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snakeyjake | 1 year ago

Your memory is faulty.

Let's take a trip back to 1992.

In 1992, unless you were rich you had a $2,000 386SX-33 sourced from parts out of the back of Computer Shopper magazine.

Here is a 386SX-33 running Windows 3.1 (1992) launching WordPerfect for Windows 5.2 (1992) a perfect representation of what a normal, typical, average person in 1992 would have as a PC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYjrX2P4iY4

WordPerfect takes 45 seconds just to start. You dropped $350 on an ATI Wonder that has hardware acceleration of Windows 3.1 video calls just to get smooth window moving and resizing.

What about a 486? Lol you didn't have a 486, those were for CAD workstations and servers. You had a 386.

Three years later, lusting after Windows 95 and frustrated with slow performance, you shell out ANOTHER $2,000 on a Pentium 75 with 8MB of ram and a 528MB hard drive.

Sure, with the lower FSB that means you're less than half the performance of a Pentium 133 despite having 56% the clock, but you're a regular person with regular person money.

Windows 95 takes over a minute to boot, Space Cadet Pinball takes 15 seconds to launch, and you buy City Streets for Windows which takes 3-5 seconds to redraw its viewport every single time you reposition the map.

From the day you could first afford a PC you chased upgrades: more ram, a hard drive with a higher rotational speed and bigger cache, holy crap they can do 3d in hardware now, can I afford a 256kB COAST module?

Then one day, in about 2011-2012 that all stops. Sandy Bridge. SSDs. Now you only upgrade every 4-6 years: when performance doubles or windows stops supporting your CPU or you drop your laptop and break it.

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ben7799|1 year ago

This guy gets it!

And even that 386 was hot stuff in 1992. I was in high school then and stuck with a 286 with 16-color graphics and like a 40mb hard drive or something. We got a 486 right around Christmas 1993 I think, which was a mind blowing upgrade at the time. 256 colors in DOS video games and Windows could display 16k colors. CD-ROMs that had little postage stamp videos and we got one of those CD-ROM encyclopedias.

We had like 286 class machines in most of the lab my senior year of High school in 1994 with amber displays and we learned Turbo Pascal on them. The school had a handful of 486s but they were setup to run exactly the same software as the 286s, no Windows for us. They must have waited till they replaced everything to start using Windows.

In spring 1995 I spent like $250 (or was it $500?) of my summer job earnings on 4MB RAM for our 486 to get Doom to run better. The upgrade struggle was real. That was a ton of money for me and my parents thought I was absolutely nuts but eventually gave in.

When I went to college I spent essentially my entire summer's earnings on my first laptop, it was close to $4k back then and it was not exactly great!

jmount|1 year ago

Once the editor was open- key pressed tended to be instant.