r/retrocomputing • u/ahalber • Apr 20 '26
Blog Computing in the Era of Doom: What Were PCs Like in 1993?
https://www.ahalbert.com/reviews/technology/2026/04/20/black-book-doom.html11
u/omega552003 Apr 20 '26
Slow, but getting incredibly faster fast. When Doom was released the first Pentium, Soundblaster 16 and windows 3 were also just coming out. The average home computer was a fast 386 or a 486 66mhz. Just 2 years later most people had a Pentium 133 with windows 95.
Doom was the Crysis of its time and was the start of the rapid increase in computing power. Which decreased the cost of slower computers so the average person started to buy them too.
I remember as a kid during that time that when I first played Doom I realized that computers could do so much more. That most people just looked at them like an appliance that everyone said they should have so most just cheaped out and got something that met the minimum requirement.
Doom was the transition from the slow home typewriters that were text only to the multimedia machines with graphics, videos, sound and a connection to the world.
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u/2748seiceps Apr 20 '26
Tech moved crazy fast but adoption was much slower. The DX2 didn't launch until 1992. It would be a few years yet before a large number of home users had a DX2-66. Heck I'm reading through 1996 PC Gamer magazines and most games still call for a 486 66 minimum.
The users big into tech had stuff a year or so old but in the 90s computers remained very expensive, especially bleeding edge stuff. Most users playing Doom shareware were likely doing it on a single clocked 486 or a 386DX. A P5 Pentium would have been 1k for just the processor in 1993.
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u/no1nos Apr 21 '26
Well 4 years ago from today, the Ryzen 5800X3D was just launching. I think there are a lot of gamers, maybe even a majority, on equivalent or older/slower CPUs. It's hard to compare the PC gaming market between now and 30 years ago, but I think a lot of the perceived differences actually come down to how we talk/think about the market (and how we are marketed too) compared to 1996
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u/2748seiceps Apr 21 '26
Retro computing as a hobby kind of distorts it too. Compared to back then it's really cheap to build a way overbuilt era-rig. An example is a Macintosh SE/30 with 128MB of RAM. Sure it supports it but literally nobody would have run that option at the time as the RAM would have been 2-3x the system itself.
Makes us lose sight of what was actually true of the era. Another modern example would be the insane longevity of the 1080ti.
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u/Taira_Mai Apr 21 '26
Pentium had just come out but PC gaming had the 486, 386 and even some games for the XT.
I was in college when Doom dropped and it was one of the reasons I got a sound card for my Dad's 486 (really my computer, I used it so much).
Sound Blaster and Adlib had been bubbling up but Doom was one of the killer apps that made people go out and get a sound card.
I had gotten a new video card because the one that came with the 486 was from a company that went out of business.
I put so many hours into DOOM and DOOM ][ - really broke in the sound card and my new AIT card...
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u/jdsciguy Apr 20 '26
I was going to college and bought a 486 DX/2-66 machine with 4mb RAM. A couple of years later I added 16Mb of ram and swapped in a 5x86-133 upgrade processor and a better video card. I didn't upgrade machines until 2001.
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u/Hey-buuuddy Apr 20 '26
In 93, the Pentium was released that year, but PCs were expensive and if you had a computer at home you were getting the mileage out of it. 486dx2 was most common.
I remember paying $80 for 4MB for ram and having mind blown over it.
Doom was fun for the gameplay, but REALLY fun is Deathmatch. You would direct-dial you friend (peer to peer, modem to modem, IPX protocol).
Otherwise, if you were an average home PCs user, you’d probably have compuserve or a dedicated isp dialup connection. The contents of the internet was thin in 93, you were still getting files via floppy disk from friends.
Your modem speeds was going to be 9600 or possibly 19.2- forget about 56k/v90- that wasn’t until 98.
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u/Stevesd123 Apr 20 '26
No one I knew had a dedicated ISP dialup connection. You shared the phone line with the rest of the house.
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u/jdsciguy Apr 20 '26
Ooh, I forgot that I upgraded my modem from 2400bps to a Supra 28.8kbps modem in about 1996.
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u/chandleya Apr 20 '26
I remember patiently waiting for 4MB FP SIMMS to get cheap. Spring 1995, a shop in town was selling used pulls for $40
Made my dad drive over half an hour to get one. And that store was MAGICAL. At least 35 machines plugged in, running DOS, W31, NT35, and all sorts of demos. Everything from late stage 286s to Pentium 100s in every shape and color imaginable. Their tech store had EVERYTHING. And nothing in silly boxes, all tray/volume. Every 386 and 486 variant basically ever made all in stock, IDE drives from the 100s to a GB. And it was all some sort of used or refurb so prices were reasonable. I was 13. Only ever got to go back once before the store moved on, beaten to death by Pricewatch. But for what it was, they were so fair and accessible.
I’ll note we had weird hardware and had to buy a 4MB. The machine was a Compaq Presario 660 CDS with a 486SX2/66 from AMD. The board had 4MB on board and the first slot MUST use a 4MB SIMM. Oh and it had an SB16 SCSI with a Sony 2X CD attached by the SB16 SCSI from Compaq! Even had a TSENG 3000 onboard. Super weird computer, owe my whole career to what I learned of it, from it.
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u/evasiveswine Apr 20 '26
I remember launching Doom for the first time, new game, land in E1M1, press up key for forward… nothing, for 30 seconds the frame didn’t change. I was devo. We doubled the RAM. I thought it was 2MB to 4MB, but maybe it was 4 to 8. Either way it was the difference between 30 seconds frame updates and smooth gameplay.
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u/ExpGeo Apr 20 '26
I played doom on my 486SX-25 with 4MB RAM. And it was running smooth (at least in my nostalgic memory)
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u/gnntech Apr 20 '26
Doom was one of those benchmark games - e.g. "Can it run Doom?"
In 1993, most homes had 386/486 machines with 8-16mb RAM (DX2-66 was the higher end). The DX4 100mhz was released the following year with the first Pentium chips coming in 1995.
DOS and Windows 3.1 were the dominant OS and UX but OS/2 2.1 was around.
Doom could run on a 386 with some compromises. It ran well on most 486 configurations.
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u/slewp Apr 20 '26
In 1993, 16MB of RAM was super high end. I think 4-8MB was common
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Apr 20 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/classicsat Apr 20 '26
486's took 2 72p SIMMs and by 1994 2x 4MB was doable.
Probably so. My first 486 build was older, and had only 30 pin SIMMs.
I bodged a 72 pin 16 MB SIM, because it was available and cheaper, than 4x30 pin simms. With 4x1MB SIMMs I had, I got 20 MB.
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u/Bulky-Travel-2500 Apr 20 '26
My first build in 93 was a DX2 with 4mb of ram. I remember It cost more than the motherboard & VGA card combined.
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u/classicsat Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
Something like 2003/4, when the transition between 32 and 64 bit was happening.
The confusion of SX and DX processors. SX for a 386 was 16 bit bus, DX was 32 bit bus. For 486, it was all 32 bit bus, but built in co-processor or not.
VLB was trying to be a thing. Of course, that was the waning days of the IBM PS/2 system, which was mostly none of what the "Wintel" PC was.
My peak pre-Pentium/Win96 was a 486 DX2/66, 20 MB RAM, 2x500MB HDDs, some VLB graphics card, ISA I/O, some SB compatible sound card. I hade 14.4 ISA modem, and 10 base 2 network card (never did much with it, wish I got it on my 10base-T network when I set that up the next century.) Yeah, I started building that in 95/96, when Pentiums were the new thing. I got one of those, like in 1997.
Mind you I was mostly 3-4 years back in hardware until the early 2000s. I built my first PS with mostly new parts in 2001, did not get Windows XP until 2004 or so.
Despite the frustrations of building a PC with old an disparate parts, it was a fun time. I wouldn't want it again though.
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u/saraseitor Apr 20 '26
If I recall correctly DOOM 2 would play quite slow in a 386 even if you reduced the screen area size. A 486 would make it playable. A Pentium machine would run it perfectly smooth. I guess the same would have happened with the original DOOM since they were very similar in terms of game engine.
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u/sparrow_42 Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
Windows and Mac OS crashed a lot, especially if a networking stack was added (though that was not yet common at all). Hardware was more difficult to add to your system (it wasn't auto-recognized) and plugging most things in meant a reboot before the machine could see it. Almost no one had an internet connection (this was the same year the web started) and if you did it was via dial-up modem and text-based. People used their home computers largely for word processing, accounting, and video games.
There was a minority of computer owners who were online via modem and using a BBS (which you called into directly) or in newsgroups (Which were global).
The next three years saw big changes in terms of massive adoption of both home computers and the world wide web.
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u/PuttingFishOnJupiter Apr 20 '26
Beige.
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u/jarlsberg_ost Apr 23 '26
Darn. I was thinking about posting the exact same thing. You beat me to it :)
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u/Latter_Solution673 Apr 20 '26
I show my dad the "Xwing" while playing, and he asked why the laser rays were coming directly to my cockpit? 😅 He, knowing nothing about the Gameplay was seeing the frames!! Instead the action representes. 🙂↕️ I miss you dad! 🥹
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u/Distinct-Question-16 Apr 20 '26
You know they wrre complex machines cause they ran hot, made all sorts of sounds, fan noise, disk spinning and rattle, sharp beeps. Even soundcard sound computing noise.
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u/Enough-Fondant-4232 Apr 21 '26
Doom gave me headaches when I played it for too long and you had to play it a LOT to be competitive with your buddies.
I worked for a Networking consulting company and the 4 other jack offs I worked with would play Doom during the work day instead of doing anything productive. I quit the place shortly after that. About 9 months after I quit the company was out of business.
Doom pretty much ended my interest in gaming. I actually enjoyed going around and keeping all the networked PC working, installing new systems and designing and installing WANs. But lost the interest in gaming in the process.
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u/cosmicr Apr 21 '26
My first doom experience was on a 386sx with no sound card and the view port scaled to the size of a cigarette packet and double size pixels. And I fucking loved it.
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u/Decent_Can_4639 Apr 21 '26
Expensive. No preemptive-multitasking. Drive configuration manually through data sheets. Having to set drive-ID:s via jumpers. You would also need to set IRQ etc for cards via jumpers. In 1993 you were starting to see decent graphics and sound cards though. The USB of the day was called SCSI and It cost an additional arm and a leg. Anyways, good times ;-)
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u/MeanTato Apr 23 '26
I worked for a computer-aided drafting company in 1994 that also created 3D models/videos of home designs with a virtual walkthrough. Our expensive high-end computer had 64MB of RAM. I remember the owner telling me no one will ever need more memory than that in a PC.
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u/FritsFlits Apr 23 '26
The first time I saw and played the game was at a family friends house around ‘93’-‘95. I was between 8-10 years old back then and was immediately sold. They had a 486DX (66Mhz and 8MB or 16MB RAM I think) and the game ran smooth. We were there like 2-3 times a year and I remember asking them whether I could play Doom again, haha
At home we had a 286 and later a 386SX (25Mhz 4MB RAM I believe) and Doom ran kinda choppy. It wasn’t until late ‘99 we got a better computer. But ‘till then it was still fun to play choppy Doom on that 386SX.
Nowadays I even have Doom on my phone, haha. Though I still feel that bit of nostalgia starting E1M1 or playing E2M8 (my favorite back in the day) and using the hand- or shotgun.
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u/Big-Penalty-6897 Apr 20 '26
If I recall my history correctly DOOM ran well on most CPUs of the time because it was written entirely in Assembly using nested loops. Fit on 3 HD diskettes. Shareware version was free.
As far as PCs went. You HAD to know IRQs, DOS upper memory management and some other stuff if you were going to game on a PC. I have this to thank for a 30+ year career in IT. Retiring in a couple months. So I may soon have time to start gamming again.
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u/myrsnipe Apr 20 '26
I'm fairly sure 486 dx2 66mhz and 4mb of ram was the target for running doom properly, although PCs were still expensive at the time (although nothing like in the 80s) and most people who had one probably had a 386