance out of Doom as they can...

 

More, the old cards all did their own things to get resolutions and color depths greater than baseline VGA. (640x480@4bit)

 

Most older DOS games targetted the so called "Mode X", which was 320x240@8bit color. This was because it was "in spec" behavior for basic VGA, and offered a nice color pallete-- and could thus be used with ANY VGA card.  These were the days before the VESA bios interface standard for utilizing the different bespoke methods of high color "SuperVGA" modes.  Games that made use of VESA video modes, would (By nature of the software to do it being baked into the card itself in its VESA bios) make use of the advanced chipset features inside the cards to do fancy stuff in higher resolution modes (like blitting, etc.), and came out much later.  Some cards had vastly better 2D performance than others, and could accept and draw screen data faster than others on the market.

 

Cirrus Logic and S3 had some rather fast 2D implementations, compared to other common video chipsets of the time.

 

Vesa Local Bus was a kludge to get 32bit bus access on the ISA slot architecture. It was not very stable, and relied far too heavily on the frontside bus being within a very narrow margin of idealized clocks, that were not always conserved in reality. 50mhz DX chips, for instance, were notorious for making VLB very angry.

 

Nobody shed any tears for it, when Intel released PCI.

[zzip]

37 minutes ago, MrMaddog said:

I think VESA LocalBus video was made more for Windows because using a VGA card on ISA makes the screen redraws painfully slow.

Yeah the ISA bus was 8.133Mhz @ 16bit data and VESA local bus was 32-bit @ typically 33mhz, but it could vary from 25-50mhz,  so it could push quite a bit more data.

 

30 minutes ago, wierd_w said:

Vesa Local Bus was a kludge to get 32bit bus access on the ISA slot architecture. It was not very stable, and relied far too heavily on the frontside bus being within a very narrow margin of idealized clocks, that were not always conserved in reality. 50mhz DX chips, for instance, were notorious for making VLB very angry.

 

Nobody shed any tears for it, when Intel released PCI.

VLB was also exclusive to the 486 I think.   Pentium and above needed something different anyway.  

[+OLD CS1]

6 hours ago, zzip said:

VLB was also exclusive to the 486 I think.

I only ever saw VLB on 486 boards.  Let me tell you how excited I was to get a 486 board with PCI.  Still have it

[KG7PFS]

I think the worst computer I ever bought was a Dell Inspiron 1121. I got it to replace a Dell Mini 9 that I loved, (no, I'm not into games, except rarely on 8-bit computers.) but the mini 9's keyboard was wearing out. The 1121 wasn't available with XP, only 7. I wanted the one with a tv tuner, but couldn't find one, so I got the one with WiFi and WiMax thinking I could just replace the WiMax card. It turned out I could have tv or WiFi, not both. I wore the silver paint off the touch pad. The cat laid on the keyboard and the 1 key came off. I never could get it back on.

 

When the power connector got flaky I replaced it with the second worst computer I ever bought - A second hand ThinkPad X220 Tablet. It was missing the stylus and the rubber pads around the keyboard, and bluetooth never worked at all.

 

The worst computer I never bought was an Amiga 500. In High school, everyone said how great Amiga was. The local Monkey Wards had an Amiga 500 on sale for $500.00 with a monitor and a bunch of software. I was doing good to have $5.00. $500 wasn't going to happen. After I got out of high school I played with a variety of 8-bit stuff found at yard sales, thrift shops, and flea markets and was soon very happy the CoCo 3.

 

Since then I have been tempeted to look into the A500 again. I downloaded a few back issues of Amiga World and other magazines. I wanted to see what software was available. Graphics Editors. Video Overlay. Graphics editors. Games. Graphics editors. A word processor. And graphics editors. I guess it's a good thing I couldn't afford an A500 in 1991. I'm afraid I would have been very dissapointed.

[H454]

23 hours ago, Keatah said:

As a middle-schooler I was totally unaware of the awesomeness hidden in the 800 pages of documentation that came with the Apple II. Learned a ton without realizing I was learning! Good hand holding through and through. Good explanations. Tons of technical stuff that stretched my head. Yet there were introductory paragraphs and clear-cut examples understandable by a freshly minted teen. Or pre-teen.

 

And fortunately I learned PC OS'es like DOS and Windows on a turnkey GW2K.

 

But unfortunately my PC building experience started out with too many overclocking sites as a guide. Or mis-guide. All they taught me was to spend more money on diminishing gains - to be #1 for a shining moment that no one gave a rat's ass about.

The apple II manuals are top notch. When I was In forth or fifth grade, got a second hand IIc with the original included manuals and disks.

They really made sure anybody could use that computer. Those manuals were probably the one of reasons I grew-up to like reading how-to books and text books.

Those and the readers digest how to repair books or The Way Things Work by David Macaulay.

 

 

 

[Keatah]

On 1/20/2022 at 11:29 PM, wierd_w said:

It very much depended on the generic, if I remember correctly.

 

Modems? NEVER GENERIC.

I learned the brands when I was getting into PCs. A little bit in the 286 era, and more in the 486 -to- Pentium II era. Early on I had:

 

MODEMS: Hayes and Supra. Novation for Apple II, and much later US Robotoics.

 

CD-ROMS: Either no-name, Creative rebranded, or Plextor. Now it's LG or Lite-On

 

RAM: Either Kingston (loved their no-hassle warranty in real practice) or some generic stuff the guy at Myoda loved to shove up my ass at 2x cost just because I was green!

 

HDD: Generally Western Digital all the way. Avoiding some models. But not really caring because I always do backups. Loved that they'd send me all kinda of literature like the tech/specs manuals that were quarter-inch thick.

 

In the early days I knew nothing about HDD mechatronics and was blissfully unaware what was happening my FirstClassPeripherals Sider 10-megger for the Apple II. Nonetheless I reveled in its capacity and performance. Might be a Shugart, Xebec, or Seagate mechanism. Been a while since I opened it for inspection and cleaning.

 

MOTHERBOARD: 1st PC I bought with my own money had (still has) its original Micronics board. I had no idea it was a quality brand. I learned (that it was) when satisfying my own curiosity. Then there's Intel stuff. Boring but usually the most solid and stable, thinking about the AL440LX Atlanta, Or Venus VS440FX. I had some good ASUS, Gigabyte, and Genoa boards. I wanted to believe ABIT was reliable, but they turned out to be not too stable. Too much O'C going on.

 

SOUND CARD: I first tried a ProAudioSpectrum, but it had some issues with SoundBlaster compatibility. Since then I've always been an SB guy. When I got an SB16 I was amazed at the stuff it added to my humble rig. The Gameport, MIDI interface, CD-ROM interface, Joystick interface, among other things like Wavetable upgrade and "advanced" DSP functionality.

 

I currently have a pile of SB16, AWE32, AWE64 Gold, WaveBlaster daughtercards, and other assorted CL stuffage. I never could afford a Roland or Gravis or any other "top" sounding cards. I didn't care. I was always impressed at the sound the early 486 and Pentium games were producing. Commanche, Doom, Stellar7/Nova9, NanoTank, Descent, Raptor, and others, were so enthralling that they cemented SB as the best, in my mind. And I was happy.

 

Later on I tried some of the Live! series boards and it was all so-so. And soon enough soundcards fell off my radar as integrated sound took over.

 

FLOPPY DRIVES: Meh! Sony, Teac, NEC, Epson.. They're all good enuf.

 

SYSTEM CHASSIS/CASES: Whatever.. As long as the layout is good and there is room to work on stuff. Had my fair share of cases that made you stretch cables or overheat just about everything. I think I learned my lesson. Finally! These past coupla years..!

 

POWER SUPPLY: I didn't know or care about sagging white-box supplies from the likes of CompUSA or other no-name brands. I was forced to learn about them in the Pentium III and IV epochs when 300 watts wasn't enough. Ended up getting an Antec 550W which still serves to today. Yes! You get what you pay for. But I will also say that a lightly loaded budget model today is much better than the bargain shit being sold in the 1990's. I also have a Power-Tronic unit which is also a top brand and still works some 30 years later!

 

KEYBOARD & MOUSE: Fuck.. whatever I could plug in and get working.

 

GRAPHICS CARDS: There's a lot to say, but.. Early on when I got my 486 (which I just cannot stop mentioning, it's a disease! Sorry! No not the computer!) I had to pick a graphics card, and I did so strictly and solely on the merits of X,Y resolution AND simultaneous on-screen colors. This was just at the time VESA SVGA standards were coalescing into coherent consistency. A time when ISA slots were still going strong, just before VL-BUS.

 

So I found an Evolution board from STB, 1MB, ISA, Cirrus Logic 5422. Man-O-Man! One whole Megabyte! That's what my entire Amiga had! And it did millions of colors! I got it from CompUSA. Still have it of course. I didn't care about Windows' acceleration primitives or hardware cursors or clock speeds. I just wanted trillions of colors onscreen.

 

Incidentally it was a time when I was getting into looking up the names of the companies making the important chips, the big chips, the smart chips, you know.. And I requested a catalog/brochure, which every company seemed to be happy to send me. Loved the "Feature Chips" pamphlet from Cirrus Logic - which stylized the function (of a chip) by overlaying a then-modern-looking rendering of something representing the purpose of the part. WD sent me all kinds of charts and reference manuals and catalogs. So did Intel, Practical Peripherals, Creative Labs, HP, Gravis game controllers, Micronics, and so many others.

 

When the Riva-128 and Voodoo hit the scene I was already toning down the literature craze. And more and more companies were making it harder to find out how to get printed material. PDFs were becoming popular, so I rolled that way from the late 90's onwards.

 

And while it was exciting to be there at the birth of PC 3D gaming, I have little desire or nostalgia for the hardware and craze surrounding it all. Not devoid of good times with it, but too many of those memories were filled with hustling and savings on overdrive to afford it all. It was expensive. And what I bought was incredibly quickly outdated - thus making me feel bad.

 

Nevertheless I "grew up" with mostly Nvidia, Riva-128, TNT2-Ultra, GeForce 2, 3, 4. Then the lousy 5900/5950 FX garbage. A GT 8800-something. And recently a GTX 1080. Likely I'll get a 30xx or 40xx sometime this year. When I get around to it.

 

I also did the Nec PowerVR, Voodoo, Voodoo2, Rendition Verite, Intel 740, Voodoo5 6000, and likely many more I can't recall ATM. I never did much with S3 Trio, or Matrox Millenium, Number Nine, or S3 ViRGE, and nothing with Tseng Labs, or S3 Permedia.

 

And definitely nothing with ATi, too expensive. A $10 or $20 price difference was a big stink and had to be considered at every purchase.

[Keatah]

15 hours ago, zzip said:

In the 90s before 3D, chipset didn't seem to matter as much.   You probably wanted a local bus card (VLB, PCI) rather than ISA though for higher bandwidth.  When it came to DOS gaming they roughly performed similarly,   I'm not sure how many DOS games actually used the accelerated features of those chipsets.  

Pretty much. It was all about main memory speeds, CPU speeds, and chipset efficiencies. Graphics chipsets had little or no standardization when it came to acceleration features.

 

11 hours ago, zzip said:

VLB was also exclusive to the 486 I think.   Pentium and above needed something different anyway.

Yup. The 486 itself was designed from the outset to allow for direct connect of peripherals. Something to do with tri-stating or buffering? Was the only Intel processor made that way. And thus VLB just kinda-sorta happened.

 

5 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

I only ever saw VLB on 486 boards.  Let me tell you how excited I was to get a 486 board with PCI.  Still have it

I always assumed that PCI had too much overhead to be useful in 486 rigs. Maybe the last Overdrives or the Am5x86 could utilize it. PCI definitely was matched to Pentium, and PII/III/IV.

 

 

[+OLD CS1]

9 hours ago, Keatah said:

I always assumed that PCI had too much overhead to be useful in 486 rigs. Maybe the last Overdrives or the Am5x86 could utilize it. PCI definitely was matched to Pentium, and PII/III/IV.

IIRC, I ran a DX4/100 on this board.  But it is capable of accepting lesser CPUs. Have to pull it out sometime and check it out. I have unfortunately lost the manual for it, but thankfully many boards of the era have settings silk-screened onto them. The other question is if this PCI runs at 33MHz or at the CPU setting.  For the DX4/100 that would be 25MHz.

 

My buddy and I tried running it at 33MHz, pushing the CPU to 132MHz, but that made the system unstable. I was able to load Windows 98SE but it would randomly lock-up. Honestly, who really knows what the problem was? I expect the board should have run at 33MHz just fine, so maybe it was the CPU not liking the speed or the early-PCI bus versus the video cards at that speed (Trident-based generic and an S3 ViRGE.)

[Keatah]

On 1/21/2022 at 2:30 AM, wierd_w said:

Unlike computers of Yore, machines of that era did not come with a comprehensive whitepaper.

I remember that. I suppose the next best thing would've been a mix of techie brochures from individual companies, datasheets, and those 7-inch thick "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" bibles from Que Publishing.

 

I was lucky to get a turnkey 486 system that was nicely equipped, but not so much as to where I couldn't experience the fun of upgrading. It came packed with something like 8 or 10 pounds of Microsoft manuals. 2x 40 pager quick-start tutorials for both DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1. 2x 300 in-depth pagers explaining of DOS commands and Windows operations. And then yet TWO MORE for reference, conventions, and drilling down into whatever. Then of course Word had another 500 page manual supplemented by thinner (but still substantial enough to be called books) guides for each of the plug-ins. Things like DRAW or EQUATIONS.

 

None of it was written in a manner to teach you how things operated. Only how to do a specific task. They detailed procedures rather than instilling an understanding beyond the basics. I suppose this was signaling a transition away from hobbyist/hacking to business productivity for me. When writing corporate documentation it is counterproductive to be babysitting the hardware. The beginning of the house of cards that is today's tech.

 

The Gateway "remake" of the Micronics system board manual fared little better. It gave you the necessary information on how to upgrade memory, a rough system map, detailed some DIP settings, discussed briefly the "Multi-I/O MIO-400KF rev F" expansion card from DFI. Outlined the connectors and Berg jumpers. Told you how to install/swap drives. Change the secondary backup battery..

 

So.. When researching vintage brands in 2018, I learned that DFI was a sleeper. Made lotsa OEM stuff for 386/486 rigs. Often sold at mom'n'pop shops as white box stuff. But quality stuff. Bargain stuff that worked silently in the background. I mean how exciting can a floppy drive controller be? Or a Multi-IO card?

Edited January 22, 2022 by Keatah

[Keatah]

On 1/21/2022 at 2:30 AM, wierd_w said:

Thankfully, my time at the Mom&Pop place mom scored me a summer job at later that year, paid lots of dividends when it came to gaining that skill and knowledge-base.  Saw and dealt with all manner of shenanigans.  Also got to see all manner of generic hardware, both good and bad.  (which is how I tended to select which generic hardware I would buy for myself...)

My mom'n'pop shop time was rather boring. Borderline disastrous even. They expected me to know far more than I did! I hadn't progressed beyond figuring out how install games, but they asked these annoying questions like what the A-B twist was or the difference between a floppy cable and IDE cable. Never asked anything like how to set-up games. I had enough when I couldn't figure out how format a floppy, let alone set up hard drive! Fffvvvoooommm! I was outta there skidding on my ass!

 

[Keatah]

On 1/21/2022 at 2:30 AM, wierd_w said:

I remember, sometime around 1996, we got a shipment of generic HSC Winmodems.

I remember these. Introduced to them via Windows 95/98. Wasn't sure (at first) what to make of them. But when I examined the cards themselves things like "cost cutting" & "cheap" roared into my head from seemingly every direction. Was the computer industry becoming that cutthroat by eliminating one or two chips for savings? Yup.

 

The only advantage I could see might have been that they were software-upgradeable, not in the X2, V90, or K56Flex sense for faster speeds or bug fixes, but for something else nebulously defined. Maybe hooking up to my Atari/Amiga rigs or special game protocol connections. IDK. It seemed a useless feature with tons of annoyances. And they stole processor time.

[+x=usr(1536)]

On 1/21/2022 at 2:30 AM, wierd_w said:

I remember, sometime around 1996, we got a shipment of generic HSC Winmodems.  They were the worst kind of host software controlled modem you can wrap your head around, if you dared to try imagining something that awful.

The first real job i had in the US was working phone support for Earthlink right in the thick of Winmodem market pervasiveness.  The number of people to whom we had to try to explain the concept of, "your PC manufacturer is run by a pack of cheapasses who saddled your computer with a Winmodem; good luck ever establishing a connection to the Internet if you're running anything more CPU-intensive than just the OS by itself and even then it's a crapshoot," was not insignificant.  Worse was trying to have to explain to them why Winmodems sucked: no matter how many analogies you'd pull out to try to make the explanation something that would be easy to relate to, you would at some point have to give a technical explanation, which went about as well as could be expected.

 

And then there were the early attempts at Winmodem support under Linux.  *shudder*

[wierd_w]

3 hours ago, Keatah said:

My mom'n'pop shop time was rather boring. Borderline disastrous even. They expected me to know far more than I did! I hadn't progressed beyond figuring out how install games, but they asked these annoying questions like what the A-B twist was or the difference between a floppy cable and IDE cable. Never asked anything like how to set-up games. I had enough when I couldn't figure out how format a floppy, let alone set up hard drive! Fffvvvoooommm! I was outta there skidding on my ass!

 

 

Oh, I could answer those questions, what the DOS memory map was supposed to look like, how the A20 address line worked, and a bunch of other stuff.  The A-B twist is a kludge on the prior schuggart cable arrangement, created by IBM to avoid having to jumper the diskette drives.  It's a clever hack.  Basically, the drive select and motor lines get swapped around.

 

IDE has 44 pins, and floppy diskette as 34 pins.  IDE ATA-100 cables have 80 wires, with every other one being a ground line.

 

Formatting a floppy is easy peasy.

 

Format A: /C /U

 

for unconditional format, with verification of cluster integrity.  OR, if you need to force say a 720k diskette in a 1.44mb drive:

 

Format A: /F:720  /C /U

 

It gets more byzantine when trying to make less common diskette types, like single sided 160kb diskettes in a 360k drive... but that's obscure trivia.

 

Hard drives, you needed to create a partition table and a valid master boot record. You did both of those tasks with fdisk.  After partitioning the drive, you would format the drive with the format command.

Some hard drives were too large for some motherboards' INT13 implementation to properly address, and you would have to set up a dynamic drive overlay (DDO).  Those worked by occupying the first physical sector of the drive, and loading as if it were an OS, hooking the DOS interrupt vector table, and pointing software interrupt 13 (INT13) toward memory it owned. It would thus intercept all INT13 calls, and would provide an alternative, more capable disk handler routine that could fully address the drive's geometry. It would prevent having itself get nuked from orbit on OS install, but subtracting one sector from the total disk size (the sector it lived on), and enumerating starting at physical sector 1, instead of physical sector 0.

 

The Upgrading and Repairing PCs was actually a very useful read.  In its earlier versions, it gave you a lot of trivia and information about the hows and whys of the IBM PC clone's architecture, as well as some historical context to understand it with.  What I had trouble comprehending, was the byzantine 16bit x86 assembler code my asian-american colleague was poking around with all the time. 

 

 

 

[atarian1]

12 hours ago, Keatah said:

I remember these. Introduced to them via Windows 95/98. Wasn't sure (at first) what to make of them. But when I examined the cards themselves things like "cost cutting" & "cheap" roared into my head from seemingly every direction. Was the computer industry becoming that cutthroat by eliminating one or two chips for savings? Yup.

That reminds me of the time in the 1990s when you could go to Rite-Aid (or somewhere similar), and buy a new cheap-ass Apollo inkjet printer for $40. The catch was it was cheaper to throw away the whole printer rather than buying a new ink cartridge for the cheap-ass Apollo inkjet printer. That was peak cutthroat cheapness absurdity for me...

[Keatah]

I think we need to discuss E-Machines!! Who doesn't love to hate those abominations?

 

Turns out that one of my e-Machines is a serious contender for best PC I ever had. Reliable, very very reliable. Low power consumption 7 -to- 20 watts depending. Excellent SpeedStep and undervolting, 0.700v through 1.052v. 40MHz -to- 1.7GHz. Properly working c3 powerstate. Windows XP home edition. BSOD log = 6 times in the past 2 decades, some of those due to experimenting with drivers early on. And it still serves as a daily productivity, utility, and archiving platform, some 18-19 years after purchase.

 

But it's totally resistant & armored against overclocking and upgrading. Even with a CPU replacement! The best upgrades that could get through its shield of mediocrity were more RAM, to a 2GB limit. And slightly larger PATA HDD, 100GB to 160GB.

Edited January 23, 2022 by Keatah

[+OLD CS1]

e-Machines and Winmodems.