PCs and Computing in the 1990s

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You had to bring back bad memories! Try loading a new version of VMS onto a DEC VAX 4000 series mini. Also, try backing up a Sun SPARC II running SunOS over a network to a VHS machine, especially the crappy network NRaD had installed at Warminster. It was no better than Corvus OmniNet running on Apple ][ Plus's. Any wonder why I was always reading the Stories of the Bastard Operator From Hell. (Sometimes I wish I could have gotten away with what BOFH pulled off in those stories .

I also remember using an IBM-like computer, which was my first computer.

I remember being obsessed with Monkey Island 2 on the PC when it came out in 1991 when I was 9.

When I first got internet access in 1997 I could stay up for days with no sleep looking on the internet. I ran up a ridiculous bill.

I'm guessing I'm a bit younger, though I too loved BOFH. The first computer I had of my very own was an early TRS-80 Model I. Two of them, actually. The local high school math teacher gave them to me as they no longer worked by the end of their first year. With a summer of reverse engineering, learning how to solder and many very lucky failures I eventually had one working machine. Eventually I made/modified a cable that would allow me to save my programs to a tape recorder (also salvaged; my folks were not happy about my 'embarrassing' interest in those computer-things so learned to scrounge everything) as recorded/encoded sound. I typed something like Moon Lander in from a magazine for an entire weekend...saved without an error...and then discovered that both the recording and playback levels had to be "just so" for it to work without too many accumulated errors. And everything from humidity to house voltage to something odd, like screen brightness would alter the levels. IIR I ended up writing some sort of program that helped me tune the levels via character block "bar chart" like displays.

Things were closer to the metal back then. I'm guessing that's why Arduinos & similar have found an audience.

I grew up in the 90's, and I was raised on Macintosh computers. My brother had an Apple ][c, which I never used, but I saw some of the stuff he did on it, and it was fascinating. I remember vividly some of the screensavers that we had on our Macintoshes - Flying Toasters, Starry Starry Night, and this screensaver that drew 3D mountains on all the different planets in the solar system.

I remember the computers the library used for their card catalogs. They had these green-on-black monochrome displays. I don't know what kind of computers they were - possibly IBM PC-XT's, maybe Apple ][e's.

Yes, those were the good old days.

A fun project of mine at the very end of the 90's was to take an old Mac SE/30 and get UNIX running on it. Finding 128MB of ram for it was easy, as was getting the CD .ISO's from Apple. And I already had one of those external Apple CD drives. The thing that stumped me was finding a "caddy" which was a little box you were expected to put CD's into, and then put the whole thing into the drive.

And speaking of Apple ][ / III's I had a 'Woz' Apple III that I first used to play...Oregon Trail! Later, my spouse and I got hooked on the PC version, OT-II and played for weeks. IIR, I also had "Sim Ant" which was the start of the Sims series...

Since my first full time job out of graduate school was in library automation, those computers were probably DEC VT-52 terminals or their clones. As far asmy former employer is concerned, They were probably the second or third publisher to produce an OPAC package for IBM-PC's and clones working on a client-Server model, just as local area network solutions like Novell became cheap enough to be afforded by the public schools.

My first computer I used was whatever computers were at school way back in the day, 386 or a 486, can't remember. I remember playing Cross Country Canada on them which is a text based truck driving game. My childhood friend had a PC with windows 3.1 which I remember playing some Kings Quest on, but I never owned a Windows 3.1 computer.

The first computer I owned was this 486 that my dad brought home for free from his work. I think I remember playing some text detective game, wasn't much useful for anything else.

A few years later my parents bought this $4000 pentium 90mhz for use for school. I remember the computer crashed a lot and was buggy. The printer was this Lexmark Inkjet printer which talked, and told you when the ink levels were low, or it ran out of paper etc which I found amusing. It was like 8 months later that the computer was completely obselete lol. I remember the screeching sound that the 14.4k modem would make as well as overhearing my mother's phone calls come out of the midi speakers inside the computer lol.

My first experience with computers was in the Spring of 1984 when my dad brought home an Apple IIc, which was the only computer in the entire school that he was a janitor at. My sister and I had fun on that thing for hours.

I first started using the Internet in the December of 1997. My parents subscribed to Sprint Canada. We went wireless in 1998. I got my first laptop in the Summer of 2005.

My first computer I got was a Commodore 64 in 1984. I later got an Amiga in 1989 and use that system up until 1997. We had Apple IIe's at school. I really miss those Commodore machines, best computers I've ever own. Today, I'm still somewhat of a bare metal freak. I still like programming in assembler and bit-banging hardware. I now own 10 Ardunio's, 5 Raspberry Pi's and 6 FPGA dev. boards. I've even gone as far as soldering a couple of wire into the motherboard of my Linux server, just to access the I^2C port. Long live bit-banging.

I have a Dell Dimension from 2001 (not quite 90s, but close) with a Pentium 4 that I still use to this day. It runs Windows 98 SE, Windows XP, and Bodhi Linux currently. I mainly use it for old DOS games (from the 90s) that don't run well on newer operating systems. It's got a 1.5 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM. On Linux, it's actually pretty decent for browsing. Sites like YouTube make it struggle, but for the most part it's speedy.

The first computer I've ever used was this 1996 Dell Dimension XPS P133c running Windows 95. It has a 133 MHz Pentium processor and 32 MB of RAM. I still have the computer in perfect working condition, but it's way too underpowered for me to use it for anything.

I also have a Commodore 64 which was actually my dad's first computer, but the floppy drive doesn't work, so pretty much the only thing I can do is play games on cartridges.

If it's a Dimension 4600 or similar, and if you are comfortable doing such things, you can pick up a much faster CPU & 4GB ram for a pittance on eBay. While it may sound ridiculous to put money into a 15 year old system, I still have one that I bumped up to a 3.4 Pentium 4 P4 a few years ago and it is still quite usable for Win XP, web browsing (incl YouTube!), lightweight x32 Linux distro's and similar. The nice thing is that by matching the RAM & CPU the system can use its much faster built in bus speeds; very few came from the factory that way & it makes a very noticeable difference. It'll also run a hyper-threading P4, but depending on the speed that can push the PSU past the point where the voltages remain stable.

This computer can only use a maximum of 1 GB of RAM, and it only uses PC133 RAM (no DDR or DDR2). I may upgrade it and install the RAM limitation patch on Windows 98 if I ever feel like it, but for now it runs pretty solid with just half a gigabyte. The processor I have runs fine, and I'm wary about upgrading it since many of the later Pentium 4 models were known to run very hot and draw a lot more power. Anyway, I normally use my new desktop for browsing and daily use which has a blazing fast 3.4 GHz Core i7 "skylake" processor and 12 GB of RAM.

Since this thread is about 90s computing, if anyone is interested, there's this awesome piece of software called KernelEx which can allow some newer programs to run on Windows 98 and ME. For browsers, you can run Firefox 9 and Opera 12.02, both of which support HTML5, and the latest VLC Media Player works, too.

Like a 2300, got it. I would certainly worry about pushing the power supply as much producing heat w/ a faster CPU, that was also one of Dell's eras where they swapped a few PSU wires to make them proprietary.

Browsing through KernelEx on SourceForge...very nice. I just might dig up a system from storage and have some fun - or at least show my kids what computers used to be like.

One favorite feature of Win 98 was the accessibility to the desktop, as they hadn't locked it down yet. I used to have a wallpaper of CGI water + sky and then ran a utility that would distort the desktop to look like waves with a reducing wavelength & amplitude from the bottom of the screen to the 'horizon' of the static background .BMP of a CGI ocean + sky.

Another favorite was the Kine screensaver...I'm a little ashamed of how much of my employer's time I must have wasted getting it, "just right" when work was slow...

I miss activedesktop. I had that Xmas fire movie as a background (played it through a HTML page with the movie embedded), and i just loved it.

Does anyone have fond memories of that 3D maze screensaver that came with Windows 9x, NT 4, and 2000? I remember spending so much time watching this screensaver run again and again on the classroom computers we had at my elementary school.