ScuzzBlog: Diaries October 2019
Entry 14th October 2019: Post 01: The PC tin box era - We press on.
The PC tin box era - We press on.
It may be hard to comprehend why a dedicated Amiga enthusiast would
embrace the Microsoft Windows systems so willingly. It wasn't that
I was abandoning the Amiga but more that I was simply carrying on
with the journey I started way back with the ZX81. For me it was
about progress and advancing ever further with the technology. And
whilst I was still very much an Amiga user I really never ever
questioned why I should not use a Windows computer to further
my interest.
This was the age of the internet and even then I could see it going
only in one direction. I knew in time there would be faster speeds
for downloading from the Net. I knew that the systems would improve
to show full motion video and play online games. It was inevitable
that storage capacities would grow and system processors get faster.
Why wouldn't they, nothing had happened previously to suggest that
progress wasn't just in the blink of an eye.
And so when I purchased my P120 Windows 95 machine I also gathered
as much material from magazines that I could buy, just to keep me
up to date with what was going on. Each week I acquired more magazines
just as I had with the Amiga. Nothing changed. I would just love
to throw open a fresh magazine and peruse the sumptuous gadgets and
software on show. Temptation was always just a page away.
And so to my very rich collection of Amiga magazines the stacks of
PC magazines started to fill my shelves. With them also came a rich
abundance of CD covers that were filled to the brim with tempting
programs. And so after many many years of buying magazines I have
a store cupboard stacked to the ceiling with the things. I have
never thrown anything away so I still can drag one off the pile
and have a reminisce about what life was like in 1996.
The magazines were very thick... incredibly thick. You may be
forgiven for thinking that this reflected healthy journalistic
content. You would be wrong. It reflected only on the incredible
amount of adverts these magazines provided. Companies would
include with the magazine their whole brochure of multiple
pages. It was epidemic to be honest. It became a challenge just
finding anything written in the magazine of interest.
There were still some pages with Amiga articles, though few and
far between. It is interesting to reflect on the names of Escom
and Gateway that adorned the pages, and later being the owners
of the Amiga brand. Computer systems were not cheap and in truth
for the most part pretty ugly. After all what is a tin box compared
to an Amiga.
There was nothing elegant about the PC tin box of the nineties. It
was in your face boring. It made no apologies about its style, it
just sold what it did. And each year it did what it did last year
twice as fast and that included CD drive speeds. When I bought my
Win 98 machine I think the processor doubled in speed in the time
it took them to finally ship my beast.
On the CD cover disc front you may have been tempted to install
these little goodies, but you would really be very foolish to do
so. Not only would they muck up your system and be a pig to remove,
but they also liked to leave little pop-ups on your machine and
give the impression of a whole product, but in truth one giant
advertising scam.
And so this was the era of the tin box and the doubling of Intel's
processing speed with each year. Mostly though it was the era of
the internet and free dial up service providers. And yes we had
to pay for every minute on line. Telephone companies grew with
the ISPs and bandwidth became the watchword. I mean absolutely
everybody, and I mean everybody, was providing internet services.
It was a boom period for home computers and yet it offered nothing
more than food without taste. A lot of substance but not very filling.
The period did see some giant steps forward but in doing so we lost
a lot of the finesse of the previous age. Design just got junked
in favour of faster download speeds and processor power. By the
new millennium we were ready for a change and I think that came
with broadband and XP. Cus after that, computers were anticipated to
be online all the time. Something Windows snuck in through the
back door and yet shipped their original OS without any security
or firewall.
Times they were a changing again, and for me that was a pretty
difficult pill to swallow. For now though it was the world of
Netscape Navigator, Newsgroups and IRC. Bang that drum Valda.
The PC tin box era - We press on.
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