[tirwander]

I feel you. We got our first computer in, I think, 1994? I was 12. It was a Gateway 2000 486 something. haha I can't remember the letters on the end. It was magic. Oh, and AOL of course.

It continued to feel that way because it was kind of newer territory to a lot of people in general. Now, it is just standard... everywhere... I think the mass adoption is the fun killer. It was much more niche back then.

[hestefisk]

Spot on. Awesome post. My first PC was a 1995 486 clone no name PC with a Cyrix (!!!) 57 MHz cpu and 4 megs of ram. Originally it came only with a floppy drive and a 420MB HD. I bought this sound blaster-like card with a CD-ROM drive attached to it and picked up Slackware Linux 3.0 distributed via a computer magazine. It wouldn’t install at first because the cd drive was attached via the sound blaster clone card so I had to install it via many floppies instead. I finally got it working. I really miss those days where things were hard and required work to make things seamless. Today even Windows runs Linux so there’s no incentive to geek out anymore.

[iancmceachern]

Those were the good days, between me and my buddies we had a Pavkard Bell, a Micron, a Gateway 2000, and a home built or two. We played C&C, red alert, doom, quake, descent and some old fashioned board game Axis and Allies when we got tired on the computers.