1990s computers (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: Today 7:18:43 AM EDT
[Last Edit: 1975][Edited]
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Were the ‘90s into the early 2000s the golden years of computing? Attached File Attached File Attached File |
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” -George Orwell, 1984
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| I didn’t buy my first until 1997. $2,000 for a 200MHz Compaq Presario (Pentium MMX)with 24mb RAM from Sears. |
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” -George Orwell, 1984
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Originally Posted By PKT1106: My first computer for college was a Compaq Presario desktop package with speakers on the side of the monitor and a printer. Had a 950mb hard drive. This was the summer of 2000. Saved up all summer and I think it was around $2000 for everything. Good times. That’s what I had. It looked something like this. Attached File |
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” -George Orwell, 1984
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I ran a WWIV BBS out of my room in high school 1990-1992. Hundreds of users, games (Tradewars!) and even a file library which mostly consisted of cDc documents and tits. 80286 12mhz with 1MB RAM (640k conventional and 384k extended!) with a 20MB HDD. 2400baud Hayes modem later upgraded to 19,200. NEC Multisync 3D monitor. |
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Originally Posted By 1975: Were the ‘90s into the early 2000s the golden years of computing? https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/259519/IMG_8824_jpeg-3774252.JPG https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/259519/IMG_8825_jpeg-3774256.JPG https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/259519/IMG_8826_jpeg-3774254.JPG |
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Originally Posted By InflectionPoint: Don’t forget that dot matrix, tractor fed printers! Okidata refurb dot matrix printers are $500 now. I assume that business that still think they have to have multipart forms are paying near extortion level prices rather than changing their processes. New ones are getting close to $1000, fucking crazy. |
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Originally Posted By 1975: I didn’t buy my first until 1997. $2,000 for a 200MHz Compaq Presario (Pentium MMX)with 24mb RAM from Sears. sounds very similar to my second computer. my first was a 386 something from Radio Shack. lol. it wasn't great but i learned the basics by using it for a few years. |
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I remember my freshman year in college, my friend had an 8088 with a 10mb hard drive. No more floppy swaps! I remember in the early 90s, a good price on a hard drive was a buck a meg. I think a 10-15 years ago was peak computing. Before AI and crypto mining started monopolizing graphics processors and chips. |
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I built a kit computer back in the late 70's. S100 bus, Z80, 64K of RAM. I eventually added a disk controller and build a case with two 8" Floppy drives (1 Shugart and 1 Siemens) and gen'd the OS to run it all. Good times 
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| I don't know about golden age, power and price are great today. More niche desires are (or were) filled more today, you weren't getting a custom color Hello Kitty case then if you wanted it. But it probably felt the most fun. The internet was still booming and not sanitized monetized corporate content. People were giving aware their software as shareware in hope you'd buy it, versus today not being allowed to buy it and being sold a monthly subscription. There was still new exciting hardware coming out, like cd roms and 3d accelerators, and you could buy it. |
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Originally Posted By 1975: Were the '90s into the early 2000s the golden years of computing? https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/259519/IMG_8824_jpeg-3774252.JPG https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/259519/IMG_8825_jpeg-3774256.JPG https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/259519/IMG_8826_jpeg-3774254.JPG |
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Originally Posted By InflectionPoint: Don't forget that dot matrix, tractor fed printers!   Rocky's Printer - Eye of the tiger on a dot matrix printer [HD] |
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We were poor. So this was the family computer through all of the 90s. Attached File |
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One of my first real jobs around 2000 set me up with a US Robotics 56k modem. That thing was king for quite a while. Attached File |
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” -George Orwell, 1984
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We had a Commodore 64 from the late 80s to the early 90s. That was the extent of our computer experience. Attached File |
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My first computer was a TI-99/4 with all the accouterments. 300 baud acoustic couple modem. Cassette storage. Attached File Fun fact: my father worked for Texas Instruments for 30 years and retired as a VP. At one time he was in charge of the 1-800-TI-CARES customer service number and he was instrumental in changing the home screen and user manuals to say "press SPACE BAR" to continue or to begin. Too many people called because they couldn't find the "ANY" key. |
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I got a 486/DX2 66mhz with 8MB RAM for a Christmas 1995 when I was 13. The good ole days of 14.4 baud AOL, games that were a mix of floppy disks and CDs. The only thing that sucked was the video card and I could never convince my parents to buy me a Voodoo 3Dfx one even if I did a a shitload of chores Got a Compaq Pentium III 300 mhz and 32MB of RAM in 1999 and thought I was king shit - it actually ran most games at high settings. |
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SGT Shawn M Farrell II - A Co 1-32 3BCT 10th Mountain, KIA Nejrab AFG 2014
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Originally Posted By Airborne11B: I got a 486/DX2 66mhz with 8MB RAM for a Christmas 1995 when I was 13. The good ole days of 14.4 baud AOL, games that were a mix of floppy disks and CDs. The only thing that sucked was the video card and I could never convince my parents to buy me a Voodoo 3Dfx one even if I did a a shitload of chores Got a Compaq Pentium III 300 mhz and 32MB of RAM in 1999 and thought I was king shit - it actually ran most games at high settings. That Compaq was a great system back then. I don't think I had anything that powerful until a few years later. |
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Originally Posted By ED_P: I owned an Atari 800 as my first home system in the 80's and I remember staring at the 16K memory expansion cartridge at Sears for $100. |
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It certainly felt like it at the time. I only dabbled in the hardware side, mostly to make whatever game I wanted to run actually run better. On the software side though it felt like the wild west. Gaming together was a fucking nightmare most of the time though, we spent as much time fucking with local area networks just to get it all working right as we did actually playing. Hubs and cables and shit everywhere, and then for no reason at all one guy's PC just would never work until we fucked with IP setting 40 times, just taking a scattergun approach to cobble together a network so we could play Starcraft. |
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Growing up we had a C64. I remember spending an entire evening punching in code from a book and all it did was make a character fall across the screen and you could change the colors of it by pressing on if the function keys. You would put in a floppy and 30 minutes later you played the shittiest version of wheel of fortune you ever saw. I remember I wanted tnmt on the nes but I couldn't afford it. I could however afford it for the c64. If you thought that game was hard on nes, well you would be in for a treat. It used an Atari joystick and it only had one button. You gave it a long press to jump and a tap to attack.
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Attached File I spent waaaay too much money out of this book over the years. (That and Shotgun News....) |
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I know the voices aren't real, but MAN do they have some good ideas!
"If there must be trouble let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." - Thomas Paine
I know the voices aren't real, but MAN do they have some good ideas!
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Originally Posted By Soybomb: I don't know about golden age, power and price are great today. More niche desires are (or were) filled more today, you weren't getting a custom color Hello Kitty case then if you wanted it. But it probably felt the most fun. The internet was still booming and not sanitized monetized corporate content. People were giving aware their software as shareware in hope you'd buy it, versus today not being allowed to buy it and being sold a monthly subscription. There was still new exciting hardware coming out, like cd roms and 3d accelerators, and you could buy it. Unfortunate the AI farms and crypto crap has driven prices way up. I was hopeful to do some upgrades and can’t justify the costs to even buy what I did 4 years ago. It does seem that the computer hardware tech has stalled a bit over the last 5 years though |
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I learned how to play poker out of necessity thanks to this DOS masterpiece. Attached File |
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Originally Posted By Colt1860: Okidata refurb dot matrix printers are $500 now. I assume that business that still think they have to have multipart forms are paying near extortion level prices rather than changing their processes. New ones are getting close to $1000, fucking crazy. Originally Posted By Colt1860: Originally Posted By InflectionPoint: Don’t forget that dot matrix, tractor fed printers! Okidata refurb dot matrix printers are $500 now. I assume that business that still think they have to have multipart forms are paying near extortion level prices rather than changing their processes. New ones are getting close to $1000, fucking crazy. Yes. We do pay extortion level prices for them. And rebuild kits are hundreds of dollars. We have 3 in each warehouse. It’s how the meter tickets get printed for my trucks. |
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Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
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Originally Posted By PhuzzyGnu: I ran a WWIV BBS out of my room in high school 1990-1992. Hundreds of users, games (Tradewars!) and even a file library which mostly consisted of cDc documents and tits. 80286 12mhz with 1MB RAM (640k conventional and 384k extended!) with a 20MB HDD. 2400baud Hayes modem later upgraded to 19,200. NEC Multisync 3D monitor. Small world. I had a WWIV board in the early nineties. 386DX40, 14.4 modem, 40MB HDD. Tradewars, The Pit, other games, WWIVnet, IceNet. It was fun while it lasted. |
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I built my first x86 based system in 1993 though I had a lot of exposure to 68000, 6502 and Z80 based systems in the decade prior. It was an 80386 in a full tower case, built for a purpose: To serve as the controller for my packet radio node. Space for CDs and backup drives was needed along with lots of I/O - mostly serial port but a 10Base2 card as well. 40MB drive running DOS 5. Later upgraded to 6.22. That effort got me hired at my first large corporate job by a fellow ham. Proceeds over the next year went to fund building a 486 mini tower and enough RAM to run OS/2 Warp. Eventually, Linux. Many other systems followed. All homebuilt. I still build largely from scratch, or do a lot of customization to a base platform. Latest effort is a quad CPU enterprise class server that's going to be used as a nested hypervisor. 10 concurrent VMs with separate video and serial for each. As was the case back then, finding the EXACT card or drive to make everything play nice can be challenging. |
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Originally Posted By Never_A_Wick: My vinyl guy still uses a Compaq with windows 98 for his plotter program. He’s never had a single issue with it. Stable as can be. But in reality it’s a very limited OS. I have a VM of 98SE w/ SciTech video drivers on a couple of my hypervisors. Some software from back in the day prefers it. I think the only OSes I don't have virtualized at present are NT4, 2000, Vista and ME plus the 2k3/2k8/etc Server platforms. Haven't needed to set up an AD root so really no need for Server...yet. |
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Around '95, I bought a new Tandy "Sensation" from Radio shack. 486 SX33. Multi media, with 4 megs of RAM, 210 MB hard drive. DOS 6.0, and Windows 3.1. 2400 Baud Modem. I don't remember the exact price, but with a 14" monitor, and a dot matrix printer it was around $1500. It came with a CD with Wolfenstien and Doom shareware. That started me down the rabbit hole... 
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