4 ms·

This bring back fond memories. I had a 486DX2/66

UI_at_80x24 4y ago
I worked in a computer store while attending college during this time. We were the only "Computer store" in town, but the local BigBox "furniture store" also sold computers too. None of the staff there knew anything about computers. We would often have people come into our shop asking questions and then going to the BigChain to buy the PC's. Well, one day a couple came into the store carrying the flyer for the other place. The couple then asked several questions about the computers, "What does this mean, What does that do, Is this part important... etc" I tried several times during the discussion to steer them towards the products that we sold. It was obvious that they were only using my time to educate themselves so they could 'smartly shop' at the other location. So we get to the part of the listing where the choice was DX vs DX2 (33Mhz vs 66MHz IIRC). Them: "What does the 2 mean?" Me: "That's needed if you want to use two floppy drives, both a 5.25" and a 3.5" or just one." fun times..... =) *Edit/Note: the 2 in DX2 means that it was clock-doubled. I lied to the customer because they were wasting my time.
- alberth 4y ago
  That's a great story. Had no idea about that either. In my case, I had a Packard Bell - which had 1 floppy & 1 CD-ROM. https://www.weavweb.net/2020/09/22/packard-bell-486-dx2-66mhz/ https://www.weavweb.net/2020/09/22/packard-bell-486-dx2-66mh...
  - navjack27 4y ago
    You had no idea about it because it's false
    - UI_at_80x24 4y ago
      Correct. I lied to somebody that was wasting my time.
  - 1970-01-01 4y ago
    Those PackardBell CD-ROM games and encyclopedias were very innovative. I have several of those PCs and still have all their CDs. Check out 3D Body Adventure predicting the pandemic: https://youtu.be/VlxyjOLBKbg?t=980 https://youtu.be/VlxyjOLBKbg?t=980
    - alberth 4y ago
      Yes!!! I totally remember that and loved it. Thanks for finding the video link. Brings back great memories.
isolli 4y ago
Lucky you! I could only afford a 486 DX/33, but at least I splurged for 230 MB of hard drive.
antx 4y ago
Heck yeah, I went from a C64 to a 386SX (which youngin me eventually broke by trying to upgrade memory), to a 486DX2/66 which allowed me to FINALLY play doom. Then followed a Cyrix 5x86 100GP in somewhere around 1996, which was a bit of an upgrade, since I could not afford Pentiums just yet with my own money. In 1997, I bought a Diamond Stealth II S220 as an alternative to a Voodoo, for the same "poverty" reasons. You have to know my parents were ... very much against computers. As we started to get access to the internet in high school, I learned about overclocking, and oh my! was my system the best candidate for it! I could push the CPU to 120Mhz without additional cooling! The graphics cards, which bore a rendition verite v2100 chip, could also be overclocked quite heavily, but since the chips where bare, without any form of cooling, it became too hot, so I had to "MacGyver" my way around the problem. I also have very fond memories of the socket 3 era... for me it started with the classics from id software, to Warcraft 2, Duke3D, LAN matches, Carmageddon, Quake, etc.. and all the early mods such as paintball, skin modding, what fun!
- bluedino 4y ago
  > I bought a Diamond Stealth II S220 as an alternative to a Voodoo I did the same thing, it was a great budget card. vquake was awesome, plus you were able to use Direct3D inside of Windows which the first 3Dfx cards didn't do. It also came with a Descent clone called Forsaken on the demo CD, which was the first colored lighting I had ever seen in a game, and was pretty amazing. Ironically, the Verite chips didn't handle certain VGA modes that well, so DOS games like Doom were pretty choppy.
  - antx 4y ago
    Oh yeah, tomb raider was fun, but vquake was the bomb. Although, eventually, when the miniGL port was released, it was clear that the V2x00s were sub-par, even with 24 bit support and hardware z-buffer. Eventually the voodoo2 just put the nail in the coffin. But for a time, little geek me had fun pushing the hardware limits, even though I knew nothing of thermal management at the time. Indeed, I remember some DOS games having some... stutters? For lack of a better term. But at that point I was hooked on 3D and Windows 9x, so it didn't matter too too much.
  - 4y ago
mschaef 4y ago
I went 8088->386SX->486DX/33->P5/100->... The 386SX transition was nice, because it also brought Windows (with its standard printer drivers) and enough memory and video capability to start to do interesting work with graphics. It brought most of what I'd call the baseline capabilities of a modern computer, with the subsequent generations mainly just adding capacity. It was interesting at the time, though, that the 486 I had was mainly heavily constrained by expansion bandwidth. It had an accelerator for the video, but the connection from the CPU into the video card was just 16-bit ISA. Anything that had to transit the bus was glacial - so it couldn't really do more than 8bpp graphics. It was a great argument in support of local bus (and a source of some amount of envy when VLB DX2/66's started showing up... computationally only about double speed, but so much more capability to drive the screen).
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Our Family went straight from the 8088 + cga graphics to the pentium 100mhz (really an overclockerd 90mhz model) + sound blaster card + matrox something and a decent Sony screen . Quite a big jump :)
  - deckard1 4y ago
    same here. We had an 8088 with AdLib, which only had FM synthesis. We stepped up to a Pentium 75Mhz with SoundBlaster AWE32 and 16-bit 44.1kHz audio. And CD-ROM drive! Those were amazing times. Shortly after that the internet hit mainstream and MP3s became a thing, and the world changed forever.
    - JohnBooty 4y ago
      The AWE32 was amazing. I remember being so frustrated that essentially no games seemed to take advantage of it. That's actually the time period when I started to fall in love with game music. I'd download MIDI files of songs from 16-bit games. On most setups, they sounded quite bad. But in MIDI software that supported the AWE32's soundfonts a lot of them sounded incredible.

I worked in a computer store while attending college during this time. We were the only "Computer store" in town, but the local BigBox "furniture store" also sold computers too. None of the staff there knew anything about computers. We would often have people come into our shop asking questions and then going to the BigChain to buy the PC's. Well, one day a couple came into the store carrying the flyer for the other place. The couple then asked several questions about the computers, "What does this mean, What does that do, Is this part important... etc" I tried several times during the discussion to steer them towards the products that we sold. It was obvious that they were only using my time to educate themselves so they could 'smartly shop' at the other location. So we get to the part of the listing where the choice was DX vs DX2 (33Mhz vs 66MHz IIRC). Them: "What does the 2 mean?" Me: "That's needed if you want to use two floppy drives, both a 5.25" and a 3.5" or just one." fun times..... =) *Edit/Note: the 2 in DX2 means that it was clock-doubled. I lied to the customer because they were wasting my time.

alberth 4y ago
That's a great story. Had no idea about that either. In my case, I had a Packard Bell - which had 1 floppy & 1 CD-ROM. https://www.weavweb.net/2020/09/22/packard-bell-486-dx2-66mhz/ https://www.weavweb.net/2020/09/22/packard-bell-486-dx2-66mh...
- navjack27 4y ago
  You had no idea about it because it's false
  - UI_at_80x24 4y ago
    Correct. I lied to somebody that was wasting my time.
- 1970-01-01 4y ago
  Those PackardBell CD-ROM games and encyclopedias were very innovative. I have several of those PCs and still have all their CDs. Check out 3D Body Adventure predicting the pandemic: https://youtu.be/VlxyjOLBKbg?t=980 https://youtu.be/VlxyjOLBKbg?t=980
  - alberth 4y ago
    Yes!!! I totally remember that and loved it. Thanks for finding the video link. Brings back great memories.

isolli 4y ago

Lucky you! I could only afford a 486 DX/33, but at least I splurged for 230 MB of hard drive.

antx 4y ago

Heck yeah, I went from a C64 to a 386SX (which youngin me eventually broke by trying to upgrade memory), to a 486DX2/66 which allowed me to FINALLY play doom. Then followed a Cyrix 5x86 100GP in somewhere around 1996, which was a bit of an upgrade, since I could not afford Pentiums just yet with my own money. In 1997, I bought a Diamond Stealth II S220 as an alternative to a Voodoo, for the same "poverty" reasons. You have to know my parents were ... very much against computers. As we started to get access to the internet in high school, I learned about overclocking, and oh my! was my system the best candidate for it! I could push the CPU to 120Mhz without additional cooling! The graphics cards, which bore a rendition verite v2100 chip, could also be overclocked quite heavily, but since the chips where bare, without any form of cooling, it became too hot, so I had to "MacGyver" my way around the problem. I also have very fond memories of the socket 3 era... for me it started with the classics from id software, to Warcraft 2, Duke3D, LAN matches, Carmageddon, Quake, etc.. and all the early mods such as paintball, skin modding, what fun!

bluedino 4y ago
> I bought a Diamond Stealth II S220 as an alternative to a Voodoo I did the same thing, it was a great budget card. vquake was awesome, plus you were able to use Direct3D inside of Windows which the first 3Dfx cards didn't do. It also came with a Descent clone called Forsaken on the demo CD, which was the first colored lighting I had ever seen in a game, and was pretty amazing. Ironically, the Verite chips didn't handle certain VGA modes that well, so DOS games like Doom were pretty choppy.
- antx 4y ago
  Oh yeah, tomb raider was fun, but vquake was the bomb. Although, eventually, when the miniGL port was released, it was clear that the V2x00s were sub-par, even with 24 bit support and hardware z-buffer. Eventually the voodoo2 just put the nail in the coffin. But for a time, little geek me had fun pushing the hardware limits, even though I knew nothing of thermal management at the time. Indeed, I remember some DOS games having some... stutters? For lack of a better term. But at that point I was hooked on 3D and Windows 9x, so it didn't matter too too much.
- 4y ago

mschaef 4y ago

I went 8088->386SX->486DX/33->P5/100->... The 386SX transition was nice, because it also brought Windows (with its standard printer drivers) and enough memory and video capability to start to do interesting work with graphics. It brought most of what I'd call the baseline capabilities of a modern computer, with the subsequent generations mainly just adding capacity. It was interesting at the time, though, that the 486 I had was mainly heavily constrained by expansion bandwidth. It had an accelerator for the video, but the connection from the CPU into the video card was just 16-bit ISA. Anything that had to transit the bus was glacial - so it couldn't really do more than 8bpp graphics. It was a great argument in support of local bus (and a source of some amount of envy when VLB DX2/66's started showing up... computationally only about double speed, but so much more capability to drive the screen).

prmoustache 4y ago
Our Family went straight from the 8088 + cga graphics to the pentium 100mhz (really an overclockerd 90mhz model) + sound blaster card + matrox something and a decent Sony screen . Quite a big jump :)
- deckard1 4y ago
  same here. We had an 8088 with AdLib, which only had FM synthesis. We stepped up to a Pentium 75Mhz with SoundBlaster AWE32 and 16-bit 44.1kHz audio. And CD-ROM drive! Those were amazing times. Shortly after that the internet hit mainstream and MP3s became a thing, and the world changed forever.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    The AWE32 was amazing. I remember being so frustrated that essentially no games seemed to take advantage of it. That's actually the time period when I started to fall in love with game music. I'd download MIDI files of songs from 16-bit games. On most setups, they sounded quite bad. But in MIDI software that supported the AWE32's soundfonts a lot of them sounded incredible.