PC Gamer's '94 Dream Machine

[Ablang]

< Amazing to look back at how expensive things were. >

5/04

$4k-$4800

P90
16MB RAM
540MB HD
SVGA 64-bit Video Card w/ 2 or 4MB RAM
4X CD-ROM
28.8k MODEM

 

[Gene Puhl]

< Amazing to look back at how expensive things were. >

5/04

$4k-$4800

P90
16MB RAM
540MB HD
SVGA 64-bit Video Card w/ 2 or 4MB RAM
4X CD-ROM
28.8k MODEM

Heh, my first PC back in 1996 (Commodores before that)
Gigabyte GA586VX mobo
P100
1200MB Connor CFS1275A (I still have it)
16MB RAM
S3 Trio64V+ 2MB
Creative Vibra16
8X CD-ROM

What a BEAST!

 

[Conor]

Heh, my first PC back in 1996 (Commodores before that)
Gigabyte GA586VX mobo
P100
1200MB Connor CFS1275A (I still have it)
16MB RAM
S3 Trio64V+ 2MB
Creative Vibra16
8X CD-ROM

Mine Circa 1990..

Intel 286.
2MB RAM
30MB HDD
Floppy
256K VGA card.

 

[JHeyen]

FWIW a mainline machine in the fall of '94 was a Gateway 2000 i386-25MHz.

It consisted of 4MB FPM RAM, 80MB HD, 3.5" floppy, 5.25" floppy, 1MB vid
card,
keyboard & mouse, 14" monitor, no CD or modem, and sold for $2k.

I recall as I first had an upgrade done to it, then later ventured out on my
own and did
my own upgrading, that I bumped the memory up from 4 MB to 16MB on a
replacement
mobo w/ a Cyrix 40MHz cpu that the EDO memory stick sold for $625 ( w/ some
trade-in
memory I was able to bring it down).

Based on that kind of pricing scenario the 1GB of PC3200 (Corsair TwinX)
that I just
bought would have sold for $39,062.!

Jeff

 

[BP]

I bought a "PC Professional" (later to be Quantex) 386-33 with 120MB drive
and 4MB RAM in 1992. They had 486's out at the time I ordered, but those
"screamers" were almost $3000. Too rich for me.
FWIW: Intel introduced the 286 in 1982; the 386 in 1985; the 486 in 1989;
the Pentium in 1993; the Pentium pro in 1995; the Pentium II in 1997; the
celeron and Pentium III in 1999; and the p4 in 2000.
I had the old 386 running until just last fall. I loaded Win95 on it (from
floppys!) to try and blow it up but it just kept chugging along doing
everything asked of it, just with a walker!

 

[Cuzman]

" $4k-$4800 "


....and you can build it second-hand for about $30 now.

 

[~misfit~]

I bought a "PC Professional" (later to be Quantex) 386-33 with 120MB
drive and 4MB RAM in 1992. They had 486's out at the time I ordered,
but those "screamers" were almost $3000. Too rich for me.
FWIW: Intel introduced the 286 in 1982; the 386 in 1985; the 486 in
1989; the Pentium in 1993; the Pentium pro in 1995; the Pentium II in
1997; the celeron and Pentium III in 1999;

I didn't realise the Celeron wasn't released until '99. Was that in the Slot
1 format as well? I thought they were around before that.

Cheers,

 

[news.individual.net]

I bought a "PC Professional" (later to be Quantex) 386-33 with 120MB drive
and 4MB RAM in 1992. They had 486's out at the time I ordered, but those
"screamers" were almost $3000. Too rich for me.
FWIW: Intel introduced the 286 in 1982; the 386 in 1985; the 486 in 1989;
the Pentium in 1993; the Pentium pro in 1995; the Pentium II in 1997; the
celeron and Pentium III in 1999; and the p4 in 2000.
I had the old 386 running until just last fall. I loaded Win95 on it (from
floppys!) to try and blow it up but it just kept chugging along doing
everything asked of it, just with a walker!

I have a spare machine here:
AMD 386-40 with 16 megs of ram running win95 just fine!

 

[BP]

I didn't realise the Celeron wasn't released until '99. Was that in the Slot
1 format as well? I thought they were around before that.

The Celeron has a whole history of its own. It was originally released in
April of 1998 to much press and public derision. It was essentially a
Pentium II (Deschutes core) with all of it's level 2 cache and plastic
casing removed. Intel did this because they were getting their lunch eaten
by AMD's K6 and the Cyrix MII at the low end of the market and they needed
to think fast. They came out with the Celeron A (Mendocino) in August 1998,
another disappointment (except in the overclocking community). These were
slot 1 units. The "official" socket 370, 466Mhz Celeron was released in
April 1999.

 

[Gary Tait]

I didn't realise the Celeron wasn't released until '99. Was that in the Slot
1 format as well? I thought they were around before that.

Nope, they came along shortly after PII, as a reduced cache version.

BTW, introduced and released are somewhat different things.

 

[Gary Tait]

" $4k-$4800 "


...and you can build it second-hand for about $30 now.

Or out of a dumpster.

 

[~misfit~]

The Celeron has a whole history of its own. It was originally
released in April of 1998 to much press and public derision. It was
essentially a Pentium II (Deschutes core) with all of it's level 2
cache and plastic casing removed. Intel did this because they were
getting their lunch eaten by AMD's K6 and the Cyrix MII at the low
end of the market and they needed to think fast. They came out with
the Celeron A (Mendocino) in August 1998, another disappointment
(except in the overclocking community).

I had one, a 300Mhz model that did 500Mhz easy. I knew it was pre-'99,
that's why I asked.

These were slot 1 units. The
"official" socket 370, 466Mhz Celeron was released in April 1999.

I have a Socket 370 333Mhz Mendicino Celeron here. (At least I assume it's a
Mendicino, it looks identical to the 400 and 500Mhz models I have).

 

[BP]

Or out of a dumpster.

Literally. I sort of got hooked on collecting old processors because I was
at the dump and someone had just dumped a load of about 30 old desktop boxes
in the metal pile. I looked inside and they were intact (HD's too, when will
they learn?). There were 486 processors of every flavor and a couple of
Pentiums. Took those and a some sticks of 4MB SIMMs that worked great in the
old 386! Going from 8 to 16 made the old girl a screamer!

 

[Overlord]

Mine Circa 1990..

Intel 286.
2MB RAM
30MB HDD
Floppy
256K VGA card.

sometime in the 80's
Vic-20
5k ram
No HD
No Floppy
cassette tape backup
God only knows what video outputting to TV
"roll yer own" programs in a primitive form of Basic
Upgraded to 11k of RAM to alleviate my own feeping creaturism

1990?
8088
? ram
dual floppy
no HD
? video
Upgraded to dual doublespaced 10meg MFM drives

199? (Moe)
8086 (TURBO! 8MHZ!... or was it 6.....)
DOS 4.01?
16 color monitor!!! (no more damn green monitor!)
modem!
¼meg Trident vid card!

199? (Larry)
80286
24/7 BBS

199? (Curley)
80486
DOS 5.01?
Friend at work showed me Edit.com and I dropped that Edlin like
nobody's business!

199?
first build from scratch
P90
1gig SCSI drive
DOS 6.22 and DesqView
Win 3.01 run occasionally as a program in a DesqView window

199?
P166

199?
K6-2(?) 450 (OC'd to sumpin'...448 I think)
installed Win98 as an OS

199?
1gig(?) K6-3 (The great and all powerful OZ!)
17" monitor some nitwit couldn't get working and threw in the dumpster
retired the BBS

200?
3.06 OC to 3.5 (Colossus)
..5gig DDR ram (2-2-2-5)
8 Ultra 160 SCSI drives (10k to 15k)
Ti4800SE OC'd
21" Sony monitor
Win2k Pro

Guess my memory isn't so hot especially for dates....
Ahh the good old days, start a huge 30k download and go to bed.

~~~~~~
Bait for spammers:
root@localhost
postmaster@localhost
admin@localhost
abuse@localhost
postmaster@[127.0.0.1]
(e-mail address removed)
~~~~~~
Remove "spamless" to email me.

 

[Gary Tait]

sometime in the 80's
Vic-20
5k ram

Expandable though. And at that, you had about 3.5 K programming space.
(1 K was system ram, you could use parts for ML code or look-up
tables) 4K was user ram, the upper 512 bytes were screen memory (if
you wanted custom characters, that took yet more away from the 3.5K
ram.). In the middle somehere was 1K/4 bit colour memory.

No HD
No Floppy
cassette tape backup
God only knows what video outputting to TV
"roll yer own" programs in a primitive form of Basic
Upgraded to 11k of RAM to alleviate my own feeping creaturism

1990?
8088
? ram
dual floppy
no HD
? video
Upgraded to dual doublespaced 10meg MFM drives

199? (Moe)
8086 (TURBO! 8MHZ!... or was it 6.....)
DOS 4.01?
16 color monitor!!! (no more damn green monitor!)
modem!
¼meg Trident vid card!

199? (Larry)
80286
24/7 BBS

199? (Curley)
80486
DOS 5.01?
Friend at work showed me Edit.com and I dropped that Edlin like
nobody's business!

199?
first build from scratch
P90
1gig SCSI drive
DOS 6.22 and DesqView
Win 3.01 run occasionally as a program in a DesqView window

199?
P166

199?
K6-2(?) 450 (OC'd to sumpin'...448 I think)
installed Win98 as an OS

199?
1gig(?) K6-3 (The great and all powerful OZ!)
17" monitor some nitwit couldn't get working and threw in the dumpster
retired the BBS

200?
3.06 OC to 3.5 (Colossus)
.5gig DDR ram (2-2-2-5)
8 Ultra 160 SCSI drives (10k to 15k)
Ti4800SE OC'd
21" Sony monitor
Win2k Pro

Guess my memory isn't so hot especially for dates....
Ahh the good old days, start a huge 30k download and go to bed.

~~~~~~
Bait for spammers:
root@localhost
postmaster@localhost
admin@localhost
abuse@localhost
postmaster@[127.0.0.1]
(e-mail address removed)
~~~~~~
Remove "spamless" to email me.

 

[Michael Black]

sometime in the 80's
Vic-20
5k ram
No HD
No Floppy
cassette tape backup
God only knows what video outputting to TV
"roll yer own" programs in a primitive form of Basic
Upgraded to 11k of RAM to alleviate my own feeping creaturism

Well, if it's jumped away from IBM compatibles, then
I've had computers for a quarter century, and right about
now marks the anniversary of bringing home the first computer.

A MOS Technology KIM-1.

1K of memory. Calculator-style keyboard and readout. Cassette interface.
6502 CPU running at slightly under 1MHz.

And yes, you could get "junk" computers back then. While it sold
for hundreds of dollars at the time, I got it for free. There
had been a seminar on microprocessors at a friend's workplace,
and a KIM-1 had been part of the package. A co-worker of his
didn't want the thing, so I got it.

My second computer came in 1981, an OSI Superboard II. Again
a 1MHz 6502, but with a modification it could run at 2MHz, which
gave it a rather snappy response. 4K of memory built in, but
sockets for another 4K and when I bought it I bought the extra 4K.
Microsoft BASIC in ROM. Again a cassette interface, though
OSI did make a disk drive controller if you were willing to pay
the high price. The video interface had 32 characters across,
and something like 16 lines, though the "II" was advanced over
the original model and had hardware that allowed for 80 columns
by I forget what if you were willing to write the software
and load it each time you turned on the computer. I paid something
like $500 for it, and that was downright cheap here in Canada.

My first printer, a crummy dot-matrix with no lowercase, was
$500 in the fall of 1982.

I didn't get a floppy drive until 1984. ONe floppy and a controller
cost $500. A box of ten name brand floppies were fifty dollars.
I paid something like $80 for 64K of RAM that year.

I didn't get a hard drive until December of 1993. And that was
the year that I got a computer that most people would recognize,
a worn out Mac Plus that was about to be tossed out.

I threw together some scrap parts to make an IBM compatible
about 1992, but I never used it as a main computer, and other
than trying it, never really used it.

I never used an IBM compatible until mid-2001.

I've never run Windows, though I did have DOS for the 1992 computer.

Michael