So my last post, my dad found his 3rd computer… he finally found his first computer!
Bonus: Back of the receipt has some additional purchases: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8ed5e2cb-3a29-4a8d-9f0f-347cc41771f2.jpeg
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That’s about 3800 bucks in today’s money.
Pretty crazy how far things have come.That’s like the newest MacBook pro, with the newest iPhone and Apple watch, and you might have to skip out on the Apple T.V.
Or a single gaming PC with a 4090.
I thought PCs were closer to $8000 in 1980s money. This is considably cheaper than I thought it was. My current PC cost more than $3800, thanks to out of control GPU pricing.
This dad was not a console peasant.
Ha never owned one until my parents got me an XBox which was my only console. PC4Life
The xbox is a pretty much a stripped down pc :p
Seems like you never really left pcRuns around the same core os if you use windows too lol
Everytime someone talks about old computers, it makes me miss the 90s “turbo button”
There were built in over clocks that could be activated while the computer was running.
So anytime you loaded up a game, you got to engage it with a physical button.
I think that’s backwards - the turbo button (very unintuitively) actually slowed down the computer to allow backwards compatibility with older software and games!
Here’s where I heard that, anyways: https://youtu.be/p2q02Bxtqds?si=f-inplPWdxMnwwu8
A lot of games didn’t work properly if turbo mode was engaged. They would run unplayably fast, have crazy game breaking visual glitches, or just crash. A few of my games had a splash screen reminding the user to turn off turbo mode. The turbo button was mainly there to speed up processing for mundane tasks like spreadsheets or for compiling code.
It was basically to downclock the CPU because old computer games were built to run off of the speed of the CPU. When processors got faster those games scaled up their speed too. Normally you’d leave turbo on all the time except when playing those games. You turned it off and it would restrict the clock speed on the CPU.
Maybe I never noticed it as a kid?
But I never played PC games on any other computer, so I might have just been playing on hard mode that whole time.
I do specifically remember Street Fighter (2?) on PC being the hardest video game ever, so that would explain it.
Are you around 40 years old? If not you probably never had a computer with a turbo button.
65MB HDD in '89? Some people had it all.
I had to make do with 20MB until 1992, when I got a 386/33MHz with 60MB HDD. And it was glorious.
I got my first 1GB HDD in like 95 or 98 and thought I would never use close to that…fast forward to now and I’m filling up terra bytes for movies I watch maybe once a year and video games that sometimes I never even play.
Then Strike Commander came out the next year demanding nearly 40MB. xD
oh yeah… 89/90… I remember, I wanted the 386 because 32bits and protected mode (windows 386 enhanced mode for the win!) so I bought something like your father but a 386/1MB/40MB and I upgraded to a VGA card and a 14" multisync VGA monitor (1024x768, at the time it was incredible). Cost of all this? $4000…
Saw that 45/HR labor charge (I work in IT and my going rate [for the company, not my pay] is a little above that. No wonder he said he’d do it himself, at those rates
oh I did everything myself too, bought all parts and assemble everything, always funny to plug everything, LED, turbo button, HDD led, etc.
What was the ‘scariest’ thing to do at the time? Like, before slipping into that sweet sweet AM5 chip with easy placement and locking, putting in the CPU and thermal pasting scared me and all my friends.
The scariest part was inserting properly all the ISA cards, some were pretty hard to put and remove. 386 CPU was soldered on the MB, we cannot replace it :-/
But it was the same in 1990 that in 2023, install spacers on motherboard, screws, PSU with AT plug, insert all ISA cards, and wire all the small wires for led/button, IDE cable, floppy cable, power cable, etc, it was a nest inside :)
Then you powered on (a big red switch on the side that made a big CLUNK) and pray everything work!
After that it was configuring your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to load driver etc. Playing with XMS, EMM386, HMA, to gain the smallest kilobyte you can from the first 640K, else some games weren’t working.
Your dad overpaid. I can get twice that speed now for the same amount ;)
Joking aside, a modern computer of that price is probably hundreds if not thousands of times faster than that PC. Pretty cool
$102 for an ega compatible graphics card in 1989 sounds like an absolute steal. So many computers had that terrible cga 4 color crap. Something that could output 16 color video was like having a 1080ti probably.
640K ought to have been enough for anybody, except this guy’s dad apparently
My first was in 1982.
No hard drive. Just two 5.25 floppies.
Came with floppies for Fortran and cobol.
Dad?
:(
in late 1992 my first ‘ibm’ pc was a used one of about the same specs (286, 1mb ram, 30 and 20mb hdd, cdrom, evga). cost me $80
I wonder if there are any similarities between the Cardiff Company and the fictional Cardiff Electric from Halt and Catch Fire.
That is quite blatantly a take on Tandy, a leather company getting into the co.puter business.
RIP RadioShack
Why Tandy and not Compaq?
Did Compaq also start as an acquisition from a completely unrelated industry?Tandy was a leather goods company that purchased a hobby electronics chain, and started selling PC’s.
That was my thought too
This is so cool to see. Thank you for sharing!
Labor @ $45/hr
Damn, that sounds like a pretty sweet gig. $45 = $111.43 in today’s money.
That’s probably shop rate. Like paying a mechanic. Shop rate for me is $160 but I don’t get nearly that, also covers machines, rent, etc.
I guess Dad built this computer himself.
