Year 1999, month of July. The 100 MHz speed PC with 32 Mb of RAM with Windows 95 arrives and I learn to do some wonders on it, I mean, I started to become little by little an advanced Windows user. At first, the screen did not look very good, since the video card (as I later realized) was a Cirrus Logic that was damaged: as time passed, some spots began to appear in the pixels of the screen. Of course, the screen resolution did not exceed 640x480 (although at that time it was enough for everything I did) and you could not put more than 16 colors deep, so any graphic with many colors looked bad, unless it was dither filtered. As if this wasn't enough, the monitor (Markvision brand, model VC4968, I think) was supposed to be Super VGA with the proper drivers but it couldn't be used at that kind of resolution. One day, apparently in the summer of 2000, I went to the university where I was studying Electrical Engineering (a degree I never finished) to a PC room to download the drivers from the internet: they did not exist.
But one day, they gave me an S3 video card (it was quite big) and I installed it myself, even though I knew very little about “irons” on the PC. It worked, and it was great to finally be able to see 16-bit color; I could already appreciate the graphics in all their splendor. Also, because the resolution was low (it currently is, back then it was normal) the screen looked extremely sharp and easy on the eyes.
Regarding the sound (my dream, during my high school years, was to compose and produce music using computers and synthesizers), I had an ESS Audiodrive 1868 sound card. The grace of this card is that it had a MIDI sound of high quality, of the type Yamaha OPL3 compatible. So one of the first things I downloaded from the internet (at the time, from college) was MIDI files that could be played. I brought everything on floppy disks, put them in the floppy drive and copied the MIDIs to folders. Thus, I enjoyed some very high quality speakers that gave me the MIDI sound of the Yamaha OPL3 type in all its splendor. The basses sounded very special. Among other things, there was music from the Super Mario series video games (notable were the MIDIs from Super Mario 64) and a collection of MIDIs from the dance-electronic genre, some of which sounded pretty good for OPL3-type soundings. But it didn't end there: I searched until I found a program to learn to compose music without really being a musician (I've always been very clumsy with instruments). That's how I got to compose a series of MIDIs (pretty bad and primitive, by the way) with Anvil Studio. It was laborious to set up the sound channels with the mouse but the first time everything sounded great. Another program I tried was Fractmus 2000: it generated MIDI music using algorithms based on fractals (music generated by mathematical formulas). I had interesting examples of that kind of music and I remember showing it to a friend from uni while we were in a computer room with Windows NT 4.0 (Pentium 133, apparently, with 64 Mb of RAM): I plugged in some headphones that I used on my “personal” (cassette walkman, which was used in those years before the advent of walkman CDs) and showed him some files.
The year 2000 arrived, the year in which a critical period in my life began (no details, sorry) that lasted quite some time. In the month of April of that year I learned to use a program called Fasttracker II version 2.09. Goodbye MIDIs, because this one used a format called XM: an extension of the MOD format that is basically similar to MIDI but includes sound samples in WAV format inside them, which weighs much more than MIDI. That's how I got into the hobby of music production.
I used Windows 95 with Office 97 installed, so I did my first assignments for some elective courses (very low-demand courses, 5 credits at the time) with the already mythical Times New Roman font that everyone used (if not occupied Arial). He played with the Office “wizards”: I quite liked Einstein, especially when he left the screen sneezing when you closed the wizard (it was very funny).
For the most demanding courses, I bought a CD from a fellow student who sold software: Maple version 5 release 4 (mathematics program: symbolic calculation and that kind of thing), powerful and very pleasant to use. At the house of a cousin of a friend of mine we installed MATLAB (it was a version that was installed from 5 diskettes, with this friend we took a Linear Algebra course with MATLAB laboratory included and we gave 5 diskettes to the teacher so that he could copy the program for us) and we learned to use it for the Linear Algebra course.
I had an HP printer (can't remember the model) to print. It didn't print much but it was enough for everything I needed. To print documents using several pages per page, we used the FinePrint program (the one that was used in a shareware version: the message that it was used and could be purchased at the bottom of each printed page always came out).
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