The Rise and Fall of Micron Computers (2020) | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of Micron Computers (2020)

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92 pointskaishiro29 comments

This brings me back to when I was shopping for my college computer. I used to pour through Computer Shopper magazine, totally captivated by the ads from (Midwest?) Micron, Gateway 2000, etc.

I ended up with a Gateway 2000 486-25 DX, 4 MB of RAM, 83 MB HDD, 14" SVGA monitor, and Windows 3.1(?), an AnyKey keyboard, and mouse for (IIRC) $3100. And the salesman was named Tom Reibur (I may be misspelling his last name). It was delivered in several large cow-themed boxes by a FedEx delivery van with a woman driver.

Guess my first serious computer left an impression :)

My first serious purchases: (prior to these, my parent foot the bill for my first 286, 386 486 ((Because I convince my dad he needs a computer for his business. Oh and you also need to buy these modems. And these games.))

I bought a machine in Seattle it was $1,600 for a machine - I think it was a 266 mhz PII 1995

---

BUT I spent $1,700 on an Evans and Sutherland 3d graphics card with 32 megabytes of vram - it was collasal, full length AT card. 32MB -- but it could run Softimage on NT4 like nobody...

My current laptop is an HP Oman flagship with GTX 3070ti and I have blender and so much power I dont know what to do with.

and I have two of them...

Oh, that brings me back! I remember seeing those cow-themed boxes everywhere back in the day.

I was so disappointed to see the cow theming disappear when the company folded. (Or, you might say... when the company moo-ved on.)

OT: Anecdotally, it seems like there was just a bit more whimsy and playfulness around the design back in those days. The iPods that came out a few years later -- with all their delightful neon and pastel shades -- were another lovely echo of that same theme. Nowadays, it seems like technology is all polished metal and rounded corners -- Airspace [1] and Alegria [2] everywhere you look. I'd love to see a return to some of the more playful designs of yesteryear.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-...

[2]: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-...

Two fascinating links. Thank you!

Gateway was involved in my first college computer, too, but not in the standard way. In 1998 I worked at a mall RadioShack, and there was also a Gateway store at the other end. I was able to get one of their credit cards, then went home and used it (upon recommendation from a coworker) to buy a custom-built PC from a company called Midwest Micro. 266 P2, 64MB of RAM, 6GB Seagate drive, SoundBlaster AWE64, and a CD-ROM. Came with Windows 98, soon replaced by Red Hat 5.2, my first foray into Linux. Served me well, upgraded it along the way, and I still have the case next to me today, with a P3, 1GB of RAM, 20GB of disk, DVD burner, 3.5 and 5.25" floppies, and running the latest FreeBSD. Great bridge machine for retrocomputing work.

You’re thinking of “Midwest Micro” from Fletcher, OH. It was a pretty big white box PC reseller located, literally, in the middle of farm fields in rural Ohio. (Have a lot of friends who “did their time” starting out in IT work there— in support, production, or admin roles.)

The founder sold out and eventually the business was owned by the same company who owned Tiger Direct.

My first PC was a Micron. I don't remember the specs at this point but the machine was fast, every component in it was well-chosen and standard, and the case was roomy and easy enough to get into that I was still using it long after swapping out all of the original components.

The best thing about Micron, though, was the support. Micron had no Level 1 "techs" reading replies from a script on staff, no annoying phone trees to navigate, and no obnoxiously long hold times. You'd just call and within a few rings be speaking directly to a Level 2 or 3 tech who knew both hardware and Windows troubleshooting and treated you as a peer. Discovering how aggressively awful support from most tech companies is after working with Micron was disheartening.

My parents got a 486 from Gateway 2000, but the first PC I bought and owned personally was a Micron. Full tower case, Pentium 2-233, 6.4GB hard drive, S3 Virge DX video, USB (that being kind of a new thing at the time), 24x CD-ROM, I think either 16MB or 32MB of RAM, 17 inch CRT monitor. I think it had a mix of ISA and PCI slots. I don't remember if AGP was a thing yet. Zip drive and 3.5" floppy. Actual serial and parallel ports. PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse I think. It probably had one of those MIDI/joystick ports, but maybe things had moved to USB by then. I don't remember if it came with a 56k modem, but if not I think I added that later. Also a 10-baseT ethernet card. Probably an NE-2000. It came with Windows95, but I also dual-booted to Redhat 5.0 and for awhile also ran BeOS.

It was quite a machine at the time, and cost me about $3,000. I think the next time I upgraded it was to an AMD system with a clock speed around 1400 MHZ, but I also kept using the Micron case for quite a long time after I had replaced almost all of the original hardware.

I don't think I ever had to call Micron support.

What a weird time that was. Computers were really terrible, but the amount of rapid progress and competition between big companies and the rise of open source software and the Internet were all really exciting and inspiring. Like there was always something amazing right around the corner. These days I can't really immediately distinguish a computer manufactured yesterday from one that's 10 or 15 years old.

> Microsoft was about to release Windows 95, which everyone knew was going to require 8 megabytes of RAM to run reasonably, 16 megabytes of RAM to run well, and power users were going to want 32.

And here we are, 25 years later, doing mostly the same on our PCs (the typical desktop applications are the same today as they were then, ok, some of them now run in a browser, and instead of WinAmp playing your local MP3 files you have Spotify streaming from the cloud), but requiring 1024 times more memory to do it - 8 GB bare minimum, 16 GB ok, 32 GB for power users!

Of course 32MB of ram isn't enough to hold the frame buffer for an HD screen, let alone multiple 4K monitors.

Even if you did have all those pixels worth of memory, the idea that the CPU could reasonably render a nice crisp UI with gradients at any reasonable FPS is lauaghable.

You're talking about an era where the idea of leaving a PC on overnight and expecting it to be usable in the morning w/out a reboot was a foolish pipe dream - I discovered linux because I couldn't even get windows 95 to stay stay running for a few hours without seeing BSOD.

Point of all this being: the notion that those apps were somehow better is rosy nostalgia at best. Yes a lot of apps today suck, but so did a lot of apps back then - generally the ones that suck these days suck less, and even if they are complete trash, they almost never bring the whole OS down with them. If the cost of that is taking advantage of the fact that my computer came with 1000x as much memory, so what? That 32GB in my desktop isn't even used all the way by FS cache + games + whatever else is running, why does it matter what the number of bytes used by any single app is?

Ok, granted, screens today are more hi-res, and use transparency and other shader effects that weren't available in 1995. Also, VS Code is a much more advanced IDE than Visual Basic 4 or Delphi 2 (although you could design a UI graphically with the latter two, but not with the former). But my general point still stands: the applications today aren't 1000 times better than in 1995 (except possibly games), so why do they need 1000 times more memory?

Wait, you're seriously proposing that memory usage and quality should have a directly linear relationship? (ignoring the fact that 1000x "better" is a purely subjective measure that even people with similar tastes have extreme difficulty in quantifying).

Keep in mind that most of those apps you are talking about were designed with 256 color palletes (or smaller!) in mind. Just moving to true color triples the rendering target buffer without any other change. The same proportion of a screen used by the same app in HD vs 640p is another factor of ~9. (a lot more for 4k, etc).

Word size is 2x larger - every pointer and int takes twice as many bytes.

Depending on the native endcoding of your OS, strings can take 2-4x as many bytes, because it turns out there are languages besides English that have different letters.

All of the above are just mechanical changes in the underlying gear that require a significant portion of your 1000x factor.

Other things go into to it too but they are dev choices:

* responsiveness due to keeping more in RAM rather than waiting for disk io

* (related to disk io) fetching resources from the network is very slow too, so keeping them in memory is a good idea.

* spending a huge effort minimizing RAM usage is often a waste of effort, given that the machine will have far more memory - this has made your free/cheap app possible (more so considering a 1995 dollar is ~2 2022 dollars).

* The little features most users (maybe even you) take for granted all cost memory and cpu, and those are not present in the old software.

* In general the software today does more anyway - even ignoring the convenience features, this also has a cost.

I notice you have yet to answer my question: So what? Why does that matter when machines come with more RAM than I can use even with the increase in memory usage?

> * responsiveness due to keeping more in RAM rather than waiting for disk io

Excel , word, etc are much slower. It seems that although they keep some things in RAM they need to report to mothership.

I was just thinking about how much faster and less cluttered things like Word and Excel were back then. Office 2000 vs whatever version we are on now.

>Of course 32MB of ram isn't enough to hold the frame buffer for an HD screen, let alone multiple 4K monitors.

Actually, it's exactly right for a 4k framebuffer: 3840*2160*4/1024/1024 ~= 31.6MB. 8-)

You're right, my search history shows i did 4*1920*1080*4 :facepalm:

Word, Spotify and Chrome (Gmail, Google News, Medium) runs fine on 4GB of RAM.

Just tested on a fairly old laptop I have.

Couldn't hold many MP3's on my 2.1GB hard drive back then. I was streaming the 'cool' radio stations from the big cites on RealPlayer!

I currently work for Micron as a 25 year old. I honestly had no idea Micron used to make computers until I saw a Linux Tech Tips video where they made a "sleeper PC" using an old Micron case from the 90s.

This article was a good summary of what I have understood to be Micron's history. Thanks for sharing.

I flopped at interview at Micron PC (MPC) around 2005 maybe? An interviewer asked me who their main customer was and I had absolutely no idea. Turned out that it was the government.

I was so idealistic at the time that I was thinking about stuff like NAND flash memory and FPGAs and affordable solar panels and multicore CPUs. Which were ideas being explored by Micron. But MPC's business was supplying rudimentary computers for office use. That was a solved problem by the late 90s so there wasn't anywhere for the market to go except a race to the bottom.

On a side note, many techies in southern Idaho felt that Micron and HP had monopolized the local tech scene through tax waivers and hiring up talent, barring entry to startups until around 2015. Today there's an eerie feeling that it's all happening too quickly and we'll go the way of Austin as thousands of economic and climate refugees flock here from other states, paving all of the farms for subdivisions and cutting down all of the trees for 3 story apartments. Now a home that was $150k in 2010 goes for half a million dollars while wages for average working people still hover in the $40-60k range, so the locals are getting forced out just like everywhere else.

Not enough history about Micron, the company. The founder sold the exclusive potatoes for McDonald's French fries! He literally went from chips to chips.

I don't think Simplot was the founder, just the funder. IIRC it was a couple engineers from Texas Instruments who founded Micron. Pretty sure JR Simplot and Ron Yanke funded the company.

Another source suggests they were former engineers of a company founded by former TI engineers.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/20/5-things-you-didnt...

Simplot was an early investor, not a founder.

I miss Micron computers, they were clean and click with black cases... It was so easy to work on them because the cases were well designed and durable. Most of the parts in Microns i recall were easily swappable, which was great for troubleshooting. Back then the top of the line desktops were around $2-4k each, I worked in a university library that bought 100 of them and I was a help desk/support tech back around 1995... The job was quite easy, except for working with printers. Now, you couldn't convince me to do PC support if you held a gun to my head. :/

I think a lot of those people went to work for Dell. Unfortunately they lost the plot in making too many fail-prone things as integrated components.

Micron Computers had a fantastic website, with a no-frills configurator that let you customize nearly every component. They also offered solid upgrades to sound and video cards, and even Trinitron monitors.

They were like an unpretentious Falcon Northwest.

My ex and I had one of those. I think it might have been the last PC we bought without a video card... worked well (for its time), actually.

I miss the days when there were more vendors and Computer Shopper was enormous. Ah well.

We had a Micron growing up, it was a pentium 90, it had one of those early plexus cd burners that had that plastic caddy you put the cds into, I spent such a long time getting my boot disk to work and run wing commander 3 well.

Good times.

Micron is killing it these days, and it's all thanks to Gurtej Sandhu.

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