| Author |
Message |
Mack
Member
07-22-2002
| Saturday, April 06, 2019 - 8:05 am 
I have had a computer of some type since 1983 when I bought my Apple IIe. Used that for years and years until I bought my first real PC in 1988. That was a Gateway 386 and really brought me into the world of home computing and the beginnings of the Internet with the old dial-up modem and AOL. That computer lasted for quite a few years but I had learned how to upgrade and maintain it. It had gotten to the point that I had made so many changes to the hardware that the only original piece was the case so I actually called it a Klugway.
My then bride-to-be looked at the old Klugway in 1997 and kind of gave me this "you got to be kidding" look. She is an engineer and at the time was the program manager of an Army computer system so very much into that stuff. We went out and bought my second PC which was an off-the-shelf HP from BestBuy. Neat stuff and my first color monitor.
I didn't do much to the HP but back in the late 90's computer technology was moving at a very rapid pace and equipment became relatively obsolete in just a few years if not months. Anyhow the HP last until about 2000 when I got the urge to actually build my own PC from scratch. Bought all the pieces and parts, put it together, and that became what I called the Klugway II.
The Klugway II lasted until about 2006 with occasional updates like increased memory but again technology caught up with it so time to upgrade. About that time desktop computers were numerous and had gotten relatively inexpensive at least in the sense you could hardly build your own for what you could buy one for at a computer retailer.
That brings me to a couple of weeks ago where I got frustrated with my machine lagging behind and giving me issues with my part time job doing medical records reviews and my personal video and photography editing. Started the process of looking for a new computer and discovered that desktop PCs are now harder to come by as more folks are into laptops and tablets. Pricing what I wanted from Dell or HP was actually pretty expensive so I started looking at building my own again after all these years. Not something I undertook lightly as I am not exactly a computer wiz or nerd and I am "elderly" by some, actually most, definitions.
So the decision was made and I was going to build a new computer. That meant getting a new case, mother board, Intel processor, memory, etc., etc. The only parts left over from the old computer are the monitor, which had been upgraded anyhow, the wireless keyboard/mouse, and speakers. It is at least for the moment state-of-the-art. It has computing power to spare and it is fast, really fast. Maybe not for the typical "turn it on and use it" user but it actually was surprisingly easy to do. Helps that YouTube has numerous videos on building computers so I spent several hours catching up on my skills before I even decided to attempt a new build. Bottom line is Klugway III lives!!!!
|
Jimmer
Moderator
08-30-2000
| Saturday, April 06, 2019 - 12:59 pm
That’s very cool, Mack. I got into computers about the same time you did and while I didn’t build mine, I made numerous upgrades to them over the years. My biggest purchase was my Pentium 90 which was ridiculously expensive but it was an awesome move up from my 386. Those were fun days. 
|
Juju2bigdog
Member
10-27-2000
| Saturday, April 06, 2019 - 9:42 pm
Congrats, Mack. I didn't even think folks did that anymore. Our very first computer was shop-built by a guy in San Francisco, and we were SO proud of it, and it had endless capacity with a 4 GB hard drive. LOL. Anyway, may you and the Klugman III have many happy hours together.
I have not had a desktop for probably over ten years, when an online friend of mine, former TVCH member Car54, convinced me that modern laptops can do everything a desktop can, particularly Dell Latitudes, when combined with a docking station. I have had nothing but Dell Latitudes and docking stations since. They, like, NEVER break down, and since I travel so much, I love just taking the laptop off the docking station, and carting everything I know with me in a 12-14" 2-4 pound flat box.
|
Mack
Member
07-22-2002
| Sunday, April 07, 2019 - 9:16 am
Interestingly it appears building computers has made a bit of a comeback. While I did it for a mix of business and film/photography editing the real interest is among gamers who want the fastest, most powerful computer and that's hard to accomplish in a laptop. Gamers also prefer desktops because they can upgrade components relatively easily versus the limitations of a laptop. Gamers push their systems so hard that many have gone to water cooling, very much like a car but smaller, to keep their equipment from literally burning up. Admittedly I built the Klugway III on a gaming platform but that was more because the mother board provided a lot of features and flexibility that I couldn't get with a more business oriented board. In fact, business oriented boards are actually in the minority and really lag behind in terms of state-of-the-art. A full up gaming computer can easily run $3,000 and there is actually one company that offers and apparently sells $30,000 gaming computers. Gamers obviously can take this stuff pretty seriously.
As much as I'm enjoying the new computer I still haven't abandoned my HP laptop or iPad. Sure not going to haul the 30+ pound Klugway III out to the patio this summer.
|
Mack
Member
07-22-2002
| Sunday, April 07, 2019 - 9:47 am
Juju2bigdog - Meant to mention your first computer with the what was then considered giant 4 GB hard drive. I put a 4 TB hard drive in the Klugway III which is about 1,000 times larger storage than your first drive. Amazing what has happened over the years in computers and actually electronics.
|
Naja
Member
06-28-2003
| Sunday, April 07, 2019 - 10:00 am
You sound you're having so much fun. Mack! I replace my own parts, but I have never actually done the building. Well, I have chosen all the parts and had someone else build it.
Last night I ordered a new desktop to replace my 2008 core2duo. It had a good run. The new one is an i7 with 16 gigs of ram, decent 4GB GDDR5 nvidia video card. And my first Asus motherboard. I have Asus everything else, so I figure why not.
|
Mack
Member
07-22-2002
| Sunday, April 07, 2019 - 10:54 am
My basics were an i7 8700K processor, an MSI Gaming Edge mother board, a be quiet Dark Rock TF cooler, and a Sapphire Nitro+ RX 280 8GB GDDR5 video card. I put all that in a new Cooler Master case along with a new 750 watt power supply. After a couple of weeks of research and watching YouTube videos I settled on the pieces and parts and over the course of two weeks gathered them. I think Klugway II was an ASUS mother board and it worked great. I went with MSI this time because of the features, recommendations, and a great sale. I wish I could have gone with NVIDIA for the video card but they're quite proud of their stuff. An NVIDIA would have cost me about double what I spent on the AMD Radeon based Sapphire.
On the surface it sounds kind of daunting to put together but quite frankly it actually isn't that hard. For the most part it's plug and play in the sense that the most parts only plug in one place on the mother board so if you can follow pretty simple instructions it's not hard. I was kidding with my son over the phone when I was in the final assembling about not being able to test anything until that last step where you actually plug it in and turn it on. Kind of one of those hold your breathe moments looking for sparks, smoke, and the smell of burning plastic.
And yes it has been fun. Not only takes me back to my other computer builds but also to those days when we could work on our own cars. Many a night as a teenager and young adult changing oil, gapping spark plugs, and even totally rebuilding an engine. That was a real sense of accomplishment.
|
Colordeagua
Member
10-24-2003
| Sunday, April 07, 2019 - 8:49 pm
Computers and cars. ????? 
|
Juju2bigdog
Member
10-27-2000
| Sunday, April 07, 2019 - 9:34 pm
Mack, you made me laugh out loud with that gaming talk. I now live in a lovely 123 unit over-55 townhome community. Over-55 seems to mean over-85, and the gamers are the ones who can manage to walk or drive to the clubhouse in the early evening to play bridge or cribbage or poker before bedtime. If I get the energy when we get a bit older, I just may teach them to play euchre.
I think of gamers as the 4-chan and Q-Anon kids (19-30 year olds) who live in their mother's basements, but gaming technology is what I would go with too if I were building my own desktop. I am pretty sure, having no children or grandchildren, that I do not know a single gamer.
|
Mack
Member
07-22-2002
| Monday, April 08, 2019 - 3:59 am
Colordeagua, I only draw the comparison because back in the day young people could work on a car, it was our technology of the time. We could spend hours working on them. There was no Internet, no computers, and maybe three TV channels and dad had control of the one TV set in the house anyhow.
Juju2bigdog, I too don’t know any gamers in my age group. The few younger computer techs I know are all gamers but most of them are 20-30 years old. Neighbor across the street has a 17 year old son who is never off his computer. He is a gamer but also spends hours and hours on social media. Kid is so hooked to his computer I rarely see him outside the house. Whereas turning 16 and getting a driver’s license was a rite of passage when I was young he could care less. Mom and dad will drive him anywhere he needs to go if he leaves the house other than going to school.
|
Juju2bigdog
Member
10-27-2000
| Monday, April 08, 2019 - 8:11 pm
Same here, Mack. If we were lucky we got into Driver's Ed. classes at school at age 15 and a half, and then we went and got our driver's licenses on our 16th birthday, and then we were FREE!!!
Wait! The neighbor kid could very well be 4-chan. If you don't know what that is and want to scare yourself mirthless, you can Google. You will come across the term incel, which means involuntarily celibate because these kids spend all their time in their rooms on social media and sometimes go to the dark side.
|
Colordeagua
Member
10-24-2003
| Monday, April 08, 2019 - 10:31 pm
I didn't mean it as a comparison of computers and cars. Both computers and cars are a puzzlement to me.
|
Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Monday, April 08, 2019 - 11:12 pm
My first computer didn't have a hard drive. At first it was a big deal to have an external tape, then we got external floppy disk drives.
And the first computers I worked on .. We had to use cards and the files were on tape and with no direct access, the fire had to sort and merge to get things in order to match with transactions to process, update, repirt.
We didn't have gigabytes of anything. Bytes and words kb .. and megabytes were big.
While programs had to fit into 48 kb. I mean like payroll. For the whole county.
Fun.
|
Mack
Member
07-22-2002
| Tuesday, April 09, 2019 - 9:01 am
Seamonkey, early in my career, before I became a shrink, I was the chief of administrative services for my activity. I got us the first generation “word processor” which actually was an IBM Selective typewriter hardwired to a “computer” about the size of a small refrigerator. What it really did was record the typist keystrokes and store them on a floppy disk drive. No screen, no spellcheck, no automatic formatting, etc. They’d type in a document and then print it out for review and editing. Once it was corrected and approved you could have the “word processor” print out the final document on the same typewriter you entered it with. Show that to a young person today and they’d think it was like using clay tablets.
|
Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Tuesday, April 09, 2019 - 9:26 am
Exactly!
And when I was a trainee, the older programmers talked of the big Univacs where they went inside to read the binary code in the lights!
|
Juju2bigdog
Member
10-27-2000
| Tuesday, April 09, 2019 - 10:46 pm
Sure! But did you kids ever go to the university lab and punch out 1500 Fortran IV coded punch-cards, and if you got a typo on even ONE, or accidentally got ONE turned upside down your whole program might be rejected? And there was no way to preview them, AND you had to walk two miles in the midwest winter SNOW at night to submit them?
Oh! Somehow missed Seamonkey's 9:26 am post this morning. I went to University at University of Illinois, and it was my impression at the time that Illiac, as we called it, was one of the very first Univacs in the country. We had NO idea at the time that we would one day have that same amount of computing power on our wrists.
|
Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Tuesday, April 09, 2019 - 11:20 pm
Yes, even one wrong card.. But it was COBOL and big programs.. Lots of cards.
And if you didn't get the deck sequenced, and someone dropped the tray, disaster!
|
Jimmer
Moderator
08-30-2000
| Wednesday, April 10, 2019 - 11:02 am
Those punch cards were a real piece of work. What a convoluted way to input a program.
|
Juju2bigdog
Member
10-27-2000
| Wednesday, April 10, 2019 - 9:36 pm
I never did have to learn COBOL for some reason, but I only took like 20-24 hours of computer science classes.
It was all we had at the time, Jimmer. After I graduated from college, I worked for a while at the front desk of the University Police Department, and ran license plate checks that the officers called in. In order to run the check I had to first type it into a machine that translated the query into punched holes in a 3/4" wide paper tape that I then put in some sort of reader that sent it off to the State department of motor vehicles, and then we waited for a reply.
|
Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Thursday, April 11, 2019 - 1:45 am
I got to be quite good at keypunching. We had a keypunch group, two shifts of them and programmers could submit two pages of coding sheets as a rush, but we could also use a couple of machines,especially on second or third shift.
I didn't take any programming at Berkeley and COBOL wasn't taught there. I started as a trainee. It wasn't a class, but a job with potential at that time.
Wow, you used punched tape!!
I know as soon as we got just a couple of terminal I was an early adaptor. Then we could run tests without waiting for the twice a day hatched test runs.
We usually had several programs we were writing or modifying so we were not sitting around waiting for a test to come back.
And it wasn't the time of internet, cell phones, and non business phone calls were not common. Different times.
|
Naja
Member
06-28-2003
| Monday, May 13, 2019 - 9:40 am
I just upgraded my Dell Inspiron i7 laptop by adding a 240GB SSD as the main drive and moving the 1TB sata to the other bay for just storage. OMG, I knew it would speed things up, but I had no idea it would be this much better. It is the least expensive upgrade one can make to a laptop. I payed 29.99 for my 240GB Sandisk SSD.
And like always, all I did was find a video of someone else doing it on youtube to show me how
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOSg1vOw46g
It only costs about $3 for a Win10 Pro key on eBay, so I went ahead and upgraded to pro as well for the new SSD.
What made me do this was my new desktop with an SSD was so much faster and smoother, that I wanted my laptop that way, too. I would say the first thing you notice with the speed is how apps and files open instantly without a pause. Second is how fast it writes big files.
|
Juju2bigdog
Member
10-27-2000
| Monday, May 13, 2019 - 9:07 pm
Yay Naja!!! I am tickled just thinking of how happy you are to have done it yourself, and it works and had an excellent result!
I also started taking on doing hardware change-outs at an age much older than you, and I did the same thing as you, found a Youtube to see how difficult it was. There were a couple things I wouldn't tackle, like replacing the screen on a Tom Tom GPS, and something else I don't recall. I even went so far as to buy a laptop for parts to replace the screen on an early model 11" Sony Vaio TN, replaced the screen with ease, then re-sold the for parts laptop for what I paid for it. It was fun, and so thrilling when it worked. LOL.
|
Naja
Member
06-28-2003
| Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - 7:55 am
It really does feel good! LOL
The first time I opened up a laptop I was scared to death. I replaced the optical drive. Youtube came in handy there, too!
|
Jimmer
Moderator
08-30-2000
| Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - 9:59 am
It’s surprisingly fun and you get a special sense of satisfaction out of doing it.
|
|
