[wiremine]

My first computer was a 486sx 25Mhz [1] The rig (tower, monitor, etc.) cost around $3,000. We got the SX instead of the DX because it was $500 cheaper. And I wanted a 16bit sound card. (Note that this is in 1992 dollars. Today it would cost over $7,000)

My parents didn't have a lot of money, but my great-grand father passed and they used some of the inheritance to buy the computer. I was instantly hooked. In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.

The announcement reminded me of article John Dvorak wrote around the same time. 1GB hard drives had just come out, and he asked what all the extra space would be used for. Even as a young teenager, I remember thinking how short sighted that comment was. That was before I realized how the tech press tends to get stuck in local optimizations, and can't understand the bigger picture.

It's all a good reminder that cutting edge today doesn't stay cutting edge very long, and the world figures out how to squeeze every ounce ounce of power out of hardware. (Also, yes, that leads to bloat...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I486SX

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak

[mikestorrent]

> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.

True for many, many of us, I suspect. My family bought a 286 in the early 90s and it cost something like $2000 CAD then, which is nearly $4000 now; but salaries were lower then, this would have been something like 5-6% of my single income family's yearly post-tax earnings for the year, and if you think about it as the % of "disposable" income it was probably more like 60% of it for the year.

Obviously it paid off in that it set me on the path for my career, hard to make any other investment as good as that, but who would have known that at the time? I'm glad that there were so many ads positioning computers as being educational and not just game machines; even though in reality I think it was learning about the computer to make the games work that taught me way more than any educational software ever did.

[amoorthy]

Ha! Same for me: 286 in 9th grade (1990) for about $2k CAD. 286 was a bad call though as I think it was harder to expand compared with 386. I remember 1MB RAM but really only 640k usable. Had to change some BIOS settings to get to about ~700 kB?

[Eric_WVGG]

similar, but I got the 486 DX2-66.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these inflation-adjusted prices due to the big Apple Computer anniversary — an Apple // cost $5000 in 2026 dollars, meanwhile a $600 Macbook Neo cost $150 in 1980 cash!

What helped me reconcile this was an observation that we’ve inverted the prices of necessities and luxury goods. Rent and mortgage in particular were a much smaller slice of income back then, but luxury goods were very expensive, so one would save up for a year or two to buy a new TV or a computer for the kids.

Now the necessities take a much larger slice of our income, but TVs and computers are incredibly cheap. It takes very little money to get a nice computer, and not-buying it barely makes a dent in the bills. This isn’t a good thing.

I do disagree a little with your observation regarding the industry “squeezing every ounce of power out of hardware”. Beyond local LLM stuff, there’s basically nothing a modern computer can comfortably do that any laptop since the mainstreaming of SSDs can’t.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Audio, video, and 3D animation are still extremely processor intensive. You need something beefy if you're serious/professional about those.

Office tools and web browsing are less demanding.

[koutakun]

> You need something beefy if you're serious/professional about those

But you can get way better results with the lowest end computers than you could years ago. Back in the 90s my grandfather used 3DS Max to map out his future apartment's rooms and start planning furniture, using renders to get an idea of how sunshine would look like at different times, etc. At the time, he did this on an expensive 486 that would take an entire day to render some of those visuals. Nowadays I can do the same with a free copy of Blender and any reasonably modern integrated GPU in probably under an hour.

[anthk]

You can just use SweetHome3D (GPL too) and call it a day. No need to mess with models, everything can be set and adjusted. Just design in a plane, set heights/widths for forniture, walls and the like, set a final render settings (hour of the day/sunny/cloudy and such) and even an Elementary kid could finish the work.

[vardump]

"Nowadays I can do the same with a free copy of Blender and any reasonably modern integrated GPU in probably under an hour."

Try seconds or at most minutes.

[gspr]

> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.

Gotta tack on to this thread showing appreciation for parents. We could never afford new computers in the 90s, but luckily my dad could bring home obsolete equipment from work. We were thus always at least a generation behind. I remember my friend's Pentium feeling like sci-fi compared to our 386, but my goodness it completely molded my life!

Later, towards the end of the 90s, those sci-fi Pentiums were obsolete, so I got a few to run "that weird Linux stuff" on. Since it was considered junk, nobody cared what I did with it. To this day, if I happen to hear Metallica play and there's early winter's first smell of snow in the air, my mind will be transported back to that school night I secretly stayed up wayyy too late and discovered SSH for the first time. Haven't looked back.

Thank you, dad! I just hope general computing devices owned by regular people are still natural by the time my children come of age.

[wat10000]

My grade school friend got a Nintendo and I wanted one so badly. My parents got me an Apple IIGS instead. I was a little disappointed about the Nintendo, but saw there were plenty of games on the thing, and of course it could do so much more than play games. That turned out to be a very good move on their part.

[cbm-vic-20]

I wanted an Atari VCS

[bananaflag]

John Dvorak has tons of short sighted articles.

I wanted to link his columns "Microsoft Dot Nyet" and "New Architecture Needed" from circa 2000-2001 but it turns out they have been memory-holed. They should be somewhere in the wayback machine.

EDIT: At least one of them has not been deleted, just his name has been removed

https://www.pcmag.com/archive/new-architecture-needed-32570

[DarkUranium]

Yikes, you're not wrong. And I guess he's never heard of security issues, what with his ROM idea. Neat for a console (where the ROMs are game cartridges, as they used to be) or an appliance not connected to the internet, not a general-purpose OS...

Pretty much the only thing I agree with is that computer architecture could use a complete rework (both from a software as well as hardware side, though primarily the former); as well as said rework being basically impossible in practice.

[TacticalCoder]

> My parents didn't have a lot of money ...

Mine neither although the grandparents were moderately wealthy but my mom understood very early on that it was a match for me and that computers would really take off.

Fun story: first BASIC I ever got was an Atari 2600 cartridge that came with some key of a "keyboard" in two parts you'd plug in the joystick ports. When my parent bought that Atari 2600 they tried it and spent the entire night playing "Tank Attack" on the TV in their bedroom. She only told me that years later.

Then as I was writing tiny BASIC programs on the Atari 2600 gaming console, she realized I needed a "real" computer, so she bought me an Atari 600 XL a bit later. Then I began salivating on the neighbours' Commodore 64, which I could see trough a window. And she thought: "If I buy the exact same computer as the neighbours, maybe my son and the neighbours shall become friends!". 42 years later one of our neighbor just went to visit my brother in another country and his brother we exchange Telegram messages nearly daily.

Then the Amiga. Then the 386, 486, etc.

What a mom. RIP.

[ransom1538]

My mother was a stenographer. She used a 286 for processing docs. That baby wasssss alll mine during the day!!! All my friends had hacks for sys/bat/exe files to get wolfenstein at least to load. Best days of my life.

[_the_inflator]

Wonderful gift, even though I gave it a pass and saved on the sound card.

Mine was the 486 DX 2/66.

The trouble with the 486 SX 25 was IMO that a fast 386 easily beat it. I was part of the demo scene back then and wanted to compete with the likes of Dust, Future Crew.

And: Doom! It could be displayed and run in 800x600 if I remember correctly on a DX 2/66.