TMI: PC Like It's 1995

One of the many things I did during my summer vacation (from blogging) was purchase a PC. A close connection helped me procure a fairly brand new high end desktop PC previously used only for game demos at the recent E3 convention at a great discount. It has a 3.0GHz dual core Pentium D, dual nVidia video cards, dual 150GB SATA disks in a RAID 1 configuration, and yada, yada, yada.

I also finally tossed out a very old PC that a colleague helped me cobble together in 1995. It had been gathering dust in the corner for many years after I bought a newer system in 2000. I found many of the now faded receipts for this system lying in the same corner. Just about every component was bought at a different place as I tried to get the best parts for the cheapest price. Not sure what this translates to in 2006 dollars but I definitely got much more in an assembled package for about the same price 11 years later.

Intel 486DX2-66MHz + 256K cache (and motherboard?) $232.56
16MB 70ns SIMM $619.00
Refurbished DEC 2000MB Internal SCSI Drive, 12.5ms seek time - $495.00
1.44" Floppy Drive $31.82
Diamond Stealth 64 Video Card $289.00
SoundBlaster Pro-16 Audio Card OEM $99.00
28.8 Kbaud internal modem $122.40
PC Keyboard $13.26
MS Mouse $30.00
Full tower case $105.00
Snickers Bar $0.45 - got hungry putting the pieces together.

NEC XE17" Monitor ??? (it was probably about $900.00 back then)

Only the monitor avoids the recycling bin as I prefer staring into a tube over even much larger, higher-resolution LCD screens in the same price range.

Some day I'll have to break the habit of buying high end PCs. Considering I mostly use these things to play solitaire or connect to work and catch up on e-mail, it basically means I've just purchased world's most expensive deck of cards with a workaholic option.

Okay, World of Warcraft is occasionally played on this thing as well ...