The last 10 years ... o how computers evolved

I remember when I was a kid I had an Atari ST with half a megabyte of memory. I happily played game after game, until Street Fighter 2 came out! I cried. It needed a whole MEGABYTE of memory! My dad bought me another half a megabyte on an expansion card about the size of a network card for some ludicrous price!

I was happy :D

Then about a year later he got me my first PC. A 386 (25MHz) I think it was with 4MB of RAM and a 32MB HDD!
 
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I remember ISA IDE cards, I had a 486 with a VLB socket for the Video Card, but the rest was ISA and to get a CD rom drive working you needed to have a sound card with a ATAPI CD Rom connector..

And they were a total **** to get working on your config.sys and autoexec.bat files…

Then IDE became mounted to the motherboard and CD Rom drives followed the IDE standard, boy that made life simpler.

If you look at motherboards today, all you really need to get a PC up and running once the motherboard is installed would be a SATA drive, SATA DVD or Blu Ray drive to install the O/S (or even a USB stick could do the job) a video card (if not already on the motherboard), mount the CPU with a cooler and install the memory..

Back in the 486 days you would need –

Motherboard
IDE and FDD ISA board
Video Card
Floppy Drive connected
Hard Drive Connected

If you wanted multimedia

Soundcard in an ISA slot
Soundcard needed a CD rom connector
CD Rom

Then the CPU, cooler and memory as well as setting up the CPU jumpers for the CPU you installed – building a PC today is so simple.
 
Cycrow said:
at least now, everything is intergrated into the motherboard. whereas i remember when you had to buy them all seperatlly.

seperate ISA IDE controllers, IO cards, even serials ports had to be bought seperatly. Back when motherboards were AT, and all they had on them was a keyboard port
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I remember having quite a discussion with a guy in an IT shop about a motherboard with onboard sound and graphics and I couldnt quite understand why anyone would want that. It was all about making a unique machine with your own choice of parts and a personal slant on it. I seem to remember this board only having 2 PCI and 1 ISA port. I didnt buy it.

Peripheral IDE controllers and IO controllers are a bit before my time though!
 
Yeah I/O controller cards were just on the way out when I finally got into PC’s.

They used to have all types of I/O connectors, IDE, Floppy, Serial connector on the back of the card, some had Game port connectors (although sound cards had these mostly) and you needed jumpers and all sorts of configurations to get them working.

They were towards the end 16bit ISA boards, they became obsolete once onboard IDE became the standard..

Onboard sound and graphics haven’t quite had the same impact as onboard IDE and SATA. Sound has started to see less sound cards being installed, most motherboards can handle digital 5.1 with SPDIF out and optical etc…so the need for an expensive sound card is getting less and less.

Not to say an addon sound card isn’t required, but it’s a case of if the onboard is good enough, don’t waste money on another card that does pretty much the same job.

But graphics will always be better with an addon board.
 
iv-tecman said:
I remember ISA IDE cards, I had a 486 with a VLB socket for the Video Card, but the rest was ISA and to get a CD rom drive working you needed to have a sound card with a ATAPI CD Rom connector..

And they were a total **** to get working on your config.sys and autoexec.bat files…

Then IDE became mounted to the motherboard and CD Rom drives followed the IDE standard, boy that made life simpler.

If you look at motherboards today, all you really need to get a PC up and running once the motherboard is installed would be a SATA drive, SATA DVD or Blu Ray drive to install the O/S (or even a USB stick could do the job) a video card (if not already on the motherboard), mount the CPU with a cooler and install the memory..

Back in the 486 days you would need –

Motherboard
IDE and FDD ISA board
Video Card
Floppy Drive connected
Hard Drive Connected

If you wanted multimedia

Soundcard in an ISA slot
Soundcard needed a CD rom connector
CD Rom

Then the CPU, cooler and memory as well as setting up the CPU jumpers for the CPU you installed – building a PC today is so simple.
Click to expand...


Then you would have conflicts with hardware, IRQ's sharing not allowed, memory addressing, upper and lower memory, as you said ensuring all commands were correct in config.sys and autoexec.bat. Himem.sys had to be started before anything was loaded above 640k, programs had to be removed manually from memory otherwise they hogged the lot (TSR Terminate and stay resident), important when you had so little. Optimisation was an art to maintain the most usable RAM space.

andy
 
I used to work in a computer shop years ago. I just found an old price list from April 1999. It's a trade price list so shows what we paid for stuff. I've removed supplier info because I've no idea if they're still in business.

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Yeah, to the OP, memory was a pound-a-meg when I had my first PC in 1999. In year 2000, I managed to get an extra 64MB stick for £45, so the price had slipped a little by 2000. In late 2001, I bought a 512MB stick for £55, again a further reduction, but it was pot luck. Shortly after my £55/512MB, the price shot up to £85 because one of the Asian RAM factories blew up or suchlike.

Also, 10 years ago, floppy disks were still the norm although they've already had their peak by then. CD burning went into consumer range around 1999/2000, then USB memory sticks took over from 2004-ish.

The typical monitor resolution in year 2000 was 1024 x 768 on a CRT. 17" TFTs went into consumer range around 2004, and widescreen around 2006.
 
sid said:
Actually top end stuff costs a lot more now than it ever did before. And I mean absolute bleeding edge stuff

Stuff like 6 c0res, SLI graphics, SSDs costs absolutely loads. 1k cpus are a new thing tbh. I think graphics cards used to be around 300-400 always but 300+ motherboards are a new thing

sid
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I dunno, it always used to be expensive if you ask me:
32meg EDO simm = £400+ in the mid 90s.
Bleeding edge Intel cpus = often around $999
SCSI controller + fast drives = 'absolutely loads'

When I went to uni in 1998 I was considering applying for DSA which would have given me up to £3000 to buy a computer. For fun I was speccing one up and I had no trouble at all hitting that budget (dual P2-300, SCSI hd, Voodoo2 12MB SLI etc).

Then you have to factor inflation in, the cumulative rate means that something costing £1000 15 years ago is the equivalent of around £1500 in today's money. A budget of £1000 wouldn't have got you anything fancy in the mid-90s but £1500 can build you a perfectly respectable system today.
 
accod said:
I used to work in a computer shop years ago. I just found an old price list from April 1999. It's a trade price list so shows what we paid for stuff. I've removed supplier info because I've no idea if they're still in business.
Click to expand...

Yes they are, I recognise that price list hehe, I found an old price list from another company the other day from when the 130mhz 486 was AMD's flagship CPU lol, insane prices, I still have an ancient software brochure somewhere from the Al Wazzan Computer store in Kuwait city and im naming them because they closed after the Iraqi army looted their stock so they don't count as a competitor any more :P

"Back in the day" A new high spec computer would cost you over £1000 and believe it or not its still the same today, back then if you wanted cheaper your only option was either to buy the 50mhz one instead of the 66mhz one or just buy a second hand one.

Today options are different, for a cutting edge system your still paying at least around the £1k mark but the difference is loads of companies will sell you "new" hardware with yesterdays performance and call it their budget/midrange hardware, in example a top of the range system from 2005 will perform on par if not better than a budget (~£300) system from today
 
When i started out in IT in 1988, i was a workbench engineer, cutting chips out of boards, and resolding replacements in. Serial i/o's 1488 and 1489 spring to mind, we had PC's in the workshop, but never at home, whoever wanted an IBM PC at home, now there everywhere...

Red
 
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