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If you were trapped in 1995 with a personal computer, what would you want it to be?
| 3% | 4 votes |
| 15% | 16 votes |
| 0% | 1 votes |
| 43% | 45 votes |
| 12% | 13 votes |
| 12% | 13 votes |
| 4% | 5 votes |
| 6% | 7 votes |
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- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
If you were trapped in 1995 with a personal computer, what would you want it to be?
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(1)
(1)
Finagle's Creed:
Science is true. Don't be misled by facts.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23, @07:54AM (4 children)
A poll with pre-deleted comments? What will janrinok think of, next?
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Monday September 23, @08:40AM (3 children)
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 5, Funny) by janrinok on Monday September 23, @08:45AM (1 child)
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23, @08:08AM (3 children)
I don't remember what our first computer was. the die said Cyrix 150Mh (although on the outside it said "200+". this was 1996 or 1997). worse than a Pentium anyway.
and about that: weren't Pentiums already available in 1995? and better than "486"?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Monday September 23, @02:29PM (1 child)
They had the floating point bug then.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23, @10:26PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug [wikipedia.org] to be specific. Although you could participate in the recall by 1995 if you knew about it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Samantha Wright on Thursday September 26, @05:50AM
As I said here [soylentnews.org], the poll options were chosen so that the CPU specs were all similar. This was meant to be a vote on software and overall experience rather than clockspeed.
(Score: 5, Informative) by KritonK on Monday September 23, @09:56AM (27 children)
I actually was trapped in 1995 29 years ago, and My Amiga 2000 with a 68040 accelerator card served me very well, thank you. It did all the things I wanted it to do in a way that made using the computer fun, instead of drudgery. DOS and Windows 3.1 were a joke compared to the Amiga, and even Windows 95, which came out that year, although a massive improvement, was still too frustrating to use. I don't remember if we installed Windows 95 at work as soon as it came out, but I do remember the dents on the metal PC case that were caused by the angry kicks I would give the machine each time it crashed. And I do mean every time: at least once daily.
So, from the available choices, an Amiga 4000T would have been a welcome upgrade back then.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Monday September 23, @02:18PM (16 children)
Insightful observation for us all.
As a Classic Mac user (eg, the Quadra option), I would agree. Way too many things were laughable. And some of them were the PC hardware, not just Windows. With the original Apple Lisa, and the 1990s Macintosh's, you could disassemble the machine with your bare hands -- and not shed any blood! No tools were required to open the case and remove major subsystems, power supply, motherboard, etc. I swear that the PC shops (remember Gateway 2000) would pay someone to sharpen the edges of all the interior metal parts to make sure you got a bloody cut when doing the most minor of servicing, such as installing a card.
Want to add memory to a Mac, just plug in the sticks. Done. No dip switches or other system configuration. Now, of course, all PCs have been like this for decades now, but it wasn't always so. Even adding memory was a pain back in the 1990s.
It was amusing that Windows had a "C" drive. Completely unintuitive to end users without explanation of CP/M in the late 1970s. Why do filenames need to have a three character suffix? (again unintuitive to ordinary people)
Brief explanation of TYPE and CREATOR . . .
PCs let you remove floppy disks even if they were in use! Lisa / Mac made disk ejection be under software control. (A straightened paper clip could be pushed through a tiny hole to force ejection even if there were no power.)
Installing a CD ROM in a PC was such a nightmare that Apple ran commercials making fun of it. You mean you don't just plug it in to the SCSI connector on the back?
It is amazing that an Intel employee created USB, later joined by seven other companies, and it went exactly nowhere in the PC industry until Apple made USB the standard on it's iMac (jellybean colored triangular shaped all-in-one with CRT built in). Apple was big enough that peripheral makers, who also made Mac peripherals, had to adopt USB. Soon USB was everywhere on PCs.
There were a lot of fun memories I could go on about. But eventually Apple lost its way in the late 1990s.
Pigs not displaying registered tail numbers violate FAA regulations and can qualify as unidentified flying objects.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Freeman on Monday September 23, @02:26PM (2 children)
Microsoft had already won at this point in time, though. Everything else was dying or losing marketshare. Even Apple/Macintosh was doing poorly comparatively. Microsoft was much more open to software developers which nearly successfully killed off Apple. Thankfully for everyone, Apple pulled through, Jobs came back and the rest is history.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday September 23, @05:21PM (1 child)
+1 Informative
It is true that Windows ruled the world by the late 1990s. Apple made several missteps.
1. They were pushing the new Power PC RISC processors. And the new Power Macs were great. But the majority of machines Apple manufactured were the 68000 based Macs. In other words, they didn't believe what they were preaching to developers. Once the Power Macs were released, there was understandably huge demand. But no supply. Apple had plenty of 68000 Macs though, which nobody wanted. Apple had to write off a billion dollars in inventory. That was the first major widely publicized sign of problems.
2. There wasn't a lot of PowerPC native software available at first. Sure the new machines ran the 68000 software transparently in an emulator. An ordinary end user couldn't tell the difference. Their existing software worked as always. So developers weren't in a giant rush to port their software to the new processor.
3. Like Windows, the Mac OS needed a real OS kernel that ran everything in protected mode so that no single application could bring down the entire machine. Apple tried, I believe, three times.
4. There was widespread speculation Apple might buy Be and make BeOS the basis of the new Mac OS. IMO that would have been a very good decision. Better than NeXT.
5. Apple bought NeXT and with some UI changes, that became the future of Mac OS. Unix based.
6. Brought back Steve Jobs (that's okay, but . . .) gave him power. Steve promptly obsoleted all of the (expensive) Mac hardware that existed for classic Mac. The future was Mac OS X, all of course on entirely new hardware. This is where I parted ways. I used and enjoyed my existing high end hardware for a few more years. I was also reading about this new Linux thing for a couple years before deciding to take the plunge.
Pigs not displaying registered tail numbers violate FAA regulations and can qualify as unidentified flying objects.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Samantha Wright on Thursday September 26, @06:04AM
In Avie Tevanian's CHM Oral History [youtube.com], he explained in detail why the Be deal with Apple failed but the one with Next succeeded: Next's software was way more mature.
Next had been shipping for about a decade and had several niches carved out for itself, including video [youtu.be], (at a higher tier than the Amiga Video Toaster), publishing [youtube.com], and finance [youtu.be]. (And, of course, software development.) They also had a solid office suite, in the form of the Lighthouse Design suite, although around this time Sun bought and killed it to sabotage Next.
By comparison Be was in its infancy, and had been asking for way more money. Jean Louis-Gassée thought he could name his price and Apple would have no choice but to give him whatever he asked for, so he tried to extort them for a huge sum (undisclosed, but maybe as high as $200 million.)
During the "bake-off," as Tevanian called it, the Next team was able to show off a bunch of multimedia jazz that Be was nowhere near capable of. AFAIK Be never had the same class of software architects; by contrast Jobs had hand-picked far (more) Apple staff and had a ton of Silicon Valley connections when he left in 1985, and was able to use his personal wealth in those days to sweeten hiring deals by providing loans to new employees for relocating.
So the hardware may've been comparable, but unfortunately you'd be an idiot at the time if you wanted to get anything done in BeOS. The success of Haiku has somewhat warped history.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday September 23, @09:03PM (9 children)
As we all are... fortunately we escaped!
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday September 24, @11:48AM (5 children)
I suspect some of the members here were not born then.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 24, @02:27PM (4 children)
Somehow I doubt it.
Pigs not displaying registered tail numbers violate FAA regulations and can qualify as unidentified flying objects.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday September 24, @03:21PM (3 children)
You calling us a site full of old fogies?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday September 24, @07:31PM (2 children)
Oi! I resemble that remark!
[Adding entirely extraneous text to pass the 'too short posting' filter. Lorem ipsum etc...]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 25, @03:25PM (1 child)
⠀
Pigs not displaying registered tail numbers violate FAA regulations and can qualify as unidentified flying objects.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 25, @03:27PM
I was able to evade the 'too short posting' filter easily enough. Only my sig shows up. And I know from past experience that if I didn't have a sig, even that wouldn't show up.
Pigs not displaying registered tail numbers violate FAA regulations and can qualify as unidentified flying objects.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 25, @03:46PM (2 children)
By 1995 all computer keyboards had an ESC key.
Now oh Lord, please reveal unto us in thy divine wisdom what is the eternal purpose of the SCROLL LOCK key?
Pigs not displaying registered tail numbers violate FAA regulations and can qualify as unidentified flying objects.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Thursday September 26, @01:12AM (1 child)
On FreeBSD, it turns your console scrollback-buffer-viewing-mode on and off.
Very convenient.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday September 26, @11:51AM
Yes, I never knew why Linux didn't do the same, instead requiring to hold down some odd key-combo + up/down arrows to do the same.
Beyond that it would have been nice if scroll lock would actually work in modern apps, however it is effectively ignored by all the major OSes. On my machine the Scroll Lock LED does not even turn on when I press the button (it does register on xev though).
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday September 24, @12:45PM
Hey, that's not a bug, that's a feature!
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Tuesday September 24, @07:56PM
Cost no object though, I'd probably go with either a HP PA-RISC or DEC Alpha 64bit CPU based workstation.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday September 26, @11:00PM
Hehe. So I was a DOS kid back then, now I'm a Mac user. Way back when there wasn't much choice for my household, we had to go the cheap route. I had a 286 when 386s with ExPaNdEd MeMoRy made Wing Commander awesome. I had a Mac friend who just loved bringing stuff up like you mentioned. Oh and heaven help you if you brought up configuring a SoundBlaster. No-one ever asked him, he'd just start babbling about it like an Android fan commenting on an Apple article. Man it used to really piss me off...
... because he was fucking right and I couldn't do anything about it.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23, @02:27PM (7 children)
The Amiga will rise again!
... okay, no it won't. Alas.
The Amiga 1000 was the best machine I've ever owned. Sure, adding memory via a daughterboard under the front cover, or via the side expansion port, seems weird now, but it felt like hacking back then. It had a color monitor when all the IBM clones and Macs had dinky green or black & white screens. Storing the Amiga's keyboard under the computer was great, and it was a damn good keyboard too.
Upgrading the 1000 to the 2000 was the second stupidest computer-related mistake I ever made. Yes, the 2000 was more capable, but the machine itself had much less soul to it. The first stupidest computer-related mistake I ever made was succumbing to the PC borg and trading the 2000 for a PC clone so I could be consistent between home and work. The guy who bought my 2000 was going to use it in a t-shirt printing booth, to take pictures of customers and print them on the shirts while they waited. I hope it served him long and well.
The Amiga won't rise again, but it damn well should.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday September 23, @02:42PM (3 children)
Anything the Amiga was good at became commoditised a long time ago. Also, its OS, good for its time, has long been surpassed. What may have been lost is its GUI and general user environment. GUIs nowadays are shockingly awful.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by Freeman on Monday September 23, @09:09PM (1 child)
I've been too traumatized by modern GUI design to be shocked anymore.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by Tork on Thursday September 26, @11:03PM
Btw this was Windows 98... that was not, in effect, a suspend button. It was a self-destruct button. Even my cat was like "why are you mad at me about that?"
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24, @01:25AM
Let me romanticize my youth and the computers of back then, damn it! You, sitting there, being all correct and everything!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Monday September 23, @08:54PM (2 children)
You're not the only one, apparently there's at least two of you:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/the-a-eon-amiga-x5000-reviewed-the-beloved-amiga-meets-2017/ [arstechnica.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by Samantha Wright on Thursday September 26, @06:11AM (1 child)
There are new "Amigas" coming out every six months, although most of them are FPGA-based or Raspberry Pi-based emulations of 68k systems. It's safe to say no other brand has had such an enduring tail of post-mortem clones, save perhaps whatever powers those ∞-in-1 plug-and-play shovelware systems.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Thursday September 26, @02:09PM
Here's an interesting rabbit hole: https://amigaonthelake.com/ [amigaonthelake.com]
Interesting:
https://hackaday.com/2019/03/12/its-raining-brand-new-commodore-64s/ [hackaday.com]
Also interesting:
https://hackaday.com/2020/06/16/why-you-probably-wont-be-building-a-replica-amiga-anytime-soon/ [hackaday.com]
Also, FPGA Amigas:
https://amigang.com/hardware-fpga-amigas/ [amigang.com]
I never owned or used an Amiga though, so I have very little will to try one out.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Monday September 23, @04:19PM
The A4000T was a very small release as I recall it. So if it doesn't have to be the tower version I would have gone with the desktop version, and I did. I still own that machine to. A4000/060 at 50Mhz, I don't recall the exact memory amount now but it was probably 128 megs -- just massive overkill for the time. I don't recall if the 060 was in the machine in '95. It still works, it's just the PSU that is shit and I can never really find the time to fix and replace it. The machine is boxed at the moment. Not enough desk real estate to have more machines unpacked. My classic macs (or SE/30 machines are also boxed). I might be remembering wrong, it could have still been 040 in '95, in which case the 060 came a year or two after when I got a phase5 expansion and graphics card. That machine was my main machine beyond the year 2000 for home usage. I never bothered getting a PowerPC upgrade for it.
All the other machines listed in the poll can just go and suck it by comparison. The good SGI/Sun boxes are not released until '96 or '97 with the O2. I would still pick my A4000 over an SGI O2 any day. Even if we fudge the years a bit here and there.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by McGruber on Monday September 23, @08:52PM
My choice would depend on what kind of internet connection I had back in 1995. If it were dialup, I'd go with the Amiga, but if it were cable or other higher speed (for the time) connection I'd go with the NeXT.
I was actually trapped in 1995 during 1995. As a grad student then I had access to a computer room filled with Sparcstations - model 5s, if I am remembering correctly. Those were amazing when hooked to the high speed internet available on campus, but monochrome and soundless.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday September 23, @02:24PM
Microsoft was already dominant by that time and a 486 PC Compatible would have run pretty much anything I wanted. Some of the best games ever would have run on a 486 PC Compatible. (Though I would rate some of these as "best to that point and/or best in the genre".) Master of Magic, Ultima VII, One Must Fall: 2097, Traffic Department 2192, Might and Magic, ("Elder Scrolls: Arena" had released by then as well, but Might and Magic was arguably still better.), both of the original X-COM games (First game I played that had essentially a fully destructible environment, realistic fire spread, and smoke left after, which also dissipated.), Commander Keen (a good platformer, but to be honest platformers as a genre suck), Duke Nukem (also platformer), Major Stryker (decent scrolling plane shooter), Metaltech: Earthsiege (Precursor to Starsiege, and Starsiege Tribes), CD-Man (Interesting and a "good as" PAC-Man clone), Battle Chess, as well as other gems of that gaming age.
Also, Windows 3.1 was a good enough GUI at that point and some decent office software could be had for Windows/DOS.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Monday September 23, @02:47PM (2 children)
Would a DEC AlphaStation, SGI Indy2/Crimson, or Sun Ultra count? These were the sort of graphics workstations that we folks stuck in x86 land wished we had back in 1995.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Funny) by turgid on Monday September 23, @03:04PM
I've got two quad processor Ultra 80s and a Blade 100. I had a couple of others over the years but had to get rid of them because of lack of space. I also had a quad CPU 64-bit SGI workstation that I had to dump for similar reasons. I've never had or seen a real Alpha machine but I do have a broken Alpha 21064 CPU somewhere. I one knew a guy who had a real itanic. He used it for drying his clothes.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Samantha Wright on Thursday September 26, @05:48AM
No! When I submitted the poll, I carefully chose machines with comparable CPU power. (That's why there's no Pentium.) I suppose I could do another poll about favourite obsolete workstations, but this line of questioning will eventually lead to horrible response numbers. Consider the following slam-dunk ideas I had to throw out:
(Score: 2, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 23, @06:13PM (3 children)
If you're going to smuggle a human being past customs and border patrol into 1995, why can't we sneak my server along with me? Actually, that's rather bulky, so I'll settle for my ThinkCentre. Either one would pass for a supercomputer in 1995. Just give me a few minutes to make sure I have dialup drivers installed.
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday September 23, @09:06PM
IBM Thinkpads of the era were still workhorses, with the Lenovo sellout still over a decade away. Perhaps my favorite laptop without a full-size keyboard was the IBM Thinkpad A21m, released around the year 2000. Half my complaints with laptops revolve around the exclusion of the number pad. The other half of my complaints with laptops revolve around heat+user abuse==death.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23, @10:12PM
Imagine all the bitcoin and NFTs you can fit on a server that size. You would practically own the entire future market of bullshit.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 25, @03:44PM
I may be mis-rememberizing a few details, but as I seem to recall . . .
In 1995 one of the things Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) was searching for, even more than illegal immigrants, was cryptographic technology being smuggled out of the country!!!
Now a lot of (non government) work on crypto (no, not cryptocurrency, but what crypto used to originally mean), was done out in the open by researchers. Plenty of code examples and useful libraries were open source licensed. But OMG this information might get smuggled out of the country.
The Clinton administration had declared cryptography to be munitions so that CBP could seize it and arrest people (give them a rest).
So there was this textbook, Applied Cryptography, which I have. Lots of code. Lots of highly detailed and technical discussion about cryptography. Now would carrying a textbook when you are traveling be a violation of exporting munitions? Do we want to start taking away textbooks now? That was an actual concern back then. They backed down. Of course, you could get all the code examples online, and they didn't attempt to stop that.
But here we are in 2024 and removing (ahem) certain age appropriate textbooks from school libraries is a thing -- in some states. But now it is not allowed and those books are going back on the shelves.
Pigs not displaying registered tail numbers violate FAA regulations and can qualify as unidentified flying objects.
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Monday September 23, @08:24PM
In 1995, my daily driver was an Amiga 3000. The new shiny (new to me) was a Sparc Station 10/40. I also had a 486/33 running NT 3.51 but that was for running specific tools and generally disliked.
BTW, have people forgotten when 1995 was? There was Pentiums at that point. Maybe even 3.3V P90's. A4000T was already out manufacture as Commodore was bankrupt.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nostyle on Tuesday September 24, @01:50AM
1995 was a great year. I had finally got my wife's Thinkpad converted to using OS/2 (v.2.1 I think), and we discovered she could work with her Windows compatible business software without the daily system crashes. There were weeks and months at-a-time that i did not have to reconfigure her machine,
Then I had just discovered Slackware - all 24 diskettes of it - for my PC workstation (linux kernel 1.2.13 as I recall), and life was suddenly worth living again.
Sadly OS/2 got undermined, and the wife eventually moved on to Win2K and descendants, when they finally stopped sucking so much.
Slackware is still my go-to distro, although for major audio work, I've found it easier to use some specialized distros.
--
-Coolio, Gangsta’s Paradise
(Score: 3, Funny) by lentilla on Wednesday September 25, @03:19PM (2 children)
A SPARCstation 5 [wikipedia.org].
Mind you; true story; I was actually trapped in 1995, once, a long time ago, for about a year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 25, @04:00PM (1 child)
can you please elaborate on the "about"?
I see two options: (1) perception difficulties (I was too young, but I've heard stories of raves from the 90s) and (2) relativistic time stretching.
(Score: 2) by Samantha Wright on Thursday September 26, @05:25AM
Well, some people were presumably born on or around January 1st, 1995, which might account for difficulty with rounding errors.
(Score: 2) by Cyrix6x86 on Thursday September 26, @05:44PM
In 1995, I had a 486. I used it until 2002.