[liotier]

Let's not exaggerate: Winamp .mp3 playback was just fine on any Pentium running Windows 9x - though I concede that even my Pentium 75 had 16 MB RAM and I have never seen a Pentium with less than that.

On the other hand, extracting a CD and compressing it's .wav to .mp3 was a whole day of computing, and sending the files as attachments through SMTP was enough to elicit flowery vehement objections from my university's sysadmins and my friend's small ISP alike...

[tonoto]

Alright, it might be that the memory fades and that it was OGG that I were struggling with, nevertheless the music playback worked way better in Linux. My issue I had were modelines/vertical refresh rate and having the graphics card recognized as it were my first computer and as a newbie with no friends to ask it felt rather steep to understand XFree86.

But it was the IBM Aptiva K23 (basically this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhYumJiEbY ) with 12MB onboard. Later upgraded to the K6-2 (500?) with a real speed bump.

[inferiorhuman]

OGG would make a lot more sense. Even back in the Pentium days I believe there were optimized integer decoders that would handily outperform OGG stuff which only had a floating point decoder. Wikipedia is showing the og Pentium at 0.5 FP ops per clock cycle vs 1.88 integer ops.

Of course by the time you get to the Core architecture you're in the opposite situation where Sandy Bridge is at 16 FP ops and 6.2 integer ops per clock cycle.

[znpy]

Ah the times when the netiquette dictated not to attach large files to emails directed to mailing lists, but to upload them to some ftp server and only paste the link…

The whole industry was had more attention to performance and resources consumption.

[liotier]

Netiquette aside, a bunch of .mp3 as SMTP attachments hogged the single 64 kb/s that was my whole school's single link to the Internet and they entirely filled the receiving side's mail server storage, resulting in an outage... Both valid basis for criticism of my obnoxious behaviour in 1996 !

[ta1243]

> sending the files as attachments through SMTP was enough to elicit flowery vehement objections from my university's sysadmins

The more things change....

OK they don't complain as much about 500kb attachments, but a lot of corporate direction for 20 years is about stopping that behaviour

[bitwize]

The first mp3 I ever played was Jun Kazama's theme from Tekken 2 on a Windows 95 box (Pentium 60) using Fraunhofer's own graphical mp3 player. I had to close all other open applications and not move the mouse around too much, lest the playback start to "crackle". This would've been about 1996, just a few scant months after Damaged Cybernetics, the famed emulation group, announced on their home page: "We are investigating the possibilities of using MPEG Layer III compression for music piracy."

[ptspts]

I had a 486 CPU running at 120 MHz. The WinPlay3 player was able to play MPSs smoothly, WinAMP wasn't.

[toast0]

My Pentium 75 definitely shipped with less than 16MB. I can't remember if we had 4 or 8, but I think we had 16MB when we junked it.

Either way, I played mp3s in winamp while on IRC and sometimes even running netscape. Took at least an hour to get a mp3 though, and I had to throw them all out when I got decent speakers and could hear how terrible they sounded.