My dad found his order form from our 3rd computer

$5778 adjusted for inflation.
- At last something is more accessible than 30 years ago 🤗
  
  Video games, too. They're still in the $20-$60 range for the most part, same as they've been since the 1970s, which means their cost has dropped dramatically.
- Wild that a 1k USD machine lasts like 6-10 years now.
  I’m using one as a media center that’s a Phenom from 14 years ago lawl
  My VR machine is eight years old but with a new GPU.
  My main game machine is like four years old and plays basically everything 1440p/100FPS+. Cost bout 1.5k.
  My first REAL game computer I built was over 2k back in the day (maybe 3k adjusted for inflation) and was slow as shit after two years. I love you, solid state drives. Athlon 64x2 4400+, SLI7900GT, 4GB DDR2, and an antec lanboy with the bondage kit. Built it for Crysis. No Raptors tho.
- You're the real MVP.
- I built a computer around 1998. OP's dad got reemed.

2 CD ROMs drives AND a zip drive? This guy fucks
- Shit. DVD drives!
  In 96? Fucking bleeding edge stuff
  
  I think it says 98. IE4.0 wasn't released until 97, same for Pentium MMX.
  
  And don't forget the floppy slot.
  Every good 'puter has a floppy slot.
- The 2X part means the DVD drive could read DVDs at up to 2X speed
  
  Ah yeah I realized that after. But a floppy reader too! Dude definitely reading some floppies
  
  I came to the comments hoping somebody would explain a reason for 2 DVD readers back in the days of Win95 lol thanks!

My dad bought one for me 🥰 so i that i can become a scientist one day but then I discovered porn and now I work at McDonalds.
- Yeah, but bro: your burger flipping hand is STRONG
  
  Aww, I hate to be the one to tell you this.
  McDonald's uses a proprietary "clam shell" grill. The only flipping that's happening is an employee cooking their own burger without closing the grill.

I was going to be extremely impressed at the 64 GB of RAM until I realized that said MB.
Such a throwback though, that iomega zip drive was cutting edge.
- We bought a house last year from a lady who lived here with her husband since they built the house in 1972. I found an iomega zip disk in a cabinet in the garage. I had never seen anything like it before. Really cool tech for the time.
  I'd kinda love to see what's on this disk. It could just be spreadsheets or maybe some copied floppies or lots of Metallica courtesy of Napster. Or some pictures of the family. No idea.
  
  100 MB portable storage was unreal back then, and then they came out with 250MB.
  Apparently you can still buy the media and drives, even a new one:
  https://www.amazon.com/Iomega-Zip-100-Portable-Drive/dp/B00000J3Q7
  
  I still have two Zip disks! One of them has Bulma’s boobs.
  
  My father still has a working external zip drive, I believe. I'll check with him today, but lemme know if you want me to DM the address. Sadly it only has about a 50-60% chance of retaining the data after all this time. It's likely demagnetized.
  
  I had one... Traded music with friends on them. We all had a few disks, which were crazy expensive. I had the portable drive. My friend had the in box drive. So we'd copy disk to disk all night.

Even back then you had McAfee bloat preinstalled

Dude! You're getting a Dell!
- Remember when dell bought Alienware? And all of a sudden people buying an Alienware machine got hit with that line.

It's been 25 years and their invoices look the same
- If it works, why change it?
  
  It only works mechanically. The actual customer service is terrible and they always had useless warranties even if you remove them.
- FYI the Customer Service line still works lol.

So funny story, if this is the first-gen (Blue) Dell XPS, we also bought one similarly spec'd.
Dell shipped it to us and when it arrived, it had 64 MB of ram instead of the 128 MB we ordered it with. Rather than sending us out new ram, they shipped us ANOTHER whole XPS. They never asked for the first back.
- They never asked for the first back.
  What in the dot-com fuck?
  
  Yep! It was during their "dude you're getting a dell" years when they had crazy good support.
  We had a particularly large desk and when we called into support, they mailed us (at no cost), Belkin extension cords for all our peripherals. It was wild.

Seems like overkill
How will you ever fill up 8.4gb of storage
- The day we got our 10mb hdd and installed it, as the old man carved up partitions and I got my H: drive, I can still hear his voice, "who could ever use all this space?!"
  
  Today I deleted 1 TB of old files that were buried and forgotten
  It blows my mind that such a thing is possible
- Honestly was the Windows 95 Factory Install really necessary? They couldn't be bothered to install it themselves?
- DVD Decryptor card that came pre installed

The Sales line doesn't work...
Surprisingly the Customer Service Line did still. Neat.
- You! You're the reason 555 is used in movies
  
  ... if there's a working number shown in media, I immediately call it.
  Most of them actually go to some kind of line with an automated message regarding whatever you're watching. If they get too old though they go out of service. RIP.
  I wanna say I originally remember doing this with some number in Fight Club and it went to Tyler Durden's line?
  
  KL5 in the Simpsons
  
  8675 30 9 eee ine
- So does the website!
  And Michelle Knippling is still slinging Dell computers!

You know you're an old geek when you look at the spec and go "300MHz PII? 64MB RAM? that's late 96 or early 97... Or cheap 98, but it's shipped with win95, and ooh la la IE4.0 pre-installed, definitely late 96 or early 97" and then you see the invoice date, and recognize it as Clinton's 2nd inauguration.

I know modern audio purists probably still use them, but I completely forgot that sound cards were always an additional thing!
- I'm rocking two soundblaster cards in my main rig
  https://pcpartpicker.com/user/wreckedcarzz/saved/#view=cN4ypg
  
  What do you use them for?
- I vaguely remember the Soundblaster AWE64, too. I don't remember what I had in my 486, though.
  
  I had the Gravis Ultrasound Max.

Dude, you got a Dell!
- My friend was hooking up with him. He was kind of a degenerate Stoner, but we all were.. he was an actual loser iirc (from.. 20? yrs ago)

That was a beast of a system back in its day. Your dad was clearly a PC connoisseur.

I remember when we upgraded to a Pentium III and later put an aftermarket Voodoo card in the thing after much begging on my part. That was the first PC I had that felt genuinely "powerful" to me.

Man, my first homebuild out of college was an absolute monster with 8MB of RAM so I could run NT at home. $640 just for the memory. I did cheap out on the CPU and only got the 75MHz Pentium, though we ran 90s at work. Wing Commander III was awesome on that thing.
- 96ish? I got a 120MHz Pentium with 8MB in like mid 96 for the equivalent of 2500USD and that was WITH a 15" CRT and 1.27GB HDD!
  
  Would have been circa '94. My build was definitely up in that range, possibly without the monitor. I'm also certain that my HD was measured in MB; might have been either a 250 or 330.

"It's an investment in your family's future, sir..."
So OP, do you now do clickity clacks professionally for money? Did that included edutainment software suite do the trick?
- I had an okay PC earlier than a lot of people in my age bracket, me and siblings all do use computers in our work now lol, so if they said that to my dad in the 90s they wouldn't be wrong
- Lol it really did, software engineer here

I just saved a pair of altec Lansing computer speakers from becoming ewaste at my work. They're easily 20+ years old but still work decently enough! I just use them to play music when no one else is in the office.

For the kids, this would've been a top of the line beefy set-up. I would say in '98 you would find a 1gb hd, a 120 Pentium, and 16mb of ram in a typical home that had a computer.
Remember things upgraded fast back then, by '00 your average Joe would be buying Pentium iii's with 600mhz and a DVD drive! Woah!
- This monster has 2 DVD drives! And a floppy drive too!

The only thing I miss about ZIP drives is that when you are holding one of those huge disks, you feel like a hacker in a 90s movie

That was after computers got significantly cheaper, too. The adjusted prices for PCs in the 80s were insane. My family got an Amiga 3000 in 1990 because my dad had an expense account he could only use for computers and didn't really need it for work that year... it was something like $4,500 which would be about $10,500 today. Same for his office PS/2, which was just a 486.

IDE DVD ROM drive and a hardware DVD decoder.
Dude, you could play DVDs? On your computer! Wow, truly it was the future.

Can it run Crysis?
- Maybe Doom
- Yeah in monochrome.

I repaired about 1000 of these in a single year.
That USR softmodem was an absolute plague.
- If it was a real ISA card it was solid, the "winmodem" was shitty as hell however
  
  US Robotics. Accept no substitute.
- Was that the modem that used “spare CPU cycles” as its processor?
  Because that was hot garbage.
  
  Yep, software modem.
  So if you bogged your system in any way while doing anything online, you'd DC in a heartbeat.
  Additionally, the software part was buggy and prone to getting tainted beyond repair.
  Driver updates also often borked everything.
  And replacing the modem was only 50/50 going to fix your issues with it, so until the internet developed a driver cleaner tool specifically for the USR Softmodem, you often had to reinstall Windows to actually fix the issues.

My dad had the >$4k receipt for our 1988 286 until this death recently

Powerhouse rig
- This system is jacked AF for 98 Almost a 10 gig HDD!
  
  CD ROM, endless capabilities

Our first desktop was a 365k. It cost $5600 Canadian and my father had a program at his work that allowed him to buy it and pay it back in payments. It took him 5 years to pay it off.

I have a very similar PC in the kitchen right now. It was my first PC. Pentium II 400, 32MB RAM, AWE64 ISA, DVD Decoder card, etc. That DVD decoder card was definitely an upsell though. That AGP graphics should have been able to do mpeg decoding in hardware.
- I’ll byte; why is it in your kitchen?
  
  My sister had it for a while and wanted me to wipe the data on it for her. Now I gotta recycle it or sell it. The CRT is in really good shape.

A 300 MHz Pentium II in early 1996 is insane. No wonder it cost so much!
I remember getting my first computer in 1998 and it was an AMD K6-2 and it cost approximately $1200.

You only paid $35 tax on a $3000 computer?
- Even better, they paid $2.89 tax on $35 of the total

That mouser was so comfy (first consumer optical)! You could spin it out, but then again also overclock it.
And not to brag, but I bought (also my third computer) a Celeron 300A at that time & overclocked it from 300 to 450MHz making it the fastest Intel CPU for years. Those were some good days.
- Hello fellow overclocker! Got myself the 366 and managed to get it to a consistent 550, 605 with a box fan on it 😂
  
  Damn, what a rush! And a fellow golden-era overclocker.
  I couldn't manage over 500 on my Celeron, I tried the pin-voltage trick but it made no difference.
  Also the last time I didn't really have to worry about cooling - for my next CPU (Thunderbird) I made a custom water block (gramps helped a lot :)).
- My first PC build was a K6-2, overclocked with jumpers from 300 to 400 MHz. Setting Vcore with jumpers made for a very exciting first power on!
  These days it’s hard to destroy a processor by overclocking, and it seems like it’s on its last legs. My 3090 and 5800X3D have no headroom, it’s the first non overclocked rig I’ve had since 2001.
  
  For real tho. What kind of bs OCing is lowering the voltage (curve) banking on the chip being good enough to run more efficiently to go faster.
  And gone are the days when CPUs didn't have thermal throttling (for purely safety purposes, iirc those shitty early P4 were the first ones to have it). I fried the Thunderbird I mentioned when I was testing some coolers and accidentally ran it for like 5 seconds without the cooler on. Its still a nice ornament on my wall tho. And a reminder of my brainholes intellect. Also nostalgia.

My man got that dual DVD setup in 1998! I got my first own computer when i was 15 in 2001 and it had a DVD tray and I thought I was cool af. Watched the first DVD the same day and a few days later I got a DSL modem and I was king of the world. It ran Delta Force like a dream.
- I think it's referring to the speed the drive can read a DVD at. https://kb.iu.edu/d/adme

Well, we know he overpaid by about 1500 dollars...

64MB ram? Go wild!

Intellimouse is a timeless classic

Wow. That seems really expensive for that time. I guess it must have been top of the line?
I wished I had better memory or still had the receipts for my home built 486 gaming rig (Matrox Mystique gfx card) around 95(?) or the year old Mac G4 I bought around 99 or 00. I swear it was well below half that^1. I've always been too cheap to get top of the line computers lol.
1 (ed) looking up the old specs and prices... If it was a G4 450 it cost $2500 new and I got a refurbished model. I guess I am misremembering the price. (Wtf was I thinking, spending that kind of money on a damn computer lol. It served me well for years and years though).
- I ordered a similar one but in 97 in Canadian dollars, near Aug for University. The 17" flat screen (crt flat) alone was $1400, I think the total was close to $4k.
  This does seem a bit on the high side though I agree. I think mine was a P2 200, 32MB RAM and matrix millennium card. Maybe their processor was the top end at the time which could account for a higher price. I think that hard drive was really big for the time, 8GB in 98? I may be misremembering too.
  
  Yeah you're right about the hard drive being big for the time. I got my first PC around then and plumped for the 8GB drive. It was a Dell too and the bump in cost wasn't actually that much.
  My roomie, who was far more computer literate at the time, said I would never fill it.
  Heh. I filled that sucker up with a huge MP3 collection pretty quickly.
  Similar enough specs but lower in many regards it was 2400 Irish pounds which if I remember correctly was around 1.4 US dollars per pound.
  Nvidia riva 128 graphics card. I nearly peed my pants when I saw hardware accelerated quake when they brought out the alpha drivers.
- The G4 didn't come out till 2002.
  
  Apple did some weird fuckery with switching models and specs around that time but Mac G4 towers were definitely being made and shipped in 1999. I think it was a G4 450 or [G4 500] (https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/specs/powermac_g4_500.html).
  But I probably paid way more than I was remembering above, because the 450 ran $2500 new and the 500 was $3500.
- No need to ever get top of the line stuff, unless you're doing video editing or something intensive. If you're not paying out the ass for proprietary software you don't need expensive hardware.
  I got a nice beelink tiny desktop computer recently that's better than MacBooks for $240. Only thing it can't do is go to the coffee shop.

A thousand times as much RAM as my 2nd computer.

An iMac with upgraded RAM and a USB drive of your choice woulda been cheaper. Weird.
- All the best games were on PC. And you couldn't upgrade the monitor on the iMac.
  
  I was just listing it as an interesting datapoint showing just how expensive this was at the time when compared to what people considered to be the expensive option in home computers.