It's 1994 and you Startup a Windows 3.11 Computer [video] | Hacker News Reader

It's 1994 and you Startup a Windows 3.11 Computer [video]

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17 pointsredbell27 comments

486-dx2-66 in 1995, with CD-rom, maybe 16mb of RAM, 100mb HDD. (maybe 20, maybe 200, it was a long time ago).

Without an OS, self built, cost me approx ~£1600 (GBP). Saved all my McJob money for an entire year.

I remember the cost as it was 100% of the money I saved and my desire for more cpu power meant I couldnt upgrade my crt (amber monochrome).

I brought it all home on the bus.

Edit. 95, not 96.

For comparison in US September 1994

"486dx2-66mhz, 256KB cache, 8MB, 1.44MB fdd, 350MB HDD, SVGA monitor/card, keyboard/mouse."

was $1840 = ~£1200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37851056

The LCD is clearly connected via VGA. The owner needs to hit the autosync button so the left edge isn’t cut off.

Packard Bell, there’s a name I haven’t seen in a while!

I remember it was nicknamed “Packard Hell” back in the day because they were one of the first companies to embrace the idea of inexpensive family computers sold in normal retail stores like Sears.

That computer hardware seems a little too good for 1994.

My guess is that it’s late 90’s hardware.

75 MHz and 16 MBytes RAM isn't all that unrealistic for a 1994 PC but it would be quite bleeding edge. The first Pentium was released in 1993 at 60 and 66Mhz, and the successor P54C came out in 1994 with 75, 90 and 100Mhz.

By the end of the decade there was already the Pentium III at 800 MHz (it's actually quite amazing how fast hardware progressed in the 90's compared to today):

https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1999/dp1220...

There has been a larger increase in computing power in the last 5 years than there was in the entire history of computers beforehand.

[[Citation needed]]

...the same can most likely be said about any 5 year period since computers were invented though, doesn't change the fact that the 90s saw a particularly radical hardware progress.

This sounds like a classic "graph should be using a log scale" situation.

I had a very similar computer (100mhz Pentium instead 75mhz) bought in late 1995 and it was not obscenely expensive. It’d be a high end machine for 1994 and obsolete by the late 90s (by 2000 AMD were selling athlons at >= 1Ghz)

I rolled into my sophomore year of college with a P90, 16MB RAM, and a 19" CRT.

All of that was great, but it was Windows 3.11 that made the difference, as that was the the version that made networking work reasonably well.

The computer did not look like 1994 to me either because of the more rounded aesthetics, the CD drive, and kind of because there's no 5.25" disk instead (something has to fill that bay). Also the bundled speakers.

The internet says it came out in 1995. http://pbplanet.info/wiki/index.php/Force_482CDT Which seems like a quibble, but Windows 95 changed everything.

CD-ROM drives were much more common than 5.25” floppy disk drives by 1994. Several games and multimedia applications required them.

My family's first PC, they made a big point of getting both types of floppies; it was a 386SX, probably around 1992.

By 1995, you didn't get a 5.25 drive; I can recall bolting one into the family's third PC (a P100 Packard Bell, the second one was a P75 they swapped out under warranty) because I had acquired a 286 "project machine" and wanted to be able to sneakernet it; I had an extra 5.25 drive but putting a 3.5" drive in the 286 would take several years and upgrades.

Depends on where you was. In 1994 a 2x CD-ROM was a top notch. By the end of '95 you could buy a CD for $5 with the all 3D games, but Duke3D didn't yet came out.

EDIT: my mind reminded me - Full Throttle and Lost Eden

The price hadn’t fallen to the point where they were in mid-range PC’s from big box/discount brands like Packard Bell. Those brands mainly sold behind the curve (e.g. the RAM spec in this machine).

In 1994 a CD-ROM was still a bit premium. It would have made more business sense to put a floppy in one of the 5.25” bays for “compatibility.” And cost savings.

Windows 95 made CD-ROM a standard feature…most Windows 3 sold on floppy. Multimedia capable PC’s went mainstream with Windows 95 and Packard Bell was what your father-in-law bought at Office Depot.

Before that speakers and CD’s were the kind of thing added into a build.

I agree about the CD-ROM drives, they were definitely only in higher end machines. However, by 1994 5.25” floppies were long obsolete. You would have had to go out of your way get one at that point, which means that yes, in 1994 a machine was far more likely to be purchased with a CD-ROM drive than a 5.25” floppy.

Companies like Packard Bell put them in to lengthen the list on the features sticker and so all the front facing 5.25” bays would not be blank.

It was marketing these PC’s based on selling at retail in big box stores. Mostly to people who were not engaged with tech enough to build their own machines or go to a builder.

Anyway, people had legacy 5.25” disks past the millennium…at least I did and my last computer with a 5.25 floppy lasted almost to 2006. Only disposed of because I sold my house and moved out of state. I built it in 1996 with a 5.25” for those aforementioned legacy discs.

That’s how it was on my street, but I didn’t live in Silicon Valley and didn’t work for big tech…I set up a sneaker net in 1997 where I worked.

"The Force 482CDT was a computer manufactured in 1995."

http://pbplanet.info/wiki/index.php/Force_482CDT

This has to a be fake: Everything loads too fast. There's no way it could be faster than today's modern software and hardware...

Don't know if this is /s or not, but for me it seems fast, but not extremely so.

My PC from '92, a 386 with 4Mb RAM was a bit slower, but not much. Boot took about a minute, including RAM test. Once in windows 3.1, bigger programs took long to start, but I presume that's mostly RAM limited.

This machine was very powerfull. 16Mb was huge and pentiums were rare.

My biggest slowdown was win95 on I think a cyrix 6x86 with 16Mb. But win95 was such a leap forward that we tolerated it.

SSD's brought us vack to this era of startup speed, and we're quickly regressing again.

/sorry ;-)

Windows 3.1 was pretty light though. It did indeed start up pretty fast because it simply didn't do much. Remember a DOS PC had almost no startup time besides the BIOS Self-Test so there was some expectation to fulfill as well. With 95 and even more so 98 it really started becoming a thing.

The LCD looks amazing though for 1993. Where I lived we didn't see those appear until much later in the 90s and they didn't have that much contrast (they were still very crappy DSTN panels). In 1994 I worked for a computer shop that sold packard bell among others (mainly their own brands) and we didn't have LCDs until much later. I have seen this Philips 150S LCD later but not in 1994. According to ChatGPT the 150S is from 2002 but I can't find a source link so take it with a grain of salt :)

And at work we didn't get LCDs until 2004-2005! At that time I worked in a callcenter and we used to throw stress balls at each other which we had to stop when the LCDs arrived due to an unfortunate accident.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxQLWF_X2eQ “The classic Windows 3.1 "ding" sound, restored to CD quality, using the original Korg M1 "Vibes" sound source!”

That was a baller PC for 1994.

In 94 I joined the 100MHz club, my buddy had a 100MHz Pentium and I had a 100MHz... 486 :-(

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