preludeofmeMy dad found his order form from our 3rd computer
$5778 adjusted for inflation.
At last something is more accessible than 30 years ago 🤗
BizarrolandVideo games, too. They're still in the $20-$60 range for the most part, same as they've been since the 1970s, which means their cost has dropped dramatically.
Skullgrid
Wild that a 1k USD machine lasts like 6-10 years now.
I’m using one as a media center that’s a Phenom from 14 years ago lawl
My VR machine is eight years old but with a new GPU.
My main game machine is like four years old and plays basically everything 1440p/100FPS+. Cost bout 1.5k.
My first REAL game computer I built was over 2k back in the day (maybe 3k adjusted for inflation) and was slow as shit after two years. I love you, solid state drives. Athlon 64x2 4400+, SLI7900GT, 4GB DDR2, and an antec lanboy with the bondage kit. Built it for Crysis. No Raptors tho.
You’re the real MVP.
I built a computer around 1998. OP’s dad got reemed.
DannyMacDude! You’re getting a Dell!
Remember when dell bought Alienware? And all of a sudden people buying an Alienware machine got hit with that line.
2 CD ROMs drives AND a zip drive? This guy fucks
Shit.DVD drives!
In 96? Fucking bleeding edge stuff
And don’t forget the floppy slot.
Every good 'puter has a floppy slot.
I think it says 98. IE4.0 wasn’t released until 97, same for Pentium MMX.
Heck I think you’re right.
Man, I bet they were so bummed that they’re stuck on Windows 95 then.
I was in a similar boat. Got our first family PC with windows 95 like 4 months before 98 released. Which kept me from being a PC gamer until i was later into my teens.
either way, how common were DVD drives in 98?
Not very common at all; you needed a separate MPEG2 card to decode the DVD as the CPU wasn’t fast/strong enough.
How did windows 95 keep you from gaming? That’s when I started. 98 wasn’t that big of a chance to my memory.
Well it’s not that it “kept” me from it, but I am to remember the couple of PC gaming friends that I had, had games that I couldn’t run as they seemed to me (with like 30 years of memories obfuscating) to only run on Windows 98?
But I mean honestly that could’ve been my parents giving me excuses and stuff. Idk.
I didn’t have access to News and stuff about upcoming PC stuff back then so I could only go off what others told me haha
EndorkendIt literally says 1/16/98 on the order date :)
Literally, as opposed ton_figuratively_ 1/16/98?
The 2X part means the DVD drive could read DVDs at up to 2X speed
Ah yeah I realized that after. But a floppy reader too! Dude definitely reading some floppies
2X speed was impressive for the time too :)
Altima NEOBy 1998? Nah, not really. I think I had at least a 16x by then with my stock prebuilt.
Cd maybe but not DVD.
I think there may be a difference in measurement and that might where the discrepancy is. According to Wikipedia’s entry on optical drives:
The 1× speed rating for CD-ROM (150 Kbyte/s) is different from the 1× speed rating for DVDs (1.32 MB/s).
So if that was indeed a 2x DVD drive, it would be pretty comparable (if I’m interpreting all this info correctly): 16x150,000 bytes per second= 2,400,000 or approx 2.4 MB/s and the 2x DVD speed would be 1.32 MB/s x2= ~2.6MB/s
Pretty close!
Ah wait, I misread it as cd. Didn’t realize it was DVD.
I came to the comments hoping somebody would explain a reason for 2 DVD readers back in the days of Win95 lol thanks!
That was a beast of a system back in its day. Your dad was clearly a PC connoisseur.
I repaired about 1000 of these in a single year.
That USR softmodem was an absolute plague.
MagisterIf it was a real ISA card it was solid, the “winmodem” was shitty as hell however
US Robotics. Accept no substitute.
Was that the modem that used “spare CPU cycles” as its processor?
Because that was hot garbage.
Yep, software modem.
So if you bogged your system in any way while doing anything online, you'd DC in a heartbeat.
Additionally, the software part was buggy and prone to getting tainted beyond repair.
Driver updates also often borked everything.
And replacing the modem was only 50/50 going to fix your issues with it, so until the internet developed a driver cleaner tool specifically for the USR Softmodem, you often had to reinstall Windows to actually fix the issues.
I remember launching Netscape Navigator Gold was PAINFULLY slow with a software modem.
finthechatThe only thing I miss about ZIP drives is that when you are holding one of those huge disks, you feel like a hacker in a 90s movie
That mouser was so comfy (first consumer optical)! You could spin it out, but then again also overclock it.
And not to brag, but I bought (also my third computer) a Celeron 300A at that time & overclocked it from 300 to 450MHz making it the fastest Intel CPU for years. Those were some good days.
Hello fellow overclocker! Got myself the 366 and managed to get it to a consistent 550, 605 with a box fan on it 😂
Damn, what a rush! And a fellow golden-era overclocker.
I couldn’t manage over 500 on my Celeron, I tried the pin-voltage trick but it made no difference.
Also the last time I didn’t really have to worry about cooling - for my next CPU (Thunderbird) I made a custom water block (gramps helped a lot :)).
Awesome! I never got around to water cooling but that was definitely the dream
My first PC build was a K6-2, overclocked with jumpers from 300 to 400 MHz. Setting Vcore with jumpers made for a very exciting first power on!
These days it’s hard to destroy a processor by overclocking, and it seems like it’s on its last legs. My 3090 and 5800X3D have no headroom, it’s the first non overclocked rig I’ve had since 2001.
For real tho. What kind of bs OCing is lowering the voltage (curve) banking on the chip being good enough to run more efficiently to go faster.
And gone are the days when CPUs didn’t have thermal throttling (for purely safety purposes, iirc those shitty early P4 were the first ones to have it). I fried the Thunderbird I mentioned when I was testing some coolers and accidentally ran it for like 5 seconds without the cooler on. Its still a nice ornament on my wall tho. And a reminder of my brainholes intellect. Also nostalgia.
FoundTheVeganCan it run Crysis?
Yeah in monochrome.
Maybe Doom
OverzeetopMan, my first homebuild out of college was an absolute monster with 8MB of RAM so I could run NT at home. $640 just for the memory. I did cheap out on the CPU and only got the 75MHz Pentium, though we ran 90s at work. Wing Commander III was awesome on that thing.
96ish? I got a 120MHz Pentium with 8MB in like mid 96 for the equivalent of 2500USD and that was WITH a 15" CRT and 1.27GB HDD!
Would have been circa '94. My build was definitely up in that range, possibly without the monitor. I’m also certain that my HD was measured in MB; might have been either a 250 or 330.
squibletThat was after computers got significantly cheaper, too. The adjusted prices for PCs in the 80s were insane. My family got an Amiga 3000 in 1990 because my dad had an expense account he could only use for computers and didn't really need it for work that year... it was something like $4,500 which would be about $10,500 today. Same for his office PS/2, which was just a 486.
So funny story, if this is the first-gen (Blue) Dell XPS, we also bought one similarly spec’d.
Dell shipped it to us and when it arrived, it had 64 MB of ram instead of the 128 MB we ordered it with. Rather than sending us out new ram, they shipped us ANOTHER whole XPS. They never asked for the first back.
They never asked for the first back.
What in the dot-com fuck?
Yep! It was during their “dude you’re getting a dell” years when they had crazy good support.
We had a particularly large desk and when we called into support, they mailed us (at no cost), Belkin extension cords for all our peripherals. It was wild.
I was going to be extremely impressed at the 64 GB of RAM until I realized that said MB.
Such a throwback though, that iomega zip drive was cutting edge.
𝕾𝖕𝖎𝖈𝖞 𝕿𝖚𝖓𝖆We bought a house last year from a lady who lived here with her husband since they built the house in 1972. I actually found an iomega zip disk
100 MB portable storage was unreal back then, and then they came out with 250MB.
Apparently you can still buy the media and drives, even a new one:
Oh I lived it too. We were still using 1.4 MB floppy disks for school projects in '04. I think the computer class teacher finally started asking people to use bring flash drives in '06 or '07. I was walking around with a whole two gigs (wow!) in my pocket. I felt like a god. When we went to flash drives, we all started sharing the music we downloaded from Kazaa and Limewire with each other because now the required kit for computer class had the headroom to allow that. Many of us still lugged around CD players if we didn’t have iPods but the flash drives made burning mixes for each other so much easier lol
Another kid in a class below me got HEAVY into emulators. So he started telling us how to download ROMs and we’d all be playing Turok and Ocarina and Pokemon on the school computers. Being a teenager in the late 00s was a riot.
Now, my Nintendo Switch has a memory card that’s smaller than my pinky nail, and it holds 200 times the capacity of those chap stick size flash drives. It’s wild. I remember being amazed at the PSP in its day, thinking surely it doesn’t get much better than that. I really appreciate how amazing the Switch and Steam Deck are, even if Tears of the Kingdom makes the poor little guy crap itself.
It’s really cool that there’s still support for old tech like this…even if it’s too pricey for someone who isn’t neck deep into it to consider it lol
ah, young piracy, those were the days.
If I could go back and tell my classmates we’d eventually be able to store 1TB on something the size of a microsd card, they’d say I’d lost my goddamn mind.
I was in college in 2000. They had us use zip disks at first, but it was around that time that USB flash drives started coming out so we quickly transitioned to those. I liked the zip disks, they were definitely cool, but couldnt beat the convenience of a USB drive. Though, they were like 64MB and a bit over a dollar a meg, while a zip disk was like 15-20 bucks for a pack of them.
khannieI remember being amazed at the PSP in its day
I’ve been using computers since around 1980 and the PSP was one of the few things that really stood out to me as a huge leap at the time.
Most things are incremental but they really nailed the hardware on that one.
The PSP legitimately rocked. It had several great exclusives and a large backlog of compatible PS1 games. I actually ran hacked firmware on mine and dabbled a little into homebrew. Mostly to run (you guessed it) emulators. Given all of the buttons are the same, the PSP is an excellent portable SNES emulator.
Somewhere I still have my original 1st gen PSP running the OG 1.5 factory firmware.
For emulators.