![]() A network operating system like NetWare 3.11 might come on nearly thirty floppy disks. Or 200MB, But then you were in SCSI territory, big bucks.ĬD-ROM technology was just in its infancy, and we were using 1.2MB and 1.44MB floppy disks to distribute software. If you were a serious power user, you might have a 100MB hard drive. Typical IDE hard drives of the day had 20Meg, 40Meg or 80Meg capacities. #WISE MEMORY OPTIMIZER CHIP MP3 SONG#And if you really wanted to make it fly like a rocketship and run a ton of apps on it, you'd need like 4 Megs of RAM, if you wanted to run say, Word, Excel and PowerPoint at the same time.Ĥ Megs, by the way, is about as much space as one MP3 song or a single RAW 3.1 Megapixel photograph takes up. The 486DX 50Mhz was over 700 times less dense, transistor-wise, and over 3000 times less powerful than what you can put on your desktop today.Īnd the amount of memory and hard drive space on these things? Well, if you wanted to run Windows 3.0 halfway decently, you needed at least a Meg of RAM. Today, none of that mishegas really goes on because PCs are heavily commoditized as consumer products and there's very little room for pricing games even with business-class systems.Ĭompare these systems with today's fastest Intel Core i7 desktop chip, clocking at 3.4Ghz, with 731 million transistors on it, running at 159,000 MIPS. You'll notice if you read the various other ads in the rear of those Infoworld issues there was a ton of pricing games going on with the "White Box" 2nd-tier and 3rd-tier vendors to try to squeeze out the margins. #WISE MEMORY OPTIMIZER CHIP PC#Northgate, along with Dell, Everex, Acer, Gateway, HP, Compaq, Tandon, AST, ALR and Zeos were considered the better vendors of IBM PC clones.Īnd IBM itself was still selling PS/2 systems to big corporate accounts, although if you read the previous issuetimes for the company were. A similarly-equipped 486-33 in the April 1 issue from Tandon was $7699. A business-class 386/33 with 4MB of RAM, a 200MB hard disk and 14" display went for $4299. Take a look for example at this Northgate advertisement from Infoworldin May of 1991. If you were doing engineering and CAD work, maybe you bought a 486.Ī friend and colleague who was at NASA at the time told me they were just starting to replace their original PCs in the mail room with 12Mhz 286 systems in 1991. And by and large, most places were still using 5Mhz or 10Mhz 8088s like on IBM PC-AT's and original IBM PC's. If they were up to date, companies were running 386-based systems, which ran at 33Mhz, 25Mhz or less. ![]() That was on the very high end of the PC scale. ![]()
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