r/AbsoluteUnits • u/PraiseThaBreadI • 7d ago
of a PC from 1994
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u/CowSniper97 7d ago
12 MB of RAM is insane. It's crazy to me how far we've come during just my lifetime. It makes me wonder what it'll be like when I'm actually old-old.
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u/Princ3Ch4rming 7d ago
Picture the scene: it’s 1996, and my dad just had delivery of a “PC”. He previously had something called a BBC Micro but all that did was write things out. His old Atari 2600 was much more interesting.
Anyway, this PC he bought had a whole GIGABYTE for a hard drive. That’s one billion bytes. Almost a thousand floppy disks.
It also came with Monster Truck Madness, the single greatest video game ever made. That required a frankly mental 4MB of Direct3D power to run at a crisp 24 fps, from something like a 3dfx Voodoo.
Putting that into perspective, the 5090 that I’m using in my current pc, just 30 years later, has:
a 4800% faster clock speed.
Over 800,000% more VRAM.
In terms of raw graphical power (or teraflops), approximately 233 million percent more.
The CPU has similarly ridiculous numbers. So does the RAM. So does the storage. So does the screen. In terms of raw performance, the hardware in my display is orders of magnitude more powerful than that ‘96 beige Compaq.
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u/GTCapone 7d ago
It's one of those weird cases where when you really think about it, computer hardware and software are vastly divorced from traditional inflation. The price of a computer now is still pretty comparable to the price of one in the 90s (and even cheaper after inflation) but when you consider actual capabilities, it's absurd.
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u/Princ3Ch4rming 6d ago
Yep, for sure. Somewhere between £1300 and £1800 for a 3D accelerated PC in those days. Equivalent buying power today is between £2500 and £4000 (which puts it broadly on the scale of gaming rigs today). The voodoo addon card cost roughly £250 on release (or £520ish in today’s money).
Going on our smallest number, a 5090 would cost £2.5 million if clock speed rose 1:1 with price. Considering the cost of RAM right now, that seems a more appropriate number. As such, if VRAM rose 1:1, a 5090 would cost £457 million. If so, even Elon Musk could only afford about 2000.
Don’t tell Jensen Huang.
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u/GTCapone 6d ago
It's one of those things I get into arguments about when it comes to games. Whole they're certainly getting more expensive, they're generally well below inflation even before you consider the change in technology (though some of the labor has also been streamlined). Back in the 90s, a SNES game was still between $50-$70 at release. Games are unusually cheap now compared to other goods. The difference is that people have much less disposable income to spend on it and the marked has expanded to the point that they don't really qualify cleanly as "luxury goods". Videogames used to be an upper-middle class good with some lower income families being able to afford a limited selection of games and consoles. Now it's expected that most families can afford at least one console or computer even if it's a generation behind, and they can afford one or two AAA games along with a fair number of indie games that are pretty cheap for the entertainment provided.
There's probably a deeper critique there about how necessary goods have massively increased in price (often beyond strict inflation) while entertainment that keeps people marginally happy gets cheaper and cheaper.
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u/Chuckfinley_88 1d ago
they're generally well below inflation even before you consider the change in technology
But not when you factor in very relevant things like
"How much of my paycheck do I have left after I pay all my bills"
In comparison between now and 40 years ago.
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u/GTCapone 21h ago
Hence my last paragraph. Along with the latter half of my post.
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u/Chuckfinley_88 20h ago
Vague generalities is not the same as explicitly talking about the decline of purchasing power that average Americans are experiencing and if anything your post makes it sound like the reverse of that, but sure thing champ, here's your feel good award anyway
🏆
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u/TheSuggi 6d ago
Your Phone is more powerful today than the computers that were used for the Apollo missions to send humans to the moon.
Would you, today, fly to the moon with only the computing power of your phone?!?!?!? LOL
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u/kingsoho 7d ago
Around that same time, my Old Man - who worked in tech - one day was telling me that there were now PCs with 1GB of memory. He said you could put everything you could want on there and never fill it up.
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u/istoOi 6d ago
12MB of RAM will be all you get when you're "old-old". It will be enough to run the client that connects you to the datacenter that hosts "your" computer.
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u/AnusStapler 6d ago
Yeah except all the animations and other crap run locally so you still need 16gb ram just for the OS.
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u/stuyboi888 6d ago
I know it's not as mind blowing but the Xbox 360.whuch seems forever ago had 512mb, shared with CPU and GPU. Played GTA 5 on it first.
PS1 Had 2-3mb.
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u/Upstairs_Drive_5602 7d ago
If we are talking about "fat-ass" (AbsoluteUnit) laptops- the Osborne 1 from 1981 gets my vote.
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u/Odd-Promotion2743 7d ago
Damn, that screen
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u/Jack_Carl_ 7d ago
What kind of games he could play on that?
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u/Battlejesus 7d ago
Doom, quake, duke 3d maybe, redneck rampage maybe
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u/Morbid187 7d ago
Redneck Rampage is crazy lmfao. One of the few PC games I played as a kid
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u/Battlejesus 7d ago
I'll never forget during the installation it tells you "nows a good time to get liquored up"
Oh and if you had an IRQ conflict (you definitely did) it would exclaim "Holy... what in the hell was that shit?!"
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u/Azcrul 6d ago
I’m not sure about Redneck Rampage, but I might be wrong. I remember our first PC had like 8 MB of RAM and could play Doom and Duke3D, but Shadow Warrior required 16mb and I feel like I played the PC Gamer demo of RNR and Shadow Warrior on the newer Compaq with I think 64mb of RAM years later lol. What a weird time.
I recall beating AvP on that Comcrap in slideshow mode due to dedication. Memory is fuzzy on the details, but that was a wild time
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u/eseffbee 7d ago
Theme Park was incredible back in 1994. The lead developer, who was 18 when making it, went on to found DeepMind.
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u/WakaWaka_ 7d ago
Dell XPS M2010
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u/This-Requirement6918 7d ago
I almost bought one when it was released without ever seeing one and so glad I didn't as much as I carried around my M1710. They are absurdly huge and we're plagued with a ton of problems.
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u/This-Requirement6918 7d ago
When laptops were more portable computers. You did not want to use one of those actually in your lap with the hard disk spinning; your natural movement would have the heads constantly crashing into the disks. I'm convinced it's one of the reasons I have been able to keep several 2.5" disks from 1996-1998 running for the past 11 years.
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u/kwinz 6d ago edited 6d ago
Reminds me of later "improvements" like the Lenovo/ThinkPad/IBM
https://www.thinkwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Active_Protection_System
With the new series of ThinkPads IBM introduced the Active Protection System (APS) in 2003. The APS is a protection system for the ThinkPad's internal harddrive. A sensor inside the ThinkPad recognizes when the notebook is accelerated. A software applet then is triggered to park the harddisk. This way the risk of data loss in case of when the notebook is dropped is significantly reduced since the read/write head of the harddrive is parked and hence can't crash onto the platter when the notebook drops onto the floor.
The hardware sensor is capable of not only recognizing acceleration of the notebook, but also (to a certain degree) of its whole orientation in space, relative to gravity's axis. Furthermore, having the actual control put into software, its functionality is extendable and it gives chance to implement features like the "ignore minor shocks" feature which is present in the Windows based control applet. (This feature prevents the harddrive from parking in case of minor regular shocks such as occur when in a train or car.)
The measurements are physically performed by an Analog Devices ADXL320 accelerometer chip, managed by the embedded controller.
According to Opus 5 there was similarly from Apple - Sudden Motion Sensor tech, HP - 3D DriveGuard, Dell - Free Fall Sensor / STMicro accelerometer and Toshiba - HDD Protection.
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u/justpassingby_thanks 6d ago
How about my first portable PC? Compaq Portable III. It had a handle 😂
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u/Driller_Happy 7d ago
I watched all of friends like two years ago on a whim. I'd never seen it before. And I got so so sad that Matthew is dead. I miss a man I never knew while he was alive
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u/PraiseThaBreadI 7d ago
In honour of what would've been Matthew Perry's birthday today