10 Years Ago.. My (Legacy) Dream Machine '96. :)

[-silencer-]

Thought this was interesting today.. and still trying to pick my jaw up off the floor from the hit to my wallet.

In '96, I built my first machine for myself after putting together a dozen for family/friends. While shredding massive amounts of old paperwork, I came across my order list with prices.. unreal how expensive a lot of this was back then.. circa late summer/early fall 1996. Surprisingly enough, this was by far a top-end machine at the time.. especially the RAM and 1600x1200 resolution monitor. It looks pre-historic now.

CPU: Pentium 166MHz $390
Mobo: Asus P55T2P4 w/512K pipeline burst cache $190
Memory: Corsair 64MB EDO PC100 (2x32MB) $275
Hard Drive: Maxtor 2.0GB $360
Video Card: Matrox Millennium 4MB WRAM $270
Sound Card: Sound Blaster 32AWE $175
Speakers: Altec Lansing ACS500 "Surround Sound" $330
Monitor: Mag Innovision MXP17F 17" 1600x1200@60Hz $725
Modem: US Robotics Sportster 33.6k External $175
CD Drive: Teac 12X Internal $160
Floppy Drive: Epson 3.5" $40
Case/PSU: 9 Bay Tower w/digital MHz display & 250W AT PSU $110
Network Card: 10baseT Ethernet $30
SCSI Card: Jaz Jet $100
External Backup: Jaz 1GB Drive $395
Printer: Epson Stylus 600 $320
Scanner: Mustek Paragon SP1200 $320
Keyboard: Microsoft Ergonomic $100
Mouse: Microsoft Mouse $50
Joystick: Microsoft Sidewinder Pro $60

A few upgrades came along soon..

A CD Burner in 1997:
Sony 2X SCSI CD-R $350

And 3D graphics in early '98!:
Diamond Monster 3D II Voodoo2 12MB 3dfx $150
Diamond Monster 3D II Voodoo2 12MB 3dfx (2nd for SLI) $150

For a grand total of:
$5225.00

Judging that was roughly 10 years ago, or 3650 days.. how much would that be if I had invested it with average 10% yearly returns (compounded daily)?
$14201.10

That's enough cash for one (or 4!) slick machine(s).. unfortunately it's been salvaged apart to various destinations over the years, and the only remaining pieces in my possession are the monitor (sitting in the attic) and floppy drive (in a working linux box!).

It lasted me long enough to get me to the Athlon 1GHz t'bird w/Geforce2 Ultra days.. ok.. $14k gone.. time to make this Core2Duo last till 2015.

Moral of the story? Computer equipment has by far the highest depreciation of any consumer product.. don't blow money every 6 months for every upgrade stage unless you're driving a Ferrari.. or your "video" business/habit depends on it.

 

[apt403]

I would get that order sheet framed.

 

[-silencer-]

Yeah I'm not shredding that.

I was working in high school and took over a year to save up for it.. now that I've got a career in programming & investing, I should have started saving much earlier in life. The earlier you invest, the more time you allow for your money to work for you.. if I knew then what I know now, I would have bought that Gateway 2000 Pentium 66 for 1/3 the price and invested the rest...

 

[georgelawton]

lies all lies

 

[zjohnr]

Diamond Monster 3D II Voodoo2 12MB 3dfx (2nd for SLI) $150

A subtly inserted joke, right? :?

-john

 

[Natecannon]

How is that a joke? SLI was around during Voodoos control of the GPU market. Nvidia resurrected the tag when they bought out Voodoo.

Or am I missing something?

 

[zjohnr]

NVidia had SLI available in 1996? You are kidding, right? No?

Sheeeesh. And this was implemented using video cards on ... what? ... the PCI bus?

(I may be old, but that doesn't mean I remember that far back)

-john

 

[Natecannon]

I don't know if you are being sarcastic or not but...

"The name SLI was first used by 3dfx with its Scan-Line Interleave, which was introduced in 1998 and used in the Voodoo 2 line of graphics accelerators. 3dfx was later purchased by NVIDIA, who ended development, and then sales, of the Voodoo series cards. NVIDIA reintroduced the SLI name in 2004 and intends for it to be used in modern computer systems based on the PCI Express (PCIe) bus. However, the technology behind the name SLI has changed dramatically." -Wikipedia

he said he added the voodoo 2 and SLI in an update (I assume 2 years later)

Ugh, and I keep calling 3dfx, voodoo.

 

[Natecannon]

Yeah, I always wanted a SLI solution back in the days... maximize FPS in Jedi Knight 8)

 

[zjohnr]

I don't know if you are being sarcastic or not but...

No, not sarcastic, I'm just totally clueless. Thanks for setting me straight.

People actually plugged two graphics cards into the PCI bus. Wow. And I thought I was placing a strain on the available PCI bus bandwidth by using a PCI IDE controller card in addition to the existing IDE controllers.

-john

 

[theboomboomcars]

People actually plugged two graphics cards into the PCI bus. Wow. And I thought I was placing a strain on the available PCI bus bandwidth by using a PCI IDE controller card in addition to the existing IDE controllers.

The Voodoo 2s were an add in card, so you had you main graphics card plus the two 3D cards. That is a lot of real estate for your graphics especially when you only had 5 PCI slots and the other two were taken up by the sound card and nic.

 

[Ranman68k]

People actually plugged two graphics cards into the PCI bus. Wow. And I thought I was placing a strain on the available PCI bus bandwidth by using a PCI IDE controller card in addition to the existing IDE controllers.

Yeah... you can still do that today.

If you can find PCI graphics cards, you can plug as many in as you have slots for. But... in this case it is not "SLI"; each card generates a stand-alone video signal.

 

[DrBlofeld]

Yeah I'm not shredding that.

I was working in high school and took over a year to save up for it.. now that I've got a career in programming & investing, I should have started saving much earlier in life. The earlier you invest, the more time you allow for your money to work for you.. if I knew then what I know now, I would have bought that Gateway 2000 Pentium 66 for 1/3 the price and invested the rest...

I saved early and invested. I lost 10K. Not true at all. I should have used the money to build a kick-A$$ computer.

 

[pshrk]

I think that quote should have ended "and invested the rest wisely..."

time to change investing strategies?

 

[croc]

I'd make two changes to that setup...

USRobotics HST
Anthem Eagle NIC

Now that would have been a killer system.

 

[duthoy]

those voodoo's had SLI with a kind of bridge cable, no sh*t
maybe you slept that day in school
3Dfx rocks, it wasn't microsoft so it had to go, stupid micro...

http://www.planetquake3.net/tweak/lod-4.jpg

this what you could pull out of a pentium 1 200Mhz and 1 voodoo, image what you could do with SLI
it took Dx until version 7.0 on a pentium 3 500 Mhz and a geforce 4 before it looked better than the old pentium 1 with a 3DFX voodoo card

 

[Naw-yi]

u could also add more memory to the card or cards with memory chips that snapped in like old bios chips.

 

[croc]

Huh? I thought that went out when 286's came in... But I'm never too old to learn.

 

[plankmeister]

A friend of mine back then had an SLI system... We used to gather round his 1600x1200 monitor watching him play "Unreal" (yes... the original!) WOW that was awesome. Real lighting effects! Volumetric smoke! "Photo-realistic" water! (well.... sort of!) If I remember rightly, he had one of the first Celerons that could be REALLY overclocked... And there was me with my K6-233 and Matrox Mystique 64MB!

 

[plankmeister]

u could also add more memory to the card or cards with memory chips that snapped in like old bios chips.

Anyone remember "COAST"? Cache On A STick? Waaaaay back in the day when the L2 cache was on the motherboard! Most computers that had a COAST slot didn't have it populated... you had to buy it extra! Imagine that... a 166MHz processor with no L2 cache! Hahaha.... And we all thought those processors were bLaZiNg fast! I remember upgrading my P200MMX machine with a 128kb COAST board. I used to use Bryce 3D to benchmark! Adding the cache decreased render times by about half, if I remember correctly!

Great days

 

[Naw-yi]

about 2 years ago i opened up a newer looking Micron case to find cache on a stick w/pentium 2 and sdram memory, the dam this had an agp slot, lol.

 

[plankmeister]

OMG!

 

[misry]

Huh? I thought that went out when 286's came in... But I'm never too old to learn.

Oh no. You weren't a hacker unless you piggybacked chips, (stacking an identical chip on top of another and soldering thier legs together), to double the cache and the video.

Voodoo cards didn't have a VGA out. You ran a 3 or 4" ribbon cable to a video card that could accept it and could then rock Wolfenstien's world.

 

[yakyb]

got to ask the question. how out of date do you think our dream systems of today will be in 10 years time. i think that things are slowing down a bit and our systems will still be capable of a lot more than the one the OP posted i.e they could be used as file servers, Web servers, firewalls/routers but then again a 8 year old 800Mhz system could do that with a Linux Distro.
anyone got any opinions

 

[bb1ood]

My almost 10 year old system is still running 24/7 as a web server. It is a Dell XPS400R which I purchased in 97 or 98. Originally had a PII400 and 128 MB ram, 15GB hard drive, and some kind of 8mb vid card made by ATI. I used this machine for general duty until 2002 when it became a server.

I have upgraded the ram to 512mb, the processor to a PII650, hard drives total 220 GB and run Redhat linux on it. I have it plugged into a fairly large UPS and it NEVER....knock on wood.....needs to be shut down.

[code:1:8240a3b08e][guest@********* guest]$ uptime
06:45:29 up 256 days, 23:57, 5 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00[/code:1:8240a3b08e]

This last shutdown was for hardware upgrade....A new UPS....

This machine serves up around 10 different domains to the internet and a whole bunch of media to my HTPC....The media server aspect is being phased out and moved to my HTPC, which is my old gaming rig.

I spent about 3 grand on that Dell....Still going strong. I even still use the monitor for my current gaming rig...Needs upgrading though....16X12 is nice but I want widescreen....