1y ago

My dad found his order form from our 3rd computer

Those were some good specs back in the day... And the price 😯

133 comments

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.
  
  It literally says 1/16/98 on the order date :)
  
  Literally, as opposed to figuratively 1/16/98?
  
  Heck I think you're right.
  Man, I bet they were so bummed that they're stuck on Windows 95 then.
  I was in a similar boat. Got our first family PC with windows 95 like 4 months before 98 released. Which kept me from being a PC gamer until i was later into my teens.
  either way, how common were DVD drives in 98?
  
  Not very common at all; you needed a separate MPEG2 card to decode the DVD as the CPU wasn’t fast/strong enough.
  
  How did windows 95 keep you from gaming? That’s when I started. 98 wasn’t that big of a chance to my memory.
  
  Well it's not that it "kept" me from it, but I seem to remember the couple of PC gaming friends that I had, had games that I couldn't run as they seemed to me (with like 30 years of memories obfuscating) to only run on Windows 98?
  But I mean honestly that could've been my parents giving me excuses and stuff. Idk.
  I didn't have access to News and stuff about upcoming PC stuff back then so I could only go off what others told me haha
  
  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
  
  2X speed was impressive for the time too :)
  
  By 1998? Nah, not really. I think I had at least a 16x by then with my stock prebuilt.
  
  I think there may be a difference in measurement and that might where the discrepancy is. According to Wikipedia's entry on optical drives:
  The 1× speed rating for CD-ROM (150 Kbyte/s) is different from the 1× speed rating for DVDs (1.32 MB/s).
  So if that was indeed a 2x DVD drive, it would be pretty comparable (if I'm interpreting all this info correctly): 16x150,000 bytes per second= 2,400,000 or ~2.4 MB/s and the 2x DVD speed would be 1.32 MB/s x2= ~2.6MB/s
  Pretty close!
  
  Ah wait, I misread it as cd. Didn't realize it was DVD.
  
  Cd maybe but not DVD.
  
  I came to the comments hoping somebody would explain a reason for 2 DVD readers back in the days of Win95 lol thanks!

133 comments