ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-30, 03:26:

I would suggest maybe 1% of the people on Vogons use their Windows 98 PCs like we did back in the late 90s into the 2000s. The r […]
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kingcake wrote on 2023-10-29, 20:20:

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-29, 13:42:

I believe one of the reasons that it was kept is that a whole number of Windows 3.1 installers added icons/program groups by directly interacting with progman.exe instead of using the proper APIs (which, in 9x, switched to generating shortcuts/folders in the start menu items). An early example of Microsoft keeping unnecessary dated stuff in the name of compatibility...

No offense, but you have the wildest, most unhinged takes on Windows 98 that I've ever seen. Every post of yours is about how 98 was unusable. I built hundreds of 98 machines for customers during that time (and supported them) and never experienced problems that weren't related to hardware issues like bad ram. Plenty of people on Vogons, including myself, build myriad permutations of Win98 machines and game on them for hours on end without "resource problems" and instability.

Also, your posts about old hardware are broad and incorrect. "Old" CPUs had MMUs. The CPU+MMU combo just didn't support modern features like virtual memory, etc.

I would suggest maybe 1% of the people on Vogons use their Windows 98 PCs like we did back in the late 90s into the 2000s.
The resource problems are baked into the Win9x architecture itself and the underlaying problem is DOS.

I have a few PCs running Windows 98 today and the experience is very different to the ones I had back when I owned them in the 90s, and that is purely down to the way we use them now.
Half or all of the software I used to have to install then just isnt needed now so none of the problems will manifest themselves and Windows wont struggle.

Its not like this is just my opinion on 98, its based on technical limitations of the OS itself and is well documented.

Yup, and the thing is, what caused the resource problems was multitasking. On my PIII in 2000, I would have had a web browser with a couple windows, two IM clients (ICQ/AIM, actually maybe also MSN Messenger was out by then so make that three), a copy of mIRC or two, an email client, a newsreader (anyone remember Usenet before it got completely destroyed by binaries? 23 years ago we would have had this discussion in comp.sys.ibm-pc.something), Winamp, etc. Plus any productivity application I was actually working with. Win98 SE could not handle that - the system resources would dip and dip and boom, instability, reboot, etc after a few hours or, at most, a few days. Win2000 struggled a bit with the same workload with 128 megs of RAM, but give it 256 megs and it just was happy and didn't need rebooting for weeks/months.

No one would do that on a retro PC today. Or, really, any sort of multitasking. For one thing, the servers are no longer there for most of those Internet apps (even if, say, ICQ is still around, I would be shocked if any version of ICQ compatible with 98SE could connect to today's servers). For another, well, the security issues. But more importantly, the purpose of a retro PC tends to be retro games, and... why do you need a bunch of background apps behind your retro game if you're surrounded by modern machines?

And I think this also comes back to why everybody (particularly non-enthusiasts) loved XP so much. For most people who didn't have 2000, XP was their first experience (no pun intended) of a serious, robust OS. And its long life meant that by 2004-5, you didn't have any driver/device compatibility issues. And the rise of telemetry, frequent patches, etc meant that software generally was getting more reliable.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-30, 21:40:

I have a few PCs running Windows 98 today and the experience is very different to the ones I had back when I owned them in the 90s, and that is purely down to the way we use them now.
Half or all of the software I used to have to install then just isnt needed now so none of the problems will manifest themselves and Windows wont struggle.

That all makes sense. There were a lot of static resource pools, etc. But I think there is another aspect too. 25 years later, we are using the most mature drivers & OS patches on the first try. There is something to be said for system stability when you install the ultimate OS patches, the final bug free drivers, and the software you want right after the install and you don't mess with it again. There were times back in 1999 when every new video driver just seemed to replace old bugs with new and there were so many app uninstalls, .Net upgrades, directX installations, and ODBC drivers going in and out that I'm sure my registry had stretch marks.

In 1999, I started the year with a Celeron 300a OC'd to 450. In April, I replaced the Rage with a TNT2. (It was stable enough for games at 450, but for work use, I'd slow it to 300.)
When the public beta of counterstrike in June, it became pretty clear that I was going to need to get a second computer with an Athlon 550 & Voodoo 3. (I twitch thinking about those early AGP drivers)
But we could get both into online games at the same time because I had ISDN!

douglar wrote on 2023-10-31, 00:29:

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-30, 21:40:

I have a few PCs running Windows 98 today and the experience is very different to the ones I had back when I owned them in the 90s, and that is purely down to the way we use them now.
Half or all of the software I used to have to install then just isnt needed now so none of the problems will manifest themselves and Windows wont struggle.

That all makes sense. There were a lot of static resource pools, etc. But I think there is another aspect too. 25 years later, we are using the most mature drivers & OS patches on the first try. There is something to be said for system stability when you install the ultimate OS patches, the final bug free drivers, and the software you want right after the install and you don't mess with it again. There were times back in 1999 when every new video driver just seemed to replace old bugs with new and there were so many games installed and uninstalled that the registry had stretch marks.

One nitpicky point with the way you rewrote my post, first - I don't have a 'few' Windows 98 PCs now, I'm trying to get one running, so far unsuccessfully... (let's just say I've had more luck with XP systems and vintage Macs so far)

I do agree with you generally, but sometimes the final drivers are not the best, and sometimes some bugs were never fixed. 25 years ago, you could check for new drivers every two weeks and hope that a particular bug was finally fixed. And, most of the time, probably be disappointed. 25 years later, if the last driver version didn't fix something, well, that bug is going to be there forever unless a community member takes it upon themselves to fix it. But overall, absolutely - you have the most mature version of something, and, perhaps more importantly, you are putting way fewer demands on it than you would have back in the day.

And it's funny - my planned 98SE machine is temporarily running XP for testing, and like... it's not a bad XP machine. Certainly a lot better of an XP machine than my late-2001 Willamette P4 that I ran XP on for 4.5 years. And yet, my goal isn't to use it for XP long-term-wise, but for an OS dramatically less demanding than XP.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-31, 00:58:

One nitpicky point with the way you rewrote my post, first - I don't have a 'few' Windows 98 PCs now, I'm trying to get one running, so far unsuccessfully... (let's just say I've had more luck with XP systems and vintage Macs so far)

Sorry about that. not sure how that happened.

I did something very similar years ago. Here is what I had come up with. I have actually built each of these with the listed parts. I stuck with Intel CPU's but have since built some AMD machines.

fsmith2003 wrote on 2023-10-31, 01:08:

I did something very similar years ago. Here is what I had come up with. I have actually built each of these with the listed parts. I stuck with Intel CPU's but have since built some AMD machines.

CD-RW in 1995? Wow... you're assuming as much of a budget as the OP 😀

I remember buying a CD-RW drive for $3xx CAD in either December 1998 or 1999. And that was the beginning of CD-RW drives being half-affordable...

Also, speaking of cool (but half-affordable) optical drives, have people forgotten the CD-ROM changers? I never had one, but I feel like in the early-1995 era in particular, Gateway was pushing those big time. And then I think the software didn't work quite right with Win9x... but I think that would be a cool addition to the OP's lists.

fsmith2003 wrote on 2023-10-31, 01:08:

I did something very similar years ago. Here is what I had come up with. I have actually built each of these with the listed parts. I stuck with Intel CPU's but have since built some AMD machines.

Very cool! Lots of similarities in the respective lists. 😁

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-31, 01:18:

fsmith2003 wrote on 2023-10-31, 01:08:

I did something very similar years ago. Here is what I had come up with. I have actually built each of these with the listed parts. I stuck with Intel CPU's but have since built some AMD machines.

CD-RW in 1995? Wow... you're assuming as much of a budget as the OP 😀

I remember buying a CD-RW drive for $3xx CAD in either December 1998 or 1999. And that was the beginning of CD-RW drives being half-affordable...

The optical section of that list was more just to keep tabs on what I had available and which machine it was going in. RW’s weren’t even available until 97-ish I don’t think.

fsmith2003 wrote on 2023-10-31, 02:55:

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-31, 01:18:

fsmith2003 wrote on 2023-10-31, 01:08:

I did something very similar years ago. Here is what I had come up with. I have actually built each of these with the listed parts. I stuck with Intel CPU's but have since built some AMD machines.

CD-RW in 1995? Wow... you're assuming as much of a budget as the OP 😀

I remember buying a CD-RW drive for $3xx CAD in either December 1998 or 1999. And that was the beginning of CD-RW drives being half-affordable...

The optical section of that list was more just to keep tabs on what I had available and which machine it was going in. RW’s weren’t even available until 97-ish I don’t think.

CD burners (which probably weren't called CD-RW drives yet?) were around before 97ish; I remember reading reviews of some in Mac magazines around 1992-1993. SCSI, $4000USD or so. Also, Kodak has launched its Photo CD in 1991 - I presume this relied on CD burners in the labs. But... honestly, if you had told me that 15 years after reading that article, a DVD burner would be <$50, well... I suppose I was young enough that 15 years would have seemed like an eternity.

Also, as a random aside, isn't it funny that they're called CD-RW drives when I feel almost no one has used CD-RW discs in there? And apparently at some point someone figured out the software side of nicely using a CD-RW disk as a giant floppy/Zip disk/etc type thing (I remember trying to use DirectCD in 1998 but no one else thought that was a great idea), but I guess too late. I also saw a video on YouTube a few months ago about... was it DVD-RAM?... another format that seemed to have a solution for that problem, but that I never heard of until it was long dead and described on a vintage technology channel.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-30, 21:40:

Yup, and the thing is, what caused the resource problems was multitasking. On my PIII in 2000, I would have had a web browser wi […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-30, 03:26:

I would suggest maybe 1% of the people on Vogons use their Windows 98 PCs like we did back in the late 90s into the 2000s. The r […]
Show full quote

kingcake wrote on 2023-10-29, 20:20:

No offense, but you have the wildest, most unhinged takes on Windows 98 that I've ever seen. Every post of yours is about how 98 was unusable. I built hundreds of 98 machines for customers during that time (and supported them) and never experienced problems that weren't related to hardware issues like bad ram. Plenty of people on Vogons, including myself, build myriad permutations of Win98 machines and game on them for hours on end without "resource problems" and instability.

Also, your posts about old hardware are broad and incorrect. "Old" CPUs had MMUs. The CPU+MMU combo just didn't support modern features like virtual memory, etc.

I would suggest maybe 1% of the people on Vogons use their Windows 98 PCs like we did back in the late 90s into the 2000s.
The resource problems are baked into the Win9x architecture itself and the underlaying problem is DOS.

I have a few PCs running Windows 98 today and the experience is very different to the ones I had back when I owned them in the 90s, and that is purely down to the way we use them now.
Half or all of the software I used to have to install then just isnt needed now so none of the problems will manifest themselves and Windows wont struggle.

Its not like this is just my opinion on 98, its based on technical limitations of the OS itself and is well documented.

Yup, and the thing is, what caused the resource problems was multitasking. On my PIII in 2000, I would have had a web browser with a couple windows, two IM clients (ICQ/AIM, actually maybe also MSN Messenger was out by then so make that three), a copy of mIRC or two, an email client, a newsreader (anyone remember Usenet before it got completely destroyed by binaries? 23 years ago we would have had this discussion in comp.sys.ibm-pc.something), Winamp, etc. Plus any productivity application I was actually working with. Win98 SE could not handle that - the system resources would dip and dip and boom, instability, reboot, etc after a few hours or, at most, a few days. Win2000 struggled a bit with the same workload with 128 megs of RAM, but give it 256 megs and it just was happy and didn't need rebooting for weeks/months.

No one would do that on a retro PC today. Or, really, any sort of multitasking. For one thing, the servers are no longer there for most of those Internet apps (even if, say, ICQ is still around, I would be shocked if any version of ICQ compatible with 98SE could connect to today's servers). For another, well, the security issues. But more importantly, the purpose of a retro PC tends to be retro games, and... why do you need a bunch of background apps behind your retro game if you're surrounded by modern machines?

And I think this also comes back to why everybody (particularly non-enthusiasts) loved XP so much. For most people who didn't have 2000, XP was their first experience (no pun intended) of a serious, robust OS. And its long life meant that by 2004-5, you didn't have any driver/device compatibility issues. And the rise of telemetry, frequent patches, etc meant that software generally was getting more reliable.

I must admit my use of 98 was pretty much like yours was in many ways... maybe the programs were different but the idea is the same, and the usage was similar too and yeah I remember having to restart the computer sometiems.

These days my use of 98 is very different. All those programs run on my main desktop and I just use 98 for playing old games...
Almost no use at all compared to what I expected it to do in the past and my experience is nice and stable. But then there is no Norton Anti virus, Zone Alarm firewall and all the apps running in the background I thought I needed.

Which is why this thread is more interesting than it might appear, because it makes you/me/us think what a Ultimate PC of any given year really was.
What we expect to do with it now and what we did with them then.

CD-R drives were released long before CD-RW drives were.
Once they started to gain traction they released DVD-RAM.

I think I was aware of the existence of CD burners in 1996, but I was only seeing them as SCSI at that point, 1997 they were getting around more in IDE. Thing was they were skipping to the next speed ASAP to keep the price and profit margins up, so retail price remained high until later 90s. However, my buddy managed to get one on a closeout deal for $250 I think it was in 1997. Being of restricted means and a cheapskate, it wasn't until 2000ish I first got one, for under $100, an unlovely 6 speed. Then by 2003 they were down to what just a 24x ROM was 5 years prior. In the meantime DVD drives had appeared and DVD burners were just out of reach for me for a couple of years.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-10-31, 13:16:

Then by 2003 they were down to what just a 24x ROM was 5 years prior. In the meantime DVD drives had appeared and DVD burners were just out of reach for me for a couple of years.

I think I got my first DVD burner in either 2004 or 2005. A friend of mine was one of the leaders in the LiteOn patching community and he told me I could buy the single-layer 12X model and flash it to the not-yet-available-in-stores 16X dual-layer model.

But yes, these drives were improving really quick at the time, I think they went from 4x to 16X in, oh, 2-3 years at most? And prices were falling...

I cant remember the exact year I got a CD-R drive, but it was somewhere around 1999. By the time 2004 rolled around I knw the drive I had was old hat and I upgraded it not long into 2004 to a CD-RW DVD combi drive which stuck with me in one build or another for 10 years or more.

I do remember CD-R drives were quite a disappointment to me.
I use to download MP3 files on IRC using a DCC. I remember trying a few times to convert them into CD Audio discs to play on a hifi CD player and finding it just wouldnt work. It wasnt for quite some time that i found out, havent read the Red Book that what I wanted to do was impossible with the CD-R discs that I had and it would never work no matter what...

NT4 liked to turn expensive CD-R discs into coasters, but Windows 2000 faired a lot better once I upgraded to that.

Back then a system with a CD-R would have been an ultimate system because to be able to use it and not make coasters it needed to be fast enough to feed the data to the CD drive.
burner software has come a long way too. When I started it was only 2 steps away from looking like a command line! I dont know what the software was called, it was bundled with the disc drive but it wasnt easy to use. I remember Adaptec Roxio Easy CD creator and Nero too.

Another update to the list:

Added a line for modem specs based on what was available in a given year.

Added a year 2000 build with an Athlon 1200. I tried to find direct comparisons of the Athlon 1200C versus PIII-1100 / 1133 at the time, but couldn't really find exactly what I wanted. Ended up making an assessment based on what benchmarks I could find.

Added a couple alternate builds for 1993 and 1996 including a Pentium 66 and Pentium 200.

Finally, created a version of the list with a series of games released in the given year just as a point of reference for each system.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-11-02, 21:50:

Another update to the list: […]
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Another update to the list:

Added a line for modem specs based on what was available in a given year.

Added a year 2000 build with an Athlon 1200. I tried to find direct comparisons of the Athlon 1200C versus PIII-1100 / 1133 at the time, but couldn't really find exactly what I wanted. Ended up making an assessment based on what benchmarks I could find.

Added a couple alternate builds for 1993 and 1996 including a Pentium 66 and Pentium 200.

Finally, created a version of the list with a series of games released in the given year just as a point of reference for each system.

One obvious comment from me: why no floppy in the 2000 build? This is not Mac-land... and while I may have been late to the no-floppy approach, I certainly was putting floppies in new builds in 2006. (Those lovely Mitsumi combo floppy + card readers... an outstanding product, I might add) You can google and see when Dell started making floppies optional, that might be a better time to start thinking about removing the floppy, and even then, gamers would have kept the floppy drives around for the F6 drivers for Windows XP...

The other thing I would flag to see others' thoughts would be the floppy drive for the 1994 and maybe 1995 system. I suspect if you were looking at a no-budget DOS/Windows system in either of those years, you might have thrown in a 5.25" drive and/or one of those cute combo 3.5/5.25" drives that Gateway and others offered.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-31, 05:35:

Which is why this thread is more interesting than it might appear, because it makes you/me/us think what a Ultimate PC of any given year really was.
What we expect to do with it now and what we did with them then.

And then the other interesting question is... which of those are available today, 25-30 years later?

I suspect, for example, that things that became mainstream a year or two later (e.g. a Pentium 166) are probably relatively easy to find today, but things that stayed high end and were discontinued (e.g. a 1GHz Slot 1 PIII, although that's not on the OP's list) are going to be much, much, more rare. I think it's only in the very late 1990s, then starting in the early 2000s that Intel/AMD/etc launched dedicated low-end parts instead of just selling two years' ago high-end part at a lower price.

Some things were crazy ubiquitous, e.g. SoundBlaster 16s or AWE32s, even in far-less-than-high-end systems. Same with things like modems; sure, I remember that in 1994-5, some low-end systems had 2400 bps modems, some mid-end systems had 14.4 modems, and maybe some really high-end machines came pre-installed with brand new 28.8 modems, but that's not a trend that lasted - I think within a year or two all classes of PCs adopted the newer modems, especially once Winmodems rolled around. Some things cost such a steep premium that only rare high-end systems would have had them.

Doesn't help that I would suspect that high-end systems are actually more likely to have been e-wasted a long time ago than lower end systems that might have quietly been doing someone's word processing or accounting or whatever just fine with whatever 1993-era software they had for 2+ decades.

VivienM wrote on 2023-11-02, 23:46:

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-11-02, 21:50:

Another update to the list: […]
Show full quote

Another update to the list:

Added a line for modem specs based on what was available in a given year.

Added a year 2000 build with an Athlon 1200. I tried to find direct comparisons of the Athlon 1200C versus PIII-1100 / 1133 at the time, but couldn't really find exactly what I wanted. Ended up making an assessment based on what benchmarks I could find.

Added a couple alternate builds for 1993 and 1996 including a Pentium 66 and Pentium 200.

Finally, created a version of the list with a series of games released in the given year just as a point of reference for each system.

One obvious comment from me: why no floppy in the 2000 build? This is not Mac-land... and while I may have been late to the no-floppy approach, I certainly was putting floppies in new builds in 2006. (Those lovely Mitsumi combo floppy + card readers... an outstanding product, I might add) You can google and see when Dell started making floppies optional, that might be a better time to start thinking about removing the floppy, and even then, gamers would have kept the floppy drives around for the F6 drivers for Windows XP...

The other thing I would flag to see others' thoughts would be the floppy drive for the 1994 and maybe 1995 system. I suspect if you were looking at a no-budget DOS/Windows system in either of those years, you might have thrown in a 5.25" drive and/or one of those cute combo 3.5/5.25" drives that Gateway and others offered.

Dell was still fitting a floppy as standard to 3GHz P4 Prescott systems

VivienM wrote on 2023-11-02, 23:46:

One obvious comment from me: why no floppy in the 2000 build?

That was a copy-paste typo. You're right that the 2000-era should have had a 3.5" drive.

The other thing I would flag to see others' thoughts would be the floppy drive for the 1994 and maybe 1995 system. I suspect if you were looking at a no-budget DOS/Windows system in either of those years, you might have thrown in a 5.25" drive and/or one of those cute combo 3.5/5.25" drives that Gateway and others offered.

Looking through ads in past magazines, 5.25" drives started disappearing from systems as early as 1993. By late 1994, they were mostly gone.

Certainly one could always add one but as a standard feature at the time, they just weren't being included any more.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-11-03, 00:41:

Dell was still fitting a floppy as standard to 3GHz P4 Prescott systems

I think they made the floppies optional on the lower-end systems first. I have a vague recollection of my dad ordering either a Dimension 2400 or 3000, a hotburst Celeron 2.4, and having to select the optional floppy. That would have been... what? 200...4?