I found this on an old tape I had and just had to upload it. sorry for the beyond terrible quality, but you probably won't find this whole episode anywhere else =
And now everyone needs to upgrade their phone every year or two, even though any phone on the market now could probably obliterate all of the computers in this video combined.
@@justandhansback then they were just happy to get something somewhat acceptable and we're happy with it. Things like this were new at the time so people would ACTUALLY get excited, go out to the store, shop for what they want, and come back and be happy for months or years. Today, people sit home downloading one app after the other and use it for 2 minutes and then forget about it and leave it stuck on their device never deleting it either r
I used to work for an old software vendor, Egghead Software. For a while on the floor, our top computer was a "true blue" IBM 386. Next to that we had an Apple IIGS, then a 286 and finally an old 8088 XT machine. We then got a new 486 machine, and the speed increase was impressive. The price was high, but some people would spend the money just to play Wing Commander. And the difference in animation was quite noticeable. And of course, if you wanted more speed you'd upgrade from 1MB to 4 MB. And if you really wanted more power you'd upgrade to 8 MB, but for rich people, you might as well go all the way to a whopping 16 MB! Heck Windows 3.1 and MS Office ran at light speed on a 486dx2 50MHz with 16 MB. The ThunderBoard sound card was an option, but SoundBlaster was the superior product. I think a 30 MB hard drive was about the standard, but again if you had lots of money you could get 250MB. And that software, wow! Egghead sold all that software: Stacker 2.0 which just slowed down your computer to a crawl. MS-Dos 5.0 upgrade was a huge seller. The memory manager. Norton Desktop was a big seller too.
The 486 when it came out was quite a revolutionary jump. Because the cost jump was also fairly significant the SX and DX versions were interesting. The 486 came with the math co-processor built in. Prior to that you purchased the 8087, 287, 387 etc separately. The 486 chips that failed the co-processor functions had that portion of the chip disabled and were badged cheaper SX variants. The DX was a full function CPU. If you purchased the "co-processor" for the SX, you in essence got a fully functioning DX instead that would completely disable the other chip when connected to its socket.
My first computer was a 486 with a whopping 340 MB hd and 8 megabytes of ram. I paid through the nose thinking it would take a while to become obsolete but it only took about a year.
@@raven4k998 I had a 260MB HDD on mine, could only have 2-3 'big' games on it at once -- it was like a roster system, uninstall one or more games to install others.
If you had a 340 MiB HD, then you obviously bought the 486 quite late. When the 486 was new, 20 to 40 MiB HDs were normal and 340 MiB were not available at all.
And it's only 240p. It could look great with a proper transfer (not saying this transfer is bad) and a high-bitrate/high-res upload to RUclips. Even doubling the framerate would make it look better.
That's because the 240p videos are really 240p. In this case they were able to intermix the pixels like old tv sets would do it to get the picture more gradient => less fragmented.
I remember 486 from 386 was really big jump, allowed doom style games, which consoles didnt run. Difference was very big. 386 games were blocky, mostly 2d games. Wolfenstein isnt so impressive, but Doom is. Ofc until maybe 2005 it was all about getting faster hardware, limits were always there, not even programmers could bypass everything. Since 2005 and dualcore era, programmer skills are more important than cpu raw power. I thought that pentium 60 was insane improvement and very very expensive computer, maybe 4000$ then. Looking now, it is minor improvement over 486dx's with decent ram. But this era from 90s to 2000s was critical what hardware trick programmers used, leaving older cpus behind just coz instruction set limitation. This was era before proper 3d cards, so cpu was everything. Since first Geforce card came, cpu could get a breather in games sometimes. Intel was very skillful in securing its cpu "monopoly" by instruction set support and other tricks. Competitors were just way worse, still more affordable but not cheap like now, 80$ cpu is still decent.
I remember trading my 386SX motherboard/RAM for a used 486DX4-100, costing me $100. Of all the upgrades I've done over the decades, this one sticks in my memory.
In 1994, the first PC I ever built was a 486DX2-80 with 8mb of RAM and an Orchid VLB video card (and original SB16). Oh, the memories not just of building it, and the gaming, but the joy I experienced continually reconfiguring it - DOS, Windows, OS/2, DesqView, sometimes all of the above in multi-boot config with System Commander 3. I was running dial-up BBSes on the same system I was simultaneously playing DOOM (OS/2 was downright miraculous).
@@TruthLivesNow I had a VESA card, it was only 1MB but I had one in like 1991 so it was pretty decent for it's time for home computing. It could do 16 Million colors etc with my SVGA Samsung Syncmaster 3ne.
Clearly everyone does, I answered you on an 8086 a few years ago from the future at the time and its only just appearing now, I dreampt of a day when there will be a 586, but alas, that's just a dream..
That one organization going with OS/2 was understandable to have a stable PC network. In the engineering company I was working at back then, with Windows 3.1, it was a PC network headache for the IT crew. Many-a-times the laser printers wouldn't work due to network issues. So with that, I got my own laser printer for my PC so I could continue with production work while everyone else sat idle. When my colleagues made an issue about why I had a printer they didn't, informing them I paid for the printer out of my pocket had them get quiet. The printer went with me when I left the company.
Its sad to see back then that they were talking about moving from Ethernet to fiber optics and more than 20 years later we still have not made the move.
+jwdickieson I was thinking about this the other day while watching a video about a raspberry pi.The ethernet connector takes up a lot of room on the board.It's 2015 isn't there a better way?
It depends on what country you are in. We have full fibre optic internet throughout the whole of the UK (even in the rural areas) as our government directly funded it.
I just looked up John Wharton. Very sad to hear that he passed away in 2018. I enjoyed his talks. He was also on a panel talking about Gary Kildall. I was kind of annoyed that he was cut short as he was talking about Gary. I also remember him at a famous talk that Linus Torvalds gave. John asked Linus about the x86. Life is too short.
Fun fact: up to and including the 80486 and first generation Pentium CPUs(60-200MHz) had no level 2 cache on-die. It was supplied by static RAM chips around the CPU. This they never tell you but these machines being demoed have a huge amount of cache making it fast. Consumer 486 machines had no or little cache making them slow as hell, certainly no faster than a well-cached 386.
an x58 based pc from 2008 (with upgrades) is still a pretty good gaming pc today. imagine using a pc from 1993 in 2008 *even with all the upgrades*. The 1993 computer was a joke by 1996.
I would love to take a 132 core Apple M2 Ultra Mac Studio (size of small dinner salad), with just 192GB of RAM and an 8TB SSHD back to your time 2 years ago! 😂
It really was, so much stuff changed so quickly. Computers got more powerful and got nice color displays, and the internet became more of a household reality. Sure things are changing these days, but it's more of a progress of technology than the revolution that personal computers were.
I had a 486DX33 in 1993, with 8MB RAM, a 250MB harddisk, a 1MB videocard and a double speed CDROM drive. That videocard could do do 1024x768 resolution. Only my monitor couldn't handle that, and limited the resolution to 800x600. Most games ran in 320x240 though, and some in 640x480 which was like super high definition. It was a beast of a machine! I still have it, for nostaglia. Haven't hooked it up for years though.
@@ivo215 If you ever crank it up, put it on the end of a long extension cord, preferably outside. Electronics age out. I'm typing this in 2024. So, that's a 31 year old box. Solder joints, capacitors..... Heck PCB boards can degrade.
@@hulksmash8159 People back then thought they were close to virtual reality applications. Here we are in 2022 and we also think we are close. For me the Quest 2 is a blurry mess, I can't even imagine how it must had looked back then.
I remember buying a high end Pentium 133 back in early 1995, it was made in 1994 but I got it on sale since the P166 came out. it had 16MB of RAM, 2 1GB Seagate medalist HDDs, a Trident 1MB card, and a PCI Turtle beach card (back when turtle beach was first starting out) it was the baby AT form factor with 4ISA and 3 PCI, I still have that machine and it works fine to this day. It was made by CompuPartner, a Swedish company that left north america in 1996.
Yes, it was really the way my friend told this story. The reason they had to special ordered this 24MB SIMM was due to the demand to a CAD application that was loaded onto a underpowered PC (486 I believe), and the teacher demanded more memory!!!! As a result, we decided on the 24MB SIMM that would total 32MB on his CAD system.
I think the 486 era was one of the most innovative eras in computer hardware. So many ideas tried back then are still used in computers to an extent today. The CPU/Video board is basically the same idea as I3/I5 A8 cpu/gpu chips are today. Removable drive bays are still used in many desktop HP/Dells today.
Watching these old series just reminded me about my old acer 8088 with 8kb ram and dual 5.25" floppy drives.. didnt even have a hard drive coz they were like $10,000 lol
Luv how Cheifet went out of his way in every intro to make it as hard on himself as possible. I would never be able to give that little flawless speech in a once-every-ten-minutes background situation.
my first PC was an old 1986 IBM AT/XT with a 10MB HDD. then I got a used 386SX, then in 1995 I got a 1994 Pentium 133 on sale (they were selling last years stock for cheap) and it came with 8MB of RAM, CD-ROM 4x (upgraded to a 52x in 1997), 2 1GB Seagate medalist HDDs, and a 3.5" and a 5.25" floppy drive. it came with Windows 3.1, Win95 wasn't out yet. I upgraded to Windows 95 in 97, then to windows me in 2000, which it still has on it to this day. it still runs fine.
I remember the 50MHz DX had problems with overheating, which led to the clock-doubled DX2 versions. I still have my chunky old laptop with a 100MHz "DX4". It was actually clock-tripled, and I never knew why they called it DX4 instead of DX3?
2 years late, haha... but yeah, the way she says her surname is odd for sure. As if she suddenly got some kind of stage fright and forgot how to pronounce her surname. 😀😄
Windows 3.1 and Dos 6.22 were the standard operating systems of the early 1990s. Computer technology really accelerated from 1997 to 1999. The comp industry came out with many amazing things, like 3d accelerators(3dfx, Riva TNT, STB velocity, etc), high powered processors(Pentium 2s/3s, Pentium 4s, & Athlons), hard drives became much bigger(10 gbs 20 gbs, 40 gbs), and DVD-ROM drives were released in the late 1990s. Computers also got cheaper in the late 1990s.
QuantumBraced Until about the Pentium 4 days, my personal computer was a 386DX with 4MB of RAM. IDE was a revelation for me when it came around, it was *much* faster than the MFM card I had been using. Went strait from a Type 0665 IBM drive of 44MB to a 273MB Maxtor drive, both of which I still have and both of which still work correctly to this day.
Update BIOS using a floppy disk, makes me wonder if those things had a least error check redundancy to prevent problems if not done right. Beside the normal parity check that's.
well. Thats no prophecy. that are the logical steps of developing microchips. Shrtink everything and put more inside of it. It will be faster. thats like i said, no prophecy, but logics.
I remember back in 1992 -- 386's were still common then, in fact I bought a 386sx notebook PC that year -- a co-worker was pontificating that a 386 was all anyone would ever need! Sounds like a joke but people actually used to say things like that, every step of the way.
I was in high school when they came out, I loved the idea at the time as well! (ended up with a 586 by the time i could afford to upgrade from the old 386 tho) (wish i had spent the extra on a pentium)
My first computer was a 486dx4 100 8mb ram and a 120mb hdd with dos on it. Was a beast for playing games in 1994. As a bonus it ran windows 95 no problem when that came out in 95. Only problem was the first copy of windows 95 that was released was like 45 floppy disks. Not on cd.
@Kamil Niewiadomski Before the Pentium MMX and the Motorola 68040 (but with the exception of some 486's), home desktop CPU's didn't need special cooling at all, not even heatsinks.
I've never seen any processor newer than a 486 DX2 without a heatsink. 486 SX/DX yes and the first two Pentium models (60/66 MHz), but after that it just never happened.
VR has got to be one the slowest progressing technologies to get to to where we are today.... I remember hearing it's coming since I was 12 years old lol....and it looks like they were working on it before that!
Pentiums didn't became popular until they hit the 100MHz mark. Before then, 486 CPUs running at up to 133MHz could pretty much match pentiums in performance while being cheaper. After Pentium hit the 100 MHz mark it became "the undisputed king of the arena", the competition consisting in AMD K5 and Cyrix 6x86 were late to the market and slow. It wasn't until AMD launched the K6 that Pentium got some real competition.
Stewart asked the same question with the 8088->268->386->486->Pentium etc. Same thing when upgrading every OS. The haircuts are still stuck in the 70's for some reason.
I paid 600 for a 16MB 72 pin simm in 97, it was the largest capacity available at the time, there was 2 modules in the package.(it was on sale at the time because people were moving over to SDRAM DIMMS on new motherboards, so EDO RAM was starting to get obsolete.
Intel had to recall ~900.000 motherboards powered by the i820 chipset which pissed off the OEMs and allowed VIA to take the title of No.1 chipset manufacturer. (Google "i820 chipset saga" for some fun reading) They launched the 1.33GHz P-III and had to recall it shortly after due to problems, rushed the P4 to the market before it was finished, it was very expensive and couldn't beat the existing AMD Thunderbirds and Athlon XP until it reached the 2GHz mark.
4:12 Milliseconds & seconds rather than days. This is the main reason the job market has changed so much, so fast. The last 30 years are like no other in history. My first CPU was a Z80, then an 8088, 286, 386sx, 386, 486 then I went AMD until the i3 - i7 What changes!
There were quite a few especially in the early days: National Semiconductor, IBM, Texas Instruments, NEC, NexGen (later aquired by AMD), etc. The ones that survived the post 486 era or appeared in the post 486 era were: Cyrix (later aquired by VIA), Transmeta, IDT and VIA.
To be fair though, these guys probably assumed we'd have flying cars by now. I doubt they'd be that impressed with today's computers given the age we live in.
Cyrix Cx486DX2-80 used to be the cpu that everyone wanted. They were way cheaper than intel. 4 mb ram 80mb Hdd with Dos 6 and win 3.11 14.4k modem was my first internet machine in 1993. Internet was $5 per hour.
Computer Chronicles was the tech show that set the standard for all tech shows that came after it. We wouldn't have G4TV if not for shows like CC. They used to show this on PBS on Saturdays around 10AM where I live and I never missed it. Does anyone know if it's ever been released on DVD?
I remember playing the Quake demo on a 486 with software rendering (long after the introduction of the Pentium, mind you) and while it wasn't pretty, it was certainly playable. It was a heck of a chip for its time but was made horribly, _laughably_ obsolete within just a few years.
Наука
thanks to progress we can do what used to take minutes in milliseconds, and spend the time we just gained watching youtube videos about old CPUs
LOL, so much for progress :D
thanks to multitasking prograss i can fap to porn and watch this parallel.
😂😂😂👌👌👌
Laugh in one channel and cry in another as well😃
And now everyone needs to upgrade their phone every year or two, even though any phone on the market now could probably obliterate all of the computers in this video combined.
“We need VR at at least 12 FPS to be practical” 😂
I'll get the bucket ready.
And you'd be paying almost 10 RTX4090's for the pleasure.
Watching stuff about 80's and 90's computer tech is super comfy
Well, 60's, 70's and 80's for my part. After 1990, it started get out of hand :)
"you need about 12fps and the 486 50mhz processor has made that a reality" on VR
Christ, 12fps on vr would make me nauseous
It makes you wonder how long you could operate one of those before getting sick. We now need at least 60 FPS to remain somewhat comfortable
@@justandhansback then they were just happy to get something somewhat acceptable and we're happy with it. Things like this were new at the time so people would ACTUALLY get excited, go out to the store, shop for what they want, and come back and be happy for months or years. Today, people sit home downloading one app after the other and use it for 2 minutes and then forget about it and leave it stuck on their device never deleting it either r
@@justandhans Uh, "now"? It's not like that just happened recently.
It is insane today see these guys talking about virtual reality in a i486 PC.
3GB in an era of 250MB hard drives was darned impressive!!
It was for tracking political contributions. They have since upped their game.
250MB? even most high capacity drives were around 100MB in '89
@@Kennephone maybe I was thinking of '92/'93 (when I bought a system with a 250MB HDD).
I used to work for an old software vendor, Egghead Software. For a while on the floor, our top computer was a "true blue" IBM 386. Next to that we had an Apple IIGS, then a 286 and finally an old 8088 XT machine. We then got a new 486 machine, and the speed increase was impressive. The price was high, but some people would spend the money just to play Wing Commander. And the difference in animation was quite noticeable. And of course, if you wanted more speed you'd upgrade from 1MB to 4 MB. And if you really wanted more power you'd upgrade to 8 MB, but for rich people, you might as well go all the way to a whopping 16 MB! Heck Windows 3.1 and MS Office ran at light speed on a 486dx2 50MHz with 16 MB. The ThunderBoard sound card was an option, but SoundBlaster was the superior product. I think a 30 MB hard drive was about the standard, but again if you had lots of money you could get 250MB.
And that software, wow! Egghead sold all that software: Stacker 2.0 which just slowed down your computer to a crawl. MS-Dos 5.0 upgrade was a huge seller. The memory manager. Norton Desktop was a big seller too.
you ready to upgrade to a 386 or you going hole hog to 486??🤣
I miss Egghead.
The 486 when it came out was quite a revolutionary jump. Because the cost jump was also fairly significant the SX and DX versions were interesting. The 486 came with the math co-processor built in. Prior to that you purchased the 8087, 287, 387 etc separately. The 486 chips that failed the co-processor functions had that portion of the chip disabled and were badged cheaper SX variants. The DX was a full function CPU. If you purchased the "co-processor" for the SX, you in essence got a fully functioning DX instead that would completely disable the other chip when connected to its socket.
The 486SX was introduced to kill the AMD 386DX-40 just as 386SX was introduced to kill other manufacturer's 286s which ran at 16 MHz.
@@okaro6595 Both is true.
My first computer was a 486 with a whopping 340 MB hd and 8 megabytes of ram. I paid through the nose thinking it would take a while to become obsolete but it only took about a year.
you poor thing 340 meg hard disk you must have been crying for space real quick with that tiny old drive back then
@@raven4k998
I actually paid big bucks extra for the bigger drive option. 🤦
@@raven4k998 I had a 260MB HDD on mine, could only have 2-3 'big' games on it at once -- it was like a roster system, uninstall one or more games to install others.
If you had a 340 MiB HD, then you obviously bought the 486 quite late. When the 486 was new, 20 to 40 MiB HDs were normal and 340 MiB were not available at all.
Bill Gates said that a 486 would be good enough until the late 90s.
For a taped video, this is actually exceptional quality.
And it's only 240p. It could look great with a proper transfer (not saying this transfer is bad) and a high-bitrate/high-res upload to RUclips. Even doubling the framerate would make it look better.
Simon Christensen
Usually 240p looks like a bad LEGO animation.
Then again, we've seen 1080p videos that make THIS one look high-def. :)
That's because the 240p videos are really 240p. In this case they were able to intermix the pixels like old tv sets would do it to get the picture more gradient => less fragmented.
georgef551 depends on the bitrate
While the video might look good, the audio was hella compressed. Watchable, but not great.
Very impressive. I have a desperate need to get the the power of the 486 right now.
I remember playing Doom on my 486 dx with 4mb of ram :]
486 dx 2x 66mhz 16mb ram, 4xcdrom,hdd 407,win 3.q up to win 95.soundblaster 32.
Wolf3d,doom,doom2,duke3;...those sweet times :)
I remember upgrading that to 8mb and a 1GB hard drive! Oh the power!!
I remember 486 from 386 was really big jump, allowed doom style games, which consoles didnt run. Difference was very big. 386 games were blocky, mostly 2d games. Wolfenstein isnt so impressive, but Doom is. Ofc until maybe 2005 it was all about getting faster hardware, limits were always there, not even programmers could bypass everything. Since 2005 and dualcore era, programmer skills are more important than cpu raw power. I thought that pentium 60 was insane improvement and very very expensive computer, maybe 4000$ then. Looking now, it is minor improvement over 486dx's with decent ram. But this era from 90s to 2000s was critical what hardware trick programmers used, leaving older cpus behind just coz instruction set limitation.
This was era before proper 3d cards, so cpu was everything. Since first Geforce card came, cpu could get a breather in games sometimes.
Intel was very skillful in securing its cpu "monopoly" by instruction set support and other tricks. Competitors were just way worse, still more affordable but not cheap like now, 80$ cpu is still decent.
@@effexon try jumping from a Tandy 1000 to a 486 DX :)
I remember trading my 386SX motherboard/RAM for a used 486DX4-100, costing me $100.
Of all the upgrades I've done over the decades, this one sticks in my memory.
Yeah, I upgraded my 486sx to the same overdrive processor, made a huge difference.
In 1994, the first PC I ever built was a 486DX2-80 with 8mb of RAM and an Orchid VLB video card (and original SB16). Oh, the memories not just of building it, and the gaming, but the joy I experienced continually reconfiguring it - DOS, Windows, OS/2, DesqView, sometimes all of the above in multi-boot config with System Commander 3. I was running dial-up BBSes on the same system I was simultaneously playing DOOM (OS/2 was downright miraculous).
Ah,the days when a video card was 2 foot long.
+joseph fulks Remember those VESA graphic cards? 1992 and they were huge!
+Monster LMA today's graphics cards don't have an excuse though
+joseph fulks SoundBlaster Awe 32 says hello
@@TruthLivesNow I had a VESA card, it was only 1MB but I had one in like 1991 so it was pretty decent for it's time for home computing. It could do 16 Million colors etc with my SVGA Samsung Syncmaster 3ne.
That's today . cards were smaller then
"who needs the power of 486?"
Too much for me
People who play hexen and doom 2 ;)
Clearly everyone does, I answered you on an 8086 a few years ago from the future at the time and its only just appearing now, I dreampt of a day when there will be a 586, but alas, that's just a dream..
Ι miss my 486s
That one organization going with OS/2 was understandable to have a stable PC network.
In the engineering company I was working at back then, with Windows 3.1, it was a PC network headache for the IT crew.
Many-a-times the laser printers wouldn't work due to network issues. So with that, I got my own laser printer for my PC so I could continue with production work while everyone else sat idle. When my colleagues made an issue about why I had a printer they didn't, informing them I paid for the printer out of my pocket had them get quiet. The printer went with me when I left the company.
Its sad to see back then that they were talking about moving from Ethernet to fiber optics and more than 20 years later we still have not made the move.
+jwdickieson I was thinking about this the other day while watching a video about a raspberry pi.The ethernet connector takes up a lot of room on the board.It's 2015 isn't there a better way?
+fbw71u Romania e considerata ca fiind tara cu cel mai bun internet din europa.
It depends on what country you are in. We have full fibre optic internet throughout the whole of the UK (even in the rural areas) as our government directly funded it.
We've got Fibre here in New Zealand, in fact I'm typing this on a home fibre connection now!
Pretty much all fiber to the street junction level in most areas by now.
I just looked up John Wharton. Very sad to hear that he passed away in 2018. I enjoyed his talks. He was also on a panel talking about Gary Kildall. I was kind of annoyed that he was cut short as he was talking about Gary. I also remember him at a famous talk that Linus Torvalds gave. John asked Linus about the x86. Life is too short.
boom! look at that, the POWER of the 486. I stand in awe.
Fun fact: up to and including the 80486 and first generation Pentium CPUs(60-200MHz) had no level 2 cache on-die. It was supplied by static RAM chips around the CPU. This they never tell you but these machines being demoed have a huge amount of cache making it fast. Consumer 486 machines had no or little cache making them slow as hell, certainly no faster than a well-cached 386.
The performance difference over 10 years was wild up until 2010
The last 12 years haven't seen the same level of improvements
an x58 based pc from 2008 (with upgrades) is still a pretty good gaming pc today. imagine using a pc from 1993 in 2008 *even with all the upgrades*. The 1993 computer was a joke by 1996.
Wow! An actual i486DX2-40.. Pretty rare beast, at least in Europe. Never seen one in person :-)
lol it's like bigfoot 🤣
I would love to take say, a dual 64 core AMD EPYC server with 1.5TB of ram back in time, just to show them where it all ends up.
... or wait for someone 20 years from now to bring back in time whatever they have 🙂 to show us what kinda Matrix we are heading to
@@peterhelpme Or just show them a smartphone that is 1000 times faster than their typical mainframes.
I would love to take a 132 core Apple M2 Ultra Mac Studio (size of small dinner salad), with just 192GB of RAM and an 8TB SSHD back to your time 2 years ago! 😂
I hate the 1990s, but I love 1990s technology. Truly the Golden Age of computing. The progress made was astounding.
It really was, so much stuff changed so quickly. Computers got more powerful and got nice color displays, and the internet became more of a household reality. Sure things are changing these days, but it's more of a progress of technology than the revolution that personal computers were.
I had a 486DX33 in 1993, with 8MB RAM, a 250MB harddisk, a 1MB videocard and a double speed CDROM drive. That videocard could do do 1024x768 resolution. Only my monitor couldn't handle that, and limited the resolution to 800x600. Most games ran in 320x240 though, and some in 640x480 which was like super high definition. It was a beast of a machine! I still have it, for nostaglia. Haven't hooked it up for years though.
Still have?
@@ens8502 Sure. Still got my old Atari 8-bit too.
Syndicate run in 640x480 but only with 16 colors. It didn't use the SVGA modes, only high res VGA.
@@ivo215 If you ever crank it up, put it on the end of a long extension cord, preferably outside. Electronics age out. I'm typing this in 2024. So, that's a 31 year old box. Solder joints, capacitors..... Heck PCB boards can degrade.
@@dlewis9760 Oh, I'm pretty sure all of te caps are bulging.
I love how this guy just casually drops "virtual reality applications." Dude, you have no idea.
It's obvious that he did have the idea.
@@hulksmash8159 People back then thought they were close to virtual reality applications. Here we are in 2022 and we also think we are close. For me the Quest 2 is a blurry mess, I can't even imagine how it must had looked back then.
@@Kynareth6 much much clearer sadly back then then it looks now my how times have changed🤣
I remember buying a high end Pentium 133 back in early 1995, it was made in 1994 but I got it on sale since the P166 came out. it had 16MB of RAM, 2 1GB Seagate medalist HDDs, a Trident 1MB card, and a PCI Turtle beach card (back when turtle beach was first starting out) it was the baby AT form factor with 4ISA and 3 PCI, I still have that machine and it works fine to this day. It was made by CompuPartner, a Swedish company that left north america in 1996.
this is the chip that is going to double your speed muhahahahahahaha
It played Quake 1 well, will it play crysis?
Maria Gay.... .... ... ... .. . briel.
every. single. time.
Yes, it was really the way my friend told this story. The reason they had to special ordered this 24MB SIMM was due to the demand to a CAD application that was loaded onto a underpowered PC (486 I believe), and the teacher demanded more memory!!!! As a result, we decided on the 24MB SIMM that would total 32MB on his CAD system.
are you a power user?
I think the 486 era was one of the most innovative eras in computer hardware. So many ideas tried back then are still used in computers to an extent today. The CPU/Video board is basically the same idea as I3/I5 A8 cpu/gpu chips are today. Removable drive bays are still used in many desktop HP/Dells today.
Spellchecking in the BACKGROUND? sci fi tech right there !
Gotta love the flash bios. They made it sound like a big must-have feature!
Because it is I guess.
Watching this channel I want my IBM PC-XT, AMD 386DX-40, 486DX4-75, and pentium 1-66 back.
And then Windows 95 came out and sucked all the raw power of that 486 right up...
12 fps VR.
0 fps on Mac.
Watching these old series just reminded me about my old acer 8088 with 8kb ram and dual 5.25" floppy drives.. didnt even have a hard drive coz they were like $10,000 lol
No way did it have only 8 kB RAM. Any computer had at least 64 kB, many had 640 kB.
That does it. I'm throwing away my Intel Core PC because I want the power of a 486!
the damn video capture card screwed up the audio. oh well, at least I've preserved it on the web.
Thank you.
Luv how Cheifet went out of his way in every intro to make it as hard on himself as possible. I would never be able to give that little flawless speech in a once-every-ten-minutes background situation.
4:08 Sweet ATi mousepad!
I remember when we got our Pionex 486sx 25mhz with a single speed cd-rom drive. It was a huge upgrade over our C64.
I bet going from 1 mhz to 25 must have been ground breaking for you at the time
I remember having the Commodore 64 SX and loading each game took over 3 minutes each.
I remember going from the abacus to the slide rule. I could now do 1 calculation per minute!
Thanks for uploading these. Interesting to read the comments since I was in college during this period. Talk about feeling old!
It must've been only months after this that VESA Local Bus was introduced along with window accelerator video cards (with hardware BitBlt etc).
its amazing how things changed how powerful the processor am holding in my palm
My first PC was a Cx486DX2-66, 8 MB of RAM and a 540 MB HDD. SB16MCD and Trident T8900D. It was the fastest PC in the neighborhood for almost a year.
And so, this show actually serves as a computer chronicle.
I love this stuff. Thanks for the video. Sadly, I never had a 486...only a 386/dx generic.
my first PC was an old 1986 IBM AT/XT with a 10MB HDD. then I got a used 386SX, then in 1995 I got a 1994 Pentium 133 on sale (they were selling last years stock for cheap) and it came with 8MB of RAM, CD-ROM 4x (upgraded to a 52x in 1997), 2 1GB Seagate medalist HDDs, and a 3.5" and a 5.25" floppy drive. it came with Windows 3.1, Win95 wasn't out yet. I upgraded to Windows 95 in 97, then to windows me in 2000, which it still has on it to this day. it still runs fine.
11 years later hows the hood going?
It never ceases to amaze me how old technology seems so quaint in retrospect. Also the commentators.
yeh the hairstyles are ace imagine rockin a hair do like them nowadays ,heads would turn
Nice to see how the world of computing changed. Back then it were mainly older man in suits. Nowadays it are young casually dressed boys and girls.
I remember the 50MHz DX had problems with overheating, which led to the clock-doubled DX2 versions. I still have my chunky old laptop with a 100MHz "DX4". It was actually clock-tripled, and I never knew why they called it DX4 instead of DX3?
Maria Gabe-riel.
2 years late, haha... but yeah, the way she says her surname is odd for sure. As if she suddenly got some kind of stage fright and forgot how to pronounce her surname. 😀😄
She says it that way in every episode.. that’s how it’s pronounced
Windows 3.1 and Dos 6.22 were the standard operating systems of the early 1990s. Computer technology really accelerated from 1997 to 1999. The comp industry came out with many amazing things, like 3d accelerators(3dfx, Riva TNT, STB velocity, etc), high powered processors(Pentium 2s/3s, Pentium 4s, & Athlons), hard drives became much bigger(10 gbs 20 gbs, 40 gbs), and DVD-ROM drives were released in the late 1990s. Computers also got cheaper in the late 1990s.
From the days when 3gb of storage was impressive... Those were the days!
3GB was insane for a 486. I had 200MB haha.
QuantumBraced Until about the Pentium 4 days, my personal computer was a 386DX with 4MB of RAM. IDE was a revelation for me when it came around, it was *much* faster than the MFM card I had been using.
Went strait from a Type 0665 IBM drive of 44MB to a 273MB Maxtor drive, both of which I still have and both of which still work correctly to this day.
my first computer ran at 66M, 32M of ram and IG of harddrive!!!!
hifijohn 486 or a clone I'd guess.
32MB of RAM would have been ridiculous at that time, good lord.
IG of hard drive? Do you mean 1GB?
My first computer had 1.5K or kilobyte of ram.
Update BIOS using a floppy disk, makes me wonder if those things had a least error check redundancy to prevent problems if not done right.
Beside the normal parity check that's.
The 486 will always be a special processor for me. Amazing how much use could be gotten by it.
I agree on that.
dude with glasses, prophetic. He was thinking hyperthreading and integrated gpus/audio/etc
well. Thats no prophecy. that are the logical steps of developing microchips. Shrtink everything and put more inside of it. It will be faster.
thats like i said, no prophecy, but logics.
@@alfa-psi yea
I remember back in 1992 -- 386's were still common then, in fact I bought a 386sx notebook PC that year -- a co-worker was pontificating that a 386 was all anyone would ever need! Sounds like a joke but people actually used to say things like that, every step of the way.
yeh remember bill gates saying all the memory you would ever need was "i think but might be wrong" ....64mb
I remember when people (including my parents) saying, "a computer, in your home, what could you possibly need that for?!?"
Maria GaBBBBriel was a highlight for me!
I have learned one thing about computers. I will not live long enough to have a computer as fast as I want.
I can still remember when these first came out. I was thinking this was amazing. I Must be getting old!
Indeed
Me too. It was a dream at that time. You could buy a small car for that price.
Holy shit, watching this on a Holographic Antimatter Subspace Crystal...
so a monitor then lol
That DEC Alpha CPU kicked ass.
i love the idea of a 50mhz 486 lol
I was in high school when they came out, I loved the idea at the time as well!
(ended up with a 586 by the time i could afford to upgrade from the old 386 tho)
(wish i had spent the extra on a pentium)
excelente work uploading this! this is the legacy of the human history man! great job!
My first computer was a 486dx4 100 8mb ram and a 120mb hdd with dos on it. Was a beast for playing games in 1994. As a bonus it ran windows 95 no problem when that came out in 95. Only problem was the first copy of windows 95 that was released was like 45 floppy disks. Not on cd.
My first computer was pocket computer. It had 1.5k memory. I expanded it to 3k.
@Kamil Niewiadomski
Before the Pentium MMX and the Motorola 68040 (but with the exception of some 486's), home desktop CPU's didn't need special cooling at all, not even heatsinks.
I've never seen any processor newer than a 486 DX2 without a heatsink. 486 SX/DX yes and the first two Pentium models (60/66 MHz), but after that it just never happened.
VR has got to be one the slowest progressing technologies to get to to where we are today.... I remember hearing it's coming since I was 12 years old lol....and it looks like they were working on it before that!
yeh and a.i.
And you're 13 now? 😂
@@ChatGPT1111 1. That comment was written 5 years ago. 2. Come up with your own original name. 3. Not funny. ✌️
@@CeeStyleDj OK so you're 17. But you act like a 13 year old 🤣
@@ChatGPT1111 what's the purpose of your comment? I've been following technology for decades. My original comment still stands.
Bring this show back
lol nowadays computers are not user upgradable everything is soldered to the motherboard specially apple
Thanks for uploading dude. Liked and subscribed.:)
Pentiums didn't became popular until they hit the 100MHz mark. Before then, 486 CPUs running at up to 133MHz could pretty much match pentiums in performance while being cheaper. After Pentium hit the 100 MHz mark it became "the undisputed king of the arena", the competition consisting in AMD K5 and Cyrix 6x86 were late to the market and slow. It wasn't until AMD launched the K6 that Pentium got some real competition.
A factor of 50x in 10 years!
Hah. 10:30 Speculative execution. It turned out great after many years, with
meltdown
Haha true
That ATI mousepad! 😁
Stewart asked the same question with the 8088->268->386->486->Pentium etc. Same thing when upgrading every OS. The haircuts are still stuck in the 70's for some reason.
I paid 600 for a 16MB 72 pin simm in 97, it was the largest capacity available at the time, there was 2 modules in the package.(it was on sale at the time because people were moving over to SDRAM DIMMS on new motherboards, so EDO RAM was starting to get obsolete.
I paid $20 plus shipping for two 16MB 72 pin parity DRAM modules just the other day!
Early graphics tester, ahead of their time these guys. These guy's were ballers.
This guy sounds EXACTLY like the mottor week guy. Like EXACTLY
Intel had to recall ~900.000 motherboards powered by the i820 chipset which pissed off the OEMs and allowed VIA to take the title of No.1 chipset manufacturer. (Google "i820 chipset saga" for some fun reading)
They launched the 1.33GHz P-III and had to recall it shortly after due to problems, rushed the P4 to the market before it was finished, it was very expensive and couldn't beat the existing AMD Thunderbirds and Athlon XP until it reached the 2GHz mark.
WHO!! needs one of these super powerful 486! These 486s are so powerful.
4:12 Milliseconds & seconds rather than days. This is the main reason the job market has changed so much, so fast. The last 30 years are like no other in history. My first CPU was a Z80, then an 8088, 286, 386sx, 386, 486 then I went AMD until the i3 - i7 What changes!
A *THREE GIGABYTE* database.
These times used to be so much easier, I swear. Or maybe it's just fuzzy memory.
I used to watch this show on PBS just about every weekend!
There were quite a few especially in the early days: National Semiconductor, IBM, Texas Instruments, NEC, NexGen (later aquired by AMD), etc.
The ones that survived the post 486 era or appeared in the post 486 era were: Cyrix (later aquired by VIA), Transmeta, IDT and VIA.
did you get the michealangelo virus back then?
To be fair though, these guys probably assumed we'd have flying cars by now. I doubt they'd be that impressed with today's computers given the age we live in.
Jared Taylor would confirm!
I’m sure they’d be very impressed, especially with networking even though they all knew it was only a matter of time.
Cyrix Cx486DX2-80 used to be the cpu that everyone wanted. They were way cheaper than intel. 4 mb ram 80mb Hdd with Dos 6 and win 3.11 14.4k modem was my first internet machine in 1993. Internet was $5 per hour.
This is so fascinating
1TB is evolving, but it's not as common YET. 2014 awaits us.
Hi from 5 years in the future. 1TB+ is fairly common these days, maybe somebody will reply in 2023 with an update.
i love this retro shit
Computer Chronicles was the tech show that set the standard for all tech shows that came after it. We wouldn't have G4TV if not for shows like CC. They used to show this on PBS on Saturdays around 10AM where I live and I never missed it. Does anyone know if it's ever been released on DVD?
This episode isn't on the official @ComputerChroniclesYT channel for some reason. There now doesn't seem to be way to ask the right-owners.
Yes, folks. You heard that right; he really did say VR on a 486. And 12 FPS is good enough!
great video and i thought the quality was fine thanks dude
Well I'm getting a 486DX-100 and an extra 2mb ram giving me a massive 4mb next week. Oh those were the days.
the overly-large glasses=smart era.
I remember playing the Quake demo on a 486 with software rendering (long after the introduction of the Pentium, mind you) and while it wasn't pretty, it was certainly playable. It was a heck of a chip for its time but was made horribly, _laughably_ obsolete within just a few years.
Yeah, Quake I was barely playable on a 486, if you use 1990s definition of playability. I would say that today
It is like a glitch when Maria Gabe-riel says her name. For some reason I feel like vomiting every time.
Same here, 486 DX2, good times! There were so many good games back then... 320x240 resolution was perfectly fine and 640x480 was luxury ;)
320x240 was the special X Mode. Most games did use mode 13h which was only 320x200.
Oh and the GeForce GTX Titan GPU has 7.1 billion transistors. Just to put the technical advancement into perspective.
Eck phones have this