[HN Gopher] 1991's PC technology was unbelievable (2011)
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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
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