4 ms·

True that. We lived a life of privilege.

by ttul 6y ago

29athrowaway 6y ago
For reference, years later, in 1996-1997, it was not uncommon for people to have a Pentium CPU with 16 MB of RAM. The 90s decade really saw Moore's law in full effect.
- xnx 6y ago
  It was wild. The MHz increases were big and made a difference. The current trends toward more cores are just a consolation prize for not being able to improve scalar performance.
  - holoduke 6y ago
    there is still quite an advancement. look at the GPU market. every new Nvidia model is quite a leap forward. check the specs of the new game consoles. quite impressive compared to 10 years ago.
    - wott 6y ago
      I am not sure they impress many people any more, in the sense that only a few specific use cases benefit from them and awaits them, while the needs of a vast majority of people on the consumer market have been satisfied with low end devices for quite many years. It was very different across the '90s, when improvements in speed and capacity were tremendous and had an actual and dramatic impact on almost everyone's usage. There were also massive price drops in those days; now for many years prices are pretty stable (I guess they couldn't really go much lower), the only notable exception of which I can think is the SSD price/GB which finally dropped significantly during the last 2(?) years).
    - anthk 6y ago
      That's nothing. From 1992 to 1996 you stepped from 320x200 based games and VGA ones to MPEG videos in your computer and games from Doom/Quake to Broken Sword. From a simple buzzer to Audio CD quality. It was the era for multimedia PC's. The changes were huge, really huge.
      - 29athrowaway 6y ago
        In that period of time I went from having a 286 with a monochrome display and a dot matrix printer to a "multimedia" computer with Pentium CPU, a 36.6 Kbps modem, color monitor, scanner, inkjet printer, microphone, speakers... And setup my own interactive voicemail with options using Cheyenne Bitware, which I also used for fax. Who would have suspected that in only 13 years from then you would have a better version of all that, plus GPS, bluetooth, etc. in your pocket.
        anthk 6y ago
        TBH you had those in your pocket too if you were a rich low-middle tier CEO: Pocket PC's, minus BT and the GPS; altough some hybrid models existed.
- jandrese 6y ago
  The flipside is it was the decade where it seemed like your machine was obsolete after like 6 months. Computers were pretty expensive at the time too.
  - noneeeed 6y ago
    This was the point I stopped playing games, around 1997-8. I was a student, with a franken-PC cobbled together from hand-me-down parts from my brother and dad. There was just no way I could keep up with the new games that were coming out, especially not ones that I could play over LAN with my friends, who had things like Voodoo2 cards. The speed with which CPUs were improving was amazing. In the 4 years I was at university PCs got about 5 times faster. The SGI Indy workstations in the labs went from being something quite amazing to being run-of-the-mill. And the comparison between the edit systems at the campus TV station that were bought at the beginning of my time there and at the end was night and day. I remember the first would take about a minute to render one second of slow-mo. The one we bought in my final year could do that sort of thing (and lots of effects) in realtime.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      I started school in 1995 with a Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM and "S3 Trio64" graphics. The machine came with a bunch of games, but was too fast to play some of them. There was a really buggy Robocop game and a space shooter that ran so fast they were basically impossible to play. Doom and later Doom2 ran buttery smooth on it. By the time I graduated I had it overclocked to 100Mhz and had to add a Matrox G200 to try keep up. Even then it was too slow for most games. Compare that to today where my machine is running with a 7 year old i5-3570k and it can still run pretty much everything.
    - megameter 6y ago
      The nature of PC gaming really changed in the 90's. Through the later years of the Amiga's commercial life, most games were focused on the lowest common denominator because markets were small and everyone wanted to pick up the largest userbase, and the computers likewise had some balance of capabilities, with gaming features existing as one of several considerations. What I think changed was that as the scale of everything picked up, it became increasingly possible for a gaming enthusiast market to emerge, distinct from general computing and console gaming. In the late 90's not only did the specs accelerate very quickly, but the media started pushing to cover this enthusiast segment(e.g. Maximum PC, PC Accelerator). Where previous graphics advances were mostly focused on larger RAM usage and had clear benefit everywhere(higher resolution, color depth, etc.) the ordinary computer user in the 1990's had no reason for a GPU except to play games or engage in 3D content creation and visualization. A high-end PC from 1996 or so is basically competent at doing everything that was envisioned in the 1970's, if not in practice, then certainly in theory - the things that come after, are there because we started looking for ways to keep applying more computing power. With games it's been simple: more detail on models and textures, more expensive lighting computations, more accurate physics and more complex animations. The progressive enhancement of the web to the degree that it taxes a modern machine, on the other hand, is like a fitness function that has become overly relaxed. And I think that's a divergence that really occurred in the late 90's when standard RAM sizes grew to the 10's of megabytes - enough to comfortably multitask provided all applications are optimized for memory size. Once you have multitasking, feature bloat can set in.

True that. We lived a life of privilege.

by ttul 6y ago

True that. We lived a life of privilege.

For reference, years later, in 1996-1997, it was not uncommon for people to have a Pentium CPU with 16 MB of RAM. The 90s decade really saw Moore's law in full effect.

xnx 6y ago
It was wild. The MHz increases were big and made a difference. The current trends toward more cores are just a consolation prize for not being able to improve scalar performance.
- holoduke 6y ago
  there is still quite an advancement. look at the GPU market. every new Nvidia model is quite a leap forward. check the specs of the new game consoles. quite impressive compared to 10 years ago.
  - wott 6y ago
    I am not sure they impress many people any more, in the sense that only a few specific use cases benefit from them and awaits them, while the needs of a vast majority of people on the consumer market have been satisfied with low end devices for quite many years. It was very different across the '90s, when improvements in speed and capacity were tremendous and had an actual and dramatic impact on almost everyone's usage. There were also massive price drops in those days; now for many years prices are pretty stable (I guess they couldn't really go much lower), the only notable exception of which I can think is the SSD price/GB which finally dropped significantly during the last 2(?) years).
  - anthk 6y ago
    That's nothing. From 1992 to 1996 you stepped from 320x200 based games and VGA ones to MPEG videos in your computer and games from Doom/Quake to Broken Sword. From a simple buzzer to Audio CD quality. It was the era for multimedia PC's. The changes were huge, really huge.
    - 29athrowaway 6y ago
      In that period of time I went from having a 286 with a monochrome display and a dot matrix printer to a "multimedia" computer with Pentium CPU, a 36.6 Kbps modem, color monitor, scanner, inkjet printer, microphone, speakers... And setup my own interactive voicemail with options using Cheyenne Bitware, which I also used for fax. Who would have suspected that in only 13 years from then you would have a better version of all that, plus GPS, bluetooth, etc. in your pocket.
      - anthk 6y ago
        TBH you had those in your pocket too if you were a rich low-middle tier CEO: Pocket PC's, minus BT and the GPS; altough some hybrid models existed.
jandrese 6y ago
The flipside is it was the decade where it seemed like your machine was obsolete after like 6 months. Computers were pretty expensive at the time too.
- noneeeed 6y ago
  This was the point I stopped playing games, around 1997-8. I was a student, with a franken-PC cobbled together from hand-me-down parts from my brother and dad. There was just no way I could keep up with the new games that were coming out, especially not ones that I could play over LAN with my friends, who had things like Voodoo2 cards. The speed with which CPUs were improving was amazing. In the 4 years I was at university PCs got about 5 times faster. The SGI Indy workstations in the labs went from being something quite amazing to being run-of-the-mill. And the comparison between the edit systems at the campus TV station that were bought at the beginning of my time there and at the end was night and day. I remember the first would take about a minute to render one second of slow-mo. The one we bought in my final year could do that sort of thing (and lots of effects) in realtime.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    I started school in 1995 with a Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM and "S3 Trio64" graphics. The machine came with a bunch of games, but was too fast to play some of them. There was a really buggy Robocop game and a space shooter that ran so fast they were basically impossible to play. Doom and later Doom2 ran buttery smooth on it. By the time I graduated I had it overclocked to 100Mhz and had to add a Matrox G200 to try keep up. Even then it was too slow for most games. Compare that to today where my machine is running with a 7 year old i5-3570k and it can still run pretty much everything.
  - megameter 6y ago
    The nature of PC gaming really changed in the 90's. Through the later years of the Amiga's commercial life, most games were focused on the lowest common denominator because markets were small and everyone wanted to pick up the largest userbase, and the computers likewise had some balance of capabilities, with gaming features existing as one of several considerations. What I think changed was that as the scale of everything picked up, it became increasingly possible for a gaming enthusiast market to emerge, distinct from general computing and console gaming. In the late 90's not only did the specs accelerate very quickly, but the media started pushing to cover this enthusiast segment(e.g. Maximum PC, PC Accelerator). Where previous graphics advances were mostly focused on larger RAM usage and had clear benefit everywhere(higher resolution, color depth, etc.) the ordinary computer user in the 1990's had no reason for a GPU except to play games or engage in 3D content creation and visualization. A high-end PC from 1996 or so is basically competent at doing everything that was envisioned in the 1970's, if not in practice, then certainly in theory - the things that come after, are there because we started looking for ways to keep applying more computing power. With games it's been simple: more detail on models and textures, more expensive lighting computations, more accurate physics and more complex animations. The progressive enhancement of the web to the degree that it taxes a modern machine, on the other hand, is like a fitness function that has become overly relaxed. And I think that's a divergence that really occurred in the late 90's when standard RAM sizes grew to the 10's of megabytes - enough to comfortably multitask provided all applications are optimized for memory size. Once you have multitasking, feature bloat can set in.