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Comment by guidedlight | Hacker News Reader

That computer hardware seems a little too good for 1994.

My guess is that it’s late 90’s hardware.

75 MHz and 16 MBytes RAM isn't all that unrealistic for a 1994 PC but it would be quite bleeding edge. The first Pentium was released in 1993 at 60 and 66Mhz, and the successor P54C came out in 1994 with 75, 90 and 100Mhz.

By the end of the decade there was already the Pentium III at 800 MHz (it's actually quite amazing how fast hardware progressed in the 90's compared to today):

https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1999/dp1220...

There has been a larger increase in computing power in the last 5 years than there was in the entire history of computers beforehand.

[[Citation needed]]

...the same can most likely be said about any 5 year period since computers were invented though, doesn't change the fact that the 90s saw a particularly radical hardware progress.

This sounds like a classic "graph should be using a log scale" situation.

I had a very similar computer (100mhz Pentium instead 75mhz) bought in late 1995 and it was not obscenely expensive. It’d be a high end machine for 1994 and obsolete by the late 90s (by 2000 AMD were selling athlons at >= 1Ghz)

I rolled into my sophomore year of college with a P90, 16MB RAM, and a 19" CRT.

All of that was great, but it was Windows 3.11 that made the difference, as that was the the version that made networking work reasonably well.

The computer did not look like 1994 to me either because of the more rounded aesthetics, the CD drive, and kind of because there's no 5.25" disk instead (something has to fill that bay). Also the bundled speakers.

The internet says it came out in 1995. http://pbplanet.info/wiki/index.php/Force_482CDT Which seems like a quibble, but Windows 95 changed everything.

CD-ROM drives were much more common than 5.25” floppy disk drives by 1994. Several games and multimedia applications required them.

My family's first PC, they made a big point of getting both types of floppies; it was a 386SX, probably around 1992.

By 1995, you didn't get a 5.25 drive; I can recall bolting one into the family's third PC (a P100 Packard Bell, the second one was a P75 they swapped out under warranty) because I had acquired a 286 "project machine" and wanted to be able to sneakernet it; I had an extra 5.25 drive but putting a 3.5" drive in the 286 would take several years and upgrades.

Depends on where you was. In 1994 a 2x CD-ROM was a top notch. By the end of '95 you could buy a CD for $5 with the all 3D games, but Duke3D didn't yet came out.

EDIT: my mind reminded me - Full Throttle and Lost Eden

The price hadn’t fallen to the point where they were in mid-range PC’s from big box/discount brands like Packard Bell. Those brands mainly sold behind the curve (e.g. the RAM spec in this machine).

In 1994 a CD-ROM was still a bit premium. It would have made more business sense to put a floppy in one of the 5.25” bays for “compatibility.” And cost savings.

Windows 95 made CD-ROM a standard feature…most Windows 3 sold on floppy. Multimedia capable PC’s went mainstream with Windows 95 and Packard Bell was what your father-in-law bought at Office Depot.

Before that speakers and CD’s were the kind of thing added into a build.

I agree about the CD-ROM drives, they were definitely only in higher end machines. However, by 1994 5.25” floppies were long obsolete. You would have had to go out of your way get one at that point, which means that yes, in 1994 a machine was far more likely to be purchased with a CD-ROM drive than a 5.25” floppy.

Companies like Packard Bell put them in to lengthen the list on the features sticker and so all the front facing 5.25” bays would not be blank.

It was marketing these PC’s based on selling at retail in big box stores. Mostly to people who were not engaged with tech enough to build their own machines or go to a builder.

Anyway, people had legacy 5.25” disks past the millennium…at least I did and my last computer with a 5.25 floppy lasted almost to 2006. Only disposed of because I sold my house and moved out of state. I built it in 1996 with a 5.25” for those aforementioned legacy discs.

That’s how it was on my street, but I didn’t live in Silicon Valley and didn’t work for big tech…I set up a sneaker net in 1997 where I worked.

"The Force 482CDT was a computer manufactured in 1995."

http://pbplanet.info/wiki/index.php/Force_482CDT

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