appiah4 wrote:

I dont see what is so amazing about the price that is a cpu motherboard combo for a very high end part. Today the highest end intel enthusiast cpu alone is 1700 bucks and the board costs 500 on top of that. It sure didnt get cheaper.

The dollar amount may be similar, but not when you figure in inflation. More importantly, back in the early 90s a top of the line CPU was made obsolete every 12 months. What good was a 33Mhz 486 five years later in 1996 when the Pentium and PPro 200Mhz were out? Now, if you'd bought a top of the line enthusiast CPU+Mobo combo five years ago (way back in 2012), you'd likely have an i7 3970x on an X79 chipset. A 6-core 12 thread 3.5Ghz (4Ghz Turbo, plus its unlocked) Sandy Bridge E is still an incredibly powerful CPU. And that chip was "only" $1000...

Spending money like that on computer components back in the 90s however would have been either completely necessary for your business to run or a complete waste of money for even an enthusiast.

Obsolete, yes, but still usable into the late 90s, like Core2s are still fine for websurfing and wordprocessing, casual gaming etc now.

BitWrangler wrote:

Obsolete, yes, but still usable into the late 90s, like Core2s are still fine for websurfing and wordprocessing, casual gaming etc now.

A Pentium 4 from 2001 is still fine for some people if they're just web browsing. Many people still do competitive gaming on Core 2 Duos and Quads (games with low system requirements and low settings).

I can't imagine trying to use a 33Mhz 486 that cost $2500 past 1995 or so, if that. My brother upgraded to a 133Mhz Cyrix back then to be able to play games and run Windows 95 decently. I know, hindsight is 20/20, but anyone who had seen the pace of technology up to 1991 would have been crazy to spend $2500 on a processor\motherboard combo with any hope of it keeping pace with software for more than a few years.

As someone who ALWAYS had a computer under his hands. The whole thing of computers being obsolete in a month was extremely hyperbolic. I could type in kindergarten. (age 5) So I was NOT a casual user. The family had an 8088 up until 1993. Then we got a 68030 mac (386sx ish). That worked perfectly until at least 2000. We still used it side by side with a new 400mhz celeron unit. Next computer was an AMD 1800+. I could go on.

so were computers expensive? Oh hell yes. That 68030 setup cost $5000 and my dad shelled out another $5000 for a laser printer. Ever see that video where the kid opens a N64 and goes batshit? That was thanksgiving 1993 for me, But for the average user, it was never something you would re-purchase every year unless you literally had more money than sense. I'm typing this up right now on a dual xeon based on the C2Q (xeon x5470 if you must know). It is more than adequate for anything non gaming. When you bought a computer, you used that thing until it literally fell apart from age. I view this whole planned obsolescence, disposable everything culture with disdain. #redpill

For the record, I still own that 68030 and laser printer. HP printers were made of adamantium and priced accordingly. Last I checked, it has made over 150k pages in its life. It would still be in service if it wasn't go god awful slow at anything beyond word documents.

Anything single core is unusable for modern day browsing, whether it is Pentium 4 or Pentium M or older. Speaking from experience. You'd be wasting time and disabling Javascript and other things is pointless since so many websites use those elements.Core 2 Duos are still fine though.

oeuvre wrote:

Anything single core is unusable for modern day browsing, whether it is Pentium 4 or Pentium M or older. Speaking from experience. You'd be wasting time and disabling Javascript and other things is pointless since so many websites use those elements.Core 2 Duos are still fine though.

We have a few 1.5ghz single core amd allinone systems at work, they are more then fine online. But those are APUs.
Use is relevant tho. We aren't using them for Facebook or YouTube and junk.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

BitWrangler wrote:

Obsolete, yes, but still usable into the late 90s, like Core2s are still fine for websurfing and wordprocessing, casual gaming etc now.

A Pentium 4 from 2001 is still fine for some people if they're just web browsing. Many people still do competitive gaming on Core 2 Duos and Quads (games with low system requirements and low settings).

I can't imagine trying to use a 33Mhz 486 that cost $2500 past 1995 or so, if that. My brother upgraded to a 133Mhz Cyrix back then to be able to play games and run Windows 95 decently. I know, hindsight is 20/20, but anyone who had seen the pace of technology up to 1991 would have been crazy to spend $2500 on a processor\motherboard combo with any hope of it keeping pace with software for more than a few years.

I used a 486DX2-66 as my daily driver until mid-2000.

It ran a modern enough web browser and OS, msn messenger and ICQ, Office for school, and a lot of games I played (for the latest-greatest games ai used my dads PC).

BUT...this was because I was a poor teenager with no job/money. The computer was given to me for free 3.5 years after it was bought new (for a pretty penny). So yeah, different times.

Cloudflare actively blocks access to any site they have their tentacles coiled around, if you try to connect to it with an old browser. THAT is the biggest hurdle in using an older system on the web today.

Spent a good deal of yesterday taking apart and cleaning an old AT case and PSU I am restoring to its original configuration. Clenaing AT cases is tedious work, I have a pretty bad back ache today. Regardless, the whole system is back together, aside from the PSU which I will mount today. I will probably do the smoke test tomorrow night.

oeuvre wrote:

Anything single core is unusable for modern day browsing, whether it is Pentium 4 or Pentium M or older. Speaking from experience. You'd be wasting time and disabling Javascript and other things is pointless since so many websites use those elements.Core 2 Duos are still fine though.

This is accurate, as I have just recently experienced this border first hand. ThinkCentre M52 from 2005, came with P4 631 3.0Ghz single core, one of the last single cores to be precise.

Browsing was VERY cumbersome up until impossible even with a lot of blocker software. And you can forget about watching videos a la youtube completely, even with a (for that time)powerful graphics card.

I swapped out the P4 3.0Ghz Single core for a Pentium D 940 (Presler) 2.8Ghz Dual core (one of the first dual cores (before Core2s), which renders the computer usable now in terms of daily web browsing.

Are we talking strictly Windows here? Because there are some very light linux distributions and retro browsers made for those that I can work with even on Pentium III systems..

I guess, because yah, I can struggle onto the net sometimes with Puppy linux and a PII-366 compaq laptop.

Brought in the HP Pavilion 7955 into my house from my car, popped it open to see what the fans looked like, and there was dust and pet hair everywhere.

As soon as I get home, I'm going to clean that sucker out, replace the thermal grease on the CPU, install my GeForce 6200 card, and install Windows 98SE on it (going to get the drivers somehow). And I thought the board used the Socket 423, but it's a Socket mPGA478B.

appiah4 wrote:

Are we talking strictly Windows here? Because there are some very light linux distributions and retro browsers made for those that I can work with even on Pentium III systems..

This. I had no problem recently with a 1.4ghz P3 system running firefox 12 and win2k with the internet. Sure it was abit slow. But not so slow it could not be used.

Spend a good 6 hours finding the source of the LS486E behaving strangely as two unfortunate circumstances happened - a PCI soundblaster and a misplaced jumper on the multiplier pins.
When the cache was turned off the graphics and sound card worked, when it was active "extened functionality"(like dma transfer with the soundblaster) would lock the system. There was also corruption when on the command line like random error messages and overflow warnings. Even after the jumper "cleanup" sound was not correctly working while, finally, the Riva worked under Windows95 and I could run Wintune. After inserting an ISA SB everything was fine and the system is running stable and pretty swift now.
I assume an interrupt issue but I'm not really sure. I have SB PCI cards running in both the P66 and the HOT433 without any problems.

Testing the Apple IIe parts I got last month...

Found 2x speech synth cards for said Apples. Dicking around ensued: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvOB9n_kgeI

If you're too young to get it... http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-your-base-are-belong-to-us

^^ 10/10. Jesus christ that meme is 19 years old now.

Made an S-Video cable for an Atari 800.

xjas wrote:

^^ 10/10. Jesus christ that meme is 19 years old now.

You have no chance to survive make your time.

That still sneaks into my daily vocabulary...

Put a UV green round/braided pata cable in my core2 system, but at 36" its abit long.
Ill have to find a shorter one when I custom wire the whole system.