That's not the experience of owning a PC I remember from the 90s at all.

"Within a year" is a bit of an exaggeration but it's true that the pace of PC tech during the 90s was much, much faster than it is now. CPU power was doubling every two years, and today we're at roughly eight years. Add onto that the rise of video cards in the late 90s.

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computomatic 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was both. 90% of people never needed nor purchased a bleeding-edge computer. The mid-tier was "good enough" and far closer to affordable for most people; though, that bar also moved upward every year.

If you bought a mid-tier computer that was good enough for what you needed, then you probably didn't shop/compare for the next few years and didn't notice. But if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less. This is how it was in the 90's PC boom, at least. Likely the same for the decades before, not sure how it went in the 2000's.

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senordevnyc 5 hours ago | parent [-]

if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less

This is not how I remember that period at all. Do you have any examples?

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benjiro29 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My first PC 386 was in todays money easily $5000+ (basic 2d GPU + screen)... A lot of hardware in our family was handed down to my folks, because you lost so much on selling, that it was better to keep using them as they had less demands.

386 to 486 to the first Pentium (with the bug!)... You did not upgrade in place, it was often a new system. Sure, you maybe kept your screen, keyboard etc but ... The only upgrade we had on the same MB, was a coprocessor upgrade. Remember those? Each new generation of CPU was a new motherboard. Upgrading CPUs in the same MB really became a thing only later on.

GPUs had a shelf life of barely a year. Its been 35 year but i remember TNT to TNT2 having like 9 month in between. Moving from 2D to 3D involved a constant cost as GPUs evolved fast and the latest games required latest hardware.

We have not talked about the ISA, AGP, and PCI fun ... The “bus wars”.

DOS to Windows 3.1 (and OS/2 somewhere in between) to 95 ... with software being pushing hardware, just like games did.

This is why people are spoiled with cheap PC hardware where its cheap, and easily lasts 4+ years. Even with the bad memory price and more expensive GPUs, your can stil buy a $1500 system that will last you years (with maybe some lower game settings later on ... or the catalog of 10.000s games that will easily run on a mid tier GPU).

PC hardware has become boring but extreme stable. You can run GPUs for year, switch MBs without issues while keeping large amounts of old hardware. That was NOT the 80s and 90s that i remember.

	▲	senordevnyc 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry, I’m specifically talking about the claim that a cutting edge $10k system cost $1k just 24 months later (or less). The 386 and 486 were 3.5 years apart, weren’t they?

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tqi 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

tbh this is how i remembered that time as well. If you look at recommended system requirements for something like Max Payne (in 2001) vs Unreal Tournament 2003, everything had basically doubled

	▲	senordevnyc 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, but the claim was that the specs for a $10k system cost $1k in 24 months or less.

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embedding-shape 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember CPUs moving relatively fast back then, some years in the 90s had relatively big jumps, much bigger than we saw today. The classic graph, : https://i.extremetech.com/imagery/content-types/03zc6ghfKswe...

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bananaflag 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is how I remember it.

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fooker 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I remember memory size going up by a factor of 8 at every PC upgrade for the same price.