That Was Then, This Is Now
I’ve just returned from an interstate trip and while I was away I caught up with my brother-in-law. We were talking about the new nVidia 96xx graphics cards and he asked me if my PC box was big enough for it, it being somewhat longer than previous iterations.
Now I know exactly what is in my PC and it is one PCI-E graphics card. I plan to have two in SLI but presently it’s just the one. That’s it. I’m using onboard Gigabit LAN which connects me to the internet and onboard 8 channel audio which works admirably with my 3.1 logitech speakers. I’m sure I’ll find more stuff over the next coming months that I think I can’t live without, but since upgrading to this system late last year I haven’t added to it.
Go back almost a decade and my brother-in-law and I bought a couple of computers. It was January ’99 and we had tons of money back then. Now we’re both married with kids but back then, I recall my brother-in-law bought a DVD burner, fairly new technology, for $800. The PC I bought then cost twice as much as the one I just upgraded to.
And that box was full. I had a 4mb Diamond Viper graphics card. Then there was the 8mb Voodoo 2 graphics accelerator. In those days a graphics card and a graphics accelerator were two very different things. I later added a second graphics accelerator in SLI (called Scan Line Interleave, one card would read odds and another evens) giving me 16mb of monster graphics.
I also had a sound card; there was no onboard sound back then, or at least nothing you would want to rely on. Add to that a network card and lastly an internal modem.
They certainly don’t make them like they used to.
