buying a computer in 1994 video, brilliant, this is gold....

[imported_rik19]

Check this video out guys of some people filmed back in 1994 computer shopping, one guy is in disbelief when told you can put a movie on the hard drive and watch it back, mind you it only looked around 100x100 pixels in resolution....And the prices are insane, I was 16/17 in 1994 and no way could I dream of buying a pc back then....Check out the pathetic specs aswell, I can imagine people 26 years from now having a chuckle at the pc specs that we have today...

 

[AOS-]

32Mhz. Mega, hertz. Daaaaaamn

But golly, do I not enjoying listening to these people telling you what to buy.

 

[kikie]

Do you think there will still be PCs 26 years from now?

I think PCs will be replaced by something that is very spectacle according to today standards.

 

[Dave A]

I remember the first PC my dad bought around 1987 IIRC.

It had 2mb RAM and a 500mb HDD and an Intel 486 processor pushing 20-something mhz. An absolute powerhouse that was.

Do you think there will still be PCs 26 years from now?

I think PCs will be replaced by something that is very spectacle according to today standards.

Yes, at least in general terms. PC simply stands for Personal Computer, and I think we will always have those in one form or another. We may not need a tower case for a decent gaming one eventually, but it all depends how soon we move away from silicone chips which is nearing it's peak I think.

 

[Northstar]

The most surprising part is the employees actually appear to know what they are talking about.

I don't even remember the specs of my first PC, it was some hand-me-down we bought for cheap from my aunts work when they upgraded their system. It could handle solitaire and word processor but not much else.

Do you think there will still be PCs 26 years from now?

I think PCs will be replaced by something that is very spectacle according to today standards.

For gaming perhaps something might replace them, but I'd imagine for work purposes they will be around for considerably longer.

 

[imported_rik19]

500 mb hard drive in 87.....wow, my first hard drive was 40mb in around 1993 for the amiga.

 

[kikie]

Yes, at least in general terms. PC simply stands for Personal Computer, and I think we will always have those in one form or another. We may not need a tower case for a decent gaming one eventually, but it all depends how soon we move away from silicone chips which is nearing it's peak I think.

For gaming perhaps something might replace them, but I'd imagine for work purposes they will be around for considerably longer.

I was kind of fantasysing. But I think that I won't be far off. What I mean is that the PC as in a personal device at home won't be around 26 years from now. It is going to be something in terms of a general way of searching/accesing (for) information without having a computer. Current example: the cloud.

Or mankind is going back to its roots and live a simpler life closer to nature.


*Only dreaming*.

 

[imported_rik19]

Hi @Dave A
could you be mistaken on the hard drive size back in 1987....only reason i say, ive just found some 1988 magazine adverts for pc`s and none of the hard drives are advertised that big back at that time...

 

[Dave A]

Hi @Dave A
could you be mistaken on the hard drive size back in 1987....only reason i say, ive just found some 1988 magazine adverts for pc`s and none of the hard drives are advertised that big back at that time...
View attachment 965915 View attachment 965917

I could well be, maybe it was 50mb .

 

[daan]

I could well be, maybe it was 50mb .

Your 2 meg of ram is a bit extravagant as well.

My first PC in 1996 came with a 60mhz Pentium, can't recall the HD size, and 2mb of RAM. I recall there was a 640k limit hard coded into DOS, and the other 360k of the first MB was known as extended* RAM, and the next MB was known as expanded*, and you had to create a special boot disk for some games. I recall Cannon Fodder was one. It wouldn't run from within windows due to lack of memory so you had to make a boot disk that only started up essential services for it to run.

* These could be the other way round.

 

[MatskiMonk]

In the mid-90's the first home PC we had was a Packard Bell 486 DX2/66mHz, 340mb HDD, 4mb RAM. I spent £200 buying a Sound Blaster SB16 sound card and 2 speed CD-ROM drive. The Laser printer we had was a Panasonic and I'm reasonably sure it cost about the same as the PC. The whole thing rand Windows 3.11 on DOS 6.22 with some rubbish Packard Bell OS sat on top of all that.

 

[Dave A]

Your 2 meg of ram is a bit extravagant as well.

My first PC in 1996 came with a 60mhz Pentium, can't recall the HD size, and 2mb of RAM. I recall there was a 640k limit hard coded into DOS, and the other 360k of the first MB was known as extended* RAM, and the next MB was known as expanded*, and you had to create a special boot disk for some games. I recall Cannon Fodder was one. It wouldn't run from within windows due to lack of memory so you had to make a boot disk that only started up essential services for it to run.

* These could be the other way round.

It was when I was in primary school so I might well have all the specs messed up, I'm very certain it was a 486 processor. but maybe I've got the year wrong too. The more I think about it the more I think it could have been more around 1990 which would have made me 8 at the time.

But it's all from the top of my head (which is currently pleading the fifth).

 

[imported_rik19]

 

[RacingGrandpa]

1996 I bought a Cyrix 120 with a 800Mb HDD and 16Mb of RAM. It's price was the equivalent of two months pay.

 

[wfooshee]

Whoever that camera operator was, I hope he never worked another camera job for the rest of his life!!!

 

[BobK]

Your 2 meg of ram is a bit extravagant as well.

My first PC in 1996 came with a 60mhz Pentium, can't recall the HD size, and 2mb of RAM. I recall there was a 640k limit hard coded into DOS, and the other 360k of the first MB was known as extended* RAM, and the next MB was known as expanded*, and you had to create a special boot disk for some games. I recall Cannon Fodder was one. It wouldn't run from within windows due to lack of memory so you had to make a boot disk that only started up essential services for it to run.

* These could be the other way round.

Actually the 640K RAM was a hardware limitation, not MS-DOS. The remaining 384K (UMA, or Upper Memory Area) was used for video RAM, the BIOS, and various peripherals. Expanded memory used page swapping so up to 8MB of expanded memory was mapped into a 64k chunk of the UMA . Extended memory, was memory above the first 1M memory space, and required a 286 or better processor because the 8088 as used in the original IBM 5150 could only address one megabyte.

As for the future of the PC, I'm sure they'll still be around 26 years from now. However I don't expect them to be as many orders of magnitude better than current PCs than current PCs are over the original PC. Moore's Law is pretty much not as applicable as it was in the past; chip making has run into fundamental physical limits. For instance, the circuits within a chip are only a couple dozen atoms wide and a signal which travels at the speed of light will only travel two inches in one 4 GHz clock cycle.

 

[Danoff]

This was the first computer I really used for any significant amount of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Portable_Personal_Computer

This is what a laptop looked like back in the day. It wasn't a color screen either, just green and black. It featured the IBM 8088 processor, at 4.77MHz and 256KB memory (expandable to double that). The prices on these old machines might look extravagant, but you have to keep in mind that it was basically compared to not having a computer at all in your home. The ability to type up a document and print it out (dot matrix baby), and keep basic spreadsheets was huge. It was like having a whole team of professionals at your personal disposal in your own home.

Email? No that was much later. This computer didn't have a modem.

Anyway, they were expensive, but they were extremely valuable. These days we take that value for granted.

 

[ROAD_DOGG33J]

I think this is what the first computer we bought looked like. It was circa 1998. It cost around $3,000 altogether, which would be close to $5,000 today.

233Mhz Intel Pentium MMX processor
Windows 95
32MB of RAM (guessing - seems to take up 64MB, but can also come with 16MB)
ATI Rage Pro graphics card with 2MB of memory
4GB hard drive

Everything was pretty much cream colored in that day, so I think the CD burner drive we bought eventually ended up being that.

Processor speeds increased pretty rapidly within a few years and this thing was left in the dust.

 

[TenEightyOne]

This was back in the day when Apple was the poacher, now they're the gamekeeper and it all feels so much different.

 

[Animera]

My 1st PC (after the 48k ZX Spectrum) was a 386DX33MHZ.
It had a 20MB HDD and the salesman said, "In your whole life you won't fill up the hard drive!"

 

[cholton]

I remember my mates dad bringing an IBM home from work , One of the first games we played was Leisure Suit Larry which was pretty inappropriate.
My first PC was a Packard Bell and I lost countless days playing Championship Manager and Settlers.

 

[BobK]

My first IBMish PC was a Tandy 1000hx, which came with 512k of memory and a 3 1/2" floppy drive. This was actually my third home computer, the first two being a scratchbuilt machine of (partly at least) my own design and a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I.

 

[imported_rik19]

Love seeing these old adverts from 30 years ago, laughable now, can imagine future generations doing the same, people from 2030 looking back at xbox series x/ps5 etc...laughing at the pathetic specs etc...

 

[klondike]

@Dave A

Not that it matters, but I think you are a bit of the year too

The 486 was released in 1989 and was very expensive at first. Might have been a 386 you had or the year is wrong.

My first PC was around 1993 and was a 486 wich at that time was still a pretty good cpu. I think the pentium was released about 1993 but when I Bought my first PC that was still a bit to pricey for a very young man I was at that time.

As i remember I paid about 1800 $ for my 486 PC including a 15" monitor and mouse / keyboard.

Before that I had C64 and Amiga

 

[LeGeNd-1]

As for the future of the PC, I'm sure they'll still be around 26 years from now. However I don't expect them to be as many orders of magnitude better than current PCs than current PCs are over the original PC. Moore's Law is pretty much not as applicable as it was in the past; chip making has run into fundamental physical limits. For instance, the circuits within a chip are only a couple dozen atoms wide and a signal which travels at the speed of light will only travel two inches in one 4 GHz clock cycle.

Quantum computing will probably be the next big leap in speed...if we ever manage to figure it out that is.

 

[theknyte]

Yep, add me to the old timers group.

First family computer was a Commodore VIC-20, Then a C=64, C=128, Amiga 500, Amiga 2000HD, and then our first PC was a 386/33 w 387 Math Co-Processor (which I got just to make F-16 Falcon run better.) VGA card and a Sound Blaster! (The OG one.)

 

[RacingGrandpa]

I remember thinking that it was crazy that you needed 3 floppy disc to install A10-Tankhunter. But then it loaded up and we where in awe over the graphics.
Two years later I bought a Voodoo card to get 3-D. The first game we played on it was Outlaws.