How I got the mailman to hate me 25 years ago....

sdkid

sdkid

IPCT+ Member
Dec 6, 2014
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South Dakota
LOL....

I found this buried in the back of a cabinet today.... Who else had a subscription to the biggest "magazine" ever coming to you every month?

This just cracked me up--- a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro for $3,500!!


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I pissed off my mailman years ago via a different method. I had a sensor on the mailbox on the street that alerted me when the mail was delivered. I set up an announcement to play over the house speakers when he delivered the mail. well this guy was a jerk and if there was a car any where near the mailbox parked on the street, he would not deliver the mail that day. So I made the announcement say “the lazy postman has decided to do his job today”. Well…one day he delivered the mail but needed a signature from me for a certified letter. i opened the door and the announcement was delayed and played right in front of him. He was not pleased but I was.
 
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And that was 1997 dollars.....which is probably equivalent to over $6,000 today! :wow:

And how much RAM were we using back then? A HUMONGOUS 256K ? :cool:
 
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TonyR said:
And that was 1997 dollars.....which is probably equivalent to over $6,000 today! :wow:

And how much RAM were we using back then? A HUMONGOUS 256K? :cool:
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From that era I had a Gateway 2000 with a Pentium 100 that had 80 MB of RAM. :) At work then, I was forced to work with OS9 Macs that crashed all the time with 3 programs running. That ol' Gateway ran circles around them.

Back in '91 I got my first computer-- a USA Flex from the back of the Shopper. a 386sx @20mhz with 1Mb of ram. Cracking the 640k limit was tricky and every program was different. DOS 5.0 helped a lot with accessing that upper memory.
 
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sdkid said:
From that era I had a Gateway 2000 with a Pentium 100 that had 80 MB of RAM. :) At work then, I was forced to work with OS9 Macs that crashed all the time with 3 programs running. That ol' Gateway ran circles around them.

Back in '91 I got my first computer-- a USA Flex from the back of the Shopper. a 386sx @20mhz with 1Mb of ram. Cracking the 640k limit was tricky and every program was different. DOS 5.0 helped a lot with accessing that upper memory.
Click to expand...
I had a $3,000 gateway in 1995. It was a beast. It was expensive but when you called support you actually spoke with someone who knew what they were doing.
 
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sdkid said:
LOL....

I found this buried in the back of a cabinet today.... Who else had a subscription to the biggest "magazine" ever coming to you every month?

This just cracked me up--- a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro for $3,500!!


View attachment 116350
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I'd love to see a couple pages of ads in there to see what some prices were!
 
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sdkid said:
I will post some later today--- any particular company?
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Just any page(s) that had a lot of items listed to see what I can remember LOL...
 
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sdkid said:
Who else had a subscription to the biggest "magazine" ever coming to you every month?
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I did! It often had 1,000 pages of not just computers/parts to sell, but editorial reviews. Ordered my first Gateway 2000 PC for $3K from it.

My first computer in 1988 was a 1 year old used Apple II (48K RAM) with 2 floppy drives, b/w monitor and a printer for $1,900. Cost me $100 to add a 16K RAM expansion card to max it out to 64K! When looking up historical prices of DRAM, you should check out this bizarre "When Humans transcend Biology" site that does timeline comparisons of all sorts of technology.

P.S. Interestingly, the distinction of the "biggest magazine "ever was an Aviation parts catalog that was over 2.5 times bigger than Computer Shopper! (source: Guiness Book of Records).
 
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sdkid said:
LOL....

I found this buried in the back of a cabinet today.... Who else had a subscription to the biggest "magazine" ever coming to you every month?

This just cracked me up--- a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro for $3,500!!


View attachment 116350
Click to expand...


a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro for $3,500!!

Ahhhhh .. but can it run Blue Iris and my 8 4k cameras???
 
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About that time I built a"video capture" machine. 12 ESIA slots, 64 Megs, an EISA caching controller
with SCSI with16 Megs 7 SCSI drives for data acquisition, 1 drive for OS, CD-Rom burner and last but
not least a Laser Disc burner on a 486 50MHz.

Windows ran super fast in a virtual machine run from a ram drive.
Camera resolution was in femtoseconds. Too bad they filled in the hole
under Waxahachie TX. SCSC.
 
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garycrist said:
About that time I built a"video capture" machine. 12 ESIA slots, 64 Megs, an EISA caching controller
with SCSI with16 Megs 7 SCSI drives for data acquisition, 1 drive for OS, CD-Rom burner and last but
not least a Laser Disc burner on a 486 50MHz.

Windows ran super fast in a virtual machine run from a ram drive.
Camera resolution was in femtoseconds. Too bad they filled in the hole
under Waxahachie TX. SCSC.
Click to expand...
That really sounds cool as hell! I had to look up femtoseconds...

I had a very young family at the time, and I was not able to upgrade to a 486 of any kind. Remember all those shitty Packard Bells in the aisles at Walmart? They sucked... but all I could think of was "but it's a 486!" We skipped the whole 486 line and went directly to that Gateway Pentium 100. I remember seeing Gateway "cow" boxes prominently displayed in scenes on ER back then..... not-so-subtle product placement... LOL
 
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dudemaar said:
Please read our wiki section at the top of page.
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Hi Dude,

I assume you weren't serious given who it was addressed to. Anyway, I was not familiar with the game image you posted, but found that it lives on today as Subspace Continuum!

Subspace.png

Mike A. said:
I still hate that fugly magenta color...
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Certainly entitled to your own color opinions, but T-Mobile is sorry you feel that way. Kinda cool #FF00FF works nicely as a text color! ;)
 
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sdkid said:
That really sounds cool as hell! I had to look up femtoseconds...

I had a very young family at the time, and I was not able to upgrade to a 486 of any kind. Remember all those shitty Packard Bells in the aisles at Walmart? They sucked... but all I could think of was "but it's a 486!" We skipped the whole 486 line and went directly to that Gateway Pentium 100. I remember seeing Gateway "cow" boxes prominently displayed in scenes on ER back then..... not-so-subtle product placement... LOL
Click to expand...
Omg. Packard Bells. I haven't thought about those pieces of shit in 20 years. I don't believe you could cram any cheaper junk cards and boards inside of an enclosure and claim it was a workhorse, any better than PB did. I worked on a few of those things for some friends who had them. Always the exact same problem: Sound card went out. Never mind the fact they placed the sound card, with oscillators components, right over the microprocessor chip on the motherboard.
 
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sdkid said:
That really sounds cool as hell! I had to look up femtoseconds...

I had a very young family at the time, and I was not able to upgrade to a 486 of any kind. Remember all those shitty Packard Bells in the aisles at Walmart? They sucked... but all I could think of was "but it's a 486!" We skipped the whole 486 line and went directly to that Gateway Pentium 100. I remember seeing Gateway "cow" boxes prominently displayed in scenes on ER back then..... not-so-subtle product placement... LOL
Click to expand...

I still have an old "cow" box in the shop. I don't know why, but it looked good beside the old TRS80 box.
 
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