dave343 wrote:

I didn't realize how many 486 systems were still being sold in 95-97 because Pentium's for the most part were still out of the budget range for most.

As a poor Eastern European student I bought my 5x86 m/b+CPU+8MB RAM (umm, well, I had stolen the RAM 😖 </confession>) in early 1997 to upgrade a 386SX/4MB. And I still had a CGA monitor. Definitely not period correct but it was I could afford. Connected to a Tseng ET3000 EGA/VGA, first via a home brew mess of resistors in EGA mode then with another self made adapter in VGA mode, with a TSR that set up the card for a 200/240 line output. I guess I still have the source code somewhere 😁

The ET3000 was dog slow, btw. Doom was far from optimal, despite the CPU that was capable of running it at the 35 fps limit.

Later the same year I worked for a month to get a 14" SVGA to finally replace the CGA. Mostly at night. And saved on food too, I lost a lot of weight that summer.

dave343 wrote:

Back on topic, I find the replies interesting. I always thought the transition to Pentium's happened in 93-95, and by 96 not many people were still using 486's unless you upgraded to the DX4 or 5x86. I didn't realize how many 486 systems were still being sold in 95-97 because Pentium's for the most part were still out of the budget range for most.

Yea, I got my 486 in 1994, and I was the first among my friends and family.
I suppose 93-96 is the era where people would upgrade from 286/386 systems to 486. I don't think many people had a Pentium before 95.

There is some logic behind this too.
The 486 was very expensive initially. But around 1992, the product line was updated with the SX and DX2 models, which made them more affordable. And around 1993-1994, clones from AMD and others started to arrive, which were considerably cheaper than Intel at first. This also led to Intel lowering their prices.
Likewise, the early Pentiums were really expensive (800 nm tech). But when the newer socket 7 systems arrived, prices came down, especially when Intel moved from 600 to 350 nm production in 1995.

So I guess what I'm saying is: a 486 is not a 486, and a Pentium is not a Pentium. Various developments occured during their lifetime.

I ran a Pentium 90 with 32 MB of RAM until December 1999. It was awfully slow by then, but still usable for basic internet browsing (on a 28.8K modem), school work, older games, etc. My biggest impetus for an upgrade was wanting to play Sim City 3000. In December '99, I got a Pentium III 500 with 128 MB of RAM. By then, the Pentium III was already up to 800 MHz, but that 500 Mhz Katmai system still felt really high-end.

My uncle had a 486DX2-66 until he upgraded to an Athlon 1 Ghz rig in early 2001.

period correct doesn't mean junk. I mean I remember we couldn't have a real IBM 486 because it was too expensive so we had a IBM compatible that was the term "IBM compatible" this was the DOS days. Then windows 95 came around and we couldn't afford a real Pentium so we bought a Compaq with a cryrix cpu in it. Having lived through this time and being poor and having terrible computers personally don't want to relive that. Maybe some people want to relive having what was considered a bad computer but I don't. So when I build a period correct system I build it out of "NICE" parts.

dave343 wrote:

I'm curious what the actually norm was (affordable norm), vs what was available say during a particular month/year eg; 1994/95. For instance, the Pentium 100 was released on or around March 1994, so building a PC based around that would be period time correct. However, how many people actually had a Pentium 100 on release date, let alone even in 1994. My father bought a NEC Ready 166MMX in April 1997 and it was used until 2001. A friend upgraded his PC to a 166 in 1998, another ran his Pentium 100 until early 2000, and another upgrade from a 386 to a AMD 586/133 in Summer 1997 and was still using it as his main rig in 1999.

I always thought the transition to Pentium Systems for the majority of people happened between 1993-1995, and it wasn't until recently that I realized how many 486 systems were still being sold in 95-97. So I'm curious to know how many of you were still running Pentium 1 systems in the late 90's? and even into the 2000's. And if you were still using a 486 in the late 90's when and what did you upgrade too? I often forget how expensive PC parts were back then, and I guess that's why so many of my friends at least ran their Pentium system's until very late 90's, even into the 2000's.

family PC wise, I know we had a 486 66mhz with 8mb RAM, 330mb SCSI HDD, upgraded with a 16-bit ISA Sound Blaster 16 + CD-ROM drive running Windows 3.1 around 1991.
In 1996 my dad got a Dell desktop from work which was a Pentium 133mhz and I thought it was crazy-nuts-fast, and so futuristic with Windows 95!
IIRC around 1998 or 1999 mom bought an HP Pavillion that had the Celeron 300A, then later after I fried the motherboard she bought another one with a Celeron 333. Around that same time step-dad bought a Dell with a Pentium III 500.
In 2000 I built my first rig with my own money, and the best I could afford was a Celeron 566mhz (compare that to my new retro rig of 'best of 2000' parts, they had Pentium III 1.13ghz that year).
I want to say it was in 2003 or 2004 I upgraded to a Pentium 4 3.2ghz on the older socket, it died and I downgraded (or sidegraded perhaps) to a 3.0ghz on the newer socket.
That lasted me until 2007ish when I upgraded to a Core 2 Duo 3.14ghz on a funky Asus motherboard with triple-channel DDR3
in 2010 I upgraded to the much beloved core i7 2600k quad core that is still not horrible 9 years later (it OC'd on air to 5ghz the entire time I had it).

Since that rig things have jumped a bit quicker... I had a 6 core 5820k in 2015, upgraded to an 8 core 6900k in 2017, then a whole new build in 2018 with the i9 7960x and for the first time ever had 2 current rigs because I got bored and made a 9900k rig a few months later (parted it out when some sense hit me this year).

point is... "affordable" really changes as you go through life. When I was a kid building his first new PC I was buying stuff half as good as the best current tech because that's all I could afford. Now as a yet-unmarried adult with few financial responsibilities and not enough patience I get the best that I can comfortably go broke affording because I love building new things just to see what they can do.

Yeah, "period correct" seems to be a spectrum that widens as we look outward from the 80s and early 90s into the current era - people are running a huge range of hardware today.

Imagine circa-2035 vogoners arguing about 2019 period-correct hardware: A sysadmin for Amazon cloud servers, a hardcore youtube-gamer, a casual online gamer, hobbyist developer, graphic artist, and data archiver/hoarder.

56-cores down to dual-core. 1TB of ram to one 4GB stick. Nvidia 2070 vs onboard Sandy Bridge, and 2TB NVME RAID IOPS monsters and 16TB 3.5" helium drives down to a rickety 160GB 2.5" laptop HDD.

I guess whatever satisfie[sd] my performance and resource needs at the time defines my own version of "period correct".

For me it's about satisfying the fondness I had for the build I had at the time. The look of the straight-outta-Singapore case, the sound of a Western Digital Caviar drive, Creative / Panasonic optical drives, even the KB and mouse I used for years. I'll stretch the truth a little on some of the less ideal parts, like how my first 486 came with a pathetic 2MB of RAM, an 85MB HDD, and a monitor that could only do 1024x768 interlaced.

But I don't get the point of buying a 486 motherboard and shoe-horning a Pentium into it to squeeze every potential drop of performance out of the platform. People might have done that back then, because what choice did they have? But if I want to go fast, I can just turn on my Core i5. That's not what this is about. (To me, of course. Everyone's got their own goals for the hobby.)

Anyway, when you're re-creating a past build and soaking in the nostalgia of life at that time, you kind of hit period-correctness as a matter of course. That's what you had at the time because that's what was available.

As a eastern European I was a bit behind until 2000s. My first computer was Commodore 64 in 1992. Then I've got Amiga 1200 in 1996. My first PC was P133/32MB/some terrible 1MB Matrox/1GB SCSI disk and very slow CD-ROM. Then I used all my saved money to buy P2-233 in 2001 and I was so dissapointed... My friend lent me movie Blade in ASF format and it didn't run smooth :'( But gamig was OK. It had 128MB of RAM and Matrox Millennium II with 8 MB + VooDoo 2. Finally I sold it to one unfortunate man and bought PIII-550 (Abit BE6-II, 512 MB, Radeon 7500, CD-RW) in 2002. It was my firs not-so-outdated computer. Computers started to be really affordable here with Athlons XP.

Fact: first family PC from the summer of 1992 until the end of December 1998 was a 386.

One fascinating thing about the history of personal computers is the ratio price/performance. Inside any time period of retail avalability there was the affordable norm guided by the search for the sweet spot between performance and price. I keep coming back to the Red Hill Guide website to read the opinion of someone who built and sold computers since the early 90's to see what would be considered a bargain back then or a too expensive part for the performance.

Branco wrote:

Red Hill Guide

had never heard of that, what a really cool trip down memory lane that site is!

Warlord wrote:

period correct doesn't mean junk.

Yes, I think here especially it means the opposite - top of the line for a particular time, down to a month of the year in accuracy.

When you folks say "Pentium was 3000$ or so at release" are you talking about the entire system, right? I can't imagine a single component costing that much even if it was cutting edge. Curious as to the cost of the individual components that made up these systems as I imagine that besides the motherboard and CPU you could re-use components from say a 486.

I had no idea at the time how much my family spent on our first computer at the end of '98 but looking back at some old ads it was about $2500 and that got you the fastest Intel CPU and Nvidia's newest GPU of the time.

I remember the family getting a Compaq Presario with a Pentium MMX 166 MHz chip, 24 MB of RAM and a 2 GB HDD around 1996. At that time, it was probably upper mid-range, with most people getting something akin to a P100-P133 with 16 MB of RAM. Top of the line would have been a system with 200-233 MHz chip and 32 MB of RAM.

Of course, I was still using a 16 MHz 386SX at that time. I managed to make Dune II run on it by tweaking the STACKS setting in config.sys.

Boy was I pleased. 😁

I think the country from where you are is a huge factor. Europe was (and still is) divided. People from Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and other countries were much poorer than people from Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, England, etc. So, in some countries people couldn't afford latest hardware. In Romania it was quite common to own a 486 machine even in 2000.

In 1993 I could only dream to own a PC, hardware was very expensive. In 1997 the prices started to come down. The big change was around 2003-2005, computers were very affordable, even the latest hardware didn't cost too much, if you didn't target the top of the line.

Anyway, as I said, it's hard to answer the original question. Some people had the latest and greatest hardware even then. Many more were a few generations behind. And most people didn't own a computer. But again, it depends on who you ask.

Our family had owned a used 286 in ~1992, for a short duration a used 386 in 1998, and, in late '98 (or early 99?), there was a used Pentium 120/16Mb/1.2GB/VirgeDX, initially with no sound card (too bad I don't remember the specs of the other PCs), which had lasted till late 2001 with a mild overclock to 133 Mhz and an 8MB RAM upgrade.

From a gaming standpoint of the 11-year old me, the P1 was the best PC in the world 😀 Running most then-current 2D (StarCraft, Commandos, Dune 2000, Caesar III/Pharaoh, Fallout 1/2, Heroes III even) and some software mode 3D gems (Quake 2, Half-Life, NFS3, Midtown Madness -- in 320x200, naturally!) at playable speeds. It was so much fun pushing this little thing to its limits.

RaverX wrote:

People from Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and other countries were much poorer than people from Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, England, etc. So, in some countries people couldn't afford latest hardware.

I'd say it goes even further than that.
PC hardware was quite expensive compared to home computers and game consoles.
Only the richer people could afford PCs, let alone the latest PCs.
If you look at the demoscene for example, it was mainly active in the 'rich' countries, like Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands.
But even there, it mainly focused on the 'cheap' machines, like the C64 and Amiga, until the early 90s.
And once the PC scene started taking off, it wasn't quite the super-highend machines they targeted. Eg, Second Reality was released in 1993, and targets a 486DX-33. This was considered 'high-end' among your average western European family. When it came out, I didn't have a 486 yet, and I was the first to get a 486 among my friends and classmates.

I am originally from an ex-USSR country and our family only had a 286 until 1997 (when it was replaced with a Socket7 machine running AMD K5-PR133), but there were only a handful of people at my school who even had a PC, so my humble 286 was still an object of envy in the eyes of my classmates.

My cousins had a Pentium-60 in 1995! I was extremely envious. They could run any game they wanted, I had to hunt for games that didn't use any 386 features.

My favourite games that I played on my 286 were: Dune II, Civilization I, Prehistorik I & II, the original Railroad Tycoon, Wolfenstein 3D (that ran really well on the 20MHz 286), F-19 and F-117A...

ShovelKnight wrote:

I am originally from an ex-USSR country and our family only had a 286 until 1997 (when it was replaced with a Socket7 machine running AMD K5-PR133), but there were only a handful of people at my school who even had a PC, so my humble 286 was still an object of envy in the eyes of my classmates.

My cousins had a Pentium-60 in 1995! I was extremely envious. They could run any game they wanted, I had to hunt for games that didn't use any 386 features.

Exactly same story here (Poland)! 286 switched to K5 PR133 in 1997. Same at my school!
Generally things changed in the second half of the 90s - hardware became easly available and cheaper and people started buying stuff. And in early 2000s we already had the stuff which was considered top notch everywhere else in the world.

ShovelKnight wrote:

My favourite games that I played on my 286 were: Dune II, Civilization I, Prehistorik I & II, the original Railroad Tycoon, Wolfenstein 3D (that ran really well on the 20MHz 286), F-19 and F-117A...

No Perestroika? ;D

-

My 486DX33 system with a GD-5428 VLB, SB Pro, 4MB RAM and 213MB HDD cost around $2,000+Tax in Autum 1992. That, I remember VERY clearly. It was EXPENSIVE. Most of my friends still had 286/386 PCs or ran on upgraded Amigas.

By 1994 most people had upgraded to a 486DX/DX2, but people who had 286/386 PCs at home was not unheard of even as late as 1998. I had one such friend who loved coming over to play games on my 486/Pentium but only had a 286 with Hercules graphics at home. He would play the fuck out of games like A-Train that ran OK on it.

Then in 1998 he upgraded to an IBM PS/2 Pentium 100. I can't imagine the jump it must have been for him..