CPU Upgrade / Overclocking Centris 650

[PB145B]

Money, computers were a lot more expensive then, the dollars were worth a lot more back then and the total cost was a much higher percentage of annual income.

Exactly. And there’s no point in paying for that extra power if you don’t need it.

 

[boitoy1996]

I can respect that thought process, but wouldn't it have been upsetting to spend $3000 of your hard earned money, and proudly unpack your new computer only to find out that your office, or your neighbors bought a computer the next month that was a model higher and was faster and better.  I know when things like that happen to me, I instantly feel like what I have is crap and I have to go get the next model.  Keeping up with tech in the 90s must have taken a significant chunk out of a person's wallet.

 

[PB145B]

That personally wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. I’m still happily using 2011 13” MacBook Pro as my main machine! 

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

What about HTML rendering?  That had to be dog slow waiting for a javascript laden website to load and render.

Javascript wasn't even finalized until the tail end of 1995. 68k owners weren't exactly tearing up the internet when it started to really take off in the late 90s anyway.

 

[boitoy1996]

I thought AOL and the like had been around since the mid to late 80s.  but i guess thats for another topic

 

[EvilCapitalist]

Echoing TWF, the internet in the late 90s was a much different beast that it is today.  The majority of sites were still just basic HTML and graphics up until the early 2000s with the features that "broke" older web browsers being things like frames and image maps.  If you take a look at the Space Jam website that will give you a pretty good idea of what it was like at that point, or you can look at sites on the Internet Archive.

AOL is a different beast entirely because for a lot of its history it was a "walled garden" where content was only available in the AOL application and not truly out on the world wide web.

 

[boitoy1996]

Wow I see.  So how did things happen so quickly?  I'm a computer tech but only recently got into vintage.  How did things evolve so quickly with with web technology?  And is there a "solution" to browsing on an older machine that simply cannot keep up?  Is there some kind of way to use a router CPU or a proxy server to remotely render the web page and convert it to a format that the 68k can easily  show you?  Like downconvert the HTML, or render the whole thing as an image mapped gif or jpg?

 

[Compgeke]

There's a read for MacIP Pi somewhere on here but I'm too lazy to find it so here's the site, http://www.macip.net/ . It has a proxy to render web pages as gif to make them viewable.

Plain HTML without anything fancy doesn't take a lot of resources too render, it's basically glorified coloured text and some images thrown in. It'd be a few years before javascript and such hit the web big time, well into the period of which a 650 would be obsolete.

One thing to note, the modern web won't be usable on something this old without proxying it through something else. It's almost physically painful on a 1 GHz G4, I can't imagine trying it on a 25 MHz 68040.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I thought AOL and the like had been around since the mid to late 80s.  but i guess thats for another topic

Quickie for now:

Compuserve hit the 'net in 1989

AOL for DOS rolled out in 1991

AOL for Windows was 1992 (switched to AOL under Windows 3.1 at home on a 386 in that time frame)

Mosaic 1.0 release was November 1993

Navigator was released December 1994

Internet Explorer 1 released August 1995

 

[boitoy1996]

This may sound like a stupid question, but since were on the topic of when the internet came out, I'd like to know a few things:

What did people do with computers before the Internet.  I can't imagine people paid thousands of dollars to play single player games when they could have just gone and bought a Nintendo.

How did people "connect" before the internet?  Seriously!  Every boyfriend I have ever had has been met initially through an app or a website where you can say, "Hey. I'm here for dating, heres who I am looking for, Here's what I am, Here's what I'm into."  Being a huge tech nerd and mostly introverted and slightly autistic, I cannot imagine how people got dates before the internet.  How did you filter people out or find people who were into what you were into?  This is a serious question and not a troll.

How did people keep track of what was in their checking account.  I run my balance down to the last dollar, and use my debit card for EVERYTHING.  Before the Internet, I know there were still debit cards so how did people keep track of their balance?  Get fraud alerts? 

What did people do for audio visual entertainment?  With the Internet we have streaming services, and illegal torrents, and youtube.  When these did not exist, what did people do?  Go to a redbox?

 

[EvilCapitalist]

Not a stupid question, and one that will likely be asked a lot more frequently now since there are plenty of folks born after the internet (as we know it today) started. 

Before the internet people still used computers for many of the same things they use them for today.  Creating documents in Word Perfect, presentations in Harvard Graphics, spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3, and databases in dBase.  Instead of searching Bing or Google for new software people would read about upcoming titles in magazines and send away for the disks, buy them from a physical store, or perhaps download them from a BBS.

As for "connecting" with people, you met them out in the world at the grocery store and running errands in general, to say nothing of bars and clubs.  Failing that you had the personals section in newspapers and dating services, both video and otherwise.

Checking accounts were managed through mailed monthly statements and balancing your checkbook.  Debit cards don't predate the internet by much (I want to say they started being widely available in the late 80s) but ATM cards have been around since the 70s or so and people could check balances on them.  Consumer fraud alerts didn't really exist because ID theft wasn't anywhere near as prevalent as it is now. 

If you didn't have cable or satellite (much different than satellite TV today) you went to a video rental store, be it Blockbuster or a local video store and rented what you wanted to watch.  On the audio side you went to a record store to pick up a new LP (record), cassette, or later CD, or you just listened to the radio.  Redbox is younger than the internet.  Those kiosks only started popping up in the mid 00s and didn't really take off until the late 00s.

 

[nglevin]

I'm not even sure how I can really address the "what was it like" question.

I remember having access to Price Waterhouse (not yet Coopers') consulting's private Intranet via Lotus Notes and marveling over their extensive collection of Windows 3.1 icons.

I remember having an entire low-grade synthesizer (the Roland MT-32) to give my Sierra games better quality music, before 16 bit soundcards and wavetables became standard. And they sounded freaking amazing compared to any Nintendo at the time.

I remember magazines on CD-ROM being offered as an alternative to the then-highly expensive online services of Prodigy, Compuserve, Imagination Network, etc for those of us who didn't want to tolerate plebian dial-up BBSes. They were based on cross-platform HyperCard-like software, used to be several of those programs out there. Among them, Macromedia Director nee Shockwave was spun out of a late 80s HyperCard add-on that gave HC good animation.

I remember JPEG accelerator cards being a brief niche market before CAD software required its own hardware-based accelerator. Sound cards were more popular though, probably because the IBM PC speaker BEEP BEEP BEEP wasn't so pleasing to the ears.

But at the end of the day, computers were awkward business machines that I found hilarious, and to this day, I still think they are awkward business machines with limitations that I find hilarious.

 

[boitoy1996]

Wow, reading your post (and then checking things out in my spare time), makes me so happy to have the internet as it exists today, and makes me so happy that I'm young enough to not have to have experienced things any other way.  It sounds as if getting anything done required interacting with society a lot more than it does these days.  I don't think I could have survived a lot of it without having a panic attack at the thought of all that face-to-face interaction.  As to software on disks, I do wish it was still that way.  I don't like the idea of the cloud owning my software / music / movies.  Case in point, I had a large amazon collection of digital media at one point, then decided to sell goods on Amazon.com.  One sale went south, and I refused the customer a refund, and I did become rather rude and belligerent with him.  Amazon could have just closed my seller account, but no.  They blocked that account entirely, and I lost access too all of the digital media contained within.  Had I just purchased CDs, then I would have been fine.  But a phone can't play CD's, you have to rip them first.   I chose convenience and got burned.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

"This is a fascinating little gadget. It'll replace CDs soon. Guess I'll have to buy the 'White Album' again. "

 

[Juror22]

Not all of the early computers were thousands of dollars, my first home computer was nearly free - it was a TI99/4a that cost a little over $100 with a $100 rebate.  I joined the local users group, through which I bought a used disk interface and between the games on disk, the few cartridge ones that I bought and programming on it, the computer was pretty useful, fun, and helped me gain an early understanding of what these microcomputers could do.

Three years earlier, I had taken a computer class in high school, which consisted of spending class time writing out programs (in COBOL), typing them into a card punch machine and then once or twice a week going to the school's district office to run the program on a mainframe (once, maybe twice if you were lucky).  A few years later, I lost my connection to a college Chemistry qual/quant program over my 300Baud modem, because my Mom got a phone call from one of her friends.  Still, it was better than having to go wait in line at the Chemistry building to use the local teletype terminal that everyone else had to use.

I credit these early experiences as the reason that I have such an appreciation of where computers, and later the internet evolved.  The same issues that were there at the beginning are still there and have yet to be resolved, successfully - storage, security and equal access.

I am impressed that you have gained an appreciation for these early machines and I wish you continued good luck in getting your vintage system to do what you would like to accomplish.  That is what drives this community forward.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Same here, got a taste for computers programming in Basic on TRS-80s in a spring 1982 adult ed class, so  .  .  .

1982 -  Commodore 64 - I got my start like so many others, hadn't realized that it's been called the Model T of computing!

1986 - Tandy 1000SX - annoyingly semi-compatible PC got me looking into computerizing my business, played with Ashton-Tate's Framework (office_suite)

1987 - Macintosh 512k - got it used with an ImageWriter Wide Carriage to get me started with the Mac based production system that was on order

1988 - Macintosh SE/Radius16/CoPro bundle arrived and I was off and running!

Internet was somewhere around 1990, but the Mac User Group was what really got me going! The BBS was fun, meetings better and hanging out in the office was the best.

About socializing back in the stone age: meeting the friends of friends at their weddings was and probably still is one of the best ways to hook up with a spouse. They've been vetted/selected by the couple for that social mixer. Met my wife at our friends' wedding and a pair of friends met at ours. Dunno if anyone met at theirs, but that mechanism was way better than meeting in Bars.

Match.com is an abomination, but my girlfriend did snatch me off that site several years ago.

 

[johnklos]

Why would you purchase a machine without an FPU?  Even if your application specifically doesn't use it, doesn't an FPU generally speed things up?  Why would anybody ever purposely buy something that wasn't the highest model?

It was cheaper, and it only speeds up things that can use it. All non-floating point stuff runs at exactly the same speed whether an FPU is installed or not.

Since many Macs were used for graphics and desktop publishing, FPUs were quite helpful.

 

[Cory5412]

What did people do with computers before the Internet

This dovetails perfectly with questions about why it was acceptable not to have the latest and greatest at all times. You bought a computer to do what you needed, and until your needs changed, that computer worked fine. The reason this isn't quite the case today is because security is such a big concern and any internet/network-connected computer has "receives patches" as a high priority need. Plus, the movement toward doing everything on the web and web-based applications (Electron) running on the desktop means that for certain use cases that looked trivial a decade ago, there's no longer any way to get enough computer.

The '80s and '90s were a time of immense and rapid change, but one of the important things to note is that Internet connectivity, and Internet being quite as central to daily computer life as it is today, only really started happening in the late '90s. Before that, if you were going to exchange data with somebody, you had to already know them in advance, have a way to do it (often involving FedEx or the USPS), and know what their computing setup was like, or simplifying the data you sent them into as common a format as possible so they could read it.

If it's 1992 and I have a Macintosh with Claris applications and you have a PC with Microsoft Office, the best way for us to transfer data will be as plain text files on PC-format diskettes.

My earliest experiences are with the public Internet, and what I did back then (this is around 1999-2003) was basically stuff like visit this forum (which was launched in 2001 or 2002) and use some of the hotline servers that surrounded at the time. I didn't get on IRC until a few years later, but the protocol itself is around 30 years old (I believe it was specified in 1986 or 1987.)

It's worth noting that CompuServ, AOL, etc weren't really Internet service provider. The service that, say, Compuserv was providing wasn't the Internet. It was Compuserv. AOL, likewise, was its own entirely unique service that for much of its existence wasn't connected with the commodity Internet at all. That came along in the '90s.

One to look at when you've got time is eWorld. This page has a good published book from the time about eWorld, which was Apple's attempt at an online service for Macintosh users. eWorld didn't last very long, probably for a lot of different reasons, but notably it was pretty expensive and didn't allow users of any other types of computers on, so its usefulness was limited for things like "e-mailing a grandparent" if said grandparent didn't also have a Mac.

 

[Cory5412]

I referenced this, sort of, but didn't actually write it above:

If, in the late '80s or early '90s, you were going to buy a machine to do a particular task, you probably looked at Apple's product stack and figured out the smallest comfortable or the biggest reasonable machine on which to do it.

If you were mainly writing, a Classic, Classic II or LC is a perfectly fine machine to use. It'll even do other things such as simple games, financial chores (maintaining a checkbook and budget, for example), connecting to online services of the day, outlining, graphics work, and so on.

I've mentioned it before but within the spread of Apple's product line there's almost never something that one of their high end systems can do that their low end ones can't, even if slowly. You bought a high end system if you needed the expansion or if you needed to do some complicated task quickly, especially in professional scenarios where your work pace is limited by the machine and where you are making money doing whatever it is you're doing with it.

You didn't buy a IIfx or Quadra 900 for keeping a journal, a budget, and an Oregon Trail save file.

 

[boitoy1996]

You didn't buy a IIfx or Quadra 900 for keeping a journal, a budget, and an Oregon Trail save file.

LOL.  Maybe not then, that would have been extremely wasteful.  But stuff like old games and an offline banking budget are EXACTLY how I plan on using my old Macs.