Old, lying computer advertisements

[sandorski]

What was that PC Shop's website Selling non-existent Super PCs? Everything was better than what was available and it was a big Internet controversy for awhile.

 

[Shadmere]

DEC Alpha chips? They were in the 500MHz range in the mid 90's I think.

Huh, maybe that was it.

Looks like they had a 600 mhz chip in 1996, which would definitely have tripped my "wtf" circuits.

Though looking around on the internet for information, it also looks like they actually were that fast.

So why wasn't that a big deal?

 

[SlowSpyder]

Huh, maybe that was it.

Looks like they had a 600 mhz chip in 1996, which would definitely have tripped my "wtf" circuits.

Though looking around on the internet for information, it also looks like they actually were that fast.

So why wasn't that a big deal?

They weren't your typical x86 processors for running Windows 95. They were used in expensive enterprise machines.

 

[sandorski]

Huh, maybe that was it.

Looks like they had a 600 mhz chip in 1996, which would definitely have tripped my "wtf" circuits.

Though looking around on the internet for information, it also looks like they actually were that fast.

So why wasn't that a big deal?

They were that fast. They were not X86, so useless for PCs. That was back before Intel/AMD were Players in the >simple Network Server Markets Some one can probably state this better than I, but Intel/AMD really didn't matter in larger Computers back then. It was practically a joke to think they ever would matter in the high end.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

They were that fast. They were not X86, so useless for PCs. That was back before Intel/AMD were Players in the >simple Network Server Markets Some one can probably state this better than I, but Intel/AMD really didn't matter in larger Computers back then. It was practically a joke to think they ever would matter in the high end.

The did have versions of NT for the Alpha though, so you could run a Microsoft OS on an Alpha box.

 

[CPA]

I remember a friend's parents bought a computer that was advertised as "NEVER OBSOLETE." Most blatant lie I've ever seen in any advertising, ever.

EMachines. You could apparently trade up your old machine to another EMachine at a cost, of course. That was their way of marketing "Never Obsolete"

Picture of the front

My dad bought one of these once. I laughed at him.

 

[waggy]

He he, I remember that. What was somewhat hard for intel is they had been promoting to their fan boys for so long "Oh it is 3.7Ghz, Way faster than anything else, tomorrow it will be 10Ghz!" Then, all the sudden, they released a CPU at lower clock speeds that destroyed their other line in terms of performance. (As well as AMDs best offerings). That was certainly a shock that nobody really expected.

actually nearly everyone i talked with said Intel had ot do that. it was obviouse to people.

Speed is nice but its useless if you hit a bottleneck. what would you rather have. a 1 lane road with a dragster doing 300mph or a 10 lane road where traffic was at 150 mph?

pretty much everyone agreed intel would have to do what they did. the speed race was uselss.


there was some ads that were insane. i remember a computer shop claiming that they had intel 1ghz chips when 233 was top speed. they claimed they "hacked" them to get more speed. they also claimed to do the same with HD's and video cards.

 

[mb]

DEC Alpha chips? They were in the 500MHz range in the mid 90's I think.

Yup, that's what I was going to say.

I remember seeing those ads and drooled for the day I too could have a 500MHz processor.

Now my cell phone is even faster - hah!

 

[sandorski]

actually nearly everyone i talked with said Intel had ot do that. it was obviouse to people.

Speed is nice but its useless if you hit a bottleneck. what would you rather have. a 1 lane road with a dragster doing 300mph or a 10 lane road where traffic was at 150 mph?

pretty much everyone agreed intel would have to do what they did. the speed race was uselss.


there was some ads that were insane. i remember a computer shop claiming that they had intel 1ghz chips when 233 was top speed. they claimed they "hacked" them to get more speed. they also claimed to do the same with HD's and video cards.

Ya, that sounds like the same place I mentioned above. Can't quite remember the name. I remember the guy defending himself and many going to his website to spam messages on it.

 

[darkswordsman17]

What was that PC Shop's website Selling non-existent Super PCs? Everything was better than what was available and it was a big Internet controversy for awhile.

I remember them, but can't think of what they were called.

 

[Cogman]

Ya, that sounds like the same place I mentioned above. Can't quite remember the name. I remember the guy defending himself and many going to his website to spam messages on it.

Is that the place where the moderators subscribed the company CEOs to a thread dedicated to us tell the company how we would never purchase from them? That was awesome. (We never got any spam from that company again)

 

[waggy]

yeah we had one guy spam here about it. but I remember seeing crap like that since the early 90's.

teh one that spammed here was something like freds computers or something lame like t hat.

 

[AstroManLuca]

Ya, that sounds like the same place I mentioned above. Can't quite remember the name. I remember the guy defending himself and many going to his website to spam messages on it.

Is that the place where the moderators subscribed the company CEOs to a thread dedicated to us tell the company how we would never purchase from them? That was awesome. (We never got any spam from that company again)

Liebermann, Inc. perhaps? I remember that as well. Their website at the time was a copy of Apple's site. And yeah, their computers had insane specs for the time, well beyond what anyone else had.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.go-l.com/

 

[Fayd]

EMachines. You could apparently trade up your old machine to another EMachine at a cost, of course. That was their way of marketing "Never Obsolete"

Picture of the front

My dad bought one of these once. I laughed at him.

wow, look at all the stickers!

 

[sandorski]

Liebermann, Inc. perhaps? I remember that as well. Their website at the time was a copy of Apple's site. And yeah, their computers had insane specs for the time, well beyond what anyone else had.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.go-l.com/

Nope, but those were the type of Claims being made.

edit: On second thought and further review of the archive, that might be it. When I started reading the Glowing Reviews/Fan Mail it sure seemed the same.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Liebermann, Inc. perhaps? I remember that as well. Their website at the time was a copy of Apple's site. And yeah, their computers had insane specs for the time, well beyond what anyone else had.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.go-l.com/

That's the one I was thinking of.

 

[vshah]

hahaha, go-l, that takes me back

 

[BoberFett]

I recall an ad from the mid 90s from some company claiming that their compression software could get any file, no matter how large, down to a few KB. All you had to do was keep recompressing the same file until it was down the size that you wanted. Wish I had saved a copy.

 

[geno]

There was Cyrix back then, marketing their 166mhz cpus as "200", model... They had pretty much the shittiest FPU ever. Their ALU was great, but, they were completely useless for anything related to any game.

They had no FPU (or next to none since it sucked), right? I had a Cyrix 586 CPU and it was awesome until I fired up Quake, which thrived off of FPU performance, lol.

 

[BurnItDwn]

They had no FPU (or next to none since it sucked), right? I had a Cyrix 586 CPU and it was awesome until I fired up Quake, which thrived off of FPU performance, lol.

The Cyrix 586+/686+ both had an FPU. The FPU was a design similar to a the i486 FPU, and only running a little bit faster than an i486 FPU.

So, it was total garbage for Quake

My friend's P75 was faster than my cyrix p200+ for Quake... (Was my first PC, and I didn't have a lot of $$, so I built cheap... I should have went with a K6, but just couldn't scrape together enough dough at the time.)

 

[pmv]

There was Cyrix back then, marketing their 166mhz cpus as "200", model... They had pretty much the shittiest FPU ever. Their ALU was great, but, they were completely useless for anything related to any game.

I think the cyrix 200+ actually ran at 150Mhz. It used a 75mhz bus speed back when the pentiums used 66mhz, I believe it actually overclocked the chipset by design.

The AMD PR number was understandable - when Joe Schmo consumer thinks 'higher clock speed = faster' ignoring the different architectures meaning differeing amounts get done with each clock tick.

I don't know why no-one bought out a CPU clocked at 30Ghz, but designed so that it didn't actually do anything at all for 99 out of 100 clock ticks.

 

[HN]

are speakers still sold with the 9 brazillion watts PMPO rating?

 

[The Boston Dangler]

http://www.download3k.com/Press-Those-who-use-Michael-s-Computers-are-the-only.html

The most popular tower (desktop) has continued to be Michael's MX8 system. The ONLY tower with an 8 year warranty and free shipping. Where people always want the fastest processor and lots of memory (thinking that’s what makes a fast system), they often don't realize that most loading, saving and running comes from the speed of the hard drives that store data. Unfortunately, systems sold in stores have a single drive that doesn't make the system appear to run any faster than another with a slower processor. Thankfully, Michael's Computers developed the 500GB Hyperdrives exclusively which function 4X as fast as a single drive and twice as fast as the archaic RAID system! Hence, why Michael's Computers is the only company to claim INSTANT performance...because it's that fast!

 

[OCGuy]

LCD/TV companies are messing with us with all the BS specs right now. 10 years from now we will laugh at the contrast ratio claims.

 

[0roo0roo]

they still do it on ebays and such sometimes...add up the core ghz
nvidia and their gimp chip 9600 gso does the shady sh*t as well. i mean really, they call a 9600 gso with half the shaders and some ridiciulous 1.5gb of ddr2 by the same name as the original, its fraud.