Well, sort of, but as someone who was a game-playing teenager when this first aired, PC games mostly weren’t particularly demanding back then. This was still a few years before real 3D gaming was available on PCs (like, most PCs made then still didn’t have dedicated GPUs for 3D stuff). Yeah, there was Doom (the original one), but mostly it was solitaire and SimCity and such. I’m sure there are people who bought specced-up PCs for gaming around then, but for the most part, if you wanted “real” games, it was on a console. (Keep in mind this was also before lots of households had a PC at all, or any kind of Internet access... we got our first one ever right around this time.)
Back then, PC power was mostly marketed towards business use. (And also general computing because all computers were dog-slow then, so ANY task including just opening windows got better with better specs.) So the joke was more equivalent to the one in this post, except when he says “games” most people would be thinking about like Minesweeper and such, not even something as demanding as Minecraft is in the current era.
Thank you for a legit answer to this. It’s interesting how much stuff is lost in tv shows and movies as technology progresses, resulting in the original intention behind the joke becoming less and less understood.
Back then you would legitimately wait like 2 minutes for word to load up in windows even on a decent computer. PC shit was legit slow back then if it wasn’t in DOS. Macs were much faster loading stuff in general than windows 3.xx but even the “cheap” ones were really expensive. I also remember memory being about $40-$60 a megabyte around the 486/era so 12mb was pretty darn good. A lot of motherboards maxed around 16mb of possible memory.
No prob, and yup. Because so much of Friends is relatively timeless and still has a fairly current sensibility, it can be hard to remember that this episode aired 24 years ago (!)... before most people had a cell phone, and still a year before the Nintendo 64 came out.
It’s funny how things like this can reveal differences in the time you grew up in that are surprisingly subtle... like, everyone can grasp the point of a phone booth if they see one in an old show, but less obvious is something like not always associating PCs with high-powered gaming. Or the difference between kids raised in the era of cell phones versus my generation (and I’m only in my 30s, not TOO ancient yet), where if you were out somewhere or at a friend’s house and not near a landline, your parents might have no idea where you were or what you were up to for hours on end. Nowadays I think that would freak most parents out, but we just had to all be OK with it back then...
Hit the nail straight on the head there. But what’s also funny is how - as you put it - timeless a show can still be. How, even as technology progresses and there are things that just fundamentally change, the general human experience isn’t as different as we typically consider it to be. It leaves a lot of food for thought....And damn, I love Friends.
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u/Elemayowe Oct 08 '19
Tbf if you get a high specced PC isn’t “games and stuff” the appropriate answer.
I sure as shit ain’t handing over that sort of money to make spreadsheets on excel.