[HN Gopher] 1991's PC technology was unbelievable (2011) ___________________________________________________________________ 1991's PC technology was unbelievable (2011) Author : doener Score : 67 points Date : 2021-02-27 07:46 UTC (15 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com) | paulpauper wrote: | The 50mhz 486 in 1991 had about 9 years of use before total | obsolesce. not bad | stakkur wrote: | _That storm was the Microsoft and the GUI storm that would | eventually bring us to the computing model we are using today_ | | Huh? I'm wondering if the writer knew there Macintoshes (and | Amigas!) with GUIs over a half-dozen years before 1991. And | Windows 3.0--I was there, and used it--was bloody _awful_. | hiram112 wrote: | > And oh look at the column on the left, Apple is going to | license Mac OS to expand market share. How open! | | That would have been nice had it ever happened. | robotresearcher wrote: | The licensing did happen. There were licensed Mac clones for a | while. | zeckalpha wrote: | It did. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone | agumonkey wrote: | The sociological/anthropological aspect of this are interesting. | | 1991: 100MB = serious work | | 2021: 100MB = so tiny you can't buy storage that small, can't be | serious | grishka wrote: | I remember trying to buy a 2 GB SD card once for an old device | that didn't support SDHC/SDXC. Was almost laughed out of the | store. | deadlyllama wrote: | Multiple boot floppies? Never had to do that. I was very excited | by the new version of DR-DOS that let you build a menu system in | CONFIG.SYS to load a different set of drivers and memory | managmemt at start up. | | Also the wierd IRQ issues. Simpler when you had to set them with | header pins on the card in question. When early plug and play | came in it was awful, automatic IRQ conflicts and sometimes no | way to change them. Was a real pain when the knock off sound | blaster clone I had would auto assign itself anything other than | IRQ 5 and some games would stop making sounds! | rusk wrote: | dwcfgmg.sys had my heart broke | qubex wrote: | The Dos & Windows Configuration Manager... if I remember | correctly bridged the gap between DOS and Plug 'n' Play (or | Pray) functionality. | | If one were not touched by good fortune whilst specifying, | assembling, and configuring one's system, then one might | reasonably expect interact much too often with this obscure | system component. | | (Kind of like mDNSResponder on OS X.) | GuB-42 wrote: | > early plug and play | | Also known as plug and pray. Yes, I remember that time. | unnouinceput wrote: | Yeah, that irked me too when I read the article. I had only one | boot disk, with a very stuffy CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT that was | running like 12 different configurations for what I wanted to | run. Sure, I had to Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart but the diskette | never left the A: drive. Actually I still have that diskette | virtualized inside of one of my DosBox VM's. | pjmlp wrote: | Ah, ViewMax memories in DR-DOS 5.0. | Firehawke wrote: | I had problems with that all the way into Windows 98. I had a | motherboard that would not stop sharing IRQs between a WinTV | PCI card and the onboard audio. Attempting to use the TV | capture card would crash the system, and there was literally no | way to stop the motherboard from doing it. | | XP, and the hardware of that new era, for all its faults was a | HUGE step forward on UPnP. | phicoh wrote: | As far as I recall that was not a hardware problem. ISA PnP | cards describe what they can do and then the driver picks one | of the possibilities and programs the card. | | It got fun when real sound blasters had broken config, so a | generic driver (for a unix system) would fail. | | In my experience (playing with unix) IRQ conflicts was much | more a dos/windows problem than hardware. Though the hardware | was nasty too. | forgotmypw17 wrote: | I still use Word 97 for most of my writing, because it never nags | me for anything, it's always ready to go in a split-second, even | though it's running inside a VM, and it always saves a file with | no more than two keypresses, one if it's already been saved | before. | | (Clippy is an optional component I did not install, as much as I | miss that face sometimes.) | agumonkey wrote: | When I boot an old box (win95, nt5) I'm surprised at how few | things I miss.. and how some things feels better. Go figure .. | forgotmypw17 wrote: | I use it regularly for compatibility testing. Here are a few | things I find myself missing in relatively modern computing, | off the top of my head: | | Accessibility. Everything, every single little nook and | cranny is keyboard-accessible. And I mean accessible not in | the sense that I can keep pressing the Tab key, and | eventually the barely-visible focus rectangle may arrive at | the control I want to use. I mean, everything has a visile | keyboard shortcut, and the Tab key also works, and the focus | rectangle is visible, and it works every time, not just when | the application feels like it. | | Keypresses don't get dropped from the buffer even while the | application is thinking. | | Fast as heck startup time. Fast menus. Fast application | startup. Fast, fast, fast. My current daily driver is a | 10-year-old laptop with a spinny drive, and Windows 95 is | running inside a VM, which is competing for resources with my | entire dev environment, so it's not like the hardware is not | comparable to what it was designed for. | | Consistency in look and operation. Everything has the same | widgets and dialogs, and they all work about the same way, at | least between Microsoft apps. Netscape and other browsers are | a different story. | | Flat, dull, boring interface. Everything is a flat gray, | nothing is shiny, nothing is animated. Everything is a frame | around the work that I'm doing, and feels like it wants to | just help me, assist me with what I'm doing, and then get out | of the way. | | Oh yeah, and I the Save and Open File dialogs are fully- | featured file managers with sorting, multi-select, copy, | paste, rename, the works. | | And IE6 is challenging to develop for, but I fucking love | using it. It feels just like the Windows UI (Trident, after | all), it's snappy, has focus rectangles on everything, and | modern enough to have a DOM with all the works like | createElement() getElementById(). | | IE3 has the most beautiful toolbar of any browser I've seen | to date, and also has focus rectangles and basic CSS support. | I can still use it to post to my blog. | agumonkey wrote: | yes, yes, and yes. mostly yes. | | another factor is that computers were limited in | presentation and computation, they'd present to you | abstracted, dull tables and operations on data. But it did | serious jobs. Now we have extremely (extremely, as a CGI | fan, I cannot deny that) fancy presentation systems, but | the actual data displayed is linear list of paragraphs, a | few pictures and data points. Well computer is | hypermainstream so obviously it talks to the average user.. | but it says something about what computing was and is now. | sys_64738 wrote: | No product activation either. Those were the days. | 0df8dkdf wrote: | word perfect for me! | qubex wrote: | Yes, I agree: Office '97, 2000, and XP were the high points of | that lineage as far as my experience goes. But I stopped using | Office when I switched to Mac in 2003 and have used Word and | Excel occasionally since then (preferring the iWork suite's | analogues Pages and Numbers respectively). | kcartlidge wrote: | Similar with me for old non-naggy tech. | | I'm on an Apple Silicon MacBook Air but still often run | WordPerfect 4.2 and DataEase 4.53 under DosBox (also Boxer is | good but not tried it on M1 yet). | | BTW if you're interested in the nuts and bolts of running | WordPerfect DOS in emulation, Columbia University (NYC) has a | great site at http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/ which may | even help fixing other DOS software issues. | forgotmypw17 wrote: | For Word 97, I find that a Windows ME install in VirtualBox | works better than Wine. | dvfjsdhgfv wrote: | Not to mention the price - you can easily buy it for $10, and | it's really blazing fast. I wouldn't use it for complex | documents though. | systemvoltage wrote: | This resonates with many things from 80's, 90's and even well | into 2000's. | | There has been a severe erosion since then. From car dashboards | to web design, software apps to online communities - it's an | erosion on all fronts. | | Fuck everything after 2010. It sucks. Fight me. | Firehawke wrote: | Well, the PS4 is certainly better than the PS3 and I'd say | the Nintendo Switch is certainly better than the Wii. Modern | ARM chips are certainly better than what we had in 2009 in | every respect. There are certainly things that did improve, | though I agree a lot of things did regress-- I'm just saying | that not EVERYTHING regressed. It's all about perspective. | grishka wrote: | > Well, the PS4 is certainly better than the PS3 | | I don't know about PS3, but the thing that bugs me about | PS4 is that it requires installing games. It can't just run | a game straight off the disc like PS1 and PS2 did, it has | to copy it to its hard drive first. | | > Modern ARM chips are certainly better than what we had in | 2009 in every respect. | | Modern processors are, generally, great and very fast, | regardless of the instruction set. Their greatness is | usually compensated with mediocre software that is being | constantly rushed to meet imaginary deadlines that no user | cares about. The result is that the end user never really | realizes how fast and capable modern hardware actually is. | dvfjsdhgfv wrote: | I really miss Kinect though. Yes I know everybody wants me | to put on a VR headset but I just want to move in front of | my screen and have fun without forcing on myself something | I don't feel comfortable with. I recently tried to play | Power Up Heroes online. At first, I thought something was | wrong with my Live account, but no - I just couldn't find | anybody to play online. A quick look at the leaderboard | showed two records. In the whole world. | systemvoltage wrote: | Hah, it was mostly a tongue in cheek comment with a broad | stroke, of course you're 100% right. | forgotmypw17 wrote: | Fortunately, I think the pendulum has already passed its | highest mark, and is already picking up momentum in the other | direction. | | And this time around, it will be even better! | jeroenhd wrote: | The progression of hardware has stopped the progression for | software. As a result, developing software has become so easy | that we're running Electron in spacecraft right now because | who even bothers learning to properly use the native UI | toolkits in $currentYear. | | Windows XP was considered a memory hog because it needed a | whopping 256MiB of RAM to run properly. I run text editors | that use more of that these days, and they still feel slower | than notepad felt on XP. | nrb wrote: | A change in perspective might be helpful. If you only look | for the bad, that's all you'll see. | | We have, among countless other things: | | - mobile devices, networks, and services that are allowing | developing countries to leapfrog their progress in the world | | - development toolchains and frameworks that empower a single | person to create an order of magnitude more output, enabling | smaller teams or even solo enterprises to create major value | | - reusable rockets bringing high quality and affordable | internet access to the underserved | | - mass produced electric vehicles for goodness sake!! | | And that's only a few tech-related advancements, the world is | largely moving in the right direction in so many areas. I'd | never bet against the steady drumbeat of technological | progress. | systemvoltage wrote: | I am not trying to look for good things. | | We need to look at what we can improve. Of course things | have improved, but not uniformly across all domains and | many things have gotten worse. | | If we keep patting ourselves on back, these too will | degrade. Using hindsight to definitively say what has | gotten worse is how we improve including the things you are | mentioning. | forgotmypw17 wrote: | There is plenty of good to appreciate in every moment of | every day, and it's helpful to do that. Even in software, | there are a few standout gems which were not around just a | few years ago. | | However, this particular thread seems to be about the | quality user-facing software, which, overall, has been on a | continuous nosedive for about 10 years, and every time I | think it can't get any worse, someone figured out a new way | to make it suck. | prvc wrote: | >Word 97 | | Is there a FOSS program with a comparable user experience? | forgotmypw17 wrote: | Not that I have seen. I'm way into FOSS, but I'm compromising | on this because nothing even comes close. | | It was made at a time when Microsoft cared a lot about user | experience, poured millions of dollars into user studies, | design, and ensuring that every pixel was perfect, every | function was keyboard-accessible, and every workflow was | smooth. And it shows. | | Trying to use e.g. LibreOffice or Google Docs, after that, | it's like comparing a science fair project made by a kid who | just wanted to pass with a C versus an A+ student whose | project was also made by their parents, who also happen to be | scientists. | marcodiego wrote: | Abiword. | klodolph wrote: | No. | | I've used Abiword a bit, but it has been a few years, and | Abiword doesn't really come close to the Microsoft Word | experience back in the day. People generally have their | favorite MS Word version that they like before it "went | downhill", and mine is Word 5.1a for Macintosh. This is the | last version of Microsoft Word that was specifically | designed as a Macintosh application, rather than a cross- | platform application with a Mac port. | | Microsoft's turned out some very high-quality Mac | applications in the 1990s and 2000s. Another notable one is | Internet Explorer 5, which is _unrelated_ to the infamous | Internet Explorer 5 for Windows (the one with poor | standards compliance), other than the fact that the | products are made by the same company, have the same name, | and have the same version number. | forgotmypw17 wrote: | Abiword is decent. I open it, and I start typing right | away, no dialogs. The startup time is rather fast. | | However, saving does not provide me with a default | filename, so there is friction there. | | In the status bar, the indicator text runs right up to the | border edge, nobody took the time to ensure vertical and | horizontal spacing matches up. | | The menubar does not provide keyboard accelerators until | after I press the Alt key -- too late in terms of | discoverability. | | The cursor actually disappears when I use the arrow keys to | move around. It's not even blinking, it's just GONE, until | I stop using the arrow keys, then reappears after a delay. | | The spell-checker finds an spelling mistake in both | "Abiword" and "abiword". | | Using only the keyboard, I cannot figure out how to change | the font size, except by going through the Format->Font | menu. The Font dialog has invisible or nearly-invisible | focus rectangles on most controls. | | I just installed it to write this comment, and I found all | this stuff in the first five or so minutes of using it. | | It's a nice little word processor, and I'd use it in a | pinch, but it's no Word 97. | boogies wrote: | I think some of these things can be fixed in Abiword and | other apps with GTK configuration. Eg.: | | > The menubar does not provide keyboard accelerators | until after I press the Alt key -- too late in terms of | discoverability. | | I think this is a GTK theme setting that you can override | https://askubuntu.com/questions/329668/always-show- | keyboard-... | forgotmypw17 wrote: | thanks | [deleted] | HugoDaniel wrote: | prince bypass megahit | piokoch wrote: | Remarks about IBMs OS/2 are very true, but there was one more | aspect: Win 3.1 was coming on 2 floppy discs, OS/2 was coming on | 10 or more, can't remember exactly, but this was something huge, | bigger than anything else at that time. But, indeed, technically | that was a great achievement. | wazoox wrote: | MS-DOS up to 4.1 was coming on 2 floppies, but Windows 3.1 came | on a whole bunch of them (probably no less that 10). Windows 95 | ans OS/2 came on a enormous stack of floppies, more than 20. I | did this install more then once back then. | aduitsis wrote: | I had installed Windows 3.0 on the 20Mb HDD of my Hyundai 16v | (8088, 10MHz!) via 20 360Kbyte floppies :) | | (edit, yes Windows 3.0 could use CGA 640x200 with 1 bit | colour) | Firehawke wrote: | Windows 3.1 was on 7 disks, with the last disk being printer | drivers. | | This is a beta version, but still should demonstrate nicely: | https://ia801800.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/30... | chadlavi wrote: | stopped reading at "If you believe the Steve Jobs iPad snake oil" | | _eyeroll_ | _the_inflator wrote: | This article is really about PC nerd nostalgia. From the "If you | believe the Steve Jobs iPad snake oil" sentiment to mentions of | Token Ring and IRQ conflicts - I loved it. Memory lane! :D | coreyhn wrote: | To clarify, 1991 was 30 years ago so is it zdnet's 30th | anniversary or were they founded in 2001 and this is just a | bigger reflection beyond that? | wyldfire wrote: | Ten years ago, this article was published. For their 20th | anniversary. | coreyhn wrote: | Thank you for pointing that out. Totally missed the 2011 at | the end of the link | drewg123 wrote: | While Linus was just starting Linux in 1991, there was also Net/2 | which came out in 1991. Net/2 was 4.3BSD with the AT&T code | removed, and is the precursor to all of today's BSDs. | | In a lot of ways 1992 and 1993 were more interesting than 1991, | as they saw the first releases of Slackware, FreeBSD, NetBSD, | Windows NT, Solaris, etc. | jedberg wrote: | Oh man, all that high memory stuff brings back memories. In 1991 | my dad and I custom build a 486-33 (for way cheaper than the | $7,000 quoted in the article). After I got it all set up, I spend | _hours_ tuning my config.sys and autoexec.bat. Not only did you | have to put stuff in high memory, but you had to do it in the | right order. There were programs that would help, but you could | tweak it manually for added efficiency. | | I remember how proud I was when I tried every combination and got | max efficiency. | DanBC wrote: | > Very few PCs had CD-ROM drives and multimedia software was | nearly non-existent on the PC platform. | | Transferring data meant either a stack of floppies, or something | like LapLink which used a special cable for the parallel port, or | a null-modem cable for the serial port. LapLink could transfer at | 115200 baud. And it cost over $100 1990s dollars. | | https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kggOZ4-YEKUC&pg=PA92&red... | brandonmenc wrote: | > LapLink which used a special cable for the parallel port | | One summer, I used a similar product called Brooklyn Bridge to | hook our old 286 with 40 MB HDD to our 386 tower because I ran | out of disk space. The filesystem mounted with no problems, and | I played the VGA remake of Quest for Glory over it. It was | unbearably slow, but I still thought it was awesome. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | > Transferring data meant either a stack of floppies, | | Not often. Usually one floppy (maybe two) would suffice: | programs and data were proportionally smaller. And if you had | two floppy drives, as many computers did, this was no big deal. | | The only time you needed "a stack of floppies" or LapLink is | when you wanted to backhp or transfer an entire hard disk. | cesarb wrote: | > Heck, most people didn't even own mice. You actually had to go | out and buy one separately, from Microsoft or IBM if you wanted | to run Windows. | | You actually could run Windows without a mouse (I did it for a | while). The only thing that didn't work was Paintbrush. | Everything else was fully keyboard accessible. Every or nearly | every menu item and form field had a prominently underlined | keyboard accelerator, and you could always rely on the tab order | (for form fields) or the arrow keys (for menu items). | narrator wrote: | I was doing Macintosh programming back then. Programming was much | harder because there was no stack overflow. If you got stuck, you | had to figure it out yourself or ask someone who knew something | at a user group meeting or call a BBS and pay long distance. | There was one book : Mac Programming Primer that was the only | beginner book that existed. The Inside Mac books were large and | heavy and the only official guides for programming macs. There | was no online help or search, so you had to open these heavy | books and flip through them every time you needed anything. Think | C had a pretty fast compiler, but there was no protected memory, | so every time you null pointer dereferenced, or otherwise | corrupted memory, the machine would crash and you would have to | reboot. Version control and other programmer tools were very | primitive. Working with other programmers was extremely clumsy. | | My favorite memories of the era were the BBSs. These were dial up | services with one or two lines that a hobbyist would run on his | home machine. They were very local, because calling long distance | was expensive. It was a tech nerd only local hangout club for the | local area. Also, at this point in time, nerds were very split | off from the rest of society. We were really our own strange | order of weirdos and very very uncool, while nowadays a much | larger percentage of people would say they're in tech and | everyone uses tech and is a tech nerd now. | qubex wrote: | > _Programming was much harder because there was no stack | overflow_ | | Oh, stack overflow definitely existed, but only the kind that | makes programming _harder_. | | EDIT: Corrected a typo. | lisper wrote: | Well, stack overflow existed, but Stack Overflow didn't. | | (This is probably the one time in my writing career when the | initial "Well," actually makes a difference in communicating | the idea I intended to convey.) | agumonkey wrote: | a decentralized world where everybody had their own private | stack overflow for their own malefit. | klodolph wrote: | I was lucky to have access to THINK Pascal and later Metrowerks | CodeWarrior, and adults who would answer programming questions | or tell me how pointers work. | | I don't remember the Inside Macintosh books being especially | large and heavy; they were broken into volumes which were a | half-inch or inch thick, except for volume VI. It wasn't | terribly long before these books ended up online on Apple's | developer website but I don't remember when that happened. | buescher wrote: | It's so strange how unevenly the future was distributed back | then. You could get a Quadra 900 or a color NeXTstation. The | SE/30 was two years old. You could run Mathematica. Matlab 3.5 | was available on DOS and the Mac, and Matlab 4 was a year away. | AutoCAD was pretty well established on PCs and Macs for 2D CAD. | LabView was _five years old_. Microsoft Word for the Mac was _six | years old_. | | Gopher and the rudimentary gopher-with-pictures web already | existed. Mosaic was two years away. | | If you were a hobbyist, you might buy an Amiga 3000 instead of a | mid-tier Mac or PC- the Amiga 4000 was a year away. | | On the PC, Wolfenstein 3D was year away. DOOM was two years away. | | And yet well into the nineties, PC nerds were amazed to be able | to spin up multiple Wordperfect 5 windows, and they may as well | have been at the vanguard as far as most people were concerned! | Quickbasic! Lotus 1-2-3! | beagle3 wrote: | .... and the Amiga did all of that, and more, in 1985. The basic | Amiga cost almost twice as much as a basic PC where I lived, | which was why it wasn't as popular. | | But in 1985, a PC that had capabilities comparable to the Amiga | cost over 10 times as much as the Amiga: you'd need specialized | graphics card to get 4096 colors at once, specialized sound cards | to get 4 channel 8-bit stereo sound (or 2 channel 13-bit) - | hardly any were available, and even if you got them, you didn't | ha e use for them because almost no software supported them. | | The o/S did good cooperative multitasking with just 512K ram. Oh, | and it ran faster than a real Mac while emulating a Mac (used the | same CPU, but also had a graphics accelerator that the Mac | didn't). | | In 1985. | | Sound blaster (8 bit sound card) and VGA (only 256 colors at once | at low resolution, and no sprites) became common around | 1991-1992. It took a few more years for it until hardware better | than Amiga's 1985 debut - 16 bit Soundblasters or Gravis | Ultrasound; and Extended SuperVGA cards. Still no sprite or | genlock features. Win 95 was finally comparable to AmigaOS, if | somewhat more buggy. | | Alas, commodore was horribly mismanaged - and we are left with | the PC legacy. | agumonkey wrote: | A massive amount of creative people or creative content related | company were born on the Amiga I believe. | mortenjorck wrote: | Indeed; both EA and Blizzard had some of their earliest | successes on the Amiga. | WalterBright wrote: | I bought an Amiga in the early days. I was pretty annoyed with | it because you had to buy the peripherals (like monitor, | keyboard, etc.) only from Amiga. They were standard parts, but | would have an interface that was just different enough to | prevent the use of standard parts. | | I figured this sort of nonsense would kill the Amiga (like what | happened to the Rainbow PC), and decided to not invest in | making a compiler for it. | | Edit: if I recall correctly, while it had standard 3.5" | diskettes, it couldn't read/write DOS disks. C'mon, guys. I | don't recall what I did with the machine, probably gave it | away. | MrRadar wrote: | > and decided to not invest in making a compiler for it. | | For those who are unaware of the significance of this | statement, Walter Bright wrote the Zortec C compiler for DOS | (eventually rebranded as Symantec C) which he later extended | to be the first compiler that translated C++ directly to | machine code without first going through C as an intermediary | language and is currently the lead author of the D | programming language and its DMD compiler. This man knows | compilers! | beagle3 wrote: | That was a problem, but that didn't kill the Amiga. It had | enough advantages for people to pay more - but Commodore | mostly rested on their laurels. When the Amiga 3000 was out, | it turned out that the CPU was faster than the blotter, for | example - over 10 years, CPUs effective speed was almost 10 | as much, but the ECS (which included the graphics | coprocessor) wasn't even twice as fast as the original 1985 | version if I remember correctly. | | And Commodore was really horribly mismanaged at the time in | every perspective. | | And yet, the Amiga lived a very, very long time - i know it | was still used in TV stations into the early 2000s, despite | being dead for a few years at that point, and the PC world | having caught up to it and surpassed it in capabilities. | | Amiga hardware and software is still coming out. But it's the | afterlife now. | icedchai wrote: | I remember running a program on my Amiga 3000 that replaced | calls to the blitter with calls to the CPU. Performance for | common operations, like scrolling text, was greatly | improved. | | Except for faster CPUs, the Amiga barely changed from 1985 | to 1993. The AGA machines (1200, 4000) were too little, too | late. | ghaff wrote: | The DEC Rainbow was interesting because it highlighted a | couple things in the early 1980s timeframe. | | - If you were buying a PC right after the IBM PC came out, it | still wasn't obvious whether you bought an IBM PC with DOS | (or one of the clones that were starting to come out) or if | you bought a Z80 system running CP/M-86 (or an Apple III). I | bought a PC clone in, I think 1983, but I had been shopping | for a good year--those things were pricey--and it wasn't | obvious when I first started shopping what the right choice | was. | | - None of the minicomputer makers, including DEC, really | understood compatibility in the context of PCs. They were so | used to making completely proprietary systems so just selling | something that could run an off-the-shelf operating system | already seemed like a bold concession. | WalterBright wrote: | I bought my IBM PC shortly after it came out. It was | obvious to me that it was going to do well. | | DEC certainly misunderstood compatibility, but the DEC- | heads certainly did. The DEC-heads were anxiously waiting | for the DEC entry, and assumed it would be awesome like the | PDP-11. Instead, DEC proudly introduced a crippled, | incompatible PC. The DEC-heads literally laughed at it, and | walked away, crushed, by what DEC had done. DEC never | recovered after burning their godlike status. | | DEC should have introduced a PDP-11 priced competitively | with the IBM PC. That would have knocked it out of the | park. | vidanay wrote: | Yeah, my $4000 486-DX2 with 8MB RAM and a Weitek P9000 graphics | card was amazing(ly expensive)! | Firehawke wrote: | Yep. A friend of mine convinced his mother to get him a $4000 | Zeos machine in 1992 for his birthday. It was one hell of a | beast for that era in time, being the next to highest end | machine Zeos was selling and I remember playing The 7th Guest | on that thing up until I got my own CD-ROM drive. | | His machine also came with a Windows graphics accelerator video | card, which was a pretty impressive piece of hardware. Back | then, you could see the difference in redraw speeds between | accelerated and non-accelerated very easily. | | These days, 2D is so simple that nobody even thinks about | whether your card can keep up or not. | | Back then, even in MS-DOS you had a lot of questions about if | your card could do VESA modes, undocumented video modes, etc, | and sometimes you'd need SciTech Display Doctor to get those | modes. Linear framebuffers weren't commonly supported, and | getting the best possible performance required that. | klodolph wrote: | It was also such a _fast-moving_ era that your 486 would get | crushed in a couple years by the arrival of Pentiums. | | I still regularly use a 2012 laptop, but if you were using a | 9-year-old PC back in 1991, it would be a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088, | or something like a Commodore 64. | vidanay wrote: | Yeah for sure. My next one after this was a Dual CPU Pentium | Pro. | Agingcoder wrote: | Lucky you! I dreamt of owning a machine like this. I thought | the dx2 cpus had appeared later though (92?). | | I was stuck with a 386/16Mhz/40 megs hd, and a whopping | megabyte of ram. | | At least it taught me that it was sometimes worth optimizing my | code... | downut wrote: | The 8087 chip I added on to my 8086 system sits on my monitor | pedestal, forever. Right now, it's next to my _() &(_^&^%%$%^ | 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 $12K/yr stipend. Good times. | da-x wrote: | Every respectable hacker remembers the spec of their first | computer. | | 286 + 1MB RAM + 40MB hard drive. | | This was 1992 and it was valued about 1000$. | Firehawke wrote: | 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. | santoshalper wrote: | I too spent a lot of formative years on a 286, envying my | friends who all had 386s and could run Windows and play | cooler games. | Narishma wrote: | Windows ran fine on a 286. Even with just 1 MB of RAM. | You just couldn't launch more than a couple of big | applications at a time without severe swapping. | Firehawke wrote: | Yep, you could run 3.1 in "real mode" instead of | "protected mode" but the 286 was kind of a dog of a CPU | and it had some pretty nasty flaws that led to 286 | machines not really being all that common compared to | 80886 and 386 ones. | benttoothpaste wrote: | 3.1 couldn't run in real mode. It could run either in | standard mode or in enhanced mode. The enhanced mode was | 386-only. 3.0 on the other hand could run in real mode so | it technically could be used with 8086. | qubex wrote: | I also had a 386SX-16MHz with 2MB of RAM, a 40 Megabyte hard- | drive, a VGA adapter and a 14" screen. | | That was in 1992 and it was an abysmally slow system. | tpmx wrote: | I remember those CPUs being a lot more expensive than that. And | (after looking it up) launching in 1992. | lrem wrote: | Hmmm, really? I had a DX-4 which was not expensive at all | around 1996-ish. | tpmx wrote: | When the 486 launched in 1989/1990 a typical system cost | like $10k+. | | In 1996 it was very cheap. | toast0 wrote: | Pentium 200Mhz (Socket 7) came out in 95; so a dx-4 in 96 | was definitely old and should be not expensive. | vidanay wrote: | A lot of baked brain cells between then and now....I don't | deny my memory is fuzzy. | tpmx wrote: | Fair enough. I guess I was mostly retroactively jealous - | at the time I was rocking an 8086 with CGA. | lr4444lr wrote: | And to think of $4000 in 1991 dollars... | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | i never spent $10k on a home system in 1991. What ??? | fanatic2pope wrote: | 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 wrote: | If I remember correctly, the final use of mine was running a | home email server on Debian Linux with a dial-up modem. | msisk6 wrote: | Back in 1989 I hauled a Toshiba portable up to the top of San | Jacinto via the Palm Springs aerial tramway to do some work on | AutoCAD. I didn't get much work done; mostly I just had to | explain what this computer thing was. Toshiba probably ended up | with a few sales from that. | | Computing was definitely a niche industry back then for most | folks. | | I kinda miss it. | vidanay wrote: | AutoCAD 9 users unite! (or was that still v2?) | buescher wrote: | Those old Toshibas with the gas plasma displays were so cool. | Razor sharp monochrome graphics, easy on the eyes, and flat. I | had the use of one for a while in 1993 or so when it was | already quite obsolescent - it was like a laptop for a giant, | with a full sized, full travel keyboard and a card cage in the | back for ISA cards. | geocrasher wrote: | You'd have been my hero. In 1989, I was 12 or 13 years old, and | was actually living in Palm Springs! I lived in Palm Springs or | Desert Hot Springs for a decade. Never did get up there on the | Tram though. A shame, looking back. Small world! | choeger wrote: | Oh my the bootdisks. Funnily I recall managing a lot of MS-DOS | config.sys and autoexec.bat stuff (we run this stuff for games | until 96 or so) but I definitely didn't understand it. Now I | wonder were I got the ideas to change such arcane things like HMA | or Interrupts from. Game magazines, probably. | ghaff wrote: | You were really running up against DOS memory limits in the | 90s, so there were all sorts of tricks to make use of some of | the memory range above 640K. There was also the expanded memory | spec which allowed memory from an expansion card to be | basically paged into the usual memory range. So people ended up | having a bunch of config files that they booted into depending | upon what they were doing. | Firehawke wrote: | QEMM was a must-have to keep conventional memory as free as | possible. Also digging around for low-RAM-usage mouse | drivers, etc helped a lot. | | Even then you'd run into headaches with things like Ultima | 7's JEMM memory manager that insisted you not have | EMM386/QEMM running. To say that managing a DOS install was | somewhat painful is an understatement. | creamynebula wrote: | I remember I learnt most of this stuff from a neighbor, he took | an "informatics" course that taught him all that wizard stuff. | FiddlerClamp wrote: | And on the other hand, 1991 saw the release of a pen-based | operating system and one of the early tablets: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EO_Personal_Communicator ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-27 23:00 UTC)