PC magazine March 1997

Guest2 · 7 Jun 2020 at 14:37

I found this whilist searching for how original C&C Redalert looking in VGA mode.
Some of the prices in 1997 of PCs were eye watering. I forgot a basic machine was £1000 with the good / better ones around £3000 and high end ~£6000
A lot of time was spend as a child (~12) admiring the expensive computers in such magazines

Enjoy

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Loads more issues here
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=N03JdBfVv0kC&pg

Game wise this one has Quake 2, Unreal, Starcraft and Total annihilation reviews (page 370)
I bet they didnt know at least one of them would become the national sport of a country!

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=unreal&f=false

LiE · 7 Jun 2020 at 15:51

Phwoar! look at the specs on this beast!

Woden · 7 Jun 2020 at 15:56

What in earth do you need 32MB ram for??

sanaxe1 · 7 Jun 2020 at 16:11

what was the battery life on that beast?

BongoHunter · 7 Jun 2020 at 16:16

Crikey that brings back some memories

Regarding battery life I would think about an hour maybe? That CPU probably had a 15w TDP and the batteries were probably NiCad

BowdonUK · 7 Jun 2020 at 17:35

Woden said:
What in earth do you need 32MB ram for??

Probably the same reason people need lights on their PC's today

Guest2 · 7 Jun 2020 at 18:05

Bargain too at $6.5k! It's no VAT included in that price by the looks of it

Fusion · 7 Jun 2020 at 18:18

It's always easy to laugh, but 32mb of RAM would have been reasonable in a desktop in March 1997, never mind a notebook. Windows 95 would run fine with 8mb of RAM. People forget how little space programs and files took up then.

Guest2 · 7 Jun 2020 at 18:42

Fusion said:
It's always easy to laugh, but 32mb of RAM would have been reasonable in a desktop in March 1997, never mind a notebook. Windows 95 would run fine with 8mb of RAM. People forget how little space programs and files took up then.

In 1996 I had a computer with a 1.2GB Hard drive. My dad bought it for me but we shared it as he used it for work.
Around a year later Atomic Bomberman came out which my friend bought. It could be installed and played from the CD at around a 100MB install, but then the CD was needed. The was an option (one of the first) to play it without the CD but this required ~650MB install! On a 1.2GB HDD with Windows 95, this was quite large...The was no other way and I wasnt buying it... I removed all the MS Office suite and almost all programs to install it. Dad was fuming when he found out, I blambed it on a virus

PureAppleJuice · 7 Jun 2020 at 19:01

How funny, I remember trawling through PC magazines in the late 90s salivating over tech like this.

www.mmx.com is dead, unsurprisingly!

Guest2 · 7 Jun 2020 at 21:23

PureAppleJuice said:
How funny, I remember trawling through PC magazines in the late 90s salivating over tech like this.

www.mmx.com is dead, unsurprisingly!

Also Intel comparing their 3d accelleration cards to ATI and 3dfx... Intels effort at GPUs did really well

azazl187 · 7 Jun 2020 at 21:32

God they used to cram loads of words into these magazines

d_brennen · 7 Jun 2020 at 21:40

In 1997 I was lusting after some 3DFx Voodoo card or other. Didn't get an accelerator til 1998/early 1999 and it was obsolete in a year

People complain about the lack of progress now, at least you can hold your GPU for a few years without the API being swept from under you

One More Solo · 7 Jun 2020 at 22:06

When did Game stop selling PC GPUs? I remember ogling the Voodoo cards in there as a kid.

Blackjack Davy · 7 Jun 2020 at 23:29

Oh I've still got computer mags from the 80's lying around in an attic somewhere, no-one owned PC's outside of business environments partly because they weren't all that great in the gfx dept but mostly because they were on average hideously expensive compared to the spectrums and C64's of the home market. PC's were an exotic species for most kids and even parents back then.

Fusion said:
It's always easy to laugh, but 32mb of RAM would have been reasonable in a desktop in March 1997, never mind a notebook. Windows 95 would run fine with 8mb of RAM. People forget how little space programs and files took up then.

I remember when a 40mb hard drive was the height of sophistication... and expense. And about the size of a brick or two.

Justintime · 8 Jun 2020 at 03:43

Wow 1997 i remember going to Tottenham court road on weekends to see the fairs and going to various book places to buy the mags and get demo cds or even free software lol. My first amazing experience at a fair was seeing a Hauppauge Win TV card playing BBC on a pc screen and using NT 4.0 for the first time. Gone are those days.. 38 this year, wife, kid...lost a lot of people got no real job anymore and feeling like my best days are long past me in certain aspects.

Rroff · 8 Jun 2020 at 03:51

d_brennen said:
In 1997 I was lusting after some 3DFx Voodoo card or other. Didn't get an accelerator til 1998/early 1999 and it was obsolete in a year People complain about the lack of progress now, at least you can hold your GPU for a few years without the API being swept from under you

Yeah I remember when GPUs would take a big jump almost if not year on year - whether API support or just raw performance increasing massively. On the other hand back then they were sort of reasonable priced for the most part :s

Justintime · 8 Jun 2020 at 03:55

Rroff said:
Yeah I remember when GPUs would take a big jump almost if not year on year - whether API support or just raw performance increasing massively. On the other hand back then they were sort of reasonable priced for the most part :s

Yea i remember buying an x800XT PE or something for like 250.00 and thinking this was an extreme one off treat to get myself a top end gpu. Never thought i'd see a gpu for over 1000 as 'normal'.

Pawnless Endgame · 8 Jun 2020 at 10:54

Woden said:
What in earth do you need 32MB ram for??

Didn't Bill Gates say that 640kb would be enough for anyone?

Ninco! · 8 Jun 2020 at 19:31

I had a Dell Dimension XPS 200 very similar to the one posted on Vogons. It was a simple case of changing a jumper and you got a 233.

Having a drought for years (owned a 386SX) wanted to make up time as missed all the awesome games from 93-97 and saved up. I cannot remember, exactly the cost in 1997. Just made up the order on Dell. Tried to find the Computer Shopper Ad for the exact machine - I know it had a 17" inch Dell Monitor and my first subwoofer. Internet and Voodoo followed in 1998, as d_brennan mentions, obsolete by 2000 (like my 386 - new in 1992 and out of date the following year!).

I did restore a couple of XPS's a couple of years back, went through a house move last year and got rid - sad now as they ended up in lovely condition after restoring. I got them to work and then they packed up (bloated caps or something beyond my skills); so in a fit of pique got rid of them both. Not tipped just recycled via a local PC outlet so hopefully sold on again.