Long shot question based on vague memory.
Posted by thewalruscandyman@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 21 comments
When I was a kid in the early 90s my stepfather had an MSDOS PC which ran Windows 3.11.
The brand on it that (I at least think) I remember was "Pulse," sometime around '93.
It had no CD ROM, just a floppy drive.
Old school "light switch" power on/off, typical beige tower.
Beyond that I have no more useful information.
I am wondering if anyone knows of anything similar to what I tried to describe.
(I wasn't a "computer guy" until quite recently, so I really wasn't paying attention to such things at the time. Also I was eight. š)
Scoth42@reddit
It sounds like one of a billion generic beige towers that was around at the time. Might just have to look at pictures of some and see if any look familiar.
brymc81@reddit
Yeah the DOS 6/Windows 3 era was just an explosion of generic 286-386-486 machines ā I donāt know if I can remember a single recognizable ābrandā from that entire decade.
The_Jizzard_Of_Oz@reddit
Compaq, IBM, Olivetti, Fujitsu, Panasonic.... and a ton of generic any beige case with a 150 watt psu built by a repair tech in his garage with bulk parts... And that died in 2004 when Dell came in and murdered that market with tested pc's and next day repair, for starting like 15% more than an artisanal build - you then built for gaming but your office went Dell or Compaq, which was HP's discount brand.
BetElectrical7454@reddit
Donāt forget Gateway, they were a major competitor to Dell in the mid to late 90ās. If I recall correctly it was the competition between Dell and Gateway that set up the collapse of the generic repair tech assembler.
The_Jizzard_Of_Oz@reddit
Ah yes, Gateway and their cows!
Blackholeofcalcutta@reddit
Dude! Youāre getting a Dell!
I had my 486DX4-100 with 64MB of RAM and a WD Caviar hard drive. I loved being able to tinker with it, install peripherals, get mad at Debian while trying to load drivers, and repeat.
Scoth42@reddit
The only one I can remember is Antec, which is still a maker of cases, but other than that it's all just a sea of generic beige.
thewalruscandyman@reddit (OP)
Yeah, I figured. And tried to no no avail. Figured I'd ask here knowing it was a bit of a Hail Mary.
Hoping someone might know if they had a parent company or something, or even better have on stashed somewhere.
whwt@reddit
Based on the light switch type power switch and lack of CD drive I would say you probably had a 286 made by a local small computer shop. It could have been a 386 but less likely.
Loan-Pickle@reddit
Back then there were tons of little shops that would buy generic components and assemble them into systems. Most of those shops didnāt survive very far into the 2000s. They usually never had a web presence as back then not a lot of people shopped on line. I worked at one back in the 90s. We did most of our advertising in the newspaper.
VivienM7@reddit
I don't know how it was in other countries, but here (Canada) there were free computer newspapers in some of the big cities that were full of advertising for these clone shops (and dialup ISPs). Probably peaked in 1994-1996.
Some of these were super sketchy. I remember going to one that had credible advertising with a friend in, oh, 1994-1995, he wanted to buy a hard drive. The place was actually run out of some dude's apartment, his living room was overflowing with parts.
My sense is that most of the clone shops went bust around \~2000-2001. Partly because the price of pre-built systems from the big guys plummeted, partly because many people (with the help of the Internet) got more comfortable building their own systems, who knows why else. The surviving computer shops in the early 2000s first and foremost sold parts for enthusiast DIYers and only secondly did their own system assembly.
Loan-Pickle@reddit
Our business pretty much dried up once on line shopping became a thing. You could buy the components on line for less than we could buy them for from our vendors. Pretty much couldnāt compete anymore. We chugged a long for a little doing service but even that volume went down as the price of new computers dropped. I got of the business in 2004 and by that time I had worked for 3 shops that had went out of business.
VivienM7@reddit
In which country?
Here (Canada), computer stores remained a thing for selling parts because the shipping was too costly compared to the US. And it wasn't possible to play anywhere near the kind of sales tax games that online US retailers could play. So with the exception of Newegg building a modest presence here, the online retailers were largely just brick-and-mortar retailers trying to increase their volume by selling elsewhere...
That being said, the market absolutely consolidated to maybe... 2?... players per metro area at most. All the smaller guys got swept up in the later 2000s.
Loan-Pickle@reddit
Iām in the US.
VivienM7@reddit
That makes sense. I remember talking about this with friends in the US in the mid-late 2000s. They had all switched to buying their parts online (although at least one later discovered Microcenter). And they thought it was strange that here we bought very few of our parts online...
To listen to them, there basically weren't any brick-and-mortar stores selling more enthusiasty stuff than worst buy in the US.
Cool_Dark_Place@reddit
Another reason lots of these shops didn't make it was that many of them didn't have a CLUE what they were doing! Got a 486/DX2 66 build from one of these back in 1994, and had to reconfigure all the device address settings (in BIOS AND the I/O controller jumpers) because the mouse and modem wouldn't work at the same time.
Loan-Pickle@reddit
One store I worked at the owner previously sold metal to aerospace companies. Quit that job and opened a computer store. He was a very good salesman, but incredibly frustrating to work for.
NetFu@reddit
Yeah, I was in IT in all of the 90's, through today.
We dealt with a whole lot of PC brands like you describe, but nothing named Pulse. There could have been a similar name I'm not remembering, but more likely than not, what you're describing was a "white box" Value Added Reseller that slapped their own name on generic builds they sold.
More likely than not, it was a local or regional business where you grew up, so where that is would help.
Plus, that time period you're talking about is definitely pre-Internet and web, so everything was sold locally or in mail order catalogs, like "Computer Shopper". But a regional reseller may not have even advertised in those, they could have just had marketing on the street, local papers, and in the Yellow Pages.
It's like trying to reach back and remember the name of the resellers back then that I used to go to for Amiga software and actual Amiga computers, both in South Dakota and the Silicon Valley. No way would I ever find a record of any of them today.
Distinct-Question-16@reddit
Pulse was the OS/2 cpu/disk monitor utility
Distinct-Question-16@reddit
Pulse was IBM OS/2 cpu/disk monitor
KSPhalaris@reddit
It's possible that "Pulse" your remember was the name of a local shop. Back in the day, I worked for a local shop that built beige boxes, and we would also our stores name and logo on as a badge. The internals were often Asus motherboards, Intel cpu's. ATi graphics cards, 3com network cards, etc.