PC magazine March 1997

[robfosters]

I still remember my first ever RAM upgrade in about 1996. £95 for 4MB

Tbf, it did make a huge difference jumping from 4 to 8MB.

 

[Ninco!]

I still remember my first ever RAM upgrade in about 1996. £95 for 4MB

I think I paid similar for 2mb upgrade for my 386 - desperate to upgrade 2mb to 4mb so I could finally play Syndicate and Theme Park in 1993-4. Saved up me pocket money and it arrived, fitted and it did not work. Parents watched me open up an expensive computer when I had no clue, so no pressure!

To this day I never knew if I ordered the wrong type or fitted incorrectly. I just humoured my parents that I had not squandered my pocket money savings and it had made an almighty difference. Those days you would squint at the small print and guess it was the right type. I failed.

 

[Guest2]

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

I'm trying to remember what I had.
I think it was December 1996 I got my first PC, 2MB onboard graphics. It was terrible but at the time 3D cards were only just arriving.
1997 I think the first 3dfx voodoo and voodoo rush cards appeared on the market and in 1998 the Voodoo2

My first 3d card was the Matrox Mystique 220 which I got in 1998. That was £150 whch I saved for months plus my birthday money... it was utter junk. I just couldnt afford a Voodoo2 card as it was £300, a lot of money for a 14 year old. My friends dad had a beast of a PC with a Voodoo2, 17" monitor, big speakers, SCSI HDD, the lot. I would go round to his house and be in awe watching the Unreal into castle flyby, Half life, Quake 2 and other 3dfx games. Playing anything like Unreal, Quake 2 or Half life with the Matrox was pointless. 10-15fps with bad graphics aswell, no better than on-board really

It wasnt until 2 years later in 2000 when I got a Voodoo 2 card

The glide API was around for many years. Remember there was the Voodoo 3, 4 and 5. I'm sure I ran the Voodoo2 card up until getting a GeForce3 Ti200 in 2002 / 2003, maybe for Farcry

 

[Timber]

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

Apparently not (link and another link).

Tbh I'd heard of the quote years ago in the late 90's but only recently bumping into a YouTube video ('think' it was RetroManCave) where they also stated that it was arguably fabricated. Second time that quote has popped up in the last few days for me.

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

^^ Ahhh myth debunked!

Thanks, I stand corrected

 

[HangTime]

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

I bought a Voodoo card from Game in 1998, but it had artifacts whereby textures wouldn't display properly. I spent absolutely ages (and I mean _AGES_, as in weeks) trying to get it to work, lowering settings, tinkering with startup options, all sorts. Bearing in mind I didn't have an internet connection back then to do research on.
In the end I took it back and the replacement worked fine, but I thought it highly unlikely that the hardware could actually be at fault, must have been dodgy VRAM (all 4MB of it!).

 

[FoxEye]

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.

Yeah we didn't have web browsers eating 400MB per tab back then