PC Prices 15 Years Ago Today

I keep my old PC and gaming magazines in part for ads like these. I remember wanting to run Ultima 8 Pagan on my very first PC, a Packard Bell 486 DX2-50 MHz with 4 megabytes of RAM, and it cost me around $200 to purchase an extra 4 megabyes of RAM in order to meet that game's steep system requirements. It wouldn't have been a bad investment if the game didn't suck tremendously.
 
This is more like what the prices were like when I first started building my own rigs...

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The fact that you can buy a budget desktop for $200, and build your own capable gaming rig for $500 these days really has to be put into perspective, especially considering inflation...

$1,999 in 1987 would be $3,785 today...
 
HAHA! Great Picture! Oh those were the days!!! RAM DOUBLER!! LOLOLOL!!!! I remember that! hehe Giggling deeply at it all and makes me alittle meloncoly. LOL!:D
 
My first PC I spent $3000+ on a NEC 133mhz pentium with MMX 17" monitor.

Just so I could play Doom and Duke Nukem.
 
i have that hp on the left. came with a free printer that is still working today.
 
I predict in 16 years the people of 2027 will be laughing at what we are paying for such "slow processors, tiny sizes of RAM & SSDs and stupid looking, highly nonfunctional tablets" - Of course all these opinions are from their perspective.

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I actually had that $1999.99 Packard Bell. What a POS. Sears came out and replaced the HDD about five times, then they just gave me a NEC that never had any problems what so ever.:p
 
i remember my dad payed $3000 for our p1 100mhz 8mb ram pc. it was from a custom pc shop in the area.

a side note, that is the system that got me started on pc. after i blew it up for the second time i had to learn how to fix it because my parents werent going to pay anymore.
 
I remember getting that Acer system's little brother (133MHz) 15 years ago. Only $1900 with monitor and printer included! Man those were the days.
 
How do you run applications and an operating system with GUI in 8-16MB of ram? My computer from 1997 had 32 MB of ram and I was told it was more than I would ever need.

Mac's did it with ONE MB of RAM starting in 1984, and actually did it quite well.
 
Anyone else here have the privilege of hacking their own Lower-Case mod into their TRS-80 Model 1?

Oh, it was uuuuuugly. You had to solder a Ram chip piggy-back onto a chip on the motherboard (after bending a few pins upwards you needed for soldering wires), cut traces on the system board, run wires from the left-over pins on the chip to the traces on the motherboard, etc...

And they you ended up with lowercase that always had a super-scripted "a" LOL

It was real wing-and-a-prayer stuff.
 
The Mac version was brilliant. In reality, it was just a really, really good Virtual Memory system.

It was more than just virtual memory but it also compressed the contents of your RAM, thus effectively "doubling" it. Of course the amount you could get varies on the contents, but you get a small CPU performance hit but the additional ram greatly outperformed the calculations required.
 
Ram Doubler... wow.....

I'm breaking out the MS-DOS tonight... along with my 20lb 20MB HD to run Wildcat BBS on....
 
I remember when we bought our first PC. What a jump from a non-working commodore 64

Bought it at a furniture store (!) for ~$2500 circa 1992.

It was:

486SX 25mhz
4mb ram
100mb hard drive
14" monitor
mouse/mouse pad
keyboard
Panasonic Printer (one of those ribbon ones).

We were told when we bought it, you'd never need to ugprade it, and that if you did have to, the potential would be limitless.

It still boots up and works just fine.
 
Pft... In 1996 I was running my dad's old computer and rocking it out with a 100MB hard drive and an AMD 386 33MHz chip (exact one I don't know). I think he had upgraded it to 12MB of RAM at the time though I could easily be overestimating that number. In 1998 or 1999 I got an AMD K6-2 system though with a much more palatable 400MHz and 64MB of RAM that was eventually upgraded to 128MB. My mom ended up with one of those eOne machines though, which still works in fact.
 
I remember my very first computer was a Headstart Explorer, IBM XT with an Intel 8088 4.77 MHz CPU with 9 MHz turbo. Lol. It also came with 8 KBytes of RAM. It was an interesting computer compared to other PCs at that time. The custom OS was hard-coded into the ROM/BIOS so bootup times were nearly instantaneous. It came with a basic wordprocessor, database, calender, and spreadsheet programs. You could not install Windows 2.0 no matter how many times I tried. Eventually I learned how to make my own programs through QBasic, mostly simple ones like Monopoly, a text-based RPG, and played other games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

My parents bought it from Circuit City for $800. There was a faster (at that time) 486 SX and DX computer from Compaq going for $1999 and $2499 respectively.

The add-on 40 MB hard drive for the Headstart was $199. There was also a "RAM pack" that expanded the RAM to 768KBytes. I only got the hard drive but it had two problems: it was not low-level formatted and the DOS programs I was given with the computer was not able to low level format it; and it had a noisy fan attached to it.

Fast forward to about 1998 or 1999, my first real upgrade of a computer was a Toshiba 335 CDS laptop bought from Best Buy. It had Windows 95, Pentium I 266 MHz CPU, 32 MB of SIMM RAM, a 2X CD-ROM drive, 12.1-inch TN LCD screen, a Cardbus slot, floppy disk drive and was 1 3/4th inches thick. It cost $1499 if I recall. Again, there was a faster Pentium II laptop but it was one of the first Pentium II laptops at that time, but it was going for nearly twice the price of the Toshiba.

I later upgraded the RAM to 160 MB (its maximum) and Windows 98 SE. I still remember playing and beating Half-Life 1 on the laptop running it in software rendering mode. I've also played the full Red Alert series on it.

It's crazy how fast technology in computers advances but how ridiculous prices were back then because the technology was so new.

My parents avoided Apple computers because they were a couple hundred to a thousand dollars more expensive than an IBM-compatible PC.

Heck, I remember when the 8-bit NES came out and that was $249, bought from Toys R Us. I even remember when VHS tapes and Beta tapes were still relatively new. Walking into a Warehouse with my dad, I remember seeing a VHS tape go for over $50 or $60. And, I was born in 1980.

I didn't get a CD player until the early 1990s when they were "cheaper." I still have my Sony Walkman radio cassette player on me to this day for nostalgia.

Those were the days, right?
 
The funniest thing to me is the $800 markup on the Mac after buying a monitor compared to the PC.

Even better, is PC's got faster and prices went down, Macs got faster sure but prices didn't drop!

Oh hell I'll toss my "what expensive shit i've bought" story out there

$1k for a 20 MEGAbyte hard drive for my Amiga 500 ... oh yeah used... *BLERGH*

The upside is back in the day you could resell stuff and still not do too bad.... if I try selling my 250GB hd I bought 6 years ago, I won't get squat for it.
 
Back in the days when we could make actual money selling this stuff. I had just started my business 15 years ago. Time flies.
 
First computer: C64, quickly replaced with an SX-64. I remember my dad taking that uncomfortable hunk of metal along on vacations in a large suitcase. I blame my nearsightedness on trying to play Adventure Construction Set on that tiny CRT built into the face.

First PC I bought with my own dough was a no-name PII 166MHz 32MB with 4MB for video. Sucked bad! Finally built my own in early 2003, AMD 2600+ (@ 2.35GHz IIRC) 512MB 9700 Pro box that saw a lot of HLII and SWG.
 
How do you run applications and an operating system with GUI in 8-16MB of ram? My computer from 1997 had 32 MB of ram and I was told it was more than I would ever need.

Much less bloat in the OS/software.

OS-9 which could run on the Radio Shack Color computer was a full multi user/multi tasking OS that ran in 64KB of ram. It was originally design to run multi-user mini computer systems, generally with text based terminals.
 
Anyone else here have the privilege of hacking their own Lower-Case mod into their TRS-80 Model 1?

Oh, it was uuuuuugly. You had to solder a Ram chip piggy-back onto a chip on the motherboard (after bending a few pins upwards you needed for soldering wires), cut traces on the system board, run wires from the left-over pins on the chip to the traces on the motherboard, etc...

And they you ended up with lowercase that always had a super-scripted "a" LOL

It was real wing-and-a-prayer stuff.

I did the 32kb to 64kb upgrade on my on my color computer. At the time they where installing good 64kb chips in the computer, but only using 1/2 the chip. Piggy backed a few ttl chips on the existing chips, ran a few wired, and instant 64kb upgrade. Of course the basic os could only see 32kb, but that's another story.
 
I use to have that Acer It was pretty sweet PC I remember playing decent and jazz the jackrabbit demos nonstop.Those were the days when a megabyte meant something.
 
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