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Retro6

Retro6

Retro6

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So its 1996 you bought a desktop computer which has 16MB RAM 2GB hard drive Intel Pentium II processor... what would be the price for that in 1996 used I wonder? without monitor or keyboard/mouse It be about average for 1996

Fast forward to now 2026 a new used average desktop PC 16GB RAM 240 GB SSD i5 processor price between 30 to 50 pounds without monitor or keyboard/mouse seems to be cheaper than if you were to buy an average PC in 1996 right?

Back then 486 PC's were still widely used and considered more low end Windows 3.11 machines as the new Intel Pentium 133MHz PC's came onto the market often shipped with Windows 95 but the Intel Pentium II with MMX technology were also on the market with processor speeds ranging from 230MHz to 400 MHz those were quite a beast for the time and some of them came with 24MB RAM while 16MB RAM was about average and 32MB RAM being the ultimate upgrade although I do recall some machines having 64MB RAM around that time while other machines only had 8MB RAM. The older 486 machines running Windows 3.11 would have had about 4MB RAM.

Today in 2026:
Dual core 2 Duo = 486 specs of the mid to late 90s
i5 being about average = higher end Intel Pentium Pro mid to late 90s or lower end Intel Pentium II MMX 230 MHz.

What are your thoughts on this?
 
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I remember back in 2001 I got given an old AST computer which I think was a 486 100MHz CPU 8MB RAM 1.5 GB HDD running Windows 95 and it was very slow. 8MB RAM was about the minimum requirement to run WIN95 but 16MB was recommended for smoother operation. I remember trying to upgrade the RAM in that machine but it would not post with any other RAM.
 
In 1992 I bought a 286-12.5mhz PC with 1mb ram and a 40mb hard disk with a 14" vga colour monitor and a local bus 256kb graphics card, keyboard and mouse, Dos5 operating system for £900 with a few educational games.

What could that buy now?
 
I bought an Amiga 500 when they first came out so this would have been in the late 1980s.

I bought the official 512kb memory upgrade for it, it was a metal wedge that slotted into an access point on the underside, and it cost me £100. I bought 32gb of DDr4 in 2020, last time I can see I bought some memory, and it cost me £110.99.

If my maths is correct 32gb is 65536 times bigger than 512kb. I'm now doubting myself if that is correct.
 
Hagar said:
In 1992 I bought a 286-12.5mhz PC with 1mb ram and a 40mb hard disk with a 14" vga colour monitor and a local bus 256kb graphics card, keyboard and mouse, Dos5 operating system for £900 with a few educational games.

What could that buy now?
Click to expand...
£900 in 1992 is almost £2500 in inflation adjusted terms now, so quite a bit.
 
Hagar said:
In 1992 I bought a 286-12.5mhz PC with 1mb ram and a 40mb hard disk with a 14" vga colour monitor and a local bus 256kb graphics card, keyboard and mouse, Dos5 operating system for £900 with a few educational games.

What could that buy now?
Click to expand...
That is incredible 900 quid for a PC.

I remember going to a boot fair in 1998 and somebody was selling a PC an Intel Pentium PRO with the CRT and all the bits plus printer for 500 quid. I was only about 9 years old at the time and the next stall had an Apple II with green screen monitor and double disk drive unit with lots of 5.25 floppy disks all for a fiver. I spent hours on that thing learning about stuff and programming in Basic fun times. The setup I got for a fiver back in 1998 would be worth a lot today. I also bought an apricot color CRT screen monitor EGA with screen burn for 50p but it worked.
 
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ElliorR said:
I bought an Amiga 500 when they first came out so this would have been in the late 1980s.

I bought the official 512kb memory upgrade for it, it was a metal wedge that slotted into an access point on the underside, and it cost me £100. I bought 32gb of DDr4 in 2020, last time I can see I bought some memory, and it cost me £110.99.

If my maths is correct 32gb is 65536 times bigger than 512kb. I'm now doubting myself if that is correct.
Click to expand...
I got given an Amiga 500 around 1999 but I had no PSU for it, it was a 5 pin if I can remember rightly with 5v&12v input and then when I eventually found a PSU for it... it never worked. I then got given an Acorn Archimedes A3000 with an Acorn color CTR and 3 button mouse and I loved that thing, a computer well ahead of its time.
 
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In the mid-80s, there was that (in)famous saying, along the lines of "640kb should be enough for anyone".

My first hands-on experience with a PC was playing Warcraft on the school PCs in 1996. It was an MS-DOS game but pretty sure the main OS was Win 3.1 or 3.11. There was also a bat and ball game called Paranoid. When the teacher came in, we'd press the reset button to hide the fact that we were gaming when we were meant to be studying.

First time I had a PC at home was when I borrowed my dad's old 386 in 1998. Clock speed 16MHz, hard drive 40MB. Not sure on RAM amount. It ran Windows 3.1 pretty slowly and you had to run Double Space to get more out of the 40MB hard drive. In the Pentium age of 1998, a 386 was an old PC and a 286 was obsolete. A 486 however was still a reasonably good spec.

My first PC that I owned myself was in 1999 while at university. A Pentium II 350MHz, so that was already quite old by the time I got it as the Pentium III was just around the corner.

My current PC is a 14th-gen i7 (14700K) which I would consider as still being recent. 64GB RAM, 3 x 2TB m.2 and an RTX 4070 Super.

One of the OP's queries is what would be considered an old PC now? My answer would be the early Windows 7 PCs which came out in 2009 and 2010. I recently refurbished a Windows 7 laptop with an Intel T4400 processor and 4GB RAM which would have been a decent spec in 2009. However, the previous owner updated from Win 7 to Win 10 and it now runs horrendously slow even after a reformat. It's like my above example of the 386 running Win 3.1. I wouldn't want it as my main PC.

A bit off-topic: as it's no longer about clock speed, is there a way to measure CPUs against each other? Or do we just look it up on Passmark's web site and get the scores from there?

Edited for typos.
 
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In 1993, being in school, I got an Olivetti 486/33 with 4Mb of Ram and 120mb hard disk. No cd rom, no sound card. It broken and the engineer they sent out replaced the motherboard but did such a bad job, it ended up going back to them where they upgraded me to a dx2 50 iirc. With this, I added another 4mb or RAM and a triple speed cd rom drive with 16 bit sound card. The cdrom plugged into the sound card in those days and I can remember being blown away by the rich media playback when using encarta. I used the heck out of that machine with its 14 inch vga display.

Total paid over the 3 years I "rented" it was about £1500
 
Retro6 said:
So its 1996 you bought a desktop computer which has 16MB RAM 2GB hard drive Intel Pentium II processor... what would be the price for that in 1996 used I wonder?
Click to expand...

A Pentium II in 1996 would have been ludicrously expensive and buying one used would probably have landed you in some sort of legal trouble.

Mostly because they weren’t released until 1997.
 
kaiowas said:
A Pentium II in 1996 would have been ludicrously expensive and buying one used would probably have landed you in some sort of legal trouble.

Mostly because they weren’t released until 1997.
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I was rocking the Pentium 150MHz back in '96 :cool:
 
In secondary school in the late 90s I bought my friend's older brother's Olivetti desktop PC, a Pentium 133 with overdrive processor, 128MB RAM (I think), Soundblaster soundcard, 15" CRT with speakers (it was all an off the shelf build by Olivetti at the time), I think a 1GB HDD. Paid £150 for it and spent a few years running it playing FLASH games, watching Homestar Runner, Strongbad Emails, playing Worms, Theme Hospital and so on.

On a 56K modem and making use of 100 hours free internet via AOL thanks to PC Advisor magazine discs was quite something before LibertySurf came out offering unlimited dialup internet for free (it installed a toolbar on your desktop). Watching a 1600x1200 desktop wallpaper progressively download in front of your eyes was a thing back then.

It was in the early 2000s I saved up enough cash (£1k) from a part time job where I then built my own PC, and so began the Abit KT7A adventures.
 
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1998/99? - Pentium III @ 500ghz with 128mb RAM and a TNT Graphics card.

my dad paid around £2k for it i believe.

The speed in which progress was made was insane, i still remember reading magazines whereby they were talking about 64bit CPU's

progress year on year was incredible, but also put a lot of people off buying a PC.

i still dip into the computer chronicals episodes on youtube along with some LGR content for dem nostalgic feels.
 
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I remember as a kid having Windows 95, I had a steering wheel and pedal setup to play Network Q RAC Rally. I was living the dream then. No idea what specs, maybe a Pentium 2 at the very least.
 
Hagar said:
In 1992 I bought a 286-12.5mhz PC with 1mb ram and a 40mb hard disk with a 14" vga colour monitor and a local bus 256kb graphics card, keyboard and mouse, Dos5 operating system for £900 with a few educational games.

What could that buy now?
Click to expand...

A decent Mac Studio or MacBook Pro if you compare it in real terms so quite a lot more for your money these days.

Computer hardware has gotten far, far cheaper since then even with the recent spikes in GPU/memory prices in the past few years.
 
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