AFAIK, and 100% how it worked on my 3Com OfficeConnect, "switching hub" means it keeps 10 and 100Mbit traffic on the hub separate, so 100Mbit traffic does not flood the 10Mbit ports.
I remember that deal of getting ten 100 MB Zip disks for $100 (not just in this catalog, it was everywhere) caused quite a stir because you got 1 GB of total storage space for a lot less than what a 1 GB hard drive cost at the time. Another oddity in this catalog was a 17" CRT monitor that was a lot cheaper than anything else that size because it had an unusually high 0.39 mm dot pitch, instead of the typical 0.28 mm. I always wondered how bad it actually looked. They also sold very cheap build-it-yourself PCs (just the case, power supply, and motherboard) with the weird Cyrix MediaGX processor (a souped-up 486 with graphics and Sound Blaster-compatible sound built into the CPU).
I knew if anyone was to have one of those subwoofers, it would be you! :-) And you’re right the 0.39 is abysmal for anything high res. I suppose if you run 640x480 on a 17” with that bad dot pitch, it probably was still decent!
Well, as for prices per MB I guess you mean when the zip format first came out in '94-5 and not when this catalog came out, since a 4GB hard drive was $200 (or 250 for a 6.4 GB one) then, as seen shortly later.
0.39mm sounds as if they were using a TV tube rather than one designed for a monitor. I recall getting excited about a cheap (for the time) 20" LCD TV with a VGA input. Then I looked at the specs and found the screen resolution was 640 x 480.
40:43 Pretty sure those switching hubs were proper switches as we know them. The one pictured is the one that's marked $899.99, and the description says the 16 ports are 10Mbit (switched auto negotiation) and the 2 ports are 100Mbit (switch auto negotiation). But indeed, this was the era of repeaters for 10Base2, Hubs for 10BaseT and transducers for AUI to either standard. What a time to be alive! Where I worked we had 10Base2 coax in two segments in the office. And, it still ran faster than the local hard drives of the day. Admittedly a bit before 1997 though.
I guess they were just relying on the name recognition of hub, “we’re like a hub but we’re switched so no collisions”, kind of a thing. Of course a funny thing is wifi is a collision domain just like hubs and coax ethernet, so that type of behaviour is still very relevant.
Ahh. Brings back some memories. In September or October 1997 I purchased the Sony Viao PCV-100 and CPD-100VS for about $1200 in Bethesda, MD. I was home on leave about halfway through a deployment to Bosnia. I was stationed in Germany between 1996 and 1998 while in the US Army. Home was in southern Maryland, about an hour and a half away from Bethesda. Dad saw an ad for it (probably in The Washington Post) and he drove me there. I left one of my sleeping bags and brought the computer back to Bosnia with me in a duffel bag. I don't know how but it survived the trip. I re-deployed back to Germany December 1997. That's where I purchased the Ricoh MP-6200S CD-RW. It's an external SCSI model. I was a tinkerer and decided to take it apart and discovered the drive itself was IDE. So I decided to add CD-RW into the computer. June 1998 I left the Army and went back to Maryland. Shortly after I upgraded the PCV-100 to a PCV-200 (or some such model) that had a Slot 2 P-II 233MMX. It had the ATI All-In-Wonder GPU/TV capture card. I believe I eventually upgraded the CPU to a P-III 400 (or something close). Of course I never retrieved that sleeping bag so I got a $200 or so bill from Uncle Sam.
I Worked in a Computer store in the UK around this time and we sold hundreds of those IBM subwoofer systems (we got them as a 2.1 system not just the sub). They were actually really good sounding systems. I bought a beige one for myself which I later gave to my dad and I think he actually still has it!
The terms are linear and non-linear editing. I think you're right, it looks like that device just controls your camera and VCR to play the camera and record on the VCR, so you could edit the video. That's linear editing, because you're assembling the final product linearly, one shot after another. Whereas in non-linear editing, you slice up and rearrange the clips on your timeline in any order. They still had one linear edit suite at my work when I started in 2007, but that was on its way out by then. Basically it was only used to ingest Betacam/DigiBeta tapes if the ingest stations were all busy and they had a breaking news story that needed to be ingested for editing and they didn't have enough time to wait before going to air. Or if they needed to play something out to tape. Nobody used it to actually edit footage by that stage.
Ah man, I loved the TigerDirect catalogs when I was a kid in the mid-2000s. My dad bought a video card from them and we'd get these for years. I was fascinated by all the hardware inside and I'd dream of owning stuff from there. Also did some dream PC builds using the catalog and the website. It was also cool seeing the evolution of flash memory prices; I remember a 4GB flash drive being $499 around 2004, lol. Thanks for sharing!
I loved every second of this. 1996/97 was the time of my first PC build, I was 16 at the time, so watching this was a trip right down memory lane. There was a fortnightly magazine over here called "Micro Mart", what was essentially one of these catalogues, but for many different companies combined. There was one company, I forget their exact name, but they were called something like "Page 73 Computers", because they'd frequent that page every issue. I might have bought my first PC from them? Can't remember. I miss those days. I miss Micro Mart.
zip disks brought back memories, back when i worked as a hotel night auditor about 15 years ago every night we had to use a zip drive to run a back up of all our files
I had a CompUSA locally (before they went out of business) so I didn't generally mail order computer parts, but I did find a really nice overstock IBM Thinkpad (I think it was a T30 or T40) with a 14" 3:2 screen in the early 00's in the TigerDirect catalog that I bought for my first programming job. It was basically a home business, a guy and his wife owned a custom software shop and brought me on as a junior developer, but since they were so small I had to bring my own computer. That was a great laptop and I got it for a really good price.
I wish I would have kept those 'Tiger DIRECT' direct mail pieces. SO HILARIOUS. I remember one motherboard (Super Socket 7) advertised as 'THE ULTIMATE IN UPGRADABILIY' - it had ONE PCI slot. Just ONE. It had integrated video, sound, and modem. ONE PCI slot. Just ONE.
But it probably also had several ISA slots - which AT THE TIME were used for everything but video. PCI at the time was EXPENSIVE and almost nothing else needed the bandwidth then.
@@bricefleckenstein9666 No, no, this just had ONE PCI card slot. That's it. That's what was so memorable about the advertisement, which a picture of the board's layout. I ever scanned it. But that's been lost to time.
Man, some of these prices, hahah. And there was such rapid advancement, too. I remember a friend who had a 386 when we'd just got a Pentium, and they wanted something similar but their parent were all "we just spent $3500 on a computer a few years ago! It should still be good!" It wasn't, lol
Everything was moving blazing fast in the computer world, and through rose-tinted glasses that might make one nostalgic about that times. It was as exciting as it was economically horrible, which means basically that magazines made for a darn interesting read because there was always something new on the market. Real ownership of the stuff was not affordable if you wanted something moderately fancy though, and on top of that, your machine got phased out so quickly, really frustrating unless you had really deep pockets.
We retired the last HP 4050 printer we used at my day job I think 2 years ago, and if I remeber correctly, it had somewhere around 800k pages run through it during it's lifetime. I know I'd changed out the fuser on it at least 2 times during it's run, but otherwise it definitely was a workhorse. I also had that exact model of pager-watch back in the day, it worked, but not great.. It would only store a handful of pages, and the windows software would let you manage those on the PC when connected, delete, read, etc. That's about all the software did though, I don't recall if it'd let you manage the watch time/alarm stuff or not (I don't think it did, but it's been so long ago I just don't remember). During that time period I worked at a PC builder shop, so I had access to most of the stuff in that catalog at cost, so I always had the latest stuff, lol. I've still got a parallel/SCSI ZIP drive that works, along with a USB zip-250, the combo lets me use the SCSI zip on older macs (my old SE), and transfer files on the PC side with the 250. Same for the Jaz (I have several working Jazz drives (2 working 1gb, one working 2gb) that I do the same with occasionally. The zip disks seem to hold up better than the old Jaz cartridges though, as about half of mine are now dead, where I think I may have one or 2 bad zip disks...
I used to use a document feeder for scanning things for business every day, I now just a scanner software on my phone that autocrops, auto adjusts, makes pdfs, etc. Honestly the fastest way to download documents for me. Plus saves to the cloud so is available to me from any device I am using.
@@alecnab2340 I've got a 1000w, it's looking a bit sorry for itself, and it sucks a little because HP were toying with the idea of 'winprinters' for a while, so it has to download its firmware every time you turn the damn thing on, and sometimes it has a tizzy and fails to get it properly and you must power cycle it, but its not like you can tell till you try to send smthg to it lol
Hey, I had one of those Sony Vaios! It was a store display unit, so it didn't come with the monitor, keyboard, or mouse, but it was the first PC I had as a kid that really got me excited! I remember being blown away with it because it could play MPEG video. Came with some actually-cool bloatware called "Vaio Space" that kind of demonstrated what it was capable of. I still remember some of the sample videos, like the warrior fighting a skeleton while descending some stairs inside a dungeon. From what I understand it was the first (and only?) Sony Vaio that was a desktop computer and not a laptop. Also, the picture of it here is really oversaturated. It wasn't really *that* purple. I wish I could find another one, because the case was actually kinda cool, and I'd like to build a retro-PC outta that thing. Wow, thanks Adrian, this certainly did the nostalgia thing for me. :P
@@chris_hertford Years before the Sun monitor a secretary / receptionist got one of those 17" Trinitrons at work. Everyone else, with their 14" HP monitors was so jealous.
I remember when I used to write out dream PC builds using these catalogs and graphing paper complete with prices, page numbers, etc... Good ol days... was a happy time.
Nothing compared to buying from the Computer Shopper - it was easily 3 inches thick with pages larger than a normal magazine. When you needed to find some obscure part, that was the winner.
Really enjoyed this, thank you! I properly geeked out. I have an IBM Subwoofer, for my Aptiva, and it's surprisingly good. I also love anything Iomega, love my zip drives and disks, still use them. I wish I had that 486 upgrade chip, but I'm confused as it's PR rating was P75 yet it implied P133 performance but I think that's just the clock speed? Finally, I have a Sony Mavica that uses floppy disks, and to be fair it takes incredible photos, if only a handful of photos per disk!! What a wonderful time to be alive with all those tech developments, I really miss those days, everything just seemed more humble in a way. Great vid!
Ah, I love those old computer catalogs, and I do miss them. Back in the day whenever I was at the grocery store and had some money I would pick up a copy of "Computer Shopper" which was a FREAKING HUGE (seriously -- each and every edition was about as thick as a telephone book) magazine that had nothing but ads. There may have been some articles here and there (I don't remember) but it was mostly ads from various first-party companies (i.e. the actual manufacturer of the thing doing the selling) as well as third-party sellers (companies that resell stuff made by other companies.) I used to love flipping through them and drooling at all the cool stuff that I couldn't possibly afford. Unfortunately when I moved out my mom went on a cleaning spree and got rid of pretty much all of my old magazines, etc. Really wish I had saved some of those.
They had articles. I remember they had one for making a Hackintosh. The key part was to go dumpster behind Apple stores to find a motherboard from a Mac update. Back then upgrading a Macintosh involved replacing the motherboard and throwing the old one in the trash.
In the U.K. they had an excellent series "The Computer Creators" which looked into the history of things like the mouse. So good that I cut those out and kept them when I dumped the magazines. You are right about the thickness. There were like 30 pages of articles and 1000 pages of adverts, with many being complete catalogues like this being bound into the magazine. p.s. Norman. Nowadays upgrading a Mac means buying a new one and throwing the old one in the WEE :-)
Yeah the ads did fill up most of the gigantic tome each time, but the articles were neat too. That's where I first read about EISA, VLB, and similar technologies that came out in the era... as well as drooling over (early) CD-ROM drives a good 8 years before most people knew that was even a thing.
I used to get one that semed to like a decimeter thick and I think that might have been the one for me it was a dream catalog.... Did you know in prison they call those catalogs when they come dream magazines.... fun fact
This scanner is exactly why I suggested you to donate the catalog to Tech Tangents on your second channel (oh this is the second channel, sorry). It is almost the same scanner he uses (I think it is an earlier model) to scan magazines without cutting or taking staples off. Well done. About the fingers in the scans, at Google Books sometimes you see one (usually with gloves or finger covers) on the scans.
The TigerDirect catalog was the main reason I got into building PCs. I remember the first time I read one, in the eye doctors office. By the time I was in 9th grade I had started building machines for friends. Its a shame they are a shell of what they once were.
Those AMD 5x86 processors were basically AMD's slightly faster version of Intel's 486. It was marketed to compete as a cheaper upgrade than a low-end Pentium, but honestly you would've been better off saving for a few months and the price of a Pentium 133MHz would've come down by then, or you could just pick up one second hand for cheap. We upgraded the family 486 DX2/66 to one of those AMD chips, and we also got a new motherboard, RAM and (PCI!) video card at the same time, and it was a big upgrade. It could play a lot more games, but pretty soon it was struggling to play newer games that listed a low-end Pentium in the system requirements. We also used those 4x30-pin to 72-pin SIMM adapters when we upgraded from our 386 to the 486 to bring the memory up to 16MB. But we went straight to 32MB when we got the AMD 5x86, since we wanted more than 16MB. EDIT: I don't think those 4x30-pin to 1x30-pin adapters would work with more than 16MB of memory total, since there's only 12 address lines in a 30-pin SIMM socket, so you could use 4x4MB SIMMs max. Which you could make yourself with a certain open source project made by a certain sleep-deprived geek. 😉 EDIT EDIT: Right, they were probably saying the SIMMs on the motherboard could be that size, but that doesn't really make sense either since you can't get 64MB 30-pin SIMMs.
Oooooh, all those printers @25:00 !!! I spent a year trying to replace my Dad's Hp Deskjet 940c Printer. He needed the PCL5 programming support for his custom print jobs. Printers are mostly dumb these days, so I couldn't find a good-enough replacement. Eventually I scored a new-in-box 940c from flea-bay and it's working bettern than I would have imagined.
I like how the Danmere Backup added Betamax in the ad given at the time the format was considered "dead" by that point, maybe they added that to give people a use for their "abandoned" Beta machines and tapes languishing in a cupboard... :D
I really had a good time streaming through this catalogue. I really did not expect this would make for such a good time. Your way of talking about "the old days" hits the spot for me. Thank you Adrian.
I really enjoyed this video. Brought back so many fond memories! This was the golden era of PC's if you asked me. To go from a pII or k6 233mhz being blazing fast in 1997 to a 1ghz althlon T-bird in 1999. What a time it was. Keep up the great work. I still have a few of the tiger and Computer Shopper catalogs from the late 90's. I was also a Beta tester for win2000! Was working as a CNA/CNE at the time.
I remember that at a time Canon had some inkjet printers where you could replace the printhead with a scanner-head, this turned the printer into a scanner using the same paper-path for both printing and scanning.
The 1997 Canon BJC-4300 ($200) & several other series #s supported the scanner head feature IS-22 ($100). Was a neat idea but I don't think Canon sold many of them.
The ALPS printer was a dye sub printer that used separate cartridges, the photo printers you can get now like the canon selphy use the same process, i still have mine and used it to print water-slide decals in gold and silver, output was very high quality.......
MD4000the ALPS printers are very interesting, I have one here with Citizen branding. This is a dye sublimation printer, the ink is on a ribbon and is thermally bonded to the paper. With this you can print fabric banners and also metlaic colors like gold, silver, etc.
Speaking of CPU Galaxy, he actually used a peltier device to achieve the 486 speed records and was able to keep the CPU at 0 degrees. Past the 486 platform, of course, their usefulness starts to break down.
The 3 CCD DSLR would make for an incredible camera. The first single lens color motion pictures (eg what was used for Wizard of Oz) used the technicolor process which ran three film strips through a camera at a time with a set of partially silvered mirrors which would split the light path into 3 separate paths for each film strip. And that's what this DSLR was doing. The other alternative (which is used on most consumer cameras) is to use a Bayer filter with either a red, green, or blue filter over each pixel (and when the final image is created for each pixel the camera pulls the color information from the surrounding pixels and as a first pass averages them out). So the color resolution on most cameras is effectively only about half the resolution of the stated number of pixels and the demosaicing process can lead to weird artifacts (which is far less of an issue now with our high megapixel cameras where other artifacts of the process have become bigger issues). This 3 CCD camera had a proper full color resolution image. Even if it was a relatively low resolution camera by today's standards, the image would have been so much better than other cameras of the era because of that and within certain domains, the images made on it will still hold up to scrutiny today.
I had written an really long comment that explained all the foibles and problems with the RD-175, but UA-cam ate it. Unfortunately, while the 3CCD system (which used two green CCDs and one blue/red interlaced CCD) produced images free of false color, its actual image quality wasn't as good as the bayer-based Kodak DCS 460c it competed with. A big problem is that the three CCDs can have alignment problems, the images had to be interpolated, the prism had negative effects on IQ, you had a significant 2x crop factor, the aperture was limited to a max of f/6.7, it only shot at ISO 800, and on and on. Granted, it cost a lot less than the Kodak, but the RD-175 wasn't a king of image quality by any means. Compared to a consumer digicam of the time? Yeah, it'll have better IQ, but Agfa/Minolta lost the early DSLR battle to Kodak/Nikon handily. It's absolutely a neat camera, as is its successor, the Vectis-based RD-3000, but even at the time its limits were apparent. Even though a DCS 460c cost nearly three times as much brand new, professionals overwhelmingly chose it over the Minolta. It's sort of like how yes, you could get a Foveon-based Sigma camera and avoid false color, but you'd be making a bunch of other tradeoffs in the process. I'm a Minolta fan and I still use A-mount cameras (Sony a99ii represent) but the RD-175 was what I'd call ambitious but mediocre.
Back in that day I had a Viewsonic 21ps and used it for at least 10 years before I finally sold it to someone and got my first flat panels (2, which my video card supported. I had a near 1080p desktop long before 1080p was a thing). After almost 20 years, I got rid of those first panels and now use a pair of Dell 4320Qs in portrait. I'm still using my first PC external speakers: a pair of Yamaha YST-M15s as shown next to the M-100s Adrian discussed @45:30. The headphone jack on the front of those has been incredibly useful for me, so as long as they keep going, I'm a happy camper. Finding external speakers with a headphone jack in the front is like finding frog fur... The prices there are a bit steep, but I learned a long time before that catalog existed that paying for exactly the peripheral you want is actually cost efficient; you'll replace the CPU/MB and maybe the case a few times before you'll replace the peripherals. And since your satisfaction with using the system depends on the peripherals, and not so much the CPU/MB/case, spending more for good I/O devices is totally sane.
I absolutely loved browsing the Tiger Direct catalogues back then. I built several PCs with parts from them, enough that they always mailed me each new catalogue when it came out. I would spend hours looking over them contemplating what I would buy next. This video was a fantastic trip down memory lane. Thanks so much for posting it.
I had 2 Parallel port 100MB Zip drives as they where the lowest cost, and from online forums rummoed to have the least Click of Death failure rates, but my first one after about a year 1/2 of carrying it in my backpack to school to use in my Comp. Network Tech classes in high school as we had High speed internet there, and I only had dialup at home, finally failed, and I had to buy a 2nd one used off eBay at time, and it lasted me till around 04 before it finally died. I eventually had 7 Zip disk to use with my drives I got over the years. Also back in the 90's - mid 00's I used Canon BJC(Bubble Jet Color)printers as the printers were well priced, and the ink was super cheap for generics, and in a pinch you take a cotton swab with a light amount of water on it, and rewet the pads on the cartage, and get a 10 - 20 more prints in the low quality settings, or if you had just let the cartage set too long, and let the pads dry out it would bring them back to life to finish out the ink left in the cartage. These days I use a Brother Wireless Laser printer, and generic toner is cheap, and last for a very long time on toner saver, and works with Linux, Android, Mac, and yes Windows with little issues. Speaking of KDS I had a 15in KDS CRT Monitor I got 2nd hand at a pawn shop in 96 for my 486 PC(later used it on my 550Mhz AMD K6II gaming PC), and even though the case looked ugly it worked well, and when I finally got my first LCD monitor in the early 00's a 15in 1024 x 768 60hz with crappy built in speakers, it was KDS as that 2nd monitor gave me such good service , but it cost me over $350 USD from Walmart. Crazy to think about that I recently got a Nokia T20 tablet with a 1200 X 2000 rez screen I'm typing this comment on for $161.99 USD shipped to my door, and it's more powerful specs wise than many desktop/laptop computers sold even just several years ago. 🤯
I worked on a system with a Peltier heat sink. When the system stopped booting and we took it apart we discovered that the processor was corroded into the socket from the moisture that condensed on the cold side of the Peltier.
The 5x86 was basically a 486 with higher clock speed, more cache and an improved multiply command, running at 3.3V. The floating point unit was still 486 based. Most overclock easily to 160MHz. Using an adapter for voltage conversion, you could use them in almost every 486 board.
Yep, It was a 486 in all but labeling. Used clock quadrupling. Later on they were sold in this QFP package which upgrade companties stuck on a PCB with voltage regulators to make the thing work in any 486 socket. Yes many went right to 160MHZ
OCR Definitely existed at the time. I remember using one of those half-page handheld scanners that was grayscale on either a Compaq Deskpro 286 or custom 386 in my father's basement in the early '90s, and it came with an OCR program that sort of worked If you got the text just right, and I remember thinking it was so cool.
48:33 At my high school in 1996 we had a video production studio, which included a stage area. The editing room had a toaster which was a computer that did exactly this: computer-controlled the two VCRs and executed your edit list to create your final video product.
Oh man, this catalog is such a blast from the past. I remember when I got myself a KDS VS-7i monitor, which was a 17" without the speakers. These are so fascinating. I love looking at these old catalog and the scanned ads from places like circuit city and best buy from the early 90's.
Great trip down catalog-memory-lane. I remember skimming through all the catalogs at the book store, but only purchased Computer Shopper. Always looked forward to what Asus was selling. Their MBs were impressive even back then. 🖖
In the 1990s the U.K. edition of Computer Shopper was about 1" (25mm) thick and would have about four similar catalogues bound into it. Evesham Micros, Dabs, Watford Electronics. Those names will bring back memories to U.K. watchers. We also had the Computer Shopper show at Olympia where the companies behind the catalogues would turn up with truck loads of printers, monitors etc and sell them at about a 30% discount literally from the backs of the trucks.
Lol I once caused a broadcast storm on a 48 port switch between around 12 connected devices. Wish I had video, things went wild for a while until the switch eventually overloaded and violently powered off. Good times
Oh this device! I think it was Tech Tangents that got the same one as a promotion like you got about 3 weeks or so back and he gave it a whirl and showed all the options and was pretty impressed with it.
22:19 I spent weeks of deliberating before spending £135 on a 4GByte Hard Drive. 8GBytes were available but they were closer to £300. Anyway 4GB turned out to be plenty until I got a digital camera. 32:36 The best CRT monitor I had was a 17" IBM bought in a sale in about 2001 for £130. Ruler flat screen. Perfect geometry. A big case though so I included it when I sold my Celeron 500 desktop to a colleague. At around the same time my boss tried to buy an LCD but after taking three back to the shop gave up "If I'm paying £400 for a monitor I don't want any duff pixels". That was a common problem with early LCDs. In fact some manufacturers claimed up to five was normal. 34:06 I paid just under £100 (after a mail in rebate) for an HP CD Writer of the same spec in 1999. That was the first one I saw for under £100.
Those peltier heatsinks were a good thought experiment that failed in reality. They were typically like 30-50w peltier pads which means that's all the heat they can handle. If you try to sink more then 30w into them they would end up dumping heat into your CPU instead of cooling it. Also, for every watt of heat the peltier removes, it uses 1 watt of power. I bought one and tried to put it on my K6-2 back in the day. It was a waste of $50.
I worked with Peltier modules in a thermometer temperature calibration factory (it was, and still is a World-Class outfit) - they were powerful, efficient and accurate to within better than 0.0001 of a degree Celcius, could heat from +240 and cool down to -60, with the right control. The heatsource was a passive Aluminium block used to hold the thermometer under test. The modules had to have massive metal finned heatsinks fitted, draught assisted by mains driven fans. But for this purpose, nothing is better at present, and they practically never break down. Any application where there is an active heatsource however, they were totally useless for the reasons you state above, plus: cooling, hardware, etc. The Peltier modules become simply redundant and, in fact make the surplus heat transfer worse, not better. A co-worker said he would use one of these sub-zero cal. units with plastic piping, containing pumped Ethylene Glycol instead of a thermometer in the cooling well, and run the pipes over the CPU, effectively making it liquid cooled - I don't know if he ever did this - I moved on to other projects.
I remember the early days of pc modding, involving early attempts at water cooling along with peltiers, de-lidding k6-2's, custom freon units and vapourchill stuff.
Blast from the past. First, I had considered the AMD 5x86 upgrade like you showed, back in the day. But Intel ended up dropping the price of their Pentium Overdrives to push AMD out. As I recall AMD’s was MOSTLY compatible but the Cyrix version was more well known. The photo scanner drive bay thingy. HP actually had a model of that too. I own/owned (not sure) the external SCSI version. It was okay. Topped out at 1200dpi as I recall so even a cheap USB flatbed could beat it these days but at the time… it was fairly unique. The dual P-II boards were mostly for Netware file servers. Microsoft’s NT had just come out but Novell ruled the roost then. So I highly doubt you could find any these days as most were dumped/upgraded due to Y2K fears. On the printers, the ALPS you show with the Metallic inks is very similar to a Primera printer I had which wasn’t inkjet but Ribbon based. (Think Okimate 20s.) They were commonly used for ID badges. I used mine for business cards (as the Metal print stood out). And one story on the 5si printers. I ran a computer lab for students during that time. I was told to buy FOUR Laserjet 4’s and I instead fought to get a 5si WITH duplexer. My boss finally backed down but was gonna hold it against me if it went wrong. We hit 1,000,000 pages in the first six months. ;) Didn’t have a single problem. And the students LOVED double sided. Even the big boss’ secretary was using it as they didn’t need to wait more than a few minutes. (As it also had Postscript embedded…) Those printers were bullet proof. I do network security now and I *still* find them on networks IN USE! :p
Intel is still producing peltier cooler which called "Intel Cryo" today. It's used for Comet Lake and Rocket Lake Core i7/i9 processors. They said that cooler will automatically adjust the cooling power to prevent condensation.
When you were talking about CPU cooling it reminded me of a time when I worked in a computer store. Although I was not one of the repair techs at the time, I was capable enough to build and repair PCs even then. A PC came into the shop which was a couple generations more recent than the ones in this magazine when they went back to sockets instead of slots. It was overheating and I took one look at the heat sink and fan once the side cover was off and I told the tech that was going to repair it that it would be melted into the socket, the board is toast and he would have a fun time with that one. He didn't believe me. What I noticed that gave it away? The rubberised coating on the CPU fan release lever had melted and dripped all the way to the heat sink. I knew that it would take temperatures >150C to melt it like that so I knew the temperatures on the CPU would have to reach twice that much. Sure enough, when he finally got the CPU out he told me that it took him a long time to get it out. It was melted in the socket and the motherboard had a black spot in the center under the CPU all the way through the board. The CPU thermal protection had failed and it turned into a toaster.
I had the backer isa card worked well but with difficulties in the lower quality VHS recordings. I lost the software for it changing my system back then 1998 so got put away. Somewhere in my junk stuff might still have it. If I find it I'll send it to you for a nice video it will be along with some other interesting stuff but might be limited due to shipping costs. thanks for your very interesting videos.
My first CD-R burner was a little over 400$ they were so expensive back then, it was a common thing to go halfers with a buddy to buy one, just to be able to transfer all the crap collected on bbs that was on hundreds of Disks to one or two CD-Rom lol Those were the fun days of commuting lol
A friend paid for his £800 CD-ROM drive (one of the first) by doing the opposite, buying CD-ROMs of shareware and running a shareware library sending out floppies at a couple of £s each. That must have been before anyone had the internet.
@@MrDuncl hehe trust me mine paid for itself rather quickly but I dare not say how, think a game console with a two-letter abbreviation that was huge in the mid-90s lol
9:25 Next to the item he's talking about, I had one of the LS120 floppy drives! " 1.44 mb? Lol you ain't got nothing on me, I got 120 mb! " Lol those were the days.
I've been re-watching Stargate SG-1, and they've got those NEC Multisync monitors all over the place. They needed them since they have separate horizontal and vertical sync inputs, so they can genlock them to same sync as the cameras to prevent flickering. They literally had like a dozen of them in the control room, and they probably just threw them out one day either when the show wrapped, or I can't remember if they upgraded to LCDs at some stage. But I would've killed to have one of those monitors back in the mid-90s!
The early NEC Multisync monitors (2D ?) could sync to both VGA and TV frequencies. I had a similar monitor (bought secondhand with bad screen burn) that could also do that so it was ideal for my Atari ST as it could do both low and high resolution. Around the same time I saw a TV program about London stockbrokers and they all had about six each, so I guess that is where mine came from.
I don’t know which model they used on Star Trek, but they picked ones which could sync to the film frame rate to build-into the sets. (Probably not really 24Hz, probably 72Hz.)
Love that "Protect your PC from heat damage" RIGHT below ads for CPU Fan Upgrade LMAO. Peltier CPU cooling could work in principle. It is however not practical because of additional power draw and condensation on cold side being potentially dangerous. And since you do need to dissipate the heat from the hot side in the end, it does not solve any issue you couldn't solve with other methods of cooling.
Cool content 👌 Takes me back to the good old times when I was 17 and went to Quake-lanparties with my classmates, drinking huge amounts of beer (in the nineties kids were actually allowed to drink alcohol here which is actually hard to believe today) 😁 25:34 "DeathJet"; That sounds killer😂
In the late '90 I had an ArVid 1020 data-to-video card, bought from someone at my school, and used it for some time. My friend got the 'english' version of it... the Backer, but it only worked under Windows, while the ArVid was mostly operated in DOS, and with a small script, you could automate almost every operation of the VCR (besides, of course, loading the tape). The Backer showed a window on screen with instructions of what to do, so when backing up or restoring files, you would need to sit near the computer and VCR, while the ArVid controlled the VCR via InfraRed, so you could do a night-job of backing up files, and go to sleep. I still have those two cards somewhere...
The last version, ArVid 1052 was able to squeeze about the size of a DVD to a 4hour tape in SP, had program to record audio CD to tape digitally (like the technics VHS deck), and even for real time video watching (due the input is digital, it's worse than regular black-and-white tv, but hey, at least it tried-- even had some blur filter to make it a bit better), AAAAND on top of that there was a program where you can set up an area of the screen (channel logo) and control the VCR accordingly -- skipping the commercials from the recording (also this program had better "video" image than the dedicated video-viewer)
It’s so funny because 1997 seems like recent tech to me. Look at all the webcams and other tech that really is quite similar to todays tech (just slower and crappier). I’m probably getting old but nostalgia to me is pc or byte magazine from like the mid 1980s
Wow. So many things that are familiar, and several I had no idea existed at all. Some I hope to get someday. Thank you for sharing and I am definitely downloading the catalog. Thank you, Adrian! You are awesome!
I had a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450Mhz that had a peltier cooler permanently fused to it. I forget the company that I bought it from. It would get sold cold that it would create condensation that would drip on the motherboard, lucky it never caused a short.
When I was in Jr High, my mom worked at the school district's District Office and I used to go hang out with the 2(!) IT guys in their cave and those Tiger magazines were all over the place. This was in like 1996/97. Those bring back a ton of memories. Now I'm the school district IT guy. Oh god... Shopping from magazines was a lot of fun. I'm into RC stuff and around that same period I remember drooling over the super-thick Tower Hobbies magazines with their hundreds upon hundreds of pages of airplane kits. Now the magazines are gone and so are most of the kits...
We had a Tiger Direct warehouse/store 30 min from where I lived in the 00-10's. Almost every month me and my dad will go to the store and shop. I sure do miss it!
Thanks for the blast from the past. I loved those catalogs. There were several catalogs which were large-format and almost as thick as a phone book with multiple advertisers, which were some of favorites to browse. I can remember lusting after the Radius Pivot full page monitors which were far out of my price range back in the day.
Very interesting stuff, it definitely would've kept me busy for days looking through that when I was a kid. Although I wouldn't have paid $2.50 for it, I'd probably have saved my pocket money and bought a proper magazine for a little more, since they usually had a section at the back for hardware and software ads anyway.
I never really bought anything from catalogs like that. Since I lived near a major city (San Antonio, TX), there were plenty of places to go to get computer stuff; cables, floppy disks, printers, modems, hard drives, power supplies, and so on. What I like is finding an old electronics magazines (Radio Electronics, Popular Electronics, Electronics Now, etc…) and seeing all the nifty test gear that I could never afford as a kid, as well as ads for stuff like “get your FCC license in 2 yrs.” or “Train to repair Radios/TVs with our 2 yr. degree program.”, etc… Plus, they had all sorts of fun projects to assemble, complete with schematics and - often - the theory of operation. But it always seemed that by the time I saved up enough money, the product/kit was outdated, or just no longer available. 🥺
SUPER FUGLY should have been in the description of several things in this catalog :D But thank you for going through this, it's super fun to look at, and I'll be browsing the PDF too! Great work on that!
Now that you mention Eudora, my school also had us store our e-mails locally, though typically on floppies. And since they used Windows 3.1, sometimes the last person didn't close the program and their mailbox would overwrite yours if you didn't know it was running in the background. Oops!
I bought Yamaha YST-M15 speakers way back then; funny thing, they're hooked up to my current desktop at home and still sound good enough, though I almost always use headphones now so the speakers don't see much use.
I actually used to use one of those pager watches, many moons ago. It was really cool, but it ate batteries crazy. If it could have been rechargeable, that would have been even better. I use4d to get alerts from servers that were having some sort of issue. Very handy :)
I had one of those "100x" CD-ROM drives. It was a decent, solid drive, but I think it was 8x. Supposedly it cached the disc to RAM, but I never got the software working right anyway...
The funny thing about zip discs. By the end of the trend I had easily 40 discs. And I never paid for a single one. I would get free discs from iomega at CES every year they were there. They would give out one or two to everybody and just keep on going back multiple times a day the entire show. And I'm not sure if the internet phone in the catalog is the same my nephew had. But when my nephew lived in Israel he would use it to call his mother here in the states. And I don't know if it was a reduced charge for the call or if it was free because it was over the Internet so, can't remember. But the internet phone was really good for international calls.
I have an old Egghead Software (also hardware) mail catalog from August 1995. It features Windows 95 on the cover. One of the values is a 1620mb HDD for only $448.73!
So many memories. That was the era when I was really getting into building and repairing PCs. I was fortunate that every couple months, a computer show would come to town with all the latest stuff at discount prices... I liked the LS120 over the zip drive. Fit in the floppy bay and read pretty much all 3.5" discs... Thanks for the blast from the past...
I liked the LS120 too. Had an internal one as my only floppy drive for years. It's easy to forget that being able to replace a standard floppy drive in a 3.5" bay was a killer feature in about 1995. A standard computer in 1995 featured space for between two and four drives including the hard drive, which was itself likely to be 500MB or smaller. Many CD-ROM equipped PCs came from the factory with every drive bay filled, meaning that fitting an internal ZIP drive required removing something else (and therefore giving up certain functionality that you probably wanted to keep). It wasn't all good, Microsoft installers of the era (and well into the 2000s) required, by default, a working device plugged into the floppy controller on the motherboard. There was information available from Microsoft on how to create custom installation media that didn't have this requirement, but it genuinely made trying to exist without a traditional floppy drive an occasional hassle. But in the end, the benefits would have outweighed this problem. If LS-120 had been available in 1995. It's a shame for imation that they didn't release the LS120 until early 1997. By then, >1.5GB hard drives were common (meaning that you could copy a CD without needing two drives), and cases typically came with space for many more bays in any case. Chances were, in 1997, you had unused drive bays in your case, you could install after market drives and not have to remove any of the drives you already had. In short, by 1997 the killer feature of the LS-120 had ceased to matter. So the product was different to the well established competitor (ZIP) only in that it could do an unnecessary thing that made life no easier and occasionally harder. That's why I think it failed. Even though I personally loved it.
@@p1mason yeah, but in those days, swapping drives, and making things work with things that didn't always work, was half the fun! I remember letting virus's infect some of my junk machines just to see how it would affect operation and study the code... Good old days!
God this takes me back, ATAPI, Ultra DMA, UW SCSI, at this time I was building Amiga systems that used both IDE and SCSI connections - SCSI was wonderful for Amiga due to it being more "intelligent" and left the CPU alone. IDE needed more CPU input and with Amiga bandwidth lacking, SCSI was always the way to go. IDE stuff was just starting to become cheap enough in comparsion to SCSI, that performance in the PC world was less of an issue for box shifters who wanted cheapest. I also remember throwing away a box (size of a shoe box) full of brand new 30 pin SIMMS (1mb) coz no one was interested....Still got my 100mb Zip drives (IDE and SCSI) used to swap file bewteen Amiga and PC. 1 GB Quantum Fireball (SCSI) Hard Drive (£300) !!!! bought my first CD/RW unit from Walmart in Saw Grass MIlls while on holiday $200 SCSI Toshiba 2001?
I still have a Zip Drive and lots of cartridges too. They were popular when they came out. Me and lots of my IT friends used to exchange shareware back then using the Zip Drives.
I had the cyrix 5x86 133mhz for my 486 50mhz 😂 good times it was supposed to be a p75 equivalent but it wasn't really, though it kept that computer going through the end of the 90s
This is amazing! What a fantastic scanner and a fantastic little brochure you got there. Im wondering if I still have all the old Sony and Panasonic magazines I used to pick up from my local tech dealer back in 95-02, it would be amazing to scan those and put them up.
15:10 We had an old Packard Bell Legend 2440 that originally had Windows 95 on it. If I remember right, the original specs included a Pentium processor that was rated to 75MHz, but my uncle had it upgraded to a Pentium OverDrive processor rated at 120MHz. The system RAM was also upgraded to 32MB, from its original 8MB that it came with. I decided to upgrade the OS to Windows 98 (found it on about 40 floppy disks at a garage sale) and took literally every last byte of hard drive space to install it. Lots of interesting memories with that computer.
One of those color laserjets would work through to today, maybe even on it's second toner replacement. I had a Lexmark with a 15000 capacity black toner.
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
AFAIK, and 100% how it worked on my 3Com OfficeConnect, "switching hub" means it keeps 10 and 100Mbit traffic on the hub separate, so 100Mbit traffic does not flood the 10Mbit ports.
I remember that deal of getting ten 100 MB Zip disks for $100 (not just in this catalog, it was everywhere) caused quite a stir because you got 1 GB of total storage space for a lot less than what a 1 GB hard drive cost at the time. Another oddity in this catalog was a 17" CRT monitor that was a lot cheaper than anything else that size because it had an unusually high 0.39 mm dot pitch, instead of the typical 0.28 mm. I always wondered how bad it actually looked. They also sold very cheap build-it-yourself PCs (just the case, power supply, and motherboard) with the weird Cyrix MediaGX processor (a souped-up 486 with graphics and Sound Blaster-compatible sound built into the CPU).
And my best friend and I both bought one of those IBM subwoofers! I think they were selling for $30 at a local computer show.
I knew if anyone was to have one of those subwoofers, it would be you! :-) And you’re right the 0.39 is abysmal for anything high res. I suppose if you run 640x480 on a 17” with that bad dot pitch, it probably was still decent!
Well, as for prices per MB I guess you mean when the zip format first came out in '94-5 and not when this catalog came out, since a 4GB hard drive was $200 (or 250 for a 6.4 GB one) then, as seen shortly later.
0.39mm sounds as if they were using a TV tube rather than one designed for a monitor. I recall getting excited about a cheap (for the time) 20" LCD TV with a VGA input. Then I looked at the specs and found the screen resolution was 640 x 480.
40:43 Pretty sure those switching hubs were proper switches as we know them. The one pictured is the one that's marked $899.99, and the description says the 16 ports are 10Mbit (switched auto negotiation) and the 2 ports are 100Mbit (switch auto negotiation). But indeed, this was the era of repeaters for 10Base2, Hubs for 10BaseT and transducers for AUI to either standard. What a time to be alive! Where I worked we had 10Base2 coax in two segments in the office. And, it still ran faster than the local hard drives of the day. Admittedly a bit before 1997 though.
I guess they were just relying on the name recognition of hub, “we’re like a hub but we’re switched so no collisions”, kind of a thing.
Of course a funny thing is wifi is a collision domain just like hubs and coax ethernet, so that type of behaviour is still very relevant.
I remember the happiness when a new catalog arrived and the smell of flipping through it the first time.
Ahh. Brings back some memories. In September or October 1997 I purchased the Sony Viao PCV-100 and CPD-100VS for about $1200 in Bethesda, MD. I was home on leave about halfway through a deployment to Bosnia. I was stationed in Germany between 1996 and 1998 while in the US Army. Home was in southern Maryland, about an hour and a half away from Bethesda. Dad saw an ad for it (probably in The Washington Post) and he drove me there. I left one of my sleeping bags and brought the computer back to Bosnia with me in a duffel bag. I don't know how but it survived the trip. I re-deployed back to Germany December 1997. That's where I purchased the Ricoh MP-6200S CD-RW. It's an external SCSI model. I was a tinkerer and decided to take it apart and discovered the drive itself was IDE. So I decided to add CD-RW into the computer. June 1998 I left the Army and went back to Maryland. Shortly after I upgraded the PCV-100 to a PCV-200 (or some such model) that had a Slot 2 P-II 233MMX. It had the ATI All-In-Wonder GPU/TV capture card. I believe I eventually upgraded the CPU to a P-III 400 (or something close). Of course I never retrieved that sleeping bag so I got a $200 or so bill from Uncle Sam.
I Worked in a Computer store in the UK around this time and we sold hundreds of those IBM subwoofer systems (we got them as a 2.1 system not just the sub). They were actually really good sounding systems. I bought a beige one for myself which I later gave to my dad and I think he actually still has it!
The terms are linear and non-linear editing. I think you're right, it looks like that device just controls your camera and VCR to play the camera and record on the VCR, so you could edit the video. That's linear editing, because you're assembling the final product linearly, one shot after another. Whereas in non-linear editing, you slice up and rearrange the clips on your timeline in any order.
They still had one linear edit suite at my work when I started in 2007, but that was on its way out by then. Basically it was only used to ingest Betacam/DigiBeta tapes if the ingest stations were all busy and they had a breaking news story that needed to be ingested for editing and they didn't have enough time to wait before going to air. Or if they needed to play something out to tape. Nobody used it to actually edit footage by that stage.
Fun review. Computer Shopper was my go-to "catalog" in the day.
Ah man, I loved the TigerDirect catalogs when I was a kid in the mid-2000s. My dad bought a video card from them and we'd get these for years.
I was fascinated by all the hardware inside and I'd dream of owning stuff from there. Also did some dream PC builds using the catalog and the website. It was also cool seeing the evolution of flash memory prices; I remember a 4GB flash drive being $499 around 2004, lol.
Thanks for sharing!
I loved every second of this. 1996/97 was the time of my first PC build, I was 16 at the time, so watching this was a trip right down memory lane. There was a fortnightly magazine over here called "Micro Mart", what was essentially one of these catalogues, but for many different companies combined. There was one company, I forget their exact name, but they were called something like "Page 73 Computers", because they'd frequent that page every issue. I might have bought my first PC from them? Can't remember. I miss those days. I miss Micro Mart.
I would like more videos like this.
zip disks brought back memories, back when i worked as a hotel night auditor about 15 years ago every night we had to use a zip drive to run a back up of all our files
I had a CompUSA locally (before they went out of business) so I didn't generally mail order computer parts, but I did find a really nice overstock IBM Thinkpad (I think it was a T30 or T40) with a 14" 3:2 screen in the early 00's in the TigerDirect catalog that I bought for my first programming job. It was basically a home business, a guy and his wife owned a custom software shop and brought me on as a junior developer, but since they were so small I had to bring my own computer. That was a great laptop and I got it for a really good price.
Who could forget the famous "Penitum II" processor advertised four times on the first page. Nice transposed letters.
I wish I would have kept those 'Tiger DIRECT' direct mail pieces. SO HILARIOUS. I remember one motherboard (Super Socket 7) advertised as 'THE ULTIMATE IN UPGRADABILIY' - it had ONE PCI slot. Just ONE. It had integrated video, sound, and modem. ONE PCI slot. Just ONE.
But it probably also had several ISA slots - which AT THE TIME were used for everything but video.
PCI at the time was EXPENSIVE and almost nothing else needed the bandwidth then.
@@bricefleckenstein9666 No, no, this just had ONE PCI card slot. That's it. That's what was so memorable about the advertisement, which a picture of the board's layout. I ever scanned it. But that's been lost to time.
@@chadhartsees That would have been VERY weird by the standards of the time.
Especially in a Super 7 board.
@@bricefleckenstein9666 It was *CRAZY* weird.
Man, some of these prices, hahah. And there was such rapid advancement, too. I remember a friend who had a 386 when we'd just got a Pentium, and they wanted something similar but their parent were all "we just spent $3500 on a computer a few years ago! It should still be good!" It wasn't, lol
Everything was moving blazing fast in the computer world, and through rose-tinted glasses that might make one nostalgic about that times. It was as exciting as it was economically horrible, which means basically that magazines made for a darn interesting read because there was always something new on the market. Real ownership of the stuff was not affordable if you wanted something moderately fancy though, and on top of that, your machine got phased out so quickly, really frustrating unless you had really deep pockets.
We retired the last HP 4050 printer we used at my day job I think 2 years ago, and if I remeber correctly, it had somewhere around 800k pages run through it during it's lifetime. I know I'd changed out the fuser on it at least 2 times during it's run, but otherwise it definitely was a workhorse. I also had that exact model of pager-watch back in the day, it worked, but not great.. It would only store a handful of pages, and the windows software would let you manage those on the PC when connected, delete, read, etc. That's about all the software did though, I don't recall if it'd let you manage the watch time/alarm stuff or not (I don't think it did, but it's been so long ago I just don't remember). During that time period I worked at a PC builder shop, so I had access to most of the stuff in that catalog at cost, so I always had the latest stuff, lol. I've still got a parallel/SCSI ZIP drive that works, along with a USB zip-250, the combo lets me use the SCSI zip on older macs (my old SE), and transfer files on the PC side with the 250. Same for the Jaz (I have several working Jazz drives (2 working 1gb, one working 2gb) that I do the same with occasionally. The zip disks seem to hold up better than the old Jaz cartridges though, as about half of mine are now dead, where I think I may have one or 2 bad zip disks...
The old "click of death" hit the zip drives real bad though.
Computer Shopper magazine was the best! It was enormous and the sale prices on parts was simply amazing.
I used to use a document feeder for scanning things for business every day, I now just a scanner software on my phone that autocrops, auto adjusts, makes pdfs, etc. Honestly the fastest way to download documents for me. Plus saves to the cloud so is available to me from any device I am using.
We had a HP Lj4 which we used for 15 years before the main gear for feeding paper died when we recycled it. They were truly workhorses
We had tons of those 4Ls at school in the late 90s early 00s, they were so much more reliable than the newer ones
I still have 4L in my basement, got in 1993 for $700 !
image is getting very faint, but this is 29 years old!
@@alecnab2340 I've got a 1000w, it's looking a bit sorry for itself, and it sucks a little because HP were toying with the idea of 'winprinters' for a while, so it has to download its firmware every time you turn the damn thing on, and sometimes it has a tizzy and fails to get it properly and you must power cycle it, but its not like you can tell till you try to send smthg to it lol
for sure !
Ahhh we had tons of these at work, indestructible beasts!
Hey, I had one of those Sony Vaios! It was a store display unit, so it didn't come with the monitor, keyboard, or mouse, but it was the first PC I had as a kid that really got me excited! I remember being blown away with it because it could play MPEG video. Came with some actually-cool bloatware called "Vaio Space" that kind of demonstrated what it was capable of. I still remember some of the sample videos, like the warrior fighting a skeleton while descending some stairs inside a dungeon. From what I understand it was the first (and only?) Sony Vaio that was a desktop computer and not a laptop. Also, the picture of it here is really oversaturated. It wasn't really *that* purple. I wish I could find another one, because the case was actually kinda cool, and I'd like to build a retro-PC outta that thing.
Wow, thanks Adrian, this certainly did the nostalgia thing for me. :P
Its funny how the ads and pictures in these magazines evokes more nostalgic memories than videos featuring actual hardware!
People might not be so nostalgic if they had to carry one of those 21" monitors. I used to have the Sun version on my desk at work.
@@MrDuncl reminds me pre internet etc had to go to computer fairs, bought and had to carry 17" Sony Trinitron monitor on the bus
@@chris_hertford Years before the Sun monitor a secretary / receptionist got one of those 17" Trinitrons at work. Everyone else, with their 14" HP monitors was so jealous.
@@MrDuncl mine was used and had a dead pixel but as a kid on a budget and upgrading from 12" VGA I was overjoyed lol
I remember when I used to write out dream PC builds using these catalogs and graphing paper complete with prices, page numbers, etc...
Good ol days... was a happy time.
I did that too! Somewhere there might still be a drawing I made of my Mac IIci with all the peripherals I wanted to go with it.
Yeah...
Page 3 references an article in "Family PC Magazine" from March 1998, so this catalog would have to be from sometime after March 1998.
Nothing compared to buying from the Computer Shopper - it was easily 3 inches thick with pages larger than a normal magazine. When you needed to find some obscure part, that was the winner.
Really enjoyed this, thank you! I properly geeked out. I have an IBM Subwoofer, for my Aptiva, and it's surprisingly good. I also love anything Iomega, love my zip drives and disks, still use them. I wish I had that 486 upgrade chip, but I'm confused as it's PR rating was P75 yet it implied P133 performance but I think that's just the clock speed? Finally, I have a Sony Mavica that uses floppy disks, and to be fair it takes incredible photos, if only a handful of photos per disk!! What a wonderful time to be alive with all those tech developments, I really miss those days, everything just seemed more humble in a way. Great vid!
Ah, I love those old computer catalogs, and I do miss them. Back in the day whenever I was at the grocery store and had some money I would pick up a copy of "Computer Shopper" which was a FREAKING HUGE (seriously -- each and every edition was about as thick as a telephone book) magazine that had nothing but ads. There may have been some articles here and there (I don't remember) but it was mostly ads from various first-party companies (i.e. the actual manufacturer of the thing doing the selling) as well as third-party sellers (companies that resell stuff made by other companies.) I used to love flipping through them and drooling at all the cool stuff that I couldn't possibly afford. Unfortunately when I moved out my mom went on a cleaning spree and got rid of pretty much all of my old magazines, etc. Really wish I had saved some of those.
They had articles. I remember they had one for making a Hackintosh. The key part was to go dumpster behind Apple stores to find a motherboard from a Mac update. Back then upgrading a Macintosh involved replacing the motherboard and throwing the old one in the trash.
In the U.K. they had an excellent series "The Computer Creators" which looked into the history of things like the mouse. So good that I cut those out and kept them when I dumped the magazines. You are right about the thickness. There were like 30 pages of articles and 1000 pages of adverts, with many being complete catalogues like this being bound into the magazine.
p.s. Norman. Nowadays upgrading a Mac means buying a new one and throwing the old one in the WEE :-)
Yeah the ads did fill up most of the gigantic tome each time, but the articles were neat too. That's where I first read about EISA, VLB, and similar technologies that came out in the era... as well as drooling over (early) CD-ROM drives a good 8 years before most people knew that was even a thing.
I couldn't remember the name, but Computer Shopper was the one I purchased from the grocery store. Many, many hours looking through those and wishing.
I used to get one that semed to like a decimeter thick and I think that might have been the one for me it was a dream catalog.... Did you know in prison they call those catalogs when they come dream magazines.... fun fact
Blows my mind that a book about the Electron ends up in Portland. I owe so much to this little computer. The first computer I owned.
This scanner is exactly why I suggested you to donate the catalog to Tech Tangents on your second channel (oh this is the second channel, sorry). It is almost the same scanner he uses (I think it is an earlier model) to scan magazines without cutting or taking staples off. Well done.
About the fingers in the scans, at Google Books sometimes you see one (usually with gloves or finger covers) on the scans.
The TigerDirect catalog was the main reason I got into building PCs. I remember the first time I read one, in the eye doctors office. By the time I was in 9th grade I had started building machines for friends. Its a shame they are a shell of what they once were.
These catalogs remind me scrolling through Wish garbage. 90% gimmicky junk.. 10% legit things you'd want.
Those AMD 5x86 processors were basically AMD's slightly faster version of Intel's 486. It was marketed to compete as a cheaper upgrade than a low-end Pentium, but honestly you would've been better off saving for a few months and the price of a Pentium 133MHz would've come down by then, or you could just pick up one second hand for cheap.
We upgraded the family 486 DX2/66 to one of those AMD chips, and we also got a new motherboard, RAM and (PCI!) video card at the same time, and it was a big upgrade. It could play a lot more games, but pretty soon it was struggling to play newer games that listed a low-end Pentium in the system requirements.
We also used those 4x30-pin to 72-pin SIMM adapters when we upgraded from our 386 to the 486 to bring the memory up to 16MB. But we went straight to 32MB when we got the AMD 5x86, since we wanted more than 16MB. EDIT: I don't think those 4x30-pin to 1x30-pin adapters would work with more than 16MB of memory total, since there's only 12 address lines in a 30-pin SIMM socket, so you could use 4x4MB SIMMs max.
Which you could make yourself with a certain open source project made by a certain sleep-deprived geek. 😉
EDIT EDIT: Right, they were probably saying the SIMMs on the motherboard could be that size, but that doesn't really make sense either since you can't get 64MB 30-pin SIMMs.
Oooooh, all those printers @25:00 !!! I spent a year trying to replace my Dad's Hp Deskjet 940c Printer. He needed the PCL5 programming support for his custom print jobs. Printers are mostly dumb these days, so I couldn't find a good-enough replacement. Eventually I scored a new-in-box 940c from flea-bay and it's working bettern than I would have imagined.
I like how the Danmere Backup added Betamax in the ad given at the time the format was considered "dead" by that point, maybe they added that to give people a use for their "abandoned" Beta machines and tapes languishing in a cupboard... :D
I really had a good time streaming through this catalogue. I really did not expect this would make for such a good time. Your way of talking about "the old days" hits the spot for me. Thank you Adrian.
I really enjoyed this video. Brought back so many fond memories! This was the golden era of PC's if you asked me. To go from a pII or k6 233mhz being blazing fast in 1997 to a 1ghz althlon T-bird in 1999. What a time it was. Keep up the great work. I still have a few of the tiger and Computer Shopper catalogs from the late 90's. I was also a Beta tester for win2000! Was working as a CNA/CNE at the time.
I remember that at a time Canon had some inkjet printers where you could replace the printhead with a scanner-head, this turned the printer into a scanner using the same paper-path for both printing and scanning.
The 1997 Canon BJC-4300 ($200) & several other series #s supported the scanner head feature IS-22 ($100). Was a neat idea but I don't think Canon sold many of them.
The ALPS printer was a dye sub printer that used separate cartridges, the photo printers you can get now like the canon selphy use the same process,
i still have mine and used it to print water-slide decals in gold and silver, output was very high quality.......
MD4000the ALPS printers are very interesting, I have one here with Citizen branding. This is a dye sublimation printer, the ink is on a ribbon and is thermally bonded to the paper. With this you can print fabric banners and also metlaic colors like gold, silver, etc.
Speaking of CPU Galaxy, he actually used a peltier device to achieve the 486 speed records and was able to keep the CPU at 0 degrees. Past the 486 platform, of course, their usefulness starts to break down.
E memory expander cards had tall and short, left and right. So you could indeed stack 4 into the slots
The 3 CCD DSLR would make for an incredible camera. The first single lens color motion pictures (eg what was used for Wizard of Oz) used the technicolor process which ran three film strips through a camera at a time with a set of partially silvered mirrors which would split the light path into 3 separate paths for each film strip. And that's what this DSLR was doing. The other alternative (which is used on most consumer cameras) is to use a Bayer filter with either a red, green, or blue filter over each pixel (and when the final image is created for each pixel the camera pulls the color information from the surrounding pixels and as a first pass averages them out). So the color resolution on most cameras is effectively only about half the resolution of the stated number of pixels and the demosaicing process can lead to weird artifacts (which is far less of an issue now with our high megapixel cameras where other artifacts of the process have become bigger issues). This 3 CCD camera had a proper full color resolution image. Even if it was a relatively low resolution camera by today's standards, the image would have been so much better than other cameras of the era because of that and within certain domains, the images made on it will still hold up to scrutiny today.
I had written an really long comment that explained all the foibles and problems with the RD-175, but UA-cam ate it. Unfortunately, while the 3CCD system (which used two green CCDs and one blue/red interlaced CCD) produced images free of false color, its actual image quality wasn't as good as the bayer-based Kodak DCS 460c it competed with. A big problem is that the three CCDs can have alignment problems, the images had to be interpolated, the prism had negative effects on IQ, you had a significant 2x crop factor, the aperture was limited to a max of f/6.7, it only shot at ISO 800, and on and on. Granted, it cost a lot less than the Kodak, but the RD-175 wasn't a king of image quality by any means. Compared to a consumer digicam of the time? Yeah, it'll have better IQ, but Agfa/Minolta lost the early DSLR battle to Kodak/Nikon handily. It's absolutely a neat camera, as is its successor, the Vectis-based RD-3000, but even at the time its limits were apparent. Even though a DCS 460c cost nearly three times as much brand new, professionals overwhelmingly chose it over the Minolta. It's sort of like how yes, you could get a Foveon-based Sigma camera and avoid false color, but you'd be making a bunch of other tradeoffs in the process. I'm a Minolta fan and I still use A-mount cameras (Sony a99ii represent) but the RD-175 was what I'd call ambitious but mediocre.
Back in that day I had a Viewsonic 21ps and used it for at least 10 years before I finally sold it to someone and got my first flat panels (2, which my video card supported. I had a near 1080p desktop long before 1080p was a thing). After almost 20 years, I got rid of those first panels and now use a pair of Dell 4320Qs in portrait. I'm still using my first PC external speakers: a pair of Yamaha YST-M15s as shown next to the M-100s Adrian discussed @45:30. The headphone jack on the front of those has been incredibly useful for me, so as long as they keep going, I'm a happy camper. Finding external speakers with a headphone jack in the front is like finding frog fur... The prices there are a bit steep, but I learned a long time before that catalog existed that paying for exactly the peripheral you want is actually cost efficient; you'll replace the CPU/MB and maybe the case a few times before you'll replace the peripherals. And since your satisfaction with using the system depends on the peripherals, and not so much the CPU/MB/case, spending more for good I/O devices is totally sane.
I absolutely loved browsing the Tiger Direct catalogues back then. I built several PCs with parts from them, enough that they always mailed me each new catalogue when it came out. I would spend hours looking over them contemplating what I would buy next. This video was a fantastic trip down memory lane. Thanks so much for posting it.
I had 2 Parallel port 100MB Zip drives as they where the lowest cost, and from online forums rummoed to have the least Click of Death failure rates, but my first one after about a year 1/2 of carrying it in my backpack to school to use in my Comp. Network Tech classes in high school as we had High speed internet there, and I only had dialup at home, finally failed, and I had to buy a 2nd one used off eBay at time, and it lasted me till around 04 before it finally died. I eventually had 7 Zip disk to use with my drives I got over the years.
Also back in the 90's - mid 00's I used Canon BJC(Bubble Jet Color)printers as the printers were well priced, and the ink was super cheap for generics, and in a pinch you take a cotton swab with a light amount of water on it, and rewet the pads on the cartage, and get a 10 - 20 more prints in the low quality settings, or if you had just let the cartage set too long, and let the pads dry out it would bring them back to life to finish out the ink left in the cartage. These days I use a Brother Wireless Laser printer, and generic toner is cheap, and last for a very long time on toner saver, and works with Linux, Android, Mac, and yes Windows with little issues.
Speaking of KDS I had a 15in KDS CRT Monitor I got 2nd hand at a pawn shop in 96 for my 486 PC(later used it on my 550Mhz AMD K6II gaming PC), and even though the case looked ugly it worked well, and when I finally got my first LCD monitor in the early 00's a 15in 1024 x 768 60hz with crappy built in speakers, it was KDS as that 2nd monitor gave me such good service , but it cost me over $350 USD from Walmart.
Crazy to think about that I recently got a Nokia T20 tablet with a 1200 X 2000 rez screen I'm typing this comment on for $161.99 USD shipped to my door, and it's more powerful specs wise than many desktop/laptop computers sold even just several years ago. 🤯
I worked on a system with a Peltier heat sink. When the system stopped booting and we took it apart we discovered that the processor was corroded into the socket from the moisture that condensed on the cold side of the Peltier.
That’s hilarious. So they’re even worse than useless!
Alps printers were typically high quality thermal transfer or dye sublimation. They used ribbons, which is how the metalic could work.
The 5x86 was basically a 486 with higher clock speed, more cache and an improved multiply command, running at 3.3V. The floating point unit was still 486 based. Most overclock easily to 160MHz. Using an adapter for voltage conversion, you could use them in almost every 486 board.
Yep, It was a 486 in all but labeling. Used clock quadrupling. Later on they were sold in this QFP package which upgrade companties stuck on a PCB with voltage regulators to make the thing work in any 486 socket. Yes many went right to 160MHZ
Many late 486 motherboards supported them directly.
OCR Definitely existed at the time. I remember using one of those half-page handheld scanners that was grayscale on either a Compaq Deskpro 286 or custom 386 in my father's basement in the early '90s, and it came with an OCR program that sort of worked If you got the text just right, and I remember thinking it was so cool.
48:33 At my high school in 1996 we had a video production studio, which included a stage area. The editing room had a toaster which was a computer that did exactly this: computer-controlled the two VCRs and executed your edit list to create your final video product.
Oh man, this catalog is such a blast from the past. I remember when I got myself a KDS VS-7i monitor, which was a 17" without the speakers. These are so fascinating. I love looking at these old catalog and the scanned ads from places like circuit city and best buy from the early 90's.
I remember leafing through the Computer Shopper magazine back in the day. It was thick as a phone book.
I remember those Tiger Electronics catalogues. I ordered a decent amount of parts from them back in the day.
Great trip down catalog-memory-lane. I remember skimming through all the catalogs at the book store, but only purchased Computer Shopper. Always looked forward to what Asus was selling. Their MBs were impressive even back then. 🖖
In the 1990s the U.K. edition of Computer Shopper was about 1" (25mm) thick and would have about four similar catalogues bound into it. Evesham Micros, Dabs, Watford Electronics. Those names will bring back memories to U.K. watchers.
We also had the Computer Shopper show at Olympia where the companies behind the catalogues would turn up with truck loads of printers, monitors etc and sell them at about a 30% discount literally from the backs of the trucks.
Lol I once caused a broadcast storm on a 48 port switch between around 12 connected devices. Wish I had video, things went wild for a while until the switch eventually overloaded and violently powered off. Good times
Oh this device! I think it was Tech Tangents that got the same one as a promotion like you got about 3 weeks or so back and he gave it a whirl and showed all the options and was pretty impressed with it.
22:19 I spent weeks of deliberating before spending £135 on a 4GByte Hard Drive. 8GBytes were available but they were closer to £300. Anyway 4GB turned out to be plenty until I got a digital camera.
32:36 The best CRT monitor I had was a 17" IBM bought in a sale in about 2001 for £130. Ruler flat screen. Perfect geometry. A big case though so I included it when I sold my Celeron 500 desktop to a colleague.
At around the same time my boss tried to buy an LCD but after taking three back to the shop gave up "If I'm paying £400 for a monitor I don't want any duff pixels". That was a common problem with early LCDs. In fact some manufacturers claimed up to five was normal.
34:06 I paid just under £100 (after a mail in rebate) for an HP CD Writer of the same spec in 1999. That was the first one I saw for under £100.
Those peltier heatsinks were a good thought experiment that failed in reality. They were typically like 30-50w peltier pads which means that's all the heat they can handle. If you try to sink more then 30w into them they would end up dumping heat into your CPU instead of cooling it. Also, for every watt of heat the peltier removes, it uses 1 watt of power. I bought one and tried to put it on my K6-2 back in the day. It was a waste of $50.
I worked with Peltier modules in a thermometer temperature calibration factory (it was, and still is a World-Class outfit) - they were powerful, efficient and accurate to within better than 0.0001 of a degree Celcius, could heat from +240 and cool down to -60, with the right control. The heatsource was a passive Aluminium block used to hold the thermometer under test. The modules had to have massive metal finned heatsinks fitted, draught assisted by mains driven fans. But for this purpose, nothing is better at present, and they practically never break down.
Any application where there is an active heatsource however, they were totally useless for the reasons you state above, plus: cooling, hardware, etc. The Peltier modules become simply redundant and, in fact make the surplus heat transfer worse, not better.
A co-worker said he would use one of these sub-zero cal. units with plastic piping, containing pumped Ethylene Glycol instead of a thermometer in the cooling well, and run the pipes over the CPU, effectively making it liquid cooled - I don't know if he ever did this - I moved on to other projects.
I remember the early days of pc modding, involving early attempts at water cooling along with peltiers, de-lidding k6-2's, custom freon units and vapourchill stuff.
Blast from the past.
First, I had considered the AMD 5x86 upgrade like you showed, back in the day. But Intel ended up dropping the price of their Pentium Overdrives to push AMD out. As I recall AMD’s was MOSTLY compatible but the Cyrix version was more well known.
The photo scanner drive bay thingy. HP actually had a model of that too. I own/owned (not sure) the external SCSI version. It was okay. Topped out at 1200dpi as I recall so even a cheap USB flatbed could beat it these days but at the time… it was fairly unique.
The dual P-II boards were mostly for Netware file servers. Microsoft’s NT had just come out but Novell ruled the roost then. So I highly doubt you could find any these days as most were dumped/upgraded due to Y2K fears.
On the printers, the ALPS you show with the Metallic inks is very similar to a Primera printer I had which wasn’t inkjet but Ribbon based. (Think Okimate 20s.) They were commonly used for ID badges. I used mine for business cards (as the Metal print stood out).
And one story on the 5si printers. I ran a computer lab for students during that time. I was told to buy FOUR Laserjet 4’s and I instead fought to get a 5si WITH duplexer. My boss finally backed down but was gonna hold it against me if it went wrong. We hit 1,000,000 pages in the first six months. ;) Didn’t have a single problem. And the students LOVED double sided. Even the big boss’ secretary was using it as they didn’t need to wait more than a few minutes. (As it also had Postscript embedded…) Those printers were bullet proof. I do network security now and I *still* find them on networks IN USE! :p
Intel is still producing peltier cooler which called "Intel Cryo" today. It's used for Comet Lake and Rocket Lake Core i7/i9 processors. They said that cooler will automatically adjust the cooling power to prevent condensation.
When you were talking about CPU cooling it reminded me of a time when I worked in a computer store. Although I was not one of the repair techs at the time, I was capable enough to build and repair PCs even then.
A PC came into the shop which was a couple generations more recent than the ones in this magazine when they went back to sockets instead of slots. It was overheating and I took one look at the heat sink and fan once the side cover was off and I told the tech that was going to repair it that it would be melted into the socket, the board is toast and he would have a fun time with that one. He didn't believe me.
What I noticed that gave it away? The rubberised coating on the CPU fan release lever had melted and dripped all the way to the heat sink. I knew that it would take temperatures >150C to melt it like that so I knew the temperatures on the CPU would have to reach twice that much.
Sure enough, when he finally got the CPU out he told me that it took him a long time to get it out. It was melted in the socket and the motherboard had a black spot in the center under the CPU all the way through the board. The CPU thermal protection had failed and it turned into a toaster.
I had the backer isa card worked well but with difficulties in the lower quality VHS recordings. I lost the software for it changing my system back then 1998 so got put away. Somewhere in my junk stuff might still have it. If I find it I'll send it to you for a nice video it will be along with some other interesting stuff but might be limited due to shipping costs. thanks for your very interesting videos.
Just want to say thanks for scanning this! So cool to look back at stuff from the era I started into computing. 😮
This was a great trip down memory lane. Thanks Adrian!
My first CD-R burner was a little over 400$ they were so expensive back then, it was a common thing to go halfers with a buddy to buy one, just to be able to transfer all the crap collected on bbs that was on hundreds of Disks to one or two CD-Rom lol Those were the fun days of commuting lol
A friend paid for his £800 CD-ROM drive (one of the first) by doing the opposite, buying CD-ROMs of shareware and running a shareware library sending out floppies at a couple of £s each. That must have been before anyone had the internet.
@@MrDuncl hehe trust me mine paid for itself rather quickly but I dare not say how, think a game console with a two-letter abbreviation that was huge in the mid-90s lol
I found myself laughing along with you when you were talking about the Adobe PageMill 3.0 lol!
9:25 Next to the item he's talking about, I had one of the LS120 floppy drives! " 1.44 mb? Lol you ain't got nothing on me, I got 120 mb! " Lol those were the days.
The LS120 made the most hi-tech noises of any computer peripheral.
I've been re-watching Stargate SG-1, and they've got those NEC Multisync monitors all over the place. They needed them since they have separate horizontal and vertical sync inputs, so they can genlock them to same sync as the cameras to prevent flickering. They literally had like a dozen of them in the control room, and they probably just threw them out one day either when the show wrapped, or I can't remember if they upgraded to LCDs at some stage. But I would've killed to have one of those monitors back in the mid-90s!
The early NEC Multisync monitors (2D ?) could sync to both VGA and TV frequencies. I had a similar monitor (bought secondhand with bad screen burn) that could also do that so it was ideal for my Atari ST as it could do both low and high resolution. Around the same time I saw a TV program about London stockbrokers and they all had about six each, so I guess that is where mine came from.
I don’t know which model they used on Star Trek, but they picked ones which could sync to the film frame rate to build-into the sets. (Probably not really 24Hz, probably 72Hz.)
Excellent trip down memory lane.
Love that "Protect your PC from heat damage" RIGHT below ads for CPU Fan Upgrade LMAO.
Peltier CPU cooling could work in principle. It is however not practical because of additional power draw and condensation on cold side being potentially dangerous. And since you do need to dissipate the heat from the hot side in the end, it does not solve any issue you couldn't solve with other methods of cooling.
Cool content 👌 Takes me back to the good old times when I was 17 and went to Quake-lanparties with my classmates, drinking huge amounts of beer (in the nineties kids were actually allowed to drink alcohol here which is actually hard to believe today) 😁
25:34 "DeathJet"; That sounds killer😂
In the late '90 I had an ArVid 1020 data-to-video card, bought from someone at my school, and used it for some time. My friend got the 'english' version of it... the Backer, but it only worked under Windows, while the ArVid was mostly operated in DOS, and with a small script, you could automate almost every operation of the VCR (besides, of course, loading the tape). The Backer showed a window on screen with instructions of what to do, so when backing up or restoring files, you would need to sit near the computer and VCR, while the ArVid controlled the VCR via InfraRed, so you could do a night-job of backing up files, and go to sleep. I still have those two cards somewhere...
The last version, ArVid 1052 was able to squeeze about the size of a DVD to a 4hour tape in SP, had program to record audio CD to tape digitally (like the technics VHS deck), and even for real time video watching (due the input is digital, it's worse than regular black-and-white tv, but hey, at least it tried-- even had some blur filter to make it a bit better), AAAAND on top of that there was a program where you can set up an area of the screen (channel logo) and control the VCR accordingly -- skipping the commercials from the recording (also this program had better "video" image than the dedicated video-viewer)
It’s so funny because 1997 seems like recent tech to me. Look at all the webcams and other tech that really is quite similar to todays tech (just slower and crappier). I’m probably getting old but nostalgia to me is pc or byte magazine from like the mid 1980s
I still have U.K. Computer Shopper Issue 2. At the time I bought it because there was an article about the Yamaha CX5M MSX Music Computer.
I used to love drooling over these catalogs, thanks for this video.
Wow. So many things that are familiar, and several I had no idea existed at all. Some I hope to get someday. Thank you for sharing and I am definitely downloading the catalog. Thank you, Adrian! You are awesome!
OMG, I had that Acorn Electron book when I was a kid. The cover art was great!
I had a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450Mhz that had a peltier cooler permanently fused to it. I forget the company that I bought it from. It would get sold cold that it would create condensation that would drip on the motherboard, lucky it never caused a short.
When I was in Jr High, my mom worked at the school district's District Office and I used to go hang out with the 2(!) IT guys in their cave and those Tiger magazines were all over the place. This was in like 1996/97. Those bring back a ton of memories.
Now I'm the school district IT guy. Oh god...
Shopping from magazines was a lot of fun. I'm into RC stuff and around that same period I remember drooling over the super-thick Tower Hobbies magazines with their hundreds upon hundreds of pages of airplane kits. Now the magazines are gone and so are most of the kits...
We had a Tiger Direct warehouse/store 30 min from where I lived in the 00-10's. Almost every month me and my dad will go to the store and shop. I sure do miss it!
Thanks for the blast from the past. I loved those catalogs. There were several catalogs which were large-format and almost as thick as a phone book with multiple advertisers, which were some of favorites to browse. I can remember lusting after the Radius Pivot full page monitors which were far out of my price range back in the day.
Very interesting stuff, it definitely would've kept me busy for days looking through that when I was a kid. Although I wouldn't have paid $2.50 for it, I'd probably have saved my pocket money and bought a proper magazine for a little more, since they usually had a section at the back for hardware and software ads anyway.
I never really bought anything from catalogs like that. Since I lived near a major city (San Antonio, TX), there were plenty of places to go to get computer stuff; cables, floppy disks, printers, modems, hard drives, power supplies, and so on. What I like is finding an old electronics magazines (Radio Electronics, Popular Electronics, Electronics Now, etc…) and seeing all the nifty test gear that I could never afford as a kid, as well as ads for stuff like “get your FCC license in 2 yrs.” or “Train to repair Radios/TVs with our 2 yr. degree program.”, etc… Plus, they had all sorts of fun projects to assemble, complete with schematics and - often - the theory of operation. But it always seemed that by the time I saved up enough money, the product/kit was outdated, or just no longer available. 🥺
SUPER FUGLY should have been in the description of several things in this catalog :D But thank you for going through this, it's super fun to look at, and I'll be browsing the PDF too! Great work on that!
Now that you mention Eudora, my school also had us store our e-mails locally, though typically on floppies. And since they used Windows 3.1, sometimes the last person didn't close the program and their mailbox would overwrite yours if you didn't know it was running in the background. Oops!
_"You've tried e-mail, now try v-mail"_
"If that's anything like D mail, I don't wanna"
I bought Yamaha YST-M15 speakers way back then; funny thing, they're hooked up to my current desktop at home and still sound good enough, though I almost always use headphones now so the speakers don't see much use.
I actually used to use one of those pager watches, many moons ago. It was really cool, but it ate batteries crazy. If it could have been rechargeable, that would have been even better. I use4d to get alerts from servers that were having some sort of issue. Very handy :)
I had one of those "100x" CD-ROM drives. It was a decent, solid drive, but I think it was 8x. Supposedly it cached the disc to RAM, but I never got the software working right anyway...
That VisionBook Traveler (Flora) is a super interesting little notebook. IBM made a rebadged one as well called the 235.
The funny thing about zip discs. By the end of the trend I had easily 40 discs. And I never paid for a single one. I would get free discs from iomega at CES every year they were there. They would give out one or two to everybody and just keep on going back multiple times a day the entire show.
And I'm not sure if the internet phone in the catalog is the same my nephew had. But when my nephew lived in Israel he would use it to call his mother here in the states. And I don't know if it was a reduced charge for the call or if it was free because it was over the Internet so, can't remember. But the internet phone was really good for international calls.
Eudora email client! Oh man. That's something I hadn't thought about in probably 20 years or more. Good times! :)
I have an old Egghead Software (also hardware) mail catalog from August 1995. It features Windows 95 on the cover. One of the values is a 1620mb HDD for only $448.73!
Been waiting for this! Thank you Mr. Black 🖤🖤🖤🖤
So many memories. That was the era when I was really getting into building and repairing PCs. I was fortunate that every couple months, a computer show would come to town with all the latest stuff at discount prices...
I liked the LS120 over the zip drive. Fit in the floppy bay and read pretty much all 3.5" discs...
Thanks for the blast from the past...
I liked the LS120 too. Had an internal one as my only floppy drive for years.
It's easy to forget that being able to replace a standard floppy drive in a 3.5" bay was a killer feature in about 1995. A standard computer in 1995 featured space for between two and four drives including the hard drive, which was itself likely to be 500MB or smaller. Many CD-ROM equipped PCs came from the factory with every drive bay filled, meaning that fitting an internal ZIP drive required removing something else (and therefore giving up certain functionality that you probably wanted to keep).
It wasn't all good, Microsoft installers of the era (and well into the 2000s) required, by default, a working device plugged into the floppy controller on the motherboard. There was information available from Microsoft on how to create custom installation media that didn't have this requirement, but it genuinely made trying to exist without a traditional floppy drive an occasional hassle. But in the end, the benefits would have outweighed this problem. If LS-120 had been available in 1995.
It's a shame for imation that they didn't release the LS120 until early 1997. By then, >1.5GB hard drives were common (meaning that you could copy a CD without needing two drives), and cases typically came with space for many more bays in any case. Chances were, in 1997, you had unused drive bays in your case, you could install after market drives and not have to remove any of the drives you already had.
In short, by 1997 the killer feature of the LS-120 had ceased to matter. So the product was different to the well established competitor (ZIP) only in that it could do an unnecessary thing that made life no easier and occasionally harder. That's why I think it failed. Even though I personally loved it.
@@p1mason yeah, but in those days, swapping drives, and making things work with things that didn't always work, was half the fun!
I remember letting virus's infect some of my junk machines just to see how it would affect operation and study the code... Good old days!
God this takes me back, ATAPI, Ultra DMA, UW SCSI, at this time I was building Amiga systems that used both IDE and SCSI connections - SCSI was wonderful for Amiga due to it being more "intelligent" and left the CPU alone. IDE needed more CPU input and with Amiga bandwidth lacking, SCSI was always the way to go. IDE stuff was just starting to become cheap enough in comparsion to SCSI, that performance in the PC world was less of an issue for box shifters who wanted cheapest. I also remember throwing away a box (size of a shoe box) full of brand new 30 pin SIMMS (1mb) coz no one was interested....Still got my 100mb Zip drives (IDE and SCSI) used to swap file bewteen Amiga and PC. 1 GB Quantum Fireball (SCSI) Hard Drive (£300) !!!! bought my first CD/RW unit from Walmart in Saw Grass MIlls while on holiday $200 SCSI Toshiba 2001?
Crossdos was great for doing that what i used on floppies on my cd32 with sx1 back then for aminet grabs
I still have a Zip Drive and lots of cartridges too. They were popular when they came out. Me and lots of my IT friends used to exchange shareware back then using the Zip Drives.
I had the cyrix 5x86 133mhz for my 486 50mhz 😂 good times it was supposed to be a p75 equivalent but it wasn't really, though it kept that computer going through the end of the 90s
This is amazing! What a fantastic scanner and a fantastic little brochure you got there. Im wondering if I still have all the old Sony and Panasonic magazines I used to pick up from my local tech dealer back in 95-02, it would be amazing to scan those and put them up.
We still have a LaserJet 4000 at work for cheque printing. Solid bit of kit!
15:10 We had an old Packard Bell Legend 2440 that originally had Windows 95 on it. If I remember right, the original specs included a Pentium processor that was rated to 75MHz, but my uncle had it upgraded to a Pentium OverDrive processor rated at 120MHz. The system RAM was also upgraded to 32MB, from its original 8MB that it came with. I decided to upgrade the OS to Windows 98 (found it on about 40 floppy disks at a garage sale) and took literally every last byte of hard drive space to install it. Lots of interesting memories with that computer.
One of those color laserjets would work through to today, maybe even on it's second toner replacement.
I had a Lexmark with a 15000 capacity black toner.