What computer did you own in the 90s...

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One of those crummy Packard Bell prebuilts. At least I got MEGARACE out of it.

You need to (mentally) grow up.
Tell me.... Did a liberal touch you in your no-no place while you were young?

OP's retardation notwithstanding, my Dad was a Macfag for a while. Probably should have stayed one, considering the Windows 10 cancer on his current computer now.

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IBM 486 DX2 66 MHz with 32 MB RAM. Not sure on the HDD space, maybe 200 MB? My dad bought it, so I'm not sure what it cost, maybe $2,000 or so at the time. Windows 3.1? 95? It came with a 2X CD-ROM, with two CDs, one was an educational "explore under the sea" thing and the other was an encyclopedia.

Ah, i do remember that 486,
Tought they had a range of 'consumer' grade HDD's at that time; ranging from 10mb to 300mb orso.

I sadly only have one HDD left from that era

127MB Quantum ProDrive ELS

Sadly lost a lot of nice relics/memorabillia from that era,
ah well still got the memories inside my gray mass :^)

OT:

'My' first computer were a Philips P2000, were sold relatively cheap to employees who were working
in their factories at that time. (thanks dad!)

Found/rescued a Vicktor V286P last year, needs a HDD and its tinkering time.
Altough i would love to have some documentation/info on this particular laptop/legbreaker
since it seems very rare to come across some info; let alone original books.
Mabe someone here knows or can point out some places 'unknown' or hard to find.

I've been getting most of my old (between 1992-1997) hardware from Russia, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine via ebay as of late. Not sure about documentation, though, since even common consumer computer documentation is fucking wind and ghosts now.

I'd have killed to have the 486 I have now, back in the nineties. 486 DX2 66MHz, 32MB RAM, 500MB HDD (dead sectors make it more like 430-some), 3.5" floppy, SB16. Pain in the ass problem is the fucked up BIOS hates other video cards, and doesn't like any CDROM drives. Goddamn case doesn't even have mounts for installing a 5.25" drive, just a bare-ass empty bay.

all me btw

Wonderful idea to look into eastren Europe and Russia.
Still have some near-future plans to go there on (extended) vacation.
Might aswell look around a bit for parts. (for one project this time, i swear!) :^)

I lost track/communications of various 'goodwill' organisations in my country though,
thinking afterwards: that would/could have been a gold mine for a lot of people, who just cant find that ONE part.
Been lurking around many tech event's/saleoffs, but aLOT people are basicly only there for the money it seems.

And remembering everyone drooling if they heared the word 'Pentium' in the 90's ;a la creme the la creme.
And the fact that computers were mostly used for things they were designed for in the first place.
+ the high price that drove them (still) in the hands of dedicated people, willing/had to learn their computers inside out in
order to work with them properly

Not to mention the manuals who were thick and detailed, counts for most electronics from that decade, i might be wrong
since we were using computers/televisions from aout 5-6 years of age after introduction, since they were very expensive
for a modest household to buy new or from the introduction date.
Wonderful times/memories.

Wondering for a while why the boards ain't using ID tagging like Holla Forums does.

Yeah, the biggest problem in the United States with old manuals is people saw them as useless reference books for obsolete hardware and software, believing them to be useless garbage because of this.
I should redouble my efforts to buy such documentation and literature where I find it, but I fear the gold rush is over; most of these materials have long since been destroyed.

The most obscure books I have are a book on sprite graphics for the C64, and Windows 3.1 for Dummies. And those weren't rare.

I had an XT, then a 386, then a 486 DX2 (fuck yerr). Later in the '90s I went throufh a Pentium and I forget after that as I shared boxes with my girlfriend. I think hers was a Pentium 2. The 386 and the 486 were the most fun. I learned how to write protected mode OSes, started using Linux, played Quake 1 on Linux which ran faster than the DOS version.

Let's quadripple the efforts while were at it :)
On a serious note; i find it very strange that (aside from some hoarders)
not many people had the 'brilliant' idea to scan/photograph those manuals for futher use, in case it gets lost by ageing , fire etc.

Consider yourself lucky to have at least a few pieces of intrest, it holds more valueble information than most people know.

Sold recently a few books, for the commedore 64 and some for the Z80 chips, since i got them double.
The twinkeling in the eye's of people who came to pick them up - Priceless! :')

Been sorting a lot other things either it be hardware/software or books, since i am not going to work with all of the stuff again,
to focus on just a few projects; and make the best out of it.
And like i said above, it is really wonderful to sell (fair price) VERY specific things to people ,
you just know are gonna do great things with them/good use; pure hobbyist i call them.

On the other hand; some things i wont sell this lifetime, like a 2 inch UNIX book from the late 80's.

Because it goes against the very core principles of anonymous discussion.

Your political projections are hilarious. Also you should read Marx if you're going to invoke his name.

also get back to your fucking containment board, Holla Forumsack

t. A Marxist who's built their own PC's from 1995 on

In the 90s I was really young, so I just used my parents' computers. I think one was a Compaq that was pretty sick, it could run Spiderman 64.

In the early 2000s I got my own computer, it was one of those flat box Dells that schools would purchase by the boatload. Pentium 4, 2GB of RAM.

The computer I remember using earliest was an IBM. I don't remember the model, only that it ran Windows 9* and had the Windows 95 arcade pack. It was beige, and was the slab kind of case you put your monitor on top of.

The old man dropped around 2k for an Apple MacIntosh Performa 6116CD. I still had it until a few years ago until I was moving and decided to throw it away instead of haul that heavy ass thing around. One of the few things In my life I regret.

Dad had pic related until 98 or 99.

AST Advantage! Adventure 810

Mine came with a Pentium 75, 8MB EDO RAM, 1.2GB HDD, ATI Mach64 video and a Crystal CS4232 OPL3 based Sound Blaster Pro compatible sound card.

And of course Windows 95.

Also got a matching 15" flat screen CRT monitor (a pretty big deal at the time).

The base install was fucked, no sound in DOS and a couple other more minor glitches. I spent hours online with tech support. Eventually a lot of people complained and we had to pay $20 to ship and customs clear a "fulfillment CD" which patched the included software and also configured the dos environment for Sound Blaster compatible sound and music.

Eventually (years later) scored a Pentium 100 chip for $20 which I installed, bought another 32MB of RAM for a total of 40, and another 6.4GB hard drive. Also got my hands on an external US Robotics 33.6 Sportster Voice (hardware) modem.

Later, upgrades culminated in a 3DFX Voodoo2 1000 and a Linksys LNE-100TX network card....

Yes in 2000 I was playing Quakeworld Mega Team Fortress in 640x480 on a Voodoo2 with a Pentium 100 and (very late in 2000) a 3MBIT cable modem, which dropped my pings from 230 to 65ms.

At last I had become a low-ping bastard.

Next machine I built myself after years of begging my parents for a new one and pooling birthday and allowance money forever....

So that AST we bought in 1995 lasted until 2001, in an era where processor speeds seemingly doubled every year.

By 1997, the machine was basically 2 generations behind. By 1999, it was 3 generations behind.

Wish I still had it. I went through a "fuck computers" phase and dumped all my vintage stuff, keeping only one powerful machine for school.

That reminds me of the time I dumpster'd a crippled VIC-20 and a couple of 1541 disk drives plus some tape decks. I never should have done that.

Until 1999, I had a Commodore 64. No internet, no floppy storage, just a flaky tape drive.
I ended up good at 6502 asm somehow.

In 1999 I was given a dual Pentium III box running Solaris. 128M RAM, 4 36GB 15kRPM Ultra160 SCSI HDDs, and a shitbox-grade GPU, even for the time.

My introduction to 32-bit computing was on a UNIX and I'm glad about that.

why was biege ever a popular color?
it's like white drenched in piss

They were white initially. Beige came from oxidation.

I had a Packard Bell that had this horrible file manager that tried to look like an interactive house or something.

A quick search brought up this:

guidebookgallery.org/tutorials/packardbellnavigator39/gettingstarted

Thankfully it was easy to exit out of it and get back into Windows 95/DOS.

Before that we had some archaic machine that had DOS and Windows 3.1. The floppy disks were actually floppy and we had a golf game bootdisk. I remember knocking the ball further and further out of bounds, exploring the wilderness beyond the golf course as far as the game and its glorious 16-color VGA graphics could take me.

I had one of these. It swell until I came home from school one day and found out it shit itself.

I was really poor back in the day so I only got an enhanced Apple iie

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright

Yellowing is caused by both bromine and exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light. Many of the ABS plastics used in consumer electronics devices are typically “brominated”—combined with bromine as a fire retardant—to meet fire safety standards.

IBM Aptiva-can't remember the series, but look very similar to pic related.

Its a 100 mhz running on windows 95. 1Gb Fireball hardrive and, I used one of sound blaster sound card which I couldn't remember what was it.

I have a version of Packard Bell Navigator on a system I bought a while back. I should copy it for internet sharings, but it's a fucking Windows 3 mess, and probably wouldn't just copy easily. Also I need to get some kind of removable media drive for it that works.

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Some shitty win95 machine I don't remember the manufacturer of and some shitty emachines system.

I only got my first computer in the late 90s. Perhaps this was not the best choice...

>>>Holla Forums
>>>/tumblr/

First computer bought used in 1996
Mac IIci
OS 7.5
25mhz
8mb ram
80 mb internal SCSI hard drive
900 mb external SCSI hard drive
Supra Express 33.6 kbps modem

Wasn’t good for much other than light graphics work, surfing the net and word processing.

None.

Only rich kids had computers in the '90s.

bump

tfw no poor bf ;_;

Grandpa was a mainframe operator so he gave our family our first family computer although my dad used early home computers when he was growing up, my grandpa also setup all the necessary dialup equipment and shit to get online, I think it was arouns '96 when we were using the early AOL on an IBM PC with an Intel P5 processor and Windows 3.1, uncle was also one of those tech hippies who lived in Berkeley in the 70s and 80s. Our entire family is fairly tech literate I think

lol, the middle class existed in the 90's

I'm sorry you were raised in a trailer park. I wasn't nowhere near rich and we had computers at home since the Spectrum ZX era.

All this in a shithole country.

summer comes early this year

Old PCs have such a beautiful mystique to them.

My first PC was an AST Advantage which I received in the mid 90s.

Not my photo, but it came with some customized Windows 3.1 interface which you can see in the photo.

Had a 486 with like 30mb of disc space and a turbo button. I remember downloading pretty lewd anime pictures with it and playing DOS games. That's mostly all I remember.

Anyone else remember games like Magic Carpet and Myst? Those games were like a quantum leap compared to everything before. When I look at games that existed around the early 2000s, they're honestly not that much different that what we have today.

Ehhh, as far as aesthetics go, there's something there, yeah, but I think my shitty experiences in that era crush any fond nostalgia potential.

I've got two nineties systems at the moment that have some pain in the ass issues, but both play Doom just fine. The problem I have with both is that neither will play ball with CDROM drives. One's got a dead Dallas chip (think clock, battery, and BIOS all in one sealed package), so I cannot access BIOS setup to tell it to use other video cards or configure drives, and the other just screams about drive controller errors when I connect a plain jane CDROM drive to the slave connector on the PATA cable, even when jumpered for slave mode. Shoveling shit onto them with a billion floppies is a pain in the ass. If it stops hurting to exist long enough, I'll dick around with serial networking. I had some luck with parallel networking in the past.

the first computer my parents purchased was in ~1995 from Gateway. If I remember correctly, it was Pentium I, 166Mhz with a ~1.98 GB harddrive. Not sure about how much memory.

Second computer was a gateway bought in like 1998 or 1999. It was a pentium III 933mhz. Custom ordered a sweet PCI graphics card to play games. Use to play Unreal Tournament, Starcraft and Half-Life mods on it. Upgraded the RAM and installed a CD-RW.

In 2002 I finally got my own computer. Custom Built. My mother took me to buy the parts at a computer show. That was an AMD 1900+ XP with a Radeon 8500 GPU. Good times. Can still remember putting it together in the middle of a Day Of Defeat match. We were kicking ass so I just went AFK and finished installing Win2K pro.

Thanks, mom and dad.

Picture related. First PC pretty much looked identical.

To help you remember the date correctly the P1 166 came out in 96 and the MMX version in 97.

There was desktop computers in the 90s that were only a couple hundred if you didn't mind using a slow system. By the mid 90s cheap systems could easily get online. It is about priorities not money. Most poor people had cable tv, game consoles, multiple tvs, vcrs, and other shit. No one knew much about computers or saw a pressing need.

It is easy to make massive advances in any field during the early days in this case 3d games like Magic Carpet. Point and click games died off so that isn't say much for Myst.

OP Here

There is 2 macfags 2 much.

Fuck man I don't even know

I know it ran windows 98 at least and I fucking loved sim tower and other maxis games and a shit load of dos games my dad had bootleg because he knew a guy

My Parents had a Packard Bell in the 1990's which replaced their Commodore PC-20 that I got in my room. Packard Bell was shit and the Commodore PC-20 was just old by then.

After that I got a custom made PC in a beige Tower.

File Maven (DOS) or Link Maven (win9x) to transfer files & folders over serial/parallel. Used it to get that 35MB Windows95 install folder onto a laptop without any CD-ROM.
briggsoft.com/index.html

First computer I had was one I built myself, it had a 80286 processor, and 2 megs of RAM with a 40 MB hard drive and was running DOS 5.1.

I didn't have it too long, as I quickly saved up enough to to upgrade it to a 486DX2 66MHz processor 60 MB hard drive.
It had a VGA graphics card (256 colors!) and a SoundBlaster 16 sound card.

It took a while to tweak the boot order to get QEMM and the new-fangled double-speed CD-ROM drive to work properly, but after that, I was in hog heaven.

I liked XTree Gold for a file manager because it had a decent (for the time) graphic interface, and it served me well after the first iteration of Windows came along.

I hat to sound like an nostalgia ridden old fart, I miss those days, because back then the hardware was pretty hit and miss in terms of compatibility and I actually had a good time playing around with DIP switch settings and jumpers in order to get shit to work properly together, assuming you could get your boot order sorted out, knew something about DOS commands, and had the proper drivers installed.

Now it's all pretty much plug-and-play, and while I do admit it's convenient and generally superior, the sense of pride you got from building, configuring, and fault-testing your own rig was pretty nice.

Now I'm a broken down middle aged man, and most of what I know is obsolescent.
I'd like to get back into the scene, but the gulf in knowledge is far too great to start over again.
Sorry about the blog post, but I saw this thread and nostalgia'd hard.

Jeez, aside from & , all I see are wintel trash and macfags. Didn't ANYONE here use an Amiga, Falcon, RiscPC, or something else cool in the '90s?

6500 was the first machine that wasn't a hand-me-down. My family were early adopters, first got a household computer in the 80s, throughout the 90s we usually had about a dozen. We eventually started buying mountains of equipment from tech-bubble closeout auctions for pennies on the dollar and reselling whatever we didn't want via newspaper ads, until eBay opened and all the firesales went there where the whales are. Either way, we never paid more than $800-$2500.

My final Mac was the 2003 MDD G4, last of the OS native 9-booters. All three major modern platforms (80x86 running M$/OSuX/open-sores eunuchs) are equally faggy, so I use whatever's cheapest.

Mah nigga

I was 9 in 1998 so prob a dell. Big black tower with hooked groves and external floppy readers.

I had a 386 and then later a 486 dx2. Kids today have no idea how expensive tech was - adjusted for inflation those were $7k rigs. When you look back and wonder why the internet and vidya was so based in the early '90s, realize that the audience were the kind of people with that much disposable income.

Mostly true for more modern platforms (especially if you were gullible enough to buy new from brick & mortar retail), but remember there were lots of cheap older-gen platforms for $100-$500 like the C64, roughly equivalent to today's netbooks and tablets. They were made cheaper yet by the fact that other consumer electronics like TVs and audiotape decks were good enough to be functional substitutes for expensive things like the high-resolution monitors and FDD/HDD storage needed for newer platforms.

Clear into the mid-90s, a lot of oldschool 8/16-bit platforms were still extremely well supported by developers, cheap, and very popular.

Admittedly, there was a brief gap between the death of those platforms and the wave of sub-$500 32-bit PCs like eMachines in the late-90s (made no better by rampant RAM/CRT/HDD component manufacturer collusion and price-fixing that international law enforcement only broke up in the 2000s), when a lot of cheapskates were caught in the lurch.

shiieeeeet I just found mine the other day, put a new 9 volt in the back and it still works. Those things were built to last

Used this fucker till '99.
Sweet 2Mhz 6502, 64k of RAM, 9600 baud modem and a 1541 floppy drive.
At the time I really wanted an Archimedes but they were hard to get your hands on. Still want one now.

read the ads in these old BYTE magazines

archive.org/details/byte-magazine