ANTHONYRUGGERI.COM

I'm not exactly sure what the point of this page is. I upgraded to a new computer (again) and realized, in a fit of nostalgia, how much old crappy hardware I had around and I wanted to catalog it. I guess this will also be a history of my involvement with computers, starting from the beginning. I get the added bonus of being able to point people here if they think I am insufficiently geeky or hardcore, "Chief Technology Officer" title notwithstanding.

Year	Computer	Details
1982?	TRS-80	We only had this for a little while. It was on loan to my Mom while she took some programming course. I think for a while my parents thought that was a mistake since it got me into computers. I guess the Porsche resolved that once and for all.
1983?	Timex Sinclair 1000	Including a "tape storage device" (read: tape recorder) and the 16k memory expansion pack. I loved the video chip, which had "slow mode" and "fast mode." The only problem was that the screen blinked for every single character update in fast mode. I think it was hooked up to an old black and white TV. The only game it could run was Chess.
1984?	Atari 800XL	Now before you say anything, this was not one of the cheapo Atari computers with the flat keyboard panel, this had a real keyboard. It not only supported BASIC but also Atari game cartridges and came with a Panasonic KXP-1091 printer and a floppy drive! Wow! Subsequent upgrades included a color monitor, then joysticks and game paddles (for programming games, of course). What more could you want? Ah yes, a hard drive...
1987?	4.77/8 Mhz 8088	My first real computer, a classic XT-compatible. It actually had a hard drive of a whopping 20 MB, an insane 640k of memory, and of course the omnipresent Hercules compatible monographics card with the tiny little amber monochrome monitor. It did run Windows 1.01. Fortunately I figured out quickly how to lock it in "turbo mode." Eventually it was upgraded with a blistering 1200 baud modem and a second(!) 20 MB hard drive, as well as, drum roll please, a mouse. I think it went to a couple cousins when we got rid of it.
1991	MITC 25 Mhz 80386	The computer I took away to college, with a whopping 130 MB hard drive and something like 8 MB of memory. It was the top of the line when I got it. In case you are wondering, MITC was a local computer place (probably no longer in business). The name stood for "made in Taiwan computers." It did have a color monitor, and a Super VGA card. It ran Sopwith, TankWar and Visual Basic 1.0 like nobody's business. This one was upgraded with a second 130 MB hard drive, a Sound Blaster Pro (which had a MIDI port and an onboard synthesizer and began my obsession with electronic music), and a 2400 baud MNP-5 modem, the better to log into the college network and this thing called the Internet.
1993	Micron 66 Mhz 80486	Some ditzy girl at college decided she needed a laptop and was selling this (including CD-ROM) at a cut-rate price. I am not making this up. It played Doom a lot better than the 386 (maybe it was the 32 MB of memory). Wait, no, I mean, Maple took much less time to solve calculus problems. Wait, uh... never mind. The old 386 went to my parents. This one got a prized USRobotics 9600 baud modem, an HP inkjet printer, a Gravis Ultrasound, a Sony CD-ROM that could read digital data, a Sound Blaster AWE32, and a 10 Mbps ethernet card as upgrades. The AWE32 even had its own upgrades, to 2 MB of memory. As for the ethernet card, I was lucky enough to live in a dorm that had ethernet straight to the Internet. In 1994.
1996	Frankenstein 90 Mhz Pentium	Take one Micron computer. Replace 486 motherboard with Pentium motherboard holding 64 MB of RAM. Add one cork (yes, a cork) keeping the motherboard far enough from the frame to not short out. Technically this is not a new computer, but if you replace the brains... good enough. I think it also got a new video card (Diamond Stealth 64), a USRobotics 28.8kpbs modem, a 250MB tape backup, an ISA SCSI card and a couple of ZIP drives, a 2GB hard drive, and a Philips CDD2000 CDR drive, as well as an additional 24 MB of memory. I think I first connected my Sharp Zaurus to this one.
1998	Kehtron 400 Mhz Pentium II	The cream of the crop in 1998, with a mammoth 8 GB of hard drive space, 64 MB of memory, a 2X Creative Labs DVD player and decoder card AND a 4x CD-ROM, a Sound Blaster 64 PCI, and an ATI 3D Rage Pro video card. I even have a naked picture of it. This one got a lot of upgrades. Let's see... 4(!) video cards: a Matrox Millenium/Daimond Monster 3D combo, a 3Dfx Voodoo3, and a 3Dfx Voodoo5 (yes I was unlucky enough to buy one, right before 3Dfx vanished). 3 new sound cards - a Digital Audio Labs Digital Only CardD, a Sound Blaster Live! Platinum, and an M-Audio Audiophile 2496. Somewhere along the way it picked up first a BTC 24x CD-ROM and then a Sony 8x/4x/32x CDR/RW drive, an HP color inkjet printer and then an EPSON Stylus 740 color printer, a V.90 56k external modem, an Iomega Ditto 4GB tape drive, a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro, a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer (the one with the laser), and a Adaptec PCI SCSI card for the Syquest SyJet 1.5 GB drive and the UMAX scanner. Plus a NetGear fast ethernet card. It also got an extra 64 MB of memory. Indirectly it benefited from a Linksys KVM switch, a 3COM 10Mbit ethernet hub, a Netgear RT314 Cable/DSL router and Verizon Infospeed DSL, and a Netgear ME102 802.11b Wireless Access Point. It's also the computer to which I connected my Everex Freestyle palmtop. It had gone through a lot and was still going, but the battery was almost dead and it blue screened quite a bit. It was almost ready for that big used computer shop in the sky. This one got a new lease on life with the installation of an 8MB ATI Rage Pro video card and Red Hat Linux 7.3. Then it got a completely new life by being shipped as a gift to my aunt and uncle in a little town in Texas.
2001	1.8 Ghz Pentium IV	Buy one bare-bones Pentium IV with 256 MB of DDR RAM on an Asus P4T motherboard. Add 80 GB IBM hard drive, Sony CDR/RW drive, VisionTek GeForce 3 video card, M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card. Be happy. Replace Sony drive with HP dvd200i DVD+RW drive, and be happier. Upgrade to 768 MB of RAM, and add Sound Blaster Live! Platinum card, and feel the love flowing. Experiment with overclocking to 2.0+ Ghz and decide against it. Replace the clunky old printer with an EPSON Stylus CX5200 color printer/copier/scanner, and be a media maven. Upgrade mouse to Logitech Mouseman Dual Optical mouse, play "Day of Defeat," and dispense death with pinpoint accuracy. Add a Belkin 5-port USB 2.0 card and a Maxtor external 120GB USB drive, and feel much better about backups. Replace the GeForce3 with a PNY Verto GeForce FX 5900 card and start kicking some big-time ass, especially on a sweet new ViewSonic VX900 19" flat-panel monitor!!
2002	1.9 Ghz Pentium IV	Pentium IV 1.9 Ghz + 256MB 133 SDRAM + 40 GB IBM disk + A/V/L motherboard = very capable test and development machine for Windows 2000 Server and .NET. Also a very good Christmas present for my parents.
2003	Compaq Armada M700 Pentium II 400 Mhz	My company was having a fire sale on used laptops, so I picked this up this comparatively old and clunky model as a backup to my other PCs. With the addition of a Netgear MA401 Wireless PC Card or a Linksys WET11 Wireless Ethernet Bridge, it is completely portable.
2004	Athlon 64 3200+	Ok, so the P4 1.8 wasn't really a bad computer, but the GeForce FX 5900 was a bit crippled running in a 4x AGP slot, and there was better out there. So I got myself an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ CPU in an Asus K8V Deluxe motherboard with 1GB of PC-3200 RAM, running dual 80GB drives in a striped 160GB RAID 1 configuration. For good measure I threw in a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum, and of course the GeForce FX 5900 from the P4 (which got the GeForce 3 back). I also got a new joystick for it, a Saitek Cyborg EVO. It even has enough USB ports for the printer, backup drive, and Wacom tablet. Sweet!! With the addition of an Edirol PCR-80 61-key USB MIDI keyboard, I can get rid of all my old synths. Speaking of the printer, interesting story about that CX5200. It seems that Epson multifunction printers have a way of dying on a regular basis, shortly after the warranty expires. Problem with the print head or something. Well, after a new set of ink cartridges didn't fix the CX5200, I called Epson to complain and they sent me a CX5400 replacement gratis. About a year later, the CX5400 died. So I junked it and replaced it with a Canon Pixma MP500. This machine also acquired a ZBoard convertible gaming keyboard (really a cool invention), the VX900 monitor was replaced by an HP f2105 21" widescreen flat-panel monitor, the dvd200i drive was replaced by a dvd640, and a Netgear WPN311 RangeMax wireless PCI card appeared (which by the way crashes my computer on a regular basis). The wireless card talks to the Netgear RangeMax router that runs my cable modem. In late 2006, the whole thing was looking a bit old, but the addition of an ATI Radeon X1600 Pro video card (that AGP bus has some legs left after all) perked things up a bit.
2007	Core 2 Duo E6600	Three years is a long time for me to go without a new computer. I almost made it but came up a couple months short:). I decided to get serious about my computer upgrade with a Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 Ghz) processor on an Intel D975XBX2 motherboard with 4 GB of Corsair DDR2 5300 RAM. Add to that an Enermax 600-watt power supply and an EVGA GeForce 7900 GS video card, all in a sleek black case with those cool blue LED fans running Windows Vista Ultimate, and you have a nice PC. I pulled over the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum and the HP dvd640c from the Athlon, with a new Western Digital 320GB SATA2 disk. The Athlon gets a Samsung OEM DVD-RW and a new ThermalTake 500 watt power supply to replace the old dying RAIDMAX power supply. Add the necessary peripherals - Edirol MIDI controller, Wacom tablet, Logitech mouse, ZBoard, SanDisk card reader, and get ready to rock. It's hard to back up 320 GB onto 120 GB disks, so I also picked up a pair of Maxtor 300GB external drives for rotating offsite backup. Oh, and yes... the motherboard does support a future quad-core CPU. Oh yeah. This computer also got the Canon printer and a Seagate 160GB second hard drive as a scratch disk.