My first computer was a 486sx 25Mhz [1] The rig (tower, monitor, etc.) cost around $3,000. We got the SX instead of the DX because it was $500 cheaper. And I wanted a 16bit sound card. (Note that this is in 1992 dollars. Today it would cost over $7,000)
My parents didn't have a lot of money, but my great-grand father passed and they used some of the inheritance to buy the computer. I was instantly hooked. In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.
The announcement reminded me of article John Dvorak wrote around the same time. 1GB hard drives had just come out, and he asked what all the extra space would be used for. Even as a young teenager, I remember thinking how short sighted that comment was. That was before I realized how the tech press tends to get stuck in local optimizations, and can't understand the bigger picture.
It's all a good reminder that cutting edge today doesn't stay cutting edge very long, and the world figures out how to squeeze every ounce ounce of power out of hardware. (Also, yes, that leads to bloat...)
> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.
True for many, many of us, I suspect. My family bought a 286 in the early 90s and it cost something like $2000 CAD then, which is nearly $4000 now; but salaries were lower then, this would have been something like 5-6% of my single income family's yearly post-tax earnings for the year, and if you think about it as the % of "disposable" income it was probably more like 60% of it for the year.
Obviously it paid off in that it set me on the path for my career, hard to make any other investment as good as that, but who would have known that at the time? I'm glad that there were so many ads positioning computers as being educational and not just game machines; even though in reality I think it was learning about the computer to make the games work that taught me way more than any educational software ever did.
Ha! Same for me: 286 in 9th grade (1990) for about $2k CAD. 286 was a bad call though as I think it was harder to expand compared with 386. I remember 1MB RAM but really only 640k usable. Had to change some BIOS settings to get to about ~700 kB?
I’ve been thinking a lot about these inflation-adjusted prices due to the big Apple Computer anniversary — an Apple // cost $5000 in 2026 dollars, meanwhile a $600 Macbook Neo cost $150 in 1980 cash!
What helped me reconcile this was an observation that we’ve inverted the prices of necessities and luxury goods. Rent and mortgage in particular were a much smaller slice of income back then, but luxury goods were very expensive, so one would save up for a year or two to buy a new TV or a computer for the kids.
Now the necessities take a much larger slice of our income, but TVs and computers are incredibly cheap. It takes very little money to get a nice computer, and not-buying it barely makes a dent in the bills. This isn’t a good thing.
I do disagree a little with your observation regarding the industry “squeezing every ounce of power out of hardware”. Beyond local LLM stuff, there’s basically nothing a modern computer can comfortably do that any laptop since the mainstreaming of SSDs can’t.
> You need something beefy if you're serious/professional about those
But you can get way better results with the lowest end computers than you could years ago.
Back in the 90s my grandfather used 3DS Max to map out his future apartment's rooms and start planning furniture, using renders to get an idea of how sunshine would look like at different times, etc. At the time, he did this on an expensive 486 that would take an entire day to render some of those visuals. Nowadays I can do the same with a free copy of Blender and any reasonably modern integrated GPU in probably under an hour.
You can just use SweetHome3D (GPL too) and call it a day. No need to mess with models, everything can be set and adjusted. Just design in a plane, set heights/widths for forniture, walls and the like, set a final render settings (hour of the day/sunny/cloudy and such) and even an Elementary kid could finish the work.
> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.
Gotta tack on to this thread showing appreciation for parents. We could never afford new computers in the 90s, but luckily my dad could bring home obsolete equipment from work. We were thus always at least a generation behind. I remember my friend's Pentium feeling like sci-fi compared to our 386, but my goodness it completely molded my life!
Later, towards the end of the 90s, those sci-fi Pentiums were obsolete, so I got a few to run "that weird Linux stuff" on. Since it was considered junk, nobody cared what I did with it. To this day, if I happen to hear Metallica play and there's early winter's first smell of snow in the air, my mind will be transported back to that school night I secretly stayed up wayyy too late and discovered SSH for the first time. Haven't looked back.
Thank you, dad! I just hope general computing devices owned by regular people are still natural by the time my children come of age.
My grade school friend got a Nintendo and I wanted one so badly. My parents got me an Apple IIGS instead. I was a little disappointed about the Nintendo, but saw there were plenty of games on the thing, and of course it could do so much more than play games. That turned out to be a very good move on their part.
I wanted to link his columns "Microsoft Dot Nyet" and "New Architecture Needed" from circa 2000-2001 but it turns out they have been memory-holed. They should be somewhere in the wayback machine.
EDIT: At least one of them has not been deleted, just his name has been removed
Yikes, you're not wrong. And I guess he's never heard of security issues, what with his ROM idea. Neat for a console (where the ROMs are game cartridges, as they used to be) or an appliance not connected to the internet, not a general-purpose OS...
Pretty much the only thing I agree with is that computer architecture could use a complete rework (both from a software as well as hardware side, though primarily the former); as well as said rework being basically impossible in practice.
Mine neither although the grandparents were moderately wealthy but my mom understood very early on that it was a match for me and that computers would really take off.
Fun story: first BASIC I ever got was an Atari 2600 cartridge that came with some key of a "keyboard" in two parts you'd plug in the joystick ports. When my parent bought that Atari 2600 they tried it and spent the entire night playing "Tank Attack" on the TV in their bedroom. She only told me that years later.
Then as I was writing tiny BASIC programs on the Atari 2600 gaming console, she realized I needed a "real" computer, so she bought me an Atari 600 XL a bit later. Then I began salivating on the neighbours' Commodore 64, which I could see trough a window. And she thought: "If I buy the exact same computer as the neighbours, maybe my son and the neighbours shall become friends!". 42 years later one of our neighbor just went to visit my brother in another country and his brother we exchange Telegram messages nearly daily.
My mother was a stenographer. She used a 286 for processing docs. That baby wasssss alll mine during the day!!! All my friends had hacks for sys/bat/exe files to get wolfenstein at least to load. Best days of my life.
Wonderful gift, even though I gave it a pass and saved on the sound card.
Mine was the 486 DX 2/66.
The trouble with the 486 SX 25 was IMO that a fast 386 easily beat it. I was part of the demo scene back then and wanted to compete with the likes of Dust, Future Crew.
And: Doom! It could be displayed and run in 800x600 if I remember correctly on a DX 2/66.
The 486 killer app was DOOM. It was butter-smooth at 20 fps if you also had a VLB graphic card.
The 486 DX2 66MHz was the target platform for gaming during almost two years (1992-1994). That was an huge achievement back in the days to be at the top that long.
The DX/2 66 is a true legend of a chip. It was so good. The final nail in the coffin for the Amiga and for 68k. I love the Amiga, but it just didn’t Doom.
Before it, you could claim that a 68040 was kinda-sorta keeping up with the 486 and that the nicer design and better operating systems of other computers made up for the delta in raw performance, but the DX/2 66 running Doom was the final piece of proof that the worse-is-better approach of using raw CPU grunt to blast pixels at screen memory instead of relying on clever custom circuitry was winning.
Faced with overwhelming evidence, everyone sold their Amiga 1200s and jumped ship to that hated Wintel platform.
Doom was released end of '93. In 1992 most of us were in the 286 -> 386 upgrade wave and a 486-33 was easily at $2.5k+ ($5.5k in today's terms). The 486 DX2 66 was a good choice even 1994-1996.
My first Intel based PC was actually a 486DX/2-66 “Houdini” card for my PowerMac 6100/60 in
late 1994. It had a SB16 daughtercard and could either share RAM with the host Mac or use a 32MB dedicated SIMM. I added a dedicate SIMM when prices dropped to $300 for it.
I loved my 486DX2 66Mhz based IBM PS/1 (2168), which had a whopping 8MB of RAM. Not only did it really enable me to experience the fullness of PC gaming of the era, but it was the first computer I was able to install an internal modem into, and the computer I used to get SLIP dial-in access to the state university mainframe and thus to the Internet (prior I was limited to Prodigy walled garden). It was this computer that let me play early MUDs via telnet, let me play my first graphical MMORPG (Ultima Online), and and introduced me to real visual programming (Visual Basic).
To a significant degree, the 486DX2 was the primary computing platform that created the foundation I needed to learn computing at depth and enabled my later career, and really set many of the formative moments in my life. Thanks Intel, even though you suck now as a shadow of your former self you were a beast in the 90s.
We ran a 3-line BBS (Renegade and then Wildcat) on OS/2 on a 486-33 with 12 MB RAM. This was in 1994 or so. Great way to multitask several dos applications!
486 was my dream. Unfortunately, my parents didn't have money for it. I bought my first PC in 1999 - a Pentium 2. I invested a lot of money in the monitor; computers become obsolete very quickly, while a monitor can serve for many years. Surprisingly, flat monitors appeared soon after...
I remember getting my first 486 33mhz computer and being able to play Ultima 7 the black gate, and later Ultima 7 part 2. This was a turning point for me as the game was way ahead of others on the console side of things. DOS 6 !
Funny I'm working with intel 686 right now brutal to get stuff to build eg. rust/cargo related (missing deps but mostly the hardware, slow). Recently trying to fix this maturin problem I ran into. But it is cool the backwards compatibility of python 3.11 to 32bit with debian 12
The CPU I'm working with is Celeron M 900MHz single core no HT struggling to build wheels for python (several hours)
Back in the day I couldn't even dream of a PC. They were way too expensive. It took my extended family chipping in (~15 people) to buy me a C64 with tape storage. Still it was great fun. It made me learn programming in BASIC and English at the same time (as the Polish language book included was so badly translated and full of errors it was hopeless).
It was pre-internet obviously so obtaining software was very difficult. For years when I was learning assembler I was using a so called "monitor cartridge" that did simple assembly/disassembly, but it didn't support labels and such. I could read about software like "Meta Assembler" that let you use labels and variables and think "wow, I could do so much stuff with that..."
My first PC was sometime in late 90s. A Celeron 233MHz with Windows 95. I wasn't a huge fan of Windows back then. I remember when one of the pc magazines I got had RedHat Linux install CDs. I liked it from the start. The fact my software only modem and Lexmark printer didn't work got me into kernel programming :-)
Fun to think of it now, but I prefer 2026 a 100x :-)
> But when Word 97 arrived with real-time spelling and grammar checking and Clippy, the 486 couldn’t keep up. You really needed a Pentium or equivalent to do all three at once without noticeable lag as you typed.
In other words, faster hardware was needed because the quality and performance of the software dropped. I was doing spell-checking with WordStar on an CP/M Apple II with zero lag -- and WordStar fit on one side of a 5' floppy.
- tinkered for HOURS to get enough EMM/XMM memory by tweaking Config.Sys & Co to get whatever game running
(and having dedicated boot options configured, because you could unload some drivers from mem and could then run other games)
• Ran my first Linux at home on a i486-DX2 (33 MHz, 4 MB RAM), which supported a decent X11/R6 performance in color in 1992, with a 14" CRT.
• Ran my first real UNIX at home on a PA-RISC (HP 9000-715/75 with HP-UX 9.03 and 96 MB RAM) in 1997, 20" color CRT.
• Today, Linux is still here, but on a 2-CPU, 140-core AMD server with 2 TB RAM, hundreds of TB NAS and a 40" TFT... (and it still takes too long to open the bloated Web browser! - keenly awaiting Ladybird to the rescue in August.)
Heh, I remember using my first machine, a 486 for a long time after it was obsolete and reading system requirements like, what do you mean pentium recommended and why the hell do you need 16Mb of RAM. It's interesting to reflect that the old games like Settlers, HoMM 2 or Warcraft 2, that are no worse than modern ones gameplay wise, used to run on something that is so vastly underpowered by modern standards the numbers don't even feel like a real spec.
Hard to imagine now, but this was a huge turning point. A genuinely powerful CPU in a "Pee-Cee" available for less than RISC workstation money. I had to wait a while, mine was an AMD DX2-66 since I didn't have a budget for Intel... add Slackware... and countess hours messing with XF86config and I had a poor-mans Sun workstation.
165 comments
My parents didn't have a lot of money, but my great-grand father passed and they used some of the inheritance to buy the computer. I was instantly hooked. In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.
The announcement reminded me of article John Dvorak wrote around the same time. 1GB hard drives had just come out, and he asked what all the extra space would be used for. Even as a young teenager, I remember thinking how short sighted that comment was. That was before I realized how the tech press tends to get stuck in local optimizations, and can't understand the bigger picture.
It's all a good reminder that cutting edge today doesn't stay cutting edge very long, and the world figures out how to squeeze every ounce ounce of power out of hardware. (Also, yes, that leads to bloat...)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I486SX
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak
> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.
True for many, many of us, I suspect. My family bought a 286 in the early 90s and it cost something like $2000 CAD then, which is nearly $4000 now; but salaries were lower then, this would have been something like 5-6% of my single income family's yearly post-tax earnings for the year, and if you think about it as the % of "disposable" income it was probably more like 60% of it for the year.
Obviously it paid off in that it set me on the path for my career, hard to make any other investment as good as that, but who would have known that at the time? I'm glad that there were so many ads positioning computers as being educational and not just game machines; even though in reality I think it was learning about the computer to make the games work that taught me way more than any educational software ever did.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these inflation-adjusted prices due to the big Apple Computer anniversary — an Apple // cost $5000 in 2026 dollars, meanwhile a $600 Macbook Neo cost $150 in 1980 cash!
What helped me reconcile this was an observation that we’ve inverted the prices of necessities and luxury goods. Rent and mortgage in particular were a much smaller slice of income back then, but luxury goods were very expensive, so one would save up for a year or two to buy a new TV or a computer for the kids.
Now the necessities take a much larger slice of our income, but TVs and computers are incredibly cheap. It takes very little money to get a nice computer, and not-buying it barely makes a dent in the bills. This isn’t a good thing.
I do disagree a little with your observation regarding the industry “squeezing every ounce of power out of hardware”. Beyond local LLM stuff, there’s basically nothing a modern computer can comfortably do that any laptop since the mainstreaming of SSDs can’t.
Office tools and web browsing are less demanding.
> You need something beefy if you're serious/professional about those
But you can get way better results with the lowest end computers than you could years ago. Back in the 90s my grandfather used 3DS Max to map out his future apartment's rooms and start planning furniture, using renders to get an idea of how sunshine would look like at different times, etc. At the time, he did this on an expensive 486 that would take an entire day to render some of those visuals. Nowadays I can do the same with a free copy of Blender and any reasonably modern integrated GPU in probably under an hour.
Try seconds or at most minutes.
> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.
Gotta tack on to this thread showing appreciation for parents. We could never afford new computers in the 90s, but luckily my dad could bring home obsolete equipment from work. We were thus always at least a generation behind. I remember my friend's Pentium feeling like sci-fi compared to our 386, but my goodness it completely molded my life!
Later, towards the end of the 90s, those sci-fi Pentiums were obsolete, so I got a few to run "that weird Linux stuff" on. Since it was considered junk, nobody cared what I did with it. To this day, if I happen to hear Metallica play and there's early winter's first smell of snow in the air, my mind will be transported back to that school night I secretly stayed up wayyy too late and discovered SSH for the first time. Haven't looked back.
Thank you, dad! I just hope general computing devices owned by regular people are still natural by the time my children come of age.
I wanted to link his columns "Microsoft Dot Nyet" and "New Architecture Needed" from circa 2000-2001 but it turns out they have been memory-holed. They should be somewhere in the wayback machine.
EDIT: At least one of them has not been deleted, just his name has been removed
https://www.pcmag.com/archive/new-architecture-needed-32570
Pretty much the only thing I agree with is that computer architecture could use a complete rework (both from a software as well as hardware side, though primarily the former); as well as said rework being basically impossible in practice.
> My parents didn't have a lot of money ...
Mine neither although the grandparents were moderately wealthy but my mom understood very early on that it was a match for me and that computers would really take off.
Fun story: first BASIC I ever got was an Atari 2600 cartridge that came with some key of a "keyboard" in two parts you'd plug in the joystick ports. When my parent bought that Atari 2600 they tried it and spent the entire night playing "Tank Attack" on the TV in their bedroom. She only told me that years later.
Then as I was writing tiny BASIC programs on the Atari 2600 gaming console, she realized I needed a "real" computer, so she bought me an Atari 600 XL a bit later. Then I began salivating on the neighbours' Commodore 64, which I could see trough a window. And she thought: "If I buy the exact same computer as the neighbours, maybe my son and the neighbours shall become friends!". 42 years later one of our neighbor just went to visit my brother in another country and his brother we exchange Telegram messages nearly daily.
Then the Amiga. Then the 386, 486, etc.
What a mom. RIP.
Mine was the 486 DX 2/66.
The trouble with the 486 SX 25 was IMO that a fast 386 easily beat it. I was part of the demo scene back then and wanted to compete with the likes of Dust, Future Crew.
And: Doom! It could be displayed and run in 800x600 if I remember correctly on a DX 2/66.
The 486 DX2 66MHz was the target platform for gaming during almost two years (1992-1994). That was an huge achievement back in the days to be at the top that long.
Before it, you could claim that a 68040 was kinda-sorta keeping up with the 486 and that the nicer design and better operating systems of other computers made up for the delta in raw performance, but the DX/2 66 running Doom was the final piece of proof that the worse-is-better approach of using raw CPU grunt to blast pixels at screen memory instead of relying on clever custom circuitry was winning.
Faced with overwhelming evidence, everyone sold their Amiga 1200s and jumped ship to that hated Wintel platform.
Suddenly, it was possible to imagine running advanced software on a PC, and not have to spend 25,000 USD on a workstation.
To a significant degree, the 486DX2 was the primary computing platform that created the foundation I needed to learn computing at depth and enabled my later career, and really set many of the formative moments in my life. Thanks Intel, even though you suck now as a shadow of your former self you were a beast in the 90s.
Back then, 10 years of technological advancement made a huge difference. Today, you can get by just fine with a 2016-era laptop.
The CPU I'm working with is Celeron M 900MHz single core no HT struggling to build wheels for python (several hours)
It was pre-internet obviously so obtaining software was very difficult. For years when I was learning assembler I was using a so called "monitor cartridge" that did simple assembly/disassembly, but it didn't support labels and such. I could read about software like "Meta Assembler" that let you use labels and variables and think "wow, I could do so much stuff with that..."
My first PC was sometime in late 90s. A Celeron 233MHz with Windows 95. I wasn't a huge fan of Windows back then. I remember when one of the pc magazines I got had RedHat Linux install CDs. I liked it from the start. The fact my software only modem and Lexmark printer didn't work got me into kernel programming :-)
Fun to think of it now, but I prefer 2026 a 100x :-)
> But when Word 97 arrived with real-time spelling and grammar checking and Clippy, the 486 couldn’t keep up. You really needed a Pentium or equivalent to do all three at once without noticeable lag as you typed.
In other words, faster hardware was needed because the quality and performance of the software dropped. I was doing spell-checking with WordStar on an CP/M Apple II with zero lag -- and WordStar fit on one side of a 5' floppy.
It was a life-changing machine.
Ordered, I believe, from the depths of a Computer Shopper magazine.
- tinkered for HOURS to get enough EMM/XMM memory by tweaking Config.Sys & Co to get whatever game running (and having dedicated boot options configured, because you could unload some drivers from mem and could then run other games)
:-D
• Ran my first real UNIX at home on a PA-RISC (HP 9000-715/75 with HP-UX 9.03 and 96 MB RAM) in 1997, 20" color CRT.
• Today, Linux is still here, but on a 2-CPU, 140-core AMD server with 2 TB RAM, hundreds of TB NAS and a 40" TFT... (and it still takes too long to open the bloated Web browser! - keenly awaiting Ladybird to the rescue in August.)
I built a 486 Compaq Novell server for the company I worked for and named it Godzilla - gives a sense of how the 486 was seen.