[watersb]

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions.

For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress.

Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant.

A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another 30 pounds and another $1000 for the docking stations and mice and ergonomic plastic monitor stands and Ethernet AUI for your 10BASE-5 Local Area Network.

JPEG was not yet a thing. [edit: yes, it was; Netscape Navigator shipped with JPEG support in December 1994. But that's before this original article was released.]

Shareware. I actually paid for a license for PKZip!

And I bought a Netscape license too -- I think it was 2.0, it was $40. That was their business model: sell browser software. The server happened the following year.

NeXTStep Developer License was $3000 per year. Windows MSDN was not free, either. I paid for a $2000 annual subscription at least once.

Linux was shaping up remarkably quickly, a rallying point for open source userland tools... but BSDi wasn't free. Any other UNIX was thousands of dollars -- that Open Group industry model.

The 1990s were expensive and awkward.

I am utterly stunned that it all turned out as well as it has: NeXTStep in every pocket, and Linux in every other pocket, and most tools are free, the Internet everywhere, and strong cryptography is not yet universally illegal.

It's not perfect but it was going to be so much worse.

[TrackerFF]

I think people forget how fast prices declined, and how fast stuff got outdated / obsolete.

We paid something like $4k-$5k for a PC back in 1995. I think it was a 120 or 133 MHz, 16 MB ram, and 500 MB HDD. Came with Win 95. Probably 90% of its use went to Office and Excel.

3-4 years later, pretty much unusable for any kind of (then) modern application, like games. Even if you could buy a graphic card, like Voodoo or whatever, the CPU and RAM wouldn't cut it. Besides, a decent new PC would "only" cost you around half of what you paid back in 1994/1995.

When I purchased a gaming PC in early 2008, that PC could still handle modern games 10 years later! And that was a mid-level gaming PC I paid around $1k for.

[anthk]

It depends. 4 years later, you could get:

- A 64 MB Ram module, not bad for games and a boost for Win95.

AMD K6. Not as good as a late Pentium II/early Pentium III , but it would be much better than a Pentium 120.

https://www.forbes.com/1999/06/21/mu2.html?sh=4dc70c70494b

Then, the K7 was more expensive but damn cheap compared to a Pentium III.

[georgewsinger]

This post chronicles the cost of early computing hardware over time, and you're absolutely right about how expensive things used to be: https://simulavr.com/blog/paying-for-productivity/

[npteljes]

I agree, the churn, as I experienced it, lasted until 2010 or so. My last CPU, an AMD FX-8350, is a 2012 model, and I still use it for gaming in my main PC. Before that, new tech was a must every 3-5 years or so.

[switchbak]

"The 1990s were expensive and awkward" <= this is what folks that didn't experience it don't realize. It wasn't just an earlier time with slower CPUs, computers were pretty trash at the time, peripherals sucked, the connectors sucked, everything crashed all the time, software quality was crap, and things were outrageously expensive. Oh and they had a lifetime of a couple years before they felt unbearably slow compared to the new expensive and faster crappy products.

It was actually novel when you'd find a well written piece of software that did its job well and didn't crash (at least for me, being poor and stuck in the world of DOS/Windows). Things like AutoCAD that people used to do actual work. Early WordPerfect struck me as pretty good too.

I still resent Microsoft and particularly Gates for keeping the state of computing in the dark ages for so long. Using Linux (circa 96 or so) was such a revelation, it's hard to explain how massive the jump in capability was. That Microsoft went so long not even leveraging protected mode in commodity OSs (not NT) speaks volumes.

It is nice to reflect on how far we've come, but I also appreciate Alan Kay's perspective on things: that phone and iPad style environments are primarily designed for passive consumption, and we could do a lot more to empower the users of these devices. But still, we're absolutely light years ahead of where we were!

[anthk]

You install a driver under Windows 98-> BSOD. It happened to me with he chipset ones. The official CD from the OEM.

On Linux distros and BSD's, a proper KDE setup from 3.5.10 times was light years ahead of Windows 98 and even Windows XP with Konqueror blending the file manager, the shell and the browser.

[JeremyNT]

The rise of free software on the Internet indeed pleasantly surprised me as well.

In '94 I was running some then-ancient - but still horrifically expensive - Mac, barely able to connect to a dial-up ISP on my ancient rural phone lines. The entire system was essentially impenetrable to me; I didn't even have any kind of concept of how I might write software for it and had no idea where to learn. The primitive tools I could find, like resedit or applescript, could hardly scratch the surface of what was possible.

Linux existed then, surely, but it wasn't something I could have sussed out myself until later on. The idea that everything running on a computer could have source code that you could read, and then build into a workable system, was completely unfathomable to me until I went off to college.

Now, any would-be programmer can start programming with an immensely powerful IDE after a few minutes, and they can access millions of lines of "in the wild" high quality code in hundreds of programming languages instantly.

As much as some things seem to have failed us along the way, at least in this respect things have indeed worked out better than I could have imagined.

[anthk]

Similar to you but in 2001 with Windows 98 and Visual C++. I began to learn to code with C++ under Windows. The nightmares.

Resedit -> ResHacker

Apple Script -> VBScript

Now, heck, the OS for hackers (9front) it's dumb easier on design and C programming. And, before, Linux with {Perl and/or TCL}/TK made casual coding zillions times easier than Win32.

[Tijdreiziger]

> Linux in every other pocket

Well, for some definition of Linux. Certainly the Linux kernel, only wrapped up in Google's proprietary Play Services. Say what you want about 1990's Microsoft, but at least the privacy story was better than in the 2020's.

[philwelch]

That's because connecting to the internet was a rare, deliberate action for most people and not the default state of every electronic device.

[anthk]

Well, there's LineageOS/AOSP, it runs even under x86 PCs and you can use FDroid+Termux just fine.

[Tijdreiziger]

Termux was nerfed in Android 12. See https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/2366

Either way, the statement I replied to was 'Linux in every other pocket'. Since almost all Android users are running the Google Play Services, my point stands.

[msla]

Dial-up was still the predominant mode of Internet access, to the point even Free Software was often sold in the form of people selling CD-ROMs because downloading a full Debian or Slackware install over an occasional bits per second connection was too painful to contemplate. Especially if the phone company demonstrated Quality by dropping your long-running connection.

And that was assuming you had a CD-ROM drive. Otherwise, you were looking at stacks of floppies. (I still remember being told not to waste money buying pre-formatted floppies because a stray boombox would erase that formatting. I mean, true or not, that piece of advice is so perfectly of a specific era it deserves to be remembered. Besides, you couldn't get more capacity out of the disk if you went with the formatting The Man recommended.) Even hard disks were hilariously slow and low-capacity back then, especially if your computer was more scuzzy than SCSI.

Also:

> strong cryptography is not yet universally illegal.

Communications Decency Act! Marty Rimm! Clipper Chip! Skipjack!

There. Have I put a sufficient amount of The Fear into you yet?

[anthk]

Even in DVD times I bought the full Debian release on DVD. 4. 3 for binaries, 1 for the sources. 20 EUR (~$20). A bargain.

[johnohara]

>The 1990s were expensive and awkward.

Wholly agree. Developing an application to be deployed to 100-200 users using a desktop client-server model easily ran into the thousands (tens of thousands today) and made one think very hard about which platforms were used.

Hard choices had to be made simply because you couldn't afford the cost of entry.