Tons on google books, eg Infoworld. https://books.google.com/books?id=sFAEAAAAMBAJ

I think the thread would be great showing the old computers that users here had.

I love looking at these old computer magazine articles, especially from around 1993 thru 1998. I think the idea of the thread is to place some of the images here for lustier viewing. I had a CTX monitor, similar to the one in this image.

Here's my computer in 2003. Case was an Elan Vital (I only found out about it from the vintage computer thread, before that I had no idea what the brand was)). At this time it was an Epox 8K3A+, XP1600, Thermalright AX7, a 64 meg Geforce 4Ti4200, a Philips Accoustic Edge soundcard, and only 256 megs of PC2700. This photo was to show my innovative and low dollar effort to increase cooling of my slightly overclocked video card. My game of choice was Il2 Forgotten Battles, and for every hardware upgrade I did I would increase detail settings and immediately be battling low frame rates again.

I was given two of these cases by the IT person at the job I had in 2001. She hated them, and when she had to work on a computer that had one she ordered a new case and gave them to me to get rid of them. When she gave me the first one, I had just ordered a baby AT FIC VA-503+ from Tiger Direct, which lucky for me was on back order. Now that I had an ATX case, I changed my order to a Soyo 5EMA+. Tiger Direct screwed up and sent me a Soyo SYK7VTA Socket A motherboard instead at no extra charge. Which was fine, except now I had to scrounge up a CPU, because my K6-2+ 475 obviously wouldn't fit.

I'd planned on using my Socket 7/AT case to build a computer for my friends, but then she (the IT Admin) gave me another of these cases, so I ended up building a Socket A system for them as well. Sometime later I bought a used CD burner, and gave it to my friends when they were visiting. My friend wasn't/isn't computer savvy, and never got around to installing it (though his daughters badly wanted him to so they could copy CDs). Months after I had given it to him, he still hadn't installed it, so I took these photos and emailed them to him to show how easy it was to install.

It didn't do any good. I finally installed it when I visited them in 2004, and his daughters had a celebratory CD burning party!

Also, between the top photo and the bottom three, I had upgraded to an SLK900A, which I bought to go along with the XP1700 and a 512 stick of HyperX 333 DDR. That shiny PSU is a Sparkle 400 watt, and it is powering my mother's computer now.

In the vintage computer thread a couple of people had fond memories of these computer cases, but I found this review to match my own experience. But they were great for free.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=693

feipoa wrote:

I love looking at these old computer magazine articles, especially from around 1993 thru 1998. I think the idea of the thread is to place some of the images here for lustier viewing. I had a CTX monitor, similar to the one in this image.

Micro_Express_Infoworld_Feb_1996.jpg

I have a few old magazines I like to go through from time to time. The ads are the best part.

This photo is from 2004:

The only existing snippet of our Pentium 120 / S3 Virge / 24MB EDO / 1.2 GB HDD (built in late 1998). Words fail to describe how I loved it back then because of all the great games it was able to run 😀

And this convenient shot I made in july 2007 depicts the other two PCs I ever owned in my youth:

The one on the left started its life in late 2001 as almost exactly the PC from my sig (only the original one had a Celeron 800 and half the RAM). At the time of the photo it was a Pentium 4 2.4 / Radeon 9550 / 1024MB DDR.

And the one on the right is actually my first retro rig (yeah, I grew tired of applying community patches to play old PC games on then-modern Windows XP in as early as 2007) 😀 This one was an attempt to have "only the bestest parts evah": P3 450 / Voodoo2 SLI / AWE64 Gold / GUS PnP 3.0 (they were much cheaper then). It was then I realized that this is just silly: I didn't enjoy the Voodoo2/SLI, GUS or AWE64 Gold as much as I was supposed to according to their "popularity" (GUS' wavetable is not my thing, the CT4500 beats the CT4390 by not having the gimmicky RCA output, and the Voodoo3 PCI is a much better solution for Glide than V2 SLI). Have sold it last year.

Both the Pentium 120 and the Celeron 800 now comprise my small retro PC fleet - as replicas, but oh well 😀

Self stuff 'eh? I was trying to find a photo of my office in 1999, but cannot seem to locate it. Here are some items I found in the meantime,
The following was taken sometime in 2001. Don't look at the photo dates. Very often I shrunk photos and resaved them years later. I had this LG Phenom Express with a MIPS 100 MHz CPU, running WinCE 2.11. It was surprisingly fast and was still very usable until around 2005. I used to use IRC a lot on it and often took it to the toilet with me.

Same time, around 2001 or 2002. This was my working Mac SE/30 setup with printer.

This is an early Mac Plus I was refurbishing. Sometime in 2004.

This was the office from a friend of mine, circa 2003.

Here's a few more of the Phenom. Box is from March 1999, I think. I used to connect it to the internet (dialup) with my Nokia cell phone (shown). I sold it in 2006 for only $75 on eBay.

My room circa 2007, when i collect PC artifacts like mad. VFX-1, 3DO Blaster, Quantum 3D Obsidian X-24, famous Roland holy grails, IBM Music Feature, Ultrasound Extreme and etc, etc, etc - you name it. All in this pile. All these CDs (1000+) not games, but music CDs (genres: industrial, ebm, synth-pop, dark-ambient and etc.)

You guys had good cameras back then. I had...a webcam and really shitty camera. Also, apologies for the long post...

2001:
Celeron 633Mhz/128mb/4GB hdd (located on top of the case), TTX 1774 monitor (This picture is right after I replaced a 14" TTX monitor)

Early 2002:
Pentium 4 1.6GHz/256mb/80GB hdd, same monitor

Late 2002:
Added a server computer (Celeron 366, with a PCChips all in one AT board (so many header cables!). I decided to paint it black and yellow, because why not?

Also shown, a Pentium Pro 180 I put together for my mom around same time (late 2002)

Late 2003:
Added a laptop for university (Acer Travelmate 290). Had one of the earliest Pentium M processors I saw, and it was so good on battery life compared to the P4-based mobile CPUs...
Also replaced the horribly unstable Celeron server, with a slower but more reliable IBM 300PL (p2/266)

2004:
Got a KVM to clean up the desk. PC specs were about the same, upgraded to 512MB, added a 200GB HDD, video card was now a GF4 Ti4200

2005:
Started working in a computer store...and buying things...with actual money!
Server was moved to the basement, bought a (very small 15") LCD, that I still use today for retro systems.
I believe the tower was an AMD XP 2600+ or 3000+, 2GB RAM, Asus A7V880, Radeon 9700 Pro

No pictures from 2006 when I had a massive 20" or 21" Samsung CRT...

2007:
Another new desk, New monitors (The Viewsonic VX2025wm on the right is an amazing monitor)
PC was an Athlon64 X2 3800+, 2GB, Asus A8N-E, with a sad 7600GS video card

Love looking at all these photos. 😁

Sadly, nothing to contribute myself. Never owned any camera that was not part of my phone and my first mobile phone in 2003 (my first year of college) didn't have a camera in it. Earliest photo I can find of one of my rigs is from 2010. Blehck! 🙁

I've been looking for my old PC setup pictures for a while and this topic reminded me to have another look. I knew I had some somewhere, but couldn't find any on my HDD. Then I remembered, they were saved on my old Pentium III PC in the early 2000s. The old HDD is still going strong in 1 of my current systems and sure enough, I found them on there! 😎

You'll have to excuse the picture quality on these, early 2000s camera + early 2000s web optimisation, coupled with poor lighting.

Post edited to add: I was able to date these photos, they're from 2002.

At the time these pics were taken, this was my main system:

Specs then: Pentium III 650MHz, 256MB RAM, 40GB & 200GB HDDs, DVD ROM & CD Writer. Nvidia TNT2 32MB AGP Graphics, Aureal Vortex 2 PCI Sound, Hauppauge WinTV Analogue TV Tuner Card. Running either Windows ME or Windows 2000 (or XP, I can't tell from that image). I still have everything except the monitor, which died in the mid-2000s. Those speakers are still in active usage.

Some Epson Inkjet Printer & a Parallel Port-based Scanner to the left. Plus for added retro value, an old Audio Cassette deck & a bright yellow VHS-C camcorder on top of the PC, plus a boombox to the left and a VCR underneath the monitor connected to the TV tuner. 🤣

To the right of my main PC are these 3:

PC 1 (left) specs: Pentium III 600MHz, 128MB RAM, 40GB HDD, CD Writer. Voodoo3 2000 16MB AGP Graphics, onboard sound. Same OS as main PC.

PC 2 (middle) specs: Socket 5 LPX system, IDT Winchip C6 200MHz CPU, 72MB RAM. Unknown HDD size & had standard CD-Rom drive. S3 Trio64 1MB Onboard Graphics. Windows 98SE would have been the OS.

PC 3 (right) specs: Socket 7 motherboard, AMD K6-2 500 @ 333MHz, 128MB RAM, DVD ROM & CD Writer. Voodoo3 2000 16MB PCI Graphics, Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 PCI Sound. Ran same OS as main PC.

I still have everything except the left monitor, which went faulty and was binned.

To the right of those PCs are another 3:

The specs that I remember them having at the time:

PC 1 (left) specs: Intel 486 SX 33MHz, 32MB RAM. Tseng Labs ET 4000 1MB Onboard Graphics. Would have dual booted Windows NT 4 Workstation & Windows 95.

PC 2 (middle) specs: Intel 486 SX-25 @ 33MHz with 64MB RAM. 1MB Onboard Graphics. Same OS as above.

PC 3 (right) specs: AMD Am486 DX-40 @ 33MHz, 32MB RAM. Hercules Monochrome ISA Graphics Card. Ran DOS & Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in Monochrome. May have ran Windows 95 in Monochrome also. Attached to green screen monitor.

I'm most gutted about these 3 systems, the only thing I still have is the PC on the left itself and parts from the other 2. At least 1 of those keyboards on the right is gone. The thing I'm most gutted about, is that green screen Monochrome monitor on the right is no longer with me. 😢

found this on reddit, someone's setup from 2004. I had the same keyboard and mouse! https://redd.it/90t4k5

Here are a few pictures of my computer setup from my childhood.

This is my setup from 2007 (first photo is in worse quality than the other because it was taken from a video):

My setup from back then consisted of an HP e-PC C10 (bottom-right of #1), an NEC Versa FXi for an IPCOP Firewall (bottom-center of #1), two Linksys routers (on top of the NEC laptop), a Comcast modem (the little black box in the cubby with the NEC laptop next to it), a Compaq EVO D510 e-PC (center of #1 - on a shelf inside the cubby), an HP PS/2 keyboard (seen in both photos - plugged into the HP), a Microsoft USB mouse (black one seen in #1, replaced by a white one seen in #2 when the black one broke - both used on the HP), generic Radio Shack speakers (plugged into the HP), an NEC Multiscan FE700 CRT (plugged into the HP), Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse (slightly shown in #1 - plugged into the Compaq), and a Sony CPD-E240 CRT (slightly shown in #1 - plugged into the Compaq).

And here's a picture from when it changed in 2009 (this was taken on January 2010, but it's been like that since Spring 2009, so it should count?):

In the revised setup, the HP e-PC C10 was replaced by my AMD Athlon 64 rig (shown on the left of the desk), same peripherals on the Compaq (only this time, you can fully see the monitor!), NEC FE700 monitor and the same HP keyboard plugged into the Athlon, and some generic wireless mouse (can't remember its model) plugged into the Athlon).

The only pieces of hardware I still have from those pictures are the Sony monitor, the HP keyboard, the white Microsoft mouse, and the Athlon 64 rig. I do have those two e-PCs shown but they're not the same as the ones from my childhood (I bought new ones on eBay when I found them at good prices a few years ago 😈 ). The NEC monitor died back in August 2010 when I tried to make Ubuntu 10.04 recognize it.

Hoo boy, here's a stroll downThe Creeping Network Memory Lane I'll have to do 2 posts probably, so much to share.....

Random pix from 2004-2006.. I still need to dig through photo prints, since I really didn't save any digital camera pix from before that.

And a little story.. I was the first person to rip and upload a HD DVD to the internet.. finding an exploit in the AACS key implementation in PowerDVD and WinDVD that showed the keys in hex at a certain location that could be read in realtime using WinHEX. It sort of sparked a whole HD DVD / Blu-ray ripping frenzy, 🤣. Had to use the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive at the time, since it was the only available player that worked on the PC that allowed you to rip something.

Ok got a bunch of stuff from 2001. I'll try to briefly comment on them even though I'm never going to remember what was in most of the machines pictured. But enjoy the authentic 2001 styles.

This is my rig from sometime in 2001. This was at a house where my roomates and I would routinely play lan games or play as a clan on the internet Thrusdays and Fridays.

Roomates setup from that time.

Wall o' computers from the same Lan Party house.

The following are all from the testing house where I worked at the time, you might enjoy them for the vintage hardware even though not much to talk about the setting is intense.

Finally a picture of me in my new apartment after moving out of the Lan Party house in late 2001. Enjoy the early aught stylings!

What boggles my mind is how people (me included) ever got on with so little deskspace, or rather, with the keyboard right at the edge of the desktop. My wrists ache just looking at it 😵