Strange to read a nostalgia piece about the 90s. I guess computer nostalgia is now multi-generational. Not surprising but still feels weird. The only tech that gets my nostalgia juices flowing is the Commodore 64. I know older folks would feel the same about punch cards and so on, but I think that population is much smaller since those devices weren’t part of most home computing experiences.
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And, importantly, nostalgia for one’s childhood doesn’t always remember precisely how many floppies something came on.
My mom probably doesn’t remember the exact model car her parents drove in 1957, but she remembers going to Roselyns and White Castle in it, and the drive in. Or at least, that’s what I remember her remembering, in any case. We’re getting someone’s recollection of events from 20 years ago, jeez. Who am I kidding, she probably does know exactly what car her parents had when she was 10.
But to those pooh-poo’ing an engineer buying an off the shelf PC for the family, I can sort of relate. In the mid-late '90s I worked in a small “neighborhood” computer store with very loyal customers, which was run by an ex-DEC engineer who tried to teach me to care about being able to count in octal and hex (because hey who knew that would be useful…) That store was driven out of business not long after I left by this exact value proposition. I know a lot of very smart people who had to decide whether it was worth it to buy every part for a PC and build it, or pay probably a $50 premium for me to do it (at maybe 90 minutes of my $8.50/hour time), or are you better off getting a serviceable white-box PC like the mid '90s Dell and Gateway named in the article, and upgrading it or fixing it when/if it breaks? And, back at that time, you could walk into Comp and walk out with the same motherboards, sound cards, modems, etc that we sold. The only difference is you probably save about 12% at Comp.
Well, not that CompUSA fared any better in the long run than my little shop did, I think it’s clear who didn’t win that fight, and it wasn’t the Computer Store Guy.
Ah well. It’s possible I understated my hourly pay by 50 cents or a dollar, I can’t remember, but hey, it’s just nostalgia from 20 years ago.
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If this is true, your wife might just get tired of that…
Otherwise interesting to read the reminiscences of someone who came to the “family computer” a generation or so after myself.
I’m old enough to remember this and somewhere still have a “Ready For PowerPC Upgrade” Apple promo t-shirt. The thing is, the 680x0 line had really reached the end of the road in almost everything that mattered at the time. The RISC vs CISC battles were raging and by my memory PowerPC made a hell of a lot more sense than hoping and praying that Motorolla would ever rejuvenate the seriously ailing 680x0 line.
More the sort of reverse takeover of Apple by NeXT. That and the years of fruitless effort to develop something that wasnt MacOS but could succeed MacOS. See here:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/36A61A87-064B-470D-8870-736DD59CEF48.html
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I’ve heard that, but I don’t know. My primary computer in the late 90s was a Power Macintosh 8600/200. Eventually I needed a print server, so I got a second hand Quadra 840. The operating system in the 840 with its 040 was so much faster and reliable than the 8600. I suppose the 68k processors were out-of-date, but they were truely a pleasure to use.
I know the later Amigas used a 68060. Can anyone out there describe their experience with this processor?
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I’m going to guess that if you were using it as a print server you didnt have extra Control Panels or Extensions loaded into the OS? Those things were the bugaboo of MacOS on either CPU platform. I’ll tell you that >90% of the service calls I did for slow/inoprative Macs back then were due to out of date or conflicting Control Panels or Extensions.
Unless you were doing actual ASM coding, you werent really using the CPU though. Another tale of sales/service from that era is how many design/press houses (and oddly enough even law firms) were very eager to migrate to PPC especially when native applications (as opposed to fat binaries) were released.
While I dont have first hand experience with 68060, one thing I would speculate is that Motorola probably could only manage production yields for the lower volume sales of Amiga compared to Apple.
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a fat binary is native on both platforms, The real key was when Apple made the whole system PPC native.
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Essentially what I was saying but also a matter of consumer perception.
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I can’t remember how I had it set up as a server, that was quite a while ago during a different life. No, I wasn’t doing any coding, but I installed compatable versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and PageMaker from floppy disks. So I used it for little odd jobs, because I always loved the 840 and had wanted one for years.
Yes, I remember the problems caused by extensions and control panels. Do not miss those.
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Never did get to run A/UX. Used Power MachTen, though!
The PPC-based systems were definitely faster, especially for the 3D rendering work I was doing back then.
You’re not a fan of the NeXT, I take it. I always was, though. Still have mine (at least for now). Display PostScript saved my butt a number of times.
My understanding was this was an aftermarket upgrade, like a lot of the accelerator cards you could buy for MacOS machines.
68K was a popular family, used just about everywhere, like the Amiga, the Sega Genesis, the Neo Geo, even some of the early Sun and SGI machines (at least the 68020, anyway; pre-MIPS/SPARC) but by the time the 68040 had been out for a while, it was running “out of steam” for the desktop.
If Apple was going to remain competitive with wintel, they had to switch. Frankly, while there were some problems making the transition, given the scale and scope of the transition over to the PowerPC it’s actually pretty damned impressive; Apple did pretty well in accomplishing it—especially in retrospect.
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Like most commenters here, I gave up on this one when it devolved into the “Mac works and PC is stupid” stuff that was old a decade ago.
I especially don’t get the part about Win95 being difficult to install; I did it myself at 11 with very little PC experience because it had a simple wizard.
I tried an iMac for a few months back in the day and a macbook pro more recently and both times I’ve found myself fighting to get the OS to work with me (I’ve come a way since I was 11 and got a degree in computing).
The part about the Dell ruining the decor also riled me; there’s nothing particularly great about the “thin, featureless slab” school of design that makes Apple any better at doing it than Dell. Apple used to do some pretty groundbreaking product design but the last 10 years have been basic iteration in line with the rest of the industry. Apple are the new Microsoft in terms of bland ubiquity.
</rant>
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Oh, you did not go there. Pointless ascetics and ideals? Apple invented the idea of usability guidelines with their famous Human Interface Guidelines. Apple was the only computer maker for a long time with any sort of research into how people actually use computers. I would posit an unpopular opinion that John Scully was actually the right CEO for Apple at the time, and keeping it a premium device that sweated the details helped keep Apple alive when Commodore and Atari couldn’t survive any more. And where would we be if Apple hadn’t created the Newton? That device pioneered a lot of the concepts that live on in iOS and Android.
Yeah, I was a Mac user when Apple was doomed. Sosumi.
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My dad’s friend bought a Macintosh 128K. We went around to his place to remonstrate with him. It was too small. It would never get support. It was impossible to upgrade. And so forth.
But I noticed how the macintosh keyboard didn’t have many of the keys my superboard had. Keys which did nothing on my system had been left off entirely. To delete text you swiped over it with the mouse and pressed the backspace. It had fewer keys but they had more functions when used with a mouse.
I had never seen anything like it, and I could see that the apparent simplicity, on a GUI could be more powerful.
But Apple get some things wrong. Their installations are too heavy and seem to make little use of package dependencies. They push their inhouse video formats and make it difficult to use video files from outside. Their ecosystem is only good when it benefits apple.
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I really want to like this article. It speaks to so much of my own experience of learning computers when I was 14 and got my first Pentium with Windows 95. Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and quake where my holy trinity. I spent three weeks trying to get a pair of Ethernet adapters talking to each other so I could get my dad’s work computer sharing the 33.6 modem we had so he wouldn’t boot us off the web.
But I can’t. There’s something so smug about the whole “My Mac is the pinnacle of computers because I don’t have to fix it and couldn’t if I wanted to, which I don’t” attitude. Like, the “we can fix it and learn” aspect is in the past.
That makes me sad.
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Oh come on. Windows '95 was also the time of the Powermac 6100, a sleek and powerful machine, and Mac OS 7.5, a great OS.
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I bet MagicVillage is a thing you can remember? Basically all of Germany’s Apple users were connected per FirstClass in this MagicVillage Mailbox systems, mostly through a network of Sub-boxes.
Yeah, I was there in '95 aswell. With an old Mac Plus and a 9600 baud modem, later with a IIcx and 14400 baud. Go figure.
I think you have to treat this article as if it were filed under “Humor”. There are niggling little details that are misremembered, as the author is telling us his own personal tale, not some “and that’s the way it really was, kids!” documentary thingy. It’s a Hunter S. Thompson gonzo telling, but without druggy embellishments.
Er.
Unless you count computing a drug.
Which I do.
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Not according to this article from 1994 which talks specifically about them pulling computers out of Compusa. It’s reasonable that, when Win 95 was release (in 1995) one could still find a bargain Dell at one of their stores…
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Yes. Jeez.
Author: here’s a deeply personal nostalgia piece on growing up in the PC era and learning to appreciate my techy father. As a framing device, there’s also some opinion on the aesthetic and functionality of computers.
Internet:
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Nope. They gained color with the MacII, which was out by 1990.
