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Comment by PeanutNore | Hacker News Reader

I've been using the same Microsoft Optical USB mouse at work since 2008. It's so heavily used that the textured plastic has been polished completely smooth where my hand touches it. It's great and I hope it never fails.

Also...

>and a desktop workstation that while powerful at the time, would be laughable today (16MB of RAM baby!).

16MB of RAM would have been laughable in a workstation in 1999 as well. The fairly basic family Dell we got in 1998 came with 32MB. The budget gaming PC I built in 2000 had 128MB. A powerful workstation in 1999 would have had 256MB.

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Lovely that a simple device stood the test of time like that :) polished plastic is often great (except on thinkpad keyboards).

Also it's fun to see that 128MB to me still feels more impressive than 48GB

It's funny how one gets stuck on things like that. In between my family's 286 and our first Pentium, we didn't upgrade. Consequently, there's a part of me that still believes the 386, with its awesome Turbo button, to be unattainable high-end technology.

It’s similar for me and the Pentium III 600E with 128MB RDRAM and 10k cheetah drive + 21 inch CRT. Will never forget the day my boss dropped that bad boy on my desk. It was a HP Kayak and was such a leap in speed and capability (I was a multimedia producer at the time) that I still think in my minds eye that it’s the fastest machine I have ever used.

It is, it imprints the mystical wonder of your understanding at the time and the effects it has on you (first video game, first 16bit game, first 3d game, fps or rts) and it's there forever.

For me it’s my first experience with a 16 bit game console - the Sega Genesis (if I am not wrong). Played Final Fight at my friends place and I still cannot rate any gaming experience higher than that. I have since tried playing Final Fight again, but it’s not the same.

I spent so much time on this topic. And there are some 'firsts' that don't hold up to the magic they had. But some, even though they don't shine as much, still have surprising balance/depth/quality.

For instance, Resident Evil games, have a mood that is unparalleled (I'm exagerating a bit but you get the idea). It's blocky, slow, ridiculous technically for any next gen standards.. but the mood is so on point it makes the game worth it.

This kind of perception fixed in time is why eBay prices on vintage computers are so expensive. I feel it too, and own many vintage Macs because of it.

Ohhhh the turbo button. I remember that from our first 486DX2. The case had an oddly satisfying neon green segmented LCD display for CPU frequency that would drop from 50 to 25 if you disengaged the switch. Why anyone would ever willingly do so is still beyond me.

>> Why anyone would ever willingly do so is still beyond me

Some games had animations based on frames, not time between frames. So they where unplayable without reducing frequency

One day I switched off turbo while playing Test Drive 3.

Suddenly, I didn't need superhuman reflexes to play, and could drive on curves at speed :-D

From my very vague memory, Reader Rabbit was one such game that was unplayable at a higher CPU frequency.

Turbo buttons weren't only a 386 thing. They existed way before. Even some XT clones had them.

My Compaq XT didn’t have the button, but there was a magic key combination that would change the colour of an LED on the front panel. AN LED THAT CHANGED COLOUR!!!

The minimum requirements for Windows 98 (released June 1998) was 16MB:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98#System_requirements

I’ve been using the same intellimouse for work since about 2001 on a series of macs and Linux machines. It’s only now starting to be a bit flakey on the scroll wheel.

I’m kind of curious how long I can make it last and still be effective.

Buy a new one, and see how long it lasts by comparison.

https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-us/products/mice/mi...

Message us in 18 years.

You can buy any part of it on aliexpress. There is quite big community around that model.

> 16MB of RAM would have been laughable in a workstation in 1999 as well

For sure - I got my first computer that year. It was a G3 iMac with 64 megs of ram. The salesperson assured me that a mac with 64 megs of ram was like a pc with 128, haha. I chose to believe him because I wanted to believe my purchase was worth it. I guess I was 13 back then, and that thing is still running today.

It wasn't a high-end purchase so I assume many computers had more ram than that at the time.

In fairness to the salesperson, they would've been right for typical internet usage. Late 90s and early 00s was the era of the internet toolbar; Windows users never left home without having at least 5 search bars and emoticon buttons!

And all the CPU-consuming adware and malware that came with them.

I'd gotten pretty good at disabling all the sneaky checkboxes, 'extra install options' and fucking bonzai buddies that seemed to be bundled with everything back then. I ended up having to reformat and reinstall everything once because of my carelessness. I was really careful not to install anything like that afterwards. They used to hide the 'extra bonus stuff' really well sometimes.

Even some legitimate things were bundled with some horrible spy and adware that make the ad ridden nightmare dystopia we have today seem quaint.

Apart from bonzi buddy being annoying, it didn't do anything that our modern browsers (chrome) and operating systems (windows, android) don't have baked in these days.

Which is why I can in all seriousness call google a spyware company.

Yeah. Bonsai Buddy didn't do much other than annoy. There were some pretty bad ones though. It was more tongue in cheek. The invisible mass data gathering, ad targetting and general invasiveness into every aspect of life is far more terrifying than some spyware feeding you the occasional popup.

> Bonsai Buddy didn't do much other than annoy

and eat up the limited amount of RAM on low-end machines, back when 32 MB of RAM as standard was still being sold in OEM builds.

Was Connectix RAM Doubler still around in '99? I remember it was very popular around the dorms a few years prior, when 16MB RAM was considered fairly robust.

> 16MB of RAM would have been laughable in a workstation in 1999 as well.

It wasn't state of the art but I was in high school and still earning free beer by raiding older machines and upgrading friends and families computers to 16MB of RAM. I know it was 1999 and onwards because installing napster was part of a typical job. Not the most affluent crowd though.

Yeah I raised an eyebrow at that as well.

IIRC in 1999-2000 I had a Geforce 256, 128Mb of RAM and an overclocked Duron.

> an overclocked Duron

Hah, did you also pencil in the traces on the CPU package to unlock the multiplier?

I had a Pentium II 333, and used the “tape over a pin” trick to change the multiplier from 66 to 100 and clock it at 400mhz!

Around that time (maybe a year later?) I had an ABIT BP6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6) with 2x Celeron II's. They were 500MHz but trivially easy to overclock to 800MHz and above (I think I could get it to just about 900MHz but it became unstable at that point). To this day I still consider that to be one of the best PCs I've ever used - let along owned.

You could play Counterstrike AND burn a CD at the same time! I too look back with fondness at my BP6.

I had this same setup and it was just as awesome as you say.

I wish newer mouse has been as reliable. Even standard Microsoft USB Mouse failed me after a year or two, multiple times already.

On the other hand, my first mouse, a cheap OKER branded, lasted me 10 years before clicks start not registering.

Prices have gone down though. You can buy a Logitech mouse for €25 including shipping. For such a price replacing it every year isn't a big deal.

Even hiend mice fail at alarming rates currently, all due to OMRON being forced by their clients (microsoft/logitech/razer/steelseries/benq) to open factory in China. Price difference between Japanese made switch and Chinese was always maybe $.5 per switch. Today you dont even have choice of better quality.

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