What COD and the PC world was like in the old days...

[Ol Smoke]

Call of Duty came out about 8 years ago and COD UO came out in 2004. That doesn't seem that long ago but for some of you, you were about 6 or 7 years old. So let me take you down memory lane a little and tell you how we did it in the good ol days. This is all from an old man's memory, so it might be a little off as to time and date.

 

First of all the PC. We had Pentium 3 CPU's and some had early AMD in 2003. The best speed then was 2.33GHz. We had Windows 98SE or 2000 and XP. By the time, COD/UO came out, the Pentium 4 was the CPU to have and a 64mb Video card was required. At that time the video cards were AGP design. The systems utililzed 4 GB of RAM and we had 80GB harddrives. We had 15" and 17" CRT monitors all in 4x3. There were no 16x9 monitors. In late 2004 the 19" monitors started coming out, but were so expensive no one could afford one. And, they were gigantic. You needed a forklift to put it on the desk.

During 2003, my computer business was building 20 PC's a day, just for local shops. When the internet thing took off, we were building over 40 a day and had our own UPS drop point. It was a glorious time to be in the PC business. But everything was changing so fast. Every six months there were new and faster products. So you had to limit your stocking to just 2 weeks at a time. It seemed that people had money to burn because they would buy a new and faster motherboard, cpu and RAM every time the new stuff came out. When the Intel P4 came out, I could not get enough of them, and the motherboards, to build all the orders. At this point in time,(2004/2005) the business was doing over $80,000 a month in revenue. I had 4 fulltime builders going 8 hours a day, and 4 parttime builders finishing the week. I was building the prototypes and scripting the servers with the Windows build, so we could burn HDDs for each build we did. I was working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, just to stay up. We had a cloner that could do 4 HDDs at a time.

Everytime the hardware changed, we had to make another Windows XP script and get all the proper drivers loaded. It was a never ceasing job. But I loved every minute of it. It had to be like when electricity became common, and all those inventions started to come out in the 1900's.

 

The only drawback to this period of time was the internet. In 1998 I was able to get a 125K DSL line from a local provider. This was the greatest thing since sliced bread. No more dial up. Back then it took 30 minutes to get a 1MB file to download. Luckily, the drivers and programs back then weren't as big so it all evened out. When we first started playing COD, everyone had dial-up 56k or 33.6K. Most of the sites had only 20 slots, so a lot of the time you had to watch the screen to wait for a game to end and see if someone left, then hit the enter button to log-in to the game. But, you were fighting against hundreds of other guys, so the lowest PING usually one. You prayed for a local server so you could get a ping of 70 or less. Once you got into the game there were other internet problems. We got cut off all the time because the mainline substations would cut you off when they would re-hook you to the server through another pathway. (That doesnt happen today) The other thing was trying to keep all the pings below 100. Sometimes guys from the east would try to play on a server on the west coast. Their 90 or 100 ping or higher, would lag the server so bad, no one could move in the game. So later on, there were servers who put in ping maximum latency protocols, that kept you from logging in if your ping was over 60 or 70. But most of the time we had fun and got to play.

 

The video was attrocious compared to the game of today. We started off with 8mb video cards from ATI and then nVidia. They produced 2D video that let you see distant objects in reference, but no shading and no 3d circular drawing. Then ATI came out with the first 3d enhanced board with the AGP interface and it had 32mb. This thing sold for about $300. Then nVidia came out with their version of 3d acceleration. But their board had a secret. There was a little patch driver that you could find on the internet for the nvidia boards that gave you a little edge over the ATI boards. Actually, a 15 year old kid in Kansas found this little secret and he put it out there. What the patch did was let you see thru fog and smoke. So while your are playing, you throw a smoke nade, and then run into it. Thinking that you are safe. Then suddenly, bang, bang, bang, you are dead. WTH??? This started happening more and more, and then the word got out. So everyone cried foul! Those that got caught using it, got kicked off the server. After a few months, nVidia closed that little port off in the chip, in the new cpus. So as video got better, it went by the wayside. It was only supposed to work in the singleplayer mode, in the beginner game. But, leave it to the kids to find all the hidden stuff. As time went on the video got better and better, but the game did not. In 2009/2010, real time 3d made its debut and that is what the games use today. So there you have a brief history of how this stuff came to be. It's kinda like the car. We started with the model T Ford, and today we have an electric car called the Tesla, that will go 200mph. Yee haw!

 

I made some really close friends back then, and every year we setup a group of players from the old COD/UO days and go again. We rent a large room at a local hotel and I bring my big server (Quad P4) and we hook up and get to it. It starts Friday at 6pm and quits Sunday at 4pm. We get 3 rooms with 2 beds each, and rotate sleep periods. We also have 3 or 4 camping bags in each room. One year, when I still had the business, I got Pepsi to put in a fountain in the mainroom. We ran dry on Mountain Dew. Some guys would play for 24 hours straight, then collapse. We had a local pizza company burning up the road along with a local sub sandwich place. There was about 60 guys there. We play COD/UO, COD2 and COD4, Some MOH and some splinter cell, but mostly COD4. There are 3 or 4 guys who actually fly in for this from back east. We range in age from 45 to 65. Last year we had more Subway than pizza and water. The old tickers don't take too kindly to Mountain Dew anymore.

 

I hope this was entertaining for you young guys and a bit of nostalgia for you older guys. See you on the forums or around the game.

[Jefke]

Great story ^^

 

Believe it or not, apart of that last part about the party (the fun part you could say).

I recognise most of the stuff...

 

Being on a smaller scale though:

 

- At the age of 8-9 years I was responsible for all the computers in my primary school (all 5-10 of them ^^)

- I started building pcs at age of 10-11 years old (that should have been 2004 ^^). As far as I can remember we only had 1 OEM pc

- Started gaming (online) when my stepdad gave his copy of bf1942 to me when I was the age of 12-13 (so 2005-2006, probably at the time bf2 released). The game was already a bit old then (released in 2002), but I loved it. It hooked me to gaming, fps and the battlefield franchise (shame they f*cked it up ) Think we had ADSL , but not sure .

 

- Present: I'm building on average around 12 pcs a year, most of them being budgets pcs for familly or gaming rigs for friends. But I also got little home server and HTPC ^^

I'm studying informatics ^^

[Ol Smoke]

Great. It's always nice to talk about this stuff, before it goes away.

Back when I was in MRI, I had to do a lot of informatics on the MRI and it's social impact on medicine.

I never did like the battlefield series, nor any of the squad type games.

If you ever need stuff for you builds, just get in touch with me. I still have my wholesale distributors on line.

[Guardian]

Funny enough, I can relate to most of the things said although i'm only 16...

But yeah, I have experience with Windows 95/98/XP/7 and it took a long time to leave the old big monitor for a flatter one.

 

The games that really brought me in FPS are Ghost Recon (+ expansions) and BF Vietnam. Love those games and still play them once in a while!

[General]

Man I wish I was a few years older to have experienced everything you have.

[A_Snake]

Thanks, lol. Reading about 2003 and 2004 does not seem that long ago to me and made me think of my first computer class in college where I learned about Joe Spreadsheet and DOS on a green screen CRT. I think that was in 1990 or somewhere around then. Man talk about Sanscrit and the Gutenburg press. Heck I still remember my IBM 386 and upgrading to the 486.

 

The Tesla car is great and named after a great inventor, but I was promised flying cars in the 21st century. Where are my flying cars like George Jetson.

 

My first FPS games started with Halo and Ghost Recon back in the day.

[LA_Kings_Fan]

Thanks, lol. Reading about 2003 and 2004 does not seem that long ago to me and made me think of my first computer class in college where I learned about Joe Spreadsheet and DOS on a green screen CRT. I think that was in 1990 or somewhere around then. Man talk about Sanscrit and the Gutenburg press. Heck I still remember my IBM 386 and upgrading to the 486.

 

Oh good god ... now I feel Old ... well REALLY OLD ... as I remember my first computer programing class back in Jr. High back in the early 80's (1983 I think ?) on a TANDY {yeah Radio Shack to you young whiper snapers} TRS-80 I think ? maybe it was the Tandy 1000 ... NOPE it HAD to be the TRS-80 because this was BEFORE FLOPPY DISC's !!! we had to create data on TAPE and on PUNCH CARDS that the computer read as 1's and 0's ... hell DOS was High Tech back then !

 

 

 

Edited January 7, 2013 by LA_Kings_Fan

[CookieMonsta]

I'm ashamed to say, that the oldest windows I experienced was only XP. We were too poor to buy a PC and we we're living on the mountains (yep....) There was no internet connections and we had to go to our neighbor just to watch T.V.

I wish I experienced the games of the 90's generation.

[A_Snake]

You all don't feel too old. Jr. high in 83, really? Some of old folks were out of high school at that time. My first gaming experience was Pong on a Magnavox Odyssey in 1976. They actually filed suit against Atari over this game.

[EmtHipple]

I still remember the first PC game I played, Sopwith camel. and then of course Oregon trial came along when I was in school

then I was slack jawed at wolfenstein 3d when it first came out and I was addicted to shooters from then on. When Return to castle Wolfenstein included the orig. version I'll admit I played that more than the actual game

[Ol Smoke]

Man. I loved Wolfenstein. I wish they still made games that had secret hidden stuff to find.

I remember going to the gaming convention in Las Vegas and seeing this guy doing his Duke Nukem impersonation

and a girl doing Lara Croft. All the young geeks were chasing her around for a picture. hahahaha

[EmtHipple]

Who wouldn't chase Lara Croft around .

[Ol Smoke]

Here is what Lara Croft looked like at the E3 in Las Vegas in 2002.

 

 

Now that I look back at this picture....I should have chased her around some too.

Can't find any pictures of Duke Nukem in 2002.

[EmtHipple]

yummm

[Man]

Well as for in India, nobody even had a proper PC till around 2007. [ some owned, those rich spoilt kids ], owning a PC was a dream because they were super expensive.and owning a Internet connection was even a bigger dream. before 2007, we had to go to cyber cafe to access internet at a premium rate. But after 2007, things started to change dramatically. Gradually, now almost all educated people own a PC/laptop. and 50 percent of them have got Internet connection.

Edited January 10, 2013 by mahesh