A Look Back to 1993 - the pick of the computer hardware

[disperse and recoagulate]

1993

Back then, we were happy with our cheap 486SX/25 clone, 512K Trident videocard and tower case in special needs beige with matching keyboard and mouse – a shoe-like device you had to open up and blow the biscuits out of every seventeen minutes.

We could think of no possible reason why we’d need more than 1MB free space on our 40MB hard drive, particularly when blockbusters like Doom still came on floppy disks. Who knew what 3D ‘hardware accelerator’ cards would do for gaming; that CDs – those newcomers to the music scene – would eventually lead to the extinction of floppies; how the Internet would change absolutely everything; and that it would be funny to read about seventeen years down the line?

Here is the pick of the best hardware circa ’93:

GRAPHICS CARD

ORCHID FAHRENHEIT

PRICE £200

3D cards aren’t on the market so no games take advantage of them. Famous names in 2D hardware include S3, Paradise, Hercules, Cirrus Logic and Tseng Labs, the Tseng ET4000 with VESA local bus known for making your system feel not quite as retarded as everything else. Persons lucky enough to own a Diamond Stealth or Orchid Fahrenheit ‘accelerator’ with its 1MB RAM and support for 32,768 colours at 640x480 have friends and neighbours misting up their French windows in the hope of getting a glimpse.

PROCESSOR

INTEL 486DX2/66

PRICE £400

Most PCs come with Intel’s omnipresent 80486 processor or a cheap clone made by Texas Instruments, Cyrix, IBM or AMD. Although there are only a handful of flavours on sale, ranging from the 486SX/25 to the 486DX2/66 (the DX2 variants supplied with a mysterious substance called ‘clock multiplier’), to have any choice at all makes the upgrade from the now obsolete 80386 feel even more indulgent, This year also sees the launch of the Pentium the price of which makes any Pentium-based machine at least £3,000.

SOUND CARD

CREATIVE LABS SOUND BLASTER PRO DELUXE

PRICE £165

Anyone tossing their AdLib audio card for an AdLib Gold gets home to find that AdLib filed for bankruptcy. This leaves products from Creative Labs as the only mainstream choice, the menu option for ‘Sound Blaster’ in id Software’s Doom setup cementing its position. Poseurs buy the Gravis Ultrasound instead, allegedly superior because it uses wavetable synthesis and samples, but to make your games work you must smash it to pieces with a keyboard while shouting.

SCREEN

MITSUBISHI DIAMOND PRO 17

PRICE £1,050

The sight of any monitor larger than fifteen inches invokes spontaneous dry humping, but CRTs such as the NEC MultiSync and Mitsubishi Diamond Pro are the ultimate in gamer cred. Not only do they boast four digit prices, they also make everything else in your bedroom look tiny. Features include an unnerving buzzing noise when you switch on, the sound a familiar prelude to late night gaming sessions. Rated at 70W and with radiator fins stretching back a third of a metre, they also make fine companions in winter.

HDD

QUANTUM PRODRIVE LPS

PRICE £220

Most gamers have an 80MB or 120MB IDE drive, chiefly because high-capacity units don’t leave much change from a half-year of mortgage payments. Utilities such as DoubleSpace and Stacker use on-the-fly compression to help everyone get more out of small drives while simultaneously trashing all your stuff at random moments. Seagate begin offering five-year warranty but disk failure remains part of PC ownership. Micropolis, Conner and Quantum are respected names with significant market share, yet none will see 2010.

How time’s have changed.

[futureshock]

Or an Amiga 1200 for £399

PC users were nuts back then.

[shock33]

Back then?

You could post the top of the line components in here now and they'd still look nuts (i7 980x for £780 anyone?)

[Anne Summers]

Yeah no one sensible bought a PC entirely for gaming back then. I'd say this was coming to the end of the era when the majority of PC gaming was done on a PC which had been bought as a home office machine. I still used my Amiga as my main gaming platform but was getting more and more bored with it and really lived for the moments when I could sneak in after dad had finished work, and boot up my pirated copies of Wing Commander 2/ Ultima Underworld etc. Although I played without sound I could still see were far superior to the shovelware that was being produced on the Amiga/ Snes/ Megadrive at the time, as those systems came to the end of their lives.

This was the year we had our first home PC - my previous PC experience was confined to school machines which weren't powerful enough to run the good stuff. A year later in 1994 we got one of the first multimedia packages to come out, a Creative Labs CD-Rom/ Soundblaster (Awe32 I think) combination, and things really took off - Strike Commander, Return to Zork and the 7th Guest were some of the games I remember playing.

[futureshock]

Back then?

You could post the top of the line components in here now and they'd still look nuts (i7 980x for £780 anyone?)

But that's extreme. It's not hard to get a gaming rig under £500 today, whereas all that equipment listed above would've been thousands spent on a machine that only boasted Doom or Wing Commander whilst the Amiga freaks (hello!) had hundreds of quality games.

It took the Playstation to make both Amiga and PC folk realise times were changing.

[Anne Summers]

Back then?

You could post the top of the line components in here now and they'd still look nuts (i7 980x for £780 anyone?)

Yeah but factoring in inflation, spending £1,000 on a top end machine was a much bigger deal then than it would be now.

Adding to that, a £1,000 machine was pretty much the minimum outlay for a desktop computer that could run the latest upcoming software back then, whereas these days cheapo systems costing £400- £600 would do the job, I'd imagine, although obviously you can still spend a lot more if you really want the newest tech.

edit: my last home desktop purchase was about 2004 when I spent £350 I think, and got a pretty high spec machine (without a monitor, if memory serves). which ran the then-state-of-the-art stuff (Unreal 2004, Morrowind, Medieval: Total War, Battlefield Vietnam are a few I remember) just fine.

[shock33]

My point was the PC users are STILL nuts, the top of the line stuff is still massively expensive because they know nutcases will buy (practically) bleeding edge components at insane prices to get 1 extra frame in crysis or an infintessimely small increase in some benchmark*. It wasn't meant as a statement on how much cheaper it is for entry level stuff now.

*And often quite literally no real world benefit

[Anne Summers]

Yeah I get you. My point was just that entry level pc gaming is pretty much in reach of most people these days whereas back then it was just rich kids or people whose parents used a PC for working from home.

[DarhkFox]

think i bought my a1200 in 93/94. what a great time that was. i didnt care much for the pc till later in the 90s.

[Dimahoo]

I bought my first PC around 1993 and here it am 6 PC's later.

Bonkers as ever with my GTX 480 - not even hardcore.

Actually Wing/Strike Commander and Doom were the games that really sold me off the 1200' but all the while i'm earning cash i will have a PC.

Everytime i buy a new kit i think of the fun i'd had with the old kit but i treat each new graphics card like a new machine.

The great thing is i can play the older games better, and newer games too. And given the fact the PC is backwards compatable with everthing up to a PS2....i can't complain.

I might add that times haven't really changed. There's still the big titles, theres still the sims, and theres still the German made Simualtor shite.

I love PC gaming.

[Dimahoo]

You have to wonder how things have changed

[roskelld]

WOW.

That opening post was like a massive nostalgia trip.

I got my first PC in '93, which was an Intel 486/SX25 with a 512k Trident Graphics card, 4MB Ram, and an Adlib sound card. It had a massive 120MB HDD (Which was an absolute beast, most people I knew back then had 40MB drives).

I had so much HDD space that I installed all my games and backed up the discs too incase the floppies died.

Early games I had were:

Duke Nukem

Blake Stone

Wolfenstein

Secret Agent

Alien Carnage

All Apogee releases.

After a few years I slowly upgraded, first to a DX2/66 clone chip, 8MB Ram and a Sound Blaster AWE 32, 500MB Quantum in a fancy new case with a Turbo button.

[Creamstick]

My first proper PC was an SX2/50 with 4mb of ram, and Creative soundcard, 350mb HD, 1mb graphics, 2x speed CDROM. That was xmas '94. I remember showing my Amiga owning mates Doom 2 on it, and watching their jaws just drop. At the time we had just made a game on the Amiga, and it needed an expanded 1200 to run properly. So this was some black magic type shit.

About a year later I upgraded it with a DX4/100 and added 16mb of ram - the max the motherboard could take. Man, it felt like a flying machine.

In early '98 I bought a new machine - a PII 300 with 8mb graphics, a 12mb voodoo II board, 128mb ram, 8gb HD, 2x speed CD burner, 8x DVD ROM drive, 16 bit soundcard, 17" Sony Trinitron monitor, scanner, inkjet printer.

8 GB - there was no way on earth you could possibly fill that! A few months later, I added enough another 128mb stick of ram. Man, that thing could run anything!!!

[Asura]

My first proper PC was an Amstrad one; one of those "MegaPC" things that was both a PC with an SX/25 processor, and a Megadrive built-in to the casing. My Dad got it for me so that I had both a machine for gaming and doing school work in my room. I later got a DX2/66, which was the first PC I ever did much gaming on (the SX/25 was just that bit too slow).

I had a load of games by Apogee, such as Blake Stone, as well as Wolfenstein and later Doom. That being said, I wasn't totally "sold" on PC gaming until much later; I always had a console, even later when I upgraded to Pentiums with a Voodoo and later a Voodoo2. I think this is partially because I like fighting games so much, and the PC has never really been much of a home for them, with a few notable exceptions.

In fact, thinking about it, the first PC game I ever really "got into" was Command & Conquer. I got into that in a big way, even getting the expansion too.

[Vimster]

Crikey, I loved reading that. Like many here I was an Amiga owner at the time but my twin brother and I were given a 386SX laptop which we had hooked up to a proper monitor. We played the brand-new Lucasarts adventures on it, and I spent a very enjoyable Christmas 1993 playing Wizardry 7 on there.

Didn't get a proper PC until February 1996 though. I had a 486DX/2 120, 2mb ram, 850mb HD, SoundBlaster 16 and a whopping 2mb Diamond graphics card (can't remember the actual model sadly). Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Dark Forces, ahh those were the days. Didn't have a CD-ROM drive in it, but a mate transfered the 'talkie' versions of Day Of The Tentacle to it. Oh yes.

[strawdonkey]

You have to wonder how things have changed

What!

As for first PCs, I got mine about 13 years ago now, a Packard Bell 486 SX/33 running Windows 3.11, 4MB Ram and a 512KB graphics card. It's still knocking around at my parents' place somewhere, I must go and rescue it at some point even if only to hear the sound of the hard drive spinning up again

I remember the Apogee and Epic games I would play on it had a lot in their blurb about how their games were 'console-style' on a PC, as if that was the holy grail. Things like Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall 2097 were pushed as Sonic / Street Fighter beaters.

Computers and the internet hold so little wonder these days but back then, my first and second computer (an Athlon 700 with a 56k modem) were just joyous things, it felt like the world was at my fingertips.

The world is now more at my fingertips than ever but I find myself caring less. Sad really.

[DarhkFox]

Yeah I used my upgraded A1200 up till late 1997, when my parents bought me and my brother a PC so i could do my college course. If memory recalls it was a brand new "state of the art" P200 MMX with 32MB ram, Geforce MX4, a 3GB hard drive and i think it was like 800 quid or so.

It was pretty good at the time, i enjoyed playing some games like duke nuke em, toonshruck, carmageddon, quake 2 but a lot of the time it was used for the internet and i remember at the time using loads of chat clients like Virtual World and MS Comic Chat. Good times.

[88h88]

I have a technical question, what the piss did the turbo button do on my PC aside from lighting an LED and changing the little LED 7 segment number display on the case?

[strawdonkey]

I have a technical question, what the piss did the turbo button do on my PC aside from lighting an LED and changing the little LED 7 segment number display on the case?

I believe Turbo buttons were usually used for over/underclocking your CPU to enable greater compatibility with older programs.

Some older programs do not have any way of regulating their speed, so if you run them on a faster computer they will zip along at a rate that makes them unusable. Turning Turbo off on your PC would underclock the CPU (I think mine was 33Mhz with Turbo, 25Mhz without) and let you run older programs at a more reasonable speed.

And, of course, most of the time you were RUNNING your FUCKING PC in TURBO MODE SHIT YEAH

[DarhkFox]

I believe Turbo buttons were usually used for over/underclocking your CPU to enable greater compatibility with older programs.

Some older programs do not have any way of regulating their speed, so if you run them on a faster computer they will zip along at a rate that makes them unusable. Turning Turbo off on your PC would underclock the CPU (I think mine was 33Mhz with Turbo, 25Mhz without) and let you run older programs at a more reasonable speed.

And, of course, most of the time you were RUNNING your FUCKING PC in TURBO MODE SHIT YEAH

this.

[Spoonman]

Consoles all the way.

[Mr Monday]

I have a technical question, what the piss did the turbo button do on my PC aside from lighting an LED and changing the little LED 7 segment number display on the case?

I dunno either, but I remember thinking how cool the turbo button was! I didn't own a PC until 1998, but my friend upgraded his Atari ST to a PC in about 1992/3 and we played loads of games on it. Ones that really stand out are Wolfenstein, Doom, X-wing and Day of the Tentacle. One thing that article does get a bit wrong is saying that CDs were "those newcomers to the music scene". By 1993 compact discs had been around for over 10 years and already very popular.

EDIT Actually I did own a PC before 1998. My girlfriend's Dad gave me his old PC in 1997 to do my dissertation on. The desktop form case was fucking huge and made out heavy duty metal. I could have jumped up and down on it with no ill effects. This was the days when 100mhz Pentiums were the norm, and I was using a 25mhz 386 But hey, it ran Word Perfect, could run Lemmings and beat the Amstrad PCW with daisy wheel printer I had been using.

[ScouserInExile]

Our first PC was rented from Rumbelows in 1993 "for college work". Fairly sure it was only a 386, but might have been a 486. It defo had 4meg of RAM (I only know this because it could run Doom) and about 40meg of HDD space. Games like UFO: Enemy Unknown, Lemmings 2, Doom, X-Wing, Settlers etc. just blew me away. I can remember saving up to buy upgrades like a Soudblaster 16, a CD-Rom drive and (a few years later) a Voodoo 1 3dfx card.

Anyone remember those CD's you used to get with about a million games and apps on them for about a fiver? Blobbies is what they were known as round our way...

Doom, for me, was where I saw The Future Of Gaming. I was helping out at the newly-formed Bizarre Creations one Saturday afternoon. once we'd done what we needed to do, the business manager asked me if I played Doom. She then challenged me to a game. This was the first time I'd played a multiplayer game over a network (as well as the first time I'd played a FPS with a mouse and keyboard, I'd used a joystick up until then) and I realised that this was the way all games should go. Weird thing is, I don't play online games now...

Oh yeah "online". A 56K modem and pretty much text-only internet. Until I found Usenet...

[masterhand]

Ah playing Doom with Sara.

[sir podger]

the first family pc in 93/94 was an old compaq server donated from my sisters boyfirend. it was a 386Dx 33mhz with a then mahoosive 12mb of ram. Courtesy of the sisters bit of trouser we were constantly getting up to date uber desktops in the house for a couple of days. i remember the weekend we had a 486DX2-80 with a triple speed cd rom and soundblaster pro

my dad then bought a computer, a 386sx-25 with 2mb of ram. this crushed me as i had been used to the high life and he bought a piece of junk, so i saved my money and built myself my own computer in 95, a pentium 75 with 8mb of ram, a one gigabyte harddrive, a 1mb diamond stealth 64 graphics card and it had a soundblaster 16 and a quad speed cdrom all of this with windows 95 osr2 installed.

thinking back now my proudest achievement was scrounging an athlon 1333 from amd which saved me a couple of hundred quid on pc build number 3.

im getting all misty eyed and feel the urge to go edit a config.sys file now

[Nick R]

My point was the PC users are STILL nuts, the top of the line stuff is still massively expensive because they know nutcases will buy (practically) bleeding edge components at insane prices to get 1 extra frame in crysis or an infintessimely small increase in some benchmark*.

*And often quite literally no real world benefit

I like browsing through Custom PC mag and staring in bemused fascination at the people who own four i7 rigs, each with at least two GPUs, purely for running Folding@Home 24/7. (Although I suppose since Folding@Home is a worthy cause, that's one kind of PC hardware willy-waving that could potentially have some real world benefit.)

GRAPHICS CARD

ORCHID FAHRENHEIT

PRICE £200

...

SOUND CARD

CREATIVE LABS SOUND BLASTER PRO DELUXE

PRICE £165

Anyone tossing their AdLib audio card for an AdLib Gold gets home to find that AdLib filed for bankruptcy. This leaves products from Creative Labs as the only mainstream choice, the menu option for ‘Sound Blaster’ in id Software’s Doom setup cementing its position. Poseurs buy the Gravis Ultrasound instead, allegedly superior because it uses wavetable synthesis and samples, but to make your games work you must smash it to pieces with a keyboard while shouting.

My first PC (a 486DX2/66... which would have been quite high end in 1993, but I got it second-hand in 1996) had some type of Orchid sound card. I remember spending ages trying to find it in SimCity 2000's setup program's list of compatible sound cards so I could get sound out of that game (not sure why I bothered; it was never the game with the greatest SFX and music), and wishing I had one of those compatible-with-damn-near-everything SoundBlasters instead.

Ah, the fun of sound drivers in DOS! Thank heavens DirectX came along and put a stop to that.

[88h88]

All I remember of old sound cards is pissing about with the IRQ and DMA settings in order to get them to work. I have no fucking clue what it means anymore...

[DeFiBkIlLeR]

SCREEN

MITSUBISHI DIAMOND PRO 17

PRICE £1,050

The sight of any monitor larger than fifteen inches invokes spontaneous dry humping, but CRTs such as the NEC MultiSync and Mitsubishi Diamond Pro are the ultimate in gamer cred. Not only do they boast four digit prices, they also make everything else in your bedroom look tiny. Features include an unnerving buzzing noise when you switch on, the sound a familiar prelude to late night gaming sessions. Rated at 70W and with radiator fins stretching back a third of a metre, they also make fine companions in winter.

You know, this is one area where we have gone backwards, todays best LCD's still cannot match the best CRT's for colour reproduction, contrast, blacks....

For retro gaming in paticular, 'LCD Native Resolutions' were the worst thing to ever happen......play an old school 640x480 game on todays screens and see just how shit they look compared to a CRT...

[Vimster]

You know, this is one area where we have gone backwards, todays best LCD's still cannot match the best CRT's for colour reproduction, contrast, blacks....

For retro gaming in paticular, 'LCD Native Resolutions' were the worst thing to ever happen......play an old school 640x480 game on todays screens and see just how shit they look compared to a CRT...

o/

My current monitor is a 20" Compaq CRT. I tried one of those cheapo flat panel screens and was shocked by how awful the viewing angle, colour reproduction and blacks were. How people can put up with that sort of crap is beyond me. But I'm on the verge of derailing the thread, so yes, I used to own one of these babies about 10 years ago. 19" was the norm then but I stepped up from a 15" to this and it felt like more.

[Blu3Flame]

I remember the Apogee and Epic games I would play on it had a lot in their blurb about how their games were 'console-style' on a PC, as if that was the holy grail. Things like Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall 2097 were pushed as Sonic / Street Fighter beaters.

I used to love playing Jazz Jackrabbit as a kid, it's kind of crazy to think that the creator of that went on to make Gears of War.