I read “Building my childhood dream PC” by Fabien Sanglard and shared in his nostalgia for his childhood dream PC.

So cool. So beautiful. So nostalgic!

I like the final line in the epilogue:

I am quite eager to build a “Beautiful 1997 Quake Machine” now.

YES!

Now, I’m trying to remember my PCs. It’s really hard.

Here’s a first draft of my PC history:

  • XT (later a 286?), Dad’s, early 1990s to about 1993.
  • 486 DX2/66 (?), Family’s, 1995-ish?
  • Pentium 133MHz, My first PC, circa 1996-ish
  • Pentium 266MHz MMX, Upgrade + 3DFX, circa 1997-ish
  • Celeron 300A @450MHz, Gaming box, circa 1999
  • AMD 1.2Ghz, Some kind of AMD and GForce video card?, circa 2000-2004
  • Apple iBook, sold everything for a laptop, circa 2005-2008.
  • Apple iMac, first imac, 2008-2017
  • Apple iMac, Current Workstation, circa 2017-present

Some details are solid, because I have hard evidence. Others less so,

I remember the first family PC was probably an XT, but could have been upgraded to a 286. It was the machine where I played a ton of wolf3d, commander keen, and all the 1980s and early 90s games that dad had collected (pirated) over the years. I have strong memories from 1991 and 1992 of using this machine a ton on weekends. First batch programming too I think. I lost access to this box late 1993 I think.

I recall a close friend getting a new PC in 1994 and all of us going around to his house a lot to play games. It was a Compaq Presario all built-in, everything in one unit, including speakers and monitor. It felt like every weekend we were all down there play games on that thing. It was probably a high-end 486, but I have no idea.

I remember we got a new family PC in 1994 or 1995. It was probably a high-end 486, most likely a DX2/66MHz. I recall it was a multi-media PC, it had a soundblaster and CD-ROM, but I don’t recall if we had windows 95 or we were running windows 3.11. It was probably 1995 so it was probably windows 95, but I don’t have strong memories. I do recall that it had 4MB RAM and that at one point we got extra, probably another 4 taking us to 8 so I could try out Dark Forces, that required 6 MB. I recall playing around a lot with midi files. Also games like Doom and Heretic with cool sound. I think I remember Encarta on a CD-ROM, so it was probably in 1995 and we were probably running windows95.

My first PC, purchased with my own hard earned money was a big deal. A 33.6 modem, Microsoft joystick, and on. Lots of Mechwarrior 2, doom, duke3d, Quake, and on.

Shortly after was the upgrade to a truly awesome gaming machine with 3DFX. I documented some of this already here. This was probably 1996 or 1997.

I remember that around the time of my first and second PC, I had many other lesser PCs in my room. Mostly 286 and 386 machines running Linux or Windows 3.1 in a little LAN. I was learning about networking and needed test machines. This was probably 1997 or 1998.

In university I upgraded to a Celeron 300A @450MHz, and a record of the whole machine was captured online. I have no memory of a “Diamond Viper” Nvidia card. I was big into Linux and I do remember spending a ton of hours trying to get OpenGL and USB working right for gaming in Linux. It was a debugging puzzle more than a requirement. A technical challenge.

The next upgrade is fuzzy. It was a strange time. AMD over-took Intel, so I switched to an AMD CPU (probably an AMD Athlon 1200 or 1400). And GPUs flipped too I think, perhaps nvidia was not on top at the time (ATI Radeon?). I remember it was a big machine with lots of fans and a large copper heat sink. It was probably over 1.2Ghz but I don’t remember anything about it, really. I remember I later bought a second-hand nvidia gforce card (gforce2 or 3?) from a friend for it circa 2001 or 2002. I think. I do remember selling the whole rig to a friend in my research group around 2004 or 2005. At the time I was doing a PhD and had an assigned workstation and access to fast servers for running experiments. I was living in a share house and had no need for a home PC. I lived in the lab, basically.

I eventually got a tiny 12" iBook, for some at-home running on rails dev, and other stuff. It was tiny, white and I really loved it. This was my big switch from Linux to MacOS. I still used Linux at work for a long time.

Eventually the ibook got too slow and I got a 27" iMac with 4 cores, I guess some kind of i7. I had that for a decade at least before upgrading to another identical machine with all faster new internals (quad core i7, etc.).

I don’t even know the details of my current workstation, it doesn’t matter. If I need to run something fast or use GPUs, I get an ec2 box. And I don’t game, other than some Quake now and then. About this mac says stuff like 4.2GHz Quad-core Intel i7 and Radeon Pro 580, 64GB RAM and on. Whatever.

Man I loved that ibook. It was not intel, so probably powerpc. It was probably less than 1Ghz too.

Here’s a pic of what it looked like:

Good times.