A viewer of mine has since archived and uploaded the exact Aspire 575LB factory restore CD and floppy disk images to archive.org so I'll be using this to get it even more period-correct in the future: archive.org/details/acer-ace-2.0-resource-cd
Isn't it nice to find the unfindable after years? I recently found and bought some rare exotic pet insects that are almost legendary in rareness. Also green!
Buying this for $2500 in 1995 was like investing in a car, this was for the entire family to use and wouldn't be replaced for 4-5 years at the very least! If you had a big family with lots of siblings, then you had alloted "PC Time" every night after dinner and before bed time, each sibling getting between 1-3 hours! It was strictly off-limits to the kids during the day since that's when mom/dad needed it for work! Since hard drive space was at a premium, you were not allowed to install more than a couple of programs each, which means that you were most likely stuck playing the same video games for months at a time. If you were lucky enough to have the internet so early on, you had to pray that your time with it wasn't interrupted by phone calls, and begged your parents to allow you to use the PC between 6:30 and 8pm as that was dinner time and the "golden zone" when people never called because they were having dinner themselves! Family PC culture was still a thing all the way up until 2010 or so when PC prices went down dramatically, and the rise in popularity of smart phones negated the need to share one PC for the entire family, but until then it was an interesting time for the PC!
Did you have "Internet Time" ? I'm pretty sure my first AOL contract limited me to eight hours A Month ! It also had the disadvantage of tying up the landline when in use so nobody could call.
@@wemartin12 Huh? I don't doubt you, its just not how I remember it, perhaps its because tech was improving so rapidly that a top-end rig was obsolete by next year during 2000-2010 that it *seemed* more expensive due to the fact that you had to keep constantly upgrading just to keep up.
This made me smile. My family was robbed on Thanksgiving of 1995 and our 486 Compaq was stolen as a result. With the insurance money, we bought the grey 75 mhz variant of this PC in February of 1996. It came with a fun “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” adventure game, along with demos for Tyrian and Jazz Jackrabbit. A a 12 year old, it was perfect for getting into PC games that were from the early 90s I missed.
12:44 “I’d like to congratulate you on successfully setting up your Acer computer…” The moment an NPC actually acknowledges Clint’s quest of P/N and S/N lookups, CD and floppy imaging, bad sector allocating, waiting and retrying. 😂
Due to everyone regarding them as E-WASTE and there being NO COLLECTORS [in the mid 2000s and later], you would be AMAZED at how rare a common basic PC will become due to everyone collectively throwing them in the trash in the 90s and 00's and everyone regarding them as garden variety old junk. I just got a Gateway FX-series desktop for $30. You can not obtain this PC anywhere. It took me 6 years to find one and it's a total wreck but it's all complete, just in about 6 billion parts and missing the PSU. The original motherboard is in it which I am very lucky for, those are a $250 part alone.
It's kind of like how, in every era, the cars that become the rarest are the boring everyday cars that outsold most of the others at the time, because nobody cared enough to preserve them. You go to a car show and it's all 1970s muscle cars, a few Corvettes, maybe a few '50s and '60s boats; it's a special day if someone shows up with a Gremlin or a Pacer, because most of them ended up in demolition derbies because even the _junkyards_ didn't want to waste space on them.
@@stevethepocket I was just going to say about cars. I reckon there are now more Ladas in the USA than the U.K. despite hundreds of thousands being sold here new. Of course in the USA a Soviet car is a novelty, while here they were something you bought if you couldn't afford a Ford.
@@stevethepocket This is a great point, I drive a mid-90s Oldsmobile station wagon and it gets a ridiculous amount of attention because this once-mundane car is incredibly rare now, let alone in excellent condition like mine. It's far more unique and special to me than a more conventionally "exciting" car. Plus the boxy, low profile is virtually the opposite of modern automotive design.
I currently work at Best Buy and we go through nearly a gaylord a day of ewaste; primarily old computers and printers. It pains me as well how many crt tvs and monitors we recycle. Just going to get rarer and rarer.
I’m 20 and got into retro computing recently, and a coworker at my job still had one of these in his basement, it was his first computer! It now has a new home and I’m in the process of restoring it fully to its original glory!
That’s awesome! I’m also 20 and into retro computing but mostly Macintosh stuff. I got a Macintosh SE for free from someone I know because he didn’t want to bother selling it and knew I’d give it a good home. I expected to do some repairs on it but it ended up working just fine. So I bought it a mouse and keyboard and now I have a nice 80s desktop to mess around with.
I’m an old geezer and I think it’s very cool that young people are into this. I’m in my early 60s and was one of the first students at my college to get the first Mac. It is maybe hard to imagine now, but at the time it was literally like time travel science fiction how advanced it was to use compared to other PCs. But my first computer when I was still in high school was a TRS-80.
Seeing Pod struggle on a machine that's only 2 years old is a good reminder how fast processors generationally improved back then. Each new generation seemed to make the previous one completely obsolete.
@@stephenharris5532 hardly. Nothing (apart from Winmodems) actually used the extensions until the P1 was history, and the doubling of L1 cache was definitely useful, but still only added about as much speed as upgrading to the next speed tier would give. A P166MMX from early 1997 performed about the same a a P200 (non-MMX) and by Decenber of the same year would still have given you a slideshow in Quake II. Things only really started slowing down after the MHz/GHz race had ran out and development focused more on integrating memory controllers and adding cores. A 2005 machine was still usable in 2015, more so than a 1997 machine in 1999.
it's terrible cirrus logic crap! even windows has problem with drivers, errors with fonts and so on. there was nvidia 128zx on market! remeber playing shogo mobile armour division on this. only 4 y later 1st gpu with t&l -- geforce 256ddr (still got this -- elsa erazor x2)
I was surprised Clint didn't try and lower the settings though. At 26:38 at the bottom right it seems to have defaulted to the highest quality 😅(unless he did change them off-camera?)
Oh hey there, my pleasure! Yeah this does seem like your kind of thing. Thought of you as I was reading through my Frog Design books and seeing familiar products that they came up with, like the lovely scifi hifi: the Dual MN 8010.
I'm a PhD historian. Future historians that specialize their focus on computer technology will absolutely be watching your videos to incorporate into their research and I kid you not, you'll be in someone's footnotes and bibliography.
An LGR box set would be cool. You could have a disc for each series of LGR. But if Clint does this, for the Sim's disc he should only include his review of the base game, and then have each DLC review be a separate disc that collectors have to buy separately, each disc released a year apart, hehehe.
@@Leofwine I'm from the future, we have wholenet backups of the entire internet for every year starting from 2004. They've been kept in US' echelon and a private company in Switzerland. Every single thing you've ever done, said or photographed anywhere on any internet connected network exists in the RonnaBank quite literally forever. Be careful out there!
The "Information Super Highway" was one of Al Gore's favorite subjects. At the time people were using the name it wasn't clear what form it would take. Quite a lot of people thought both the service and content would be provided by Cable TV companies. Remember that Compuserve was originally a separate service to the internet.
If there was ever a video I was waiting for, it's this one, and I've been watching LGR for years. This (or very similar) was the first computer I had any experience with. It belonged to my grandmother. She was an Assembly programmer at IBM for a long time. I can remember sitting on her lap when I was around 3-4 years old, while she used the machine. I also remember tanking the Windows install not long after I found myself with unsupervised access to it. lol. Sorry Grandma! Clint, seriously, thank you. Really. More than I can put into words. Way more. This was an amazing walk down memory lane. That deep teal, man, it just brought the memories right to the surface. Makes me smile. Thank you man, if my Grandma was still with us, we'd both be smiling.
I had that same system as a kid! The tower version though. I still have the CDs for all those apps you showed, the CDs did come with the PC bundle originally. I can upload them to the internet archive but I'd assume they're already there. Infopedia blew my mind seeing it for the first time, I couldn't imagine a digital encyclopedia and wondered how so much data could fit on our PC. It aided with my school work so much vs. spending time in the library doing research the old timey way.
Please upload them if you are willing! As mentioned in the video, it looks for those _specific_ versions of several of the games and programs so the original discs are required to run them.
I saved a green monitor from e-waste in the early 2000's because it looked cool. Used it on the bench for testing until recently when the flyback blew. Loved the analog controls and speakers as it was connected to many systems on a daily basis. Great vid as usual!
Thanks for your extremely wholesome videos! Watching them for years and you really helped me through depression. Greetings from Berlin (the one in Germany)!
Oh, God. I had completely blocked out those point and click games that really had no purpose and that was like a rush of nostalgia I was not ready for.
Clint, I find it hilarious that you have my first 2 computers. A similar green Aspire was my first computer. It was $1699 and has a 75mhz pentium. Second computer was that exact white Acer aspire tower in your other video with the AMD K6 233 processor!
Well, amazing! I wasn't aware that computer tech was that advanced by 1699... I'd have thought that the abacus still seemed a pretty neat idea around then; I guess I was wrong! 🤣🤣
Few years ago I've realized that PCs were never getting useless of obsolete. Each new PC we got just give us access to more software. While upgrading from 286 to 486 was huge, after 1 GHz CPU clock we got less and less. 1 GHz is important, because it was fast enough to emulate all the retro computers and consoles up to PS1 and N64. The problem in the first was not the lack of software on our old 90's PCs, but the fact it was hard to get it. When few years ago I've restored my first 386SX PC I was blown away how capable it really was. I just didn't had the greatest games and software for it back in the day. Pentium 100 MHz is a wonderful machine. It can run all great DOS games at good speed. It will also run some of the Windows 95 games too. It will run DOOM and Quake and these games had so many mods, that they delivered more content than you had time to explore.
Very true, so long as the essentials are there it’ll serve you years more than you could ever expect. Can’t imagine if today’s internet (along with the speeds) was available back then, we might have just worn all the computers down with the amount of content we could peruse on them lol Now this might be a little unrelated since it’s about a modern game, but I have been thoroughly enjoying cyberpunk 2077 against all odds of it running at all on my system. It is a gaming laptop from nearly 10 years ago now, with 4th gen i5 and mobile nvidia gpu. It somehow manages a fairly consistent 30 fps at 1080p, even though it’s very clearly underspecced even for the minimum requirements. I had little hope it would even run the game, let alone have a decent experience playing it! There are hiccups certainly, it chugs the whole time but I’m more than happy to accept whatever it can do. I did have a chance to use a modern powerhouse of a computer, and it was clearly quicker than this laptop of mine regardless of what you did with it, giving you almost instant responses but at its core it’s hardly any different. There’s very little this new machine can do that mine cannot no matter what, and even then it’s hardly relevant to me. Older machines have plenty of life left in them, just give them a chance before writing them off
And really, most of the reason for why at least late 90s hardware can't really be used as a daily driver today is bloat and stupid frameworks upon frameworks upon frameworks that simply don't exist on Windows 9x. It's not like transmitting text over the internet is an entirely new thing that needs 32 Gigs of RAM and 16 CPU cores running at 2.21 Jiggawatts. I suppose 4k video streaming would be a bit difficult on a Pentium III, but a great portion of what people do on their computers should be doable on a Machine that's about a quarter of a century old. The oldest Machine that I own that I would consider to be usable as a daily driver is a 2008 Thinkpad. Upgraded with an SSD and maxed out on RAM, admittedly, but still: Most of the system is 16 years old, and it does not feel much different than a brand new lower end laptop. Imagine using a machine from 1978 in 1994.
My previous desktop lasted so long that I had to replace the button cell on the motherboard... _twice._ I'd never had to do that with a computer before.
Oh, my 2009 iMac came to the rescue when my (newer) MacBook signed off. It couldn't access RUclips, but browsing the digital collection of the British Library (just weeks before the cyber attack) went well.
It's because the advancement of tech was happening so fast, a PC would become obsolete within 2 years. The pinnacle of technology has peaked now which is why you don't see new desktop pc's anymore, only retardyphones.
This was our first family computer in 1996. Bought from Montgomery Ward, if I remember. I didn't realize how much ACE Desktop was burned into my brain. That machine saw a ton of Descent, Tyrian, Jazz... I even played with TripMaker a lot. I also remember one of the pack-ins being a sample issue of a CD-ROM magazine, with an impressive (for the time) multimedia preview of Star Trek: Voyager... totally a selling point to 11-year-old Trekkie me.
the voice recognition is kinda funny. because back then it wasn't good, but you could trust it because things weren't connected to the internet 24/7. now it works much better, but there's a good chance everything you say gets uploaded to a server at Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon or some other corporation
@@kevinbutton4580 you misread what i said. i never said that every little thing gets long-term *stored* on external servers, just that it gets uploaded to one in many cases for processing, which companies don't even make a secret of. but who knows what exactly they do with the data between upload and deletion. also in some cases, things you say actually *do* get stored, as Louis Rossmann found out at some point when he discovered that his Google account had recordings of things he had said to his phone for the purpose of voice to text input
This computer was my family computer for a long time, then became my first ever computer. I love it so much. Green might be my favorite color because of this computer.
I was genuinely always impressed with my acer laptops. They were way more robust than expected, and the reasons 2 of them failed were: my kid poured a glass of milk on it and didn't turn it off until it died (I was able to get the HDD) and the other one had a removable GPU (imagine that! In a laptop!) that probably needed reflowing (I was able to 'fix' it for a few minutes using a hair dryer). The last one isn't dead yet
Man, this era of PCs is my home. By 16yo I saved up a whopping 1000 German Mark and bought my first fully owned Pentium 90MHz PC. Not some retail machine though, all hand picked parts self-assembled. I was SO proud! Eventually added a Sound Blaster AWE 32 Gold and some ELSA brand GFX if memory serves me well. These were the days where you'd "shut down into DOS" your Win95 OS to be able to play most of the games available. The birth years of Glide (later OpenGL) and DirectX, where games would need to specifically support these, but otherwise were fine running entirely in software mode. Awww man, thanks for this trip down memory lane.
This was my first ever PC I bought. Got it at Best Buy and had Dark Forces, Descent, Mech Warrior 2, a CH Throttle and Flight Stick, a Forte Cyberpuck, and some speakers that I can't remember the name of. Wish I had hung on to it. Loved the built in voice recognition.
This is, or is almost, IDENTICAL to our first family computer!!!! Wow! I recall ours also having a phone to attached to the monitor and came bundled with Ring Central. I can still remember that new plastic smell on Christmas morning! This machine saw a TON of Duke 3D back in the day! That, and some shareware version of Terminal Velocity. Great video!!!
Mine may have been one model newer. I recall ours having the soundcard and modem together on a combo card. That was always a bitch getting the drivers to work with that setup
This computer looks like what they'd buy for props in a movie that was supposed to be set in the distant future of 2009. And the operating environment on the screen would be some Lawnmower Man-looking schlock animation while the actor is just randomly typing away.
I bought one of these in 1996 with a cyrix 6x86 PR166 (120MHz)! I was a senior in high school and I bought it for college with the idea that it was not just a beige box and it was kind of integrated so it would take up less space on the tiny desks in dorm rooms; laptops made no sense to buy at this time unless you had tons of extra money to spend on less useful machines. It got me through my first two years of college. I played so much quake on it LOL.
To think, the last Tower I purchased brand new was an ACER Aspire. I in fact started my channel using that very machine. We often lament about the PC brands and badges that have failed over the decades, and we forget to celebrate the ones that succeeded and continue to this day. Great video Clint. Thanks as always.
We had these at my first ever job. With the matching screen and mouse/keyboard. My own workstation was an SGI Personal Iris though, and my home PC was a custom job. I don't think anybody used anything other than 320x200 for gaming back then, at least not in the real world. With perhaps something like Solitaire or Mahjong as the exceptions.
My very first computer (mine 100%) was a Acer Aspire Tower I guess the second generation because it had a Celeron 333Mhz MMX 32mb Ram 4Gb Seagate and an Ati Rage Onboard2Mb with a booklet full of software and games. Man! Those were the days. P. S. LGR is the Best Chanel for me.
My highschool had these in the library in the late 90s. They ran Win95 with Novell Netware. Just browsing the late 90s web and using Groupwise email was a real chore for these machines.
ZOMG! We had this PC when I was young- 166MHz with a 1.9gb hard drive- we didn't have the matching monitor though :( Sooo many hours playing SimCity 2000
11:00 This is the only reason why I love Acer PCs back in the day. They always had some sort of software you could use right out of the box. I still remembered back in 2009 (I'm a millennial) that we purchased our first home PC (sounds contradictory but home computer is a different thing from PC) and we got a thing called "Acer e-Infotainment" alongside with the PC itself. It has many software including games! I played crap-tonne out of it.
My first PC, although I had the purple tower version. Got it for $500 working at the Good Guys, it was old stock hidden at the service center. Thank for the memories.
Yeah I had never seen one. Reminds me of the hand me down monitor my dad gave me for my first PC build, running Win95 at 640x480 because that was all the monitor supported. I had a Cyrix M2 "233" chip and it played games about as slowly as this, but it was mine, I built it, and I loved it!
I had one of these as my first "real" computer for college, which replaced my IBM PS/2. I admit it: the looks got me. In a crowded field of off-white boxy tanks, this computer felt different and modern. I also remember that this was when "Pentium" meant something to people--as a cutting edge technology label. My machine lasted for quite a long time, too, well into grad school.
This was my first 'modern computer', upgrading for a 386. We got the 75mhz p1 on Chirstmas day of 1994 or 1995. I would pay entirely too much money for this green monstrosity.
28:55 This really is a very good point. We complain about hardware prices now, but here I am running a 6 year old CPU and am still able to play the latest AAA titles with more than acceptable performance. We forget what things were like when PC performance was doubling every few years, and game developers always targeted the latest and greatest specs.
I got the Aspire tower when I was 6. It was a welcome upgrade from the Tandy 1000HX. Especially when we got Dial-up. I was on both of those machines the way kids are glued to tablets today. Now I am custom watercooling and overclocking modern hardware, but have a decent Win98 rig for retro. I went from Win95 to XP, so it is nice to experience the platform I missed. Plus my hardware does DOS gaming well enough, or Win95 if I want to install it. Thanks for this time machine of a video:)
Oh man, hit me right in the soul with this one. I don't have the space or money to get into retro computing physically right now, but if I ever do this is THE computer for me. EVERY visit to a computer/electronics store in the mid/late 90s with my parents was 1. Go take a look at the computers and games in general 2. Go find the Acer and play Jazz Jackrabbit. Acer was the Jazz machine. I've since learned that its stats were kind of mediocre even for the time, but its look and its pack-ins formed the dream of modern computing for me as a kid. Family never go one, though the HP pavilion we did get was also pretty fun (and may very well have had better stats).
Had an Acer Aspire 2771 at one point, an upgrade from an IBM PS2. Still remember some of it's specs: Quantum Bigfoot 6.1 GB hard drive, 16GB EDO RAM and Pentium 200MMX processor! It lasted a long time into early 200s until we moved and donated it along with a few other systems (Moved out of State).
Another awesome review Clint. Would love if you ever did a video on the 20th Anniversary "TAM" Macintosh released in 97'. I remember my dad having one of these in his marketing office but unfortunately it was stolen - would be super cool to see what that thing was actually capable of!!
I realize with this video that my brain did not connect modern Acer, with fancy Laptops like the Zenbook Duo, with Acer of the 1990's with the blue/red square logo and random desktops that competed with companies they later purchased, like Gateway 2000 and Packard Bell. Most of these big brand computers were either business or lower end home computers. In this era, there were no gaming laptops and if you were buying a gaming desktop you were going to build it or have it built by a specialty store. For that reason, the mass market computers were usually more basic.
I had that PC! It was sweet, I wish I still had one! Clint, I'd love to see you rip the guts out of the case and see how much upgraded hardware you could stuff into it to make it a more modern system!
AWESOME video Mr. LGR! This was my first computer back in 96/97 when my parent's upgraded the shared family PC. I had the green Aspire version with the actual phone attachment on the side (land-line) and all my friend's thought it was super interesting. I also remember swapping out the HDD for a 5GB version and installing Windows 98 (barely) but running into a TON of issues with the built-in modem / soundcard combo. I believe it was an IBM MWave brand. What a PAIN to try and get Windows 98 installed on that thing I remember. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, this was also the time I discovered Tyrian! Need to fire up the ol' DosBox and see if I can relive some of those nostalgic 90s days!
That is a bold choice of plastic furniture color; big Little Big Adventure 2 vibes from it! Thanks for another fun video, Cliff, wasn't expecting a Tyrian cameo certainly!
Re: 29:10 100% agreed! I didn't get sustained 60fps in my games until well into the 2000s. The games weren't the only contributions to that either. Immature drivers, new technologies, wacko experimentations (e.g. Kyro3D), and OS overhead all made gaming on PC an uneven experience for decades. I think it was finally the release of DX 9 that started a process of standardization that finally saw realization by DX 9.0c (~2006). By that time we had a solid expectation of 60fps using modern high-end hardware.
You playing that racing game that slowly actually something I would put up with as a kid. I remember Half Life some parts were like a slide show. I had a 24 mb system with a 4mb 3dfx card on it and it would play Half Life like 80% but some parts were painful like the one where the tentacles from the ground came up.
The tower version of this in the green color was the first computer we had at home. It led me down the path into working in tech before I was even in high school.
I had this exact computer as my first PC when I was in the Navy. Upgraded several times, to Pentium 133, 128MB RAM, SoundBlaster AWE32 Gold, and Voodoo 3D.
I screamed when you made the Computer Reset video and saw that Aspire left on the ground... I want one so bad, but they are so rare nowadays. I have Pentium's and 486's and everything in between... But I miss that old thing... Mine had a Pentium 133, later upgradeed to a 200, a Voodoo, 64MB RAM and a Seagate 4GB HDD and it was a nice PC. Later I got a Pentium II 333 with a Riva TnT and my brother got that Acer... Then, a few years on, my brother sold it for 25€ and I almost killed him when I found out...
You always find the coolest stuff. Checks off the nostalgia box because it's tech I remember seeing at CompUSA as a kid but you also give a different perspective by explaining the details behind the tech.
Uncle had the vertical tower version of this system and just remember all the multimedia capabilities compared to my Packard Bell at the time. The software bundle was awesome too!
Clint, I got to see both you and this computer at VCF SW. I saw this PC sitting on the table and tried to make an offer on it, but Matthew wasn't at the booth when I was there. By the time I came back by, I had already thoroughly filled my car with other vintage computer swag, so I didn't have the opportunity to try and purchase it. When I saw this video pop up, I started wondering, hmm is that the same PC I saw at VCF? And sure enough, you confirmed it. I am so happy that it ended up in your capable hands, and I thank you for giving it a good home and making a wonderful video on it besides. And thank you for talking to me at the show!
That airport game was one of the first games I ever played! There’s this luggage conveyor belt mini game in there I spent hours on. I still have the disc but nothing to play it on yet.
I have been play Some PC games on this computer in the consumer electronic shopping mall when I was 17, and yes, it’s part of my childhood and you brought the memory back for me! Thanks a lot! I am a Taiwanese and have been 46 years old, so you know, it’s amazing, even more than I think! Indeed, it’s the machine which has been abandoned, but you are trying to preserve the memory for everyone who tried to recount the beauty of the old memory!
A viewer of mine has since archived and uploaded the exact Aspire 575LB factory restore CD and floppy disk images to archive.org so I'll be using this to get it even more period-correct in the future: archive.org/details/acer-ace-2.0-resource-cd
Nice
Nice
Nice
Isn't it nice to find the unfindable after years?
I recently found and bought some rare exotic pet insects that are almost legendary in rareness. Also green!
@@LGR boy, it sure is heavy, huh? 575LB is no joke.
for me, the hard disk noises are how the computer tells you, its working very hard.
And the sadness when it got so bad and noisey, you knew it was dying but rarely right away.
Yep....the move to solid state storage dose lose something in that respect
'Thrashing is good. It reminds the user that the computer is on.'- Raymond Chen
The HDD noises are normal on older PC's because they used less sound insulation and had less optimized seek programming.
For 6 year old me it was the sound of the computer 'thinking' 🙂
Buying this for $2500 in 1995 was like investing in a car, this was for the entire family to use and wouldn't be replaced for 4-5 years at the very least!
If you had a big family with lots of siblings, then you had alloted "PC Time" every night after dinner and before bed time, each sibling getting between 1-3 hours! It was strictly off-limits to the kids during the day since that's when mom/dad needed it for work!
Since hard drive space was at a premium, you were not allowed to install more than a couple of programs each, which means that you were most likely stuck playing the same video games for months at a time. If you were lucky enough to have the internet so early on, you had to pray that your time with it wasn't interrupted by phone calls, and begged your parents to allow you to use the PC between 6:30 and 8pm as that was dinner time and the "golden zone" when people never called because they were having dinner themselves!
Family PC culture was still a thing all the way up until 2010 or so when PC prices went down dramatically, and the rise in popularity of smart phones negated the need to share one PC for the entire family, but until then it was an interesting time for the PC!
Did you have "Internet Time" ? I'm pretty sure my first AOL contract limited me to eight hours A Month ! It also had the disadvantage of tying up the landline when in use so nobody could call.
PC prices dropped dramatically well before 2010. By 2003-2004 prices came down to levels similar to today.
@@wemartin12 Huh? I don't doubt you, its just not how I remember it, perhaps its because tech was improving so rapidly that a top-end rig was obsolete by next year during 2000-2010 that it *seemed* more expensive due to the fact that you had to keep constantly upgrading just to keep up.
@@CarrowMind Yeah it was a time of rapid advances for sure. But by the mid-2000s the midrange was much cheaper than it had been a decade before.
idk i had a cheap PC when i was a kid in the 90s and my parents never used it because they didnt know shit about PCs
My family had this computer. I remember spending countless hours playing Command and Conquer Red Alert on this thing.
Kirov reporting!
We had one at home too. The amount of Rollercoaster tycoon I played on this thing was insane!
Daaaa, da da da da, da da, da da.
*March March March March*
Daaaa, da da da da, da da, da da.
Da da da, da da da, daaaa.
CHA CHIIIIIIING!!!!
@@RTherennot in the first one
This made me smile. My family was robbed on Thanksgiving of 1995 and our 486 Compaq was stolen as a result. With the insurance money, we bought the grey 75 mhz variant of this PC in February of 1996. It came with a fun “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” adventure game, along with demos for Tyrian and Jazz Jackrabbit. A a 12 year old, it was perfect for getting into PC games that were from the early 90s I missed.
@@Daniel-dl3tf"Are You Afraid of the Dark?" was a horror anthology series on Nickelodeon. Maybe they had a game based on the show.
Omg I loved that show as a kid, one of my favorites. ❤❤❤❤❤❤
And wow, to rob somebody at all is bad but on a holiday? People are fkin selfish.
That afraid of the dark game came with my 1994 mac to
@@Daniel-dl3tf It's the most fun in the park when you're laughing in the dark!
Brutalmoose did a Let's Play of that game, it looked really neat
this shade of green and if you can imagine it's cousin in purple were certified colors of the mid 90s
Green and purple in the 90's?
*puts away anime DVDs* I have no idea what you're talking about...
sI hope the interiors of our first interstellar spaceships are coated in cheap 90s plastics.
Does anyone know the actual name of the colors, I'd love to 3d print something with it.
Thanks, doc
Purple is:
Hex: #4A0A5A
RGB: 74, 10, 90
CMYK: 17.8, 88.9, 0, 64.7
HSV: 288, 89, 35
Emerald Green is:
Hex: #0E9261
RGB 14, 146, 97
HSB 158, 90, 57
CMYK 90, 0, 34, 43
LAB 54, -45, 17
Hope this helps
12:44 “I’d like to congratulate you on successfully setting up your Acer computer…”
The moment an NPC actually acknowledges Clint’s quest of P/N and S/N lookups, CD and floppy imaging, bad sector allocating, waiting and retrying. 😂
Due to everyone regarding them as E-WASTE and there being NO COLLECTORS [in the mid 2000s and later], you would be AMAZED at how rare a common basic PC will become due to everyone collectively throwing them in the trash in the 90s and 00's and everyone regarding them as garden variety old junk. I just got a Gateway FX-series desktop for $30. You can not obtain this PC anywhere. It took me 6 years to find one and it's a total wreck but it's all complete, just in about 6 billion parts and missing the PSU. The original motherboard is in it which I am very lucky for, those are a $250 part alone.
It's kind of like how, in every era, the cars that become the rarest are the boring everyday cars that outsold most of the others at the time, because nobody cared enough to preserve them. You go to a car show and it's all 1970s muscle cars, a few Corvettes, maybe a few '50s and '60s boats; it's a special day if someone shows up with a Gremlin or a Pacer, because most of them ended up in demolition derbies because even the _junkyards_ didn't want to waste space on them.
@@stevethepocket I was just going to say about cars. I reckon there are now more Ladas in the USA than the U.K. despite hundreds of thousands being sold here new. Of course in the USA a Soviet car is a novelty, while here they were something you bought if you couldn't afford a Ford.
@@stevethepocket This is a great point, I drive a mid-90s Oldsmobile station wagon and it gets a ridiculous amount of attention because this once-mundane car is incredibly rare now, let alone in excellent condition like mine. It's far more unique and special to me than a more conventionally "exciting" car. Plus the boxy, low profile is virtually the opposite of modern automotive design.
I currently work at Best Buy and we go through nearly a gaylord a day of ewaste; primarily old computers and printers. It pains me as well how many crt tvs and monitors we recycle. Just going to get rarer and rarer.
@@SSJPokaLink Then start putting them into your car.
I’m 20 and got into retro computing recently, and a coworker at my job still had one of these in his basement, it was his first computer! It now has a new home and I’m in the process of restoring it fully to its original glory!
That’s awesome! I’m also 20 and into retro computing but mostly Macintosh stuff. I got a Macintosh SE for free from someone I know because he didn’t want to bother selling it and knew I’d give it a good home.
I expected to do some repairs on it but it ended up working just fine. So I bought it a mouse and keyboard and now I have a nice 80s desktop to mess around with.
I’m an old geezer and I think it’s very cool that young people are into this. I’m in my early 60s and was one of the first students at my college to get the first Mac. It is maybe hard to imagine now, but at the time it was literally like time travel science fiction how advanced it was to use compared to other PCs. But my first computer when I was still in high school was a TRS-80.
Seeing Pod struggle on a machine that's only 2 years old is a good reminder how fast processors generationally improved back then. Each new generation seemed to make the previous one completely obsolete.
MMX was a literal game changer.
@@stephenharris5532 hardly. Nothing (apart from Winmodems) actually used the extensions until the P1 was history, and the doubling of L1 cache was definitely useful, but still only added about as much speed as upgrading to the next speed tier would give. A P166MMX from early 1997 performed about the same a a P200 (non-MMX) and by Decenber of the same year would still have given you a slideshow in Quake II. Things only really started slowing down after the MHz/GHz race had ran out and development focused more on integrating memory controllers and adding cores. A 2005 machine was still usable in 2015, more so than a 1997 machine in 1999.
it's terrible cirrus logic crap! even windows has problem with drivers, errors with fonts and so on.
there was nvidia 128zx on market! remeber playing shogo mobile armour division on this.
only 4 y later 1st gpu with t&l -- geforce 256ddr (still got this -- elsa erazor x2)
These days every 2 years they get about 10% better at the same price point lol
I was surprised Clint didn't try and lower the settings though. At 26:38 at the bottom right it seems to have defaulted to the highest quality 😅(unless he did change them off-camera?)
Ahhh, I cut this out of a magazine back then… For the design. Thanks for making it come alive!
Oh hey there, my pleasure! Yeah this does seem like your kind of thing.
Thought of you as I was reading through my Frog Design books and seeing familiar products that they came up with, like the lovely scifi hifi: the Dual MN 8010.
My 2 favorite retro tech youtubers!
I watched this while waiting for my wife, she was having surgery today. Thanks for keeping me company
Hope everything went well and she’s recovering.
I'm a PhD historian.
Future historians that specialize their focus on computer technology will absolutely be watching your videos to incorporate into their research and I kid you not, you'll be in someone's footnotes and bibliography.
*IF* RUclips, the LGR channel, and these videos are still around in 2090.
how to make "you'll be a footnote in history" sound awesome :)
@@Leofwine I wouldn't be shocked if some kind of LGR box set would sell well, the audience is the type to buy that kind of thing, after all!
An LGR box set would be cool. You could have a disc for each series of LGR. But if Clint does this, for the Sim's disc he should only include his review of the base game, and then have each DLC review be a separate disc that collectors have to buy separately, each disc released a year apart, hehehe.
@@Leofwine I'm from the future, we have wholenet backups of the entire internet for every year starting from 2004. They've been kept in US' echelon and a private company in Switzerland. Every single thing you've ever done, said or photographed anywhere on any internet connected network exists in the RonnaBank quite literally forever. Be careful out there!
You are telling me that "Frog Design" designed a green PC? lol
Also that introduction video is so 90s, "Information Super Highway." wow
yes joke.
They seemed so hopeful for the future... If only they knew.
The "Information Super Highway" was one of Al Gore's favorite subjects. At the time people were using the name it wasn't clear what form it would take. Quite a lot of people thought both the service and content would be provided by Cable TV companies. Remember that Compuserve was originally a separate service to the internet.
Super open sewer. What a time to be alive.
The Windows 95 startup chime at 13:32 has never suited a machine better.
I WANT MY DAMN WINDOWS START UP SOUND BACK.
@@vedinthorn does windows 10 even have a startup and shutdown noise?
@@jimmysullivan6054 nope. And it's ridiculously hard to even find a program to help you set one up, and most don't do it right
In 1995 Microsoft was adding features you want, nowadays they just take them away 😄
If there was ever a video I was waiting for, it's this one, and I've been watching LGR for years. This (or very similar) was the first computer I had any experience with. It belonged to my grandmother. She was an Assembly programmer at IBM for a long time.
I can remember sitting on her lap when I was around 3-4 years old, while she used the machine. I also remember tanking the Windows install not long after I found myself with unsupervised access to it. lol. Sorry Grandma!
Clint, seriously, thank you. Really. More than I can put into words. Way more. This was an amazing walk down memory lane. That deep teal, man, it just brought the memories right to the surface. Makes me smile. Thank you man, if my Grandma was still with us, we'd both be smiling.
My pleasure to help bring on some happy memories, really glad you enjoyed this one :)
I had that same system as a kid! The tower version though. I still have the CDs for all those apps you showed, the CDs did come with the PC bundle originally. I can upload them to the internet archive but I'd assume they're already there. Infopedia blew my mind seeing it for the first time, I couldn't imagine a digital encyclopedia and wondered how so much data could fit on our PC. It aided with my school work so much vs. spending time in the library doing research the old timey way.
Please upload them if you are willing! As mentioned in the video, it looks for those _specific_ versions of several of the games and programs so the original discs are required to run them.
Do it.
Evokes memories of going into my older brother's room to play Quake and drink way too much coke
Simple days.
I still have my Quake CD Set and I still have not played the first disc to completion.
@@Ryan_Christopher Get going! You gotta defeat Shub-Niggurath and save mankind!
@12:37
It's so nice of the Black Mesa Transit System lady to help you setup your computer.
I saved a green monitor from e-waste in the early 2000's because it looked cool. Used it on the bench for testing until recently when the flyback blew. Loved the analog controls and speakers as it was connected to many systems on a daily basis.
Great vid as usual!
Thanks for your extremely wholesome videos! Watching them for years and you really helped me through depression. Greetings from Berlin (the one in Germany)!
Oh, God. I had completely blocked out those point and click games that really had no purpose and that was like a rush of nostalgia I was not ready for.
Clint, I find it hilarious that you have my first 2 computers. A similar green Aspire was my first computer. It was $1699 and has a 75mhz pentium. Second computer was that exact white Acer aspire tower in your other video with the AMD K6 233 processor!
Well, amazing! I wasn't aware that computer tech was that advanced by 1699... I'd have thought that the abacus still seemed a pretty neat idea around then; I guess I was wrong! 🤣🤣
Few years ago I've realized that PCs were never getting useless of obsolete. Each new PC we got just give us access to more software. While upgrading from 286 to 486 was huge, after 1 GHz CPU clock we got less and less. 1 GHz is important, because it was fast enough to emulate all the retro computers and consoles up to PS1 and N64.
The problem in the first was not the lack of software on our old 90's PCs, but the fact it was hard to get it. When few years ago I've restored my first 386SX PC I was blown away how capable it really was. I just didn't had the greatest games and software for it back in the day.
Pentium 100 MHz is a wonderful machine. It can run all great DOS games at good speed. It will also run some of the Windows 95 games too. It will run DOOM and Quake and these games had so many mods, that they delivered more content than you had time to explore.
Very true, so long as the essentials are there it’ll serve you years more than you could ever expect. Can’t imagine if today’s internet (along with the speeds) was available back then, we might have just worn all the computers down with the amount of content we could peruse on them lol
Now this might be a little unrelated since it’s about a modern game, but I have been thoroughly enjoying cyberpunk 2077 against all odds of it running at all on my system. It is a gaming laptop from nearly 10 years ago now, with 4th gen i5 and mobile nvidia gpu. It somehow manages a fairly consistent 30 fps at 1080p, even though it’s very clearly underspecced even for the minimum requirements. I had little hope it would even run the game, let alone have a decent experience playing it! There are hiccups certainly, it chugs the whole time but I’m more than happy to accept whatever it can do.
I did have a chance to use a modern powerhouse of a computer, and it was clearly quicker than this laptop of mine regardless of what you did with it, giving you almost instant responses but at its core it’s hardly any different. There’s very little this new machine can do that mine cannot no matter what, and even then it’s hardly relevant to me. Older machines have plenty of life left in them, just give them a chance before writing them off
And really, most of the reason for why at least late 90s hardware can't really be used as a daily driver today is bloat and stupid frameworks upon frameworks upon frameworks that simply don't exist on Windows 9x.
It's not like transmitting text over the internet is an entirely new thing that needs 32 Gigs of RAM and 16 CPU cores running at 2.21 Jiggawatts. I suppose 4k video streaming would be a bit difficult on a Pentium III, but a great portion of what people do on their computers should be doable on a Machine that's about a quarter of a century old.
The oldest Machine that I own that I would consider to be usable as a daily driver is a 2008 Thinkpad. Upgraded with an SSD and maxed out on RAM, admittedly, but still: Most of the system is 16 years old, and it does not feel much different than a brand new lower end laptop. Imagine using a machine from 1978 in 1994.
My previous desktop lasted so long that I had to replace the button cell on the motherboard... _twice._ I'd never had to do that with a computer before.
Oh, my 2009 iMac came to the rescue when my (newer) MacBook signed off.
It couldn't access RUclips, but browsing the digital collection of the British Library (just weeks before the cyber attack) went well.
It's because the advancement of tech was happening so fast, a PC would become obsolete within 2 years. The pinnacle of technology has peaked now which is why you don't see new desktop pc's anymore, only retardyphones.
Almost looks like an early Silicon Graphics computer.
i see it
What an insult to the gorgeous case designs of SGI machines 😂
If the 90s was a color = Green/Teal + Purple = Smile
There were a lot of pinks and pink-red thrown in too lol.
the "Vanna White" Hand modeling, during the Acer intro video, was on point! haha
This was our first family computer in 1996. Bought from Montgomery Ward, if I remember. I didn't realize how much ACE Desktop was burned into my brain. That machine saw a ton of Descent, Tyrian, Jazz... I even played with TripMaker a lot. I also remember one of the pack-ins being a sample issue of a CD-ROM magazine, with an impressive (for the time) multimedia preview of Star Trek: Voyager... totally a selling point to 11-year-old Trekkie me.
the voice recognition is kinda funny. because back then it wasn't good, but you could trust it because things weren't connected to the internet 24/7. now it works much better, but there's a good chance everything you say gets uploaded to a server at Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon or some other corporation
100% chance that a tech company is storing everything you ask it. Even things you don't ask it, because your phone is always listening
Lmao a tech company would need petabytes to store everyone's voice commands please stop spreading miss information 🙄
@@kevinbutton4580 you misread what i said. i never said that every little thing gets long-term *stored* on external servers, just that it gets uploaded to one in many cases for processing, which companies don't even make a secret of. but who knows what exactly they do with the data between upload and deletion. also in some cases, things you say actually *do* get stored, as Louis Rossmann found out at some point when he discovered that his Google account had recordings of things he had said to his phone for the purpose of voice to text input
You can say water is wet and someone will say it's dry. And it's spelt 'misinformation'.
@@jr2904They do listen but it’s not nonstop and they don’t save it all. What they mostly want are keywords so they know what ads to show.
The callback to Computer Reset.. 😢
Just seeing your thumbnails always reminds me of how excited I was to work at Best Buy in the mid to late 90s!
This computer was my family computer for a long time, then became my first ever computer. I love it so much. Green might be my favorite color because of this computer.
I was genuinely always impressed with my acer laptops. They were way more robust than expected, and the reasons 2 of them failed were: my kid poured a glass of milk on it and didn't turn it off until it died (I was able to get the HDD) and the other one had a removable GPU (imagine that! In a laptop!) that probably needed reflowing (I was able to 'fix' it for a few minutes using a hair dryer). The last one isn't dead yet
The few Acer laptops I had in the 2010's all were fully alive, but their ABS plastic housings crumbled apart
Man, this era of PCs is my home. By 16yo I saved up a whopping 1000 German Mark and bought my first fully owned Pentium 90MHz PC. Not some retail machine though, all hand picked parts self-assembled. I was SO proud! Eventually added a Sound Blaster AWE 32 Gold and some ELSA brand GFX if memory serves me well.
These were the days where you'd "shut down into DOS" your Win95 OS to be able to play most of the games available. The birth years of Glide (later OpenGL) and DirectX, where games would need to specifically support these, but otherwise were fine running entirely in software mode. Awww man, thanks for this trip down memory lane.
I had a purple acer tower from around 1996 that I foolishly donated. I hope it went to a good home!
it's not foolish to pass on things we're done with. "it'll be worth something some day" is hoarder-think.
This, the Compaq presario and IBM Black aptiva were my dream machines just for their aesthetics alone.
This was my first ever PC I bought. Got it at Best Buy and had Dark Forces, Descent, Mech Warrior 2, a CH Throttle and Flight Stick, a Forte Cyberpuck, and some speakers that I can't remember the name of. Wish I had hung on to it. Loved the built in voice recognition.
I think this computer looks good even today, I like it
although it looks more like a game console than a computer
This is, or is almost, IDENTICAL to our first family computer!!!! Wow! I recall ours also having a phone to attached to the monitor and came bundled with Ring Central. I can still remember that new plastic smell on Christmas morning! This machine saw a TON of Duke 3D back in the day! That, and some shareware version of Terminal Velocity. Great video!!!
Mine may have been one model newer. I recall ours having the soundcard and modem together on a combo card. That was always a bitch getting the drivers to work with that setup
Great memories
I have one of these monitors, and it has the handset and cradle....
I never tire of old OS startup sounds. 95/98 are my favorites
That welcome FMV is really something...
gotta love 90s welcome to your new pc stuff
It’s like “WELCOME TO THE FUTURE”
This computer looks like what they'd buy for props in a movie that was supposed to be set in the distant future of 2009.
And the operating environment on the screen would be some Lawnmower Man-looking schlock animation while the actor is just randomly typing away.
And the text would be 24 point so that it was readable by the audience!
Looks like one of those all-in-one TV-VCRs schools always had 😂
I had a black TV-VCR in the early 2000s - it died in 2003 and ate my 101 Dalmatians cassette.
I wasn't amused, it was my favourite movie.
I had a black TV-VCR in the early 2000s - it died in 2003 and ate my 101 Dalmatians cassette.
I wasn't amused, it was my favourite movie.
In a sea of beige boxes, this was like a flashing neon sign
I bought one of these in 1996 with a cyrix 6x86 PR166 (120MHz)! I was a senior in high school and I bought it for college with the idea that it was not just a beige box and it was kind of integrated so it would take up less space on the tiny desks in dorm rooms; laptops made no sense to buy at this time unless you had tons of extra money to spend on less useful machines. It got me through my first two years of college. I played so much quake on it LOL.
This older couple took me shopping for a computer and i told them to buy this one. I upgraded the ram for them later. Never had any problems with it.
The first computer I ever played games on and SOLD me on the idea of PC's. Completely AWESOME.
To think, the last Tower I purchased brand new was an ACER Aspire. I in fact started my channel using that very machine. We often lament about the PC brands and badges that have failed over the decades, and we forget to celebrate the ones that succeeded and continue to this day. Great video Clint. Thanks as always.
We had these at my first ever job. With the matching screen and mouse/keyboard. My own workstation was an SGI Personal Iris though, and my home PC was a custom job. I don't think anybody used anything other than 320x200 for gaming back then, at least not in the real world. With perhaps something like Solitaire or Mahjong as the exceptions.
My very first computer (mine 100%) was a Acer Aspire Tower I guess the second generation because it had a Celeron 333Mhz MMX 32mb Ram 4Gb Seagate and an Ati Rage Onboard2Mb with a booklet full of software and games. Man! Those were the days. P. S. LGR is the Best Chanel for me.
I remember seeing these at my local Best Buy and wishing I had the cash for one. I also remember biking past said Best Buy on my way to work.
Wow. This was our first family PC. I remember playing Starcraft on this rig.
My highschool had these in the library in the late 90s. They ran Win95 with Novell Netware. Just browsing the late 90s web and using Groupwise email was a real chore for these machines.
ZOMG! We had this PC when I was young- 166MHz with a 1.9gb hard drive- we didn't have the matching monitor though :( Sooo many hours playing SimCity 2000
11:00 This is the only reason why I love Acer PCs back in the day. They always had some sort of software you could use right out of the box. I still remembered back in 2009 (I'm a millennial) that we purchased our first home PC (sounds contradictory but home computer is a different thing from PC) and we got a thing called "Acer e-Infotainment" alongside with the PC itself. It has many software including games! I played crap-tonne out of it.
I have an old Acer laptop (4th gen intel) that still works perfectly. It has been on almost 24/7 since I got it. Rock solid.
being a 90's kid but also in general i just love your videos man. Smile every time a new one is out. Cheers
My first PC, although I had the purple tower version. Got it for $500 working at the Good Guys, it was old stock hidden at the service center. Thank for the memories.
I LOVE the look of this pc!! Somehow I completely missed this back in the day!
Yeah I had never seen one.
Reminds me of the hand me down monitor my dad gave me for my first PC build, running Win95 at 640x480 because that was all the monitor supported.
I had a Cyrix M2 "233" chip and it played games about as slowly as this, but it was mine, I built it, and I loved it!
I had one of these as my first "real" computer for college, which replaced my IBM PS/2. I admit it: the looks got me. In a crowded field of off-white boxy tanks, this computer felt different and modern. I also remember that this was when "Pentium" meant something to people--as a cutting edge technology label. My machine lasted for quite a long time, too, well into grad school.
This was my first 'modern computer', upgrading for a 386. We got the 75mhz p1 on Chirstmas day of 1994 or 1995. I would pay entirely too much money for this green monstrosity.
28:55 This really is a very good point. We complain about hardware prices now, but here I am running a 6 year old CPU and am still able to play the latest AAA titles with more than acceptable performance. We forget what things were like when PC performance was doubling every few years, and game developers always targeted the latest and greatest specs.
I got the Aspire tower when I was 6. It was a welcome upgrade from the Tandy 1000HX. Especially when we got Dial-up. I was on both of those machines the way kids are glued to tablets today. Now I am custom watercooling and overclocking modern hardware, but have a decent Win98 rig for retro. I went from Win95 to XP, so it is nice to experience the platform I missed. Plus my hardware does DOS gaming well enough, or Win95 if I want to install it. Thanks for this time machine of a video:)
Oh man, hit me right in the soul with this one. I don't have the space or money to get into retro computing physically right now, but if I ever do this is THE computer for me. EVERY visit to a computer/electronics store in the mid/late 90s with my parents was 1. Go take a look at the computers and games in general 2. Go find the Acer and play Jazz Jackrabbit. Acer was the Jazz machine. I've since learned that its stats were kind of mediocre even for the time, but its look and its pack-ins formed the dream of modern computing for me as a kid. Family never go one, though the HP pavilion we did get was also pretty fun (and may very well have had better stats).
A new LGR video always makes a good Friday morning.
Had an Acer Aspire 2771 at one point, an upgrade from an IBM PS2. Still remember some of it's specs: Quantum Bigfoot 6.1 GB hard drive, 16GB EDO RAM and Pentium 200MMX processor! It lasted a long time into early 200s until we moved and donated it along with a few other systems (Moved out of State).
Oh wow that hardware design is gorgeous. Love the shapes, love the color, everything.
Another awesome review Clint. Would love if you ever did a video on the 20th Anniversary "TAM" Macintosh released in 97'. I remember my dad having one of these in his marketing office but unfortunately it was stolen - would be super cool to see what that thing was actually capable of!!
Ayyyye! I found one of these in the garbage around 2004. Definitely one of the coolest looking finds I'd come across.
I realize with this video that my brain did not connect modern Acer, with fancy Laptops like the Zenbook Duo, with Acer of the 1990's with the blue/red square logo and random desktops that competed with companies they later purchased, like Gateway 2000 and Packard Bell.
Most of these big brand computers were either business or lower end home computers. In this era, there were no gaming laptops and if you were buying a gaming desktop you were going to build it or have it built by a specialty store. For that reason, the mass market computers were usually more basic.
I didnt have the computer, but this monitor was the one I used on my computer for basically my entire childhood.
I had a gray one, and the sound blaster lived through many other computers
love these, really remind me of the Silicon Graphics workstations but more toned down
I had that PC! It was sweet, I wish I still had one!
Clint, I'd love to see you rip the guts out of the case and see how much upgraded hardware you could stuff into it to make it a more modern system!
Ah, 1994/95 my favorite childhood years. ☕️☺️👍💯
AWESOME video Mr. LGR! This was my first computer back in 96/97 when my parent's upgraded the shared family PC. I had the green Aspire version with the actual phone attachment on the side (land-line) and all my friend's thought it was super interesting. I also remember swapping out the HDD for a 5GB version and installing Windows 98 (barely) but running into a TON of issues with the built-in modem / soundcard combo. I believe it was an IBM MWave brand. What a PAIN to try and get Windows 98 installed on that thing I remember.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane, this was also the time I discovered Tyrian! Need to fire up the ol' DosBox and see if I can relive some of those nostalgic 90s days!
The nostalgia trip you just took me on. Thank you!
Love the Popular Mechanics spread being styled like the then-new Win95 interface. It was so new to so many!
Such a beautiful machine. It has that retro futuristic look from the 1990s that I adore.
That is a bold choice of plastic furniture color; big Little Big Adventure 2 vibes from it! Thanks for another fun video, Cliff, wasn't expecting a Tyrian cameo certainly!
Re: 29:10 100% agreed! I didn't get sustained 60fps in my games until well into the 2000s. The games weren't the only contributions to that either. Immature drivers, new technologies, wacko experimentations (e.g. Kyro3D), and OS overhead all made gaming on PC an uneven experience for decades. I think it was finally the release of DX 9 that started a process of standardization that finally saw realization by DX 9.0c (~2006). By that time we had a solid expectation of 60fps using modern high-end hardware.
You playing that racing game that slowly actually something I would put up with as a kid. I remember Half Life some parts were like a slide show. I had a 24 mb system with a 4mb 3dfx card on it and it would play Half Life like 80% but some parts were painful like the one where the tentacles from the ground came up.
I had that pc!!!! The first one with cd for me.
Wow, thats one of the 1st PC's I ever had! Diablo was great on it!
That machine+kidpix+magic mush= fine evening
The tower version of this in the green color was the first computer we had at home. It led me down the path into working in tech before I was even in high school.
OMG I loved that airport game! I would play it hours on end
It's available on steam if you want to relive it
I had this exact computer as my first PC when I was in the Navy. Upgraded several times, to Pentium 133, 128MB RAM, SoundBlaster AWE32 Gold, and Voodoo 3D.
It's beautiful.
I screamed when you made the Computer Reset video and saw that Aspire left on the ground... I want one so bad, but they are so rare nowadays. I have Pentium's and 486's and everything in between... But I miss that old thing... Mine had a Pentium 133, later upgradeed to a 200, a Voodoo, 64MB RAM and a Seagate 4GB HDD and it was a nice PC. Later I got a Pentium II 333 with a Riva TnT and my brother got that Acer... Then, a few years on, my brother sold it for 25€ and I almost killed him when I found out...
A weapon from a more civilized age...before the dark times...
You always find the coolest stuff. Checks off the nostalgia box because it's tech I remember seeing at CompUSA as a kid but you also give a different perspective by explaining the details behind the tech.
18:13 - take a trip by the map from 1995. :D
Uncle had the vertical tower version of this system and just remember all the multimedia capabilities compared to my Packard Bell at the time. The software bundle was awesome too!
Not surprised you used one in a church. They were very holey.
Ayyyy
I KNEW this was coming following your vintage computer festival footage. Congrats, you got it!
Look how spoiled we are nowadays with the bezel on monitors and TVs, because that one is thicc.
Clint, I got to see both you and this computer at VCF SW. I saw this PC sitting on the table and tried to make an offer on it, but Matthew wasn't at the booth when I was there. By the time I came back by, I had already thoroughly filled my car with other vintage computer swag, so I didn't have the opportunity to try and purchase it. When I saw this video pop up, I started wondering, hmm is that the same PC I saw at VCF? And sure enough, you confirmed it. I am so happy that it ended up in your capable hands, and I thank you for giving it a good home and making a wonderful video on it besides. And thank you for talking to me at the show!
That airport game was one of the first games I ever played! There’s this luggage conveyor belt mini game in there I spent hours on. I still have the disc but nothing to play it on yet.
I have been play Some PC games on this computer in the consumer electronic shopping mall when I was 17, and yes, it’s part of my childhood and you brought the memory back for me! Thanks a lot!
I am a Taiwanese and have been 46 years old, so you know, it’s amazing, even more than I think!
Indeed, it’s the machine which has been abandoned, but you are trying to preserve the memory for everyone who tried to recount the beauty of the old memory!