The last 10 years ... o how computers evolved

I remember paying just over £300 for a Matrox graphics card with 4mb of ram that I stuck it in a 486 and it was a real blistering beast of a machine at the time. It used to fly along with Windows 3.1, or was it Windows 95 !!!


Rgds
Binty
 
mame said:
Hard drives hit the £1 = 1mb in the early-90's. Before that I paid about £130 for an 80mb hard drive for my Amiga. Or do you mean £1 - 1GB ? In which case, I feel old.
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Me too.. Remember paying around the same for an Amiga 1200 HDD just a bit larger in size - 120GB I think. I remember upgrading my A1200 towards the end of its life to a 500MB hard drive and finally transferred it to a 486 PC as Hard Disks were just so expensive in those days...

I also remember when RAM prices in the early 90's went through the roof.. I remember having 4MB of ram in a 486 and you was considered to be a rich boy.

In the last 10 years PC's have slowed down in terms of requirements to update them so often, but the price of hardware in comparable performance for what is needed has I feel actually gone up.

A 3Dfx voodoo 1 card and a basic 2D card was the cutting edge of 3D gaming back in 1994 ish... That would have cost around £400? I think. Today an ATI 5970 is around £500.. and to be considered the cutting edge.. but it'll last you longer then a 3Dfx voodoo 1 would..

The 5970 will see you good for around 2 years?? nowadays? The voodoo 1 would see you good for maybe a year if you was lucky..

Costs haven't gone down, I feel its the lifespan that's got better..

A Q6600 is still considered a decent CPU, a chip that is still ran in older socket tech... Try that back in the early 90's.... You needed to swap out motherboards quicker then I changed my boxers..!! lol


fond memories of the early and mid 90's.. golden age of PC's as it was changing so quickly it was fun - if a tad expensive to keep up.
 
sonicology said:
Was it by any chance a GVP HD8+ SCSI? I owned one of those myself.
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Ooh now that brings back memories.. I too had a GVP Hdd enclosure for an amiga 500+. I always found it amazing that a third party company managed to release a product that looked like part of the amiga 500, whereas Commodores external A500 Hdd enclosure looked like a brick slapped on the side...

I remember Blizzard 1240 accelerator or was it 1230 cards... The increase in speed from the standard motorola CPU in the A1200 was staggering..
 
20 years ago, the silicon weighed a ton and the heat sinks nothing......... now the silicon weighs nothing and the heatsinks weigh a ton.

A standard mid range PC has always cost a $1000.

my 2p worth

andy.
 
iv-tecman said:
Costs haven't gone down, I feel its the lifespan that's got better..

A Q6600 is still considered a decent CPU, a chip that is still ran in older socket tech... Try that back in the early 90's.... You needed to swap out motherboards quicker then I changed my boxers..!! lol
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Think I agree here, The Q6600s were released in January 07 meaning the B3s are almost 3.5 years old now. Still they do pretty well in most applications and they'll continue to do so for (at a guess) 18-24 months? That's a pretty good lifespan if you ask me.
 
Ahhh jumpers, dip switches and IRQ's how I DONT miss thee :p
I remember the dumbfounded look on my friends face when I told him my then 486 had 16mb of ram.
 
thingemajib said:
not entirely comparable,but i got a 1gb ddr400 stick for 60quid about 4 years ago. just sold it for 9 :(
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I remember my first PC an extra 512mb cost me just over 60, would be completely worthless now lol. I saw 1GB as a hell of a lot of RAM to have, now I have 4x that and still feel the urge to unnecessarily grab more. :D
 
While not on par with most of the posts, I remember the first computer I used was my brother's: it ran Windows 95 and Oddworld: Abe's Oddysey was the first game I played on a PC xD
 
nkata said:
My first upgrade was for a Philips 286-12.5MHz PC, it had 640Kb Ram with 384kb extended memory. I bought an additional 1Mb for £70. The PC when new cost £900 similar to a mid range PC nowadays, it had MS Dos v5 and a basic windows system called Geo. Dos shell was the file explorer of choice. It also had a 40Mb hard disc and a floppy, 14" VGA monitor. It was a good home computer in 1991. I learnt a lot from computing with such small resources though.

andy
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£900 for a mid range! i'd be calling that entry to the top end.
It's a case of if u want the best then u pay the price, always has been, and always will be
 
I remember how I thought my Celeron 400 @ 500MHz with 128MB of RAM was awesome in 2000. Had that beast for a couple of years, before I saw some light. :o
 
Opens a drawer...
...windows 3.1 install disks, + msdos6.0 enhanced tools :D

First PC was a 486dx266... with a single speed CD rom :cool:
cost me about 1500 quid LOL
 
There seem to be a few people forgetting that money also devalues over time so a £1000 PC today is a lot cheaper than a £1000 PC 10yrs ago. The current one is also a lot more powerful!

Just wait until China starts exporting its inflation then today's prices are going to seem cheap ;)
 
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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actually today, the motherboards are pretty cheap in comparason.

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

i've paid a lot in the past for hardware, £300 for a 700mb hard drive makes SSD's look pretty cheap now :P
 
Back on the price topic, PC parts have gone down in price a lot.
Not to mention 10-12+ yrs ago but yet 4-5yrs ago, you had to splash nearly a grand on a good PC that will play games at full while nowadays you can probably get a PC 500 that will play anything just fine and for quite some time yet and when it comes to office basic use PCs - you can build/buy one 2nd hand for under 50quid ( going as low as 15-20 ) !!

Same goes for the internet connection, I remember one of my first LANs years ago and 5-20kb/s was blazingly fast, now I can get 50+ on a mobile phone.
 
Cycrow said:
actually today, the motherboards are pretty cheap in comparason.

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

i've paid a lot in the past for hardware, £300 for a 700mb hard drive makes SSD's look pretty cheap now :P
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I agree, in 1993 just before PCI, I bought a 486 based mobo and it had 2 8bit ISA, 3 16bit ISA and 2 vesa local bus slots, also 8 memory slots used in banks of four. The I/O (HDD, FDD) was a local bus card, the graphics similar, the soundcard was 16bit ISA, serial and parallel ports were on brackets and the mouse was a serial one, so yes the keyboard was the only onboard port. I used a 486DX33, the DX had a built in math coprocessor, the SX version was a cheaper CPU without the copro. (My earlier 286 had a seperate coprocessor socket).

I later upgraded to a 486DX2 80MHz (40MHz base x2 multiplier) and had to set at least three jumpers on the main board to recognise the CPU.

I paid over a £1000 then for this build. subsequent builds replaced some parts i.e. a Pentium P60 required a new mobo and graphics although still AT format.

andy.
 
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