THE GOOD OLD DAYS?

                      By Carolyn Brown

Having a free few minutes this morning I found myself delving into
the murky depths beneath my computer desk, intending to clear out
the dust of ages which had settled there. Instead, I discovered
lost treasure in the form of some old booklets which had been
give-aways with computer mags, which I had stored for future
reference, and long since forgotten about. One of these was a
booklet concerning upgrading which had come courtesy of PC Format
magazine, dated January 1995 (you can tell I don't do a lot of
housework or I would have discovered it years ago!).

It brought back memories of feeling terribly envious to read about
stuff I never, ever thought I would be able to aspire to, such as
the upcoming Pentium P100 which, so it said, 'will be hugely
expensive and the majority of you will never need the power it
will be able to kick out'. As for memory, in those heady days
'every game you can buy will run happily with 8Mb installed and
16Mb will give your system all the RAM it's ever likely to need'.
It goes on to say, 'however, before spending more than œ500 on
16Mb of extra RAM, ask yourself whether you need this much and
consider buying just enough RAM to bring your system up to 8Mb.
16Mb is a fantastic amount to have; however, unless you demand a
lot from your PC, 16Mb can be overkill'. I can well remember when
my husband upgraded my 4Mb to 8Mb of RAM for a Christmas present
one year. I was so proud to have eight whole megabytes of the
stuff! On to video cards, and in 1995 a bargain was to be had in
the form of an Orchid Kelvin 1Mb card for the measly sum of œ175!
The article urges you to get the 2Mb version if you can afford it,
especially if you want high end graphics - it cost a 'very
reasonable' œ234. The star of the article, though is a Diamond
Stealth 2Mb card, which 'only' cost œ304.

Hard drives were considered top of the range if they were 500Mb,
and in those days you could get a 1.6Gb monster for œ864. CD Rom
drives were an expensive luxury; you could expect to have had to
pay around œ200.

Reading all this made me feel guilty about the amount of money I
must have spent on my PCs over the years, ever since my first one
which I bought second hand in, I think, 1992. It cost about œ350
if I remember rightly, and was an Amstrad 2386 - I remember it
fondly; it had a 20Mb hard disk and 4Mb of RAM, and I was
inordinately proud of it. Of course it had no soundcard, just the
computer squeaker, and I can remember saving up for months to buy
an AdLib sound card (anyone remember them?), which produced tinkly
plinky plonky 'music', which was magic to my ears.  My first game
was 'Eye of the Beholder 2', and even now I can remember the
thrill of getting it loaded into DOS and seeing the first screen
appear. I remember the first scene was set in a wood with
cardboard cut-out trees and even worse wolves which poked their
heads out from time to time. Those wolves looked lame to me even
then, I remember, but having safely negotiated the wood and
arrived at Castle Darkmoon, things really hotted up. You travelled
through the dungeons one step at a time, bumping off these
flat-looking baddies if you were lucky. I never got the hang of
what I was supposed to be doing, not for ages, never having played
the pen and paper version of Dungeons and Dragons, but I still
enjoyed it and marvelled at the cleverness of it all.  Which of
course, it was, back in those days.

My next ambition was to play 'Ultima Underworld', and I remember
having a terrible job trying to get my old Amstrad to run the
game.  Does anyone remember having to tussle with DOS and extended
and expanded memory? Ah, those were the days! When I finally got
the darned game to run I felt like Einstein. I can remember having
to find a cheap new soundcard just for this game and the first
time I heard the Guardian speak, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
It was a good game, too, and I wouldn't mind having another go at
it even today if I could. Origin Software certainly knew how to
evoke an atmosphere.

Since then, I have gone on to better things, and my current
upgrade gave me 256Mb of RAM and a 1.6G processor, and even that
is nowhere near state of the art. 'Morrowind' runs beautifully on
it, though, but whenever I feel I am taking all this technical
wonder for granted I will dig out this old booklet and remind
myself of how it used to be in the good old days, unbelievably
only a few short years ago.


















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