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Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95. I had 100mb internet on lan and multi t3. Google was around before public launch in 98. You're a few years off. In 98 I had a sgi visual workstatuon with 4gb ram and 50gb HDD and was on the same hub as the t3s. This was at college of course. I had dsl in 00 and it was as fast as campus. My mom was the first non-commercial install in STL (she was kinda a techie but also a good mom to a cs student kid).

Summer of 95 I convinced her to get dialup so I could learn about this internet thing I figured would be big. I was about 2 years too late for that wave.

But yes things were way more primitive and the learning curve was high. I had to spend several hours on the phone with the ISP to get on dialup on Mac. They onboarded people on campus manually and sold Ethernet cards back then.

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> I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95

Not sure how you’re claiming this but here is an article from 2000 announcing the first 1ghz consumer processor. https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-official-amd-hits-1000mhz-...

Are you saying you were on a mainframe or supercomputer in 95? That’s the only way I could see access to anything approaching those speeds at that time.

Even an sgi workstation you’re looking at 200mhz tops in 95. And no way 1gb of ram more like 64mb.

Also here is a 1998 listing with sgis. Not close to the numbers you’re citing. https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?attachments/caa_softimage_sg...

>I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95

No you didnt. Process node enabling 1GHz wasnt even invented yet. Afaik fastest CPU at the time was Alpha released in December at 333MHz.

1GB of ram cost $32K in 1995, $2400 in 1997, $1200 in 1998, and back to $2400 in September 1999 due to Jiji earthquake. Just for some perspective 4th place on TOP500 in 1995 had 8GB of ram.

> Afaik fastest CPU at the time was Alpha released in December at 333MHz

That would be rather 1996. Alphas were already at 500MHz in 1997, and (expensive) Pentium II were at 450MHz in 1998.

You're the one that's of for sure considering the first 1ghz processor didn't come out until 1999. The Pentium PRO of 1995 (November at that)boasted a Max. CPU clock rate of 150 MHz to 200 MHz.

>> This was at college of course.

Well sure, the colleges had the good toys long before the rest of us. But we didn't have college-level money at home or at work.

I left college (and the machines that existed there) in 1992. And the hardware there in 1992 was better than the hardware I had at home or at work for the rest of the 90s.

So yeah, the tech existed, but it wasn't the tech we got to play with again until much later on. By 1998 though we had at least moved away from DOS development into Windows.

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