In mid-1999, our household was saturated with computers!
Our primary family computer was still the "Dream 486" minitower that I am currently attempting to rebuild. By 1999, I had upgraded it from its original 1995 state.
-QDI V4P895GRN/SMT Motherboard
-AMD Am486DX4-100 CPU
-64MB RAM (Upgraded from 16MB)
-VLB Multifunction I/O Controller for IDE, Floppy, Parallel, Serial & Game port
-Western Digital 4GB Hard Drive (Upgraded from a Conner CFA810A that had developed 120MB of bad sectors!)
-Trident TGUI9440 VLB Video Card
-Reveal SC-500 Sound Blaster Pro Compatible Audio
-56K Modem (Upgraded from 14.4K)
-56x CD-ROM Drive (Upgraded from 4x. This is the ONLY CD drive I've ever seen higher than 52x, even to this day)
-Travan-style IDE Tape Backup Drive (Still didn't work, but I never removed it)
-3.5in 1.44MB Floppy Drive
-Windows 98 Original (Upgraded from Windows 95)
-15in Eye-Q CRT Monitor
-HP DeskJet 400 Printer (Upgraded from an Epson FX-850 Dot Matrix)
Later that year, it died (I don't remember how), and got replaced by a cheap HP Pavilion 4530 (K6-2 350MHz, 32MB RAM, 4GB Hard Drive, Windows 98, don't remember the rest of the specs. It wasn't a bad computer, it was just extremely boring).
In 1998, I got my own laptop, a CTX EzBook 770MS-XJ, and used it quite heavily through about 2001 or so. It was the first sub-$1000 laptop my mom and I had ever seen.
-Intel Pentium MMX 200MHz
-16MB RAM
-1.6GB Hard Drive
-Trident GPU of some sort with 1.5MB dedicated video memory (Don't remember the exact chipset)
-12 inch DSTN LCD
-Onboard Crystal audio, don't remember the exact model
-14.4K PCMCIA Modem (It didn't originally come with a modem)
-Removable 20x CD-ROM
-Removable 3.5in 1.44MB Floppy
-Windows 95 OSR2.5
-Battery life of maybe 90 minutes tops (AWFUL!)
In 1997, my mom had bought an old Toshiba T3100 portable at a government auction for $20. I did briefly use it as a legitimate laptop before getting the CTX, afterwards it became more of a "just for fun" system. In 1999, I was actually using it as extra storage for the Dream 486 by connecting them with Interlnk and a LapLink cable.
-AMD 80286 8MHz
-640KB RAM
-20MB Hard Drive
-CGA graphics with special 640x400 monochrome high-res mode
-10-inch orange plasma monochrome display
-PC Speaker
-3.5in 720KB Floppy
-MS-DOS 6.22 (Upgraded from 4.01)
-No battery whatsoever
I don't remember if it was 1999 or not, but for a brief while in the late 90s I had a couple 486 computers I had gotten from the school to play around with. I don't recall most of the specs, just that one was a 66MHz minitower and the other was a 33MHz desktop with bad memory.
And to round off our 486 collection, my mom had purchased a GIGANTIC Gateway 2000 4DX2-66V desktop in late 1998 or so. Although not as big as the skyscraper that is the tower model, this thing was still huge. It also came with an equally-humongous 17-inch CRT and an enormous AnyKey keyboard. Oh, and did I mention how HEAVY all of these things were? We're talking easily in excess of 100 ̶s̶o̶l̶a̶r̶ ̶m̶a̶s̶s̶e̶s̶ pounds altogether. It was a beast! The only specs I remember are that it had a 486DX-2 66MHz, 12MB RAM and was running Windows 3.1, don't recall the DOS version.
Finally, in late 1997 my older brother had gotten himself a cheap Compaq for college, a Presario 2200. The form factor was cool, but otherwise it was a really crappy system. The name of the game for this system was "cheap cheap CHEAP", and boy did it show. $1200 for a package deal that also included a monitor and printer.
-Cyrix MediaGX 180MHz (AWFUL processor)
-16MB RAM (AWFUL memory)
-1.6GB Hard Drive (AWFUL hard drive)
-Onboard MediaGX graphics & audio (AWFUL graphics, mediocre audio performance, but AWESOME speakers)
-33.6K Modem
-8x CD-ROM
-3.5in 1.44MB Floppy
-Windows 95 OSR2
-Compaq V410 14in CRT Monitor (AWFUL monitor)
-Canon BJC-250 Printer (AWFUL printer)
That completes our "moment in time" look at the computers in our household as of 1999.
