| Thank god it's not just me! I feel I went about my days the same way you did. I didn't "Get on the 486DX2", I got on "the computer". I've had so many questions about my story with people saying "I call bullshit because he wasn't able to remember (minor detail X)" etc. It's only through absolutely racking my brains to bits and insane amounts of googling, facebook messages to old friends and such that I've managed to answer a few of these. It's good to know that my memory is not just deteriorating rapidly as I'd initially thought. Some things stand out more than others. I was suspected of having ADD for a while, then the diagnosis was shifted to Aspergers Syndrome (something they apparently didn't know much about back then, or was not as commonly diagnosed/referred to as it is nowadays), but a potential giveaway for this was that I had an eidetic memory for some things, and a lot of other stuff that should've been important but I didn't care about was instantly discarded. I can remember down to a millimetre what few toys and possessions I owned, and what they looked like, yet I can't remember what my own BEDROOM looked like because it wasn't the bedroom itself, it was what interested me within it. The same went for most of my house, I barely remember what it looks like or what the furniture placement was. I put this down to perhaps some kind of mental block for traumatic memories. The old house appears in my dreams as a very very very large building and often in pitch black darkness so that I cannot really see what it looks like save for an insanely dim and flickering flashlight. I guess the mind has a funny way of dealing with inabilities to recall events. Yet I can recreate in my head in incredible detail the structure of the school I attended as I spent quite a considerable amount of my time every day there, and I found the absolutely enormous building to be very interesting and different compared to the bland 1970s brick and tan buidings of my primary school years (I actually went on to recreate it in 3d from memory recently and was able to source some photos of it from the school themself). http://i.imgur.com/eXb430f.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/BDpt6wt.jpg And yet, I can't remember how much RAM my system had, because it wasn't of any interest to me. It was just "the computer" to me at the time, not "the 486 DX2". Any time I would've seen how much memory the system had (I don't recall if I even used the MEM command, assuming it existed in that version of DOS) but if I had, it would've been "Oh I have X amount, okay" and then I probably never checked it again. I also don't remember what exact games I had installed on the system, as I barely ever played most of them. I remember which ones I'd played at that point, but I do remember I definitely had Rise of the Triad shareware on there as it served as a key inspiration for writing a "3d" raycaster/FPS style engine. Interesting how selective memory can be, and how it will remember utterly useless details and points of information (or worse, remind you of the moments you did something embarassing or stupid) yet when it comes to crucial or vital events, it can draw a blank on something that was so striking to witness that you would think it would burn the image into your head for an eternity. |
