[HN Gopher] The Rise and Fall of Micron Computers (2020)
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The Rise and Fall of Micron Computers (2020)
Author : kaishiro
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-07-29 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dfarq.homeip.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dfarq.homeip.net)
| rob74 wrote:
| > _Microsoft was about to release Windows 95, which everyone knew
| was going to require 8 megabytes of RAM to run reasonably, 16
| megabytes of RAM to run well, and power users were going to want
| 32._
|
| And here we are, 25 years later, doing mostly the same on our PCs
| (the typical desktop applications are the same today as they were
| then, ok, some of them now run in a browser, and instead of
| WinAmp playing your local MP3 files you have Spotify streaming
| from the cloud), but requiring 1024 times more memory to do it -
| 8 GB bare minimum, 16 GB ok, 32 GB for power users!
| bluedino wrote:
| Couldn't hold many MP3's on my 2.1GB hard drive back then. I
| was streaming the 'cool' radio stations from the big cites on
| RealPlayer!
| dannyw wrote:
| Word, Spotify and Chrome (Gmail, Google News, Medium) runs fine
| on 4GB of RAM.
|
| Just tested on a fairly old laptop I have.
| sophacles wrote:
| Of course 32MB of ram isn't enough to hold the frame buffer for
| an HD screen, let alone multiple 4K monitors.
|
| Even if you did have all those pixels worth of memory, the idea
| that the CPU could reasonably render a nice crisp UI with
| gradients at any reasonable FPS is lauaghable.
|
| You're talking about an era where the idea of leaving a PC on
| overnight and expecting it to be usable in the morning w/out a
| reboot was a foolish pipe dream - I discovered linux because I
| couldn't even get windows 95 to stay stay running for a few
| hours without seeing BSOD.
|
| Point of all this being: the notion that those apps were
| somehow better is rosy nostalgia at best. Yes a lot of apps
| today suck, but so did a lot of apps back then - generally the
| ones that suck these days suck less, and even if they are
| complete trash, they almost never bring the whole OS down with
| them. If the cost of that is taking advantage of the fact that
| my computer came with 1000x as much memory, so what? That 32GB
| in my desktop isn't even used all the way by FS cache + games +
| whatever else is running, why does it matter what the number of
| bytes used by any single app is?
| rob74 wrote:
| Ok, granted, screens today are more hi-res, and use
| transparency and other shader effects that weren't available
| in 1995. Also, VS Code is a much more advanced IDE than
| Visual Basic 4 or Delphi 2 (although you could design a UI
| graphically with the latter two, but not with the former).
| But my general point still stands: the applications today
| aren't 1000 times better than in 1995 (except possibly
| games), so why do they need 1000 times more memory?
| bluedino wrote:
| I was just thinking about how much faster and less
| cluttered things like Word and Excel were back then. Office
| 2000 vs whatever version we are on now.
| sophacles wrote:
| Wait, you're seriously proposing that memory usage and
| quality should have a directly linear relationship?
| (ignoring the fact that 1000x "better" is a purely
| subjective measure that even people with similar tastes
| have extreme difficulty in quantifying).
|
| Keep in mind that most of those apps you are talking about
| were designed with 256 color palletes (or smaller!) in
| mind. Just moving to true color triples the rendering
| target buffer without any other change. The same proportion
| of a screen used by the same app in HD vs 640p is another
| factor of ~9. (a lot more for 4k, etc).
|
| Word size is 2x larger - every pointer and int takes twice
| as many bytes.
|
| Depending on the native endcoding of your OS, strings can
| take 2-4x as many bytes, because it turns out there are
| languages besides English that have different letters.
|
| All of the above are just mechanical changes in the
| underlying gear that require a significant portion of your
| 1000x factor.
|
| Other things go into to it too but they are dev choices:
|
| * responsiveness due to keeping more in RAM rather than
| waiting for disk io
|
| * (related to disk io) fetching resources from the network
| is very slow too, so keeping them in memory is a good idea.
|
| * spending a huge effort minimizing RAM usage is often a
| waste of effort, given that the machine will have far more
| memory - this has made your free/cheap app possible (more
| so considering a 1995 dollar is ~2 2022 dollars).
|
| * The little features most users (maybe even you) take for
| granted all cost memory and cpu, and those are not present
| in the old software.
|
| * In general the software today does more anyway - even
| ignoring the convenience features, this also has a cost.
|
| I notice you have yet to answer my question: So what? Why
| does that matter when machines come with more RAM than I
| can use even with the increase in memory usage?
| hulitu wrote:
| > * responsiveness due to keeping more in RAM rather than
| waiting for disk io
|
| Excel , word, etc are much slower. It seems that although
| they keep some things in RAM they need to report to
| mothership.
| [deleted]
| virgulino wrote:
| >Of course 32MB of ram isn't enough to hold the frame buffer
| for an HD screen, let alone multiple 4K monitors.
|
| Actually, it's exactly right for a 4k framebuffer:
| 3840*2160*4/1024/1024 ~= 31.6MB. 8-)
| sophacles wrote:
| You're right, my search history shows i did 4*1920*1080*4
| :facepalm:
| creeble wrote:
| Not enough history about Micron, the company. The founder sold
| the exclusive potatoes for McDonald's French fries! He literally
| went from chips to chips.
| chasebank wrote:
| I don't think Simplot was the founder, just the funder. IIRC it
| was a couple engineers from Texas Instruments who founded
| Micron. Pretty sure JR Simplot and Ron Yanke funded the
| company.
| cwbrandsma wrote:
| Simplot was an early investor, not a founder.
| tiahura wrote:
| Another source suggests they were former engineers of a
| company founded by former TI engineers.
|
| https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/20/5-things-you-
| didnt...
| iancmceachern wrote:
| We had a Micron growing up, it was a pentium 90, it had one of
| those early plexus cd burners that had that plastic caddy you put
| the cds into, I spent such a long time getting my boot disk to
| work and run wing commander 3 well.
|
| Good times.
| anewpersonality wrote:
| Micron is killing it these days, and it's all thanks to Gurtej
| Sandhu.
| tristan957 wrote:
| I currently work for Micron as a 25 year old. I honestly had no
| idea Micron used to make computers until I saw a Linux Tech Tips
| video where they made a "sleeper PC" using an old Micron case
| from the 90s.
|
| This article was a good summary of what I have understood to be
| Micron's history. Thanks for sharing.
| adamc wrote:
| My ex and I had one of those. I think it might have been the last
| PC we bought without a video card... worked well (for its time),
| actually.
|
| I miss the days when there were more vendors and Computer Shopper
| was enormous. Ah well.
| yelling_cat wrote:
| My first PC was a Micron. I don't remember the specs at this
| point but the machine was fast, every component in it was well-
| chosen and standard, and the case was roomy and easy enough to
| get into that I was still using it long after swapping out all of
| the original components.
|
| The best thing about Micron, though, was the support. Micron had
| no Level 1 "techs" reading replies from a script on staff, no
| annoying phone trees to navigate, and no obnoxiously long hold
| times. You'd just call and within a few rings be speaking
| directly to a Level 2 or 3 tech who knew both hardware and
| Windows troubleshooting and treated you as a peer. Discovering
| how aggressively awful support from most tech companies is after
| working with Micron was disheartening.
| winternett wrote:
| I miss Micron computers, they were clean and click with black
| cases... It was so easy to work on them because the cases were
| well designed and durable. Most of the parts in Microns i recall
| were easily swappable, which was great for troubleshooting. Back
| then the top of the line desktops were around $2-4k each, I
| worked in a university library that bought 100 of them and I was
| a help desk/support tech back around 1995... The job was quite
| easy, except for working with printers. Now, you couldn't
| convince me to do PC support if you held a gun to my head. :/
|
| I think a lot of those people went to work for Dell.
| Unfortunately they lost the plot in making too many fail-prone
| things as integrated components.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| This brings me back to when I was shopping for my college
| computer. I used to pour through Computer Shopper magazine,
| totally captivated by the ads from (Midwest?) Micron, Gateway
| 2000, etc.
|
| I ended up with a Gateway 2000 486-25 DX, 4 MB of RAM, 83 MB HDD,
| 14" SVGA monitor, and Windows 3.1(?), an AnyKey keyboard, and
| mouse for (IIRC) $3100. And the salesman was named Tom Reibur (I
| may be misspelling his last name). It was delivered in several
| large cow-themed boxes by a FedEx delivery van with a woman
| driver.
|
| Guess my first serious computer left an impression :)
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| You're thinking of "Midwest Micro" from Fletcher, OH. It was a
| pretty big white box PC reseller located, literally, in the
| middle of farm fields in rural Ohio. (Have a lot of friends who
| "did their time" starting out in IT work there-- in support,
| production, or admin roles.)
|
| The founder sold out and eventually the business was owned by
| the same company who owned Tiger Direct.
| samstave wrote:
| My first serious purchases: (prior to these, my parent foot the
| bill for my first 286, 386 486 ((Because I convince my dad he
| needs a computer for his business. Oh and you also need to buy
| these modems. And these games.))
|
| I bought a machine in Seattle it was $1,600 for a machine - I
| think it was a 266 mhz PII 1995
|
| ---
|
| BUT I spent $1,700 on an Evans and Sutherland 3d graphics card
| with _32 megabytes_ of vram - it was collasal, full length AT
| card. 32MB -- but it could run Softimage on NT4 like nobody...
|
| My current laptop is an HP Oman flagship with GTX 3070ti and I
| have blender and so much power I dont know what to do with.
|
| and I have two of them...
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| Oh, that brings me back! I remember seeing those cow-themed
| boxes everywhere back in the day.
|
| I was so disappointed to see the cow theming disappear when the
| company folded. (Or, you might say... when the company moo-ved
| on.)
|
| OT: Anecdotally, it seems like there was just a bit more whimsy
| and playfulness around the design back in those days. The iPods
| that came out a few years later -- with all their delightful
| neon and pastel shades -- were another lovely echo of that same
| theme. Nowadays, it seems like technology is all polished metal
| and rounded corners -- Airspace [1] and Alegria [2] everywhere
| you look. I'd love to see a return to some of the more playful
| designs of yesteryear.
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-
| aesthetic-...
|
| [2]: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-
| armed-...
| incanus77 wrote:
| Gateway was involved in my first college computer, too, but not
| in the standard way. In 1998 I worked at a mall RadioShack, and
| there was also a Gateway store at the other end. I was able to
| get one of their credit cards, then went home and used it (upon
| recommendation from a coworker) to buy a custom-built PC from a
| company called Midwest Micro. 266 P2, 64MB of RAM, 6GB Seagate
| drive, SoundBlaster AWE64, and a CD-ROM. Came with Windows 98,
| soon replaced by Red Hat 5.2, my first foray into Linux. Served
| me well, upgraded it along the way, and I still have the case
| next to me today, with a P3, 1GB of RAM, 20GB of disk, DVD
| burner, 3.5 and 5.25" floppies, and running the latest FreeBSD.
| Great bridge machine for retrocomputing work.
| closetohome wrote:
| Micron Computers had a fantastic website, with a no-frills
| configurator that let you customize nearly every component. They
| also offered solid upgrades to sound and video cards, and even
| Trinitron monitors.
|
| They were like an unpretentious Falcon Northwest.
| zackmorris wrote:
| I flopped at interview at Micron PC (MPC) around 2005 maybe? An
| interviewer asked me who their main customer was and I had
| absolutely no idea. Turned out that it was the government.
|
| I was so idealistic at the time that I was thinking about stuff
| like NAND flash memory and FPGAs and affordable solar panels and
| multicore CPUs. Which were ideas being explored by Micron. But
| MPC's business was supplying rudimentary computers for office
| use. That was a solved problem by the late 90s so there wasn't
| anywhere for the market to go except a race to the bottom.
|
| On a side note, many techies in southern Idaho felt that Micron
| and HP had monopolized the local tech scene through tax waivers
| and hiring up talent, barring entry to startups until around
| 2015. Today there's an eerie feeling that it's all happening too
| quickly and we'll go the way of Austin as thousands of economic
| and climate refugees flock here from other states, paving all of
| the farms for subdivisions and cutting down all of the trees for
| 3 story apartments. Now a home that was $150k in 2010 goes for
| half a million dollars while wages for average working people
| still hover in the $40-60k range, so the locals are getting
| forced out just like everywhere else.
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