(continued from part 1)

My first laptop...ish?

laptops were a dream for me, like a fucking computer i can use in bed? fucking insane. i wanted one but even older cheap ones were too expensive for my 0 income student era

so i waited and one day i came across an acer 486 laptop... that was missing the hdd, the hdd cable and the keyboard.

i got it for free, sure why not

it was the low end one, 486sx, 4mb ram, monochrome screen, shit even for mid 2000s, but it was mine!

 

 

but wait... what can i do with it, it boots from floppy but as before, not too much can be done isn't it?

well, i was like it has an ide port for the hdd, ps2 for the keyboard, something can be made surely.

so yeah, for a while building custom floppy disks with software, ramdisks and stuff was my jam, i really enjoyed that, messing with DOS menus, the ramdrive from the win98 floppy disk was pretty nice, i remember learning how to mess with compression to automatically unzip files to the ramdrive on boot, was pretty fun, i enjoyed that a lot.

but then i remembered, the ide port on the mobo, 44 pins, i had a quantum 200mb hdd sitting around, 40 pins plus power.

so i did what every single normal kid did, soldered 40 pins using a couple of pinouts i found online.

 

so i just went pin by pin, soldering and then, i was done.

powered the laptop, still worked, powered the hdd (with a random at PSU i had) and then the laptop and boom, it was working.

i opened the bios, selected the proper Cylinders, heads and sectors, saved.

beep

HDD does the seek noises and then

HDD ERROR

i remember it took like a min and then Press F1

i did, it actually booted to a bare DOS 6.22 install.

i was fucking going insane, can't believe it actually worked, i told my parents and even if they don't really understood, they were happy i was actually doing something productive i guess lol (still, no homework was being done).

 

So that was one of my first working devices, i had more hardware, but this was my first laptop, it was bounded to a desk, but hey, it was working.

it went downhill from there, mercadolibre and deremate (two platforms that were kinda like ebay) appeared and well people started selling their old garbage, and stuff like 386/486 laptops were pretty easy to find, i didn't had too much money, if i wanted something i had to save, so i did.

i didn't get lunches at school to save, i walked home and didn't took the bus, and sometimes i did odd repair jobs to get some cash.

One of the most interesting computers i got, was a powerbook 520c, it was almost pristine, it came with the cd drive, cables, macos 8 cd, and a massive pile of manuals, the thing was like 20 bucks or so

and for a while i got a lot of random old laptops, a Acer Extensa with a pentium 100 that we used to watch alejo y valentina .exe flash files, remember those?

I got a couple of Compaq Aero laptops, my favorite, they were brittle already back then, it's a miracle they still exist at all (i have three and a box full of spares lol)

as a phone curiosity, in this era i was sporting a Nokia 3200 phone

Idk why insisted so much in nokia, they were pretty shitty even back then, awful midi capabilities, almost nothing of storage, but i guess it was a price thing, idk, LG and Siemens did better phones back then, but they had no "bounce" game.

I also had like 3 AMPS phones that i used to fuck around the network, AMPS was a dying technology, so the network was weird, i'll cover more about phones in other post.

 

so 2005 rolls in and i got one of the most interesting devices that opens another world for me.

The HP 200LX, a insane device, from the early mid 90s, runs DOS 5 and it's a perfectly usable XT PC, pocket sized.

fucking blew my mind, i remember the one i got had some hinge issues i fixed with super glue and baking powder lol, it lasted for a while.

I loved it, there was a massive community online, websites and other stuff that covered a lot of hacks, software and others, i really loved this device (i still do, i have like 5 now lol)

Most of this stuff came and go, the original Acer "desktop" laptop ran calmira II on 3.1 for a while, i used it a lot, i never had full access to the internet, but we do had a phone line, so i hooked it sometimes when i was alone at home, same with the powerbook, the internet was mostly usable on almost anything so well, i did.

 

This era i moved from the pentium 133 stuff to a Celeron 333 with those shitty motherboards that had multiple cpu slots so you could fit a slot 1 cpu or a 370 cpu, 64 megs of ram and a 10gb hdd, it was fine, the celeron was pretty shitty but also, the mix made it pretty overclockeable so i got into that.

I installed XP, and it was pretty heavy for the computer, specially with just 64 megs of ram, but i slowly got into nlite to make the install lighter, also in this era i got really into UI modifications, gui replacements and others 

www.overclockers.cl was my jam, they were into the Athlon XP, pentium 4 overclock era, but some people still helped me get some grunt from the celeron.

my parents moved from the AMD586 computer my dad got at work to a custom build thing my uncle did, some Athlon CPU, 256ram, windows XP, pretty generic, but solid, it was the home computer for a while, MSN, and games that didn't run on my computer.

I played so much Sims lol, some rollercoaster tycoon, zootycoon and that kinda games, really shaped what i liked growing up.

On my computer i played more DOS era stuff, Quake, a lot of Quake, Duke Nukem and that kinda stuff too.

(Me, in 2006, using a Zire 21, the cheapo but modern of the era.)

later, i guess mid to late 2006 my mom purchased a computer tru her work, iirc it was like the whole setup, desk, printer, the computer itself and the monitor.

so i got that Custom built Athlon, finally some processing speed, i really got into stuff like linux and specially KDE, in that era i though it was pretty nice looking, way better than XP that's for sure.

Linux was fucking shit tbh in this era, like it was pretty, knoppix was a pretty good recovery tool.

but 

it opened a new era of computing to me, like ubuntu was sending cds for free so downloading was not an issue, linux was getting friendlier, and i really liked working with the terminal.

We moved to a new place, so moved everything, lost a lot of stuff, like my VHS tapes, i didn't care that much in that era, but now i would love to have the tapes, at some way i feel like i lost a lot of my memory by just moving on so fast from my childhood stuff.

anyways

Linux era.

 

My first experience with linux was RedHat 9, like the old redhat, my aunt got the IT guys at her work to burn me 3 cds (they also burned me the windows 3.1 floppy disks, pretty cute if you think so, i mean i would have done the same lol)

anyways, i got that installed, it was weird, i didn't understand it, but it did leave an itch

years later, ubuntu started sending cds, so i got some (until people abused that thing and they stopped, i guess it was that idk)

so i got into ubuntu, and it was easier, because of the cds i guess, there was a lot of info in how to do stuff, ndiswrapper, and stuff, whatever, lots of info, lots of stuff, i ended up going back to XP lol.

(the old, but new to me laptop)

2008 rolls in, my parents got a new laptop so i go the packardbell p4 one, it was pretty shit but it was mine, it lasted a while, i used it with Debian for a while and it was pretty usable.

(The new one my parents got, i don't remember the specs, but it was running Vista Starter, it was then moved to XP like everyone else did)

I even went to a Linux install fest thing called "Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (FLISoL)" and i installed linux in someone else computer.

I returned to XP lol

The PB Laptop died and then it got stolen (pretty shit thing to steal mate lol)

Anyways, my small brother became a thing in early 2008, so new laptop, new kid, my parents life was pretty active in that moment lol.

in this era i got a PowerMac G4 that i used for a couple of years, it was nice, not bad not great, but nice, 10.4 was better than XP tbh, my PC, the old Atlhlon that my mom got years ago was mostly relegated to ubuntu acting as a firewall with ndiswrapper for the usb wifi dongle.

(only photo i have from that era, you can see my nintendo DS lite, my cactus and the old macs i had, the only i still have is the 605, a pretty fun mac i got from the flea market and my first contact with a desktop mac after the 520c)

i guess that's all for now, next post will be about a tangent, cellphones and my experimentation and how i really liked phones and phone systems.