EMachines never obsolete PCs: More than a meme | Hacker News Reader

EMachines never obsolete PCs: More than a meme

dfarq.homeip.net

77 pointszdw41 comments

Wow someone else from St. Louis? Found this blast from the past too: https://dfarq.homeip.net/building-a-computer-in-the-90s/

I only remembered a couple CompUSAs, Circuit City, and Best Buy selling computers growing up. I don't remember visiting any independent computer stores in the mid 90s.

But talking to those in my parents' generation, most of them bought their computers from some local small shop (and sometimes went back there for computer training!).

I count St. Louis lucky for at least having a Micro Center today, otherwise all my parts would have to come from online stores.

I remember being quite young and my parents going to the one of the local computer shops and getting a beige box Pentium 3 at 450mhz that we used for a while. The shop put Quake on there because they had kids, and I remember the first time I played it my mom instantly went and uninstalled.

A few years later in ~2004/5 I dug that same beige computer out of the closet, bought some extra RAM (I think it was 256mb total I could fit in it) and used that to host a private Lineage 2 server, which is how I got into databases / software development in the first place. With a whole bunch of tuning I could run ~50 people concurrently on that machine without terrible lag.

Eventually I had enough people who donated that I could upgrade to a newly released Athlon x2 stuffed into a rack mount case, which I sent to a colo.

I worked in one of those independent computer stores in the 90s, assembling white box PCs in a dimly lit back room, and systematically removing drivers on early Win95 machines until they'd stop crashing to identify which one was buggy.

PCs were so dynamic at the time, half my paychecks were spent on discounted upgrades before I ever saw the paper. EDO ram? sign me up. 512K of pipelined burst L2 cache? yes please. HX chipset? of course. Dual socket pentium pros? I need a raise.

Similar background re: PC building here, working at a shop that built PCs in the late 90s. I remember seeing boards with these new-fangled USB ports, DIMM memory, Pentium II, the first 3D accelerators, etc. It was a fun time. I got in to the industry right at the end of AT-style boards and power supplies and mostly missed having to deal with that stuff (other than in my personal life, where I still had old stuff).

Radio Shack, the short-lived Gateway Country store, Sears had a ton of computers, regional electronics stores, JC Penny got out of it in the early 90's, Sam's Club...

My father just closed his local small shop, as it was no longer paying the bills. It's harder and harder to compete with the internet.

They were ok for the price... I think they were probably the most responsible for squeezing every bit of profitability from independent builders though. It really became a race to the bottom, combined with more interest in mobile/laptop computers.

I remember in the mid to late 90's, you could build a computer for someone and walk away with enough for an upgraded system for yourself. Of course the churn on performance was very real. IIRC, 1992 maxed out with a 486 DX2 @66mhz. Around 2000 we crossed the 1ghz mark from both Intel and AMD. We went from OG Doom that couldn't cut it full screen, to Half Life and Quake 3 Arena on Voodoo 3 and early NVidia cards.

Around 2000 I remember building myself new PCs every time someone wanted a gaming PC; I'd sell them my existing system and build myself the new hotness. I'd always buy just where the price/performance curve was starting to go vertical, so the 2-3 month old machine was still quite a good "deal".

That stopped being effective sometime before 2010. Instead I'd recommend buying a decent enough machine and sticking a graphics card in it.

Yeah.. late 90's to early 00's was pretty peak builder era. I learned through a relative fluke how much going a bit over the top on memory and faster drives really helped over even a faster CPU/GPU a lot of the time for general use. My current computer is literally the first I've built in decades that I didn't max out the RAM... I mean, I kind of did as 2x48gb was the most I could get in DDR5@6000 and only use 2 slots (or it would run much slower).

4th gen Core series was the longest I'd held onto a single PC (close to 5 years total for a 4790K). I did a mid-cycle gpu and nvme upgrade and that was it. I bumped to a 3950X/5950X and now 9950X since... AM3 is really the first socket in a long time I'd done an in-place upgrade for any CPU. My daughter's Ryzen 2400 to a 5000 series, and my own build from a 3600 -> 3950X -> 5950X... the 3600 was a placeholder as I couldn't get a 3950X for a few months.

I couldn't even name half the CPUs I ran from 1998 to 2005 or so... it was such a blur of upgrades every 6-12 months... I'd upgrade my computer, my wife's, my son's... etc. Then, things just completely stagnated... I mean there's been progress, but it's over the course of years, not seeing 2-3x in under a year.

I remember that it started to stall out on RAM before CPU (in that it became "reasonable" to have way more RAM than you really needed - Chrome didn't exist yet lol); that the very early move to multi-core was a bit of a downer (much couldn't use more than 2 or 3 cores so a "new CPU" with 4 instead of 2 cores but the same single-thread performance would be hardly noticeable).

Then of course there was the huge "replace everything with SSDs ASAP" performance bump, but ever since the later Core and before the M1, everything felt incremental. Nothing like the "Wolfenstein 3D to Quake Glide in 5 years" era.

Holy shit it was only 5 years - the M1 was released 6 years ago!

Froom Doom ~1993 to the Unreal engine ~1998, used even for Deus Ex, in just 5 years. For GenZers: a bigger jump than the one from the 3DS to the Switch.

By comparison, from the first Core Duo computers to today... we should have been roaming around, at street, level, in fully 3D rendered cities in Street View long ago, at least with Half Life 2 quality graphics and some high res textures and light bolted on to fake out the most complex effects.

And yet what we have it's the exact same rendering PC's and PowerPC macs did with virtual tour multimedia CD's in late 90's (and Encarta) but in a higher resolution. Literally. A 2D image rendered inside of an sphere.

That's it, something right now you can do in software without too much effort. You can get some 3D image and a dedicated viewer for it such as Panini with no advanced 3D support at all and what you are literally doing it's the same as JS scripts and WebGL are trying to do with Street View still images but with a Core Duo CPU or a high end Pentium 4.

Which is a technology closer to Myst in concept than the Unreal Engine. There's no actual progress as the one we lived through the 90's. Years passed as huge steps in the same way a kid aged 10 had near nothing to do in tastes with a 14yo one. Well, technology in our lives was the same. From walkmans to CD's and for crappy MSDOS computers in Mid Elementary to Windows 98 at nearly the high scrool.

Part of it is that things are slowing down, so the "solution" selected is the same - Unreal engine released in 1998; people still using evolved Unreal engine today.

I feel we haven't really had a different paradigm for decades, and I'm not sure AI even really is one.

Not sure that I completely agree here... I think part of the issue is that things have slowed down and even parallel GPUs are about as big as they can physically get. The top of the line is pretty much gate-kept and sitting in warehouses (already purchased for AI datacenters that are years away from being built, let alone where the electricity will come from).

We're in a kind of weird limbo of overpriced scraps and wait and see, while the all of computer mfg feels like an AI shell game combined with a cartel of memory pirates.

This era reminds me of the time that my grandmother (in same house) got a new Compaq with a CD burner. It was running windows ME. My dumb ass thought that because a had disk drive could be mounted as a volume over the network, a burner could too. Turns out you can sort-of network mount a CD drive but its not usable. The days and hours I wasted on this project, including convincing my mom to take me to Fry's in Burbank to get a Netgear hub (not switch!) to glue everything together.

That Fry's is forever memorialized in the 2022 movie Nope

Back when Fry's Electronics actually had hardware in stock. The last time I tried to get something at the North Phoenix location, it was pitiful and I couldn't find what I needed. I hadn't been there for years and wound up having to wait 2 days for Amazon anyway.

FWIW, I haven't been to the Phoenix Microcenter yet, mostly in that I'm afraid of how much I might otherwise spend there.

I used to live a few miles from Tustin, CA microcenter. Now I live in Michigan, and used to live a few miles from the one here in Sterling Heights.

The funny thing is that it has all the same terrible qualities as Fry's ... huge lines, the checkout pathway weaves like a tower defense setup through tunnels full of all kinds of chinesium garbage, candy, bawls energy, ESD wrist straps, cheap flash drives, back massagers, etc. The employees usually have autism with terrible social skills, love to make small talk, etc. The line will be 30 people deep and you will have some dude who has already checked out and completed his purchase (wearing And1 basketball shorts and dress socks/shoes) talking to the sales person about warhammer paint preferences. Every time I am in there I pull the floor manager aside and say, why the fuck do you guys do such a terrible job with the checkout process?

So basically one or two visits to microcenter and you will never want to go there again until you REALLY need to go there.

Dave's site has an article on Fry's: https://dfarq.homeip.net/what-happened-to-frys-electronics/

They only had one in Illinois, about seven miles or so from Micro Center, and it was one of the earliest to fold.

Once upon a time, I had brick-and-mortar Tiger Direct, Micro Center, and Fry's stores all within an hour's drive. Micro Center is the last one standing.

Oh man those first few generations of CD burners were rough. We had this old Pentium 2 that had so little memory you had to close everything but the burner software (Easy CD Creator or something, IIRC) otherwise the memory exhaustion would cause a buffer underrun and the disc would be ruined.

A few years later my mom finally let us get one with buffer underrun protection (and some multiplier on the write speed) so I could make mix CDs with music off Napster for my girlfriend and life was good.

Last year's birthday present from me to my wife was a mix CD. I attempted to recreate Cereal Killer's Greatest Zukes Album, briefly mentioned in Hackers (1995): "All great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit!" My criterion was that the artists featured had to have died of a drug or alcohol overdose before September of 1995 (when Hackers was released), and four of the tracks had to be by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cass Eliot, and the Blues Brothers (satisfying the Belushi requirement), who are named in the film.

She still listens to it when working.

I went as far as sourcing a SCSI drive with a dedicated card just to get results. Fond memories of clicking Burn and slowly backing away from the desk to let it do its thing.

I saw my friends doing that and stayed out of that game completely until Plextor released their first 8x burner -- the PR-820.

By then, it was all pretty well sorted despite that burner having no underrun protection.

The IBM Ultrastar 9ES drives kept it fed very well on that otherwise quite slow Slackware box.

Burn a CD, compile a kernel, and browse the web while watching some VCD rip of a music video in one corner of the screen? No problem.

I bought the "high end" e-Machines box on a killer sale at BestBuy because I needed a modern computer and didn't have the time it takes to get all the drivers and settings really working as they should.

They branded it as the "eMonster", and although not stellar, it was solid, reasonably quick, and got the job done. It was my daily driver for many years. I don't remember why now, but I called them with some kind of support/upgrade question several years later, and they were shocked when I told them my OS was XP. "The EMonster can't even can't even run XP!", said the incredulous person on the other end of the phone. Only then did I remember that I'd reflashed the BIOS a couple of years before.

My kids heard this on the speakerphone, and christened it the "eMonsterstein". I haven't fired it up in a long time, but it's one of three old PCs that I just moved whole out to the garage (most were cannibalized or just died). I suppose it'll boot up and run just as well as it did when I finally gave it its long overdue retirement. I may have to give it a try - I still have a monitor with a VGA plug somewhere...

So if they're never obsolete because you can always get a $99 replacement, where should I send my 486 to trade it for a Ryzen 7?

Are you paying for the dial up service? If not, gosh, you seem to be out of luck.

(Fresh out of college while the dot-com crash was still in effect, I briefly took a job for a local phone company. Their primary income was from people who were still paying 1996-ish prices for T1 lines, of hundreds and hundreds a month. Meanwhile I would go home to my cable modem which was about 4 times faster for ~$50/month. Now, techically, the T1s were dedicated bandwidth and of course my cable modem was shared, but it was still a terrible deal for them. And they weren't even getting subsidized computers out of it!)

I have an eMachines-branded PS/2 keyboard within easy reach, which I rescued when a colleague was throwing out an old PC. It's only a rubber dome board, but it's one of the best feeling rubber dome boards I've ever encountered!

10 years ago, a non-technical friend gifted me an eMachines tower that no one bought from his uncle's estate sale. I loaded with ubuntu server, racked it up and ran a business off of it, storing some backups, generating 500+ daily customer-requested database reports, and generally kept the CPU busy running batch jobs, builds in docker, etc. I kept it running on a UPS for years until the hard drive errors force the kernel to mount it r/o. I might have kept it going, but I had a replacement on standby.

It's replacement is another cast-off, uses less electricity and is much more capable, despite not qualifying to run windows 11.

Thanks for this fascinating write up. I could not afford anything better when I got into my first job, and the freedom that this mediocre box provided me was unbelievable.

I still remember dropping the MX440 I spent all summer saving for into my eMachine AGP slot and playing BF1942 for the first time as a total revelation. Must have been how the previous generation felt when Doom came out. Simpler times.

In 1998 I was using a P166MMX with 64MB of RAM that I had bought in 1995 for my Master's.

It makes much more sense to me to be cheap on the CPU and splurge on RAM.

So I don't see why I would want to upgrade that CPU and keep the 32MB of RAM.

Retail SDR SDRAM prices from that time period.

"128MB DIMM: May 1997 $300. July 1998 $150. July 1999 $99. September 1999 Jiji earthquake happens. September-December 1999 $300. May 2000 $89.

Then overproduction combined with dot-com boom liquidations started flooding the market and Feb 2001 $59, by Aug 2001 _256MB_ module was $49. Feb 2002 256MB $34. Finally April 2003 hit the absolute bottom with $39 _512MB_ DIMMs"

Ram was expensive and unpredictable so no wonder eMachines didnt include that in the offer. By 2001 you could upgrade ram on the cheap yourself which many attempted https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/memory-for-an-e-machine...

$99 never obsolete offer was very clever considering they probably had access to longer Intel roadmap. Starting with 1998 Intel was releasing Celerons with cheapest one always around $100. Even the earliest "never obsolete" systems could be upgraded to 766 MHz Cpu, with later 810 up to $103 1100 MHz.

Now add money they were making on those mandatory dialup subscriptions and you got a money printer.

Wow that's certainly a blast from the past. Even had one for a while.

My first pc was an e machines… in Argentina. It’s the reason I ended in IT lol. It would never boot straight into the OS. So many random issues. I think we got it in 2001. Pentium 3 700MHz, 64mb ram, onboard video, usb, which if I forgot to disable in Device Manager before turning it off, would not boot. Aaaand windows Me, Amazing stuff. Ran better with 98.

We didn’t have internet, hooked dial up to it in 2004. No computer books either, all trial and error. Also couldn’t hire a tech to come because it was too expensive for us. My parents didn’t know shit about computers then and don’t know shit now. But hey tinkering with it got me pretty far. Sometimes I wish I was unaware of time passing as I was then and I could spend hours just clicking icons in system32

Ahh I remember that little white desktop

The author mentions Packard-Bell which always just had the whiff of 2 legit companies and was enough to trick uninformed shoppers at Walmart that they were buying high end. Remember in 1999 if you didn't read Computer Shopper the only thing you knew about PCs was what you saw in TV ads.

I remember seeing the department-store Packard Bell PCs on shelves. Packard Hells, I called them. About half of the display models were busted. I'm surprised that uninformed shoppers could remain uninformed after seeing that.

I worked tech support at an ISP and despaired when someone with a Packard-Bell called in. First, they'd let you know it, as though they were telling you they had a high-end Real Computer. Second, you instantly knew it'd have a cheap POS LT Winmodem that would only train up to 28.8 if the wind was blowing in the right direction, and would buffer underrun if the user tried playing an MP3 while they were downloading something.

Ugh, I despised dealing with that gear.

Those shitty modems were infamous. IIRC they were also the sound card on the box and had serious issues with interrupt conflicts. It took three wizards and a dead chicken to get Doom to run stably in an online deathmatch.

My parents got a Packard Bell computer for a deep discount (maybe free?) for signing up for N years of Prodigy internet. It was one of my earliest computers.

I didn't realize until right now that it had no relationship to Hewlett Packard. I guess I always assumed that it was HP's budget line.

Even better, it was a classic zombie brand revival, and it seems like the vast majority of the trusted names of my youth have followed this path.

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