That's how cutting edge tech has always worked.
Imagine buying a shiny new PC in the 90s only to see it become practically obsolete within a year.
That's how cutting edge tech has always worked.
Imagine buying a shiny new PC in the 90s only to see it become practically obsolete within a year.
That's not the experience of owning a PC I remember from the 90s at all.
"Within a year" is a bit of an exaggeration but it's true that the pace of PC tech during the 90s was much, much faster than it is now. CPU power was doubling every two years, and today we're at roughly eight years. Add onto that the rise of video cards in the late 90s.
It was both. 90% of people never needed nor purchased a bleeding-edge computer. The mid-tier was "good enough" and far closer to affordable for most people; though, that bar also moved upward every year.
If you bought a mid-tier computer that was good enough for what you needed, then you probably didn't shop/compare for the next few years and didn't notice. But if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less. This is how it was in the 90's PC boom, at least. Likely the same for the decades before, not sure how it went in the 2000's.
if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less
This is not how I remember that period at all. Do you have any examples?
My first PC 386 was in todays money easily $5000+ (basic 2d GPU + screen)... A lot of hardware in our family was handed down to my folks, because you lost so much on selling, that it was better to keep using them as they had less demands.
386 to 486 to the first Pentium (with the bug!)... You did not upgrade in place, it was often a new system. Sure, you maybe kept your screen, keyboard etc but ... The only upgrade we had on the same MB, was a coprocessor upgrade. Remember those? Each new generation of CPU was a new motherboard. Upgrading CPUs in the same MB really became a thing only later on.
GPUs had a shelf life of barely a year. Its been 35 year but i remember TNT to TNT2 having like 9 month in between. Moving from 2D to 3D involved a constant cost as GPUs evolved fast and the latest games required latest hardware.
We have not talked about the ISA, AGP, and PCI fun ... The “bus wars”.
DOS to Windows 3.1 (and OS/2 somewhere in between) to 95 ... with software being pushing hardware, just like games did.
This is why people are spoiled with cheap PC hardware where its cheap, and easily lasts 4+ years. Even with the bad memory price and more expensive GPUs, your can stil buy a $1500 system that will last you years (with maybe some lower game settings later on ... or the catalog of 10.000s games that will easily run on a mid tier GPU).
PC hardware has become boring but extreme stable. You can run GPUs for year, switch MBs without issues while keeping large amounts of old hardware. That was NOT the 80s and 90s that i remember.
Sorry, I’m specifically talking about the claim that a cutting edge $10k system cost $1k just 24 months later (or less).
The 386 and 486 were 3.5 years apart, weren’t they?
In 1990 a Scottsdale 486 w/ 4MB of Ram and a 211 MB hard drive cost $6737 (plus tax).
In 1992 a Solidtech 486 w/ 4 MB of RAM and a slightly-smaller 125 MB hard drive sold for $2195
Both advertised in Computer Shopper and you can find their catalogues(?) online.
My numbers were slightly off apparently, but is that enough to change the point?
tbh this is how i remembered that time as well. If you look at recommended system requirements for something like Max Payne (in 2001) vs Unreal Tournament 2003, everything had basically doubled
Yeah, but the claim was that the specs for a $10k system cost $1k in 24 months or less.
I remember CPUs moving relatively fast back then, some years in the 90s had relatively big jumps, much bigger than we saw today. The classic graph, : https://i.extremetech.com/imagery/content-types/03zc6ghfKswe...
It is how I remember it.
I remember memory size going up by a factor of 8 at every PC upgrade for the same price.
Or you could buy a PC with a Celeron CPU, which was obsolete way before launch.
When my dad bought one he told me outright "this is for poor people".
I have some fond memories from my celeron days :) But I was upgrading from AMD K5 100 MHz
I had a 600MHz/64MB/9GB laptop that came with Windows mistake edition. I managed to survive first year of uni on it by switching to Vector Linux, which was really fast compared to Windows. (Of course, it had issues playing sound from more than one source, this was oss days).
Then one day the hard drive appeared to die. I eventually realised the issue was located around the 1.5gb mark, so I recreated my Linux partitions after 2gb and it worked fine for the rest of the year.
They overclocked well though, I think you could run the 300Mhz chips at >400Mhz.
I also believe you could get motherboards that supported 2 Celeron chips. I have no idea how effective/useful it was, but it was certainly a cheap/interesting way to get multiple CPU's.
The 486 chip came out in 1989. The 586 came out in 1993.
The pace of change ("practically obsolete") is different then and now.
That's kind of wild. Our first PC was a an IBM PS/2 486SX 33Mhz, 4MB RAM, that was purchased in 1993.
Hardware definitely has longer lifecycle than AI model releases at this point.
You don't see Nvidia and AMD fighting every other month over the latest cards.