8 ms·

because I didn't have a lot of money I was working on a 486 when pentiums were the normal. I used a pentium when most where on pentium 3. thank god for linux t

by toadi 6y ago

because I didn't have a lot of money I was working on a 486 when pentiums were the normal. I used a pentium when most where on pentium 3. thank god for linux to make my computers workable. Mail: mutt, Editor: vim, actually most like newsgroups, irc, .. all had cli clients. Only netscape was run in a very lightweight window manager like blackbox. good thing about that in my teens is that I learned a shit load about computers and now 25 years later having a nice carreer thanks to tinkering with that.

ulzeraj 6y ago
Same here. I was using a Pentium 3 Coppermine with a Voodoo 3 PCI GPU running Slackware while all my friends had fancy Athlon XPs and Geforces. The motherboard went bad (back then the capacitor plague was a thing) and after a few months without a computer I said fuck it and just soldered a new capacitor where the old one was bloated. I'm so bad at soldering and it was such an ugly job. But then it booted! I was so proud of myself. I was a poor kid and computers were expensive and I just had brought my machine back to life.
- SwiftyBug 6y ago
  Of course it's not the same accomplishment as yours, but when I was 15 I found a computer in the trash with all the parts still in it. I took off the RAM sticks and put them in my sister's computer. It got much faster, she was very pleased and I was very proud.
FreeFull 6y ago
Fun fact: The latest Linux kernel will still run fine on a 486, and give you a somewhat useable experience. You just need to make sure to pick a distro that hasn't built its packages targetting newer instructions than what a 486 offers.
DJHenk 6y ago
My personal anecdote about this is the time I was a student and a room mate and I were doing the same assignment that involved creating a program for some statistical simulation. I had a 486, he had just gotten a brand new blazing fast pentium of the first generation. Compiling and running the simulation took eight minutes on my computer, three seconds on his. And in the end we started and finished around the same time. Because while he was iterating quickly, continuously changing something and running it again, I just sat in front my monitor contemplating the problem and my solution. When I finally got the chance to update my program, I was able to make a big, significant change. Lesson learned: it is not the computer time that is important, but the thinking time. And thinking time is spent best in big blocks, not in tiny slivers.

by toadi 6y ago

ulzeraj 6y ago

Same here. I was using a Pentium 3 Coppermine with a Voodoo 3 PCI GPU running Slackware while all my friends had fancy Athlon XPs and Geforces. The motherboard went bad (back then the capacitor plague was a thing) and after a few months without a computer I said fuck it and just soldered a new capacitor where the old one was bloated. I'm so bad at soldering and it was such an ugly job. But then it booted! I was so proud of myself. I was a poor kid and computers were expensive and I just had brought my machine back to life.

SwiftyBug 6y ago
Of course it's not the same accomplishment as yours, but when I was 15 I found a computer in the trash with all the parts still in it. I took off the RAM sticks and put them in my sister's computer. It got much faster, she was very pleased and I was very proud.

FreeFull 6y ago

Fun fact: The latest Linux kernel will still run fine on a 486, and give you a somewhat useable experience. You just need to make sure to pick a distro that hasn't built its packages targetting newer instructions than what a 486 offers.

DJHenk 6y ago

My personal anecdote about this is the time I was a student and a room mate and I were doing the same assignment that involved creating a program for some statistical simulation. I had a 486, he had just gotten a brand new blazing fast pentium of the first generation. Compiling and running the simulation took eight minutes on my computer, three seconds on his. And in the end we started and finished around the same time. Because while he was iterating quickly, continuously changing something and running it again, I just sat in front my monitor contemplating the problem and my solution. When I finally got the chance to update my program, I was able to make a big, significant change. Lesson learned: it is not the computer time that is important, but the thinking time. And thinking time is spent best in big blocks, not in tiny slivers.