yeah, so , when and who started all this modding? like, who was the first to put a window in there case. etc..
I spose modding goes all the way back to the beginning of invention. Modders arent really doing anything but creating something "New" from something else. So you could easily call modders inventors. Thats how we get electricity, the wheel, the sword, atom bombs, and the whole works. Some dood way back when thought, Man this rock would be pimptastic if i could just make it round so itd roll...... Hard question to answer though i guess specifically. People have been screwing with puter cases since puter cases were made. Thats why we have new models every year. - Daishi
That's not particularly informative, especially when it comes from someone as apparently clueless as he is. He doesn't have proof modding began as early as the eighties because he hasn't looked hard enough. If he thinks the proof is owed him, he's got another think comin'. If he writes about it, he should do the research on it. He hasn't done that thoroughly enough, if you ask me. I've seen his rambling and insulting posts elsewhere and he seems to be self-absorbed and closed minded in this regard. You couldn't possibly believe that just because you don't see the pictures or hear from the early modders (who didn't even know they were modders, they just wanted to personalize their cases or make them work better) that it didn't exist. There are lots of inventions, innovations and modifications of technology in the world that has no pictures or official documentation (telephone, electrical devices, flooring tools, calculating instruments, medical apparatus - you name it), but there are records of these things in people's attics, foot lockers and minds all over the world. If history could only be what could be officially documented, history books would be very thin indeed. I suspect the first mod was when someone bought an early computer that either didn't look as good as the owner wanted, didn't make the sound an owner thought it should, didn't work as fast as the owner wanted or didn't do something the owner thought it should and then took steps to make it so. Some day, someone will do some real research into the area and present it to us. I don't know who or when, but I pretty much guarantee you it won't be that guy. Grump
Well, if we're talking about modding in general, of course you'd never be able to pin it down. But it is very widely accepted that the first 'proper' case mod is the Uneal Case, which I think was the focus of this question.
what is it with these threads lately??? there is this exact thread over at FM.... i mean i agree with daishi kinda... and i dont think we can really tell who did it first.... i mean since the beginning of computers we have tried to make em better, you do that by overclocking... that makes ur CPU hot... well add a blowhole!! i mean that kinda stuff.... anyone making their computer not stock or changing something would technically be modding... but i think some1 who made it big was steve jobs.... he kinda took the idea and went with it.... he has always tried his best to make his computers as nice looking as possible.... but anyone who claims they had the first mod well.....
Modding, 1989 style... [Edit] I just found an early mod guide too... A Lion in Sheeps Clothing, An Atari ST in an IBM housing (Ctrl-F and enter the phrase ^^^)
I can remember articles talking about overclocking 8086 chips, custom cards, Cutting cases to allow for harddrives, but this requires the Wayback machine to the late 70s early 80s. Or even further when you had the Radio Electronics issue from 1972 that described making a "TV Typewriter" and a later mod that let the TV typewriter do complex math like addition and subtraction. There used to be electronics magazines dedicated to things like this, but they mostly dealt with the electronics side, only working on the case when need be. And then there was Cray who had liquid cooling and waterfalls and some really cool designs. Simple fact of the matter, As long as there is a device being made, there will be somebody wanting to take it apart, find out how it works and improve and customize it.
EDIT: this just didn't make sense. I edited it for dis-jointedness. This was back in like 1990ish and is one of my first computer memories. I had a computer in this flip top desktop case; you pressed two buttons on the side and the top would hinge open, so cases with doors are nothing new. It was beige, but had a black front. It had a 8086 MB with an above-board 80286 4.77MHz chip on it. I had reset the DIP switches to run at a whole 5MHz. (BIOS-based settings weren't around then. The only thing in BIOS was the time, and hard drive settings, and no auto detect, either. You had to look at the drive and enter cylinders, heads, and sectors.) The computer got too hot, so I removed a (full-high) drive blank and had a desk fan blowing into it. So for first modding, it goes back a while. I asked my dad, who's been with computers forever, and he can remember watercooled stuff from like the 70s. I talked to him when I first started my watercooling project. He said something like "They do that all the time in Arizona. It works good. Have fun." It's been fun remembering those times. There's my 2 cents.
commercial modding is only really a couple of years old, but DIY modding is years old. it reall depends how you define "modding" changing a fan is 'modding' a pc case....
I would agree with Grump, that guy came across as stupid and "on something" and didn't prove a thing. besides we all know there was computer modding going on at the start of the eighties. You had to use a milk carton from the fridge to prevent the 16k RAM pack for the ZX80 from locking up due to overheating If the mad man means "in the modern era" he's probably right but people have been modding all sorts of kit for decades and to say that computer modding started with a specific action - naw!
I fitted a 40mm fan and overclocked my Amiga 500 in '92. I also built a small circuit that overclocked the CPU to 12MHz (acheived by bending the clock pin on the CPU out of the socket and soldering a wire from that to the circuit). The CPUs lasted about 2 months before they burned out.
modding has litterly bin around since the start of Home built PC's. i know i put my old atari 8 bit (not the game thing) in a custom made wood case, with extra fans for cooling, and that was in like 78. all computing started by modders who wrote/moddified there own code, and built there systems from the pcb level up! then in the dark ages of the 80's and 90's every one went to prebuild dells and HP's and (the evil) Tandy's (yes i still own a trash 80, and had a 1000 TL until about a year ago) when all of the pc's wer prebuild and the same bland color. Now at least thanks to good computer geeting cheap, people are no longer scared to cut up or mod a system, and do to shows liek TSS and what not, and some main line computer magazines, and ofcourse online forums like this one and the [H] modding has realy started to take back off.
The very first Apple computers (Seventies; flares anyone?), the ones that were still built in the garage by Jobbs and Wozniak, did not have a pretty vac formed plastic case. They came as a keyboard, PCB and components kit. That's all. Users made their own case for it, sometimes quite tasty numbers of laquered wood. The birth of modding, right there, baby. As for me? I modded my Commodore 64. Thoroughly. Everyone in those days did (well, it needed improving a lot. And it was forgiving to tinkerers). Didn't do my Amiga 500 or 2000 (no money, and it seemed good enough as it was...), or my first PC, although my second was a home built. Project Metaversa (in the Project Logs) however, is my first PC mod.
I'd say my first real PC mod was hacking an 80mm hole in the back of my old Antec KS282 case, using a 4" mini-grinder in the garage. Yep, square hole, fan, some melty glue, job was a good one.
It was me, i started it. And if you send me the tiny some of £5 i will send you my book. 'modding - and how it made me rich' as a few people said modding has been around for ever. As far as PC's are conerned its not so much that modding is something new its more that for a while people just brought off the shelf stuff when it became cheap enough for the avarage joe to buy. The first home computers were DIY kits where you had to build your own boxes, so really we are all just going back to that. We just have brighter led's and dremels
