Nostalgia: my $4,168 Micron PC (1995)

[DaveSimmons]

I found this while cleaning out old papers. Ordered September 12, 1995 for development and games from Micron back when they made PCs.

Pentium 133 MHz
32 MB RAM (2 x 16 MB, EDO)
1.6 GB WD IDE hard drive
3.5" floppy, 4 X CD-ROM
Diamond Stealth 64 video card, PCI with 2 MB VRAM
Creative Labs 16-bit soundcard
Custom micro-ATX case with 200 watt PSU (a very nice case for its time)
Micron KB & Microsoft PS/2 mouse
ADI 15" VGA monito
Windows 95, Office 95

No USB, smart card, wifi or ethernet. I forget whether I had an external dial-up modem or used an internal modem card purchased separately.

 

[UsandThem]

Very similar to my first HP system (although yours had a lot more RAM). I had to upgrade the RAM and video card (Voodoo) to play Quake II.

Crazy to think how much cheaper PCs are today. Another fun fact: For what you paid for that in 1995, with inflation it would have cost almost $6700 today.

 

[Torn Mind]

That is a piece of history there. Knowledge that would be lost to guys who didn't live in that moment.

 

[bbhaag]

Looks like it was a nice pc for its day. It's crazy to think about how much the cost of computers has dropped over the past 20-30 years. One of my hobbies is vintage computing and my pride and joy is a DEC Venturis 466 system like yours. I've upgraded it over the years but the list price back in '95 was a cool $2100.
That did include a DX2/66 running DOS6.22 w/Win3.11 pre-installed with the usual 8mb ram and 540mb HDD. A monster 14" color monitor and the revolutionary ZIF PentiumOverdrive processor upgrade socket were just the icing on the cake.

Ah the joys of modern computers. It makes me curious what computers will be like in another 30 years or even in a couple hundred years long after all of us are gone.

 

[hoorah]

I had a pentium 75mhz system when a lot of my friends had the pentium 133mhz. The 133 was a lot faster in games which was all I cared about at the time.

Mine first had 8MB of ram, then I upgraded to 24MB. That was my first lesson 25 years ago that more ram doesn't increase the frame rate in games.

I was mostly playing DOS games at that time so the onboard S3 video was fine. I recall upgrading to a Voodoo PCI video card because we couldn't get windows 95 drivers for the onboard video that would output 256 color (it was stuck at 16). The voodoo card helped for some windows 95 games but didn't do much for the DOS games like Doom, Duke3d, and Descent.

That system I used from 1994-ish until about 1996 or 1997 when I built my first PC myself, a Pentium II 350mhz. It was a night and day difference.

 

[vailr]

For a period of time back then, there was a unified CPU form factor for both Intel and AMD.
You could start out by buying an Intel CPU equipped machine, then upgrade later to a faster AMD CPU, all while staying on the same motherboard.
I think there was an upgrade option, going from an Intel 486 CPU to an AMD 586 CPU, for example.
Anandtech later championed the Abit BH6 motherboard, that was able to massively overclock an Intel 300 MHz Celeron CPU to 450 MHz. Anand himself produced a video tutorial on the overclocking settings within the Abit BH6 bios.

 

[dullard]

For a period of time back then, there was a unified CPU form factor for both Intel and AMD.
You could start out by buying an Intel CPU equipped machine, then upgrade later to a faster AMD CPU, all while staying on the same motherboard.

That was because of the way AMD got its start into processors.

AMD was a secondary supplier to Intel. Then Intel started making CPUs such as the 8080. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8080 . AMD reverse-engineered the Intel CPUs without a licence and made the 9080 chip as a competitor to Intel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am9080

When the military and especially IBM wanted CPUs, they had a requirement to have more than one supplier of all parts. Intel needed another company, and AMD wanted into the market. Intel licensed their patented x86 technology to AMD to be a secondary supplier. That way both companies could sell chips to the military and IBM.

Intel eventually decided that it wanted more marketshare of Intel's own IP and stopped sharing designs with AMD. AMD sued over the 386 chip and won the right to keep copying the chip due to that license with Intel. However, AMD did not win the rights to keep using Intel's microcode. Thus, AMD had to start developing its own microcode and that turned into AMD developing its own chips.

Finally AMD won the right to use Intel's microcode, but only up to the 486 line. Starting with the 5x86, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am5x86, they were no longer compatible. Since then you could no longer just pop in one chip into any motherboard. Also as other IP protections, each company started trademarking their CPU names, and we ended up with Pentiums and Athlons, etc.

 

[bononos]

That was because of the way AMD got its start into processors.

AMD was a secondary supplier to Intel. Then Intel started making CPUs such as the 8080. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8080 . AMD reverse-engineered the Intel CPUs without a licence and made the 9080 chip as a competitor to Intel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am9080

When the military and especially IBM wanted CPUs, they had a requirement to have more than one supplier of all parts. Intel needed another company, and AMD wanted into the market.........

IIRC it was originally IBM which forced Intel to license AMD as a secondary supplier for Intel cpus.

 

[sandorski]

$4k is about what an entry level IBM PC cost in the early '80's as well. Probably didn't even have a Hard Drive.