PC guide from 1996

[curtvaughan]

What a difference 20 years makes!
https://web.archive.org/web/19961101192 ... guide.html

[MichaelJohn]

My Dragon PC was from 1982 and used the TV as a monitor...

[Jedinovice]

OK, I'll bite. Although I had had a number of machines in my possession prior to 1997, including a Commodore PET from 1978… I bought my first full on PC back in February 1997.

It was the gamble of my life. After enduring a long recession and multiple family disasters.. don't ask… it was awful, I decided to jump from my dead end, starvation wage, job into IT.

Soooo…. At huge risk, I bought a $2000 custom made Pentium 133 ON CREDIT! This is massively out of character for me.

Original spec:

Pentium 133
16MB RAM
1.2GB HD
S3 2MB video card
ESS sound card
14" monitor, 800x600 standard display res at 72Htz.
Windows 95 revision B + Office 97 professional (that along cost around $300)

I then set about learning to install, configure and run Windows 95 plus Office.
I had six months to find another, decent paying job, to pay off the machine. I had a six month delay before starting to pay. I did not have the funds. It was do or die. I do NOT normally gamble like this! I was banking everything on the machine and my knowledge of it getting me a new job.

After two months of failing to find work, I quit my dead end job to spend my time - full time - trying to find real work. Again, this was completely unlike me. But I had been through eight years of utter hell and needed a break.

I couldn't do it. I was under qualified for the high end positions and over qualified for the start positions. It was a nightmare!

July 1997. I had one week before I had to pay for the machine. I had not had one single interview in that time! I could not afford to pay the rent. I was heading for big trouble…

...and then I got a call for an interview with a company building fuel monitoring systems! Well, it so happened, I was a 6502 fan and still using a Commodore 128 beside the P133. So I was able to discuss the use of the 6502 in embedded devices with the engineer there which impressed the boss. The fuel monitoring boxes used a CMOS 6502 at 2Mhz and I was able to guess the clock speed.
I got the job as software tester!

I went out a bought a bottle of wine and shared it with my mother.
"At last, something good has happened!" She cried.
Damn right. Bear in mind that she had lost her husband the year before. It had been grievous from 1990 to 1997!

I paid back the machine and became known at the OS expert in the small business. I knew more about the system setup, file system and registry than anyone else there. I also progressed to being help file author, tech support, manual author (put myself out of job by slashing support calls with instructions literally at the level of "press the yellow button, and then the red button, then the yellow button." I had to write a manual for truck drivers… Great job, I enjoyed it and the only time in my life when I have really worked a 35 hour week.

In 1998 I purchased the Matrox Mystique 'Rainbow runner' graphics card and video editing suite; software from Ulead. Brilliant! OK, I had to upgrade to 48MB of RAM and install a new 7GB HD while I was at it… but man I had fun! Put together my own "complete" version of 'Metropolis.' I still have it on soft copy extracted from video tape. Yes, I editing, added digital effects, color, contemporary soundtrack to a complete movie on a Pentium 133, without even MMX! Only Kdenlive has come close to how easy - and even powerful - that old software was. Ulead Media Pro 2 was a marvel at the time. I could never find anything like it for less than $500. Kdenlive JUST beat it in terms of features and ease of use... about 16 years later.

I called the P133 the "Phoenix 3000" - yes as in "rising from the ashes." Damn machine all but saved my life. It was agony throwing it onto the tip but I was not Linux ready then and there was no way I could transport a big, bulking, obsolete tower system to Indonesia… And nobody was going to buy a P133.

Yes, that was the next big risk… to ensure future employment I had to jump East. I could not complete being a middle aged married man in an IT market being increasingly dominated by really ambitious Asian IT grads with Java pouring out of their ears and asking half the money to take my job. I could see my employer shifting to be rid of me to hire one of said graduates. [Indeed, after I left, they restructured the entire production side of the business, dumped all the tester and went 100% agile as I predicted.]

Again, a huge gamble but it has paid off!

The Phoenix 3000 would be of no use to me now. It couldn't run Libreoffice or any usable modern office suite and video editing would be beyond it. I got the original Ulead Media Pro software running under Wine (PlayonLinux - Wine 1.2) but there was no way to convert the likes of MP4 to the old AVI formats that the software could read. The machine really was obsolete.

But the machine pretty much saved my life. I also laugh at those that say you need a Intel i7 to do video editing on. I used to render overnight on that machine for 8 minutes of video. Waiting 14 minutes to render 4 minutes of video on my atom n2840 is not slow in comparison.

[Jedinovice]

Correction. The 14 minutes was for the 1GHz AMD c50.

The atom n2840 does it in about 5 minutes. I am not complaining.

[English Invader]

I liked the bit where it said "If you say I want the best computer graphics workstation made, but I don't want to spend more than $800, I say go buy yourself a 64-pack of Crayolas with some colored paper, because that's all you can afford."

@Jedinovice - Thanks for sharing. Interesting story and that's a lot of experience with computers. Just shows what can happen if you put yourself out there and take that leap of faith.

I'm a present day Commodore enthusiast. I've never used a PET or C128, but I'm an active VIC-20 and C64 user. There are a lot of people online who still care about these systems.

[Jedinovice]

I liked the bit where it said "If you say I want the best computer graphics workstation made, but I don't want to spend more than $800, I say go buy yourself a 64-pack of Crayolas with some colored paper, because that's all you can afford."

@Jedinovice - Thanks for sharing. Interesting story and that's a lot of experience with computers. Just shows what can happen if you put yourself out there and take that leap of faith.

I'm a present day Commodore enthusiast. I've never used a PET or C128, but I'm an active VIC-20 and C64 user. There are a lot of people online who still care about these systems.

I actually ended up with a Prototype Commodore PET! It;s lying in the attic of my mother's house.
Weird machine. I thought it was a MKI PET but then we found so many oddities about it, it had to be an R&D PET - probably for motherboard testing for the MKII motherboard in 1978.

Yeah, there is a lot of love for the Commodore series. But it's all a bit of a non-starter here in Indonesia. As far as I can make out, computers did not become household items here until the Pentium 4 and the 8 but revolution never hit here.

But I like Linux because it is like the old days. You have choice! You can compare and contrast. You can push minimal systems again.
Gads it was dull under the Microsoft monopoly! Windows 95 was interesting but after that everything was dull, dull, dull.

[Jedinovice]

Oh yes, and Mr invader, I was an avid Commodre fan in the end.

I loved my PET! I then had to upgrade to a Commodore 128D. I had the machine sing and dance.

I had loadsa demos running in C64 ode. I wrote my own dos support program, I used 'suerpscript' to death and had it competing with the brother's Amigas. I even cut my teeth on assembler.

Good days. Like I say, I like Linux because it brings back some of that magic.

"You can't do video editing on a dual core atom."
"Oh. Funny that, I just did."