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A comment on I Miss Microsoft Encarta. Parent comment

Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by mixmastamyk on Monday August 19, 2019 @08:26PM (#20742896)
> In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC

Interesting, as the 486 came out in late '89. Seems you'd like a little more oomph, but perhaps they were too expensive at the time.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by joblessjunkie on Monday August 19, 2019 @09:04PM (#20743038)
One product design goal was to run on the mass market 386 PCs of the time.

It wasn't so much about oomph as it was about buggy device drivers that would inevitably blue screen at some point, or flaky CD-ROM drives that just never seemed to read the same data twice the same way.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by SideburnsOfDoom on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @04:29AM (#20744832)
> Seems you'd like a little more oomph

Seems like a case of "high-spec dev machine" vs "example target device".

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by 1stcity3rdcoast on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @10:23AM (#20757454)
A good point, so I just looked it up. This April 1991 ad [0] shows 386 desktops with a hard drive at around $2000 in 1991 prices, and the comparable 486 models with a hard drive start at $7300.

To put that in perspective, $2000 in 1991 is $3700 in today’s dollars, and the 486 would be a staggering $13,500 today.

[0] https://books.google.com/books/about/InfoWorld.html?id=0FAEA...

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by mixmastamyk on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @12:14PM (#20758678)
Interesting, I do remember 2000+ dollar computers in that time period, but $3700!?

Although '91 is earlier than I got back into PCs, strongest memories are probably more around '93, '94. The 486SX might have been the ~$2000 computer at that time. I remember later having the AMD 386/40 and 486/100 made better performance affordable.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by ew6082 on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @09:53PM (#20763915)
At that time you could get a moderate 386 system at Walmart or Radio Shack for around $800. These were pretty common consumer systems for kids just on their way to college.
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