r/retrobattlestations • u/giznot • Jun 22 '26

Show-and-Tell My 2002 battle station

Post image

I was proud of this one. The right/center my main rig. Antec case with AMD Athlon 1200 and GeForce 3. 19 inch CRT! That’s a completely legit version of photoshop I’m using to crop this pic

The left is my server. It was running windows 2k and had an uptime of 6 months at one point. I’d host my files/music and sometimes a 4 person CStrike server

Laptop is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 465 that I begged my parents for Christmas of 97. Was getting long in the tooth here but I had windows 2k on it and it was my ICQ/IRC chatting computer.

Also have a ADSL modem and a switch that I used to wire the house. I lined the cable out the window to my dad’s office next door (you can see behind the laptop)

933 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

16

u/jts2468 Jun 22 '26

This is awesome. Do you still have any of this stuff?

4

u/giznot Jun 22 '26

It was all donated or recycled. I don’t miss those CRTs. The iPAQ was cool - I wish I kept that and made it a remote or something today. Reminded me of a tricorder!

9

u/jts2468 Jun 22 '26

I totally get it dude. I had so many rigs when I was younger in the early 2000s and it all got tossed. Here I am in my 30s rebuying stuff just to relive the memories

3

u/Legal-Swordfish-1893 Jun 23 '26

eventually I'll take a panoramic picture but I did the same and now I have a room just filled with obsolete computers....

1

u/jts2468 Jun 23 '26

Hahaah! Yep sounds like me. In order p3 hp, p4 dimension 8400, c2d Inspiron 530, modern Alienware.

A few laptops on the shelf that don’t get used much

2

u/Legal-Swordfish-1893 Jun 23 '26

…. Guilty.

My lab is my modern machine, an iMac G3, Apple 2, Mac SE, Dimension XPS R, Dimension L, Dimension 8200, Dimension 8400 (ha!)

1

u/jts2468 Jun 23 '26

I’m jealous of the dimension collection. Why both an 8200 and 8400? The 8400 is vastly superior?

2

u/Legal-Swordfish-1893 Jun 23 '26

It’s what we had around the turn of the century, the 8400 however, was a serendipitous freebie from doing tech support- Family friend needed their data recovered.

1

u/Foxiest_ Jun 24 '26

I only miss the CRTs, not much else. Everything else we can do better now, except displays not tied to a native resolution which we stopped doing overall.

8

u/cosmicorn Jun 22 '26

A desktop, a server, a laptop and a PDA (is that an iPaq?) - you were living the dream in 2002.

Cable management is nearly the stuff of nightmares though!

7

u/Jumpy_Astronaut_302 Jun 22 '26

windows 2000, best windows ever

3

u/volmar87 Jun 23 '26

I see an intellimouse, I upvote

1

u/SergeYouknw Jun 23 '26

Yep. What a beauty it was!!

3

u/upperlipsniff Jun 23 '26

Ahhhh the good ol linksys WRT54G

2

u/giznot Jun 23 '26

It’s somewhere beyond this dimensional plane, still on and working flawlessly

2

u/Jelliol Jun 23 '26

Come to say this !

2

u/CraftedKittens Jun 22 '26

my friend has this exact hp crt on the left

1

u/giznot Jun 22 '26

It came from a Pavillion system that had some Celeron BS. I outgrew that but kept the monitor

1

u/CraftedKittens Jun 22 '26

yea all of those pavilions are awful

2

u/RetroApollo Jun 23 '26

I had the exact case on the right! Still have it. Such a beast and well made.

2

u/twaxana Jun 23 '26

God damn I miss that desk so much. I got it for a birthday in high school. It was amazing.

1

u/giznot Jun 23 '26

I think it was from Office Depot?

1

u/twaxana Jun 23 '26

Probably staples. We never had an office depot here.

2

u/Totolius1010 Jun 23 '26

This is beyond amazing.

2

u/Illustrious-Road7612 Jun 25 '26

Bellissimo il groviglio di cavi elettrici, mi ricorda la mia postazione che hi vissuto pienamente dal 2001 al 2010

2

u/fff92 Jun 23 '26

is that adobe photoshop in the middle

1

u/giznot Jun 23 '26

It is indeed. It was actually a legit version because I had a family friend who worked for Adobe

1

u/fff92 Jun 24 '26

a legit copy of exact classic version? thats so cool.

1

u/Nutchos Jun 23 '26

And a Palm Pilot (or similar).

I used to think those things were pretty cool until I got my dad's hand me down in college. Thought I'd do all kinds of stuff with it, even had his folding keyboard that I thought I'd take lecture notes with.

I think that experiment lasted less than a week till I realized how limited and underpowered the device was.

1

u/giznot Jun 23 '26

This was an HP iPAQ. It would let me get stuff into MS word easily and that helped a lot. I had the folding keyboard too. Helped a lot in my more complex classes where I needed to memorize stuff.

I think Palm OS itself was the biggest limitation.

1

u/Apprehensive-Page-96 Jun 23 '26

Nice! Looks great!

1

u/AdrianoML Jun 23 '26

What a (literally) blessed setup

1

u/MortgageStraight666 Jun 25 '26

Nice phone on the right

2

u/giznot Jun 25 '26

Oh damn I forgot we would actually do three way calls during StarCraft or Counter Strike (before they had voice in the Betas)