Those were some good specs back in the day... And the price 😯
$5778 adjusted for inflation.
At last something is more accessible than 30 years ago 🤗
Video games, too. They're still in the $20-$60 range for the most part, same as they've been since the 1970s, which means their cost has dropped dramatically.
Wild that a 1k USD machine lasts like 6-10 years now.
I’m using one as a media center that’s a Phenom from 14 years ago lawl
My VR machine is eight years old but with a new GPU.
My main game machine is like four years old and plays basically everything 1440p/100FPS+. Cost bout 1.5k.
My first REAL game computer I built was over 2k back in the day (maybe 3k adjusted for inflation) and was slow as shit after two years. I love you, solid state drives. Athlon 64x2 4400+, SLI7900GT, 4GB DDR2, and an antec lanboy with the bondage kit. Built it for Crysis. No Raptors tho.
2 CD ROMs drives AND a zip drive? This guy fucks
Shit. DVD drives!
In 96? Fucking bleeding edge stuff
I think it says 98. IE4.0 wasn't released until 97, same for Pentium MMX.
The 2X part means the DVD drive could read DVDs at up to 2X speed
Ah yeah I realized that after. But a floppy reader too! Dude definitely reading some floppies
I came to the comments hoping somebody would explain a reason for 2 DVD readers back in the days of Win95 lol thanks!
My dad bought one for me 🥰 so i that i can become a scientist one day but then I discovered porn and now I work at McDonalds.
Yeah, but bro: your burger flipping hand is STRONG
Aww, I hate to be the one to tell you this.
McDonald's uses a proprietary "clam shell" grill. The only flipping that's happening is an employee cooking their own burger without closing the grill.
I was going to be extremely impressed at the 64 GB of RAM until I realized that said MB.
Such a throwback though, that iomega zip drive was cutting edge.
We bought a house last year from a lady who lived here with her husband since they built the house in 1972. I found an iomega zip disk in a cabinet in the garage. I had never seen anything like it before. Really cool tech for the time.
I'd kinda love to see what's on this disk. It could just be spreadsheets or maybe some copied floppies or lots of Metallica courtesy of Napster. Or some pictures of the family. No idea.
100 MB portable storage was unreal back then, and then they came out with 250MB.
Apparently you can still buy the media and drives, even a new one:
https://www.amazon.com/Iomega-Zip-100-Portable-Drive/dp/B00000J3Q7
Oh I lived it too. We were still using 1.4 MB floppy disks for school projects in '04. I think the computer class teacher finally started asking people to use flash drives in '06 or '07. I was walking around with a whole two gigs (wow!) in my pocket. I felt like a god. When we went to flash drives, we all started sharing the music we downloaded from Kazaa and Limewire with each other because now the required kit for computer class had the headroom to allow that. Many of us still lugged around CD players if we didn't have iPods but the flash drives made burning mixes for each other so much easier.
Another kid in a class below me got HEAVY into emulators. So he started telling us how to download ROMs and we'd all be playing Turok and Ocarina and Pokemon on the school computers. Being a teenager in the late 00s was a riot.
Now, my Nintendo Switch has a memory card that's smaller than my pinky nail, and it holds 200 times the capacity of those chap stick size flash drives. It's wild. I remember being amazed at the PSP in its day, thinking surely it doesn't get much better than that. I really appreciate how amazing the Switch and Steam Deck are, even if Tears of the Kingdom makes the poor little guy crap itself.
Anyway, I'll wrap up this wall of text because it reeks of millennial. But it's really cool that there's still support for old tech like this...even if it's too pricey for someone who isn't neck deep into it to consider it lol
Even back then you had McAfee bloat preinstalled
So funny story, if this is the first-gen (Blue) Dell XPS, we also bought one similarly spec'd.
Dell shipped it to us and when it arrived, it had 64 MB of ram instead of the 128 MB we ordered it with. Rather than sending us out new ram, they shipped us ANOTHER whole XPS. They never asked for the first back.
They never asked for the first back.
What in the dot-com fuck?
Yep! It was during their "dude you're getting a dell" years when they had crazy good support.
We had a particularly large desk and when we called into support, they mailed us (at no cost), Belkin extension cords for all our peripherals. It was wild.
The Sales line doesn't work...
Surprisingly the Customer Service Line did still. Neat.
You know you're an old geek when you look at the spec and go "300MHz PII? 64MB RAM? that's late 96 or early 97... Or cheap 98, but it's shipped with win95, and ooh la la IE4.0 pre-installed, definitely late 96 or early 97" and then you see the invoice date, and recognize it as Clinton's 2nd inauguration.
I know modern audio purists probably still use them, but I completely forgot that sound cards were always an additional thing!
I'm rocking two soundblaster cards in my main rig
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/wreckedcarzz/saved/#view=cN4ypg
That was a beast of a system back in its day. Your dad was clearly a PC connoisseur.
I remember when we upgraded to a Pentium III and later put an aftermarket Voodoo card in the thing after much begging on my part. That was the first PC I had that felt genuinely "powerful" to me.
Man, my first homebuild out of college was an absolute monster with 8MB of RAM so I could run NT at home. $640 just for the memory. I did cheap out on the CPU and only got the 75MHz Pentium, though we ran 90s at work. Wing Commander III was awesome on that thing.
"It's an investment in your family's future, sir..."
So OP, do you now do clickity clacks professionally for money? Did that included edutainment software suite do the trick?
The only thing I miss about ZIP drives is that when you are holding one of those huge disks, you feel like a hacker in a 90s movie
I just saved a pair of altec Lansing computer speakers from becoming ewaste at my work. They're easily 20+ years old but still work decently enough! I just use them to play music when no one else is in the office.
That was after computers got significantly cheaper, too. The adjusted prices for PCs in the 80s were insane. My family got an Amiga 3000 in 1990 because my dad had an expense account he could only use for computers and didn't really need it for work that year... it was something like $4,500 which would be about $10,500 today. Same for his office PS/2, which was just a 486.
IDE DVD ROM drive and a hardware DVD decoder.
Dude, you could play DVDs? On your computer! Wow, truly it was the future.
For the kids, this would've been a top of the line beefy set-up. I would say in '98 you would find a 1gb hd, a 120 Pentium, and 16mb of ram in a typical home that had a computer.
Remember things upgraded fast back then, by '00 your average Joe would be buying Pentium iii's with 600mhz and a DVD drive! Woah!
I repaired about 1000 of these in a single year.
That USR softmodem was an absolute plague.
If it was a real ISA card it was solid, the "winmodem" was shitty as hell however
My dad had the >$4k receipt for our 1988 286 until this death recently
A community for PC Master Race.
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