[MVLUG] a typical PC circa 1993

[Gary Aschbacher]

AAhhhh 1993

I built a digital x-ray acquisition system for a local dentist.  Each machine had 8 meg of ram.  That's right, $400 of ram PER machine.  Remember in the fall of 1993 when the glue factory burned down in Japan?  One company made all the glue to stick the memory chips together.  RAM shot up from $50/meg to about $125/meg for several weeks.  It then settled down to $80/meg for months.  Anyway, those 486 machines had a 1Meg VESA Local Bus video card with an E9000 chipset if I recall. Super graphics, I still have 8.5"x11" laser (HP4 w/2Meg upgrade) print-outs of my finger joints.  Hey, I had to test the x-ray pads to make sure the system worked !!!

The first Pentiums had to be underclocked from 66MHz to 60MHz to work and even they burned out pretty fast.  Pentium Pro's had the same problem the next year having to run at 180MHz instead of the advertised 200MHz.  Yes, a regular 486/66 clocked to 80 and then pushing the ISA bus from 8MHz to 12MHz made quite the screaming machine.  Quad speed CD-ROM's were available and the first true IDE CD-ROMs came out about that time.  Most sound cards had the three proprietary 'IDE' CD-ROM connectors; Panasonic, Mitsumi, & somebody else to attach the CD-ROM drive to.

#1 speed increase was the ISA bus to 10 or 12 MHz, whichever the video card could handle.

#1 repair secret: If the CD-ROM did not work, update the video drivers (no joke) although that was with the new real IDE CD-ROM, more 1994-7.

#1 scam that I saw was everybody advertised the VESA Local Bus MB, but few builders actually bought the VESA LB cards, they just used ISA cards for the IDE & video.

Well, enough procrastinating down memory (no pun intended) lane,  I hope everyone has a great weekend !!

Gary Aschbacher
President,
MHz Computer Consulting, Inc.
www.megahertz.biz
www.fastwave.biz
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: rotering at animalcules.com 
  To: mvlug-list at mvlug.org 
  Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 5:41 PM
  Subject: Re: [MVLUG] a typical PC circa 1993


  I specced out and purchased a couple fo machines in the '92-'93
  timeframe for work (library acquisitions and accounting for a small
  college library).

  The screamer was a 486DX33 with a 4mm tape drive, 4MB RAM, 80MB HDD (I
  believe) 14" color monitor and Windows 3.11.

  The other box was a 386SX with a *greyscale* monitor and similarly
  configured (no tape drive).

  Yes, we were using Quattro Pro for crunching numbers.

  I remember being so very, very happy because the software we used to
  reconcile accounts with the book vendor accessed the disk and tape
  drives a lot.  A process which used to run for about 12 hours was now
  completing in about an hour.  What was I going to do with all that
  free time?

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