Comment by Pikamander2
11 hours ago
That's how cutting edge tech has always worked.
Imagine buying a shiny new PC in the 90s only to see it become practically obsolete within a year.
11 hours ago
That's how cutting edge tech has always worked.
Imagine buying a shiny new PC in the 90s only to see it become practically obsolete within a year.
That's not the experience of owning a PC I remember from the 90s at all.
"Within a year" is a bit of an exaggeration but it's true that the pace of PC tech during the 90s was much, much faster than it is now. CPU power was doubling every two years, and today we're at roughly eight years. Add onto that the rise of video cards in the late 90s.
It was both. 90% of people never needed nor purchased a bleeding-edge computer. The mid-tier was "good enough" and far closer to affordable for most people; though, that bar also moved upward every year.
If you bought a mid-tier computer that was good enough for what you needed, then you probably didn't shop/compare for the next few years and didn't notice. But if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less. This is how it was in the 90's PC boom, at least. Likely the same for the decades before, not sure how it went in the 2000's.
if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less
This is not how I remember that period at all. Do you have any examples?
5 replies →
I remember CPUs moving relatively fast back then, some years in the 90s had relatively big jumps, much bigger than we saw today. The classic graph, : https://i.extremetech.com/imagery/content-types/03zc6ghfKswe...
It is how I remember it.
I remember memory size going up by a factor of 8 at every PC upgrade for the same price.
Or you could buy a PC with a Celeron CPU, which was obsolete way before launch.
When my dad bought one he told me outright "this is for poor people".
I have some fond memories from my celeron days :) But I was upgrading from AMD K5 100 MHz
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They overclocked well though, I think you could run the 300Mhz chips at >400Mhz.
I also believe you could get motherboards that supported 2 Celeron chips. I have no idea how effective/useful it was, but it was certainly a cheap/interesting way to get multiple CPU's.
The 486 chip came out in 1989. The 586 came out in 1993.
The pace of change ("practically obsolete") is different then and now.
That's kind of wild. Our first PC was a an IBM PS/2 486SX 33Mhz, 4MB RAM, that was purchased in 1993.
Hardware definitely has longer lifecycle than AI model releases at this point.
You don't see Nvidia and AMD fighting every other month over the latest cards.