In the 90s, our family PC was in our basement that had been finished in the 70s complete with woodgrain wall panelling.

My mom hated computers so for a lot of years it was setup in the home office and weren’t aloud to tinker on it too much if we accidentally left a game disk in and it booted up while she tried to use the computer she would go apeshit because it did something she didn’t know how to deal with 🤣.
Wasn’t till 98 and already an adult that I could have my own pc in my room I’d have a corner desk setup with a bare bones tower made with leftover parts with win 3.11 on it and my gaming rig under the desk with bookshelf full of box art

In the 90's, when I had a computer in my room, my walls were plastered with posters, tech tree, maps and other stuff that either was packed in with games or came in Computer Gaming World. My computer desk was cluttered to the max with random trinkets and toys like a Devastator Transformer, a Night Elf figure from WarCraft III, and all kinds of random feelies from Ultima 9. In one corner of the room I had all the big boxes from games I'd bought, unsure what to do with them.

I remember someone asking once if our bedrooms really looked like this in the 90's, and mine probably wasn't that far off.

In the mid 90s I had an Amiga 500. It looked like this.
For me, the PC era started in late 1996 with a P133. Didn't really take many pics at the time, so here's what I could find. The PC pic was from the early 2000s, but in the 90s the desk didn't look much different, except the PC was a P133 and the monitor a CRT.

Is that a flat LCD monitor? That must have been extremely expensive in the 90s.

Is that a flat LCD monitor? That must have been extremely expensive in the 90s.

Philips Brilliance 150P, I got it in May 2000. Before that, I had a CRT monitor (Philips Brilliance 105), but I couldn't find a pic so I took that one from the early 2000s.

mid 90's both me and my best mate who were in our mid teens only had access to the family PC which were set up on a desk in a communal area, his was close to the back door, mine was in the dining room. was more a case of where it would fit then any real effort to decorate.

Late 90's I finally got a PC in my room, typically with old PC's in parts close by. This was the era when everyone was throwing out 386/486's so many of us had piles of old PC's for projects

Oh and the organising of LAN parties and lugging your beast to and fro 🤣

Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-06-27, 02:47:

Oh and the organising of LAN parties and lugging your beast to and fro 🤣

Still do that at least once a year 😀

This picture is from Christmas Day. My Pionex system on my student desk in the computer room of my house. I just got my first flatbed scanner and printer. Little did I know that I’d soon be swapping out my Cirrus Logic AGP GPU for a major upgrade, an ATI Rage Pro 128 (thanks Quake III for refusing to start).

Yes, placing my desk with my PC right next to the heater vent was not a good idea.

I grew up in a split family, and my sisters....the lucky brats they were, got to have their rich daddy BUY them a HOUSE for their college years in Auburn. I would go there on the weekends and they had not one but TWO computers.....an AMT 386 machine with VGA/DOS5, which my older sister in Vet school had, and then my second older sister had the Tandy 1000 SX that eventually became my first computer in 1997.

My older vet sister's room was a linoleum floored room with a built-in wall shelf in the end. THe bed sat in an halcove, it had a floor to ceiling window facing the front and a high hung window off to the side which was over the huge computer desk which had a bench, was topped with glass, and had photos of my sister's various adventures under the glass. Sitting on that desk was a desk lamp, a Chicony 101 key AT clicky keyboard, and a 15" AOC Monitor. The whole shebang was run by a minitower AMT 386 that sat on a black filing cabinet, which often had this gypsy like cloth sitting over the top of it. Next to the AMT was a Panasonic printer of some kind, it was white and turquoise, and then next to that was the PAnasonic stereo - I have the same stereo in my livingroom (I'm looking at it righ tnow). The stereo was important, because I got into rock music giving DOS games their own soundtrack as the AMT only had an internal speaker.

My other sister's room was far less cool and far more feminine. It was pink and white, carpeted, had a huge window to the backyard with a huge curtain, and the Tandy 1000 sat on a smaller desk with it's CM-5 color RGB monitor on top and the 83 key keyboard. I would play on the Tandy when my other sister was playing on the 386 with her college friends (usually playing Leisure Suit Larry), or when I just felt like playing Microsoft Adventure. I'd say that's where I truly learned the concept of a "boot disk" - the AMT had a 80MB HDD.

The AMT was the one I used more though. I'd spend hours drawing pictures in HArvard Graphics 3.0, writing stories in WP51, or playing one of the many hidden computer games the computer had cramming up it's 80MB HDD. My sister bought The Secret of Monkey ISland (VGA Edition) new in 1991 for it, as well as Pirates of the Barberry Coast, an ASCII Shareware DND game, and she had a bunch of the other usual suspects in a hidden folder on the hard disk somewhere (Sharedata Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, Rackets, Spades, Klondike...etc), she also had Maxis and Depthcharge for BASIC.

Any Friday or Saturday you'd hear me in there with any random 80's hair metal, movie soundtrack, or Europop album playing while I played DOS games. My soundtrack for The Secret of Monkey ISland was NOT Michael LAnd's soundtrack, it was the Top Gun soundtrack. My soundtrack for Freddy Pharkas was Bon JOvi's Slippery when Wet. I played A-ha's Hunting High and Low on Vinyl (now on display in my den - the actual record I had then) while committing acts of murder and larceny in Ultima VI as a clueless 11 year old with pinkeye! Monkey ISland 2 had the sounds of Michael Been and The Call backlining my Zombie Pirate escaping adventures. I remember getting in trouble for sneaking into my sister's savegame when I Was not allowed to play Freddy Pharkas because of the "potential content" in the game - it just happened to be the scene where Freddy and Madame Ovaree are in bed together....I think that might be the root of why I type like a maniac at the command line. This computer was also the first computer I ever got on th einternet with over a 14.4K modem via Auburn University internet, browsing guitar newsgroups.

However, my older sister moved away, and with her went the AMT, and in it's place, my less as older sister and her husband-to-be got a brand new Pentium 90 running Windows 95, with Afterdark with the Animaniacs expansion on it. THIS was my introduction to the WWW in proper with I think Netscape 2 or 3. I did not get to use it as much though. It also was where I started downloading NES and ATari Emulators and ROMs and playing emulators at the time.

Then in 1997, I got the Tandy 1000SX as my first computer. This sat on a wooden compuer desk in a room that looked like a witches library! In the back of mom's house, there was a bedroom with the ramshackle but usable remains of a 70's waterbed sands headboard and sides, and about six or seven bookshelves of books. The Tandy sat on my old desk from my bedroom, with the Tandy DMP-12 printer precariously sitting on a empty shelf of the bookshelf most of the time. Next to the Tandy was a big window....any given night in late middle/high school I'd be sitting in that room playing Ultima V, Bugs, Burger Blaster, my own attempts at text adventure games made using BASIC, or writing lyrics and sutff, while sitting a turntable on a chair next to me blasting Journey, Loverboy, and Night Ranger while jamming along on guitar waiting for my floppies to load. I even made a picture of what a night looked like in pixel art for my website.

So that was my computer "spaces" in the mid 1990's for me.

I was just a little kid then, but the first computer I remember my parents using was an old Mac (I don't remember the model - one of the ridiculously tall desktop cases) they got from another family member. I remember that it was only around for a few months before it broke, and then they bought the cheapest computer Circuit City had in January of 1999 (the Compaq Presario 2286 that I now have after it died). That's also when they first got Internet access. That Compaq was unstable out of the box, but they suffered through it because they thought that was normal (as so many other people did back then). It died after about four years (a bad CPU, of all things), and that's how I ended up with it (I found a whole motherboard and CPU combo for it for $2). That was my first time fixing a computer, and I wasn't expecting a dead CPU (I thought it was the motherboard). I found the CPU later, tried to use it, and it didn't work (no POST, no codes, and the heatsink was abnormally hot).

My parents also had (and still have) a PCs Limited AT clone, but it just sat on their basement floor. I don't remember ever seeing it run.

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-20, 07:01:

I grew up in a split family, and my sisters....the lucky brats they were, got to have their rich daddy BUY them a HOUSE for thei […]
Show full quote

I grew up in a split family, and my sisters....the lucky brats they were, got to have their rich daddy BUY them a HOUSE for their college years in Auburn. I would go there on the weekends and they had not one but TWO computers.....an AMT 386 machine with VGA/DOS5, which my older sister in Vet school had, and then my second older sister had the Tandy 1000 SX that eventually became my first computer in 1997.

My older vet sister's room was a linoleum floored room with a built-in wall shelf in the end. THe bed sat in an halcove, it had a floor to ceiling window facing the front and a high hung window off to the side which was over the huge computer desk which had a bench, was topped with glass, and had photos of my sister's various adventures under the glass. Sitting on that desk was a desk lamp, a Chicony 101 key AT clicky keyboard, and a 15" AOC Monitor. The whole shebang was run by a minitower AMT 386 that sat on a black filing cabinet, which often had this gypsy like cloth sitting over the top of it. Next to the AMT was a Panasonic printer of some kind, it was white and turquoise, and then next to that was the PAnasonic stereo - I have the same stereo in my livingroom (I'm looking at it righ tnow). The stereo was important, because I got into rock music giving DOS games their own soundtrack as the AMT only had an internal speaker.

My other sister's room was far less cool and far more feminine. It was pink and white, carpeted, had a huge window to the backyard with a huge curtain, and the Tandy 1000 sat on a smaller desk with it's CM-5 color RGB monitor on top and the 83 key keyboard. I would play on the Tandy when my other sister was playing on the 386 with her college friends (usually playing Leisure Suit Larry), or when I just felt like playing Microsoft Adventure. I'd say that's where I truly learned the concept of a "boot disk" - the AMT had a 80MB HDD.

The AMT was the one I used more though. I'd spend hours drawing pictures in HArvard Graphics 3.0, writing stories in WP51, or playing one of the many hidden computer games the computer had cramming up it's 80MB HDD. My sister bought The Secret of Monkey ISland (VGA Edition) new in 1991 for it, as well as Pirates of the Barberry Coast, an ASCII Shareware DND game, and she had a bunch of the other usual suspects in a hidden folder on the hard disk somewhere (Sharedata Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, Rackets, Spades, Klondike...etc), she also had Maxis and Depthcharge for BASIC.

Any Friday or Saturday you'd hear me in there with any random 80's hair metal, movie soundtrack, or Europop album playing while I played DOS games. My soundtrack for The Secret of Monkey ISland was NOT Michael LAnd's soundtrack, it was the Top Gun soundtrack. My soundtrack for Freddy Pharkas was Bon JOvi's Slippery when Wet. I played A-ha's Hunting High and Low on Vinyl (now on display in my den - the actual record I had then) while committing acts of murder and larceny in Ultima VI as a clueless 11 year old with pinkeye! Monkey ISland 2 had the sounds of Michael Been and The Call backlining my Zombie Pirate escaping adventures. I remember getting in trouble for sneaking into my sister's savegame when I Was not allowed to play Freddy Pharkas because of the "potential content" in the game - it just happened to be the scene where Freddy and Madame Ovaree are in bed together....I think that might be the root of why I type like a maniac at the command line. This computer was also the first computer I ever got on th einternet with over a 14.4K modem via Auburn University internet, browsing guitar newsgroups.

However, my older sister moved away, and with her went the AMT, and in it's place, my less as older sister and her husband-to-be got a brand new Pentium 90 running Windows 95, with Afterdark with the Animaniacs expansion on it. THIS was my introduction to the WWW in proper with I think Netscape 2 or 3. I did not get to use it as much though. It also was where I started downloading NES and ATari Emulators and ROMs and playing emulators at the time.

The attachment lika97.gif is no longer available

Then in 1997, I got the Tandy 1000SX as my first computer. This sat on a wooden compuer desk in a room that looked like a witches library! In the back of mom's house, there was a bedroom with the ramshackle but usable remains of a 70's waterbed sands headboard and sides, and about six or seven bookshelves of books. The Tandy sat on my old desk from my bedroom, with the Tandy DMP-12 printer precariously sitting on a empty shelf of the bookshelf most of the time. Next to the Tandy was a big window....any given night in late middle/high school I'd be sitting in that room playing Ultima V, Bugs, Burger Blaster, my own attempts at text adventure games made using BASIC, or writing lyrics and sutff, while sitting a turntable on a chair next to me blasting Journey, Loverboy, and Night Ranger while jamming along on guitar waiting for my floppies to load. I even made a picture of what a night looked like in pixel art for my website.

So that was my computer "spaces" in the mid 1990's for me.

Thank you for sharing ?

This made me wonder, are your sisters into retro tech in any way ?

This question also extends to everyone else here. Does anyone here have siblings, cousins, etc with that interest ?

Sorry for the slightly off topic diversion of the thread.

darry wrote on 2024-07-20, 16:45:

Thank you for sharing ? […]
Show full quote

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-20, 07:01:

I grew up in a split family, and my sisters....the lucky brats they were, got to have their rich daddy BUY them a HOUSE for thei […]
Show full quote

I grew up in a split family, and my sisters....the lucky brats they were, got to have their rich daddy BUY them a HOUSE for their college years in Auburn. I would go there on the weekends and they had not one but TWO computers.....an AMT 386 machine with VGA/DOS5, which my older sister in Vet school had, and then my second older sister had the Tandy 1000 SX that eventually became my first computer in 1997.

My older vet sister's room was a linoleum floored room with a built-in wall shelf in the end. THe bed sat in an halcove, it had a floor to ceiling window facing the front and a high hung window off to the side which was over the huge computer desk which had a bench, was topped with glass, and had photos of my sister's various adventures under the glass. Sitting on that desk was a desk lamp, a Chicony 101 key AT clicky keyboard, and a 15" AOC Monitor. The whole shebang was run by a minitower AMT 386 that sat on a black filing cabinet, which often had this gypsy like cloth sitting over the top of it. Next to the AMT was a Panasonic printer of some kind, it was white and turquoise, and then next to that was the PAnasonic stereo - I have the same stereo in my livingroom (I'm looking at it righ tnow). The stereo was important, because I got into rock music giving DOS games their own soundtrack as the AMT only had an internal speaker.

My other sister's room was far less cool and far more feminine. It was pink and white, carpeted, had a huge window to the backyard with a huge curtain, and the Tandy 1000 sat on a smaller desk with it's CM-5 color RGB monitor on top and the 83 key keyboard. I would play on the Tandy when my other sister was playing on the 386 with her college friends (usually playing Leisure Suit Larry), or when I just felt like playing Microsoft Adventure. I'd say that's where I truly learned the concept of a "boot disk" - the AMT had a 80MB HDD.

The AMT was the one I used more though. I'd spend hours drawing pictures in HArvard Graphics 3.0, writing stories in WP51, or playing one of the many hidden computer games the computer had cramming up it's 80MB HDD. My sister bought The Secret of Monkey ISland (VGA Edition) new in 1991 for it, as well as Pirates of the Barberry Coast, an ASCII Shareware DND game, and she had a bunch of the other usual suspects in a hidden folder on the hard disk somewhere (Sharedata Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, Rackets, Spades, Klondike...etc), she also had Maxis and Depthcharge for BASIC.

Any Friday or Saturday you'd hear me in there with any random 80's hair metal, movie soundtrack, or Europop album playing while I played DOS games. My soundtrack for The Secret of Monkey ISland was NOT Michael LAnd's soundtrack, it was the Top Gun soundtrack. My soundtrack for Freddy Pharkas was Bon JOvi's Slippery when Wet. I played A-ha's Hunting High and Low on Vinyl (now on display in my den - the actual record I had then) while committing acts of murder and larceny in Ultima VI as a clueless 11 year old with pinkeye! Monkey ISland 2 had the sounds of Michael Been and The Call backlining my Zombie Pirate escaping adventures. I remember getting in trouble for sneaking into my sister's savegame when I Was not allowed to play Freddy Pharkas because of the "potential content" in the game - it just happened to be the scene where Freddy and Madame Ovaree are in bed together....I think that might be the root of why I type like a maniac at the command line. This computer was also the first computer I ever got on th einternet with over a 14.4K modem via Auburn University internet, browsing guitar newsgroups.

However, my older sister moved away, and with her went the AMT, and in it's place, my less as older sister and her husband-to-be got a brand new Pentium 90 running Windows 95, with Afterdark with the Animaniacs expansion on it. THIS was my introduction to the WWW in proper with I think Netscape 2 or 3. I did not get to use it as much though. It also was where I started downloading NES and ATari Emulators and ROMs and playing emulators at the time.

The attachment lika97.gif is no longer available

Then in 1997, I got the Tandy 1000SX as my first computer. This sat on a wooden compuer desk in a room that looked like a witches library! In the back of mom's house, there was a bedroom with the ramshackle but usable remains of a 70's waterbed sands headboard and sides, and about six or seven bookshelves of books. The Tandy sat on my old desk from my bedroom, with the Tandy DMP-12 printer precariously sitting on a empty shelf of the bookshelf most of the time. Next to the Tandy was a big window....any given night in late middle/high school I'd be sitting in that room playing Ultima V, Bugs, Burger Blaster, my own attempts at text adventure games made using BASIC, or writing lyrics and sutff, while sitting a turntable on a chair next to me blasting Journey, Loverboy, and Night Ranger while jamming along on guitar waiting for my floppies to load. I even made a picture of what a night looked like in pixel art for my website.

So that was my computer "spaces" in the mid 1990's for me.

Thank you for sharing ?

This made me wonder, are your sisters into retro tech in any way ?

This question also extends to everyone else here. Does anyone here have siblings, cousins, etc with that interest ?

Sorry for the slightly off topic diversion of the thread.

Unfortunately no. My older sister kinda got out of gaming as she got older. She WAS "retro" for awhile in the 2000s, kept a Pentium II....if you can call that retro at that time. It was for running older games that wouldn't run on XP.

TBH, my flesh and blood family kinda leers at me for this past time tbh. Not that I care TBH. They don't really understand why I like messing with old PCs. Especially now that I can afford modern ones.

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-23, 21:42:

darry wrote on 2024-07-20, 16:45:

Thank you for sharing ? […]
Show full quote

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-20, 07:01:

I grew up in a split family, and my sisters....the lucky brats they were, got to have their rich daddy BUY them a HOUSE for thei […]
Show full quote

I grew up in a split family, and my sisters....the lucky brats they were, got to have their rich daddy BUY them a HOUSE for their college years in Auburn. I would go there on the weekends and they had not one but TWO computers.....an AMT 386 machine with VGA/DOS5, which my older sister in Vet school had, and then my second older sister had the Tandy 1000 SX that eventually became my first computer in 1997.

My older vet sister's room was a linoleum floored room with a built-in wall shelf in the end. THe bed sat in an halcove, it had a floor to ceiling window facing the front and a high hung window off to the side which was over the huge computer desk which had a bench, was topped with glass, and had photos of my sister's various adventures under the glass. Sitting on that desk was a desk lamp, a Chicony 101 key AT clicky keyboard, and a 15" AOC Monitor. The whole shebang was run by a minitower AMT 386 that sat on a black filing cabinet, which often had this gypsy like cloth sitting over the top of it. Next to the AMT was a Panasonic printer of some kind, it was white and turquoise, and then next to that was the PAnasonic stereo - I have the same stereo in my livingroom (I'm looking at it righ tnow). The stereo was important, because I got into rock music giving DOS games their own soundtrack as the AMT only had an internal speaker.

My other sister's room was far less cool and far more feminine. It was pink and white, carpeted, had a huge window to the backyard with a huge curtain, and the Tandy 1000 sat on a smaller desk with it's CM-5 color RGB monitor on top and the 83 key keyboard. I would play on the Tandy when my other sister was playing on the 386 with her college friends (usually playing Leisure Suit Larry), or when I just felt like playing Microsoft Adventure. I'd say that's where I truly learned the concept of a "boot disk" - the AMT had a 80MB HDD.

The AMT was the one I used more though. I'd spend hours drawing pictures in HArvard Graphics 3.0, writing stories in WP51, or playing one of the many hidden computer games the computer had cramming up it's 80MB HDD. My sister bought The Secret of Monkey ISland (VGA Edition) new in 1991 for it, as well as Pirates of the Barberry Coast, an ASCII Shareware DND game, and she had a bunch of the other usual suspects in a hidden folder on the hard disk somewhere (Sharedata Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, Rackets, Spades, Klondike...etc), she also had Maxis and Depthcharge for BASIC.

Any Friday or Saturday you'd hear me in there with any random 80's hair metal, movie soundtrack, or Europop album playing while I played DOS games. My soundtrack for The Secret of Monkey ISland was NOT Michael LAnd's soundtrack, it was the Top Gun soundtrack. My soundtrack for Freddy Pharkas was Bon JOvi's Slippery when Wet. I played A-ha's Hunting High and Low on Vinyl (now on display in my den - the actual record I had then) while committing acts of murder and larceny in Ultima VI as a clueless 11 year old with pinkeye! Monkey ISland 2 had the sounds of Michael Been and The Call backlining my Zombie Pirate escaping adventures. I remember getting in trouble for sneaking into my sister's savegame when I Was not allowed to play Freddy Pharkas because of the "potential content" in the game - it just happened to be the scene where Freddy and Madame Ovaree are in bed together....I think that might be the root of why I type like a maniac at the command line. This computer was also the first computer I ever got on th einternet with over a 14.4K modem via Auburn University internet, browsing guitar newsgroups.

However, my older sister moved away, and with her went the AMT, and in it's place, my less as older sister and her husband-to-be got a brand new Pentium 90 running Windows 95, with Afterdark with the Animaniacs expansion on it. THIS was my introduction to the WWW in proper with I think Netscape 2 or 3. I did not get to use it as much though. It also was where I started downloading NES and ATari Emulators and ROMs and playing emulators at the time.

The attachment lika97.gif is no longer available

Then in 1997, I got the Tandy 1000SX as my first computer. This sat on a wooden compuer desk in a room that looked like a witches library! In the back of mom's house, there was a bedroom with the ramshackle but usable remains of a 70's waterbed sands headboard and sides, and about six or seven bookshelves of books. The Tandy sat on my old desk from my bedroom, with the Tandy DMP-12 printer precariously sitting on a empty shelf of the bookshelf most of the time. Next to the Tandy was a big window....any given night in late middle/high school I'd be sitting in that room playing Ultima V, Bugs, Burger Blaster, my own attempts at text adventure games made using BASIC, or writing lyrics and sutff, while sitting a turntable on a chair next to me blasting Journey, Loverboy, and Night Ranger while jamming along on guitar waiting for my floppies to load. I even made a picture of what a night looked like in pixel art for my website.

So that was my computer "spaces" in the mid 1990's for me.

Thank you for sharing ?

This made me wonder, are your sisters into retro tech in any way ?

This question also extends to everyone else here. Does anyone here have siblings, cousins, etc with that interest ?

Sorry for the slightly off topic diversion of the thread.

Unfortunately no. My older sister kinda got out of gaming as she got older. She WAS "retro" for awhile in the 2000s, kept a Pentium II....if you can call that retro at that time. It was for running older games that wouldn't run on XP.

TBH, my flesh and blood family kinda leers at me for this past time tbh. Not that I care TBH. They don't really understand why I like messing with old PCs. Especially now that I can afford modern ones.

Thank you for sharing.

My childhood room mid/late 90s.

Metallica posters, Stratocaster (real) and Les Paul (copy) guitars as well as my big old Peavey amplifier.
My somewhat meager bookshelf with my fantasy, sci-fi and horror novels. My little 13" RCA B&W white tv and my NES and Atari 2600.
Rather large stereo and at the center of it all my Packard Bell Legend 386.
The Packard Bell was later replaced with a home built PC Chips based K6-2 system.
At some point the TV was also upgraded to a 19" Sony Vaio, but this was the late 90s/2000 by then.
Good old days

I have some photos from 2003 or 2004ish. Is that too recent to share here ?

TheChexWarrior wrote on 2024-07-24, 15:02:

My childhood room mid/late 90s.

I even made a small Duke3D Build Engine map from my memory before I found this pic on my room:
https://youtu.be/ESZxQRKSx18?si=pIAdvRi29Hbw8pnq