Video games, too. They're still in the $20-$60 range for the most part, same as they've been since the 1970s, which means their cost has dropped dramatically.
Wild that a 1k USD machine lasts like 6-10 years now.
Iâm using one as a media center thatâs a Phenom from 14 years ago lawl
My VR machine is eight years old but with a new GPU.
My main game machine is like four years old and plays basically everything 1440p/100FPS+. Cost bout 1.5k.
My first REAL game computer I built was over 2k back in the day (maybe 3k adjusted for inflation) and was slow as shit after two years. I love you, solid state drives. Athlon 64x2 4400+, SLI7900GT, 4GB DDR2, and an antec lanboy with the bondage kit. Built it for Crysis. No Raptors tho.
Aww, I hate to be the one to tell you this.
McDonald's uses a proprietary "clam shell" grill. The only flipping that's happening is an employee cooking their own burger without closing the grill.
We bought a house last year from a lady who lived here with her husband since they built the house in 1972. I found an iomega zip disk in a cabinet in the garage. I had never seen anything like it before. Really cool tech for the time.
I'd kinda love to see what's on this disk. It could just be spreadsheets or maybe some copied floppies or lots of Metallica courtesy of Napster. Or some pictures of the family. No idea.
My father still has a working external zip drive, I believe. I'll check with him today, but lemme know if you want me to DM the address. Sadly it only has about a 50-60% chance of retaining the data after all this time. It's likely demagnetized.
I had one... Traded music with friends on them. We all had a few disks, which were crazy expensive. I had the portable drive. My friend had the in box drive. So we'd copy disk to disk all night.
So funny story, if this is the first-gen (Blue) Dell XPS, we also bought one similarly spec'd.
Dell shipped it to us and when it arrived, it had 64 MB of ram instead of the 128 MB we ordered it with. Rather than sending us out new ram, they shipped us ANOTHER whole XPS. They never asked for the first back.
Yep! It was during their "dude you're getting a dell" years when they had crazy good support.
We had a particularly large desk and when we called into support, they mailed us (at no cost), Belkin extension cords for all our peripherals. It was wild.
The day we got our 10mb hdd and installed it, as the old man carved up partitions and I got my H: drive, I can still hear his voice, "who could ever use all this space?!"
... if there's a working number shown in media, I immediately call it.
Most of them actually go to some kind of line with an automated message regarding whatever you're watching. If they get too old though they go out of service. RIP.
I wanna say I originally remember doing this with some number in Fight Club and it went to Tyler Durden's line?
You know you're an old geek when you look at the spec and go "300MHz PII? 64MB RAM? that's late 96 or early 97... Or cheap 98, but it's shipped with win95, and ooh la la IE4.0 pre-installed, definitely late 96 or early 97" and then you see the invoice date, and recognize it as Clinton's 2nd inauguration.
I remember when we upgraded to a Pentium III and later put an aftermarket Voodoo card in the thing after much begging on my part. That was the first PC I had that felt genuinely "powerful" to me.
Man, my first homebuild out of college was an absolute monster with 8MB of RAM so I could run NT at home. $640 just for the memory. I did cheap out on the CPU and only got the 75MHz Pentium, though we ran 90s at work. Wing Commander III was awesome on that thing.
Would have been circa '94. My build was definitely up in that range, possibly without the monitor. I'm also certain that my HD was measured in MB; might have been either a 250 or 330.
I had an okay PC earlier than a lot of people in my age bracket, me and siblings all do use computers in our work now lol, so if they said that to my dad in the 90s they wouldn't be wrong
For the kids, this would've been a top of the line beefy set-up. I would say in '98 you would find a 1gb hd, a 120 Pentium, and 16mb of ram in a typical home that had a computer.
Remember things upgraded fast back then, by '00 your average Joe would be buying Pentium iii's with 600mhz and a DVD drive! Woah!
I just saved a pair of altec Lansing computer speakers from becoming ewaste at my work. They're easily 20+ years old but still work decently enough! I just use them to play music when no one else is in the office.
That was after computers got significantly cheaper, too. The adjusted prices for PCs in the 80s were insane. My family got an Amiga 3000 in 1990 because my dad had an expense account he could only use for computers and didn't really need it for work that year... it was something like $4,500 which would be about $10,500 today. Same for his office PS/2, which was just a 486.
So if you bogged your system in any way while doing anything online, you'd DC in a heartbeat.
Additionally, the software part was buggy and prone to getting tainted beyond repair.
Driver updates also often borked everything.
And replacing the modem was only 50/50 going to fix your issues with it, so until the internet developed a driver cleaner tool specifically for the USR Softmodem, you often had to reinstall Windows to actually fix the issues.
I have a very similar PC in the kitchen right now. It was my first PC. Pentium II 400, 32MB RAM, AWE64 ISA, DVD Decoder card, etc. That DVD decoder card was definitely an upsell though. That AGP graphics should have been able to do mpeg decoding in hardware.
Our first desktop was a 365k. It cost $5600 Canadian and my father had a program at his work that allowed him to buy it and pay it back in payments. It took him 5 years to pay it off.
That mouser was so comfy (first consumer optical)! You could spin it out, but then again also overclock it.
And not to brag, but I bought (also my third computer) a Celeron 300A at that time & overclocked it from 300 to 450MHz making it the fastest Intel CPU for years. Those were some good days.
My first PC build was a K6-2, overclocked with jumpers from 300 to 400 MHz. Setting Vcore with jumpers made for a very exciting first power on!
These days itâs hard to destroy a processor by overclocking, and it seems like itâs on its last legs. My 3090 and 5800X3D have no headroom, itâs the first non overclocked rig Iâve had since 2001.
For real tho. What kind of bs OCing is lowering the voltage (curve) banking on the chip being good enough to run more efficiently to go faster.
And gone are the days when CPUs didn't have thermal throttling (for purely safety purposes, iirc those shitty early P4 were the first ones to have it). I fried the Thunderbird I mentioned when I was testing some coolers and accidentally ran it for like 5 seconds without the cooler on. Its still a nice ornament on my wall tho. And a reminder of my brainholes intellect. Also nostalgia.
My man got that dual DVD setup in 1998! I got my first own computer when i was 15 in 2001 and it had a DVD tray and I thought I was cool af. Watched the first DVD the same day and a few days later I got a DSL modem and I was king of the world. It ran Delta Force like a dream.
Wow. That seems really expensive for that time. I guess it must have been top of the line?
I wished I had better memory or still had the receipts for my home built 486 gaming rig (Matrox Mystique gfx card) around 95(?) or the year old Mac G4 I bought around 99 or 00. I swear it was well below half that^1. I've always been too cheap to get top of the line computers lol.
1 (ed) looking up the old specs and prices... If it was a G4 450 it cost $2500 new and I got a refurbished model. I guess I am misremembering the price. (Wtf was I thinking, spending that kind of money on a damn computer lol. It served me well for years and years though).
I ordered a similar one but in 97 in Canadian dollars, near Aug for University. The 17" flat screen (crt flat) alone was $1400, I think the total was close to $4k.
This does seem a bit on the high side though I agree. I think mine was a P2 200, 32MB RAM and matrix millennium card. Maybe their processor was the top end at the time which could account for a higher price. I think that hard drive was really big for the time, 8GB in 98? I may be misremembering too.
Yeah you're right about the hard drive being big for the time. I got my first PC around then and plumped for the 8GB drive. It was a Dell too and the bump in cost wasn't actually that much.
My roomie, who was far more computer literate at the time, said I would never fill it.
Heh. I filled that sucker up with a huge MP3 collection pretty quickly.
Similar enough specs but lower in many regards it was 2400 Irish pounds which if I remember correctly was around 1.4 US dollars per pound.
Nvidia riva 128 graphics card. I nearly peed my pants when I saw hardware accelerated quake when they brought out the alpha drivers.
No need to ever get top of the line stuff, unless you're doing video editing or something intensive. If you're not paying out the ass for proprietary software you don't need expensive hardware.
I got a nice beelink tiny desktop computer recently that's better than MacBooks for $240. Only thing it can't do is go to the coffee shop.
I was just listing it as an interesting datapoint showing just how expensive this was at the time when compared to what people considered to be the expensive option in home computers.