[HN Gopher] EMachines never obsolete PCs: More than a meme
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EMachines never obsolete PCs: More than a meme
Author : zdw
Score : 57 points
Date : 2026-03-24 15:12 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dfarq.homeip.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dfarq.homeip.net)
| Bratmon wrote:
| So if they're never obsolete because you can always get a $99
| replacement, where should I send my 486 to trade it for a Ryzen
| 7?
| jerf wrote:
| Are you paying for the dial up service? If not, gosh, you seem
| to be out of luck.
|
| (Fresh out of college while the dot-com crash was still in
| effect, I briefly took a job for a local phone company. Their
| primary income was from people who were still paying 1996-ish
| prices for T1 lines, of hundreds and hundreds a month.
| Meanwhile I would go home to my cable modem which was about 4
| times faster for ~$50/month. Now, techically, the T1s were
| dedicated bandwidth and of course my cable modem was shared,
| but it was still a terrible deal for them. And they weren't
| even getting subsidized computers out of it!)
| whalesalad wrote:
| This era reminds me of the time that my grandmother (in same
| house) got a new Compaq with a CD burner. It was running windows
| ME. My dumb ass thought that because a had disk drive could be
| mounted as a volume over the network, a burner could too. Turns
| out you can sort-of network mount a CD drive but its not usable.
| The days and hours I wasted on this project, including convincing
| my mom to take me to Fry's in Burbank to get a Netgear hub (not
| switch!) to glue everything together.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| That Fry's is forever memorialized in the 2022 movie _Nope_
| tracker1 wrote:
| Back when Fry's Electronics actually had hardware in stock. The
| last time I tried to get something at the North Phoenix
| location, it was pitiful and I couldn't find what I needed. I
| hadn't been there for years and wound up having to wait 2 days
| for Amazon anyway.
|
| FWIW, I haven't been to the Phoenix Microcenter yet, mostly in
| that I'm afraid of how much I might otherwise spend there.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I used to live a few miles from Tustin, CA microcenter. Now I
| live in Michigan, and used to live a few miles from the one
| here in Sterling Heights.
|
| The funny thing is that it has all the same terrible
| qualities as Fry's ... huge lines, the checkout pathway
| weaves like a tower defense setup through tunnels full of all
| kinds of chinesium garbage, candy, bawls energy, ESD wrist
| straps, cheap flash drives, back massagers, etc. The
| employees usually have autism with terrible social skills,
| love to make small talk, etc. The line will be 30 people deep
| and you will have some dude who has already checked out and
| completed his purchase (wearing And1 basketball shorts and
| dress socks/shoes) talking to the sales person about
| warhammer paint preferences. Every time I am in there I pull
| the floor manager aside and say, why the fuck do you guys do
| such a terrible job with the checkout process?
|
| So basically one or two visits to microcenter and you will
| never want to go there again until you REALLY need to go
| there.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Dave's site has an article on Fry's:
| https://dfarq.homeip.net/what-happened-to-frys-electronics/
|
| They only had one in Illinois, about seven miles or so from
| Micro Center, and it was one of the earliest to fold.
|
| Once upon a time, I had brick-and-mortar Tiger Direct, Micro
| Center, and Fry's stores all within an hour's drive. Micro
| Center is the last one standing.
| stackghost wrote:
| Oh man those first few generations of CD burners were rough. We
| had this old Pentium 2 that had so little memory you had to
| close everything but the burner software (Easy CD Creator or
| something, IIRC) otherwise the memory exhaustion would cause a
| buffer underrun and the disc would be ruined.
|
| A few years later my mom finally let us get one with buffer
| underrun protection (and some multiplier on the write speed) so
| I could make mix CDs with music off Napster for my girlfriend
| and life was good.
| bitwize wrote:
| Last year's birthday present from me to my wife was a mix CD.
| I attempted to recreate Cereal Killer's Greatest Zukes Album,
| briefly mentioned in _Hackers_ (1995): "All great artists
| that asphyxiated on their own vomit!" My criterion was that
| the artists featured had to have died of a drug or alcohol
| overdose before September of 1995 (when _Hackers_ was
| released), and four of the tracks had to be by Jimi Hendrix,
| Janis Joplin, Cass Eliot, and the Blues Brothers (satisfying
| the Belushi requirement), who are named in the film.
|
| She still listens to it when working.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| I went as far as sourcing a SCSI drive with a dedicated card
| just to get results. Fond memories of clicking Burn and
| slowly backing away from the desk to let it do its thing.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I saw my friends doing that and stayed out of that game
| completely until Plextor released their first 8x burner --
| the PR-820.
|
| By then, it was all pretty well sorted despite that burner
| having no underrun protection.
|
| The IBM Ultrastar 9ES drives kept it fed very well on that
| otherwise quite slow Slackware box.
|
| Burn a CD, compile a kernel, and browse the web while
| watching some VCD rip of a music video in one corner of the
| screen? No problem.
| ge96 wrote:
| Ahh I remember that little white desktop
| sigzero wrote:
| Wow that's certainly a blast from the past. Even had one for a
| while.
| tracker1 wrote:
| They were ok for the price... I think they were probably the most
| responsible for squeezing every bit of profitability from
| independent builders though. It really became a race to the
| bottom, combined with more interest in mobile/laptop computers.
|
| I remember in the mid to late 90's, you could build a computer
| for someone and walk away with enough for an upgraded system for
| yourself. Of course the churn on performance was very real. IIRC,
| 1992 maxed out with a 486 DX2 @66mhz. Around 2000 we crossed the
| 1ghz mark from both Intel and AMD. We went from OG Doom that
| couldn't cut it full screen, to Half Life and Quake 3 Arena on
| Voodoo 3 and early NVidia cards.
| bombcar wrote:
| Around 2000 I remember building myself new PCs every time
| someone wanted a gaming PC; I'd sell them my existing system
| and build myself the new hotness. I'd always buy just where the
| price/performance curve was starting to go vertical, so the 2-3
| month old machine was still quite a good "deal".
|
| That stopped being effective sometime before 2010. Instead I'd
| recommend buying a decent enough machine and sticking a
| graphics card in it.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah.. late 90's to early 00's was pretty peak builder era. I
| learned through a relative fluke how much going a bit over
| the top on memory and faster drives really helped over even a
| faster CPU/GPU a lot of the time for general use. My current
| computer is literally the first I've built in decades that I
| didn't max out the RAM... I mean, I kind of did as 2x48gb was
| the most I could get in DDR5@6000 and only use 2 slots (or it
| would run much slower).
|
| 4th gen Core series was the longest I'd held onto a single PC
| (close to 5 years total for a 4790K). I did a mid-cycle gpu
| and nvme upgrade and that was it. I bumped to a 3950X/5950X
| and now 9950X since... AM3 is really the first socket in a
| long time I'd done an in-place upgrade for any CPU. My
| daughter's Ryzen 2400 to a 5000 series, and my own build from
| a 3600 -> 3950X -> 5950X... the 3600 was a placeholder as I
| couldn't get a 3950X for a few months.
|
| I couldn't even name half the CPUs I ran from 1998 to 2005 or
| so... it was such a blur of upgrades every 6-12 months... I'd
| upgrade my computer, my wife's, my son's... etc. Then, things
| just completely stagnated... I mean there's been progress,
| but it's over the course of years, not seeing 2-3x in under a
| year.
| bombcar wrote:
| I remember that it started to stall out on RAM before CPU
| (in that it became "reasonable" to have way more RAM than
| you really needed - Chrome didn't exist yet lol); that the
| very early move to multi-core was a bit of a downer (much
| couldn't use more than 2 or 3 cores so a "new CPU" with 4
| instead of 2 cores but the same single-thread performance
| would be hardly noticeable).
|
| Then of course there was the huge "replace everything with
| SSDs ASAP" performance bump, but ever since the later Core
| and before the M1, everything felt incremental. Nothing
| like the "Wolfenstein 3D to Quake Glide in 5 years" era.
|
| _Holy shit it was only 5 years_ - the M1 was released 6
| years ago!
| anthk wrote:
| Froom Doom ~1993 to the Unreal engine ~1998, used even
| for Deus Ex, in just 5 years. For GenZers: a bigger jump
| than the one from the 3DS to the Switch.
|
| By comparison, from the first Core Duo computers to
| today... we should have been _roaming_ around, at street,
| level, in fully 3D rendered cities in Street View long
| ago, at least with Half Life 2 quality graphics and some
| high res textures and light bolted on to fake out the
| most complex effects.
|
| And yet what we have it's the exact same rendering PC's
| and PowerPC macs did with virtual tour multimedia CD's in
| late 90's (and Encarta) but in a higher resolution.
| Literally. A 2D image rendered inside of an sphere.
|
| That's it, something right now you can do in software
| without too much effort. You can get some 3D image and a
| dedicated viewer for it such as Panini with _no_ advanced
| 3D support at all and what you are literally doing it 's
| the same as JS scripts and WebGL are trying to do with
| Street View still images but with a Core Duo CPU or a
| high end Pentium 4.
|
| Which is a technology closer to Myst in concept than the
| Unreal Engine. There's no actual progress as the one we
| lived through the 90's. Years passed as huge steps in the
| same way a kid aged 10 had near nothing to do in tastes
| with a 14yo one. Well, technology in our lives was the
| same. From walkmans to CD's and for crappy MSDOS
| computers in Mid Elementary to Windows 98 at nearly the
| high scrool.
| bombcar wrote:
| Part of it is that things are slowing down, so the
| "solution" selected is the same - Unreal engine released
| in 1998; people still using evolved Unreal engine today.
|
| I feel we haven't really had a different _paradigm_ for
| decades, and I 'm not sure AI even really is one.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| The author mentions Packard-Bell which always just had the whiff
| of 2 legit companies and was enough to trick uninformed shoppers
| at Walmart that they were buying high end. Remember in 1999 if
| you didn't read Computer Shopper the only thing you knew about
| PCs was what you saw in TV ads.
| bitwize wrote:
| I remember seeing the department-store Packard Bell PCs on
| shelves. Packard Hells, I called them. About half of the
| display models were busted. I'm surprised that uninformed
| shoppers could remain uninformed after seeing that.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I worked tech support at an ISP and despaired when someone with
| a Packard-Bell called in. First, they'd let you know it, as
| though they were telling you they had a high-end Real Computer.
| Second, you instantly _knew_ it 'd have a cheap POS LT Winmodem
| that would only train up to 28.8 if the wind was blowing in the
| right direction, and would buffer underrun if the user tried
| playing an MP3 while they were downloading something.
|
| Ugh, I despised dealing with that gear.
| jandrese wrote:
| Those shitty modems were infamous. IIRC they were also the
| sound card on the box and had serious issues with interrupt
| conflicts. It took three wizards and a dead chicken to get
| Doom to run stably in an online deathmatch.
| tombert wrote:
| My parents got a Packard Bell computer for a deep discount
| (maybe free?) for signing up for N years of Prodigy internet.
| It was one of my earliest computers.
|
| I didn't realize until right now that it had no relationship to
| Hewlett Packard. I guess I always assumed that it was HP's
| budget line.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Even better, it was a classic zombie brand revival, and it
| seems like the vast majority of the trusted names of my youth
| have followed this path.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Wow someone else from St. Louis? Found this blast from the past
| too: https://dfarq.homeip.net/building-a-computer-in-the-90s/
|
| I only remembered a couple CompUSAs, Circuit City, and Best Buy
| selling computers growing up. I don't remember visiting any
| independent computer stores in the mid 90s.
|
| But talking to those in my parents' generation, most of them
| bought their computers from some local small shop (and sometimes
| went back there for computer training!).
|
| I count St. Louis lucky for at least having a Micro Center today,
| otherwise all my parts would have to come from online stores.
| Tostino wrote:
| I remember being quite young and my parents going to the one of
| the local computer shops and getting a beige box Pentium 3 at
| 450mhz that we used for a while. The shop put Quake on there
| because they had kids, and I remember the first time I played
| it my mom instantly went and uninstalled.
|
| A few years later in ~2004/5 I dug that same beige computer out
| of the closet, bought some extra RAM (I think it was 256mb
| total I could fit in it) and used that to host a private
| Lineage 2 server, which is how I got into databases / software
| development in the first place. With a whole bunch of tuning I
| could run ~50 people concurrently on that machine without
| terrible lag.
|
| Eventually I had enough people who donated that I could upgrade
| to a newly released Athlon x2 stuffed into a rack mount case,
| which I sent to a colo.
| pengaru wrote:
| I worked in one of those independent computer stores in the
| 90s, assembling white box PCs in a dimly lit back room, and
| systematically removing drivers on early Win95 machines until
| they'd stop crashing to identify which one was buggy.
|
| PCs were so dynamic at the time, half my paychecks were spent
| on discounted upgrades before I ever saw the paper. EDO ram?
| sign me up. 512K of pipelined burst L2 cache? yes please. HX
| chipset? of course. Dual socket pentium pros? I need a raise.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Similar background re: PC building here, working at a shop
| that built PCs in the late 90s. I remember seeing boards with
| these new-fangled USB ports, DIMM memory, Pentium II, the
| first 3D accelerators, etc. It was a fun time. I got in to
| the industry right at the end of AT-style boards and power
| supplies and mostly missed having to deal with that stuff
| (other than in my personal life, where I still had old
| stuff).
| bluedino wrote:
| Radio Shack, the short-lived Gateway Country store, Sears had a
| ton of computers, regional electronics stores, JC Penny got out
| of it in the early 90's, Sam's Club...
| rasz wrote:
| $99 never obsolete offer was very clever considering they
| probably had access to longer Intel roadmap. Starting with 1998
| Intel was releasing Celerons with cheapest one always around
| $100. Even the earliest "never obsolete" systems could be
| upgraded to 766 MHz Cpu, with later 810 up to $103 1100 MHz.
|
| Now add money they were making on those mandatory dialup
| subscriptions and you got a money printer.
| dublin wrote:
| I bought the "high end" e-Machines box on a killer sale at
| BestBuy because I needed a modern computer and didn't have the
| time it takes to get all the drivers and settings _really_
| working as they should.
|
| They branded it as the "eMonster", and although not stellar, it
| was solid, reasonably quick, and got the job done. It was my
| daily driver for many years. I don't remember why now, but I
| called them with some kind of support/upgrade question several
| years later, and they were shocked when I told them my OS was XP.
| "The EMonster can't even can't even run XP!", said the
| incredulous person on the other end of the phone. Only then did I
| remember that I'd reflashed the BIOS a couple of years before.
|
| My kids heard this on the speakerphone, and christened it the
| "eMonsterstein". I haven't fired it up in a long time, but it's
| one of three old PCs that I just moved whole out to the garage
| (most were cannibalized or just died). I suppose it'll boot up
| and run just as well as it did when I finally gave it its long
| overdue retirement. I may have to give it a try - I still have a
| monitor with a VGA plug somewhere...
| forinti wrote:
| In 1998 I was using a P166MMX with 64MB of RAM that I had bought
| in 1995 for my Master's.
|
| It makes much more sense to me to be cheap on the CPU and splurge
| on RAM.
|
| So I don't see why I would want to upgrade that CPU and keep the
| 32MB of RAM.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| I have an eMachines-branded PS/2 keyboard within easy reach,
| which I rescued when a colleague was throwing out an old PC. It's
| only a rubber dome board, but it's one of the best feeling rubber
| dome boards I've ever encountered!
| elevation wrote:
| 10 years ago, a non-technical friend gifted me an eMachines
| tower that no one bought from his uncle's estate sale. I loaded
| with ubuntu server, racked it up and ran a business off of it,
| storing some backups, generating 500+ daily customer-requested
| database reports, and generally kept the CPU busy running batch
| jobs, builds in docker, etc. I kept it running on a UPS for
| years until the hard drive errors force the kernel to mount it
| r/o. I might have kept it going, but I had a replacement on
| standby.
|
| It's replacement is another cast-off, uses less electricity and
| is much more capable, despite not qualifying to run windows 11.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I still remember dropping the MX440 I spent all summer saving for
| into my eMachine AGP slot and playing BF1942 for the first time
| as a total revelation. Must have been how the previous generation
| felt when Doom came out. Simpler times.
| berkeleyjunk wrote:
| Thanks for this fascinating write up. I could not afford anything
| better when I got into my first job, and the freedom that this
| mediocre box provided me was unbelievable.
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