1993 Circuit City Ad
Posted by sdjeff79@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 28 comments
This was in an old box of records I bought. This brings back a lot of great memories!
Posted by sdjeff79@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 28 comments
This was in an old box of records I bought. This brings back a lot of great memories!
Away-Squirrel2881@reddit
The Mac is the least expensive one in the ad!
sonicjesus@reddit
I've never seen an Apple product be the cheapest thing on the page. That model is a 25mhz, presumably on par with the other 25s in the ad.
Big_Locksmith_4211@reddit
Mmmmm, Macintosh Performa, I hated it tbh
ryannelsn@reddit
The absolute worst time to buy a PC.
VivienM7@reddit
Worse than at other times in the 1990s? The entire decade, pretty much, if you bought a low-end system it was obsolete before you even unboxed it.
I actually would probably say that the \~1997-2000 period that took processors from about 200MHz to 800+MHz and RAM from 16 megs to 128+ was an even worse time to buy a PC. Every 3 months processors seemed to gain another 50-100MHz...
chandleya@reddit
6 months later the SX2 was everywhere, multimedia was everywhere, and drives were commonly twice the size. We grew up fast in the 12 months leading to Windows 95. These completely mistakeable OEM beige boxes gave way to at least a few total classics from Packard Bell, Acer, NEC. WILD they all became the same company lol
VivienM7@reddit
Wilder that by about 2000, all the retail PC brands from this era were gone.
AST - went bust, technically got bought out by Samsung IIRC but really vamished
Packard Hell/NEC - left North America
IBM - dropped the Aptivas and exited retail
Compaq - acquired by HP (okay maybe that was a little after 2000)
And IIRC, HP didn't really play in this sphere until launching the Pavillion in the socket 7 era, so it's funny that they became one of the big survivors.
But these guys all got swept aside by Dell/Gateway/eMachines/etc.
nobody2008@reddit
What? Macs were cheaper than PCs? I had Amiga and PC back then but Macs were still expensive as far as remember.
VivienM7@reddit
This was an LC II-class Mac. 16MHz 68030. Not really comparable to a 486SX which was more aligned with a 68LC040...
ksuwildkat@reddit
The Preforma 405 was a compromised filled machine that was hyper limited.
sprashoo@reddit
Was puzzled by that too. Admittedly that was a pretty budget Mac model, but still...
lutello@reddit
I want the mini tower. No DXs? I guess that wouldn't make a difference for Doom.
i486dx4@reddit
In 93 my dad got a Siemens Nixdorf 386SX with 4MB RAM and 61 MB HDD. Great pc, yet one year later i was dreaming for a 486. we never got one so 5 years ago I got my 486dx4 :-)
JJDoes1tAll@reddit
DX4 is such a beastly CPU
JJDoes1tAll@reddit
I wish I could go back in time to these days
sputwiler@reddit
I do NOT miss the era of mail-in rebates.
cybah@reddit
lol looking at the spec for the 486... these must be last years models or low budget ones. There's not a DX in sight. A new wave of DX's (33 & 50mhz!) came out a month before this ad.
imho the AST is the best out of them. Costs a bit more but can do multimedia and has a CDROM drive!!!
VivienM7@reddit
My guess is that there would have been another page with higher end systems. Or Circuity City didn't carry higher-end systems.
That entire page is low-end systems. The Performa 405 is even worse, that's an LC II-class machine. But the prices are also lower than I might have expected.... $1299-1699 USD with a monitor was loooow end for that era...
Im_100percent_human@reddit
For vast majority of users, SX/DX didn't really matter. The applications that the average user uses don't crunch a lot of floating point. Games/Internet/Word Processing will all run with nearly the same performance on an SX. If you were going to run CAD or physical simulations, you probably were not going to buy your computer at Circuit City.
JCD_007@reddit
That Apple monitor was the definition of mediocrity. They didn’t even badge it with the Apple logo on the front.
TeamScience79@reddit
That AST system is very close to the first computer that I ever got to use at home. My parents got it for the family but really I was the one who used it. It ran Doom, NHL hockey, Warcraft. Eventually learned the thing had room for a co processor so we got the one that improved it a bit. The memories!
VivienM7@reddit
Ahhhhh yes, the old days when retail computers almost always came bundled with (mediocre) monitors...
chandleya@reddit
Not just bundled but not even brand matching. Weird intersection of time there.
Kiwi_eng@reddit
Same as the 386SX, the price leaders followed the release of the proper DX versions.
bio4m@reddit
I used to stare longingly at ads like this, wishing my parents would buy me something like this
I still love going through old back issues of PC Gamer just to see the hardware ads
Im_100percent_human@reddit
I used to subscribe to the Computer Shopper. It was 98% of its 900 pages were ads. I remember that it was $12 a years for the subscription. I am pretty sure the ads subsidized the printing and shipping.
Deer-in-Motion@reddit
My family had that Mac. Got me through High School.
roy-dam-mercer@reddit
Very cool! I bought my first Windows PC in ‘93. It’s awesome to see what certain specs cost back then.
I also have a home video recording from that exact date! Took some video at an awesome party at a coworker’s house. Also great memories!