Mmm... Yes... IBM had some pretty incompatible models in the early to mid 90's.
Soundcards not compatible, OS/2 not running and other stuff.

Other brands that had bad things going in the 90's were brands like Apple and Escom.
Apple had some pretty horrible DOS implementation and such. Cross-compatibility with X86 systems.
Not that it mattered that much, just a failure when looking at the fact that it was a sales point.
In short... Apple not delivering.

Escom bought the rights to some of the Amiga models (if not all) and used an incompatible FDD.
Not that all software was incompatible, only some of the most used titles.
Wich again, led to a horrible experience. Escom released a fix later on.
At least they did something, yet it was just too late.

I think the 90s was a minefield in general. I quickly learnt to stick with the branded stuff, and not save money and going with a "100% compatible" version. I also built my first computer in around 1995 or 1996 or so, a 486 machine with an AMD DX4, because buying in the shops you just had no idea what parts they put in...

brostenen wrote:

Mmm... Yes... IBM had some pretty incompatible models in the early to mid 90's.
Soundcards not compatible, OS/2 not running and other stuff.

Hmm, I'd love to know more on that... 😉 Mine won't post with a new VIA usb 2.0 card. Had 9x drivers! x-P
Earlier I put a Promise ATA66 card in to use a 120GB hard drive. The bios won't naively support more than 32GB. I tried all driver versions I could, but Win2k got blue screens when I did a clean install using that card and the 120gb drive. Win98 actually worked but had extreme buggyness before I installed the 9x driver and after that the boot time was surpisingly slow... hehe... good old times of messin with old computer crap. wooohooo....

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I think the 90s was a minefield in general. I quickly learnt to stick with the branded stuff, and not save money and going with a "100% compatible" version. I also built my first computer in around 1995 or 1996 or so, a 486 machine with an AMD DX4, because buying in the shops you just had no idea what parts they put in...

PCchips (Amptron) was junk, and ECS too. I think Acorp was bad too, I had a flaky board from them also.

My trashed IBM Aptiva had an Acer motherboard. I don't know about Acer too much.

Packard bell! Dealing with their crappiness every day! But I like them.

DELL

Sure, they look nice and pro up front........until you have to deal with their power supplies

Never understood why ECS get so much stick, never had a problem with any of their boards and when they go for it they can make good stuff. In the 2000s, the PF5 kicked the shit out of the competing Asus boards and cost a lot less on top of it.

Things sure change. Brands of parts or complete systems?

Worst system brands, from what i have seen:
> Packard Bell - Really ugly to look at as well. Probably hurt HP's sales as most people thought they were the same company.
> IBM never really made anything good past the 286 era. Ugly too.
> Anything cobbled together by the local store, Peckham Computers, was bound to break down.
> Apple sucked at that time.
> Advent - PC World stuff.
> Time - From the UK, not really the worst as they were very cheap and used standard parts, you could make a decent system out of them if you had the patience but they would not win any races. Still, a lot are still running out there, so they did something right. I don't mind them, but they were sure limited out of the box.
> Tiny - UK again and often confused with Time. They were uglier to look at and used worse parts; Where Time liked ECS boards which at least worked, Tiny liked Wan Hung Lo boards with strange silkscreens... Oddly, they usually came with really good LG monitors right until the end, unstable Athlon's which smelled like burning with an awesome LG StudioWorks display...
> Elonex - Think they started in the 90s. Used by some government places, horrible.
> RM - Used by schools with their horrible "Window Box" software for the kiddies. Performed like crap, suspiciously similar to Tiny but still around.

Some of the best;
> Compaq - Goes without saying. Contura, Deskpro, Armada, Prolinea... Excellent systems that refused to die.
> HP - Got the job done, kind of a second go-to workhorse after the Deskpro.
> Dell - Yeah, I said it. Dell were pretty good back in the earlier days. They sure suck now ever since the latter half of the 90s.
> Zenith - For what time they were around, built some of the best laptops I have ever seen.
> Toshiba - They worked well.
> Everex - I think they were still around, if not, scratch that. Every Everex product I have ever seen has been solid though, so they make the list until I know otherwise.
> Mitac - Good budget boxes using fairly standard parts so you could always upgrade them. Suspect they were behind other labels like Akhter (Used by the military).
> Golding - A local builder making systems for nearby factories and such. Used very high quality parts (Strong cases, QDI motehrboards, Matrox VGA and stuff like that).

I could add more if I wanted to go into components, I might do later, but I have to go out now. Also, some really good industrial machines out there that don't seem to get much love. There are also those weird brands which sit in the middle, like AST and DEC, which I don't know what to say for because their products were a bit of a mixed bag. This is all going off of memory anyway as I have always preferred clones/compatibles to OEM boxes when possible. Probably why I like makers like Golding, because they used off-the-shelf components.

computergeek92 wrote:

Quite ironic that IBM was so bad in the 90's when THEY designed the first x86 pc...

Where exactly is the irony? The first IBM PC was a pretty horrible design as well.
Compared to competing machines at the time, the IBM PC was way overpriced, and needed far more components than other machines. It also had less features than competing machines and suffered from poor performance.
There are also some design choices that are dubious at best (such as CGA snow, broken colorburst signal in 80-column mode and the fact that the relative clock phase in the machine is not deterministic between different components).
Early IBM PC PSUs were also under-specced and prone to failure.

Aside from that, IBM didn't actually design all that much.
99% of the logic in an IBM PC is basically from select chips from the Intel MCS-85 chipset, which was developed in the 1970s for the 8080/8085 CPUs.
And the video circuitry was based around a Motorola MC6845 chip (again 1970s technology).
IBM didn't add a whole lot of their own. Which is why the hardware was trivial to clone.

Shh, you'll make the fanboys mad! 😁

IBM, to me, were just a tool to get other people to build the same thing better. As soon as the clone makers got the hang of what they were doing and started opening their standards, IBM were pretty much a pointless entity for reasons like the ones you just specified.

Scali wrote:

Where exactly is the irony? The first IBM PC was a pretty horrible design as well.

Oh nevermind that, i'm not as knowledgeable about anything pre 486/386 as I am with my motherload of 90's and 2000's PC's.

As we well know, Intel took over PC design after IBM did.

Packard Bells were mostly terrible; we had a Pentium 100 machine and a couple of my friends had 486DX2/66 machines. I remember the CD-ROM in ours went bad about four days after we got it. Rather than just get the drive replaced for some reason my Dad returned the whole thing and got a new one. THAT CD-ROM died probably two years later; still an insanely short time imo. The Aztech soundcard/modem combo I also remember being junk. When Windows 95 played its startup sound, you'd get static and eventually a high-pitched whine that would not go away. Occasionally playing another digitized sound would make it go back to normal, but usually not. Every one I ever worked on had random dead components (RAM, onboard video cards, etc.)

I never owned a Mac back then but we had a couple in school and they ALWAYS seemed to have issues. They'd have the sadface disk icon on startup more often than not (or was it a disk with an X in it? I can't remember). The old Apple IIC+ we had in one classroom held up better than the Macs.

I don't know why, but every Micronics 486 board that I ever came across never worked right. Maybe I just got some duds. This was also years ago so who knows, I might have screwed something up.

On the flipside, I remember mid-to-late 90s Gateway 2000s being rock solid machines that performed very well. I rebuilt my family's Zeos 386SX, and that thing is a TANK. I put all the components through hell in storage (motherboard being tossed in a random box with no antistatic bag), and the damn thing STILL powers up and works fine besides a single small blown fuse near the keyboard connector.

leileilol wrote:

DELL

Sure, they look nice and pro up front........until you have to deal with their power supplies

^This

I never really liked anything that used non-standardized components, so anything that fits in here will often get a place on my list 😁

Basically speaking. If you wanted something that just worked, you had to stick to one rule.
That rule being: Dont buy brands.

Some models of each brands was okay, some were shit and some were good. All depends.
To avoid a bad machine, you either had to know each brand to the dept or...
Build your own, using reliable tested and stable parts. That's what I remember most.

Wasn't olivetti one of those shitty brands too? Brands you had to know what to upgrade
with, in order to avoid prob's.

computergeek92 wrote:

Hmm, I'd love to know more on that... 😉

Remember that some had probs installing Os/2 on some of the Ps1 and Aptiva models.
Shure they could install on other models of the IBM lineup.

People was constantly complaining on them not being able to install certain hardware
in certain models. Wich models I can't remember.
Eighter hardware incompatibility or just that they were not doing it right.
Could also be some incompatibility between hardware and drivers.

When I think about it. Then it was not only IBM. It was other brands too.
Most of all... It was brands and not clone's that had issues.
Like me, trying to run basic dos games on an "clone", wich had some strange DOS.
I don't really remember the name of the brand. The model was something like 1024
or something like that. (Amstrad perhaps?) Or it was the disc encoding that made
it all impossible. Just remember that it was like not 100% compatible.

To me, IBM always seemed to be a mixed bag in the 90s. Pretty good laptops but very questionable desktops, with IBM's own OS/2 being incompatible with some Aptiva models (there's even a flyer in my copy of Warp 3 that says something like this). Used to have an Aptiva E series K6-2 system that died a few days after I picked it up from the dump. Interestingly, it had a K6-2/450 that was underclocked to 300MHz. Their 300GL/PL series, several of which I saw throughout school, seemed to be a lot better, though they were pretty old by the time I went through middle school (2005-2008 - in other words, Pentium/Pentium II machines still in service in the era of the P4 and C2D).

As for other brands... Compaq and Toshiba were among the best, Dells were OK if you can tolerate the proprietary parts, and HP was a mixed bag in my mind as well. I used to have a massive ~1997 P233MMX-based Pavilion tower with an 8GB Quantum Bigfoot hard drive that still worked but I wound up selling it (not before keeping the HDD for myself), but I also had a ~1999 Celeron based Pavilion that, like the Aptiva, died within a few days of me acquiring it. Their Vectra series seemed to be a lot better from what I've heard (never had one myself). Another decent make that came into my mind was Gateway 2000. I've got a Pentium Pro 200-based G6-200 that still works, though it doesn't see much use. Ditto with a P200MMX-based Solo 2300 - still works, doesn't see much use.

I think most of us know how bad Packard Bell was, though most of the duds seem to have long since proven that they were, indeed, duds. My Legend 300CD (P60-based!) still soldiers on, sitting next to the Pentium Pro in storage. And yeah, confusion with HP (Hewlett-Packard) as well probably hurt their sales. eMachines, which appeared with a bang in the late 90s with new systems at bargain bin prices, was pretty bad. How do you think they managed to get those bargain bin prices on their systems? To be fair, the quality did seem to improve after a few years or so, but when they started out...

There was a local make named Cardinal that seemed to make high-quality systems (AOpen cases/mobos etc.) throughout the 90s and into the 2000s. At least, until they moved to another city, stopped making systems, and started selling refurbished Dell and Apple systems...

brostenen wrote:

Wasn't olivetti one of those shitty brands too? Brands you had to know what to upgrade
with, in order to avoid prob's.

I dunno. Both Olivettis our family bought new were decent enough (386SX-25, PCS Educator 486-DX/2-66). In fact that 486 was my to-go retro machine in 1995-2012 and ultimately failed only due my stupid mishandling.

Then again... I never have had any trouble with modern day Acers either and I've heard they are apparently crap. Fool's luck I guess. 😀

Sutekh94 wrote:

To me, IBM always seemed to be a mixed bag in the 90s. Pretty good laptops but very questionable desktops,

Pretty much this. Say what you want of the desktop variants, but IBM laptops (Thinkpads) were awesome. Still are.

I remember Acer and Packard Bell as the most complained about consumer brands. Probably because that was what sold best and so I heard about them more.

I almost miss the ridiculous plastic bezels and built-in speakers on super crap CRT nonsense. 😀

Maybe you could buy 12V DC (not AC) powered speakers and instead of plugging power brick, you could take 12V from the molex plug of the computer's PSU :p

I hate to continue to crap on Packard Bell (or not I guess) but you reminded me how TERRIBLE the CRT monitor we had was. It was the blurriest monitor I've ever used, and those side-mount speakers were ugly and sounded awful as well.

I also had an Acer P90 system that performed really well but had one of the worst proprietary cases I'd ever seen. IIRC I had to dismantle the entire case to get the drive cage out to remove the HD. I had a late 90s HP Vectra VL Pentium II system that was similar. Come to think of it, late 90s proprietary cases are the main reason I started building my own machines.

Yeah the proprietary cases (and motherboard designs) were usually quite annoying.

Of course nowadays we often still have proprietary PSU and front-panel connections, and permanent rear panel port layouts.