9 ms·

Something about this story does not sound quite right to me. If I were essentially locked up in that scenario, I would at least be confident of the names of the

by phpnode 12y ago

Something about this story does not sound quite right to me. If I were essentially locked up in that scenario, I would at least be confident of the names of the 3 games which were installed, since they'd inevitably be played to death, regardless of how good they were. Also there's this http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2p63rv/australian_isolated_from_1999_to_2006_with_a_486/cmtpdr5 http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2p63rv/australian...

sillysaurus3 12y ago
People who get big projects done don't really play lots of games. Carmack, for example, has said he doesn't actually play any. It's strange how consistently true this has been. I wonder how many games Notch plays, especially during his prime when he was making Minecraft.
- Pxl_Buzzard 12y ago
  Check out Notch's Twitch broadcast history[1]. Since Mojang was sold he has been playing a variety of games, but scroll down a bit and it mostly turns into live programming and Team Fortress 2. 1. http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    The earliest broadcast is titled "Notch: Creator of Minecraft," from August 2011. Minecraft was released in 2009. So those videos aren't really evidence one way or the other in regards to what I'm saying: people who do big solo projects don't seem to play many games during the time they're hammering out features. And while Notch's LD sprints are impressive, he hasn't really shipped a big project since Minecraft.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      Whoops, I just noticed I phrased my original comment like "I wonder how many games Notch plays" (present tense) which is exactly what you showed. I meant to phrase it in past tense. Sorry, that was my bad.
  - nacs 12y ago
    Notch had handed over the vast majority of Minecraft development to Jeb at that point so its not surprising that he was playing so much TF2. I doubt he was playing as much when he was the sole developer.
dalke 12y ago
It sounds quite reasonable to me. I did morally similar things on an 8088 machine, 10 years previous. Eg, no ray-tracing, but I did an animated movie. No operating system, but I wrote my own BASIC in BASIC. Everything described is well within the skills of a hobbyist. While I played a bunch of games on it, they weren't games to play to death. Once I finished the levels of Loderunner, for example, it looped back to level 1, and I stopped playing it. The game instead was to figure out neat thing to do, then do it. The comments on the reddit link are often uninformed, both the negative ones (few hobbyists of the era used source control) and the positive (the projects did not make real use of the hardware, and show no special 'knack' - I certainly am from that era but have no knack for the demoscene).
qnr 12y ago
Also, "Osborne 486, with about 64k of RAM if memory serves me correctly. " First, a 486 with 64K RAM is ridiculous as they typically had multiple megabytes of memory. Second, he worked with that PC for 7 years and isn't quite confident of how much memory it had? This doesn't sound quite right either. I can clearly remember the amounts of RAM my first few PCs had, starting from 1999.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Why are we trying to insinuate they're lying? Either there's evidence or there's not, and without some pretty strong evidence, this is just depressing. Especially from the point of view of someone who might like to one day present a project they've been working on to "the internet." I'm close to someone who I've been watching slowly discover their passion for programming over the last six months or so. They never realized they'd care so much, or be any good at it. I've been giving consistent positive reinforcement, and I dread the day that they roll out their first real achievement to the masses. They might just throw their hands up in the air and give up entirely, judging by how people usually act.
  - mkramlich 12y ago
    I totally hear you and understand. However, two points to consider. One, nobody's forced to share their project/efforts on the Internet, which is essentially the entire planet, all of humanity, 24x7 for all the rest of time (info wants to live forever, etc.) We are all free to keep our things private, off-line, just among friends, etc. You're free to approach people in real life you know for feedback, tips, encouragement. They're more likely to be polite, and also you're not asking something of a total stranger. Second, there's been a cultural change that a lot of younger people or newbs may not be aware of. For folks of the pre-Internet, "first with computers" generation, that's precisely the standard operating environment when we we learning, just starting out, taking those early baby steps. When we were first scribbling out our first programs, however naive or full of bugs or flaws, we didn't immediately go push it in the faces of millions of strangers across the world (ala Show HN, GitHub, blogs, etc), a good portion of whom would be professionals alot further along, and say "omg look at this isn't it amazing I'm a hacker now please hire me k thx" -- we couldn't because the Interent didn't really exist and most of these modern ways of publishing and sharing didn't exist. So most of that early crude, naive, sometimes embarassing stage was done in private, off-line, or only among friends or teachers known personally. Today we have the equivalent of proud (and healthily, voluntarily deluded) parents posting their kindegartener's first crayon house-and-trees-and-sun drawings out onto blogs, GitHub, HN, Reddit, YouTube, etc and then being shocked or having their feelings hurt when others aren't as eaually blown away as them, and in some cases critical or dismissive. Its just the nature of the beast. Nobody forced them to share those things, and in that public global anonymous mixed (newbs/kids and experts/pro's) of a forum. They chose that. And it makes sense you'll also get back a mix of reactions, some of which you won't like. What the modern Internet enables today has lots of great qualities (eg. I can download all this cool software for free, Wikipedia, Kickstarter, etc etc) but it also enables lots of sucky stuff (eg. eternal September, eternal kindegarten mode, arrogant assholes, FAQs, RTFMs, trolls, flamewars, phishing, astroturfing, doxing, etc.) Its hard to enable one without the other.
comrade1 12y ago
I, and I assume anyone else that has tried, get much more enjoyment out of writing a game than playing games. And writing an OS is probably even more fun than writing a game. Edit: Also just wanted to point out that writing a few games has in a way ruined playing games for me. I still load up a new or classic game every now and then but it's more to admire what the developers have done and not so much as to play the game. I don't really 'play' games any more.
- jmccree 12y ago
  That's interesting. After getting into game modding, I lost most interest in single player games other than modding them/playing with mods. Multi-player FPS was still fun, but playing Crysis after tweaking some LUA files so you were invincible and could punch trucks into the air was way more fun to me. Two other similar things ring similar to me. I was big into haunted houses when I was younger, volunteered at them and hung out around the online "haunting" community every season, and to this day visiting haunted houses is more about admiring what is being done than being scared. I recognize the animitronics from the catalog, know to expect that panel to drop, and know how that illusion is done, but I still enjoy visiting a good haunted house. The other really sad thing, is that living in downtown Atlanta where there is a moving/tv show being filmed within a block of my place every other week it seems, I've seen the sausage being made. Knowing how long it takes to setup and shoot a scene that may only be 30 seconds in the movie, it's "ruined" watching TV shows/movies, as I can't help but think about the filming process. I was blissfully unaware how much work went into filming a simple shot of two people walking down a city street.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    Doesn't it make you appreciate movies in another way though? Knowing how it's done and how difficult it is, don't you start looking at things such as lightning, cut techniques etc. in a more informed manner? It's not usually the same movies (or music, or games) that gets popular with the professionals in the industry is popular with regular folks, for this very reason.
    - 12y ago
ciupicri 12y ago
Also > old Apple Powermacs from the 1980s (the tiny ones) Except that Power Macs were available from 1994 until 2006.
- coldtea 12y ago
  Obviously didn't (and doesn't) knew the name of the product? That makes it even more believable, not less.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    I agree. The only reason I knew anything about the hardware of the classic Macs at the time was that I was an Amiga user, and Macs were occasionally dragged in on the periphery of the war of the 68k based machines that was primarily an Amiga vs Atari thing. Beyond knowing it too had a 68k, that it had laughable small screen and was monochrome and cost a ridiculous amount, that was it. That was despite hanging out at the local computer store every few days, and reading every computer magazine I got my hands on (I can thank Commodore Computing International for a lot the earliest English I learned) Most PC users of the era certainly had no reason to know much more about Apple than the name Mac, and know it was some other computer.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      >Most PC users of the era certainly had no reason to know much more about Apple than the name Mac, and know it was some other computer. Yep, especially in Australia...
orangecomputer 12y ago
OP here; Technically, I had already played them to death over the 1990s. Dad used to bring home multiple shareware games: Xargon, Jill of the Jungle, Wacky Wheels, Skunny Kart, you name it. I played them until I became tired of them, although I never got sick of Rise of the Triad. I had a few floppy disks with these titles on them, but again, having played them for so long, I chose to start my own little endeavour to create games instead of playing them, so I eventually removed everything but ROTT for as much disk space as I could get (being my first computer and such, I believed it might've helped performance, was still learning at this point). When I wasn't writing crappy interactive textventures, I was writing up stories in general in EDIT. My reasoning was also that when my stepdad would come into the room, he could never say I was "off playing those bloody games" again in an argument, and that I could argue that I was studying the books I'd picked up from the library. I did play a lot of ROTT in my spare time. It was an early copy (1.0) which had some features removed from the final game such as alternatively coloured pushpillars and the such, but as my system had no speakers, the pc speaker became more and more annoying over time as well. That much I definitely remember, but since we went through so many shareware games in the 1990s, I don't remember what was ultimately on the system when it was given to me (nor when it was thrown away). I would give everything I owned to get it back, but unless someone chose to salvage and restore it, that system is long gone and crushed up.
coldtea 12y ago
>If I were essentially locked up in that scenario, I would at least be confident of the names of the 3 games which were installed, since they'd inevitably be played to death, regardless of how good they were. Also there's this You'd be surprised what happens after 10 years or so. There are games I played as a kid countless times, in arcardes and on my PC, and yet I coulnd't remember their titles at all when I was at university age and such. I only rediscovered some of their titles with luck and queries on Google later (in my 30's). E.g.: "game where a frog tries to cross the road" was apparently Frogger. "game where you have a crosshair and hit people" is Prohibition. "pc game where a cat jumps in an neighborhood" is Alley Cat, etc.
- Keyframe 12y ago
  This is absolutely true. One of my favorite arcade games from the 80's where I've spent countless hours and played it to death and I can't remember the name of it. To this day the quest to find it again continues. It's like an adventure or something.
  - swimfar 12y ago
    You should post something here: http://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue http://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue Or try an arcade related forum or subreddit. I'm sure someone out there can help you.
    - Keyframe 12y ago
      Tried it already a year ago with no luck. Maybe I'll try it again!
      - 9999 12y ago
        You could try it here too, what do you remember about it? What country were you playing it in? What were the controls? Joystick, trackball, one giant button, several buttons? What year did you first play it? Any memories at all about what the gameplay was like or the overall quality of the graphics?
IkmoIkmo 12y ago
I'll remember visual images from tons of places, people, games, music, street names and books. But I'd not have a clue what they were called. I'd know where my school was, I'd just 'go there', I didn't know the street name. I'd turn on the TV, I didn't know what brand it was. I'd just turn on the computer and play Escape Velocity, didn't know it was called that. There are lots of exceptions, like I wouldn't miss the name 'teenage mutant ninja turtles' or ever forget it. But especially for things like computer games when I was 8, I'd just 'doubleclick the game icon with the picture of a car' not having a clue what that racing game was called.
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  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/eXb430f.jpg http://i.imgur.com/BDpt6wt.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.

by phpnode 12y ago

sillysaurus3 12y ago

People who get big projects done don't really play lots of games. Carmack, for example, has said he doesn't actually play any. It's strange how consistently true this has been. I wonder how many games Notch plays, especially during his prime when he was making Minecraft.

Pxl_Buzzard 12y ago
Check out Notch's Twitch broadcast history[1]. Since Mojang was sold he has been playing a variety of games, but scroll down a bit and it mostly turns into live programming and Team Fortress 2. 1. http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  The earliest broadcast is titled "Notch: Creator of Minecraft," from August 2011. Minecraft was released in 2009. So those videos aren't really evidence one way or the other in regards to what I'm saying: people who do big solo projects don't seem to play many games during the time they're hammering out features. And while Notch's LD sprints are impressive, he hasn't really shipped a big project since Minecraft.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Whoops, I just noticed I phrased my original comment like "I wonder how many games Notch plays" (present tense) which is exactly what you showed. I meant to phrase it in past tense. Sorry, that was my bad.
- nacs 12y ago
  Notch had handed over the vast majority of Minecraft development to Jeb at that point so its not surprising that he was playing so much TF2. I doubt he was playing as much when he was the sole developer.

dalke 12y ago

It sounds quite reasonable to me. I did morally similar things on an 8088 machine, 10 years previous. Eg, no ray-tracing, but I did an animated movie. No operating system, but I wrote my own BASIC in BASIC. Everything described is well within the skills of a hobbyist. While I played a bunch of games on it, they weren't games to play to death. Once I finished the levels of Loderunner, for example, it looped back to level 1, and I stopped playing it. The game instead was to figure out neat thing to do, then do it. The comments on the reddit link are often uninformed, both the negative ones (few hobbyists of the era used source control) and the positive (the projects did not make real use of the hardware, and show no special 'knack' - I certainly am from that era but have no knack for the demoscene).

qnr 12y ago

Also, "Osborne 486, with about 64k of RAM if memory serves me correctly. " First, a 486 with 64K RAM is ridiculous as they typically had multiple megabytes of memory. Second, he worked with that PC for 7 years and isn't quite confident of how much memory it had? This doesn't sound quite right either. I can clearly remember the amounts of RAM my first few PCs had, starting from 1999.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
Why are we trying to insinuate they're lying? Either there's evidence or there's not, and without some pretty strong evidence, this is just depressing. Especially from the point of view of someone who might like to one day present a project they've been working on to "the internet." I'm close to someone who I've been watching slowly discover their passion for programming over the last six months or so. They never realized they'd care so much, or be any good at it. I've been giving consistent positive reinforcement, and I dread the day that they roll out their first real achievement to the masses. They might just throw their hands up in the air and give up entirely, judging by how people usually act.
- mkramlich 12y ago
  I totally hear you and understand. However, two points to consider. One, nobody's forced to share their project/efforts on the Internet, which is essentially the entire planet, all of humanity, 24x7 for all the rest of time (info wants to live forever, etc.) We are all free to keep our things private, off-line, just among friends, etc. You're free to approach people in real life you know for feedback, tips, encouragement. They're more likely to be polite, and also you're not asking something of a total stranger. Second, there's been a cultural change that a lot of younger people or newbs may not be aware of. For folks of the pre-Internet, "first with computers" generation, that's precisely the standard operating environment when we we learning, just starting out, taking those early baby steps. When we were first scribbling out our first programs, however naive or full of bugs or flaws, we didn't immediately go push it in the faces of millions of strangers across the world (ala Show HN, GitHub, blogs, etc), a good portion of whom would be professionals alot further along, and say "omg look at this isn't it amazing I'm a hacker now please hire me k thx" -- we couldn't because the Interent didn't really exist and most of these modern ways of publishing and sharing didn't exist. So most of that early crude, naive, sometimes embarassing stage was done in private, off-line, or only among friends or teachers known personally. Today we have the equivalent of proud (and healthily, voluntarily deluded) parents posting their kindegartener's first crayon house-and-trees-and-sun drawings out onto blogs, GitHub, HN, Reddit, YouTube, etc and then being shocked or having their feelings hurt when others aren't as eaually blown away as them, and in some cases critical or dismissive. Its just the nature of the beast. Nobody forced them to share those things, and in that public global anonymous mixed (newbs/kids and experts/pro's) of a forum. They chose that. And it makes sense you'll also get back a mix of reactions, some of which you won't like. What the modern Internet enables today has lots of great qualities (eg. I can download all this cool software for free, Wikipedia, Kickstarter, etc etc) but it also enables lots of sucky stuff (eg. eternal September, eternal kindegarten mode, arrogant assholes, FAQs, RTFMs, trolls, flamewars, phishing, astroturfing, doxing, etc.) Its hard to enable one without the other.

comrade1 12y ago

I, and I assume anyone else that has tried, get much more enjoyment out of writing a game than playing games. And writing an OS is probably even more fun than writing a game. Edit: Also just wanted to point out that writing a few games has in a way ruined playing games for me. I still load up a new or classic game every now and then but it's more to admire what the developers have done and not so much as to play the game. I don't really 'play' games any more.

jmccree 12y ago
That's interesting. After getting into game modding, I lost most interest in single player games other than modding them/playing with mods. Multi-player FPS was still fun, but playing Crysis after tweaking some LUA files so you were invincible and could punch trucks into the air was way more fun to me. Two other similar things ring similar to me. I was big into haunted houses when I was younger, volunteered at them and hung out around the online "haunting" community every season, and to this day visiting haunted houses is more about admiring what is being done than being scared. I recognize the animitronics from the catalog, know to expect that panel to drop, and know how that illusion is done, but I still enjoy visiting a good haunted house. The other really sad thing, is that living in downtown Atlanta where there is a moving/tv show being filmed within a block of my place every other week it seems, I've seen the sausage being made. Knowing how long it takes to setup and shoot a scene that may only be 30 seconds in the movie, it's "ruined" watching TV shows/movies, as I can't help but think about the filming process. I was blissfully unaware how much work went into filming a simple shot of two people walking down a city street.
- xorcist 12y ago
  Doesn't it make you appreciate movies in another way though? Knowing how it's done and how difficult it is, don't you start looking at things such as lightning, cut techniques etc. in a more informed manner? It's not usually the same movies (or music, or games) that gets popular with the professionals in the industry is popular with regular folks, for this very reason.
  - 12y ago

ciupicri 12y ago

Also > old Apple Powermacs from the 1980s (the tiny ones) Except that Power Macs were available from 1994 until 2006.

coldtea 12y ago
Obviously didn't (and doesn't) knew the name of the product? That makes it even more believable, not less.
- vidarh 12y ago
  I agree. The only reason I knew anything about the hardware of the classic Macs at the time was that I was an Amiga user, and Macs were occasionally dragged in on the periphery of the war of the 68k based machines that was primarily an Amiga vs Atari thing. Beyond knowing it too had a 68k, that it had laughable small screen and was monochrome and cost a ridiculous amount, that was it. That was despite hanging out at the local computer store every few days, and reading every computer magazine I got my hands on (I can thank Commodore Computing International for a lot the earliest English I learned) Most PC users of the era certainly had no reason to know much more about Apple than the name Mac, and know it was some other computer.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >Most PC users of the era certainly had no reason to know much more about Apple than the name Mac, and know it was some other computer. Yep, especially in Australia...

orangecomputer 12y ago

OP here; Technically, I had already played them to death over the 1990s. Dad used to bring home multiple shareware games: Xargon, Jill of the Jungle, Wacky Wheels, Skunny Kart, you name it. I played them until I became tired of them, although I never got sick of Rise of the Triad. I had a few floppy disks with these titles on them, but again, having played them for so long, I chose to start my own little endeavour to create games instead of playing them, so I eventually removed everything but ROTT for as much disk space as I could get (being my first computer and such, I believed it might've helped performance, was still learning at this point). When I wasn't writing crappy interactive textventures, I was writing up stories in general in EDIT. My reasoning was also that when my stepdad would come into the room, he could never say I was "off playing those bloody games" again in an argument, and that I could argue that I was studying the books I'd picked up from the library. I did play a lot of ROTT in my spare time. It was an early copy (1.0) which had some features removed from the final game such as alternatively coloured pushpillars and the such, but as my system had no speakers, the pc speaker became more and more annoying over time as well. That much I definitely remember, but since we went through so many shareware games in the 1990s, I don't remember what was ultimately on the system when it was given to me (nor when it was thrown away). I would give everything I owned to get it back, but unless someone chose to salvage and restore it, that system is long gone and crushed up.

coldtea 12y ago

>If I were essentially locked up in that scenario, I would at least be confident of the names of the 3 games which were installed, since they'd inevitably be played to death, regardless of how good they were. Also there's this You'd be surprised what happens after 10 years or so. There are games I played as a kid countless times, in arcardes and on my PC, and yet I coulnd't remember their titles at all when I was at university age and such. I only rediscovered some of their titles with luck and queries on Google later (in my 30's). E.g.: "game where a frog tries to cross the road" was apparently Frogger. "game where you have a crosshair and hit people" is Prohibition. "pc game where a cat jumps in an neighborhood" is Alley Cat, etc.

Keyframe 12y ago
This is absolutely true. One of my favorite arcade games from the 80's where I've spent countless hours and played it to death and I can't remember the name of it. To this day the quest to find it again continues. It's like an adventure or something.
- swimfar 12y ago
  You should post something here: http://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue http://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue Or try an arcade related forum or subreddit. I'm sure someone out there can help you.
  - Keyframe 12y ago
    Tried it already a year ago with no luck. Maybe I'll try it again!
    - 9999 12y ago
      You could try it here too, what do you remember about it? What country were you playing it in? What were the controls? Joystick, trackball, one giant button, several buttons? What year did you first play it? Any memories at all about what the gameplay was like or the overall quality of the graphics?

IkmoIkmo 12y ago

I'll remember visual images from tons of places, people, games, music, street names and books. But I'd not have a clue what they were called. I'd know where my school was, I'd just 'go there', I didn't know the street name. I'd turn on the TV, I didn't know what brand it was. I'd just turn on the computer and play Escape Velocity, didn't know it was called that. There are lots of exceptions, like I wouldn't miss the name 'teenage mutant ninja turtles' or ever forget it. But especially for things like computer games when I was 8, I'd just 'doubleclick the game icon with the picture of a car' not having a clue what that racing game was called.

orangecomputer 12y ago
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/eXb430f.jpg http://i.imgur.com/BDpt6wt.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.