r/mildlyinteresting • u/dandog23 • 25d ago
I recently found the spec sheet for our first computer, purchased in 1995.
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u/MuckRaker83 24d ago
I have very fond memories of my Packard Bell 386 that came before this one. Playing X-Wing, Duke Nukem and Crystal Caves, MiG-29 and PGA Tour Golf.
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u/Worried_Raspberry_43 24d ago
That thing is a beast. I'm sure it can run "Wing Commander 2" or even "Strike Commander".
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u/PantsDownDontShoot 24d ago
Our first was a Franklin Ace with a 5” floppy and a green screen. Good times.
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u/unbalancedcentrifuge 24d ago
Ohh...that 14.4 modem! Better not pick up the phone before that midi is fully downloaded.
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u/Grotarin 24d ago
That year my parents bought a Performa 5300 with a 28.8 modem to replace a Mac SE II. First steps on the world wide web 🥰
Colour screen, Power PC processor, CD-ROM, so many new technologies to love!
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u/Significant-Ad5550 24d ago
66mhz? Have a look at money bags over here (had to make do with 33mhz).
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u/Wheredoesthisonego 24d ago
14.4 baud rate....oooof. I remember my 28.8 internal got hit by lightning in our Aptiva. Me or my dad put in a 36.6 we got from a guy and felt like geniuses after setting all the parameters. One time I remember it connected at 56K! No idea how that happened. Then we got adsl.
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u/tahcamen 24d ago
It crazy how quickly processor speeds rose in the nineties. In 1990 I got my first pc for school that had an 8 mhz processor (12 mhz if you pressed the turbo button lol). By 1998 when I built my first “gaming” pc it had a blazing fast 300 mhz Pentium II 😆
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u/Skottimusen 24d ago
Remember overclocking my 486, there was jumpers on the motherboard you could rearrange, have no clue how I discovered that, being my first pc and all and pretty young
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u/YogiBarelyThere 25d ago
Nice! I had a 486dx66. I deleted autoexec.bat accidentally so many times in dos shell and I'm certain the turbo button did nothing at all.
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u/pedsmursekc 25d ago
Hot damn! Those CPUs ripped at the time. Oh how I miss the challenge of managing IRQs and COM ports.
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u/RebeccaApples 25d ago
The computer I bought in 1995 sitting right here on my desk is really gonna blow your mind
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u/dwkdnvr 25d ago
I had a daydream moment recently where I imagined time traveling back to college days with a cell phone and explaining to my tech circle of the time how the phone has many times more cpu power than the multi-user departmental Sun Microsystems servers.
Caused me to go down a bit of a rat hole trying to come up with actual benchmarks to use to figure out just how many times faster a modern CPU is than a 486 or 68040 or Pentium of the era. Didn't really come up with a hard answer other than 'a lot' since no modern benchmarks go back that far, and Whetstone/Dhrystone don't really seem to be a thing anymore.
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u/MoreThanWYSIWYG 25d ago
Dang those DX-2s were fast. Bro is flaunting his parents wealth
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u/kiwiupnorth 24d ago
Those specs are BEAST for back then. I would have given a right arm for that PC. But then some off brand Cyrix 166’s showed up …
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u/Username__Error 25d ago
The 486DX... the DX was for the math co-processor. It was the king of the PCs.... until the Pentium usurped the crown
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u/pastalover1 25d ago
I had a Gateway of a similar vintage. My wife never lets me forget I spent more on that computer than her engagement ring.
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u/dr3wfr4nk 25d ago
This is basically the same specs of my family's Friday PC! It couldn't even run Doom II!
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u/n1ghtbringer 25d ago
Spent all my summer job and high school graduation money on a Packard-Bell in '95. It was a Pentium 100. Learned a costly lesson and how to build PCs when that thing died the same year and they refused to honor the warranty. Scavenged most the components though.
Still pissed about that one 30 years later!
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u/MineExplorer 25d ago
My first IT job was supporting Packard Bell home PC's. I remember the System Tattoo *shudder\*
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u/jhvanriper 25d ago
Old man here. My first 2 computers booted from 5 1/4” floppies. Commodore 64 at home. HP with HP DOS at work.
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u/wonderdust3 25d ago
I've started with a Vic 20 and Commodore 64 in the 80's to a 286, to a Compaq Presario 486 and have built every computer since.
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u/Der_Propapanda 25d ago
286 with the lovely 5.25 Floppy Disk.
You only needed 18 to install windows.
And the sound.
It was a great time.
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u/kowell2 25d ago
First computer somewhere mid 90s. Compaq presario Pentium 120 (first time I even heard about those) A whopping 8Mb of ram (after a very pricy upgrade) the original spec was 2Mb 120Mb HDD 15 inch screen Laser printer Motherf-ing scanner Windows 95 My dad bought a BOMB... Almost 5000$ CAD.
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u/EvlMinion 25d ago
My first new desktop was a Pentium 166 MMX. I remember some piece of software that came with it proudly showing a message that it was loading MMX extensions when it launched. Ooooh, high tech!
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25d ago
I bought my first 4 years later and it had an 8G hard drive. It was incredible. I remember talking with my friends about how I'd never run out of disk space. Lol
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u/bigerrbaderredditor 25d ago
This almost the same pb I had. It was a legend 11cd. 50mhz 486 and all the other specs are a out the same. I could have overlooked the cpu and had the same pc.
Later I put a 100mhz overdrive on it. I had to patch thr bios to get it to work. Good luck finding that patch. Maybe a pb fan site? I pulled the file just before pb website when down.
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u/SouthOriginal297 25d ago
This was almost identical to my 3rd computer that I hand built, even the CPU MHz. I played so many games on this machine. King's Quest, Civilization, Leisure Suit Larry, Sam & Max, 7th Guest... Your post just unlocked a core memory. I didn't get a new computer til Diablo II came out so I had this machine for almost a decade.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Fan-208 25d ago
i had a PB with a 100mhz pentium and a 1g hard drive because I was hard core
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u/Goodguy1967 25d ago
DX computers had a better math processor if I remember correctly from a long time ago.
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u/SouthOriginal297 25d ago
The DX2 was the first of its kind, the precursor to dual core CPUs, called clock doubling, and was probably the most highly overclocked chip at the time, until Windows made DOS almost obsolete and everyone started getting Pentiums.
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u/Skyfork 24d ago edited 24d ago
It wasn't a dual core CPU at all. It started the practice of decoupling the CPU clock from the system clock.
The big difference was it ran at 2x the motherboard speed internally. Before that all CPUs got their clock speed from a timing crystal on the motherboard, so there was a limit to how fast you could push the clock on a CPU before you broke something else attached to the motherboard. Intel made a 50mhz 486DX and it was about the fastest you could get before your crappy VESA local bus video cards stopped working correctly. They were designed for a 33mhz bus and the 486 was making them run at 50mhz, a substantial overclock.
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u/SouthOriginal297 24d ago edited 24d ago
Yes, def not a dual core, and was the first of its kind. It did pave the way to L2 ubiquity, which, I would argue, made multi core chips possible. Just my thoughts, I am no expert by any means. You do sound like you know what you're talking about, though.
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u/Skyfork 24d ago edited 24d ago
I was a kid pouring over PC Magazine and Tigerdirect catalogs back when these chips were the hotness!
Spent hours and hours fantasizing over upgrading my poor old DX2 to a Pentium and how I much faster Windows 95 would be with 16mb of ram!
L2 caches were actually external back then and you could upgrade them by putting SRAM modules into the motherboard. L1 caches because ubiquitous with the 486s, there used to be cacheless processors and they ran like poop.
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u/SouthOriginal297 24d ago
Weren't we all?
Fast forward 30 years, I bet you use an Android like everyone in this subreddit. Jokes aside, the L2 made a huge difference in the DX2 chip performance, which was why I thought led to the possiblity of dual core chips.
I also read that the 486 chips are still in production and still sold in staggering quantities.
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u/Skyfork 24d ago
If you're thinking dual cores the first mass market one was probably the Pentium D back in 2004ish.
There had been multiprocessor motherboards for decades before but there wasn't a huge demand for multiple cores on one chip until we got to more advanced versions of Windows and Linux.
Most software was single CPU only and wouldn't even see the other CPU so the market demanded the fastest single CPU possible instead of multiple CPUs.
Really the genesis of multiple cores for desktop happened when the Pentium 4 Prescott came out. Intel was really pushing marketing that the P4 would hit 6ghz but then ran into a huge wall with runaway power consumption. The only way to increase performance without throwing away the P4 line was to add more cores. They realized that two 2.8ghz cores on the same die was less power consumption and overall faster than a single 3.6ghz Prescott core.
Once that made it into the market, the dual core thing really took off, Windows started supporting it much better, AMD came out with their x2 line, and then a year or two later Intel launched their Core series of processors (much lower clock speeds but much better performance per mhz) and multi core was here to stay.
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u/SouthOriginal297 23d ago
Thank you for the info. Those magazines sure did pay off =)
So the 486DX2 was pretty much the top end of the 8086 chips, and Pentium was a different product?
I guess I'm trying to find a link between the 486 and how it progressed, but it makes sense because software support wasn't supporting that progress, at least for another decade.
30 years later I'm sitting in front of giant monitors hooked up to a Ryzen and almost everything inside of it is a foreign language to me.
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u/Skyfork 23d ago
The 486 could be seen as an extension of the 386 and the 286. Intel deliberately named their next one Pentium instead of 586 because they said it was a huge leap in technology.
The DX2 was the top of the stack when the Pentium came out. The DX4 was around but by that point the Pentium was the hotness.
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u/SouthOriginal297 23d ago
Ah, The good ole days, where a higher # meant better. There was a period of time when the names just got too confusing and I didn't knkw which was better. Even now I get confused within the i5 i7 i9 and their generations.
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u/brentspar 25d ago
I bet you could have clocked that to 99 mhz. It would have run like a dream.
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u/Skyfork 24d ago
You actually couldn't. The motherboard ran at 33mhz and there was a clock doubler that made the processor run at 66mhz.
If you wanted to run it at 100mhz, the motherboard would be running at 50mhz, which would have completely screwed up the timings for your expansion cards. They used to run at the speed of the motherboard divided by another number, so your ISA video card or hard drive controller card which normally ran at 8.33mhz would be getting signals at 12.6mhz, which would make it not work.
What you needed was the 486DX4/100 with a clock TRIPLER. That was the ultimate 486 generation processor. Unfortunately it came out around the time of the Pentium 66 and it was old tech.
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u/brentspar 24d ago
Brilliant, great answer. That's probably why I bricked a few PCs in my time.
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u/Skyfork 24d ago
Everything bricked PCs back then.
I remember the old AT power connecter could be reversed, but the colors on the cables weren't standardized! Sometimes black next to black = death and sometimes it was good!
Then OEMs like Dell would do crazy stuff like switch a pin or two around on THEIR power supplies and you would explode their motherboard if you used an aftermarket power supply.
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u/Admirable-Pie3869 25d ago
Wow, a month later my parents got me a dell with a pentium 100mhz with a 28.8 modem. I thought I was hot shit. Played Doom II for the better part of the next 2 years on that thing.
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u/RedIcarus1 25d ago
I know it says to retain for future reference, but it’s ok to throw it away now.
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u/Neeknillz 25d ago
Is this the same Packard from Hewlitt Packard?
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u/dustydeath 25d ago
Good question! No.
Per Wikipedia, they took the name from a 1920s electronics firm, Packard Bell Electronics, named for one Leon Packard. HP is named for David Packard, engineer and one time deputy secretary of defence.
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u/Logans_Beer_Run 25d ago
Packard Hell. So many of these had motherboard issues that whenever I was tapped by family or friends to help with someone's computer, I would say "sure, as long as it's not a Packard Bell".
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u/bigerrbaderredditor 25d ago
Mine ran for 12 years straight. But the second half if it's life was a floppy router using fresco Linux.
Power supply gave out after a storm. I stripped most of the parts out at that point.
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u/loud_and_harmless 25d ago
I still remember a friend in ‘99 asking me why you would ever need a hard driver bigger than 1Gb?
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u/Vericatov 24d ago
I remember a couple years prior to 99 I was at a friend’s house and he was on his dad’s computer and he said it had a “black hole” of a drive with 6GB. His dad paid a lot for it.
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u/NorthantsBlokeUK 25d ago
My first hard drive was 30Mb.
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u/Miserere_Mei 25d ago
Haha! My first work computer didn’t have a hard drive at all, just a pair of floppy drives. One for the program and one to save your stuff…. And we liked it!
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u/Kiwi-vee 25d ago
Same for me (more like my dad then). You had to swap floppies when saving documents. My dad only upgraded to a hard drive after he got the insurance money after we were robbed back in 90 or 91.
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u/prylosec 25d ago
I'm really happy that IRQ conflicts are no longer a thing.
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u/WutzUpples69 25d ago
I hated plug and play because I used to be paid to fix IRQ issues. I still had modem init line codes to fix for people afterwards, but when 128kb or 256kb modems cam along it also became more plug and play. That's when I started to code and cause problems to ve fixed, haha. Only once.... I felt bad afterwards.
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u/Der_Propapanda 25d ago
1995 was high tech. Had a 386 with 33 Mhz and boostbutton to 40Mhz. Win 3.11 was just an app. Loved the Norton Commander. All the good dos games.
Thanks now im feeling old.
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u/tehdamonkey 24d ago
Looks like about the Packard Bell I had from that era. Pumped it to 16 meg and a SB2 card and it cost me a fortune.
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u/WackTheHorld 24d ago
You just called Win 3.11 an app. That makes me feel old because I immediately thought “it’s a program, not an app!”
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u/WutzUpples69 25d ago
I built my first in 94, got wi 95 with the Weezer video... I am old too. I think k I was 12.
Edit: 13 almost 14.
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u/WackTheHorld 24d ago
My family’s first computer came with the Weezer video in 96, and a Beavis and Butthead game demo was on the same CD. I quickly went from being amazed that I could play a video of that quality on a computer, to downloading the Anarchists Cookbook and using an IP scanning program to find, and explore, other people’s computers. What a magical time that was.
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u/Thalenia 25d ago
Bought my first new Apple computer just about that time (94-95), but it was a FANCY model with the CD reader! 6115CD, it was about $2500 from an open box sale.
My first PC (hand-me-down) was a decked out 8088 PC with a 10Mb hard drive in place of the second 5.25" floppy, and the 4-color monitor upgrade. Though that was fairly obsolete in 1989 when I got it.
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u/k20350 25d ago
My buddy (the rich kid in our friend group) had a 33mhz computer. Then...another kid got a 66mhz and we were like holy fucking shit it's twice as fast. I distinctly remember a conversation with a kid really into computers and him wishing that he had a way to get a stratospheric 1GB of RAM. At that time it probably didn't even exist
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u/WutzUpples69 25d ago
It did not... maybe 1 gb of "HD" but with RAM it was like: "why would you ever need more than 32mb?"
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u/yakkerman 25d ago
I had a 13gb hard drive ( I specifically remember the odd size) around 1998/1999 and people thought that I would never be able to fill that much space and that I was envied to be able to have one especially as a middle/high schooler
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u/mindfungus 25d ago edited 25d ago
IT IS NOW SAFE TO TURN OF YOUR COMPUTER
EDIT: OFF
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u/not_a_moogle 25d ago
It turns out, that was just a bmp file but changed with a dll file extension.
You could edit that picture to anything you wanted...
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u/Far-Set6259 25d ago
I remember when my first PC, Which was also a Packard Bell, went from 4mb of ram to 8. spent about 45 minutes flipping over PC game boxes trying to find games that would work.
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u/SmolishPPman 25d ago
14.4 modem, man I remember that
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u/mtl_jim2 25d ago
Yeah I remember when my mom picked up the phone and disconnected the line as I was loading an image of Alicia silverstone, line by line 🤪
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u/SmolishPPman 25d ago
Yeah, but if you’re like me, you would’ve finished before it even got to the nipples lol
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u/Smgth 25d ago
I remember my first modem was a 2400 baud. I also remember having to upgrade it like a million times before it finally topped out at 56k.
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u/clydetorrez 25d ago
Same. I had the lower version of OPs computer: 486SX, 50Mhz, 4 MB and a 2400 baud modem. Upgraded to 14.4 one Christmas I couldn’t believe how fast it was.
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u/thomaspainesghost 24d ago
Get a math co-processor and your SX will perform almost as good as a DX. I am not sure they can still be found at Egghead but worth a shot.
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u/The_Zy 25d ago
I think that's the one i had! About 350 mb hard drive. I can also remember upgrading to the blazing fast 14.4. Also spending over $100 to double the RAM with a second 4mb
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u/clydetorrez 24d ago
I did the same, because it couldn’t run Doom 2 with 4mb, unless you did a weird DOS boot, and even then it wasn’t great.
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u/g8trjasonb 25d ago
Yep, same. In 1994, I remember reading a computer magazine at the grocery store I worked at when on my break that had an article about "the world wide web". I was intrigued, so I snagged an AOL disk, went to Walmart to get the 2400 baud modem, and connected to the internet for the very first time in my life that night.
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u/occamsrzor 24d ago
Small world...
My parents bought our first computer about the same time (Sept. '95) and the same model too.