Depending on when in 1992... (I was in high school.)

At the beginning of the year, we had:
IBM PS/2 Model 30-286 with Evergreen 386 upgrade and 4 MB RAM and 30 MB hard drive. I was running an OS/2 2.0 beta on it. (Yes, it was at the *VERY* low end of minimum specs, even with the CPU upgrade.)
Leading Edge Model 'D', the first PC we had at home, bought in the mid '80s. By this point, it had been upgraded with a 20 MB "Hard Card" hard drive, and kept its dual 360 KB floppies. CGA monitor, 640 KB RAM. By this point, this one resided in my bedroom.
IBM PC-XT with Hercules video card and monochrome display, 640 KB RAM, 20 MB hard drive, dual 360 KB floppies.

At some point during that year, we got:
Leading Edge 486DX2/66 with 8 MB RAM (8 MB might have been a later upgrade, now I don't remember,) 1.4 MB and 1.2 MB floppy drives, VGA (that I later upgraded to an ISA SuperVGA card I don't remember.) I bought a Sound Blaster Pro+CD-ROM kit for it soon after. I remember getting into arguments with a friend over which was better: his 486DX-50 or my 486DX2-66.
Compaq Portable 2 "luggable" with 20 MB hard drive and single 360 KB floppy, got an internal modem, and dialed in to BBSes in the middle of the night when this replaced the Leading Edge in my bedroom.

Note that the upgrades (Evergreen 386 upgrade, HardCard, Sound Blaster Pro+CD-ROM, modems) were all purchased by me, not my parents. Had to save quite a while to afford them each.

Damn, a 486DX/2-66 in 1992 was the fastest thing money could buy. That must have cost a fortune.

Yeah, my dad was thankfully always ahead of the curve, having bought the old Leading Edge model 'D' right after it came out in 1985, even postponing buying a (much needed) new car by a year to get a computer in the house.

Then came machines that were borrowed from his or my mom's work (the PS/2, XT and Compaq.) But the 486 was a true splurge. Even as an off-brand (Leading Edge was no longer a "major clone maker" by that point,) it wasn't cheap. When I was younger, my parents were decidedly "poor", but by the early '90s they had dug their way into firm middle class. The 486 was still a stretch, but my dad believed in future-proofing. (But, as I said, I had to pay for the multimedia bits.)

Anonymous Freak wrote:

Even as an off-brand (Leading Edge was no longer a "major clone maker" by that point,) it wasn't cheap. When I was younger, my parents were decidedly "poor", but by the early '90s they had dug their way into firm middle class. The 486 was still a stretch, but my dad believed in future-proofing. (But, as I said, I had to pay for the multimedia bits.)

My parents were like that too. Even when they only had a small toy shop they bought a 386 in 1991 for what was equivalent to about 10 decent monthly wages at that time. My dad said that when he saw just how slow the 286s they were offering him were, he chose a 40 Mhz 386 instead. It had no multimedia stuff and a crappy Trident SVGA card, but it booted up in 5 seconds and did productivity stuff very well until 2000. I cannot understand the mindset of people who buy cheap crap like Packard Bell or E-machines. Not having money is not an excuse as my parents would be probably considered "below poverty line" in USA in the early 1990s and a cheap crappy computer is eventually going to eat much more money on repair and lost productivity than a decent one would. I guess this is because many people in USA/Australia/Western Europe consider a computer to be some consumer good that is to be bought in a supermarket while a computer here in the early 1990s was only bought by people who actually needed one, seeing as there was no such thing as a "cheap computer" for us at that time, only differing degrees of expensiveness (except for 8-bit, tape drive only computers that would be useless for work).

m1so wrote:

I guess this is because many people in USA/Australia/Western Europe consider a computer to be some consumer good that is to be bought in a supermarket while a computer here in the early 1990s was only bought by people who actually needed one, seeing as there was no such thing as a "cheap computer" for us at that time, only differing degrees of expensiveness (except for 8-bit, tape drive only computers that would be useless for work).

This might be the case now, but this was definitely not true in the early-to-mid '90s in the US. Computers were expensive, and weren't a common household item.

So how come crap supermarket brands like Packard Bell and e-machines are notorious for the time era?

eMachines didn't come out until 1998 or so, after the internet access boom and every grandma and grandpa had to get on the AOL. Packard Bell was obviously around early/mid '90s, but "cheap" is a relative term. I would hardly consider a $1500-$2000 US computer disposable.

I am probably thinking more of the "AOL era" then which seems to be the main "crap computer era".

This will annoy those who dislike topics to be resurrected so apologies for indulging but this caught my eye.

'92 happens to be the year we got our first PC. Knowing nothing about such things at the time, I had no objection to my Dad deciding to make the purchase from Ryman (an office supplies store) of all places. So we ended up with an Ambra machine which, oddly, for a machine of that time, is quite well documented here and here to link but a couple. We had the Sprinta model, which was anything but quick for the time:

Am386SX-25
2MB RAM
40MB hard disk
Integrated Paradise graphics (512KB memory? )
3x ISA slots (on a riser)

and that's it. About a year later a talked my Dad into getting us a sound card (an Adlib). I was going to say that we got a CD-ROM drive too but I don't remember getting an interface card for it. I think that came later when we upgraded to an AWE32 when it came out. I used this until about '95 when I built my 486.

Was gutted to find out a few years ago, when I asked if it was still in the loft, that the Ambra had been taken to the tip. 😢

Sad times.

I had a Commodore 386SX-16, with Paradise SVGA, expanded to 512KB memory.
Memory was 1 MB stock, expanded to 5 MB (with nifty EMS support through the chipset, rather than slow EMM386 emulation).
I had a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 card, with PC speaker hooked up to it (I removed the piezo from the motherboard and replaced it with a header, so I could connect either a real speaker or the SB Pro easily. I could also route the SB Pro mixer output back to the speaker. I used that very same SBPro 2.0 and that very same cable in the IBM 5160 to capture 8088 MPH 😀).
I had a 170 MB Conner harddisk, which was an upgrade from the 40 MB Seagate it came with. For a while I had both drives in the 386SX-16, but since the Seagate was also XT-IDE compatible, I had moved it to my Commodore PC10-III.
I also had a Logitech Scanman installed.

Scali wrote:

I removed the piezo from the motherboard and replaced it with a header, so I could connect either a real speaker or the SB Pro easily. I could also route the SB Pro mixer output back to the speaker. I used that very same SBPro 2.0 and that very same cable in the IBM 5160 to capture 8088 MPH 😀

Nice hack! I was never brave enough to try such things. I remember once changing a setting in Windows because my display was set to VGA and I thought that I could just increase the resolution by changing the driver. Alas my monitor was a 640x480 model and the 1024x768 res scrambled the screen. I thought I'd broken it. Fortunately telephone support talked me through using the DOS-based setup program to fix the issue. That was the end of my tinkering.

Hmm 1992, We didn't have a computer. In 1987/88 we had a 8086-12MHz (8MHz turbo off)
Later i think 93/94 it was, a 486DX2-66MHZ, 4MB Fastpage memory, 426MB Harddrive (Conner Peripherals) Windows 3.11 (WFW) and Microsoft Works 3.0
The printer was a Star SJ-144.
A year later i installed my first hardware, it was a ESS 1688 Soundcard

Amiga 500 in 1992. 2 Years later and it was a 486 dx-2 66. I still have the Amiga, but the original PC went to a friend then either passed on elsewhere or dumped.
The 486 I recently built, currently with a 486 dx-2 66 in it, blows my original machine away in performance terms.

In 1992 I acquired a really sluggish and bad Olivetti 286 with a monochrome screen. Not sure if it was 8Mhz or 16Mhz, but I'd guess at 8Mhz. It had a full 640K memory and a 20MB Hard Drive, with a single 3.5" floppy. The only game I could get working on it was some rendition of Frogger. Needless to say, I didn't game on it. I did start to learn DOS, however. My Megadrive and probably even my BBC Master kicked it's ass.

The following year I got an equally bad 486-SLC-33, only at least it had 2MB EDO RAM and a 120MB Hard Disk, so I could play Raptor (sort of) and Wolfenstein 3D. Later I upgraded it to 4MB just to play Doom in a postage stamp sized window. That year at any possible opportunity I would go to my friends house straight after school, as his brother used to work at a PC store in the town centre, and would "borrow" machines they didn't have room to display on the shop floor, for weeks on end. Consequently, we saw fit to put them to good use, and after I had networked them in DOS we used to play deathmatch Doom on a pair of 486-DX2-80's among other equally awesome machines. I never could afford one though, so I went straight from that shitty 486-SLC-33 to an AMD PR-133 running Windows 95, around the end of 1995.

badmojo wrote:

Quake was OK but it was more about "wow real 3d!". But DOOM knocked my socks off and hasn't ever really been surpassed IMO. Duke 3d was great and I played it a lot, but all of the extra gadgets and movement options took the clones further from DOOM's action packed and addictive gameplay, and thus made them a little less cool. It just never gets old.

On release, Quake ran like a 3 legged dog on my AMD PR-133 (100mhz) system being that the FPU in those CPU's were nowhere near as fast as the Intel Pentiums. Pretty sure the timedemo on START map gave me less than 10fps in full screen with that CPU. Given the slideshow, even in 320x200, it was hard to get a grasp of the game at first. It wasn't until after upgrading to a Pentium 200 Vanilla and an extra 16MB RAM I started to appreciate Quake. Then I saw a demo of a guy called "Q-Tip" playing a 4 player deathmatch on Q1DM4, realised that he was using a mouse to control movement as well as the keys (and consequently owning the shit out of the other poor guys) that changed my gaming life forever.

Quake wasn't just an amazing tech demo or piece of creative and innovative gaming history, it was the first real deathmatch game with an almost infinite skillcap. Hence why people still play it today, and have just gotten better year on year. Watch some freaks like Reppie or Paradox play that shit now and it blows your mind! 😎

To think we went from Wolf 3D and Blake Stone, to Doom and then to Quake in just 4 years ... while today, we seem to step backwards with 30fps locked console ports where you basically watch a game on rails filled with bloom and cut scenes and Kevin Spacey...

What happened? 😲

Quake was really the start of consolitis for me, well into the downward ramp of iD's days. And it looked like regurgitated diarrhea.

Now, Duke 3D, there was a real DM game... And Blood probably offered by far the best experience yet, especially with well made custom maps and skilled players.

Quake sucks.

pfft, rpg spam and race-to-the-steroids-and-jetpack gets old fast.

At least we have an inventory system. All Quake ever did was undo a lot of progress and move like you were on the damn moon.

Only problem, we have a shitty community too, can't speak for Quake as I have never had anything to do with them. I offered to record an AdLib pack for the Doom community and they said they were happy with their shitty soundfont, but that's as close as I ever got to those people.

Oh the Quake community and its sequels have jumped the elitism StopHavingFunGuys shark many times. Can't deny that, it's also happening to Quake Live this year with some elitist players getting serious about 3rd-party calculated ELO, writing autokick scripts against new players. It's sad really, then again "Quake" to them is an Atari2600graphics-tier snobfest that never had a single player game or even lore. Find a Quake video online, it's either a "winner" playing on intolerably low detail for a performance/physicsexploit placebo effect, or a horrible looking "HD" pack video that shits on the game's aesthetic much like every doom2 video being some brutal zdoom cruft.

Only computer my family had in 1992 was an old Apple II Plus an aunt had given us. 64K memory, language card, switchable integer ROM card, single floppy drive, green screen monitor. An extremely basic configuration even by Apple II standards. I primarily only used it to play games and occasionally write simple BASIC programs. Only once did I actually use it for homework, which was a struggle since it didn't have support for lower-case characters, so almost everything I typed appeared on the screen as gibberish. 🤣