[mdip]

Lovely read -- the 80s early 90s were such an interesting time in computing. That was a nice walk down memory lane for me and instantly brought back memories of dialing into (and eventually running) a Bulletin Board System.

Few families had computers and -- as a kid -- the luckiest kids had Commodore 64s. I was the only kid -- out of 8 of my friends -- who's Dad insisted on having the same hardware at home that he had at work and he, like so many of that era, fell in love with Lotus 1-2-3[0]. I found it incredible that a nearly $4,000 (1985ish dollars) 8088 "generic clone" computer with ten times the RAM of a C64, 2 floppies and an RLL (?) HDD and "a real computer monitor" had a pretty abysmal collection of often terrible looking games available (it was the early days).

The most obnoxious part of this machine was, upon powering it on, it would count all of the memory, climbing in 64k steps, for a solid minute[1] while the jet engine that was a full-height RLL 10MB HDD[2]. Because this obnoxious boot time and the small shop's recommendation (likely because "this happened before") after the rapid demise of our HDD[2], my father elected to just leave the computer running 24x7, turning only the monitor off when not in use.

That machine (that I hated), though, became a pretty substantial part of (if not all of -- at times) my life from age 11 on. The 386 really was a revolution. With a VGA adapter and Sound Blaster (Compatible) you could spend an hour making a boot disk and eventually get a game with excellent graphics (for the era) to start without running out of memory below the 640k barrier.

We couldn't afford one so my Dad took the unconventional approach of starting a company and having me build PCs for neighbors, friends and eventually businesses to afford a top-of-the-line one. I had a 486DX/33 (top sku when I purchased it) PC with ... everything (even SCSI drives), a 16" SVGA monitor and laser printer a year later.

As a teenager I took a job at CompUSA[3] in hardware sales -- from about 1993-1997ish -- what an awesome time to work at a computer chain. I'll never forget the Windows 95 launch (after years of being promised a successor to WFW 3.11; even long enough for IBM to have a reasonable contender in OS/2). We had been receiving boxed (3.5" floppy and CD-ROM versions) of the software for weeks with an embargo[3]. We'd run promotions for the release day that involved staying open over-night. Somehow many members of the public were under an odd impression that "there might not be enough copies for everyone" and people actually started lining up around 10:30 at night. By midnight the line went all the way around the entire strip-mall (which could fit three CompUSA's worth) ... twice. The warehouse walls were floor-to-ceiling Windows 95 boxes, as were the tops of all of the aisle, the entire wall behind Customer Service, along with several large 5 foot tall 4-pallet wide stacks, several end caps and a few floor-to-ceiling shelves-worth, along with their "Power Pack". The store was surrounded in "blue." We had more RAM, Hard Drive and CD-ROM drive upgrades in the store than we'd ever had at one point in time at discounts that meant nearly everyone bought one of the three, many bought all of them. We played rock music on the speakers and watched Bill Gates with the cast of Friends from a CD-ROM displayed on the monitor wall.

That release at that time felt like a very large tipping point. Not just "there's something better than DOS that's mainstream" but with the local news regularly bringing up "The Information Super-Highway" and careers were increasingly requiring computer skills, by then the 8ish people I knew who owned computers became "half of my friends" (all from suburban middle-class families) owned recently purchased PCs. It was a unique thing to see. There were hundreds of people waiting in line. Unlike other situations where people "wait in line to buy something", this wasn't a Cabbage Patch Kid, concert tickets to a huge musical act's tour, or various Super Mario/Link cartridge games ... this was a boring operating system. One that I'd been running betas smuggled through "Elite" BBSes for probably a couple of years by then[4]. It was also well known by then that there was no shortage of the OS or the promos (we did run a few door-buster "first X people get Y for free" deals) but we'd never had more than maybe 25-30 people "waiting for the doors to open" during even the biggest promos outside of this. The composition of people, as well, was unique. Yeah, all but maybe four were guys. But it wasn't hundreds of "computer nerds" -- it was a pretty huge number of normal, average, middle-aged men of various ethnicities (we had an unusually high number of Korean individuals due to the location's racial make-up).

Summers were notoriously slow and usually saw a few bumps toward the end of August with "laptops becoming a school supply for college students" but that year, every weekend from the release of Windows 95 until the following summer seemed as busy as early-Christmas and this was in a location that was a half-mile from Computer City, Best Buy and Circuit City. Things started taking off like crazy owing mostly to "The Information Super-Highway" everyone kept reading about (and a half-decade later it was basically "over", with all computer-centered brick-and-mortar shops but Microcenter failing).

Intel, having gotten into a legal fight with AMD, went with Pentium branding and brought some of the best swag. I've got varieties of stuffed Intel "hazmat suit" toys and still have two Pentium key chains with the processor embedded in (apparently) Lucite. Their competitors vendor reps brought T-Shirts (and I still wear my Athlon64 "Power me Up" T-Shirt).

Crazy stuff ... fascinating how rapidly things apex, collapse and then just become part of every-day-life and the cycles get shorter and shorter. Intel had a few mis-steps here and there during that time (Pentium FDIV), but they were the king through most of my childhood. I now sit in a room with three high-end workstations. All are recent AMD processors.

[0] The company he owned also designed parts and was an early user of AutoCAD, so there was a profanity-infused evening involving my Dad installing an 8087 in that iron lung of a case.

[1] After about age 8, I could recite every number it displayed for a few seconds ... 64k, 128k, 192k, 256k, 320k, 384k, ... 576k, 640k

[2] One that I destroyed a few months after its purchase because I wanted to see what kinds of sounds it made if I turned it on, then off as it was spinning up, then immediately back on. It turns out that given a sufficient number of cycles, the kinds of sounds it makes is "none at all". It also turns out the number of cycles impressively low, like, maybe, five? Luckily, it was new enough for warranty replacement since nobody discovered my devious act.

[3] Including rewards if we caught a competitor selling a copy before the release date.

[4] I continued to run the final beta version I had downloaded because it was more stable than the GOLD version on my hardware ... I finally relented after the first service pack, I think.

[fabiensanglard]

> 16" SVGA

These things existed? I never heart of them. I thought it was 14", 15", 17", and 21".

[kjs3]

I know NEC made 16" VGA monitors; I had one. VGA monitors came in all sorts of sizes. I've seen VGA screens that were probably 7" deployed with PoS terminals.

[mdip]

There were a handful lesser known brands at that size, as well. I remember we went 16" when 'it was incredibly rare to see anything other than 14" screen sizes.'

Honestly, I can't remember what the brand was, but I don't think it was the NEC. I remember I had sold a few 16" displays and had liked a cheaper model well enough to save the money. We tended to value larger monitors with higher resolutions at home (Dad had spreadsheets and AutoCAD), so we went through a few -- plus, at one point, "I worked at CompUSA" and it was hard to get them as cheap as "employee discount"[0] as a small-time re-seller.

But the huge deals, IIRC, were with the "strange vendor" -- the Nokia Display -- that was a huge solid Trinitron tube, the largest sporting a slightly higher refresh rate than ... anything else.

But they have a hard time selling because "Who's Nokia Display?" As this was pre-"digital mobile phone service" -- the "pagers are cool" days -- it was often "Nokia Who?". If you could catch the vendor when they swung by and grabbed the right form, they'd let you buy the top-of-the-line for like 75% off[1] which was substantially less than "employee discount." I know I picked up a monitor, a scanner and a US-Robotics modem, cheap, that way. :)

[0] We were told this was "cost" -- and that wasn't completely out of left field. I had a re-seller agreement with some of the same distributors and got worse pricing, pretty consistently, than I could get as an employee.

[1] Either in the form of "do this and ..." ("spiffs") or just "we'll give you a discount on exactly one" and depending on the vendor, this was "mail us a bunch of sh!t" and "we'll ship you one" or "we'll mail you a rebate check equivalent to the difference from what you paid" (assuming you paid MSRP or less). And make sure you make copies of everything :).