[CrackMonkey] Re: [Pigdog] last meals - chips n dips

[Peter Peterson II]

pigdog-quoting is Nick's dept., but oh well. This should fill
Crackmonkey's nostalgia quota for a while.

begin  liquor.pig at pigdog.org quotation:

--------------
All this talk of bad fugu reminds me of Fry's 
Electronics. No, really, hear me out.

Back in the early-to-mid nineties Fry's Electronics 
sold tons of white-box motherboards. This was before 
Intel got into the motherboard chipset business, and 
brand name motherboards were too expensive for 
students like myself.

Anyway, they had shelves and shelves full of 
motherboards - some of which didn't even have a brand 
marked on the box, so you bought based on the chipset 
maker. I bought a couple of motherboards there that 
were branded Fugu Tech. The box had a big inflated 
blowfish logo, and it looked like the blowfish was 
sort of smiling.

On the motherboard itself all the main chips had 
colored blowfish stickers on them. I bought my first 
Fugu Tech motherboard from the Red Tag bins at Fry's 
for $35, sans manual. It was a 486 Vesa Local bus 
motherboard with no cache.

When I got the motherboard home I peeled off the 
strange blowfish stickers and found that the chipset 
was marked "Number 11". That's it. Not even a model 
number. I was hoping for an OPTi chipset, or even C&T, 
but instead I got the most generic of generic chipsets.

It crashed a lot when I ran Windows on it. So instead 
I ran a Slackware 1.X distro upgraded to Linux 1.0, 
which was significantly more stable. Man it took a 
long time to download those floppies on a 14.4 modem.

Recently, I bought an AMD Athlon (K7) 650 chip and an 
Asus K7M motherboard. I just walked into the store, 
handed them a credit card, and walked out with the 
merchandise.

Somehow, this seems less satisfying than the days when 
I would scour amateur radio swapmeets looking through 
boxes of motherboards for one with unbent jumper pins. 
Some sick part of me misses the days when I'd buy 
cheap computer parts from the tailgate of some guys 
truck and run home to get positively ripped on strange 
chemicals before I attempted an installation.

Then again, my computers generally work well now, and 
I don't give myself 120V shocks when I do upgrades 
anymore, so maybe it's all for the best. Or maybe I'm 
just getting old.

-LiquorPig

-- 
P. A. Peterson II -- pedro at zork.net