6 ms·

Yeah, my $4000 486-DX2 with 8MB RAM and a Weitek P9000 graphics card was amazing(ly expensive)!

by vidanay 6y ago

tpmx 6y ago
I remember those CPUs being a lot more expensive than that. And (after looking it up) launching in 1992.
- vidanay 6y ago
  A lot of baked brain cells between then and now....I don't deny my memory is fuzzy.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Fair enough. I guess I was mostly retroactively jealous - at the time I was rocking an 8086 with CGA.
- lrem 6y ago
  Hmmm, really? I had a DX-4 which was not expensive at all around 1996-ish.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    When the 486 launched in 1989/1990 a typical system cost like $10k+. In 1996 it was very cheap.
  - toast0 6y ago
    Pentium 200Mhz (Socket 7) came out in 95; so a dx-4 in 96 was definitely old and should be not expensive.
lr4444lr 6y ago
And to think of $4000 in 1991 dollars...
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  i never spent $10k on a home system in 1991. What ???
Agingcoder 6y ago
Lucky you! I dreamt of owning a machine like this. I thought the dx2 cpus had appeared later though (92?). I was stuck with a 386/16Mhz/40 megs hd, and a whopping megabyte of ram. At least it taught me that it was sometimes worth optimizing my code...
- downut 6y ago
  The 8087 chip I added on to my 8086 system sits on my monitor pedestal, forever. Right now, it's next to my ()&(^&^%%$%^ Pixel 2 XL USB C audio connector. I was a grad student in numerical analysis and holy smokes! Hardware IEEE 754 floating point! Sometime aroundish 1988 I paid $600 for an 80MB hard drive, out of a $12K/yr stipend. Good times.
  - nonamenoslogan 6y ago
    I still have my first CPU, a 12MHz AMD 80286--which I realize is pretty 'new' but I'm only 43.
- da-x 6y ago
  Every respectable hacker remembers the spec of their first computer. 286 + 1MB RAM + 40MB hard drive. This was 1992 and it was valued about 1000$.
  - Firehawke 6y ago
    4KB TRS-80 Color Computer, which would have been $400 in 1980. Wasn't my own computer as it was my father's and I was a bit too young to get deep into programming until 1983 or so. First computer that was strictly mine was a CoCo 3 in 1986, and the first one I built entirely myself was a 486-66 back in 1993. Yep, we definitely remember those first machines.
    - slantyyz 6y ago
      I was basically the same, although I think we upgraded it somehow to 16K. I remember typing in source code from magazines (Rainbow, in particular). I thought MS Extended Basic on the CoCo was pretty cool. Ended up moving to Apple ][ a few years after that, but still have very fond memories of the CoCo, even though everyone else I knew had something else and liked to refer to my computer as a Trash 80.
fanatic2pope 6y ago
I had a similar system with a 17" Nanao monitor that by itself cost something like $1000. I also had a first generation Gravis Ultrasound, which I still own. I kept that machine for a while, it ran DOS, then Windows, then OS/2 and then Linux and FreeBSD and at one point had all of them installed at the same time. So much time wasted messing with partitions and file systems.
- vidanay 6y ago
  If I remember correctly, the final use of mine was running a home email server on Debian Linux with a dial-up modem.
klodolph 6y ago
It was also such a fast-moving era that your 486 would get crushed in a couple years by the arrival of Pentiums. I still regularly use a 2012 laptop, but if you were using a 9-year-old PC back in 1991, it would be a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088, or something like a Commodore 64.
- vidanay 6y ago
  Yeah for sure. My next one after this was a Dual CPU Pentium Pro.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  To quote Weird Al, My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks/But it was obsolete before I opened the box/You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique/ Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great/If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight. These days, my parent's 8-year-old computer with 8GB+ of memory, a high-end (for the time) CPU, and an SSD is good enough for everything they do.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    I think that's the thing that is most amazing to me - once we got to the SSD era there really haven't been amazing "performance leaps" like we used to have in the 90s-early 2000s. I remember selling my gaming computer at college every 3-6 months and building the new hotness and it being NOTICEABLY better each time.
  - wistlo 6y ago
    In the 10 years between 2011 and 2021, the only computing development to make my jaw drop was the SSD (well, maybe LCD multi monitors, too). I just upgraded a 2009 vintage AMD desktop that was headed for recycling with an SSD, and it's once again useful. Smartphones came further, obviously, starting from nothing in 2006m but I see 2014-2015 as the start of a plateau. When we started seeing glass-backed cases and folding screens, I knew we'd reached the land of diminshing returns.
Firehawke 6y ago
Yep. A friend of mine convinced his mother to get him a $4000 Zeos machine in 1992 for his birthday. It was one hell of a beast for that era in time, being the next to highest end machine Zeos was selling and I remember playing The 7th Guest on that thing up until I got my own CD-ROM drive. His machine also came with a Windows graphics accelerator video card, which was a pretty impressive piece of hardware. Back then, you could see the difference in redraw speeds between accelerated and non-accelerated very easily. These days, 2D is so simple that nobody even thinks about whether your card can keep up or not. Back then, even in MS-DOS you had a lot of questions about if your card could do VESA modes, undocumented video modes, etc, and sometimes you'd need SciTech Display Doctor to get those modes. Linear framebuffers weren't commonly supported, and getting the best possible performance required that.
jgalt212 6y ago
Yes, back in day when things where expensive, but housing was cheap.

Yeah, my $4000 486-DX2 with 8MB RAM and a Weitek P9000 graphics card was amazing(ly expensive)!

tpmx 6y ago

I remember those CPUs being a lot more expensive than that. And (after looking it up) launching in 1992.

vidanay 6y ago
A lot of baked brain cells between then and now....I don't deny my memory is fuzzy.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Fair enough. I guess I was mostly retroactively jealous - at the time I was rocking an 8086 with CGA.
lrem 6y ago
Hmmm, really? I had a DX-4 which was not expensive at all around 1996-ish.
- tpmx 6y ago
  When the 486 launched in 1989/1990 a typical system cost like $10k+. In 1996 it was very cheap.
- toast0 6y ago
  Pentium 200Mhz (Socket 7) came out in 95; so a dx-4 in 96 was definitely old and should be not expensive.

lr4444lr 6y ago

And to think of $4000 in 1991 dollars...

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
i never spent $10k on a home system in 1991. What ???

Agingcoder 6y ago

Lucky you! I dreamt of owning a machine like this. I thought the dx2 cpus had appeared later though (92?). I was stuck with a 386/16Mhz/40 megs hd, and a whopping megabyte of ram. At least it taught me that it was sometimes worth optimizing my code...

downut 6y ago
The 8087 chip I added on to my 8086 system sits on my monitor pedestal, forever. Right now, it's next to my ()&(^&^%%$%^ Pixel 2 XL USB C audio connector. I was a grad student in numerical analysis and holy smokes! Hardware IEEE 754 floating point! Sometime aroundish 1988 I paid $600 for an 80MB hard drive, out of a $12K/yr stipend. Good times.
- nonamenoslogan 6y ago
  I still have my first CPU, a 12MHz AMD 80286--which I realize is pretty 'new' but I'm only 43.
da-x 6y ago
Every respectable hacker remembers the spec of their first computer. 286 + 1MB RAM + 40MB hard drive. This was 1992 and it was valued about 1000$.
- Firehawke 6y ago
  4KB TRS-80 Color Computer, which would have been $400 in 1980. Wasn't my own computer as it was my father's and I was a bit too young to get deep into programming until 1983 or so. First computer that was strictly mine was a CoCo 3 in 1986, and the first one I built entirely myself was a 486-66 back in 1993. Yep, we definitely remember those first machines.
  - slantyyz 6y ago
    I was basically the same, although I think we upgraded it somehow to 16K. I remember typing in source code from magazines (Rainbow, in particular). I thought MS Extended Basic on the CoCo was pretty cool. Ended up moving to Apple ][ a few years after that, but still have very fond memories of the CoCo, even though everyone else I knew had something else and liked to refer to my computer as a Trash 80.

fanatic2pope 6y ago

I had a similar system with a 17" Nanao monitor that by itself cost something like $1000. I also had a first generation Gravis Ultrasound, which I still own. I kept that machine for a while, it ran DOS, then Windows, then OS/2 and then Linux and FreeBSD and at one point had all of them installed at the same time. So much time wasted messing with partitions and file systems.

vidanay 6y ago
If I remember correctly, the final use of mine was running a home email server on Debian Linux with a dial-up modem.

klodolph 6y ago

It was also such a fast-moving era that your 486 would get crushed in a couple years by the arrival of Pentiums. I still regularly use a 2012 laptop, but if you were using a 9-year-old PC back in 1991, it would be a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088, or something like a Commodore 64.

vidanay 6y ago
Yeah for sure. My next one after this was a Dual CPU Pentium Pro.
dehrmann 6y ago
To quote Weird Al, My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks/But it was obsolete before I opened the box/You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique/ Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great/If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight. These days, my parent's 8-year-old computer with 8GB+ of memory, a high-end (for the time) CPU, and an SSD is good enough for everything they do.
- bombcar 6y ago
  I think that's the thing that is most amazing to me - once we got to the SSD era there really haven't been amazing "performance leaps" like we used to have in the 90s-early 2000s. I remember selling my gaming computer at college every 3-6 months and building the new hotness and it being NOTICEABLY better each time.
- wistlo 6y ago
  In the 10 years between 2011 and 2021, the only computing development to make my jaw drop was the SSD (well, maybe LCD multi monitors, too). I just upgraded a 2009 vintage AMD desktop that was headed for recycling with an SSD, and it's once again useful. Smartphones came further, obviously, starting from nothing in 2006m but I see 2014-2015 as the start of a plateau. When we started seeing glass-backed cases and folding screens, I knew we'd reached the land of diminshing returns.

Firehawke 6y ago

Yep. A friend of mine convinced his mother to get him a $4000 Zeos machine in 1992 for his birthday. It was one hell of a beast for that era in time, being the next to highest end machine Zeos was selling and I remember playing The 7th Guest on that thing up until I got my own CD-ROM drive. His machine also came with a Windows graphics accelerator video card, which was a pretty impressive piece of hardware. Back then, you could see the difference in redraw speeds between accelerated and non-accelerated very easily. These days, 2D is so simple that nobody even thinks about whether your card can keep up or not. Back then, even in MS-DOS you had a lot of questions about if your card could do VESA modes, undocumented video modes, etc, and sometimes you'd need SciTech Display Doctor to get those modes. Linear framebuffers weren't commonly supported, and getting the best possible performance required that.

jgalt212 6y ago

Yes, back in day when things where expensive, but housing was cheap.