4 ms·

I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95. I had 100mb internet on lan and multi t3. Google was around before public launch in 98. You're a few years off. In

I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95. I had 100mb internet on lan and multi t3. Google was around before public launch in 98. You're a few years off. In 98 I had a sgi visual workstatuon with 4gb ram and 50gb HDD and was on the same hub as the t3s. This was at college of course. I had dsl in 00 and it was as fast as campus. My mom was the first non-commercial install in STL (she was kinda a techie but also a good mom to a cs student kid). Summer of 95 I convinced her to get dialup so I could learn about this internet thing I figured would be big. I was about 2 years too late for that wave. But yes things were way more primitive and the learning curve was high. I had to spend several hours on the phone with the ISP to get on dialup on Mac. They onboarded people on campus manually and sold Ethernet cards back then.

gorlilla 2y ago
You're the one that's of for sure considering the first 1ghz processor didn't come out until 1999. The Pentium PRO of 1995 (November at that)boasted a Max. CPU clock rate of 150 MHz to 200 MHz.
bruce511 2y ago
>> This was at college of course. Well sure, the colleges had the good toys long before the rest of us. But we didn't have college-level money at home or at work. I left college (and the machines that existed there) in 1992. And the hardware there in 1992 was better than the hardware I had at home or at work for the rest of the 90s. So yeah, the tech existed, but it wasn't the tech we got to play with again until much later on. By 1998 though we had at least moved away from DOS development into Windows.
- hibikir 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    If you had DSL in 1998, you were rich, or at least putting a very high priority on the internet. ADSL was launched in 1999 in the UK, so you also weren't here.
    - aa-jv 2y ago
      If you had DSL in 1998, it had nothing to do with whether you were rich or not (anyone getting on the Internet was 'rich') - it had everything to do with how close you were to the nearest node. Disclaimer: I helped start one of the US' biggest ISP's in this era, and personally installed and handed over multiple DSL configurations to folks living in 'poor' neighbourhoods which were, incidentally, close enough to the NOC to be viable DSL customers.. Plenty of 'poor folks' in downtown LA were able to get DSL, purely by the nature of their vicinity to One Wilshire ..
  - thowawatp302 2y ago
    I think you’re forgetting how fast tech moved in the 1990s, it wasn’t until 1999 that broadband was available in the 8th largest city in the US. (I remember wanting to dumpster dive the CO because we got a letter from Southwestern Bell saying they were upgrading the equipment to 5ESS in late fall 1998)
    - aa-jv 2y ago
      Major US cities had bandwidth up the wazoo by the end of the 90's, it just hadn't been properly distributed yet. The poor/rich categorization is unjustified - in fact many poor folks in SoCal were able to leapfrog the Beverly Hills T1 hipsters merely due to the fact that they lived closer to the cheaper NOC's ..
  - int_19h 2y ago
    For one thing, not everybody is in US or other First World country. But also, yes, I remember 3D accelerators - and how expensive and coveted they were. Few 3D games before 2000 shipped without software 3D rendering support for this reason; I remember Quake 3 (1999) being the first big title like that, and it was one of the big reasons why Unreal Tournament was more popular in my circles back then - you could play it in software mode at 320x240 on fairly meager hardware.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
eduction 2y ago
> I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95 Not sure how you’re claiming this but here is an article from 2000 announcing the first 1ghz consumer processor. https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-official-amd-hits-1000mhz-first-5000096067/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-official-amd-hits-1000mhz-... Are you saying you were on a mainframe or supercomputer in 95? That’s the only way I could see access to anything approaching those speeds at that time. Even an sgi workstation you’re looking at 200mhz tops in 95. And no way 1gb of ram more like 64mb.
- eduction 2y ago
  Also here is a 1998 listing with sgis. Not close to the numbers you’re citing. https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?attachments/caa_softimage_sgi_pricelist_dm_01-1998-pdf.703/ https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?attachments/caa_softimage_sg...
rasz 2y ago
>I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95 No you didnt. Process node enabling 1GHz wasnt even invented yet. Afaik fastest CPU at the time was Alpha released in December at 333MHz. 1GB of ram cost $32K in 1995, $2400 in 1997, $1200 in 1998, and back to $2400 in September 1999 due to Jiji earthquake. Just for some perspective 4th place on TOP500 in 1995 had 8GB of ram.
- tralarpa 2y ago
  > Afaik fastest CPU at the time was Alpha released in December at 333MHz That would be rather 1996. Alphas were already at 500MHz in 1997, and (expensive) Pentium II were at 450MHz in 1998.

gorlilla 2y ago

You're the one that's of for sure considering the first 1ghz processor didn't come out until 1999. The Pentium PRO of 1995 (November at that)boasted a Max. CPU clock rate of 150 MHz to 200 MHz.

bruce511 2y ago

>> This was at college of course. Well sure, the colleges had the good toys long before the rest of us. But we didn't have college-level money at home or at work. I left college (and the machines that existed there) in 1992. And the hardware there in 1992 was better than the hardware I had at home or at work for the rest of the 90s. So yeah, the tech existed, but it wasn't the tech we got to play with again until much later on. By 1998 though we had at least moved away from DOS development into Windows.

hibikir 2y ago
[flagged]
- Symbiote 2y ago
  If you had DSL in 1998, you were rich, or at least putting a very high priority on the internet. ADSL was launched in 1999 in the UK, so you also weren't here.
  - aa-jv 2y ago
    If you had DSL in 1998, it had nothing to do with whether you were rich or not (anyone getting on the Internet was 'rich') - it had everything to do with how close you were to the nearest node. Disclaimer: I helped start one of the US' biggest ISP's in this era, and personally installed and handed over multiple DSL configurations to folks living in 'poor' neighbourhoods which were, incidentally, close enough to the NOC to be viable DSL customers.. Plenty of 'poor folks' in downtown LA were able to get DSL, purely by the nature of their vicinity to One Wilshire ..
- thowawatp302 2y ago
  I think you’re forgetting how fast tech moved in the 1990s, it wasn’t until 1999 that broadband was available in the 8th largest city in the US. (I remember wanting to dumpster dive the CO because we got a letter from Southwestern Bell saying they were upgrading the equipment to 5ESS in late fall 1998)
  - aa-jv 2y ago
    Major US cities had bandwidth up the wazoo by the end of the 90's, it just hadn't been properly distributed yet. The poor/rich categorization is unjustified - in fact many poor folks in SoCal were able to leapfrog the Beverly Hills T1 hipsters merely due to the fact that they lived closer to the cheaper NOC's ..
- int_19h 2y ago
  For one thing, not everybody is in US or other First World country. But also, yes, I remember 3D accelerators - and how expensive and coveted they were. Few 3D games before 2000 shipped without software 3D rendering support for this reason; I remember Quake 3 (1999) being the first big title like that, and it was one of the big reasons why Unreal Tournament was more popular in my circles back then - you could play it in software mode at 320x240 on fairly meager hardware.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

eduction 2y ago

> I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95 Not sure how you’re claiming this but here is an article from 2000 announcing the first 1ghz consumer processor. https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-official-amd-hits-1000mhz-first-5000096067/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-official-amd-hits-1000mhz-... Are you saying you were on a mainframe or supercomputer in 95? That’s the only way I could see access to anything approaching those speeds at that time. Even an sgi workstation you’re looking at 200mhz tops in 95. And no way 1gb of ram more like 64mb.

eduction 2y ago
Also here is a 1998 listing with sgis. Not close to the numbers you’re citing. https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?attachments/caa_softimage_sgi_pricelist_dm_01-1998-pdf.703/ https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?attachments/caa_softimage_sg...

rasz 2y ago

>I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95 No you didnt. Process node enabling 1GHz wasnt even invented yet. Afaik fastest CPU at the time was Alpha released in December at 333MHz. 1GB of ram cost $32K in 1995, $2400 in 1997, $1200 in 1998, and back to $2400 in September 1999 due to Jiji earthquake. Just for some perspective 4th place on TOP500 in 1995 had 8GB of ram.

tralarpa 2y ago
> Afaik fastest CPU at the time was Alpha released in December at 333MHz That would be rather 1996. Alphas were already at 500MHz in 1997, and (expensive) Pentium II were at 450MHz in 1998.