Computing in the Era of Doom: What Were PCs Like in 1993?
Posted by ahalber@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 52 comments
Posted by ahalber@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 52 comments
Leroy_landersandsuns@reddit
I remember not having enough RAM for Wing Commander 3.
funkympc@reddit
In 93 I personally had a hand me down home built 386-33 4mb sb16. And it kinda ran doom. You had to run it at less than full screen. And even then the frame rate wasnt great. That computer was much better at games like duke 1/2, crystal caves, jazz jack rabbit. It was in 94 my dad upgraded his Atari rig to a 486-66 dos rig with 8 megs, cdrom,sc55(held over from the atari)/awe32, and a VLB video card(i think it was an s3). Doom was amazing on that rig. Full screen and fast. 25-30fps the whole time. Especially since I was used to playing it at 12-15fps in a small window on my clunky 386. When I turned 14 I was able to get a job at the local pc shop and earn a bit of money. After a month of working I bought a new mobo/ram/cpu/hard drive and rebuilt that 386 into a dx4-100 machine which I used until 98 when saved enough to buy a p2-400 system.
EsoTechTrix@reddit
The whipper snappers can't grok the impact things like Jazz Jackrabbit and MODs had on music in games. https://youtu.be/Pb8WbGIT57E?si=SkV-rP9XvJ2DGWXp
Aggravating_Fun_7692@reddit
I miss the 90s
rjchute@reddit
Epic fucking killed it with their mod music. Jazz Jackrabbit, One Must Fall 2097, Pinball... All banger sound tracks.
EsoTechTrix@reddit
Damn, there's a title I have not thought about in a hpt second. I played a lot of One Must Fall. 🤣
MWink64@reddit
Jazz Jackrabbit has my favorite Christmas music.
MechanicalTurkish@reddit
I used to play Doom on a similar machine, but no sound card. PC speaker sound effects.
Later I got a 486/66 with 8MB RAM and a SB16. Later upgraded to 16MB RAM. That thing was goated. It could run Duke Nukem 3D at 800x600 without breaking a sweat.
RetroTechBro@reddit
In my experience a DX2-66 is right at what I would consider the borderline of playable by my framerate standards. Seemed to hover around 18-20FPS. I have no idea how in the fuck anyone played DOOM on 486s or slow 486s
PortableGeneration@reddit
I had a Packard Bell 486sx-25 with 4 MB ram and no sound card at all. Also a shitty integrated 2400 baud modem that made L33T BBS sysops cancel my downloads more often than not. That’s assuming my parents didn’t pick up the phone and yell at me through the modem.
I have no clue what the GPU was. Even running Ultima 7 was a challenge.
That math coprocessor must have done some heavy lifting.
KemelPanic@reddit
I also had a PB 486SX/25/4, but a "Multimedia" model that came with a caddy-load CDROM and some Aztech sound card that also provided the cdrom interface.
I never could afford a math coprocessor until the whole system was replaced by something else, but a friendly sysop gifted me a 9600 baud external with hopes of not clogging up their line leeching stuff, lol
funkympc@reddit
Probably a Cirrus Logic clone. Packard Bell loved the CL clone chipsets for most of the dos years.
Cool_Dark_Place@reddit
Yeah, my early '90s Packard Bell was a 386X 8/16 Mhz (basically a fast 286) that had a CL chipset. I won't dog it too much... I played lots of great games on it... but was SO happy to get my 486 DX2/66 in 1994.
MoistlyCompetent@reddit
I love it how you still know all the specs from your father's PC from 30 years ago. :)
_-_happycamper_-_@reddit
I freaking loved Jazz Jackrabbit as a kid. We didn’t have any game consoles so that and Hocus Pocus were my childhood games.
Ok-Helicopter525@reddit
Imagine the best game you ever played fit on four 1.44” floppies
stuffitystuff@reddit
Very few people played DOOM in 1993 with 21 days to do it in but in '94 I played it on my friend's dad's Toshiba luggable DX2/66 and it was smooth enough to host a show on Yacht Rock Radio
funkympc@reddit
The shareware was everywhere for the Xmas season 93. I had to get some rando at the mall to buy the shareware for me at Walden books. They wouldn't sell it too me cuz I was only 12. A few weeks later the full game was being passed around bbs's, ftp's, and on floppy. Fun fact I learned to use pkunzip unzipping the full version of doom.
Once the full version of doom got out in the wild everyone had it. I would bet doom is one of the most pirated pieces of software in history. At one point doom was on more computers than dos and windows 95 combined. There were whole college labs full of Unix boxes than had doom on them right next high end cad software.
In fact in 99 for one of my first jobs in IT I had to basically remotely go thru an entire floor of Sun ultras and remove doom and quake from them because of how much money it was costing the company. All the coders were half assing their work and playing doom and quake death matches on the lan. Which was also killing the network speed for people actually working.
stuffitystuff@reddit
That's an awesome story! I had to do the same thing with fellow students personal webservers but mp3 sharing a year or two later while an IT worker on campus. I weirdly never cared about finding the full version of DOOM because there wasn't much of a story and once I beat it, I played Barney DOOM and made my own version with Street Fighter II sound effects.
rjchute@reddit
The thing about computing in the 90s, especially the early 90s, was that the technology: CPUs, RAM, disk space (and speed), network (Internet and LANs) was all changing radically year over year. The old saying about buying a new computer and it being obsolete by the time you got it home and unboxed was truely not that far from the truth, albeit a little exaggerated. Nowadays, the speed and technology improvements are incremental. A 10-year-old PC now is perfectly serviceable - maybe not play this year's latest and greatest games at 4k 144hz, but for normal daily tasks, 100% serviceable, because the effective improvements in performance YoY is like.. 5-10%? Not so in the 90s. 300-500% improvement in performance just from one generation to the next was not unheard of. That 386-20SX you got in 1990 was being replaced by a 486-66DX2 in 1993 and came with nearly 6x performance improvement.
So, when it comes to bleeding edge, high performance, early "3D" games like DOOM, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, etc., you really needed the latest and greatest machine, no more than maybe 1 year old, if it was current generation, to be able to play it decently at all. Sure, DOOM might run on that 386 you have, but the performance was in the shitter and would generally not be considered "playable". DOOM needed a 486. Quake needed a Pentium.
This was, at the time of DOOMs release, also a fairly new concept of bleeding edge software needing really new/recent hardware. Prior, it was super common, if not defacto, for game and application developers to build to the lowest common denominator type machine specs, hoping to appeal to the broadest user base with a wide variety of hardware ages and specifications.
DOOM really broke the mould on many fronts. It was ahead of its time.
Maeglin75@reddit
Yes. The speed technology evolved in this era was insane.
1981 you had a brand new VIC-20 with 1MHz 8bit CPU and 5kb of RAM.
1991 you had a 486 PC with 33MHz and 4MB of RAM, VGA graphics and Sound Blaster sound, maybe even an early CD-ROM drive with hundreds of megabytes capacity.
And 2001 you had Pentium III 1GHz, a 3D-accelerator, DVD etc.
And the games really used the advanced hardware. If you read old computer gaming magazines from the 1990s, each month several games came out that invented or redefined a genre.
I would say that the 1990s to early 2000s were the Golden Age of PC gaming, where the foundations for everything we have today were built. (But my judgement may be a bit subjective, because that was also the time I was into PC gaming the most.)
Albedo101@reddit
Early 90s were PC vs Home computers and 8bit/16bit consoles. Once that battle was won, PC was left to fight with itself.
The rough decade between 1996 (Quake) and 2007 (Crysis) shows just how much gaming has evolved. Almost everything we know today, every genre - accelerated 3D graphics, first person shooter, open world, MMORPG... *all of it*, emerged in that period.
funkympc@reddit
Not many people outside of businesses had 486's in 91. They were still stupid expensive. My mom worked in the city engineers office in 91 and thats the only place i saw a 486. They spent something like $15k on a 486 based ps/2 system to do city engineering things which I know included cad work and number crunching of some sort in Fortran. It replaced a DEC mini(i think a VAX).
486s weren't really popular in the home market til spring 94 when the Pentiums started to hit the market in serious numbers. Once that happened 486s became a very good option for first time buyers and upgraders that couldn't or didn't want to spend $3k of 1994 money on a Pentium 60, when a 486dx2-66 system with similar hard drive and ram was like a thousand less in 1994 money. 2k in 1994 bought you a pretty nice used car. 3k in 94 was a used Caddy.
Maeglin75@reddit
The first PC I bought new had a 486DX50 with 8MB RAM. That was in late 1992. (The alternative high end model would have been a 486DX2-66, but I didn't trust the external 33Mhz speed and wanted the "real thing". In hindsight not the best decision, because the DX2 models already came with VESA local bus while the DX50 was stuck with standard ISA.)
Yes, it wasn't cheap. It did cost about 2500 US dollar (converted from German DMark.) I just got my first job after school (a 3 years job training) with low payments, but I was still able to afford the high end 486 machine after less than 1 year of saving.
Mid range models with 486DX33 or 486SX were more affordable and already quite common in 1991. 386 would have been considered more of a low end entry machines, even for home users.
Things moved fast back then.
MechanicalTurkish@reddit
And people bought new computers just to play Doom and the like. Cutting-edge software really started to drive hardware sales. That wasn't really the case as much before Doom came along.
cowbutt6@reddit
Psh. I played Quake on my 486 DX4-100... and was delighted to get 7fps!
Getting 25 or 50fps was really only a thing with 2D arcade-style games at that point. Most full 3D games were not the smooth experience today's gamers expect (whether that was StarStrike II, Elite, Sentinel, or Starion on the Spectrum, or Stunt Car Racer, Indianapolis 500, Castle Master, or Frontier on the Amiga).
TheGillos@reddit
I was spoiled by the excitement of tech advances in the 90s, and the overall optimistic vibes towards tech. The "wonders of the internet", virtual worlds, massive improvements with no slowdown in sight!
Now?
Oh, look. Meta is trying to monopolize VR and turn it into a shit mobile phone PS3 graphic machine to sell ads in their VRChat rip-off.
Oh, cool, AI is advancing like a sci-fi movie in all directions, but a loud, large, vocal group of villagers will bring out the pitchforks if you dare use it, or even say anything nice about AI.
Godlike access to tech, apps, information, communication, video/photography in our pockets? Enshitification, advertising, engineered obsolescence, greed, corruption, propaganda, politics/social issues in everything, brain rot...
The 90s were like "we're on our way to Star Trek, immortality, freedom, and self fulfillment for all", today, it seems more like the vibe is "we're mostly in the slums of Blade Runner, and I hope to be dead soon".
mr_dfuse2@reddit
I miss that vibe! No rules, no corporations, the internet was ours!
mr_dfuse2@reddit
From the moment I could do student jobs, I bought new pc parts every year to keep up with gaming requirements. While indeed everything evolved quickly, most parts stayed compatible though. So it was possible to upgrade a GPU one year, then the monitor, then CPU + RAM and so on. Nowadays it feels like you need replace everything at once because all standards are obsolete. Might also be caused because I only upgrade every 5 years or so.
FrostyMasterpiece400@reddit
We had a 8086 from 1987 to 1997 because my dad was told by the salesman "it will last ten years"
I was praying for the magic smoke to leave every night from 1991+
phire@reddit
Salesman forgot to say which ten years it would last.
If you start from the 8086’s release date in 1978, or even the IBM PC release date in 1981, ten years is actually reasonably accurate.
It wasn’t until 90/91 that the 8088/8086 computers started to feel outdated.
KingLim1@reddit
It was the best of times and the worst. You thought you had the best rig in town when you brought your PC and the very next month something new comes up…
But yeah, they were fun times.
WarpGremlin@reddit
In 1993 my Dad was selling Computers at Sears (back when that was a commission thing), so he got a sales display model cheap.
It was a "Cumulus" IBM clone 386 with 4MB (later 8) of RAM and a 80MB HDD.
DOS 6.22, Windows 3.1 (upgraded from 3.0 when I got the first game I really asked for and got, "SIMCity For Windows)
It had no sound card, so it was "PC Speaker" or nothing.
It was Summer of 1995 before I got my own PC (I was 10): A customer-returned Packard Bell Pentium 75Mhz, 16MB RAM, 1.3GB HDD, a 28.8K modem and a sound card and, most importantly, Windows 95.
The difference between the two systems was 4 years and the difference in capability was staggering.
It still had customer data on it when I got ahold of it, and it was, overall... quirky. But it could run DooM and C&C Red Alert and SimCity 2000.
A year was a big difference in capabilities. 3 years was a different world. 5 years? Forget it.
UltraSPARC@reddit
My dad is a theoretical physicist and does simulations on computers. Back in ‘93 we had a Mac IIci pumped out with a ‘040 upgrade and 16MB RAM with a 40MB SCSI drive. It was a screamer for sure! I played sim city 2000, El Fish (Maxis game), we also had access to the internet (dialed into the navy). The 90’s were a blast with computing. I now work in IT and am always super nostalgic for 90’s kit.
Cool_Dark_Place@reddit
I do remember one thing about DOOM was it popularized this nifty little program called DOS4GW, which slowly began appearing in later DOS games. This program automatically managed base, extended, and expanded memory, and made DOS gaming MUCH easier. I remember spending hours tinkering with my CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files trying to find the perfect combination to free up enough base memory to run ALL of my drivers and games without having to make boot disks.
arkestrax@reddit
I still have PTSD from having to do this. Creating boot disks for specific games. And oh the fun of IRQ and DMA assignments.
asc3po@reddit
From memory we had a Packard Bell Packmate with a 486-SX2 50mhz, 4mb of ram, something like a 320mb HDD, no sound card, only PC speakers 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives only. 13" VGA monitor, Windows 3.1. It might have still been 1993, but it might have been 1994 when my parents bought a Creative Labs multimedia upgrade kit with a Soundblaster 16 and a 4x CD Rom. Somewhere in there my uncle installed another 4mb of ram and a 1gb hard drive.
We didn't replace it until like 1998 because my Dad would use fast computers at his work and didn't care about noisy video games. a 486 sx2 in 1997 was rough, At least I could go visit my granpa to use his pentium after 1995.
Fluffy-Queequeg@reddit
My PC in 1992/1993
486DX-50 8Mb RAM 500Mb 3.5” HDD Tseng ET4000/W32i Opti Local Bus Graphics Gravis UltraSound 14.4K Fax/Modem Card NEC 4FG 15” Multisync monitor
This was all cobbled together while I was living in Japan, brought it back to Uni in 1993 and found that most students were still buying 386 systems with crappy monitors. The NEC monitor was a hefty piece of equipment but it looked amazing at 1024x768 with TrueColour display.
Doom ran like a dream on this breast!
Snorgcola@reddit
My family's 486SX/33, 4MB RAM and 1MB VESA card did well enough with Doom, but upgrading to a DX4/100 and 8MB was pretty awesome. I don't specifically recall if there was really any appreciable framerate improvement (probably) but I vividly remember being blown away by how fast the game loaded up.
funkympc@reddit
From sx33 4mb to dx4-100 8mb took you from 20fps to the cap of 35fps. Doom frame rate on vintage hardware comes down to 3 things. How fast your cpu is, how well your bios is optimized, and how well your video card is at running video mode 13h. Which is for most people fine unless you were running a windows "accelerator" video card. These were generally sold to cad users to give them high resolutions in Win 3.1. They weren't designed with dos games in mind and often dont have the ability to redefine color tables in dos programs. Doom didnt use the standard pallete iirc.
Snorgcola@reddit
It was a Compaq Presario (a tower case, not the original all-in-one), and I am pretty sure it was the Cirrus Logic CL5428 chipset
Cool_Dark_Place@reddit
I definitely remember the huge difference playing it for the first time in early 1994 on my dad's 486SX/25, and the 486 DX2/66 I got for Christmas later that year. I think my DX2/66 ran at least 25fps on full screen. On my dad's SX/25, I remember having to play it in a smaller window to get it playing even remotely smooth (probably about 20fps).
fbman01@reddit
I had a 386dx 40, with 4 meg of ram. The machine had a trident graphics card with 1 meg of ram. Doom ran fine on the pc, full screen.
hates_writing_checks@reddit
IRQ conflicts. IRQ conflicts everywhere.
Different settings for different kinds of audio cards. Some that needed a low and a high IRQ value.
During the golden years of DOS games (1988-1994), when Apogee, iD Software, and Epic Games were at their peak, I can recall those publishers having to support at least 5-6 different kinds of cards for Audio and MIDI: Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16, SB32 AWE, Amiga, Tandy, Gravis Ultrasound...
savageronald@reddit
486DX/2-66, 4MB RAM, wanna say 2.5gb hard drive but that sounds way too big. Plain ol VGA graphics, but my ace in the hole was a SB AWE32 WITH A CD ROM DRIVE. Granted everything I had was on floppy, including Doom, but the drive is there!
If you can’t tell by my profile pic, I’m a big Doom head so I can’t even tell you how long I played it (and still do, all the versions).
One of my first “big boy” purchases was an ATI Radeon 9800Pro for like… idk $600 or $700 2004 dollars because I was so hyped for Doom 3. Gotta say that was a letdown, in my opinion the weakest of the series.
Cool_Dark_Place@reddit
Lol... I was hyped for Doom 3 (and Half Life 2) too... but went the other way. Wound up getting a Nvidia 6800GT 256MB card for the AMD64 3200 rig I'd just built. The big thing that blew my mind about that rig was I needed a 500W power supply, which was HUGE at the time! But it was SO worth it to be able to blast through those games at 1024 x 768 with full AA and everything set to ultra at 50 - 60 fps!😁
ABeardHelps@reddit
It was still in the evolutionary period and on the eve of a revolutionary era.
State of the art in 1993 was System 7 on the Mac and Windows 3.1 in the PC world but many school computer labs were still rocking the Apple //e. Things were still fairly standalone in that the Internet hadn't fully exploded yet - NCSA Mosaic was out, but most home users were still on a BBS vs an ISP and the office network was more for sharing a laser printer versus providing a WAN connection. Games were mostly 2D in their graphics but we had stuff like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom starting to appear plus Myst making CD-ROM games more popular.
1994 is where you saw things really go crazy in the computer world as Apple went PowerPC, Netscape Navigator released, and the Web & Internet really took off ushering in the Dot Com boom along with the MHz war between Intel and PowerPC.
mrdeworde@reddit
In addition to what's been said, one additional thing: Software was so much more unstable. Whether you were on Windows or Mac, consumer, home operating systems had almost no real memory protection and very little concept of security, so things crashed all the time, and one misbehaving application might take down the whole system. Bluescreens of death were commonly caused by bad VXDs (DOS/Win9x drivers) or issues from the DOS underpinnings such as "low" and "high" memory limitations, which had to do with where in your RAM a program loaded, not how much of it you had.
Patches were much rarer too - people mostly bought their software at the store, so getting a patch for a program (to say, make it more stable) might involve sending away for it by mail, often at a small cost - so many people simply went without. Even if you had an internet connection, getting a patch meant FTPing into a server, finding the patch, and convincing everyone to stay off the phone line for the 8 or 12 hours it might take to pull down.
The illegal operation box was your constant companion.
On the nicer side of things, software was a lot more customizable then, and it was not uncommon for even people not into computers to at least have their custom wallpaper, maybe even a media player skin or two.
texan01@reddit
I still have my 1993 PC, it’s a 486dx2-66 with 20mb of ram, 1.0 gb drive, double speed CDRom it’s running dos 6.22 right now, but it has run Windows 3.1 to NT.
It runs Doom pretty decently and Quake if you give up some quality.
It’s pretty much my retro rig for everything that my PCjr is too slow to handle.
But even in 93 that PCjr was still getting it done for my sister in college, she liked to run baseball simulators and compile the stats.
EsoTechTrix@reddit
I had a 386DX33 and 4 MB iof RAM, but with a tweaked boot floppy I could run it. I tried playing over the modem with the guy next door, but he had a 486 and was just kicking my as as he could move faster. 🤣 Still have my floppies.
shinyviper@reddit
1993 I was a computer science sophomore in college. I had a CompuAdd 386sx and my roommate had a Packard Bell 486dx with a CD-ROM. The difference was night and day. Mine ran C++ compilers and his ran 7th Guest.
Wimzel@reddit
In 1993 a memory chip factory in japan exploded and cause a multi year shortage of computer memory just like today. It meant that microsoft kept its dominance in the PC market as Windows 3.x required less RAM than OS/2 and games like DOOM had to deal with severe memory constraints.
I recently found out I still have the knowledge and skills to optimize maximum conservative DOS memory while loading as many drivers as you’d need to run Dune from CD-ROM.