This will not be a rigorously researched post- just my own experience and recollections.
A good introduction: Compaq Presario (1993)
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| A representative Compaq all-in-one that is similar to ours. |
My father bought a brand new Compaq Presario all-in-one computer in 1993. The model number was 425 or 433. I have seen lots of screenshots of the shape so that I am very certain it is one of those models, but between the two there are only minor outside differences. There are no surviving close-up pictures of this PC, although we had it well into the 21st century, so I am not able to confidently state which model it was.
This was not really a cheap PC in the vein of Commodore, but it was not an IBM either. Compaq aimed squarely at the heart of the no-nonsense middle-class American family which wanted a good balance of quality, compatibility, business app potential, and gaming possibilities. For its time, it was reasonably effective at everything it tried to do, and making the system all-in-one (with the monitor mounted inside the case for the computer itself) must have made sense at the time for simplicity.
Fairly sturdy, US-made, with a lengthy instruction manual, with the latest x86 processor and Windows, and a price tag of over $1000, it was not a bad choice for a middle-class US family.
When you experience a thing in your very early years, the most poignant memories are of the basic senses. Since smell and taste don't really enter into computing, sound and touch and sight dominate. For this particular computer, sound was a lovably inimitable aspect.
Push the button to power on, and you were treated with a sequence of miniscule clicks so characteristic that I shall never forget what it sounds like. During the boot process, the hard disk drive made a series of VERY precise clicks and whirs that have likewise entered my permanent memory. There was then a very mellow "beep beep" from the machine- the pitch and timing of those two beeps are also perfectly stored in my memory after all the years. The RAM count finished at 4096 KB, and then it proceeded to launch Windows 3.1.
When the machine was underway, the hard drive was marvelously melodious. Clicks and whirs easily demonstrated when the task at hand required disk access. I assumed, as a child, that it meant the computer had to think extra hard and really gird its loins to solve the request I had just given it. For this reason, I was not overly impatient during periods of slowdown.
To use a contrasting metaphor, a silent computer which is not very fast is infuriating. It is like a listener who exhibits no verbal or nonverbal cues of understanding as you speak. Maybe the listener has understood, but you have no indication of it. If the person is slow, or fails to complete your request, it is particularly exasperating, as though the machine is not listening.
A noisy computer is much more relatable, even if slow. It is like a slow person who gives you lots of cues that he has understood what you are saying, and seems to show real effort in thinking of a response. It seems silly to say all this, but the mere fact that the computer made clicks and whirs at the right times elicited a great deal of mechanical sympathy from me that I did not give to any other machine at this point in my life. However, I can overcome the desire for noisy feedback if the machine is fast enough (as almost all modern machines are), just as in the real world I would forgive someone for not providing filler like "yeah" and "mmhmm" while listening if they got to the matter right away and demonstrated understanding.
The tactile sensations were also superior. I was greatly fond of the two-button mouse and solid keyboard. The only standard for comparison I had in the same period was the Apple II that my school used in great quantities. I did not like Apple's operating system then (nor do I today), and I particularly hated the one-button mouse and chintzy keyboard. That old Compaq keyboard and mouse served as an exemplar of what these peripherals ought to feel like.
As far as the sensation of sight.... it was no different from any other machine of its generation. All Windows machines looked the same. At the time, 32-bit apps mingled alongside 16-bit apps. Most games I played were highly rudimentary, for which 256 colors would have been overkill. Windows 3.1 was a fine operating system for a child to learn on, and I still have fond memories of it for that, although I think I would struggle to use it practically in the real world today.
But the sound and touch of the machine made me feel as though it had a presence of life which was unlike any other computer I had ever used. It was a machine which I loved.
The coming of sound: Dell running Windows 95
In about 1994, the situations changed a little bit in my family. There was a divorce and job shuffling. The Compaq remained in the household in which I lived, and it remained perfectly serviceable. In fact, my brother and I grew so attached to it that it was rarely available for the practical needs of working and studying adults. This entered into the decision to purchase a second home computer for my family.
My mother decided to buy a new machine in 1995 or 1996. The fuzzy details of this period of my life preclude remembering any more detail than that. I do not know what model of Dell it was, but I do know that it ran Windows 95.
I was extremely curious about her new computer because it had speakers. We had no sound on the old Compaq except the disk drive's charming little symphony of clicks and whirs. Therefore, to my mind there was no startup sound- in fact, I did not know until years later that a "ta-da" sound was supposed to be playing on Windows 3.1 startup! It was never played to my ears because the Compaq had no speakers except for system beeps and blips.
Imagine my awe and delight when she turned on her PC for the first time in my presence and it played this beautiful melody.
I was spellbound by the fact that it could play music, for all my experience with music up to this point was in the form of the radio or cassette tapes, and they seemed so limited. If a computer could generate music, it would be capable of imitating musical instruments.
However, this was all I ever heard. My mom mostly used the PC for work purposes, and I was never permitted to use it. She did play games occasionally, but she was a fan of the text-based RPG style of gameplay, and there was no potential for audio.
Still, I heard that damn Windows 95 startup sound many, many times.
In later years, I would revisit Windows 95. It is, by the standards of its day, one of the most groundbreaking operating systems ever made. So many features were newly introduced. It eliminated the Program Manager paradigm of Windows 1.0 through 3.1. Though it was still built on DOS (and 98 and Me would be, too), Windows 95 was a GUI that was entirely different, feeling far closer to today's operating systems than to all operating systems that preceded it.
Stability was not a hallmark of these machines, but I am told that earlier versions of Windows were not either. If you shut down improperly, or fail to restart after applying changes, you can ruin the current configuration of your machine rather easily. Crashiness is an issue, and it remained so in Windows 98. Windows Me, of course, is so terrible that it doesn't bear talking about.
My brother, somewhat older than me, was always substantially more adept with computers until we were very close to adulthood. I tried to follow what he did, but sometimes I just wasn't interested.
This was one of those cases.
In 1997 or 1998, someone at his school (he was two years older than me, so he went to different school) had tipped him off that the school would be disposing of relatively obsolescent PCs which the school intended to replace. Grandma dropped him off; I did not go with him to pick out a machine. Free computers, and I didn't even go! Was I insane? What on Earth was I doing that evening?
He selected an IBM machine whose model we still cannot agree on. We agree on only two things:
However, could an earlier IBM machine even run Windows 3.1? There is no way that a 5150 or an XT is capable of running the most advanced 16-bit operating system ever made by Microsoft. The XT usually shipped with PC-DOS, although it is certainly capable of running Windows 1.0. But 3.1? No way.
However, the AT, launched in 1984, meets the minimal requirements of running Windows 3.1, as long as it has enough RAM. They definitely shipped ATs with as little as 256K RAM, but it was expandable to up to 16 MB, which is far more than the minimum 1 MB needed to run 3.1. It did, however have an 80286 processor, which was at least two x86 generations behind the current processor line when Windows 3.1 was launched. In other words, although it would work, it would be slower than the pitch drop experiment.
This accords well with my memory of the machine. It was notoriously laggy and unable to respond quickly to any request. This machine yearned to be saddled with something less bulky. But we got sick of that tired old IBM's slow ways, and tossed it out ourselves after some amount of time.
In the same vein, my brother again got an interesting find of opportunity. It was a computer that one of our neighbors intended to throw away. Not wanting to see it thrown out, he brought it back home.
We are in agreement about which model this was. It was a Tandy 1000 for sure. Not the older TRS-80, this was a popular competitor in the IBM PC compatible segment. By the end of the 80s, Tandy was still doing well.
This machine probably had an even slower processor than the IBM, as most Tandy 1000s shipped with an 8086 like the original IBM PC. The 1000 SX came with an 8088 processor, like the IBM PC XT. While the 1000 TX was equipped with a 286 processor, it was still in a class below the IBM PC AT in other fields of performance. Tandy computers were sold through the then-vibrant Radio Shack retail network. Good prices and decent PC compatibility were strong selling points. Performance was adequate for the day, but nothing spectacular. They were a solid choice for families or educational institutions.
However, I have no memory of slowness with this machine, because it had no graphical operating system. It almost certainly was running MS-DOS, but I cannot comment on which version. It did not even have a 3.5" diskette drive, instead relying on 5.25" floppies.
This was a machine which we bought for nothing, had little to no support for, and chucked it out when we ran out of ideas to use it for. It took maybe two weeks.
I will take a brief moment to discuss what I think a "floppy disk" is.
A floppy disk is the very large (and today rare) 8" disk or the very common 5.25" disk that was used during the late 1970s and through the 1980s. These disks were called floppy because they actually were- the disks were magnetic film coated in a thin layer of bendable plastic. They lacked structural rigidity, but the upside was that they were very thin and could be stored densely. The range of storage available on the 5.25" version had anywhere from 200 kB to over 1 MB storage. Even if they were branded as "diskettes" at the time, calling them floppy disks was popular because it was a useful descriptive name.
The 3.5" disk replacement came to dominate soon thereafter. In addition to the useful improvement in storage space to 1.44 MB (or 2 MB in later versions), diskettes had hard plastic shells that made them far more durable than the old floppy disks.
Around 1990, it became useful to differentiate between what was meant by a "floppy disk", so the term "floppy disk" was used to describe the older disks, and the branded term "diskette" was used to refer to the newer hard disks. The differentiation remained relevant until the mid 1990s, when the old 5.25" disks were totally obsolete. This is the environment in which I grew up. I remember the distinctions in the terminology very well. I never once called these 3.5" disks "floppy disks" because they simply were not floppy. I do not remember them being advertised as such.
It was only after the 5.25" drives totally disappeared from the market that the meaning became muddled. There came a point in the late 1990s when I heard people referring to them as floppy disks, and I came to grips with how the shifting sands of the English language had produced ambiguous terminology simply because of technological obsolescence.
Still, to this day, I do not believe the ubiquitous 3.5" disks should be called "floppy disks," and I feel strongly enough to write about it.
Summary:
My dad bought this computer while my brother and I were out of town over the Christmas break with mom. So we came back home to be greeted with a new computer- the first one we personally experienced since 1993. I was thrilled from the very beginning.
We got off to a good start with the operating system. Windows 2000 was no longer based on DOS, and was moved to use the NT kernel that higher-end Windows systems had been using since 1993. As a result of those changes and constant development, Windows 2000 attained very high stability relative to its predecessors. On the surface it looked extremely similar, with few interface changes from earlier Windows 95 and 98, but it had some good changes underneath. Windows 2000 is still well-regarded by some minimalist computer enthusiasts to this day. Comparing it to the critically panned Windows Me, released around the same time, is like comparing night and day.
However, the hardware side would let it down severely. If you were born before the mid-90s, you may have some memory of the reputation of eMachines. If you were born in the 21st century, you may never have realized, but the early eMachines computer was the Yugo or Edsel of its day.
In 1998, the US market was dominated by American manufacturers. At this time, the American computer companies had yet to do much outsourcing: Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM, and even Packard-Bell still -mostly- made their machines in the USA. Quality varied from excellent in the IBM PCs down to mediocre in the Packard-Bells. Some outsourcing existed, but there were few foreign brands.
Surprisingly weak in the US PC market was Japan. The imported PCs from Sony's Vaio range were extremely costly and very high-quality, which has ensured them a very small but loyal fan base throughout the years. The Japanese were technologically very mature by the mid-80s when PCs started to be made by American manufacturers en masse. Japan did not have low enough wages to undercut the American manufacturers on price as they had previously been able to do with radios, motorcycles, cars, and televisions. By the 1990s, Japan had, perhaps, evolved to such a high level of development that it couldn't profitably crack into the US PC market. There was a lot of room at the bottom, and not much room at the top.
Therefore, it was time for a new Asian challenger in the huge American PC market- the time for South Korea to sell PCs abroad was nearing.
PCs were already a proven market by the mid-late 90s, but the powers that they offered varied hugely. Although American families had become familiar with PCs throughout the 1980s, they had largely bought Commodores and Apples, and the price of entry remained relatively high throughout the 1990s unless you were willing to get a very basic machine. The cheapest x86-equipped machines of 1998 started at about $999 with monitor. For that price, you got a Celeron, inadequate RAM, and probably a CD player, but maybe not a CD burner.
The eMachines PCs started at way less than that. You could get them for as cheap as $399 without monitor. The earliest eMachines models were about as cheap as you could possibly make a functional general-purpose computer with an x86 processor and Windows- these were basically the only two requirements unless they were to be considered niche items. More expensive versions, still cheap at under $800, got you much more equipment and power than competing brands. It was an appealing proposition.
The successor to the 486 was the Pentium, which by 2000 had gone through several updates into the Pentium III. Starting in 1998, the Celeron was released as a cut-rate alternative to the Pentium range. From 1998 to today, they have always had a Celeron equivalent for budget systems. This helped bring the cost of PCs down, but these were notoriously slow with their woefully undersized caches and reduced clock rate.
Still, this was not the Achilles heel of the machine we bought- not by a long shot. That would be the hard disk drive. For sure.
At first the machine was silent- that exact kind of slow, uninterested silence that I detest about computers. No progress was audibly demonstrated. However, occasionally, it would make noises. These were frightening, sharp clackety noises emanating from the hard disk. Not the charming, hopeful noises of the Compaq. These were worrying noises.
This was a machine that was born with asthma, angina, and arthritis.
Sometimes, during a disk read, you could hear that it stuck in some kind of rut, and the drive would spin endlessly making a succession of clicks like a metronome. The system was totally unresponsive at this point, and all work was lost. We undoubtedly hastened the demise of that cursed machine by angrily punching the case when this happened.
Then we suffered a head crash- the drive was wiped out, none of us had the computer knowledge or competence to diagnose the problem. It was a dead machine.
It had only barely functioned for its entire life. The total lifespan before its head crash was no more than eighteen months. Long enough to elude any warranty of the 1990s, but short enough that anyone would be understandably disappointed in their purchase.
This was most definitely not an isolated incident. eMachines had almost uniformly poor customer reviews during this time period. However this was only helpful to consumers if you had access to the internet or to magazines that contained said reviews.
They quickly earned a richly deserved reputation for crappy quality, and wrenched the lowest quality PC accolade from Packard Bell, itself in serious trouble in those days. Neither of those brands is still around today, but once eMachines hit the market, it definitely ensured that Packard Bell was no longer the lowest-quality machine around. This would remain true until the end of both companies.
What was once the heart of the American market in the 1990s was now merely one piece of the pie alongside other strong competitors. Although the absolute size of the desktop market has only shrunk slightly, it is an extremely unprofitable area of business.
This environment hurt all companies like eMachines which focused on conventional PCs unless they had a backup source of income. IBM left the market entirely, but they remain profitable in other fields. Lenovo bought IBM's former PC business, and they are today the world's biggest desktop PC manufacturer. Dell and HP still make servers and workstations for business customers, so they have some insulation from PC retail sales. While Packard Bell was a casualty of its own bad reputation, coupled with some arguably unfair bad press, this was prior to the decline of the desktop PC. By contrast, the demise of eMachines was a direct result of the decline of the desktop PC.
In short, the desktop market was too cutthroat for a low-end PC specialist brand with a poor reputation for quality to survive, and eMachines did not enter the business of selling tablets and other mobile devices, so it lasted for about as long as could be expected. Still, they stuck around for a number of years in the meantime.
So, following the ignominious downfall of the old eMachines, what did my dad replace it with, some months later? Another eMachines.
XP was coming out and what an exciting time it was. As far as color goes, this was the biggest advance in operating system history. Previous Windows releases had had gray menu bars, a gray task bar, with only the odd bit of dark blue to offset the gray.
XP had a blue taskbar and a green start button! Even the other color option for the taskbar, silver, was much more vibrant than previous generation's gray. Every window had a red "X" in the top bar to cancel the window. Window opening and closing was oftentimes accompanied by animations. It was downright pretty.
However, this graphical enhancement took a big toll on the speed of the machine. Although we had a much more capable system this time, XP had higher requirements than previous generations, and it was undoubtedly slow on that eMachines.
I had said that eMachines never quite outlived their reputation for poor quality, but throughout the 2000s they definitely took steps to address it. Very happily for us, eMachines had begun to step up their reliability game. This computer was simply better-built and had better parts than its predecessor. We had this machine for about 4 years before its demise, which is a decent, if unexceptional, lifespan. By 2005, some technology critics believed that eMachines had roughly achieved parity with Dell, the benchmark for its segment. Not everyone believed them, but they still kept buying eMachines because of its price.
I grew to like this machine more than the last, for sure. But I never loved it. It just did not have a quality feel. The keyboard was extremely lousy, with no feedback and mushy keys. It had some crashiness issues, like with previous generations, but this was a family machine shared with my brother, sister, and Dad, so I cannot comment on whether some poor download activity and insecure behavior was going on.
For me, the coming of home internet was the main appeal of this generation of computing. We first became internet customers when we purchased CompuServe in 2001. We would retain this service for the next six years, well after most people had ditched dial-up.
The dial-up experience was somewhat magical, because you were hearing numbers dialed, random sounds being played, and you had no idea what was going on. The fact that the dial-up start sequence was audibly played meant you knew how long you had to wait. It became a welcoming sound. When you heard it, you knew you were entering the broader world of information. To use language that was already laughably outdated in 2001, you were merging onto the information superhighway.
Internet access was, of course, very slow. Additionally, any other person in the house was capable of knocking you offline by picking up the phone receiver. Since these were issues that all people experienced in the days before broadband internet, we simply coped. Text-based webpages were a necessity. I loathed the greeting of a webpage redesign that made it slower to load, but I didn't blame my ISP for the slowness. I just wanted the internet to stay simple.
It is difficult to recall distinctly what my browsing material was as a young teenager. (Hold your snickering, porn was not involved) I remember joining Facebook in 2005 well before most people knew about it (and in advance of my high school friends, who all claimed that they didn't want to join). Prior to that, I just have the fuzziest memories of my early experiences with the internet.
In 2005 I decided I wanted to build my own machine, with my brother's help. He mostly figured it out himself, but I watched him every step of the way, and that would be the only time I would watch someone else.
I discovered a site called newegg, which I still love to this day. It was the source of every single part of that first PC. And the next. And the current. Frankly, I only rarely shop around because I am so satisfied with newegg that I can't imagine a competitor beating the whole experience. I have nearly 10 years of flawless experience with ordering, delivery, and longevity of electronics and computer parts I have bought from newegg.
The first build is always special. It was June 2005.
I selected an Athlon 64: socket 939, Venice core, 90 nm feature size, 64+64 kB L1 cache, 512 kB L2 cache. That was a very generous L2 cache for the day! The clock speed of this processor was only 2.0 GHz, which left it far behind the Pentium 4 of the day. But, the AMD was a much more efficient processor, made better use of its cycles, and was both more reliable and ran cooler. Performance was surprisingly good by most metrics, and inevitably it was far cheaper. I would say that during this period Intel had lost their way, with the "megahertz myth" driving their design philosophy. This was a fresh new microprocessor design in 2005, and I was extremely pleased with the performance.
The second build used the same case. This was in 2008 or so. I used my old processor and many of the old parts to build my dad a computer that was suitable for his needs, buying some new parts for my machine in the process. I bought another Athlon, this time dual-core 64 X2: socket AM2, Windsore core, and I do not recall the clock speed. This was a 2006 design from the first generation of AMD multi-core processors, and it did not feel like a huge leap even at the time. I stuck with Windows XP.
This build would last me until 2011, by which time it felt fairly archaic. The cheapola Chinese case lit up like a chintzy aircraft carrier with six blinding blue LEDs, which I considered cool when I was a junior in high school. Everything held together OK, but it didn't feel great. I guess I should feel lucky that the power supply which was thrown in for free with a $45 case lasted for 6 years.
In 2011, I did the third build overall. However, this was the second all-new build. This is the basic system I currently use: I went all the way to a Sandy Bridge Core i5 from Intel. This was the period in which I felt that Intel had reasserted its dominance. The power available in this CPU is incredible. An i7 is just superfluous when the i5 can do so much. More expensive than an AMD, but it was so worth it.
I did not buy a super-cheap case this time. I bought an Antec. Mind you, it was only a Sonata, but the quality of this thing runs rings around my old case. I occasionally wipe down the exterior, and I make it a point to clean out the inside of the machine with an air compressor several times a year. Doing this means that every time I open the case, everything feels fresh and new inside. It's a great case.
I did something that might make some geeks think of me as a sucker: I bought Windows 7 with money. I don't feel guilty about it, since this is the finest thing (for my money) that Microsoft has ever put out. This is my current favorite graphical operating system, and although it is not perfect, it is reaching a very high state of polish which I think will be hard to beat for desktop-only machines. Since Windows 8 and 8.1 were designed with touchscreens in mind, they sacrifice some of the desktop purity, although I have no doubt they are also good systems for what they are intended for. I'm a big fan of desktops, so Windows 7 feels like a high-water mark. Since most businesses with computers for professional use migrated from XP to Windows 7, I think they would tend to agree. Windows 7 is the most widely-used general-purpose computer operating system in the world as of 2014. Somewhere in the "real world" (or maybe just in my corner of it), companies expect software developers to sit down and code on a desktop computer with a separate keyboard. Not a lot of development gets done on tablets. Although I don't doubt that plenty of it does get done on laptops, laptops don't necessarily have touchscreens and I feel it is inappropriate to treat them like big tablets. Maybe I'm echoing outdated concerns here, but this is what I see from my experience. Point is- if Microsoft doesn't plan to take care of its enterprise customers when they seek a robust desktop OS to replace 7, then Windows might no longer be an "automatic choice" for those businesses. This would spell Microsoft's doom unless they suddenly start to dominate in some other field, which they currently don't.
In 2012, I felt that the onboard sound was insufficient, and I bought an Asus 5.1 sound card and installed it into one of my many open PCIe slots. This permitted me to get a better speaker system. I use my desktop as a surrogate stereo, so it was a worthwhile purchase.
By April 2014, more updates were called for, and I had a long run on my original 1.5 TB Seagate disk drive. That drive, I read, was a very poor batch that suffered a huge number of failures in real world use. I decided to augment it with an additional 1 TB HDD. Big deal- HDDs never get appreciably faster, so it was just more storage space.
At around the same time as this, I bought a second monitor. This is a very nice Acer with a quite substantial stand. Having a second monitor is simply wonderful for many everyday tasks, since it means you can still use your PC for other things when an application demands full use of one screen.
Its sturdy, telescoping stand is perfect for portrait-mode display, which I find useful for several reasons.
Also around the same time, I sprung for the biggest advancement I have ever personally witnessed in computing technology: the solid-state drive. This is the most satisfying technology purchase I have ever performed.
If you are using a computer which is not equipped with an SSD, I think it behooves you to think of no other purchase related to computers before you make this upgrade. Even a tiny one that is just big enough for the OS and system applications. The difference in speed is mind-blowing. It is far more of a difference than any CPU or RAM change I have experienced. Boot-up time is 6-10 times times faster on my machine, while everything that depends on my OS is done practically instantaneously. There is no longer any noticeable delay in opening, moving, and copying files. If you get an SSD, regardless of the processor you have and the RAM and the video card setup, I suspect the only true bottleneck will be your old-fashioned American internet, unless you're a Google Fiber customer, which I am not.
You might think I'm exaggerating and I'm using too many superlatives. I'm not! In fact, I could really talk about how awesome SSDs are until I am blue in the face. I could write a post just talking about how disk access times are the bane of my existence, and it is impossible for a machine to feel fast without some technology that minimizes them. It does not matter WHAT you are doing, you will see huge advantages from an SSD. Buy one today! Buy one from Samsung, buy one from Intel. Doesn't matter that much, they're all marvelous.
If I were ranking the satisfaction of upgrading to new computer technologies throughout history, the top would not be LCD monitors. Not CD drives. Not graphical operating systems. Not even high-definition video! There is no other advancement quite as thoroughly satisfying in all my 21 years using computers as the SSD.
Thanks to these updates, my current system performs extremely well. The next purchase on the horizon is possibly a more advanced graphics card; I am still using the CPU onboard graphics processing with my dual monitor setup. I suspect that this is part of the reason why my display driver crashes relatively frequently. It is a minor irritation, but an irritation nevertheless.
The future for me does not hold any more pre-built desktop PCs. I will never buy another one. It is not because I do not have fond memories of some of the great machines I have used in the past, but as an adult in software engineering, I feel that the priorities of a PC vendor are different from my needs as a PC buyer. For my own piece of mind, and to ensure that all my parts within are of decent quality, I will purchase and assemble all my home PCs personally. If I must buy another laptop (I have a low-end laptop from 2011), I will not have this luxury. If I must buy a tablet (I currently have none), I will not have this luxury. However, with desktop PCs, you have fewer limits, and can build a fully customized machine that does exactly what you require of it. I find that outcome very satisfying. Perhaps you could give it a try?
A limited-time bonus: Any commenters on this post will get free advice in computer assembly, if they seek it!
However, this was all I ever heard. My mom mostly used the PC for work purposes, and I was never permitted to use it. She did play games occasionally, but she was a fan of the text-based RPG style of gameplay, and there was no potential for audio.
Still, I heard that damn Windows 95 startup sound many, many times.
In later years, I would revisit Windows 95. It is, by the standards of its day, one of the most groundbreaking operating systems ever made. So many features were newly introduced. It eliminated the Program Manager paradigm of Windows 1.0 through 3.1. Though it was still built on DOS (and 98 and Me would be, too), Windows 95 was a GUI that was entirely different, feeling far closer to today's operating systems than to all operating systems that preceded it.
Stability was not a hallmark of these machines, but I am told that earlier versions of Windows were not either. If you shut down improperly, or fail to restart after applying changes, you can ruin the current configuration of your machine rather easily. Crashiness is an issue, and it remained so in Windows 98. Windows Me, of course, is so terrible that it doesn't bear talking about.
Elementary School Giveaway: IBM PC AT
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| IBM PC AT (courtesy of Vintage Computer) |
My brother, somewhat older than me, was always substantially more adept with computers until we were very close to adulthood. I tried to follow what he did, but sometimes I just wasn't interested.
This was one of those cases.
In 1997 or 1998, someone at his school (he was two years older than me, so he went to different school) had tipped him off that the school would be disposing of relatively obsolescent PCs which the school intended to replace. Grandma dropped him off; I did not go with him to pick out a machine. Free computers, and I didn't even go! Was I insane? What on Earth was I doing that evening?
He selected an IBM machine whose model we still cannot agree on. We agree on only two things:
- It ran Windows 3.1.
- It had those vents on the front that characterized most (but not all) 80s PCs from IBM
However, could an earlier IBM machine even run Windows 3.1? There is no way that a 5150 or an XT is capable of running the most advanced 16-bit operating system ever made by Microsoft. The XT usually shipped with PC-DOS, although it is certainly capable of running Windows 1.0. But 3.1? No way.
However, the AT, launched in 1984, meets the minimal requirements of running Windows 3.1, as long as it has enough RAM. They definitely shipped ATs with as little as 256K RAM, but it was expandable to up to 16 MB, which is far more than the minimum 1 MB needed to run 3.1. It did, however have an 80286 processor, which was at least two x86 generations behind the current processor line when Windows 3.1 was launched. In other words, although it would work, it would be slower than the pitch drop experiment.
This accords well with my memory of the machine. It was notoriously laggy and unable to respond quickly to any request. This machine yearned to be saddled with something less bulky. But we got sick of that tired old IBM's slow ways, and tossed it out ourselves after some amount of time.
Apartment Dumpster Fodder: Tandy 1000
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| Tandy 1000 (old-computers.com) |
In the same vein, my brother again got an interesting find of opportunity. It was a computer that one of our neighbors intended to throw away. Not wanting to see it thrown out, he brought it back home.
We are in agreement about which model this was. It was a Tandy 1000 for sure. Not the older TRS-80, this was a popular competitor in the IBM PC compatible segment. By the end of the 80s, Tandy was still doing well.
This machine probably had an even slower processor than the IBM, as most Tandy 1000s shipped with an 8086 like the original IBM PC. The 1000 SX came with an 8088 processor, like the IBM PC XT. While the 1000 TX was equipped with a 286 processor, it was still in a class below the IBM PC AT in other fields of performance. Tandy computers were sold through the then-vibrant Radio Shack retail network. Good prices and decent PC compatibility were strong selling points. Performance was adequate for the day, but nothing spectacular. They were a solid choice for families or educational institutions.
However, I have no memory of slowness with this machine, because it had no graphical operating system. It almost certainly was running MS-DOS, but I cannot comment on which version. It did not even have a 3.5" diskette drive, instead relying on 5.25" floppies.
This was a machine which we bought for nothing, had little to no support for, and chucked it out when we ran out of ideas to use it for. It took maybe two weeks.
"Floppy Disk" Nomenclature
A floppy disk is the very large (and today rare) 8" disk or the very common 5.25" disk that was used during the late 1970s and through the 1980s. These disks were called floppy because they actually were- the disks were magnetic film coated in a thin layer of bendable plastic. They lacked structural rigidity, but the upside was that they were very thin and could be stored densely. The range of storage available on the 5.25" version had anywhere from 200 kB to over 1 MB storage. Even if they were branded as "diskettes" at the time, calling them floppy disks was popular because it was a useful descriptive name.
The 3.5" disk replacement came to dominate soon thereafter. In addition to the useful improvement in storage space to 1.44 MB (or 2 MB in later versions), diskettes had hard plastic shells that made them far more durable than the old floppy disks.
Around 1990, it became useful to differentiate between what was meant by a "floppy disk", so the term "floppy disk" was used to describe the older disks, and the branded term "diskette" was used to refer to the newer hard disks. The differentiation remained relevant until the mid 1990s, when the old 5.25" disks were totally obsolete. This is the environment in which I grew up. I remember the distinctions in the terminology very well. I never once called these 3.5" disks "floppy disks" because they simply were not floppy. I do not remember them being advertised as such.
It was only after the 5.25" drives totally disappeared from the market that the meaning became muddled. There came a point in the late 1990s when I heard people referring to them as floppy disks, and I came to grips with how the shifting sands of the English language had produced ambiguous terminology simply because of technological obsolescence.
Still, to this day, I do not believe the ubiquitous 3.5" disks should be called "floppy disks," and I feel strongly enough to write about it.
Summary:
- True floppy: 8" disk introduced in early 1970s.
- Call it a floppy disk to be clear.
- Use the size in inches to be more clear.
- Use the size in kilobytes to be unambiguous.
- True floppy: 5.25" disk introduced in the late 1970s, and popular until the late 1980s.
- Call it a floppy disk to be clear.
- Use the size in inches to be more clear.
- Use the size in kilobytes to be unambiguous.
- Not a true floppy: 3.5" disk, introduced in 1987, and popular even into the early 21st century.
- Call it a diskette to be clear.
- Use the size in inches to be more clear (although 3.5" is the overwhelming standard)
- Use the size in kilobytes or megabytes to be unambiguous.
Lemon: eMachines from 2000 (running Windows 2000)
My dad bought this computer while my brother and I were out of town over the Christmas break with mom. So we came back home to be greeted with a new computer- the first one we personally experienced since 1993. I was thrilled from the very beginning.
We got off to a good start with the operating system. Windows 2000 was no longer based on DOS, and was moved to use the NT kernel that higher-end Windows systems had been using since 1993. As a result of those changes and constant development, Windows 2000 attained very high stability relative to its predecessors. On the surface it looked extremely similar, with few interface changes from earlier Windows 95 and 98, but it had some good changes underneath. Windows 2000 is still well-regarded by some minimalist computer enthusiasts to this day. Comparing it to the critically panned Windows Me, released around the same time, is like comparing night and day.
However, the hardware side would let it down severely. If you were born before the mid-90s, you may have some memory of the reputation of eMachines. If you were born in the 21st century, you may never have realized, but the early eMachines computer was the Yugo or Edsel of its day.
In 1998, the US market was dominated by American manufacturers. At this time, the American computer companies had yet to do much outsourcing: Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM, and even Packard-Bell still -mostly- made their machines in the USA. Quality varied from excellent in the IBM PCs down to mediocre in the Packard-Bells. Some outsourcing existed, but there were few foreign brands.
Surprisingly weak in the US PC market was Japan. The imported PCs from Sony's Vaio range were extremely costly and very high-quality, which has ensured them a very small but loyal fan base throughout the years. The Japanese were technologically very mature by the mid-80s when PCs started to be made by American manufacturers en masse. Japan did not have low enough wages to undercut the American manufacturers on price as they had previously been able to do with radios, motorcycles, cars, and televisions. By the 1990s, Japan had, perhaps, evolved to such a high level of development that it couldn't profitably crack into the US PC market. There was a lot of room at the bottom, and not much room at the top.
Therefore, it was time for a new Asian challenger in the huge American PC market- the time for South Korea to sell PCs abroad was nearing.
PCs were already a proven market by the mid-late 90s, but the powers that they offered varied hugely. Although American families had become familiar with PCs throughout the 1980s, they had largely bought Commodores and Apples, and the price of entry remained relatively high throughout the 1990s unless you were willing to get a very basic machine. The cheapest x86-equipped machines of 1998 started at about $999 with monitor. For that price, you got a Celeron, inadequate RAM, and probably a CD player, but maybe not a CD burner.
The eMachines PCs started at way less than that. You could get them for as cheap as $399 without monitor. The earliest eMachines models were about as cheap as you could possibly make a functional general-purpose computer with an x86 processor and Windows- these were basically the only two requirements unless they were to be considered niche items. More expensive versions, still cheap at under $800, got you much more equipment and power than competing brands. It was an appealing proposition.
The successor to the 486 was the Pentium, which by 2000 had gone through several updates into the Pentium III. Starting in 1998, the Celeron was released as a cut-rate alternative to the Pentium range. From 1998 to today, they have always had a Celeron equivalent for budget systems. This helped bring the cost of PCs down, but these were notoriously slow with their woefully undersized caches and reduced clock rate.
Still, this was not the Achilles heel of the machine we bought- not by a long shot. That would be the hard disk drive. For sure.
At first the machine was silent- that exact kind of slow, uninterested silence that I detest about computers. No progress was audibly demonstrated. However, occasionally, it would make noises. These were frightening, sharp clackety noises emanating from the hard disk. Not the charming, hopeful noises of the Compaq. These were worrying noises.
This was a machine that was born with asthma, angina, and arthritis.
Sometimes, during a disk read, you could hear that it stuck in some kind of rut, and the drive would spin endlessly making a succession of clicks like a metronome. The system was totally unresponsive at this point, and all work was lost. We undoubtedly hastened the demise of that cursed machine by angrily punching the case when this happened.
Then we suffered a head crash- the drive was wiped out, none of us had the computer knowledge or competence to diagnose the problem. It was a dead machine.
It had only barely functioned for its entire life. The total lifespan before its head crash was no more than eighteen months. Long enough to elude any warranty of the 1990s, but short enough that anyone would be understandably disappointed in their purchase.
This was most definitely not an isolated incident. eMachines had almost uniformly poor customer reviews during this time period. However this was only helpful to consumers if you had access to the internet or to magazines that contained said reviews.
They quickly earned a richly deserved reputation for crappy quality, and wrenched the lowest quality PC accolade from Packard Bell, itself in serious trouble in those days. Neither of those brands is still around today, but once eMachines hit the market, it definitely ensured that Packard Bell was no longer the lowest-quality machine around. This would remain true until the end of both companies.
eMachines was not the first attempt to carve out a niche at the bottom. Packard Bell during the mid-90s had heady success and took the title of industry leader from Compaq. Compaq fought back, and undertook to move their own product downmarket in order to strangle Packard Bell. In addition, they sued Packard Bell successfully for failing to disclose that their PCs contained used parts, even though this was industry standard practice at all firms, including Compaq. Low price brought Packard Bell up, while perceptions of quality spelled its end. eMachines launched into a market without a clear choice in the low-cost computer segment, and they undercut all their competitors on price, earning them immediate success.
The casual computer buyer of 1998 had these constraints which strongly favored cheaper new upstarts like eMachines despite their problems.
The casual computer buyer of 1998 had these constraints which strongly favored cheaper new upstarts like eMachines despite their problems.
- All the personal computers were relatively pricey, and the gap between the pricey brands and the cheap brands was very large.
- In a relatively new market, the lifespan of a product was not as well known. People might tolerate a machine only lasting 2 years before dying without dismissing the brand in the future.
- There were no tablets, and no smartphones worth talking about. If you wanted a computer, you had to buy a desktop. Laptops were substantially more expensive, and were consumed almost entirely by the upper class.
- If the computer was slow, that was not such a big deal. A slow computer is better than no computer.
- Most desktops were as cheap as possible. The cheapest were around $300, and the margin between any two brands at the bottom end was less than $50. Although eMachines also made laptops, the cheapest laptops were well under $400. This left less room at the bottom of the market for hardcore cost cutting.
- Desktop PCs were a highly mature market. Quality and reliability were required. If a machine lasted only 2 years, it would be considered a bad product, and hurt the brand perception. Most machines of today have at least a 1 year warranty, and retailers will often offer at least 2 extra years of warranty protection. The machine had to be relatively well equipped for its price, especially compared to earlier PCs.
- Tablets had gone from rich people's toys to a mature product in just a few years. Although they were less capable than desktops for many purposes, even high end tablets of 2013 were cheaper or around the same price as low-end desktops, leading some people to not buy PCs.
- Smartphones often come free with a phone plan and contract, so there was usually at least one personal alternate source of internet access and other applications, even for young buyers, leading yet more people to not buy PCs.
This environment hurt all companies like eMachines which focused on conventional PCs unless they had a backup source of income. IBM left the market entirely, but they remain profitable in other fields. Lenovo bought IBM's former PC business, and they are today the world's biggest desktop PC manufacturer. Dell and HP still make servers and workstations for business customers, so they have some insulation from PC retail sales. While Packard Bell was a casualty of its own bad reputation, coupled with some arguably unfair bad press, this was prior to the decline of the desktop PC. By contrast, the demise of eMachines was a direct result of the decline of the desktop PC.
In short, the desktop market was too cutthroat for a low-end PC specialist brand with a poor reputation for quality to survive, and eMachines did not enter the business of selling tablets and other mobile devices, so it lasted for about as long as could be expected. Still, they stuck around for a number of years in the meantime.
Not quite a lemon: eMachines, XP Home, 2002
XP was coming out and what an exciting time it was. As far as color goes, this was the biggest advance in operating system history. Previous Windows releases had had gray menu bars, a gray task bar, with only the odd bit of dark blue to offset the gray.
XP had a blue taskbar and a green start button! Even the other color option for the taskbar, silver, was much more vibrant than previous generation's gray. Every window had a red "X" in the top bar to cancel the window. Window opening and closing was oftentimes accompanied by animations. It was downright pretty.
However, this graphical enhancement took a big toll on the speed of the machine. Although we had a much more capable system this time, XP had higher requirements than previous generations, and it was undoubtedly slow on that eMachines.
I had said that eMachines never quite outlived their reputation for poor quality, but throughout the 2000s they definitely took steps to address it. Very happily for us, eMachines had begun to step up their reliability game. This computer was simply better-built and had better parts than its predecessor. We had this machine for about 4 years before its demise, which is a decent, if unexceptional, lifespan. By 2005, some technology critics believed that eMachines had roughly achieved parity with Dell, the benchmark for its segment. Not everyone believed them, but they still kept buying eMachines because of its price.
I grew to like this machine more than the last, for sure. But I never loved it. It just did not have a quality feel. The keyboard was extremely lousy, with no feedback and mushy keys. It had some crashiness issues, like with previous generations, but this was a family machine shared with my brother, sister, and Dad, so I cannot comment on whether some poor download activity and insecure behavior was going on.
For me, the coming of home internet was the main appeal of this generation of computing. We first became internet customers when we purchased CompuServe in 2001. We would retain this service for the next six years, well after most people had ditched dial-up.
The dial-up experience was somewhat magical, because you were hearing numbers dialed, random sounds being played, and you had no idea what was going on. The fact that the dial-up start sequence was audibly played meant you knew how long you had to wait. It became a welcoming sound. When you heard it, you knew you were entering the broader world of information. To use language that was already laughably outdated in 2001, you were merging onto the information superhighway.
Internet access was, of course, very slow. Additionally, any other person in the house was capable of knocking you offline by picking up the phone receiver. Since these were issues that all people experienced in the days before broadband internet, we simply coped. Text-based webpages were a necessity. I loathed the greeting of a webpage redesign that made it slower to load, but I didn't blame my ISP for the slowness. I just wanted the internet to stay simple.
It is difficult to recall distinctly what my browsing material was as a young teenager. (Hold your snickering, porn was not involved) I remember joining Facebook in 2005 well before most people knew about it (and in advance of my high school friends, who all claimed that they didn't want to join). Prior to that, I just have the fuzziest memories of my early experiences with the internet.
- CompuServe 2000
- "Welcome to CompuServe." (inevitably, we called it CrapuServe)
- "You have mail." (if I was lucky)
- A webpage with a photograph of Al Gore and George Bush, candidates in the 2000 presidential election. You could stretch and smear their faces using the mouse. For some reason I found it riotously funny.
- Pre-Google YouTube
- Jennifer Government Nation-States
- AOL Instant Messenger (although we had CompuServe IM too, AIM was more popular for a long time afterward)
- Yahoo Messenger (which still exists)
- The Grape lady (this was actually in 2006, so I misremembered how early it was)
- MySpace... enough said.
- "Thank you for using CompuServe."
The internet for me in the period 2001-2004 was shared with two other siblings. We did not share the internet- we took turns and demanded our privacy when browsing. This made for relatively little internet time, and if either sibling was belligerent, you could be sure that you'd accidentally get knocked offline a few times. Consequently, internet wasn't great in this period.
When my brother went to college in 2004, it got better for all of us. He suddenly had excellent broadband on campus. We suddenly had more internet time. But there was still only one computer (the 1993 Compaq was still in our possession, but just gathering dust at this point).
Rolling my own (2005 to present)
In 2005 I decided I wanted to build my own machine, with my brother's help. He mostly figured it out himself, but I watched him every step of the way, and that would be the only time I would watch someone else.
I discovered a site called newegg, which I still love to this day. It was the source of every single part of that first PC. And the next. And the current. Frankly, I only rarely shop around because I am so satisfied with newegg that I can't imagine a competitor beating the whole experience. I have nearly 10 years of flawless experience with ordering, delivery, and longevity of electronics and computer parts I have bought from newegg.
The first build is always special. It was June 2005.
I selected an Athlon 64: socket 939, Venice core, 90 nm feature size, 64+64 kB L1 cache, 512 kB L2 cache. That was a very generous L2 cache for the day! The clock speed of this processor was only 2.0 GHz, which left it far behind the Pentium 4 of the day. But, the AMD was a much more efficient processor, made better use of its cycles, and was both more reliable and ran cooler. Performance was surprisingly good by most metrics, and inevitably it was far cheaper. I would say that during this period Intel had lost their way, with the "megahertz myth" driving their design philosophy. This was a fresh new microprocessor design in 2005, and I was extremely pleased with the performance.
The second build used the same case. This was in 2008 or so. I used my old processor and many of the old parts to build my dad a computer that was suitable for his needs, buying some new parts for my machine in the process. I bought another Athlon, this time dual-core 64 X2: socket AM2, Windsore core, and I do not recall the clock speed. This was a 2006 design from the first generation of AMD multi-core processors, and it did not feel like a huge leap even at the time. I stuck with Windows XP.
This build would last me until 2011, by which time it felt fairly archaic. The cheapola Chinese case lit up like a chintzy aircraft carrier with six blinding blue LEDs, which I considered cool when I was a junior in high school. Everything held together OK, but it didn't feel great. I guess I should feel lucky that the power supply which was thrown in for free with a $45 case lasted for 6 years.
In 2011, I did the third build overall. However, this was the second all-new build. This is the basic system I currently use: I went all the way to a Sandy Bridge Core i5 from Intel. This was the period in which I felt that Intel had reasserted its dominance. The power available in this CPU is incredible. An i7 is just superfluous when the i5 can do so much. More expensive than an AMD, but it was so worth it.
I did not buy a super-cheap case this time. I bought an Antec. Mind you, it was only a Sonata, but the quality of this thing runs rings around my old case. I occasionally wipe down the exterior, and I make it a point to clean out the inside of the machine with an air compressor several times a year. Doing this means that every time I open the case, everything feels fresh and new inside. It's a great case.
I did something that might make some geeks think of me as a sucker: I bought Windows 7 with money. I don't feel guilty about it, since this is the finest thing (for my money) that Microsoft has ever put out. This is my current favorite graphical operating system, and although it is not perfect, it is reaching a very high state of polish which I think will be hard to beat for desktop-only machines. Since Windows 8 and 8.1 were designed with touchscreens in mind, they sacrifice some of the desktop purity, although I have no doubt they are also good systems for what they are intended for. I'm a big fan of desktops, so Windows 7 feels like a high-water mark. Since most businesses with computers for professional use migrated from XP to Windows 7, I think they would tend to agree. Windows 7 is the most widely-used general-purpose computer operating system in the world as of 2014. Somewhere in the "real world" (or maybe just in my corner of it), companies expect software developers to sit down and code on a desktop computer with a separate keyboard. Not a lot of development gets done on tablets. Although I don't doubt that plenty of it does get done on laptops, laptops don't necessarily have touchscreens and I feel it is inappropriate to treat them like big tablets. Maybe I'm echoing outdated concerns here, but this is what I see from my experience. Point is- if Microsoft doesn't plan to take care of its enterprise customers when they seek a robust desktop OS to replace 7, then Windows might no longer be an "automatic choice" for those businesses. This would spell Microsoft's doom unless they suddenly start to dominate in some other field, which they currently don't.
In 2012, I felt that the onboard sound was insufficient, and I bought an Asus 5.1 sound card and installed it into one of my many open PCIe slots. This permitted me to get a better speaker system. I use my desktop as a surrogate stereo, so it was a worthwhile purchase.
By April 2014, more updates were called for, and I had a long run on my original 1.5 TB Seagate disk drive. That drive, I read, was a very poor batch that suffered a huge number of failures in real world use. I decided to augment it with an additional 1 TB HDD. Big deal- HDDs never get appreciably faster, so it was just more storage space.
At around the same time as this, I bought a second monitor. This is a very nice Acer with a quite substantial stand. Having a second monitor is simply wonderful for many everyday tasks, since it means you can still use your PC for other things when an application demands full use of one screen.
Its sturdy, telescoping stand is perfect for portrait-mode display, which I find useful for several reasons.
- When I am on Linux, there is more command line history and space for logfile display available.
- When I am in Windows, there is more space for a longer webmail page that shows my whole inbox at any given point in time.
- For certain spreadsheets, I have very long lists with many rows, but relatively small columns. Portrait mode gives me more onscreen cells of value.
Also around the same time, I sprung for the biggest advancement I have ever personally witnessed in computing technology: the solid-state drive. This is the most satisfying technology purchase I have ever performed.
If you are using a computer which is not equipped with an SSD, I think it behooves you to think of no other purchase related to computers before you make this upgrade. Even a tiny one that is just big enough for the OS and system applications. The difference in speed is mind-blowing. It is far more of a difference than any CPU or RAM change I have experienced. Boot-up time is 6-10 times times faster on my machine, while everything that depends on my OS is done practically instantaneously. There is no longer any noticeable delay in opening, moving, and copying files. If you get an SSD, regardless of the processor you have and the RAM and the video card setup, I suspect the only true bottleneck will be your old-fashioned American internet, unless you're a Google Fiber customer, which I am not.
You might think I'm exaggerating and I'm using too many superlatives. I'm not! In fact, I could really talk about how awesome SSDs are until I am blue in the face. I could write a post just talking about how disk access times are the bane of my existence, and it is impossible for a machine to feel fast without some technology that minimizes them. It does not matter WHAT you are doing, you will see huge advantages from an SSD. Buy one today! Buy one from Samsung, buy one from Intel. Doesn't matter that much, they're all marvelous.
If I were ranking the satisfaction of upgrading to new computer technologies throughout history, the top would not be LCD monitors. Not CD drives. Not graphical operating systems. Not even high-definition video! There is no other advancement quite as thoroughly satisfying in all my 21 years using computers as the SSD.
Thanks to these updates, my current system performs extremely well. The next purchase on the horizon is possibly a more advanced graphics card; I am still using the CPU onboard graphics processing with my dual monitor setup. I suspect that this is part of the reason why my display driver crashes relatively frequently. It is a minor irritation, but an irritation nevertheless.
The future for me does not hold any more pre-built desktop PCs. I will never buy another one. It is not because I do not have fond memories of some of the great machines I have used in the past, but as an adult in software engineering, I feel that the priorities of a PC vendor are different from my needs as a PC buyer. For my own piece of mind, and to ensure that all my parts within are of decent quality, I will purchase and assemble all my home PCs personally. If I must buy another laptop (I have a low-end laptop from 2011), I will not have this luxury. If I must buy a tablet (I currently have none), I will not have this luxury. However, with desktop PCs, you have fewer limits, and can build a fully customized machine that does exactly what you require of it. I find that outcome very satisfying. Perhaps you could give it a try?
A limited-time bonus: Any commenters on this post will get free advice in computer assembly, if they seek it!
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