State Of The Art [Archive]

103rapesAday

02-11-2009, 05:36 PM

That's freakin hilarious. Reminds me of when my friend Lothar came into work with a "new" hard drive for his computer. This was back when a few gigs was the norm, and he brought in a 2 gib hard drive that he was having trouble hooking up internally. I took a look at it, and I could see that it didn't have the standard ide connector. I told him to take it to a shop where I bought cables at, and to ask them if they had an adaptor for it. When he came back, he said that the guys there were assholes and laughed at him. I took another look, and happened to notice the date on it was 1990, or somewhere close to that. I was thinking WTF--they didn't have 2 gig drives back then. Then I saw the telltale "SCSI" on the label, and I said "Lothar, you have a scuzzy drive, that's why you can't connect it." "Hey, fuck you--it isn't scuzzy, I paid good money for that drive." Son of a bitch, that drive must have cost $10,000 when it was first manufactured, and if he'd actually managed to get it installed inside his computer, the damn thing probably would have melted from the heat.

I remember when a friend of mine's mom got their first home computer late 80s early 90s and at that time it had 8gb ram, 512 mb hard drive (yes that's mb, not gb!), and running some variant of Windows before 95 (at the time I didn't know much about computers but remember that sticker on the box). Her job subsidized it and they paid over $3000 for it. I don't even know what can even be ran on it now other than some niche linux software, I think it'd be too slow and so prone to exploits that at best you can maybe use it as a word processor and a few games as long as you kept it offline. It's funny how many can't let go of something old because how much they paid for the item in the past, most of these can easily be replaced with a netbook and usb pendrive much lower than most people's rent, I shouldn't say much about this part myself, I still have my P3 and tinker with it now and then.