Warning! Geek Speak ahead
So I'm playing a Half-Life Mod called Insurgency online with some pretty cool people. An Aussie, a German some froggers and some Amuricans. Great. We kick the snot out of the enemy team and do a little victory dance. Cool. The game at this point should load up another map and we should continue to crush our enemies. But the game seems to just stall. It doesn't crash. But we're all sitting there waiting. We have voice chat and begin to wonder what's up with the server.
"Da suhrvur, eet must have locked up I zink" said the German.
"They're probably running some shitty P2" chimes in some kid who sounds like he's 9.
"No," I say "It's a it's a 486 with an add on math co-processor".
There is a moment of silence.
'What ze 'el is a math co-processor?" asks the Frenchman.
"I'm sorry to admit I do" said another American.
"That's because you sir, are 39 years old I'll bet. You are I are ancient ones here. We walked the earth on 640k of ram and got our pron over 14.4 modems from BBS's. We wrote our own autoexec.bat files to load our CD-Rom and sound drivers in to HIMEM. And none of you young bastards know what the hell I'm talking about do you?".
There was much laughing.
Then the next map loaded and we prepared to crush the other team.
"That was great mate" said the Brit. "But really, what's a math co-processor?"
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6 comments:
Technically, if it had a math co-processor it was a 486SX. The DX had a built in co-processor. The funniest thing is, the "co-processor" for the SX was just a full DX with a different pin configuration. I wish I had known that back in the day, as the co-processor was cheap compared to a DX. Depending on where you were in the cycle, you could buy a SX & a co-processor for the price of a DX. Which was insane since you were really buying two DX's - one with some parts disabled and another on a different pin out.
Okay, how lame is this? 1) a comment to be a pendant on obsolete hardware and 2) complaining about said hardwares pricing structure too many years after the fact.
Book of JaQuaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!
Honestly Ed, I was debating which suffix to use. I couldn't be sure if the DX was the model with the co-processor or not.
And again, this is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Our 286 ran at 16 MHZ! and it had VGA! The 8086 we had, had dual floppies, which was a big improvement over previous rigs, but 16 colors was never that impressive.
I never had a 386, but I seem to remember them coming in the SX (SuX) and DX (DeluX) formats. Our 486 was a DX.
My first Pentium was a 166, and it was light years beyond 16 color porn.
And there's only so much smut you can fit on a floppy...
Even an 8 incher.
Ok, if I need to prove my age - my first program was written on a HP programable calculator with reverse polish notation. It was a simulator of a moon lander. I copied the code out of a book, then modified it slightly.
The 386, both DX and SX, needed a coprocessor for floating point, I think.
Truth is, the rant and story are great. Just proof that Steve is the man.
I have to agree. Memories of using a second disk as a template to cut a notch in the other side of a single sided a floppy to use both sides are really only cool if you can drop them into conversation with the skill of a bard.
Oh God, I had forgotten about that!
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