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bluedino

>> Everybody was working witht he best PC money could buy, a high end 386DX/33MHz with 4MB of RAM

According to a May 15, 1990 issue of PC Magazine, that was a $3,500-4,000 USD machine back then.

Used to develop Wolf3D, but only good for about 8fps when Doom (ID's next hit) came out.

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Their one NeXT computer cost even more, $6500 base price.

From the book: Carmack stepped into the local bank and requested a cashier's check for $11,000. The money was for a NeXT computer, the latest machine from Steve Jobs, cocreator of Apple.

Carmack: Over the entire course of Doom and Quake 1’s development we probably spent $100,000 on NeXT computers https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/01/why-john-carma...

The sad thing is that the NeXT never had a native port of DOOM until very recently.

Interestingly that's the exact PC my dad bought us when we were kids. I loved how computers back then had a turbo button, but I could never figure out why anyone would turn off turbo! :P

I believe it was due to programs (mainly games) that relied on clock speed to work. If you ran some of them with turbo, they were so fast they were unplayable.

It was a slow button, it slowed the computer down. "Turbo on" was just running normally.

An example from Fabian Sanglard's game engine black book, wolf3d, p222

  When the AdLib was released in 1986, developers were instructed to send data "as fast as
  possible". At 4.77MHz, a PC was unable to out-pace the AdLib. Yet as CPUs got faster,
  issues started to arise and the card was unable to keep up.

So if an old program ran on a new machine, it might mangle the sound or even cause a hardware crash. So the only way to play it was to slow down the new computer to the speed of the old one.

I remember Doom pushing a much higher frame rate than that with those specs. The real issue was that you needed L2 cache!

I don't think 386 CPUs had any cache.

The CPUs didn't (except for some later variants), but mainboards could add it. Or was that only with the 486?

If I remember correctly, there were even some 286 motherboards with SRAM cache onboard, as well as on 386 boards. That would be L1 cache on those. For a 486 board, this would be L2 cache since the CPU has its own internal L1.

These SRAM chips were dual-inline pin packages (DIP), i.e. those black rectangular chips with fat pins down both long edges. Sometimes these were in friction-fit sockets and sometimes soldered down. On the 286, I think the DRAM was also socketed DIP.

Ummm.... I remember my father gifting me a 386DX 40Mhz with 4 MiB of RAM, 200MiB IDE hard disk and one of the first X2 CD-ROM that support all CD-ROM formats. All this on 1990 or 1991. Before, I had a ZX Spectrum +3. I really have good memories from these two computers.

You were a lucky kid, then. My family bought a 386DX around 90-91 for about $3k, IIRC.

My parents bought me a 386SX 20MHz, 40 MB HDD, 2MB RAM just with floppies in 1991.

It was around 1500 euros, when converting directly the price into today's money, without taking currency evolution into account. Back then working as cashier would get you around 300 euro per month, before taxes.

We were really lucky.

I remember running wolf3d.exe on my 386SX/16MHz in the mid-1990s, and it wouldn't run worth a damn unless the game display size was reduced to the lowest possible setting, about the size of a business card on the ol' VGA CRT. I spent many hours squinting at pixel-Nazis.

Now, some 25 years later, I have been playing through Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and I had nostalgic good fun playing several levels of the original Wolfenstein via an in-game arcade machine.

I like stories.

Wolf3D ran fine on a 286, it ran great on a 386, I had a 16MHz SX (sucks)

>Wolf3D ran fine on a 286, it ran great on a 386

Highly dependent on the VGA card, believe it or not (there's a nice set of benchmarks showing this in Game Engine Black Book).

Interesting point. I can add that it ran smoothly with full-size view on an IBM PS/2 70/80 laptop with a 386SX 20 MHz.

That price seems a little high. I was selling these from a custom shop in 1994 and a pretty well equipped 486 and then Pentium was about $2,000 to $2,500. You could spend a bit more and get better audio and video cards, but the base models at the time ran Doom and Quake pretty well. Computers seem like they have stayed in that range all my life. Back then I had a $2k desktop and today I have a $2k MacBook. There were always cheaper options for budget conscious buyers and the sky has always been the limit if you want to go crazy.

1994 is a long time after 1990 for computer prices. Moores law was in full effect in the 90s.

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