this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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PC Master Race

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Those were some good specs back in the day... And the price 😯

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[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 106 points 11 months ago (4 children)

$5778 adjusted for inflation.

[–] a4ng3l@lemmy.world 49 points 11 months ago (1 children)

At last something is more accessible than 30 years ago 🤗

[–] Bizarroland@kbin.social 30 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Video games, too. They're still in the $20-$60 range for the most part, same as they've been since the 1970s, which means their cost has dropped dramatically.

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[–] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 11 months ago

Wild that a 1k USD machine lasts like 6-10 years now.

I’m using one as a media center that’s a Phenom from 14 years ago lawl

My VR machine is eight years old but with a new GPU.

My main game machine is like four years old and plays basically everything 1440p/100FPS+. Cost bout 1.5k.

My first REAL game computer I built was over 2k back in the day (maybe 3k adjusted for inflation) and was slow as shit after two years. I love you, solid state drives. Athlon 64x2 4400+, SLI7900GT, 4GB DDR2, and an antec lanboy with the bondage kit. Built it for Crysis. No Raptors tho.

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[–] thorbot@lemmy.world 85 points 11 months ago (2 children)

2 CD ROMs drives AND a zip drive? This guy fucks

[–] SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world 55 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Shit. DVD drives!

In 96? Fucking bleeding edge stuff

[–] Nollij@sopuli.xyz 27 points 11 months ago (5 children)

I think it says 98. IE4.0 wasn't released until 97, same for Pentium MMX.

[–] Endorkend@kbin.social 30 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It literally says 1/16/98 on the order date :)

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[–] TechAdmin@lemmy.world 50 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The 2X part means the DVD drive could read DVDs at up to 2X speed

[–] thorbot@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Ah yeah I realized that after. But a floppy reader too! Dude definitely reading some floppies

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[–] valkyre09@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

I came to the comments hoping somebody would explain a reason for 2 DVD readers back in the days of Win95 lol thanks!

[–] Yoz@lemmy.world 58 points 11 months ago (1 children)

My dad bought one for me 🥰 so i that i can become a scientist one day but then I discovered porn and now I work at McDonalds.

[–] negativeyoda@lemmy.world 36 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but bro: your burger flipping hand is STRONG

[–] Froyn@kbin.social 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Aww, I hate to be the one to tell you this.
McDonald's uses a proprietary "clam shell" grill. The only flipping that's happening is an employee cooking their own burger without closing the grill.

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[–] mateomaui@reddthat.com 40 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I was going to be extremely impressed at the 64 GB of RAM until I realized that said MB.

Such a throwback though, that iomega zip drive was cutting edge.

[–] spicytuna62@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

We bought a house last year from a lady who lived here with her husband since they built the house in 1972. I found an iomega zip disk in a cabinet in the garage. I had never seen anything like it before. Really cool tech for the time.

I'd kinda love to see what's on this disk. It could just be spreadsheets or maybe some copied floppies or lots of Metallica courtesy of Napster. Or some pictures of the family. No idea.

[–] mateomaui@reddthat.com 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

100 MB portable storage was unreal back then, and then they came out with 250MB.

Apparently you can still buy the media and drives, even a new one:

https://www.amazon.com/Iomega-Zip-100-Portable-Drive/dp/B00000J3Q7

[–] spicytuna62@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

Oh I lived it too. We were still using 1.4 MB floppy disks for school projects in '04. I think the computer class teacher finally started asking people to use flash drives in '06 or '07. I was walking around with a whole two gigs (wow!) in my pocket. I felt like a god. When we went to flash drives, we all started sharing the music we downloaded from Kazaa and Limewire with each other because now the required kit for computer class had the headroom to allow that. Many of us still lugged around CD players if we didn't have iPods but the flash drives made burning mixes for each other so much easier.

Another kid in a class below me got HEAVY into emulators. So he started telling us how to download ROMs and we'd all be playing Turok and Ocarina and Pokemon on the school computers. Being a teenager in the late 00s was a riot.

Now, my Nintendo Switch has a memory card that's smaller than my pinky nail, and it holds 200 times the capacity of those chap stick size flash drives. It's wild. I remember being amazed at the PSP in its day, thinking surely it doesn't get much better than that. I really appreciate how amazing the Switch and Steam Deck are, even if Tears of the Kingdom makes the poor little guy crap itself.

Anyway, I'll wrap up this wall of text because it reeks of millennial. But it's really cool that there's still support for old tech like this...even if it's too pricey for someone who isn't neck deep into it to consider it lol

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[–] maeries@feddit.de 31 points 11 months ago

Even back then you had McAfee bloat preinstalled

[–] DannyMac@lemmy.world 27 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Dude! You're getting a Dell!

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[–] zaph@sh.itjust.works 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It's been 25 years and their invoices look the same

[–] samus12345@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago (3 children)

If it works, why change it?

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[–] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

FYI the Customer Service line still works lol.

[–] Sharpiemarker@feddit.de 23 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So funny story, if this is the first-gen (Blue) Dell XPS, we also bought one similarly spec'd.

Dell shipped it to us and when it arrived, it had 64 MB of ram instead of the 128 MB we ordered it with. Rather than sending us out new ram, they shipped us ANOTHER whole XPS. They never asked for the first back.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They never asked for the first back.

What in the dot-com fuck?

[–] Sharpiemarker@feddit.de 15 points 11 months ago

Yep! It was during their "dude you're getting a dell" years when they had crazy good support.

We had a particularly large desk and when we called into support, they mailed us (at no cost), Belkin extension cords for all our peripherals. It was wild.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 21 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Seems like overkill

How will you ever fill up 8.4gb of storage

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[–] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 20 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The Sales line doesn't work...

Surprisingly the Customer Service Line did still. Neat.

[–] BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 19 points 11 months ago (3 children)

You! You're the reason 555 is used in movies

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[–] itwasawednesday@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago (10 children)

I know modern audio purists probably still use them, but I completely forgot that sound cards were always an additional thing!

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[–] BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You know you're an old geek when you look at the spec and go "300MHz PII? 64MB RAM? that's late 96 or early 97... Or cheap 98, but it's shipped with win95, and ooh la la IE4.0 pre-installed, definitely late 96 or early 97" and then you see the invoice date, and recognize it as Clinton's 2nd inauguration.

[–] vsh@lemm.ee 9 points 11 months ago

You know you're old when you remember getting on McAfee's antivirus wait list

[–] TSG_Asmodeus@lemmy.world 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] ButtermilkBiscuit@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago

That was a beast of a system back in its day. Your dad was clearly a PC connoisseur.

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 15 points 11 months ago

I remember when we upgraded to a Pentium III and later put an aftermarket Voodoo card in the thing after much begging on my part. That was the first PC I had that felt genuinely "powerful" to me.

[–] overzeetop@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Man, my first homebuild out of college was an absolute monster with 8MB of RAM so I could run NT at home. $640 just for the memory. I did cheap out on the CPU and only got the 75MHz Pentium, though we ran 90s at work. Wing Commander III was awesome on that thing.

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[–] Snapz@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

"It's an investment in your family's future, sir..."

So OP, do you now do clickity clacks professionally for money? Did that included edutainment software suite do the trick?

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[–] squiblet@kbin.social 10 points 11 months ago

That was after computers got significantly cheaper, too. The adjusted prices for PCs in the 80s were insane. My family got an Amiga 3000 in 1990 because my dad had an expense account he could only use for computers and didn't really need it for work that year... it was something like $4,500 which would be about $10,500 today. Same for his office PS/2, which was just a 486.

[–] dditty@lemm.ee 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I just saved a pair of altec Lansing computer speakers from becoming ewaste at my work. They're easily 20+ years old but still work decently enough! I just use them to play music when no one else is in the office.

[–] UnfortunateDoorHinge@aussie.zone 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

For the kids, this would've been a top of the line beefy set-up. I would say in '98 you would find a 1gb hd, a 120 Pentium, and 16mb of ram in a typical home that had a computer.

Remember things upgraded fast back then, by '00 your average Joe would be buying Pentium iii's with 600mhz and a DVD drive! Woah!

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[–] finthechat@kbin.social 10 points 11 months ago

The only thing I miss about ZIP drives is that when you are holding one of those huge disks, you feel like a hacker in a 90s movie

[–] Aggravationstation@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago

IDE DVD ROM drive and a hardware DVD decoder.

Dude, you could play DVDs? On your computer! Wow, truly it was the future.

[–] FoundTheVegan@kbin.social 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)
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[–] Endorkend@kbin.social 8 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I repaired about 1000 of these in a single year.

That USR softmodem was an absolute plague.

[–] Magister@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If it was a real ISA card it was solid, the "winmodem" was shitty as hell however

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[–] blazeknave@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

My dad had the >$4k receipt for our 1988 286 until this death recently

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