Gaming memories: Being totally unaware that my computer was seriously underpowered

In the early 90's most people didn't have computers. The internet for the most part didn't exist and wasn't a part of our lives and home computers were absurdly expensive. Gaming at home was not something that most people even thought about and game companies were few and far between.

However, my father had a reasonably important job with a telecom company that would eventually become Sprint and while I was too young to really care, he was high enough up in the company that they believed that he needed to have his own computer at home. When this happened, my family was one of the only families I was aware of that even had a computer, let alone a reasonably good one.

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It was something like this gigantic bastard but it was manufactured by a company that left the home PC hardware industry a long time ago called Sysdyne. They still exist as a company to this day and I was quite surprised to find this out. Now they just work on software and components and they stay pretty quiet about all that. I never knew anyone else that had a Sysdyne home computer and I think this probably contributed to the reason why they were not in the market for very long.

It was massive, it weighed as much as a dad and his son can safely carry and it only had 2 floppy disk drives and in internal storage of less than 1GB. Since almost all programs could fit on a couple of 1.44MB disks, the idea that you were going to need more than a GB of overall storage was something no one could fathom. Obviously this quickly changed as the market exploded in the next 5 years but back in 1990 this machine we had in my Dad's office was a "beast" because we had nothing to compare it to.

Somehow I ended up getting my hands on a copy of Wing Commander back in those days and I went home and gruelingly installed it from a dozen 1.44 inch floppy disks and fired it up.

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If that graphic looks pixelated that is just because that was the only kind of graphics that existed at the time. Origin was one of the few PC game companies that existed on a semi-large scale at the time and for the most part their games were pretty epic, if you were one of the few people that had the benefit of actually owning a computer.

I played the hell out of this game on, in retrospect, was probably 5 FPS and I was none-the-wiser because I didn't know anyone else that even had a computer. Our school had a few computers but we were not allowed to put games on them so I didn't have anything co compare it to.

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I knew so little about computers that it never occurred to me that our hardware was not up to the task. This was entirely uncharted territory for me and my gaming friends and we would crowd around the computer and take turns at having a go at winning in gloriously slow fashion. If you got more than 2 enemies on the screen you could hear the hamsters inside the box getting their processing wheels up to maximum speed as the hard drive struggled to keep up with the data transfer.

I gotta hand it to the ol' Sysdyne, it never locked up on me or BSOD'd. It would just get really really slow and again, we didn't know any better so we thought that this was just how the game was for everyone.

We all stayed in the dark until my rather spoiled neighbor who got all the gaming toys from his parents ended up with a computer himself and unbeknownst to both of us, his computer would end up being MUCH more powerful than the Sysdyne back at my place. When he loaded up Wing Commander on his computer I was just blown away.

It seems silly to say it now, but the system requirements actually WERE on the box I bought but since none of us knew what any of that information actually meant, I didn't think anything of it. The sysreq's may as well have been written in Mandarin because none of use knew what CPU or RAM even was. I don't think GPU's were even a thing at that point - they may have been, but i doubt it.

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Seeing this run like it was a movie on my friend's computer was a completely different experience and it kind of ruined all the fun I had on my own family's computer for all that time.

I have to say that I was a little disappointed to see my teenage neighbor have a computer that was so much more powerful than my executive Dad's was, and from that point forward our computer didn't really see much action since my Dad wasn't playing the games and thought gaming was a waste of time (he still feels this way.)

It would be many years before I joined the PC gaming computer industry because home computers remained very expensive for quite some time after my family's initial purchase in 1990. I think it was probably around 96 before I ever had my own and at that point I made certain to get something powerful. It's funny to me to think that every single phone that we all have in our pockets right now are probably 10x as fast as my $1400 computer that I acquired in the mid-90's.

I am happy to say that I was an early adopter though and ignorance truly was bliss. Until my neighbor stepped up and got his computer I was content. Sometimes not knowing that what you have isn't very good is kind of a good thing.

Did this ever happen to you with computers? I don't even know what happened to that Sysdyne PC. The last I remember it was sitting in the storage room in my parents' basement after I had gone off to college. I presume we eventually donated it to Goodwill after realizing that there was no chance that tech was ever going to go in reverse.