this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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PC Master Race

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Those were some good specs back in the day... And the price 😯

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 10 months ago (2 children)

2 CD ROMs drives AND a zip drive? This guy fucks

[–] [email protected] 54 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Shit. DVD drives!

In 96? Fucking bleeding edge stuff

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I think it says 98. IE4.0 wasn't released until 97, same for Pentium MMX.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It literally says 1/16/98 on the order date :)

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Literally, as opposed to figuratively 1/16/98?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Heck I think you're right.

Man, I bet they were so bummed that they're stuck on Windows 95 then.

I was in a similar boat. Got our first family PC with windows 95 like 4 months before 98 released. Which kept me from being a PC gamer until i was later into my teens.

either way, how common were DVD drives in 98?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Not very common at all; you needed a separate MPEG2 card to decode the DVD as the CPU wasn’t fast/strong enough.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

How did windows 95 keep you from gaming? That’s when I started. 98 wasn’t that big of a chance to my memory.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Well it's not that it "kept" me from it, but I seem to remember the couple of PC gaming friends that I had, had games that I couldn't run as they seemed to me (with like 30 years of memories obfuscating) to only run on Windows 98?

But I mean honestly that could've been my parents giving me excuses and stuff. Idk.

I didn't have access to News and stuff about upcoming PC stuff back then so I could only go off what others told me haha

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

And don't forget the floppy slot.

Every good 'puter has a floppy slot.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The 2X part means the DVD drive could read DVDs at up to 2X speed

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Ah yeah I realized that after. But a floppy reader too! Dude definitely reading some floppies

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

2X speed was impressive for the time too :)

[–] [email protected] -4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

By 1998? Nah, not really. I think I had at least a 16x by then with my stock prebuilt.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I think there may be a difference in measurement and that might where the discrepancy is. According to Wikipedia's entry on optical drives:

The 1× speed rating for CD-ROM (150 Kbyte/s) is different from the 1× speed rating for DVDs (1.32 MB/s).

So if that was indeed a 2x DVD drive, it would be pretty comparable (if I'm interpreting all this info correctly): 16x150,000 bytes per second= 2,400,000 or ~2.4 MB/s and the 2x DVD speed would be 1.32 MB/s x2= ~2.6MB/s

Pretty close!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Ah wait, I misread it as cd. Didn't realize it was DVD.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Cd maybe but not DVD.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

I came to the comments hoping somebody would explain a reason for 2 DVD readers back in the days of Win95 lol thanks!