Those were some good specs back in the day… And the price 😯
$5778 adjusted for inflation.
At last something is more accessible than 30 years ago 🤗
Video games, too. They’re still in the $20-$60 range for the most part, same as they’ve been since the 1970s, which means their cost has dropped dramatically.
Wild that a 1k USD machine lasts like 6-10 years now.
I’m using one as a media center that’s a Phenom from 14 years ago lawl
My VR machine is eight years old but with a new GPU.
My main game machine is like four years old and plays basically everything 1440p/100FPS+. Cost bout 1.5k.
My first REAL game computer I built was over 2k back in the day (maybe 3k adjusted for inflation) and was slow as shit after two years. I love you, solid state drives. Athlon 64x2 4400+, SLI7900GT, 4GB DDR2, and an antec lanboy with the bondage kit. Built it for Crysis. No Raptors tho.
You’re the real MVP.
I built a computer around 1998. OP’s dad got reemed.
2 CD ROMs drives AND a zip drive? This guy fucks
Shit. DVD drives!
In 96? Fucking bleeding edge stuff
I think it says 98. IE4.0 wasn’t released until 97, same for Pentium MMX.
It literally says 1/16/98 on the order date :)
Literally, as opposed to figuratively 1/16/98?
Heck I think you’re right.
Man, I bet they were so bummed that they’re stuck on Windows 95 then.
I was in a similar boat. Got our first family PC with windows 95 like 4 months before 98 released. Which kept me from being a PC gamer until i was later into my teens.
either way, how common were DVD drives in 98?
Not very common at all; you needed a separate MPEG2 card to decode the DVD as the CPU wasn’t fast/strong enough.
How did windows 95 keep you from gaming? That’s when I started. 98 wasn’t that big of a chance to my memory.
Well it’s not that it “kept” me from it, but I seem to remember the couple of PC gaming friends that I had, had games that I couldn’t run as they seemed to me (with like 30 years of memories obfuscating) to only run on Windows 98?
But I mean honestly that could’ve been my parents giving me excuses and stuff. Idk.
I didn’t have access to News and stuff about upcoming PC stuff back then so I could only go off what others told me haha
And don’t forget the floppy slot.
Every good 'puter has a floppy slot.
The 2X part means the DVD drive could read DVDs at up to 2X speed
Ah yeah I realized that after. But a floppy reader too! Dude definitely reading some floppies
2X speed was impressive for the time too :)
By 1998? Nah, not really. I think I had at least a 16x by then with my stock prebuilt.
I think there may be a difference in measurement and that might where the discrepancy is. According to Wikipedia’s entry on optical drives:
The 1× speed rating for CD-ROM (150 Kbyte/s) is different from the 1× speed rating for DVDs (1.32 MB/s).
So if that was indeed a 2x DVD drive, it would be pretty comparable (if I’m interpreting all this info correctly): 16x150,000 bytes per second= 2,400,000 or ~2.4 MB/s and the 2x DVD speed would be 1.32 MB/s x2= ~2.6MB/s
Pretty close!
Ah wait, I misread it as cd. Didn’t realize it was DVD.
Cd maybe but not DVD.
I came to the comments hoping somebody would explain a reason for 2 DVD readers back in the days of Win95 lol thanks!
My dad bought one for me 🥰 so i that i can become a scientist one day but then I discovered porn and now I work at McDonalds.
Yeah, but bro: your burger flipping hand is STRONG
Aww, I hate to be the one to tell you this.
McDonald’s uses a proprietary “clam shell” grill. The only flipping that’s happening is an employee cooking their own burger without closing the grill.So at no point in cooking does the burger flip? What a sham
I was going to be extremely impressed at the 64 GB of RAM until I realized that said MB.
Such a throwback though, that iomega zip drive was cutting edge.
We bought a house last year from a lady who lived here with her husband since they built the house in 1972. I found an iomega zip disk in a cabinet in the garage. I had never seen anything like it before. Really cool tech for the time.
I’d kinda love to see what’s on this disk. It could just be spreadsheets or maybe some copied floppies or lots of Metallica courtesy of Napster. Or some pictures of the family. No idea.
100 MB portable storage was unreal back then, and then they came out with 250MB.
Apparently you can still buy the media and drives, even a new one:
https://www.amazon.com/Iomega-Zip-100-Portable-Drive/dp/B00000J3Q7
Oh I lived it too. We were still using 1.4 MB floppy disks for school projects in '04. I think the computer class teacher finally started asking people to use flash drives in '06 or '07. I was walking around with a whole two gigs (wow!) in my pocket. I felt like a god. When we went to flash drives, we all started sharing the music we downloaded from Kazaa and Limewire with each other because now the required kit for computer class had the headroom to allow that. Many of us still lugged around CD players if we didn’t have iPods but the flash drives made burning mixes for each other so much easier.
Another kid in a class below me got HEAVY into emulators. So he started telling us how to download ROMs and we’d all be playing Turok and Ocarina and Pokemon on the school computers. Being a teenager in the late 00s was a riot.
Now, my Nintendo Switch has a memory card that’s smaller than my pinky nail, and it holds 200 times the capacity of those chap stick size flash drives. It’s wild. I remember being amazed at the PSP in its day, thinking surely it doesn’t get much better than that. I really appreciate how amazing the Switch and Steam Deck are, even if Tears of the Kingdom makes the poor little guy crap itself.
Anyway, I’ll wrap up this wall of text because it reeks of millennial. But it’s really cool that there’s still support for old tech like this…even if it’s too pricey for someone who isn’t neck deep into it to consider it lol
ah, young piracy, those were the days.
If I could go back and tell my classmates we’d eventually be able to store 1TB on something the size of a microsd card, they’d say I’d lost my goddamn mind.
I remember being amazed at the PSP in its day
I’ve been using computers since around 1983 and the PSP was one of the few things that really stood out to me as a huge leap at the time.
Most things are incremental but they really nailed the hardware on that one.
The PSP legitimately rocked. It had several great exclusives and a large backlog of compatible PS1 games. I actually ran hacked firmware on mine and dabbled a little into homebrew. Mostly to run (you guessed it) emulators. Given all of the buttons are the same, the PSP is an excellent portable SNES emulator.
That and it blew the graphical capabilities of the DS out of the water. I always thought the touchscreen was a stupid gimmick, but it did allow for some interesting gameplay. But the PSP was just leaps and bounds ahead in terms of power.
Somewhere I still have my original 1st gen PSP running the OG 1.5 factory firmware.
For emulators.
I was in college in 2000. They had us use zip disks at first, but it was around that time that USB flash drives started coming out so we quickly transitioned to those. I liked the zip disks, they were definitely cool, but couldnt beat the convenience of a USB drive. Though, they were like 64MB and a bit over a dollar a meg, while a zip disk was like 15-20 bucks for a pack of them.
I still have two Zip disks! One of them has Bulma’s boobs.
My father still has a working external zip drive, I believe. I’ll check with him today, but lemme know if you want me to DM the address. Sadly it only has about a 50-60% chance of retaining the data after all this time. It’s likely demagnetized.
I had one… Traded music with friends on them. We all had a few disks, which were crazy expensive. I had the portable drive. My friend had the in box drive. So we’d copy disk to disk all night.
Even back then you had McAfee bloat preinstalled
Dude! You’re getting a Dell!
Remember when dell bought Alienware? And all of a sudden people buying an Alienware machine got hit with that line.
It’s been 25 years and their invoices look the same
If it works, why change it?
It only works mechanically. The actual customer service is terrible and they always had useless warranties even if you remove them.
The business pro support is good, at least for the experience I had in EU. I can call them, tell them my Service TAG and that I need a new SSD, they ship it no questions.
You make a good point but from what I see on YouTube, feel Dell is horrible on the standard consumer end. Look up Linus Tech Tips’ Secret Support series or reviews by Gamers Nexus and you’ll see that Dell sells terrible products and provides horrible support for them (at least in the consumer market).
FYI the Customer Service line still works lol.
Seems like overkill
How will you ever fill up 8.4gb of storage
The day we got our 10mb hdd and installed it, as the old man carved up partitions and I got my H: drive, I can still hear his voice, “who could ever use all this space?!”
Today I deleted 1 TB of old files that were buried and forgotten
It blows my mind that such a thing is possible
Honestly was the Windows 95 Factory Install really necessary? They couldn’t be bothered to install it themselves?
DVD Decryptor card that came pre installed
So funny story, if this is the first-gen (Blue) Dell XPS, we also bought one similarly spec’d.
Dell shipped it to us and when it arrived, it had 64 MB of ram instead of the 128 MB we ordered it with. Rather than sending us out new ram, they shipped us ANOTHER whole XPS. They never asked for the first back.
They never asked for the first back.
What in the dot-com fuck?
Yep! It was during their “dude you’re getting a dell” years when they had crazy good support.
We had a particularly large desk and when we called into support, they mailed us (at no cost), Belkin extension cords for all our peripherals. It was wild.
The Sales line doesn’t work…
Surprisingly the Customer Service Line did still. Neat.
You! You’re the reason 555 is used in movies
… if there’s a working number shown in media, I immediately call it.
Most of them actually go to some kind of line with an automated message regarding whatever you’re watching. If they get too old though they go out of service. RIP.
I wanna say I originally remember doing this with some number in Fight Club and it went to Tyler Durden’s line?
KL5 in the Simpsons
8675 30 9 eee ine
So does the website!
And Michelle Knippling is still slinging Dell computers!
You know you’re an old geek when you look at the spec and go “300MHz PII? 64MB RAM? that’s late 96 or early 97… Or cheap 98, but it’s shipped with win95, and ooh la la IE4.0 pre-installed, definitely late 96 or early 97” and then you see the invoice date, and recognize it as Clinton’s 2nd inauguration.
Removed by mod
I know modern audio purists probably still use them, but I completely forgot that sound cards were always an additional thing!
I’m rocking two soundblaster cards in my main rig
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/wreckedcarzz/saved/#view=cN4ypg
What do you use them for?
Listening to two sounds at the same time
Fuckin’ A, man.
Big ballin there!
I had two so I could connect two joysticks at the same time
One is for my surround sound, the other for my headset. Lets me have immersive gaming while separating my voice chat easily. I bought the older card when it was new, and when I did major upgrades I bought the new one for the split audio.
I could use the onboard and just use one SB, but ime with onboard it’s all trash configurations and half-baked features, so even though this board was $900 I immediately disabled it. I really like the features of the SB cards (and the SB X-Fi line I had before that) and figured the $150 to have something I was familiar with and I liked the audio produced by, so why even bother with anything else.
I vaguely remember the Soundblaster AWE64, too. I don’t remember what I had in my 486, though.
I had the Gravis Ultrasound Max.
I had one of their joysticks at one point
Dude, you got a Dell!
My friend was hooking up with him. He was kind of a degenerate Stoner, but we all were… he was an actual loser iirc (from… 20? yrs ago)
That was a beast of a system back in its day. Your dad was clearly a PC connoisseur.
I remember when we upgraded to a Pentium III and later put an aftermarket Voodoo card in the thing after much begging on my part. That was the first PC I had that felt genuinely “powerful” to me.
