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Ahh, my first PC after jumping ship from the Amiga like a filthy traitor, but having to accept facts that Commodore was dying and PC taking the market by storm.

by jug 4y ago

Ahh, my first PC after jumping ship from the Amiga like a filthy traitor, but having to accept facts that Commodore was dying and PC taking the market by storm. During the 386 days I honestly think it was still so immature for gaming that the Amiga still felt better, but by 486 and when I switched there was no longer a contest although PC was still unfriendlier for games with the AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS and Conventional RAM acrobatics. It was funny, PC at this time felt like powerhouses but ancient at the same time, coming from the Amiga. Ancient powerhouses! It's like they had recently discovered 16 bit sound, like... what... But anyway, I jumped on board with the 486 DX2/66 which was the bee's knees. After a year or two, I overclocked it to 80 MHz to run Duke Nukem 3D or Quake or whatever for a _very precious_ +5 fps or so because your framerate was often in the 20 fps range. Made a huge difference. So 20% clock speed was big! I even upgraded to DX4/100 during a weekend of tinkering with my high school friends for another +20% and at that point FPS games of the time ran pretty well indeed! As well as the recent Windows 3.11 of course which was starting to feel like nothing special! Damn that computer was really fast! I topped it off with a Soundblaster AWE32 and MIDI music sounded amazing too with its software soundbanks. Following this I went to Pentium 133 MHz, and it feels like the world of computing changed less and less following that. Things got more convenient as the x86 architecture won rather than having a smorgasbord of viable home computing options, but also a little bit more boring.

spookthesunset 4y ago
I’d say things got “boring” quite a while after the pentiums. All the peripherals like the cd burner got faster. Memory got larger and faster. Video got substantially faster. Network went from 10mbits to 1gb over time. Smarter power management started to exist. USB came online. Wi-Fi started to exist. I’d say things got “boring” after the clock wars. Now says the clock is basically the same as it was 5 or even 10 years ago (though massively more parallel, etc). Average memory size seems to have peaked around 16gb (though substantially faster and more parallel). Average disk size has remained about the same (though way, way, way faster thanks to SSD’s). Also things have gotten much smaller and more energy efficient. Back in the day your motherboard had all kinds of discrete shit on it. The board was huge in comparison to a modern board. Note: it’s been a good 10 or 15 years since I’ve built a desktop PC from parts… I kinda miss it.
- deckard1 4y ago
  Boring maybe. But I'll take the sheer joy of plugging in a random USB device and having it just work over the absolutely pain it was dealing with serial and parallel ports and I/O addresses, DMA channels, IRQ conflicts, etc. And everything talks WiFi today. It's amazing. I have 64GB on my main machine. I can run (virtual) machines within machines! That's a goddamn miracle if you ask me. I bought some cheap HDMI capture stick for $10! I plug it in to USB and the thing just works. And in Linux. How?! I had Hauppauge WinTV PCI capture card in the late '90s and that thing barely worked (with their awful proprietary drivers and software) in Windows, never mind Linux support. > The board was huge in comparison to a modern board. The ATX form factor is still the most popular. Mini ITX is around today, but based on the fact that vendors only make a few models compared to their ATX selection tells me most builders still use ATX. I guess the AT form factor was larger, but ATX has been around since '95 or so.
ogurechny 4y ago
Period-correct soundtrack to this comment in the form of someone's tracker file I've accidentally discovered some time ago: http://modarchive.org/module.php?153383 http://modarchive.org/module.php?153383
JohnBooty 4y ago
After a year or two, I overclocked it to 80 MHz to run Duke Nukem 3D or Quake or whatever for a _very precious_ +5 fps or so because your framerate was often in the 20 fps range. Made a huge difference Yeah! I think it's often lost to history how "vital" overclocking was. (Obviously, games aren't actually vital, but you know what I mean) Overclocking was often the difference between "unplayable" and "playable." Or "playable" and "actually nice." Following this I went to Pentium 133 MHz, and it feels like the world of computing changed less and less following that. For me there have only been two seismic hardware shifts since those days. One was LCD/LED screens. While I love CRTs for gaming, I do not miss staring at them all day for coding. The other seismic shift for me was SSDs. After the 386/486/Pentium days the gap between CPU performance and HDD performance reached utterly absurd levels. You'd have these absolute beast CPUs just sitting around and waiting for ancient spinning rust. Ridiculous. SSDs rebalanced the equation a bit. Things got more convenient as the x86 architecture won rather than having a smorgasbord of viable home computing options, but also a little bit more boring. Amen.
NathanOsullivan 4y ago
I got into PCs around same time as you, but imho the best overclock came years later: the Intel Celeron 300A would happily run at 450mhz for a whopping 50% increase. I was right into FPS games at the time, and for a while it seemed every second person was running the overclocked 300A.
hakfoo 4y ago
I recall Quake would timedemo at <1fps on a 486/80. DN3D was a much simpler, faster engine.

by jug 4y ago

spookthesunset 4y ago

I’d say things got “boring” quite a while after the pentiums. All the peripherals like the cd burner got faster. Memory got larger and faster. Video got substantially faster. Network went from 10mbits to 1gb over time. Smarter power management started to exist. USB came online. Wi-Fi started to exist. I’d say things got “boring” after the clock wars. Now says the clock is basically the same as it was 5 or even 10 years ago (though massively more parallel, etc). Average memory size seems to have peaked around 16gb (though substantially faster and more parallel). Average disk size has remained about the same (though way, way, way faster thanks to SSD’s). Also things have gotten much smaller and more energy efficient. Back in the day your motherboard had all kinds of discrete shit on it. The board was huge in comparison to a modern board. Note: it’s been a good 10 or 15 years since I’ve built a desktop PC from parts… I kinda miss it.

deckard1 4y ago
Boring maybe. But I'll take the sheer joy of plugging in a random USB device and having it just work over the absolutely pain it was dealing with serial and parallel ports and I/O addresses, DMA channels, IRQ conflicts, etc. And everything talks WiFi today. It's amazing. I have 64GB on my main machine. I can run (virtual) machines within machines! That's a goddamn miracle if you ask me. I bought some cheap HDMI capture stick for $10! I plug it in to USB and the thing just works. And in Linux. How?! I had Hauppauge WinTV PCI capture card in the late '90s and that thing barely worked (with their awful proprietary drivers and software) in Windows, never mind Linux support. > The board was huge in comparison to a modern board. The ATX form factor is still the most popular. Mini ITX is around today, but based on the fact that vendors only make a few models compared to their ATX selection tells me most builders still use ATX. I guess the AT form factor was larger, but ATX has been around since '95 or so.

ogurechny 4y ago

Period-correct soundtrack to this comment in the form of someone's tracker file I've accidentally discovered some time ago: http://modarchive.org/module.php?153383 http://modarchive.org/module.php?153383

JohnBooty 4y ago

After a year or two, I overclocked it to 80 MHz to run Duke Nukem 3D or Quake or whatever for a _very precious_ +5 fps or so because your framerate was often in the 20 fps range. Made a huge difference Yeah! I think it's often lost to history how "vital" overclocking was. (Obviously, games aren't actually vital, but you know what I mean) Overclocking was often the difference between "unplayable" and "playable." Or "playable" and "actually nice." Following this I went to Pentium 133 MHz, and it feels like the world of computing changed less and less following that. For me there have only been two seismic hardware shifts since those days. One was LCD/LED screens. While I love CRTs for gaming, I do not miss staring at them all day for coding. The other seismic shift for me was SSDs. After the 386/486/Pentium days the gap between CPU performance and HDD performance reached utterly absurd levels. You'd have these absolute beast CPUs just sitting around and waiting for ancient spinning rust. Ridiculous. SSDs rebalanced the equation a bit. Things got more convenient as the x86 architecture won rather than having a smorgasbord of viable home computing options, but also a little bit more boring. Amen.

NathanOsullivan 4y ago

I got into PCs around same time as you, but imho the best overclock came years later: the Intel Celeron 300A would happily run at 450mhz for a whopping 50% increase. I was right into FPS games at the time, and for a while it seemed every second person was running the overclocked 300A.

hakfoo 4y ago

I recall Quake would timedemo at <1fps on a 486/80. DN3D was a much simpler, faster engine.