Why pay less for a machine with Windows 98se when you could pay more for windows ME?

Sorry, by all there was, I don't mean pre-builts, I mean desktop PCs. Laptops were still mostly crap with 6 month relevancies in those days.

I remember laptops being mostly an expensive and inferior luxury until around 2003-ish.

First Solely Owned PC LJ: I had to build my own computer for college in 1996 and paid 500 bucks for a gigantic box of parts shipped to me from one of those distributors advertising in the back pages of Computer Shopper (back when the thing was, like, 500 pages and 100 pounds). I lived in a home whose only computer was an Apple II C and my exposure to modern tech was exclusively from going to other people's houses. So I am amazed I pieced the thing together without breaking anything. Had Windows 95 on 20+ floppies and FreeBSD on CD, which I fucked up installing correctly what felt like 100 times...

I fished an OmniKey keyboard, a generic mouse and a 10 inch VGA monitor out of the community college dumpster. I wish I still had that OmniKey...fuck those things feel so nice.

Then I installed Quake and dropped out of college for a few years...

I had a spare 486 that had no CD-ROM drive and so I bought the floppy version of Win95. God I'll never forget that install.

God, I remember those catalogs. Those were dark days for PCs. I remember my parents first computer. They took it to a shop for a 4Mb ram upgrade back in '97. It took 5 days and cast them 0 because those shops were basically crooked mechanics back then and they refused to believe that I could have done it for them for free. Hell, the ram itself only cost even back then.

What a bunch of spoiled whiners. My first personally owned computer was when I grabbed some 2 ton piece of junk that ran on on 10mhz Intel 8088 out a dumpster on a military base. That thing was already 15 years obsolete by the time I picked it up.

Truly, you have out-old-nerded us.

also his ability to grab a 2 ton object out of a dumpster means he's a bouncer.

Math co-processor.

My first PC was my dad's old Leading Edge 286 with a black and green monitor and an EGA card that let me see 16 different shades of green when I played ZZT.

In college I commuted for a couple years and couldn't use the labs much as a result, so I got some help from my family and between that and the money I wasn't spending on city rent I was able to get a PII 450 Xeon Gateway (I was doing sound design so I needed something POWERFUL) that was still useful right up until the graphics card overheated and died about 7 years later.

Luxury! My 1st computer was a roomful of people sitting at a table, each one performing a specific arithmetic task on the number they receive from the person on their left.

Did they know you were using them to five star cat videos?

I remember 2 Osborne 1s that we lugged out of the trash in the late 80s. Heavy, with a dumb little green screen and not rad at all to little kids because NES was out an I was the shit at Kung-Fu. Just sweep kick Mr. X like a million times.

Fun to take apart, for sure.

The Alice Deejay ripoff is my favorite thing about this.

Back when companies had computer ads. Do they actually have commercials for anything with a keyboard on it anymore (Droids don't count)?

Do they have commercials for ANYTHING anymore?

I'm honestly curious, because aside from the occasional porn ad that derps itself past my AdBlocker, I don't think I've seen any advertisements in years. I'm sure they still exist, but hell if I know what and to whom Madison Avenue is selling these days.

Sorry, I meant, if you go to the abuckaday.com website, the one specified in the commercial, it's a Japanese text site about erotic massage.

Buckaday.com is just some kind of credit service site.

Was IBM still clinging to Microchannel then or had they already given up on it for the desktop?

(They did keep Microchannel going for an ungodly length of time in the server space but it kind of made sense there.)