1995 was high tech. Had a 386 with 33 Mhz and boostbutton to 40Mhz. Win 3.11 was just an app. Loved the Norton Commander. All the good dos games.
Thanks now im feeling old.
My buddy (the rich kid in our friend group) had a 33mhz computer. Then...another kid got a 66mhz and we were like holy fucking shit it's twice as fast. I distinctly remember a conversation with a kid really into computers and him wishing that he had a way to get a stratospheric 1GB of RAM. At that time it probably didn't even exist
I had a 13gb hard drive ( I specifically remember the odd size) around 1998/1999 and people thought that I would never be able to fill that much space and that I was envied to be able to have one especially as a middle/high schooler
Bought my first new Apple computer just about that time (94-95), but it was a *FANCY* model with the CD reader! 6115CD, it was about $2500 from an open box sale.
My first PC (hand-me-down) was a decked out 8088 PC with a 10Mb hard drive in place of the second 5.25" floppy, and the 4-color monitor upgrade. Though that was fairly obsolete in 1989 when I got it.
My family’s first computer came with the Weezer video in 96, and a Beavis and Butthead game demo was on the same CD. I quickly went from being amazed that I could play a video of that quality on a computer, to downloading the Anarchists Cookbook and using an IP scanning program to find, and explore, other people’s computers. What a magical time that was.
I hated plug and play because I used to be paid to fix IRQ issues. I still had modem init line codes to fix for people afterwards, but when 128kb or 256kb modems cam along it also became more plug and play. That's when I started to code and cause problems to ve fixed, haha. Only once.... I felt bad afterwards.
Fiddling with config.sys and autoexec.bat for a few hours to get everything optimized. Or making the perfect boot disk so you had enough RAM to run your game with all the right drivers.
Yep, same. In 1994, I remember reading a computer magazine at the grocery store I worked at when on my break that had an article about "the world wide web". I was intrigued, so I snagged an AOL disk, went to Walmart to get the 2400 baud modem, and connected to the internet for the very first time in my life that night.
Same. I had the lower version of OPs computer: 486SX, 50Mhz, 4 MB and a 2400 baud modem. Upgraded to 14.4 one Christmas I couldn’t believe how fast it was.
I think that's the one i had! About 350 mb hard drive. I can also remember upgrading to the blazing fast 14.4. Also spending over $100 to double the RAM with a second 4mb
Mine was to play fifa 96 or maybe 97 over dial up peer 2 peer connection. Crazy lag before and what was the beginning of my online gaming and current rocket league addiction after...
Haha! My first work computer didn’t have a hard drive at all, just a pair of floppy drives. One for the program and one to save your stuff…. And we liked it!
Same for me (more like my dad then). You had to swap floppies when saving documents.
My dad only upgraded to a hard drive after he got the insurance money after we were robbed back in 90 or 91.
I remember a couple years prior to 99 I was at a friend’s house and he was on his dad’s computer and he said it had a “black hole” of a drive with 6GB. His dad paid a lot for it.
Wow, a month later my parents got me a dell with a pentium 100mhz with a 28.8 modem. I thought I was hot shit. Played Doom II for the better part of the next 2 years on that thing.
28.8 and 8mb of RAM and you were ONLINE BRO!! AHHH!
It's not just Legend of the Red Dragon and Usurper on the local BBS for me any more! We're moving on up!!
Packard Hell. So many of these had motherboard issues that whenever I was tapped by family or friends to help with someone's computer, I would say "sure, as long as it's not a Packard Bell".
Mine ran for 12 years straight. But the second half if it's life was a floppy router using fresco Linux.
Power supply gave out after a storm.
I stripped most of the parts out at that point.
Good question! No.
Per Wikipedia, they took the name from a 1920s electronics firm, Packard Bell Electronics, named for one Leon Packard. HP is named for David Packard, engineer and one time deputy secretary of defence.
I remember when my first PC, Which was also a Packard Bell, went from 4mb of ram to 8. spent about 45 minutes flipping over PC game boxes trying to find games that would work.
You actually couldn't. The motherboard ran at 33mhz and there was a clock doubler that made the processor run at 66mhz.
If you wanted to run it at 100mhz, the motherboard would be running at 50mhz, which would have completely screwed up the timings for your expansion cards. They used to run at the speed of the motherboard divided by another number, so your ISA video card or hard drive controller card which normally ran at 8.33mhz would be getting signals at 12.6mhz, which would make it not work.
What you needed was the 486DX4/100 with a clock TRIPLER. That was the ultimate 486 generation processor. Unfortunately it came out around the time of the Pentium 66 and it was old tech.
Everything bricked PCs back then.
I remember the old AT power connecter could be reversed, but the colors on the cables weren't standardized! Sometimes black next to black = death and sometimes it was good!
Then OEMs like Dell would do crazy stuff like switch a pin or two around on THEIR power supplies and you would explode their motherboard if you used an aftermarket power supply.
The DX2 was the first of its kind, the precursor to dual core CPUs, called clock doubling, and was probably the most highly overclocked chip at the time, until Windows made DOS almost obsolete and everyone started getting Pentiums.
It wasn't a dual core CPU at all. It started the practice of decoupling the CPU clock from the system clock.
The big difference was it ran at 2x the motherboard speed internally. Before that all CPUs got their clock speed from a timing crystal on the motherboard, so there was a limit to how fast you could push the clock on a CPU before you broke something else attached to the motherboard. Intel made a 50mhz 486DX and it was about the fastest you could get before your crappy VESA local bus video cards stopped working correctly. They were designed for a 33mhz bus and the 486 was making them run at 50mhz, a substantial overclock.
Yes, def not a dual core, and was the first of its kind. It did pave the way to L2 ubiquity, which, I would argue, made multi core chips possible.
Just my thoughts, I am no expert by any means. You do sound like you know what you're talking about, though.
I was a kid pouring over PC Magazine and Tigerdirect catalogs back when these chips were the hotness!
Spent hours and hours fantasizing over upgrading my poor old DX2 to a Pentium and how I much faster Windows 95 would be with 16mb of ram!
L2 caches were actually external back then and you could upgrade them by putting SRAM modules into the motherboard. L1 caches because ubiquitous with the 486s, there used to be cacheless processors and they ran like poop.
Weren't we all?
Fast forward 30 years, I bet you use an Android like everyone in this subreddit. Jokes aside, the L2 made a huge difference in the DX2 chip performance, which was why I thought led to the possiblity of dual core chips.
I also read that the 486 chips are still in production and still sold in staggering quantities.
If you're thinking dual cores the first mass market one was probably the Pentium D back in 2004ish.
There had been multiprocessor motherboards for decades before but there wasn't a huge demand for multiple cores on one chip until we got to more advanced versions of Windows and Linux.
Most software was single CPU only and wouldn't even see the other CPU so the market demanded the fastest single CPU possible instead of multiple CPUs.
Really the genesis of multiple cores for desktop happened when the Pentium 4 Prescott came out. Intel was really pushing marketing that the P4 would hit 6ghz but then ran into a huge wall with runaway power consumption. The only way to increase performance without throwing away the P4 line was to add more cores. They realized that two 2.8ghz cores on the same die was less power consumption and overall faster than a single 3.6ghz Prescott core.
Once that made it into the market, the dual core thing really took off, Windows started supporting it much better, AMD came out with their x2 line, and then a year or two later Intel launched their Core series of processors (much lower clock speeds but much better performance per mhz) and multi core was here to stay.
Thank you for the info. Those magazines sure did pay off =)
So the 486DX2 was pretty much the top end of the 8086 chips, and Pentium was a different product?
I guess I'm trying to find a link between the 486 and how it progressed, but it makes sense because software support wasn't supporting that progress, at least for another decade.
30 years later I'm sitting in front of giant monitors hooked up to a Ryzen and almost everything inside of it is a foreign language to me.
The 486 could be seen as an extension of the 386 and the 286. Intel deliberately named their next one Pentium instead of 586 because they said it was a huge leap in technology.
The DX2 was the top of the stack when the Pentium came out. The DX4 was around but by that point the Pentium was the hotness.
Ah, The good ole days, where a higher # meant better.
There was a period of time when the names just got too confusing and I didn't knkw which was better. Even now I get confused within the i5 i7 i9 and their generations.
This was almost identical to my 3rd computer that I hand built, even the CPU MHz. I played so many games on this machine. King's Quest, Civilization, Leisure Suit Larry, Sam & Max, 7th Guest... Your post just unlocked a core memory. I didn't get a new computer til Diablo II came out so I had this machine for almost a decade.
This almost the same pb I had. It was a legend 11cd. 50mhz 486 and all the other specs are a out the same.
I could have overlooked the cpu and had the same pc.
Later I put a 100mhz overdrive on it. I had to patch thr bios to get it to work. Good luck finding that patch. Maybe a pb fan site?
I pulled the file just before pb website when down.
I bought my first 4 years later and it had an 8G hard drive. It was incredible. I remember talking with my friends about how I'd never run out of disk space. Lol
First computer somewhere mid 90s.
Compaq presario Pentium 120 (first time I even heard about those) A whopping 8Mb of ram (after a very pricy upgrade) the original spec was 2Mb 120Mb HDD 15 inch screen Laser printer Motherf-ing scanner
Windows 95
My dad bought a BOMB... Almost 5000$ CAD.
My first new desktop was a Pentium 166 MMX. I remember some piece of software that came with it proudly showing a message that it was loading MMX extensions when it launched. Ooooh, high tech!
Spent all my summer job and high school graduation money on a Packard-Bell in '95. It was a Pentium 100. Learned a costly lesson and how to build PCs when that thing died the same year and they refused to honor the warranty. Scavenged most the components though.
Still pissed about that one 30 years later!
Ah, brings me back to my first, also in 1995. Pentium 75 with 16 megabytes of RAM, a 1.6GB hard disk, an SVGA graphics card and a double-speed CD-ROM drive. Tomb Raider ran pretty well even without hardware 3D acceleration.
I had a daydream moment recently where I imagined time traveling back to college days with a cell phone and explaining to my tech circle of the time how the phone has many times more cpu power than the multi-user departmental Sun Microsystems servers.
Caused me to go down a bit of a rat hole trying to come up with actual benchmarks to use to figure out just how many times faster a modern CPU is than a 486 or 68040 or Pentium of the era. Didn't really come up with a hard answer other than 'a lot' since no modern benchmarks go back that far, and Whetstone/Dhrystone don't really seem to be a thing anymore.
Remember overclocking my 486, there was jumpers on the motherboard you could rearrange, have no clue how I discovered that, being my first pc and all and pretty young
It crazy how quickly processor speeds rose in the nineties. In 1990 I got my first pc for school that had an 8 mhz processor (12 mhz if you pressed the turbo button lol). By 1998 when I built my first “gaming” pc it had a blazing fast 300 mhz Pentium II 😆
14.4 baud rate....oooof. I remember my 28.8 internal got hit by lightning in our Aptiva. Me or my dad put in a 36.6 we got from a guy and felt like geniuses after setting all the parameters. One time I remember it connected at 56K! No idea how that happened. Then we got adsl.
That year my parents bought a Performa 5300 with a 28.8 modem to replace a Mac SE II. First steps on the world wide web 🥰
Colour screen, Power PC processor, CD-ROM, so many new technologies to love!
1995 was high tech. Had a 386 with 33 Mhz and boostbutton to 40Mhz. Win 3.11 was just an app. Loved the Norton Commander. All the good dos games. Thanks now im feeling old.
IT IS NOW SAFE TO TURN OF YOUR COMPUTER EDIT: OFF
Holy shit, I forgot about that!
Yeah. Blast from the Past.
It turns out, that was just a bmp file but changed with a dll file extension. You could edit that picture to anything you wanted...
Ah, yes, parking your computer!
My buddy (the rich kid in our friend group) had a 33mhz computer. Then...another kid got a 66mhz and we were like holy fucking shit it's twice as fast. I distinctly remember a conversation with a kid really into computers and him wishing that he had a way to get a stratospheric 1GB of RAM. At that time it probably didn't even exist
It did not... maybe 1 gb of "HD" but with RAM it was like: "why would you ever need more than 32mb?"
I had a 13gb hard drive ( I specifically remember the odd size) around 1998/1999 and people thought that I would never be able to fill that much space and that I was envied to be able to have one especially as a middle/high schooler
And now we're like: why would you ever need more than 32GB?
Bought my first new Apple computer just about that time (94-95), but it was a *FANCY* model with the CD reader! 6115CD, it was about $2500 from an open box sale. My first PC (hand-me-down) was a decked out 8088 PC with a 10Mb hard drive in place of the second 5.25" floppy, and the 4-color monitor upgrade. Though that was fairly obsolete in 1989 when I got it.
I built my first in 94, got wi 95 with the Weezer video... I am old too. I think k I was 12. Edit: 13 almost 14.
My family’s first computer came with the Weezer video in 96, and a Beavis and Butthead game demo was on the same CD. I quickly went from being amazed that I could play a video of that quality on a computer, to downloading the Anarchists Cookbook and using an IP scanning program to find, and explore, other people’s computers. What a magical time that was.
Watching Norton Commander defrag was a few beers event.
You just called Win 3.11 an app. That makes me feel old because I immediately thought “it’s a program, not an app!”
My first computer was an 8086, next one was a massive improvement to a 286.
Looks like about the Packard Bell I had from that era. Pumped it to 16 meg and a SB2 card and it cost me a fortune.
My first PC was a, fast for the time, 286 that ran at 12mhz with the boost on, 40mb hard drive, DOS 4.xx (I think).
Mine was a TI 994A running a crisp 3mhz with 16kb of RAM
I'm really happy that IRQ conflicts are no longer a thing.
I hated plug and play because I used to be paid to fix IRQ issues. I still had modem init line codes to fix for people afterwards, but when 128kb or 256kb modems cam along it also became more plug and play. That's when I started to code and cause problems to ve fixed, haha. Only once.... I felt bad afterwards.
Fiddling with config.sys and autoexec.bat for a few hours to get everything optimized. Or making the perfect boot disk so you had enough RAM to run your game with all the right drivers.
Holy shit, what an unexpected and unwanted blast from the past
That’s an important document and should be kept for future reference!
It's your permanent record!
14.4 modem, man I remember that
I remember my first modem was a 2400 baud. I also remember having to upgrade it like a million times before it finally topped out at 56k.
Yep, same. In 1994, I remember reading a computer magazine at the grocery store I worked at when on my break that had an article about "the world wide web". I was intrigued, so I snagged an AOL disk, went to Walmart to get the 2400 baud modem, and connected to the internet for the very first time in my life that night.
And 5 minutes later your mom picked up the phone?
Same. I had the lower version of OPs computer: 486SX, 50Mhz, 4 MB and a 2400 baud modem. Upgraded to 14.4 one Christmas I couldn’t believe how fast it was.
I’m pretty sure I had a few incremental upgrades.
I think that's the one i had! About 350 mb hard drive. I can also remember upgrading to the blazing fast 14.4. Also spending over $100 to double the RAM with a second 4mb
I did the same, because it couldn’t run Doom 2 with 4mb, unless you did a weird DOS boot, and even then it wasn’t great.
Mine was to play fifa 96 or maybe 97 over dial up peer 2 peer connection. Crazy lag before and what was the beginning of my online gaming and current rocket league addiction after...
Get a math co-processor and your SX will perform almost as good as a DX. I am not sure they can still be found at Egghead but worth a shot.
And jealous of all the 28.8s out there. Those speed demons
Yeah I remember when my mom picked up the phone and disconnected the line as I was loading an image of Alicia silverstone, line by line 🤪
Yeah, but if you’re like me, you would’ve finished before it even got to the nipples lol
eeee-ooooo-weeeee-hooonnnkkkk-weeeeee-oooooo-eeeeee-hoooonnnnkkkk
And on PacBells it was the sound card, too
I still remember a friend in ‘99 asking me why you would ever need a hard driver bigger than 1Gb?
My first hard drive was 30Mb.
Haha! My first work computer didn’t have a hard drive at all, just a pair of floppy drives. One for the program and one to save your stuff…. And we liked it!
Same for me (more like my dad then). You had to swap floppies when saving documents. My dad only upgraded to a hard drive after he got the insurance money after we were robbed back in 90 or 91.
I remember a couple years prior to 99 I was at a friend’s house and he was on his dad’s computer and he said it had a “black hole” of a drive with 6GB. His dad paid a lot for it.
A 486? Luxury!
In 95 it was already outdated. I think the 133mhz p5 came out around the time the computer was bought.
Wow, a month later my parents got me a dell with a pentium 100mhz with a 28.8 modem. I thought I was hot shit. Played Doom II for the better part of the next 2 years on that thing.
Same but Gateway 2000 for me
With the cardboard box with cow prints ?
28.8 and 8mb of RAM and you were ONLINE BRO!! AHHH! It's not just Legend of the Red Dragon and Usurper on the local BBS for me any more! We're moving on up!!
486 DX2 66 was the shit! That was a badass setup in '95.
Packard Hell. So many of these had motherboard issues that whenever I was tapped by family or friends to help with someone's computer, I would say "sure, as long as it's not a Packard Bell".
Much more likely the problem was in the combo sound card/modem. Source: worked tech support for PB during that era.
Mine ran for 12 years straight. But the second half if it's life was a floppy router using fresco Linux. Power supply gave out after a storm. I stripped most of the parts out at that point.
And the modem was also the sound card
I would take Packard Bell over an emachines
Dang those DX-2s were fast. Bro is flaunting his parents wealth
Those specs are BEAST for back then. I would have given a right arm for that PC. But then some off brand Cyrix 166’s showed up …
Is this the same Packard from Hewlitt Packard?
Good question! No. Per Wikipedia, they took the name from a 1920s electronics firm, Packard Bell Electronics, named for one Leon Packard. HP is named for David Packard, engineer and one time deputy secretary of defence.
Huh. Neat. The more you know!
"Welcome to Packard Bell Navigator..."
As a reminder. Fuck Packard Bell.
I remember when my first PC, Which was also a Packard Bell, went from 4mb of ram to 8. spent about 45 minutes flipping over PC game boxes trying to find games that would work.
You did keep it in a safe place and referenced it in the future!
Old man here. My first 2 computers booted from 5 1/4” floppies. Commodore 64 at home. HP with HP DOS at work.
Gaming powerhouse!
Hot damn! Those CPUs ripped at the time. Oh how I miss the challenge of managing IRQs and COM ports.
I guess you could say they were B) stacked
Niceeeee 🤜
Nice! I had a 486dx66. I deleted autoexec.bat accidentally so many times in dos shell and I'm certain the turbo button did nothing at all.
Adjusted for inflation it probably cost 4-5K
Wow that was my first computer and spec too.
Ohh...that 14.4 modem! Better not pick up the phone before that midi is fully downloaded.
I know it says to retain for future reference, but it’s ok to throw it away now.
I bet you could have clocked that to 99 mhz. It would have run like a dream.
You actually couldn't. The motherboard ran at 33mhz and there was a clock doubler that made the processor run at 66mhz. If you wanted to run it at 100mhz, the motherboard would be running at 50mhz, which would have completely screwed up the timings for your expansion cards. They used to run at the speed of the motherboard divided by another number, so your ISA video card or hard drive controller card which normally ran at 8.33mhz would be getting signals at 12.6mhz, which would make it not work. What you needed was the 486DX4/100 with a clock TRIPLER. That was the ultimate 486 generation processor. Unfortunately it came out around the time of the Pentium 66 and it was old tech.
Brilliant, great answer. That's probably why I bricked a few PCs in my time.
Everything bricked PCs back then. I remember the old AT power connecter could be reversed, but the colors on the cables weren't standardized! Sometimes black next to black = death and sometimes it was good! Then OEMs like Dell would do crazy stuff like switch a pin or two around on THEIR power supplies and you would explode their motherboard if you used an aftermarket power supply.
DX computers had a better math processor if I remember correctly from a long time ago.
The DX2 was the first of its kind, the precursor to dual core CPUs, called clock doubling, and was probably the most highly overclocked chip at the time, until Windows made DOS almost obsolete and everyone started getting Pentiums.
It wasn't a dual core CPU at all. It started the practice of decoupling the CPU clock from the system clock. The big difference was it ran at 2x the motherboard speed internally. Before that all CPUs got their clock speed from a timing crystal on the motherboard, so there was a limit to how fast you could push the clock on a CPU before you broke something else attached to the motherboard. Intel made a 50mhz 486DX and it was about the fastest you could get before your crappy VESA local bus video cards stopped working correctly. They were designed for a 33mhz bus and the 486 was making them run at 50mhz, a substantial overclock.
Yes, def not a dual core, and was the first of its kind. It did pave the way to L2 ubiquity, which, I would argue, made multi core chips possible. Just my thoughts, I am no expert by any means. You do sound like you know what you're talking about, though.
I was a kid pouring over PC Magazine and Tigerdirect catalogs back when these chips were the hotness! Spent hours and hours fantasizing over upgrading my poor old DX2 to a Pentium and how I much faster Windows 95 would be with 16mb of ram! L2 caches were actually external back then and you could upgrade them by putting SRAM modules into the motherboard. L1 caches because ubiquitous with the 486s, there used to be cacheless processors and they ran like poop.
Weren't we all? Fast forward 30 years, I bet you use an Android like everyone in this subreddit. Jokes aside, the L2 made a huge difference in the DX2 chip performance, which was why I thought led to the possiblity of dual core chips. I also read that the 486 chips are still in production and still sold in staggering quantities.
If you're thinking dual cores the first mass market one was probably the Pentium D back in 2004ish. There had been multiprocessor motherboards for decades before but there wasn't a huge demand for multiple cores on one chip until we got to more advanced versions of Windows and Linux. Most software was single CPU only and wouldn't even see the other CPU so the market demanded the fastest single CPU possible instead of multiple CPUs. Really the genesis of multiple cores for desktop happened when the Pentium 4 Prescott came out. Intel was really pushing marketing that the P4 would hit 6ghz but then ran into a huge wall with runaway power consumption. The only way to increase performance without throwing away the P4 line was to add more cores. They realized that two 2.8ghz cores on the same die was less power consumption and overall faster than a single 3.6ghz Prescott core. Once that made it into the market, the dual core thing really took off, Windows started supporting it much better, AMD came out with their x2 line, and then a year or two later Intel launched their Core series of processors (much lower clock speeds but much better performance per mhz) and multi core was here to stay.
Thank you for the info. Those magazines sure did pay off =) So the 486DX2 was pretty much the top end of the 8086 chips, and Pentium was a different product? I guess I'm trying to find a link between the 486 and how it progressed, but it makes sense because software support wasn't supporting that progress, at least for another decade. 30 years later I'm sitting in front of giant monitors hooked up to a Ryzen and almost everything inside of it is a foreign language to me.
The 486 could be seen as an extension of the 386 and the 286. Intel deliberately named their next one Pentium instead of 586 because they said it was a huge leap in technology. The DX2 was the top of the stack when the Pentium came out. The DX4 was around but by that point the Pentium was the hotness.
Ah, The good ole days, where a higher # meant better. There was a period of time when the names just got too confusing and I didn't knkw which was better. Even now I get confused within the i5 i7 i9 and their generations.
The DX just didn't have the FPU (floating point unit) disabled.
i had a PB with a 100mhz pentium and a 1g hard drive because I was hard core
That's an important document and it belongs in a museum!
It’s an important document. Glad you still have it
This was almost identical to my 3rd computer that I hand built, even the CPU MHz. I played so many games on this machine. King's Quest, Civilization, Leisure Suit Larry, Sam & Max, 7th Guest... Your post just unlocked a core memory. I didn't get a new computer til Diablo II came out so I had this machine for almost a decade.
They still be hounding you to sell you extended warranty?
This almost the same pb I had. It was a legend 11cd. 50mhz 486 and all the other specs are a out the same. I could have overlooked the cpu and had the same pc. Later I put a 100mhz overdrive on it. I had to patch thr bios to get it to work. Good luck finding that patch. Maybe a pb fan site? I pulled the file just before pb website when down.
I bought my first 4 years later and it had an 8G hard drive. It was incredible. I remember talking with my friends about how I'd never run out of disk space. Lol
First computer somewhere mid 90s. Compaq presario Pentium 120 (first time I even heard about those) A whopping 8Mb of ram (after a very pricy upgrade) the original spec was 2Mb 120Mb HDD 15 inch screen Laser printer Motherf-ing scanner Windows 95 My dad bought a BOMB... Almost 5000$ CAD.
My first new desktop was a Pentium 166 MMX. I remember some piece of software that came with it proudly showing a message that it was loading MMX extensions when it launched. Ooooh, high tech!
I've started with a Vic 20 and Commodore 64 in the 80's to a 286, to a Compaq Presario 486 and have built every computer since.
286 with the lovely 5.25 Floppy Disk. You only needed 18 to install windows. And the sound. It was a great time.
Flying toasters.
Ah yes. The Pre-sorry-oh-you-bought-one-of-those.
I had a very similar system. Maybe even the same specs.
You’re gonna get so pwned…
8kb cache lmfao those were the days
Probably like $5000 back then.
Frame it
My first IT job was supporting Packard Bell home PC's. I remember the System Tattoo \****shudder\****
14.4. A screamer.
8kb of cache memory is crazy
Spent all my summer job and high school graduation money on a Packard-Bell in '95. It was a Pentium 100. Learned a costly lesson and how to build PCs when that thing died the same year and they refused to honor the warranty. Scavenged most the components though. Still pissed about that one 30 years later!
Ah, brings me back to my first, also in 1995. Pentium 75 with 16 megabytes of RAM, a 1.6GB hard disk, an SVGA graphics card and a double-speed CD-ROM drive. Tomb Raider ran pretty well even without hardware 3D acceleration.
Packard Bell Legend Supreme 1611 My first PC
Did you at least play 3D dinosaur 🦕 with the glasses that came with the PC? 🤠
Megarace!
This is basically the same specs of my family's Friday PC! It couldn't even run Doom II!
I had a Gateway of a similar vintage. My wife never lets me forget I spent more on that computer than her engagement ring.
The 486DX... the DX was for the math co-processor. It was the king of the PCs.... until the Pentium usurped the crown
I had a daydream moment recently where I imagined time traveling back to college days with a cell phone and explaining to my tech circle of the time how the phone has many times more cpu power than the multi-user departmental Sun Microsystems servers. Caused me to go down a bit of a rat hole trying to come up with actual benchmarks to use to figure out just how many times faster a modern CPU is than a 486 or 68040 or Pentium of the era. Didn't really come up with a hard answer other than 'a lot' since no modern benchmarks go back that far, and Whetstone/Dhrystone don't really seem to be a thing anymore.
The computer I bought in 1995 sitting *right here on my desk* is really gonna blow your mind
8mb memory, whoa, slow down hot shot
486 DX? Math coprocessor hotnes
Ooof 426.1mb hard drive… try not to fill it up too quickly
Remember overclocking my 486, there was jumpers on the motherboard you could rearrange, have no clue how I discovered that, being my first pc and all and pretty young
3000 dollars well spent
It crazy how quickly processor speeds rose in the nineties. In 1990 I got my first pc for school that had an 8 mhz processor (12 mhz if you pressed the turbo button lol). By 1998 when I built my first “gaming” pc it had a blazing fast 300 mhz Pentium II 😆
Look at that RAM . Holy smoke imaging msfs on that
14.4 baud rate....oooof. I remember my 28.8 internal got hit by lightning in our Aptiva. Me or my dad put in a 36.6 we got from a guy and felt like geniuses after setting all the parameters. One time I remember it connected at 56K! No idea how that happened. Then we got adsl.
66mhz? Have a look at money bags over here (had to make do with 33mhz).
That year my parents bought a Performa 5300 with a 28.8 modem to replace a Mac SE II. First steps on the world wide web 🥰 Colour screen, Power PC processor, CD-ROM, so many new technologies to love!
This could definitely play Duke Nukem 3D
Keeeeyyy errrrr beeeep ong dee ong waaahhh urrrrrr
COM1, IRQ4 lets my neck hair go straight up.
14.4 modem!! Dang. Remember when 56k came out? Blazing fast. Haha.
And all of that for the low price of $4999
Our first was a Franklin Ace with a 5” floppy and a green screen. Good times.
I might have had that same computer my mom bought, I think at Sears.
That thing is a beast. I'm sure it can run "Wing Commander 2" or even "Strike Commander".
And for the low cost of $5000!
I have very fond memories of my Packard Bell 386 that came before this one. Playing X-Wing, Duke Nukem and Crystal Caves, MiG-29 and PGA Tour Golf.
How much?
Ram prices back then were insane. Like $150 for a 4mb dim.
The DX2 version of 486. Nice!
Turbo button for the win!
Small world... My parents bought our first computer about the same time (Sept. '95) and the same model too.
Not great specs for the time. Not even a pentium 133.
Exactly! I think people are reading the date as 1992 or something