alt.hn

5/18/2025 at 2:52:11 PM

Building my childhood dream PC

 https://fabiensanglard.net/2168/index.html

by todsacerdoti

5/19/2025 at 12:28:45 AM

The 286/12, with its 1MB memory, 60MB RLL Hard drive, and 5.25" floppy... oh and the VGA card and 14" 256 color VGA monitor, and the Panasonic KXP-1180i. It was October 1988. My Dad's boss financed it through the company, and brought it over and set it up for us. And offered 13 year old me the opportunity to call him any time I needed help. And that I did. Between the computer purchase, the endless phone calls, and then a year later ending up on Prodigy's excellent discussion groups, I learned huge amounts.

It wasn't until much later in life that I properly appreciated how much of a sacrifice it was for my dad- a man who could barely read, worked 12-14 hour days, and came home covered in mud and grease regularly- to buy a $3300 computer in 1988. That's about $8000 in today's money.

I don't know if I ever got the chance to thank him properly for it. He died when I was in my mid 20's, self absorbed and busy with my new family.

Thanks, Dad.

by geocrasher

5/19/2025 at 1:35:24 AM

> a man who could barely read, worked 12-14 hour days, and came home covered in mud and grease regularly- to buy a $3300 computer in 1988. That's about $8000 in today's money.

The best way to celebrate that kindness is to pass it down to people around you.

by fabiensanglard

5/19/2025 at 4:55:33 AM

I agree. And I do my best to do exactly that.

by geocrasher

5/19/2025 at 3:04:28 AM

Your dad was awesome.

I tried to get my kids into computers, but it didn’t stick. It’s not the same today as it was then.

by rubitxxx6

5/19/2025 at 4:57:05 AM

He was a good man, no doubt. Troubled, which is why he died before he hit 60. That was almost 25 yeas ago, and I still miss him all the time.

by geocrasher

5/18/2025 at 5:18:50 PM

Love the image of the monitor showing Battle Chess! As a side note to all like-minded people that love old DOS games, check out the library of DOS games on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

by tos1

5/18/2025 at 5:36:25 PM

The best version of Battle Chess was on the Amiga, though. :)

by pjmlp

5/18/2025 at 11:44:53 PM

Or download eXodos torrent, 600gb with most of the DOS games ever released already comes pre-configured to run in Dosbox

by myth_drannon

5/19/2025 at 12:24:30 AM

Most of the PCs I had access to growing up sucked in some way, so I have no nostalgia to recreate any of them as entire systems.

In 2013[0], I built a PC with the loose goal of being the best the 20th century had to offer, at least as far as core components were concerned. (I considered 2000 as part of the 20th century for the purposes of this build.) I ended up with a Pentium 3 600 MHz, 256 MB RAM, Geforce 2 Ultra, 52x CDROM drive, and crappy "multimedia" speakers. Somehow, I still had the same Yamaha-based soundcard I grew up with, so that's the only original part of this nostalgic ship of thesis. I threw in a 40GB hard drive, and later upgraded to 250 GB. The 17" CRT, keyboard, and ball mouse are early-mid 2000s and Dell-branded (the PC case is beige and unbranded). The only thing that would complete the build would be a modem, but no one liked dial-up, ever, so I have a fast ethernet card instead. The clock noticeably drifts out of sync by a few minutes every month, so I have an NTP client.

I installed Windows 98 on it, and promptly started playing games I loved growing up, and later, others: Starcraft, SimCity 2000, Road Rash, Chips Challenge, Fallout, and Diablo. It barely runs the original Warcraft 3 (but Frozen Throne refuses to install).

[0] https://theandrewbailey.com/article/120/Project-Twentieth-Ce...

by theandrewbailey

5/19/2025 at 1:37:44 AM

Did you take a photo of that marvel by any chance?

by fabiensanglard

5/18/2025 at 6:58:42 PM

My first x86 was acquired in 1997: a 200MHz pentium MMX with 32 MB of RAM, a 2.0 GB harddisk, a 2 MB S3 ViRGE as video card, Aztech Labs AZT-R 2316 sound card, a 33.600 bps winmodem and 28X (I think) CD-ROM. I soon wanted to install Linux on it. It ran minilinux, a small distro that could be launched directly from DOS without partitioning, relatively well. I also downloaded Debian and prepared the 10 floppies to install it but never got ahead because it didn't support my keyboard layout (ABNT2) out of the box. I eventually installed Conectiva Linux 3.0 (marumbi), a RedHat based distro, on it. It worked somewhat beautifully but had no support for the modem and soundcard.

As my relatives and siblings updated their computers, I inherited their spare parts. My machine got some very interesting upgrades. It got 2 floppy drives (very rare at the time), 2 harddisks, a cd-recorder unit, RAM was upgraded to 64 MB and the modem was replaced by a ne2k compatible network card. I also had a Linux-supported Canon BJC 4200 and a SANE-supported TCE table scanner. Still, I couldn't get the SoundBlaster that my brother had and, sadly, my machine continued without sound support on Linux.

At around 2006 I replaced it with a new self built computer which had better compatibility with Linux than with windows-xp and then this new computer became my first dedicated Linux machine. I found out that Linux eventually got support for AZT-R 2316 at around 2007, but the last time I tried my old computer, it displayed "parity error" probably from oxidation in the memory connectors. I then just gave up on it.

Later on I thought about if it would be possible to install a graphics card with OpenGL support and USB port on one of the remaining PCI ports. I certainly wouldn't be able to install a modern Linux distro on it, but certainly it would work with one of those specially crafted for old computers like TinyCore. With recent kernel changes, swapping maybe smart enough to be usable on SSD with SATA to IDE adapters even in that computer. Now, that would be a dream machine.

by marcodiego

5/18/2025 at 10:54:15 PM

The part about buying a misleading CPU really hit home with me. Man all those small retailers in the 90s were living the dream with their unaware customers.

My parents bought an AMD 486 100mhz at the end of 1995, it was still a viable low end machine for that time but they paid as if it was a Pentuim. Had to somehow make it work up until 2001 with that machine. Don't know if I had a career in tech if I wasn't forced to tinker with it.

by sthuck

5/19/2025 at 7:46:24 AM

When you can make DOOM run on a potato, everything else feels doable

by ErigmolCt

5/18/2025 at 8:29:36 PM

The very moment I saw the letters ‘MMX’, a long forgotten part of my brain woke up and said, “I know what that smells like!”

Which is bizarre. But to me it is (apparently) the small of new electronics, plus perhaps the ‘hot dusty things’ smell. It also comes with the memory of playing Pod (a racing game), by Ubisoft (I think). Good teenage memories!

by adamcharnock

5/18/2025 at 8:43:30 PM

Oh, that was nice. I think it was one of the first "high fps" games and it looked super smooth...

by tecleandor

5/19/2025 at 4:10:23 AM

Pod is a great game, I think I bought a copy from GoG and it worked great.

Played this a lot on my families Gateway computer in early 90s.

by ghthor

5/18/2025 at 9:07:08 PM

I did that a few years ago, with the 1990 computer that I lusted over as a teenager: the IBM 8595 AKD (European reference - it is 85950KD in North America)... 486 DX, XGA display, 320 MB SCSI, 64 MB RAM... At that time my computer was a 1988 Olivetti PC-1 (512 KB 8 MHz Nec V40 with CGA and a floppy drive)...

I was awed by the beast... Everything about it screamed over-engineering - even the case was incomprehensibly robust and the power switch had a satisfyingly loud motion... I could even touch its legendary tangential fan... Touching the 20 years-old dream was an emotional moment - I'm glad I did it... The ultimate Windows 3.0 host !

But it had to go after a little while: my two-room apartment was too small for so much awesomeness, so it went to another fan.

by liotier

5/18/2025 at 6:06:00 PM

My entry was the mentioned 486DX2-66Mhz. Double speed CD-Rom and Sound Blaster. Norton Commander was great, Doom and Pirates Gold where my games of choice.

Also started programming on this one with QBasic and then moved to Turbo Pascal 7 (because I needed a .exe file to be called from autoexec as a password protection vs. my sister which I couldn't do with QBasic :)

Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D

by kriro

5/19/2025 at 3:39:13 AM

That's a pretty familiar configuration... it wasn't a COMPAQ was it?

The double-speed CDROM in mine was a SCSI. The SoundBlaster 16 card was also the SCSI controller card. Fucking weird piece of hardware. Many years later I found another one that ALSO had a 16kbit modem on it, in addition to being a sound card and SCSI controller O_O

Also, your quest of creating .exe's was cleaner than mine. I scoured the non-internet that was available to my rural country town for QuickBASIC, which had a couple of of syntax differences to QBASIC but it COULD compile .exe's!

by samplatt

5/18/2025 at 7:01:48 PM

> Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D

With a friend we destroyed the msdos 622 installation on the new 40 mb hd of my family 386 when deleting tmp files...

by yazantapuz

5/18/2025 at 6:12:27 PM

My teenage dream machine was a PDP-8 (the original) and a Teletype ASR-33. Fortunately, I never got it.

by vincent-manis

5/19/2025 at 7:47:58 AM

There's a certain romance to those early machines

by ErigmolCt

5/18/2025 at 4:33:33 PM

Great article. The mention of Cyrix brought back a rush of nostalgia - one of the earlier PCs I built used a Cyrix 686 166mhz processor.

From the article:

> 8BitDo makes a fantastic modern keyboard inspired by the M looks and feel.

Hard disagree. I found most of their keyboard replicas to be rather cheap feeling. However, their controllers such as the Arcade Stick and Pro 2 are excellent.

I think the closest approximation you can get to an old school model M keyboard with buckler springs is probably from Unicomp. If you don't care about that kind of authenticity I would just stick with something like a Keychron mechanical keyboard and call it a day.

https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/NEW_M

by vunderba

5/18/2025 at 7:30:56 PM

I had the same Cyrix cpu and all I remember is that FPU performance was terrible in Quake.

by christkv

5/18/2025 at 8:10:43 PM

I had a Cyrix 6x86MX and it was good enough for Quake (I played Quake originally on a Pentium-60, and it was fine).

The Quake code was designed to take advantage of the fact that the Pentium could have one integer and one FPU instruction in flight at the same time, thanks to optimizations by an even bigger space-alien wizard than John Carmack -- Michael Abrash. The Cyrix CPUs... couldn't dual-issue instructions like this, so clock-for-clock their performance suffered compared to Intel.

by bitwize

5/19/2025 at 2:42:10 AM

Pentium innovation was FPU that could have many instructions in flight. You would issue 0 cycle free FXCH and keep filling pipeline with new FPU instructions

https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/bf4ac424ce754894ac...

486, Cyrix, K5 were stopping until previous instruction retires, and even AMD up to late K6-2 revision couldnt do 0 cycle FXCH.

by rasz

5/18/2025 at 8:25:32 PM

It was alright in Quake, as I recall, but it really didn't cope at all well with Quake 2 and Jedi Knight.

by micv

5/19/2025 at 1:10:12 AM

When I had a Timex Sinclair 1000, I wanted a VIC-20.

When I had a Radio Shack MC-10, I wanted a Color Computer 2.

When I had a Commodore 64, I wanted a Commodore 128.

When I had an Atari 130XE, I wanted an Atari ST.

When I had an Atari ST, I wanted an Atari Mega STE.

When I had an Atari Mega STE, I wanted a 486.

I now have all of these!

by empressplay

5/19/2025 at 2:03:00 AM

Photos!

by fabiensanglard

5/18/2025 at 6:13:29 PM

PS/1 seems like an odd choice since it was intended for the home and small business market. It was IBM's answer to beige box clones dominating everyone who wasn't an institutional buyer and paying for the PS/2 premium.

by ok123456

5/18/2025 at 6:41:54 PM

Because of the authors childhood experience of his neighbors PS/1 being much better than his own machine.

by tokai

5/19/2025 at 1:51:33 AM

>IBM PS/1 is that they were upgradable. Contrary to PC clones where everything was often soldered, these came with an Intel Overdrive socket to upgrade the CPU, and extra slots to increase the L1 cache, RAM, and VRAM.

Plenty PS/1 came with everything soldered on and missing pinouts for CPU socket/ram/cache, LPX form factor makes you married to the case. Mom and pop build PCs were kings of expandability, everything standard off the shelf, could continuously upgrade step by step component after component all the way to ~2000.

PS/1 was a funny series of IBM computers. The idea was to make something low end and cheap, that necessitated using common third party components resulting in more standard and compatible PC than stupid MCA/ESDI PS/2 line. Epictronics loves PS/2 line and has plenty of repair videos, its a never ending stream of WTF where they thinking combined with oh well that part is unobtanium now, IBM IBMing.

>"Hanging note bug"[9]. I had to go to the next level and get a MIDI card.

SB16 firmware was decompiled and bug patched out, fix requires replacing microcontroller with $3 Atmel. All in all SB16 was a rushed (early reviews complained about glitchy sound, not working ASP) poor product. I associate it with hissy sound and lack of SB Pro Stereo mode support.

by rasz

5/18/2025 at 5:40:37 PM

You never forget your first teenage dream PC. For me, it would be a 8800 GTX SLI build with a QX6850. And now I've revealed how old I am :^)

by automatic6131

5/18/2025 at 6:19:46 PM

Too young to remember how to configure an autoexec.bat/config.sys for maximum memory in Falcon Gold, too old to forget what a Folder is.

by p_ing

5/18/2025 at 6:21:15 PM

Fire up MEMMAKER.EXE which makes recommendations after two restarts.

by rzzzt

5/19/2025 at 12:42:36 AM

A Q9300 + 9800 GX2 (later stepped-up to a GTX 280) was my college build.

by theandrewbailey

5/18/2025 at 9:36:14 PM

Mine was weird. An Amstrad 1512 but shrunk to about half the length in every dimension inc. monitor. I could probably make that now using 3d printer and rpi!

by coolcase

5/18/2025 at 7:02:29 PM

Thanks for sharing. I love the design/theme of the site. Pure bliss.

by dt3ft

5/18/2025 at 7:19:28 PM

In Part 2 the photo immediately after “It seems IBM integrated it to the motherboard” completely fooled my brain into believing that I’m looking at the side wall of a garage. The garage door to the left. The opener equipment top-right.

And I’m just immediately fixated on this whole vibe of a life-sized tinkering workspace that’s the inside of a PC case.

by Waterluvian

5/18/2025 at 9:27:40 PM

makes me think of the IBM AN/FSQ-7 built into the SAGE air defense stations, the largest computer ever built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7_Combat_Direction_Cent...

While realistically I understand it was just a bunch of racks and consoles, due to the permanent nature of the installation and the way it was integrated into the building I like to imagine the operators and technicians scurrying around admits bunches of wires and tubes.

by somat

5/18/2025 at 11:02:08 PM

> Weight 250 tons

So that doesn’t qualify for free shipping, I imagine.

I absolutely love the aesthetic of a big classic telephone receiver attached to the end.

by Waterluvian

5/19/2025 at 1:15:34 AM

Those huge CRT vector consoles with the light gun are amazing as well.

And, and, (I really am unable to contain my glee here) each one come with a cigarette lighter and ashtray. I love it.

Growing up My father enjoyed classic cars and at one point we had a 1962 Cadillac, and yes, it did have the infamous Cadillac fins, not as majestic as the 1959 models(peak fin year) but they were there, it looked like a four door bat-mobile. Anyway, the other thing I remember about it was that it had 5 ashtrays and lighters, one for each kid. Truly peak luxury.

by somat

5/18/2025 at 11:43:24 PM

Must have been an amazing journey, thanks for the great writeup! I also have a DELL 2007FP, now I'm thinking about getting an AMIGA 1200 again (which I coded on in assembly), and a 1997 Pentium as well :)

by karon

5/18/2025 at 3:14:46 PM

I can't say a PS/1 would have been my first choice for a 486 platform; I'd imagine there are faster motherboards out there and a desktop (i.e. ASUS w/ SiS chipsets). That said, I had a 486/66, so... (some Dell).

And it looks like the PS/1 is missing VLB, but of course the video card is integrated in this model so that makes sense.

I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card and a Sound Blaster AWE64.

But that's my childhood machine, not the author's :-)

by p_ing

5/18/2025 at 6:21:16 PM

The 486 generation was fraught with bus wars and the motherboard market was rather fragmented.

I once visited a college buddy who had a genuine EISA system, and I believe that I left flecks of drool as I admired the superior electronics and engineering invested in that EISA bus. Of course, nobody seriously purchased EISA if they expected to be compatible with stuff.

My father had a PS/2 50Z, which unfortunately saddled him with the MCA Microchannel bus. A likewise superior bit of engineering that was compatible with virtually nothing. Thankfully, Dad never felt a burning need to trick out his system.

Personally, I enjoyed the standard ISA path on my 286 and 386. It was with some regret that I chose VLB for the 486 board, because compared to the above buses, VLB was a hack and a kludge, and you could smell the duct tape and chewing gum on every expansion card.

However, VLB expansion cards were as plentiful as Star Wars action figures, so I was able to absolutely cram cards into a full-size tower until several generations of Pentiums obsoleted everything except PCI.

by AStonesThrow

5/18/2025 at 6:57:01 PM

The days of nearly-full slots was great. While by the time I had my first computer, a 386SX (12Mhz?) IDE and floppy controllers had made it to the motherboard, we still had a sound card, modem, video card, potentially game card if no game ports on the sound card, and awhile later in PCI land a 3Dfx card.

Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a purpose I no longer need). SLI is dead. Only those with special needs, LLMs or crypto, would ever fill up the additional slots.

Building computers is now just stupid simple and in my view, sorta brainless. No jumpers, no "must go in this slot #". The only thing I ever have difficulty with is mounting the CPU cooler, the thing is f-ing huge and requires a special very long Phillips screwdriver.

/oldmanrant

Oh yeah, and if you didn't bleed when building a PC, you didn't really build a PC. Now everything is rolled steel for those kitten hands.

by p_ing

5/18/2025 at 8:16:33 PM

As someone with those "special" needs (if 10Gb/25Gb Ethernet and HDMI-capture are that special), it is incredibly frustrating.

The CPUs all come with enough PCIe lanes for a single dGPU at x16, x4 for the PCH/chipset, and maybe another x4 for a single M.2 SSD. If you aren't building a bog standard gaming PC with one SSD, one huge GPU, and nothing else, you get a configuration that doesn't match what you need. Bifurcation is hit-or-miss, if you can even physically get to the second PCIe slot, if that slot is even big enough. Random M.2s are linked to the PCH with random modes and bandwidths that change based on other configuration options.

All due to the stingy lane count on consumer platforms, again, targeting the lowest common denominator. It was even worse before Ryzen came out and offered a generous 24 lanes (16 for a GPU, 4 for the PCH, and 4 for an SSD) vs Intel's 20.

Of course, PCIe lanes aren't free, but somehow, having "I/O" targeted workloads means you also must go and spend 2-5x as much for "workstation" or server class motherboards, which also are engineered to a common "usual needs" spec that add in a bunch of shit I don't need, and usually require sacrificing single-core speed unless you get top of the line $10K+ server CPUs that draw 5x the power.

What I'd really like is instead of 4 lanes going to the chipset, I wish all of them did. Or at least, all of them went from the CPU to some switch chip that would allow me to set which lanes go to what slots, and have a software configured lane/bandwidth allocation. 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0 is 48 lanes of PCIe 4.0 is 96 lanes of PCIe 3.0, which is more than enough, but trying to actually unlock all of that bandwidth is still limited to the hardware configuration of the motherboard, and no way to reallocate unspent bandwidth. Instead of it all being hardwired for specific configurations, to the CPU directly OR to the chipset, I wish they were all wired for x16 (or x4 for the M.2 slots) direcly to some switch chip, which is then fully wired to the CPU's remaining lanes after PCH/chipset connections. If I need to stuff 4 slots with x16 cards, but they only run at 3.0 speeds, that would still leave 8 lanes of PCIe 5.0 I could allocate elsewhere.

I'm sure this is probably technically impossible, or would be incredibly expensive, but a man can dream.

by wpm

5/18/2025 at 7:13:33 PM

> Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste'

Made worse by the video cards being ridiculously fat. As an example, the one I have is two slots wide, and protrudes over the third slot; my motherboard has a PCIe x1 slot there, which is made unusable by that. The fourth and last slot of my motherboard, a PCIe x4, is clearly intended for the Thunderbolt card (there's a special connector near it on the motherboard for the sideband signals), but I can't see much use for Thunderbolt on a tower desktop, so it sits empty.

by cesarb

5/18/2025 at 7:36:22 PM

MY likely-underinformed opinion is that the ATX form factor for building PCs is creaking at the seams for the generic '1x dGPU' specification, but there's a number of factors that work against a change to something substantially better. It'd need a number of companies to offer new product lines at the same time, probably incompatible with ATX and all the challenges that would bring.

It's not just the huge heatsinks to get rid of the heat output, the power input is another. Also while dGPUs are growing at the high end, low-end dGPUs seem under-served, while AMD have APUs that I think could make a lot of people very content they don't seem too eager to make them easy to get hold of, and intel have the building blocks for a similar product but are hesitant to providing something beyond the minimum

by keyringlight

5/18/2025 at 8:14:09 PM

The popularity of the mini-ITX board size really shows this along with alternative mounting locations and risers for GPUs.

The old ATX power supply standard really needs to get phased out. I'm hopeful to see progress on ATX12VO become more common.

But even separate from that I see things like the Ryzen Z series opening even smaller devices while still offering a lot of graphical punch. I love the Z1 Extreme on my Legion Go, it's an awesome platform. And yeah, having that plus an external GPU could be cool but as noted it's $$$.

by vel0city

5/18/2025 at 8:07:54 PM

Intel proposed the BTX format [0]. Didn't catch on. ATX has a lot of momentum (including the related mATX, EATX, and so forth).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTX_(form_factor)

by p_ing

5/18/2025 at 9:05:24 PM

I think BTX serves as the example for why a major change is unlikely, it's death is a warning to anyone thinking of doing the same. That said, even though it was led by intel back when they were in a much better position than they are now, I wonder if it wasn't against the background of Pentium4/"Preshott" and Athlon/Opteron would it have gone down better.

It's a shame as the only real personal computer desktop/tower maker that's exercised their freedom to make a significantly different design Apple with Mac Pros, and that's a different animal entirely.

by keyringlight

5/18/2025 at 7:20:52 PM

Yep, I have a 4090. It runs adventure and zork like no one's business.

by p_ing

5/19/2025 at 12:08:52 AM

No such luck over here. I have noticed a huge degradation in imagination fidelity since upgrading to a more powerful GPU.

by II2II

5/18/2025 at 10:53:34 PM

TFA is a great read, although the PS/1 being a turnkey system, the author didn't need to piece together a lot of compatible accessories to make a great system.

"LEGO for Adults" is a very apt analogy I began to hear recently, about PCs in those days. It was an exhilirating feeling of self-determination and control for aficionados, that you could walk into a huge Fry's Electronics and there may be an entire wide aisle dedicated to sound cards, and most all of them would be compatible with your system -- the same situation with video cards, disk controllers, anything on PCI, not to mention the RAM and other accessories.

A desktop tower PC in those days was like a blank slate. I purchased my 386 "barebones" and upgraded piecemeal, because what better way to spec out the perfect system, and spread out the costs, than waiting a few months in-between expansion cards or accessory purchases? It was sort of a miracle that I upgraded the 386 so extensively, that by the time it was time to purchase a 486 system, all I needed was a motherboard and a disk, because the rest of the spare parts were all duplicated from past upgrades!

However this sort of self-assembly of PCs has long passed us by. Another interesting inflection point for me was reached in 2018. I decided I had no need for a desktop machine, and during the purchase of my ThinkPad, I was able to go direct to Lenovo.com, and spec out every detail of the machine to my heart's desire, building a truly custom system just through their website's storefront interface. It was custom-built and shipped direct from China, built to last like a battleship. Perhaps those days are bygone as well, at this point.

by AStonesThrow

5/19/2025 at 1:10:08 AM

> However this sort of self-assembly of PCs has long passed us by.

How so?

From my recollections, building a Pentium-era PC was very similar to building a PC today: case, PSU, motherboard, CPU, RAM, video card, and storage. Most components could be upgraded independently. Granted, any meaningful upgrade of the CPU is probably going to involve the motherboard and RAM as well. That is pretty much the same as today. There were a few hiccups along the way if you wanted a smooth upgrade path, mostly with respect to the transition from PCI to AGP to PCIe for video, but that sort of thing is happening on different fronts today.

It was a slightly different story in the 486 era and earlier. There was far less I/O built onto the motherboard, but even then your computer was probably retired with the same I/O cards that it started with. The main exceptions were modems, sound cards, and some sort of controller for a CD-ROM. Yet that had more to do with online services popping up and multimedia titles becoming popular. Gamers may upgrade their sound card and a tiny fraction of people may upgrade their disk controller. So there wasn't a huge difference there. Pre-486 was slightly different since it was more common for peripherals to come with an expansion card, yet even then there were often alternatives that didn't require an expansion card.

The biggest change I can think of is the rate of progress. Performance and capabilities were exploding at a mind-boggling pace, and the only way one's wallet could cope (while keeping up) was to upgrade piecemeal. On my end, my last fresh PC build was in 2012. It has been progressively upgraded, and still has some of it's original parts. In other words, I have been upgrading that machine for 13 years, which is roughly equivalent to time-span between the introduction of the IBM PC and the introduction of the Pentium processor.

Perhaps the second biggest change is that is used to be cheaper to build. But that hasn't been true for a very long time either.

by II2II

5/19/2025 at 10:55:11 AM

Here's our perspective. The hobbyists and enthusiasts my age (mid-50s) have reached consensus that it's not worth building a system from components anymore, for these reasons:

- More turnkey systems are available from integrators. You can now configure fully prebuilt systems direct from the vendor, or pull them off a shelf at any retail outlet. In the past, prebuilt systems were sold to grandmas and busy parents. Now integrators serve all markets from gamers, to small business, to power users as well. No user of Apple Computers is building one from scratch, and this mindset is now shared by PC users as well.

- Less tinkering. As mature power users, we prefer to "Plug and Play" rather than spending our days with the case pulled off. If we're not selecting parts and worrying about compatibility, then we can get down to using the system we have. We've learned all we need to know about the internals and earned our A+.

- Still a niche market. If you want to build from components, then you need to go into the geek's catalog market. The best/most components go directly to integrators anyway.

- Fewer distinguished components. Standard integrated Ethernet and sound and storage are "good enough" on your motherboard. At this end of Moore's Law, the buyer can load enough RAM and storage in a base system.

- More people are going mobile. We've conceded that a desktop system is overkill for our "daily driver" needs, and a notebook is really convenient when on-the-go. Notebook computers now have the power and resources to completely replace a desktop system, and every 3-5 years, you just get to replace the whole thing!

And of course, these are personal justifications and reasoning for why I don't build systems anymore. I wouldn't want to rain on others' parade. If you're a teenager and you love "LEGO For Adults" then build a system. Nobody's going to stop you. If you love PC internals and tinkering with your hardware every day, nobody's going to stop you. But as a power user with things to do every day, I need a computer that works, and a computer whose case I'm not removing every other day!

by AStonesThrow

5/19/2025 at 3:00:08 AM

Even P2/P3/AMD K6-2 mostly had a need for a bunch of addin cards. Video, sound, NIC at a minimum. Maybe a modem or MPEG-2 decoder card or TV tuner.

Take a look at one of the best boards of the era — ASUS P2B. All of the above would be needed.

by p_ing

5/19/2025 at 2:52:34 AM

> Oh yeah, and if you didn't bleed when building a PC, you didn't really build a PC

Can confirm - I recently built an AT system from fully disassembled case, as the case was gross and all parts/screws/plastics needed a bath. My hands were very rough by the end, lots of small cuts!

by accrual

5/18/2025 at 5:48:24 PM

I was always afraid of a lot of the IBM and Compaq computers because of all of the incompatibility notes or issues I'd read about in README.TXT (usually minor workarounds), and then to a greater extent in getting Linux running on them.

by bluedino

5/18/2025 at 6:18:57 PM

Linux wasn't too much of a concern when these machines were in their prime. But yes, I remember those compatibility notes.

by p_ing

5/18/2025 at 5:51:10 PM

> I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card

This is exactly what the IBM PS/1 2168 have (see the unboxing section).

by fabiensanglard

5/18/2025 at 6:18:09 PM

The video frame doesn't render; on macOS Firefox it shows "No video with supported format and MIME type found.", so I missed it. But looking at the pictures, it only has ISA slots on the expansion board, unless I'm missing something.

But I missed that part of your post. I haven't seen integrated VLB before, only slotted. Does this board have an expansion to 2MiB? Though that would only matter if you wanted higher resolution/colors.

by p_ing

5/18/2025 at 8:21:41 PM

Could be a fun exercise:

- Commodore 128 with dual floppy drive vs my tape-only C64 - Maxed out Amiga 1000 with a bunch of sampler and MIDI extensions vs my A500 + 512kb - B/W PowerMac G3 fully expanded just because - Dual Celly 300A @ 450 with Dual Voodoo II vs my 450 with single Voodoo II

Nothing after that had this "I really want this, but I can't get it" thing. I just bought what I wanted.

by dep_b

5/19/2025 at 1:24:38 AM

Maybe not quite related, but I remember as a teenager dreaming about building the ultimate modern gaming PC, because the PC I had kind of sucked. But now that I'm an adult and can more-than afford it, I simply don't want to spend the money. I mean, I still would love to have my dream PC, it's just not worth the value in my mind.

by dottjt

5/19/2025 at 1:36:51 AM

I justify building computers only when it means I will play coop with my friends or my wife. These shared moment are priceless :) !

by fabiensanglard

5/18/2025 at 5:46:09 PM

More than once I’ve had a TI-99/4a and fully loaded peripheral expansion box and an Atari 800XL on my eBay watch list. I’ve come so close to pulling the trigger but I know it would give me a weekend of fun and that would be about it. Back to eBay it would go for the next impulsive dinosaur.

by criddell

5/19/2025 at 1:13:45 AM

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that! We used to rent consoles from Blockbuster; buying an old computer off eBay for a lark and then reselling it is totally fine.

by empressplay

5/19/2025 at 10:50:51 AM

If selling stuff on eBay were easier, I might.

by criddell

5/18/2025 at 5:50:15 PM

Reminds me a lot of the IBM 486 we had in school, it was the first Windows PC I had ever seen, most everything else was either an Apple II or an IBM running PC DOS.

It had a CD-ROM, speakers and sound and color and everything. I think it was $10,000, or that's what the computer teacher said.

by bluedino

5/19/2025 at 12:17:23 AM

Reminds me of my first computer... a 386 20Mhz black and white laptop. Ran DOS by default, but you could jump into Win 3.11 with the lovely "win" command. laugh I remembering so wanting a color monitor so I could play games...

by jdshaffer

5/19/2025 at 7:41:25 AM

You can feel how much this machine meant to him back then, and how satisfying it must've been to finally track one down and bring it back to life

by ErigmolCt

5/19/2025 at 11:07:23 PM

That looks actually nice. Interesting screen also. Seems rather practical, with all those inputs and optional scaler.

by LargoLasskhyfv

5/18/2025 at 7:55:44 PM

I can’t help but notice the ship date on both the keyboard and the main unit. It looks like you had already bought the keyboard before the pc itself arrived.

by dgfitz

5/19/2025 at 1:57:31 AM

Even if they didn't know the included keyboard wasn't a Model M, they likely knew it was a full-size keyboard instead of the tenkeyless one they wanted.

by Uvix

5/18/2025 at 11:52:13 PM

RadioShack catalog, lots of suped-up “TRash 80s” and Realistic audio equipment. Super tweeters and Psycho Lite for the win!

by mixmastamyk

5/18/2025 at 6:01:10 PM

I love this. What a trip down memory lane.

by ungreased0675

5/18/2025 at 10:47:08 PM

Thanks for sharing. Its a great writeup

by agcat

5/19/2025 at 2:41:22 AM

My teen dream machine was a Pentium 3 with a Voodoo 3. Luckily, this is a machine I now own.

by BirAdam

5/19/2025 at 2:52:38 AM

TNT2 had made the Voodoo3 irrelevant; the Voodoo3 lacked 32bit color output. But I loved my Voodoo2, there was nothing like it at the time. 3Dfx had a couple more years to run on the Glide API.

by p_ing

5/19/2025 at 10:03:05 PM

Yeah, it was Glide that made the Voodoo3 my target at the time. Now that I do have one, I love it :-)

by BirAdam

5/18/2025 at 5:53:55 PM

Jealaous of that video game library. Fabien has good taste indeed.

by MrBuddyCasino

5/18/2025 at 7:29:23 PM

Every times I think I a "done" I see something I want to add. The technique I used to limit myself is "whatever can fin on the three top shelves".

It worked until I started to store some boxes horizontally.

by fabiensanglard

5/18/2025 at 6:23:54 PM

[dead]

by curtisszmania