STICK WAVING CONTEST: HOW TO BRAG ABOUT YOUR PC IN THE 1990s

What does a geek do to satisfy the human urge to say “my thing is best thing”, when the thing in question is a 1990s-era PC? How does he prove to other PC geeks that his PC is best PC, when hardly anybody understands what a PC’s spec even means?

The nature of the PC as a, shall we say, collective instrument of sub-systems designed by different companies, and replaced by new versions at different rates, or becoming suddenly obsolete or integrated into so other system, and so forth, means the importance of each of those systems changes over time.

Importance to the gamer I mean. Consider the importance of your choice of CPU vs your choice of GPU, for example.

And therefore, so too has the way we brag about our awesome systems evolved, over time. And bragging about your PC has never been easy. And rarely has it been something

non-PC geeks understand.

See, your basic geek... they’re brand or platform focused. They started early. Console kids were fighting it out with primitive tools over first the Atari/Commodore, then Sega/ Sony, and then eventually (and on some level ironically) Microsoft/Sony. And during that time, we PC freaks struggled - at least when it came to impressing our friends by describing our PC.

The ur-brag of course was: “I have a PC just for playing games”. And it was enough to impress for years because even in the early 1990s, PCs cost $8,000.

Then from 1994, Australians all decided to buy a home PC suddenly, for some reason, and prices went down to a mere $3000$5000, and pretty soon at least several of the king geeks at your local high school had PCs.

But how to establish top dog? PC bragging doesn’t work using the afore-mentioned Holden/Ford method. What does the brand of your PC mean? That you paid $400 more for a slightly different shade of beige?

A “my rig is best rig” argument only works if your opponent can imagine how their experience of playing games would be better, if your PC was their PC.

Today, doing this is easy. Oh, nice machine dude, let me see your GPU... Oh a 2070?

Pretty sweet, yeah... of course I went for the dual 2080s. Ti, natch. Wait, this might be a bad example. But you get the point: fancier GPU, better PC. It’s a broad claim, but not a totally unreasonable one.

Back in 1993 - the year my family bought our first PC, from Osborne of course - bragging was hard. Oh you have a 17-inch monitor? Big screen is cool, but it takes up so much space, I prefer my 15. A 125MB hard drive? Seems like overkill (little did they know). Sound Blaster Pro for games that don’t even have good sound anyway? Cool I guess.

As for the machine’s single-speed caddytastic CD-ROM, it was, in the early 1990s, the equivalent of buying dual RTX 2080s: cool future tech with almost no content to use with it, and by the time there was enough content to need one, the component had been superseded by a better, cheaper, next-gen version.

But among the king geeks of a surprisinglygrim-and-dingy-in-old-photos-looking NSW state high school in 1993, there was one spec of that Osborne which actually impressed: that Osborne had 4MB of RAM.

So you can be sure it’s not a typo: four megabytes of RAM. And sure, most people had no idea what RAM even was, and most of those who knew what it was didn’t think of it as a thing you could get more of, but among a very select few - those earliest pioneers of the DIY PC scene - they understood what 4MB RAM meant.

These guys, the builders, came from families that certainly couldn’t afford to buy a computer (what do you need a computer for anyway?), but who also didn’t mind their - I’m going to hazard it was almost exclusively - teenage boys wandering the industrial parks of Sydney basically begging for IT scraps.

They knew the ragged edge of minimum system requirements. These guys knew that DOOM had a low-detail mode. That you could run VGA games in CGA and, if you squint, even figure out what was going on. And they were among the first to understand why RAM even matters at all.

My Osborne was - as previous related - a 486SX, which ran at 25MHz. It had a capricious Western Digital VESA-compatible graphics chip soldered to its motherboard, and a Sound Blaster Pro jammed in one of its ISA slots (for which Osborne had not provided us the correct drivers). It ran DOS5.0 and came with a copy of Windows 3.1 on at least six floppy discs. The 1x CD-ROM drive (in later years) could not play the interlaced video cutscenes of Wing Commander IV because it couldn’t stream the data off the disc fast enough to keep up with the game’s software video decoder.

But those 4MB of RAM made all the difference. In a land where 2MB was the norm, I had, like, twice as much RAM! Sure, getting games to use that RAM meant having to keep different boot disks on hand, for different games.

But when I ran Wing Commander, Expanded Memory was detected and full music played. And more importantly, when I ran Wing Commander II it actually worked.

Dune II? Amazing digital speech. Reporting. Yes sir. Reporting. Yes sir. Reporting. Yes sir. Enemy units approaching... from the South!

So despite the overall crapulence of that Osborne - with its wrong drivers, IRQ conflicts, CD-ROM that couldn’t really be used to stream large amounts of data, and motherboard that died after six months and was replaced, at our actual house, by a man in an Osborne polo shirt - it did show me that every component of a PC was important, not just the (in the 1990s) CPU or (today) the GPU.

My first personal machine, the first PC I bought just for me, in 1998, had 256MB of RAM, and people thought I was nuts. My next PC, I can’t actually remember the RAM spec, but I knew it was “lots” by the standards of 2000.

Today though? I’m running 16GB, and have been for a few years now. I could add another 16GB, but who gets impressed by 32GB of RAM these days?

Nah, I need to go way harder than that. Let’s see what google says about “terabytes of RAM”...

ANTHONY FORDHAM

These guys knew that DOOM had a lowdetail mode. That you could run VGA games in CGA and, if you squint.