What was the worst computer you ever bought and why?

[CatPix]

On 4/3/2022 at 12:18 AM, MrMaddog said:

I had the exact same experiences using the Mac Performas in collage...

In the 90's, Apple Designed some truly garbage systems.

I was given a Performa 5260 some years ago. It is really, truly garbage, apparently due to Apple's corner-cutting decisions; the main issue is that they replaced SCSI with IDE, which shouldn't have been a problem... Except the IDE chip they used was a 10 years old 8 bits one.

And goodness I could tell. This Performa with a 120 Mhtz processor and with the max amount of RAM possible (as it is often a good solution to boost a computer) is slower than my LCII. Hell, it's even slower than my Commodore SL286 with Windows 3.0 on it! To be fair, the system is fine and works fine... Until you have to access the hard drive. Then as soon as you access anything on the hard drive, just go get a coffee.

 

https://lowendmac.com/2014/power-mac-and-performa-x200-road-apples/

[hamburgler]

My most disappointing computer was a Mac Color Classic. At the time I was 2 years into grad school and had been using the same turbo XT clone since 1988. It was an Epson Equity 1+ with 640 k ram, 20 MB drive and I had upgraded to an NEC v20 chip and added an 8087 coprocessor. However the lab I was in was all Mac so converting between Wp5.1 and Word 5 was not practical. I had thought about an LCIII but couldn’t afford that plus a monitor, so I got the color classic, but with a 160 MB drive instead of the standard 80 MB. It was a cute system but not entirely practical, as I later found out. For Word, the screen size was not quite large enough at standard settings to show the whole page across, so it was not and convenient as I hoped for word processing. The standard 4 MB RAM was just enough to run system 7 plus 1 app so I later upgraded to 10 MB. Apple at the time seemed to specialize in crippling systems as much as possible, as I needed to actually upgrade to 12MB, of which the system recognized 10. It was sort of the equivalent of a 386SX system where it was a 32 bit processor running on a 16 bit bus.
 

Also the few stores selling Apple equipment at the time were incredibly snobbish. They would routinely ignore me as a customer since I wasn’t wearing a suit. When I wanted to but a 68881 fpu (I was also diung a lot of analysis using SigmaPlot), the person in the store said, “I don’t even think I’m allowed to sell you that”, and I needed to wait half an hour while he got on the phone to Apple Canada. Eventually he did let me buy it, what a guy. definitely a culture shock compared to the pc clone world where there was incredible competition to sell you anything. 
 

I was doing a lot of BBSing and reading Usenet. At the time, you could download an archive of current news then work offline to read it and reply. I forget the name of the programs which did that. Anyway, it had always worked fine even on my XT, but it was dog slow on my Mac. Really disappointing. Plus the moderator of the Mac forum, Stan Witowski, had an absolute obsession with removing any software he thought could be pirated. This went all the way to official system updates from Apple, since at the time Apple Canada wanted to distribute software only from clubs and stores, not on line. I reminded his name since every message he sent was about removing some useful piece of software from the Mac DL area. Meanwhile the pc area was a free for all, of course. 

 

After a couple years putting up with that, I bought a used PowerBook 100 on a local classified site. That turned out to be one of my favorite systems ever. It was a 16 MHz 68000 with a BW screen but for practical  tasks, it totally outperformed the classic. Plus it was really light and portable. I soon sold the CC and have been using notebooks as my primary computer ever since 
 

 

 

[zzip]

39 minutes ago, hamburgler said:

Also the few stores selling Apple equipment at the time were incredibly snobbish. They would routinely ignore me as a customer since I wasn’t wearing a suit. When I wanted to but a 68881 fpu (I was also diung a lot of analysis using SigmaPlot), the person in the store said,

That's funny because it totally goes against the stereotype that PCs were for the corporate suit types and Macs were for the artsy types who wore black turtlenecks or whatever

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

That's funny because it totally goes against the stereotype that PCs were for the corporate suit types and Macs were for the artsy types who wore black turtlenecks or whatever

Dude... Mac snobs were the absolute worst. We had a Mac "store" right across from Radio Shack in our mall.  Seriously, if they saw you go into the RS then come over to their shop, they would all but ignore you.  They were such bitches that the traffic to their shop became almost nothing and they eventually started pulling people in by having an Amiga 1000 demo in their window.  Apparently that was just a draw to get people in, then they brow-beat them with Mac.  My dad and I got kicked out of the store once because I brought him in to show him the Amiga and kept blowing off the Mac.  I am pretty sure they thought Daddy was going to buy Son a new computer, but not the one they wanted to sell.

[digdugnate]

I don't guess I have a 'worst' one, though probably up there was a Dell Dimension 4xxx I had in the early 2000s.  It was perfectly fine I guess for what it was intended, but it certainly wasn't a whizbang fantastic system, lol.

 

It was one of the Dells that you had to keep the CDs for because of their proprietary hardware drivers.  

[zzip]

1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

Dude... Mac snobs were the absolute worst. We had a Mac "store" right across from Radio Shack in our mall.  Seriously, if they saw you go into the RS then come over to their shop, they would all but ignore you. 

There were two types.   The snobs who thought they were better than you because you had a Mac, and the evangelists who would keep trying to convince you that you needed a Mac.   I'm sure they hated each other because the evangelists would bring in the 'riff-raff'

[hamburgler]

10 hours ago, zzip said:

That's funny because it totally goes against the stereotype that PCs were for the corporate suit types and Macs were for the artsy types who wore black turtlenecks or whatever

Yeah that was in the early to mid 90’s before Steve Jobs came back and Apple seemed to be trying to put itself out of business. Expensive hardware, crippled machines at the mid end, unreliable software, System 7 forever. Apple dealers were so bad that one of the first things Jobs did was open their own stores. 

[wierd_w]

I was staunchly a PC kid back in that era.

 

I distinctly remember that Mac heads were rather cringe, in terms of how 'religious' their zeal for apple products were, despite a lack of features, lack of upgradability, and massively inflated prices. (With the lack of upgradability being 90+% artificial.) You didn't see PC owners waiting 6 hours outside of a convention center for a CEO's keynote speech, that's for damned sure.  Whatever was in that coolaid, it was pretty potent stuff. The notion that Macs were somehow "superior hardware" due to a vetting process did not actually pan out in reality; I was working at the Mom&Pop back then, and had several very sad macs come in. What they WERE, were a synthesis of high price, "whatever was most inexpensive in the market right then" system build components (talking can type transistors and pals), and proprietary designs out the wazoo, with all kinds of strange quirks.  I stuck with my PCs. While they had their own share of strange quirks, they were more 'consistently present', and were artifacts of the IBM lineage and intel bus designs, rather than from "Oh hey, let's super optimize the bus so that nothing else besides the baked on components can live there, and give almost no tolerances for operation!" that was seen in apple products. 

 

That said, the Mac did have some things going for it back then, such as "ahead of its time" low-cost local networking (LocalTalk was suitable for the needs of that era, and was dirt cheap in terms of components used.) However, Apple was dead-set on the closed hardware access + branded/blessed only upgrades, to the point of absurdity.  SCSI drives with a special identifier string, before the system will even format it? PLEASE.  HARD PASS.  Systems with special RAM needs (Oh, needs to be a SPECIAL class of EDO with an obscure form of parity bit checking! No, normal parity ram wont work, we used an obscure alternative checking method!), purely "BECAUSE APPLE" ?  Please. Hard pass.  That kind of thing is what put IBM out of the PC business; they tried it with the MCA bus, where getting license to make a card required paying IBM fat wads of cash, and jumping through logistical hoops. (It didnt work so well for them)  I am actually surprised at how many peripherals actually DID make it to market for the Mac series computers, due to apple's closed-fistedness with supporting add-ons.  The walled garden strikes again.  They were obsessed with an "Image", and a false presentation of "eliteness" and "prestige", at the expense of their user's pockets.  It was this elitist attitude that colored the licensed mac sales centers snobbishness. 

 

 I kinda just let the Mac people suffer the consequences of their delusions, since there was no correcting them. They could scoff at my PC all they wanted; At least I could buy reliable and affordable parts from dozens of makers, while they had to get approval from the mothership for sales. I could also run all manner of software, including different OSes, on my PC. Getting A/UX to run on a Mac?  "Oh, that needs A SPECIAL MAC!" Getting Linux to run? "Oh, we dont talk about that-- that requires bootstrapping through MacOS with a special launcher, because of how our OS and Rom Toolkit work, and who would want to get out of the walled garden anyway?"

 

On the PC? "I will just execute whatever 512-byte assembly routine I find on sector 0 of either the diskette, or primary hard disk partition. I dont care what it is. If its a program, and it is there, I will run it."

 

I found it rather sad, really-- I doubt that is the kind of computer company Woz wanted to work for;  His designs were quirky, for sure-- but also genuinely brilliant, leveraging way more functionality than was normally possible from so sparse of a parts list. Reading about him. he strikes me as the OpenHardware zealot, before open hardware was a thing-- Super eager to show you what cool thing he made, so you could make your own.  Sadly, those days of Apple died with the Apple II line. The Mac was all about the lock-in, and the abuse of the userbase, with the siren-song of "Prestigiousness!"

 

And people paid for it. In many different ways.

 

Edited June 1, 2022 by wierd_w

[Keatah]

Having an A2 since the 70’s to the mid-90’s, and not having funds to look at something more expensive, I was rather oblivious to how the industry was working.

 

I found the PC to be a continuation more or less of my A2 activities and style of working.

 

First thing I asked was how many slots the PC had. Eight.. Eight? Eight. That spoke volumes which I didn’t completely understand. But I somehow knew would be my next purchase.

 

Slots gave the II good versatility and longevity. They would do no less for PC.

 

Now OTH I appreciate the walled garden stability of iOS and iPhone. Not interested in hacking or proving my bravadacious mastery of tech on business tools.

[+OLD CS1]

15 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Now OTH I appreciate the walled garden stability of iOS and iPhone. Not interested in hacking or proving my bravadacious mastery of tech on business tools.

It certainly has its purposes.  I have sent a number of customers to iOS devices and they have been plenty happy.  You get what you get and it does what it does, which is just what many of them need and it is good enough for me.  Though, I still make fun of the Mac users... of course, Windows 11...

[edweird13]

In 1999 I went back to school to get into IT. At that time I had been putzing around with a 486-DX 50 that I had gotten for free from my brother in 97. My father offered to buy me a machine as a gift for me going back to school. I had no clue what I was looking for. So I bought a computer, monitor and speakers from a mail order catalog. It had a Slot 1 PIII 450 64MB RAM and a board with a SIS 620 chipset with integrated graphics. No 2D or 3D support. I learned a lot from that failure. Ended up having to get a Nvidia Riva PCI card for 2D and a Voodoo 2 for 3D.

 

The next year I ended up upgading to a Intel BX2 board and a TNT2. Traded that SIS board for a DX4-100 with a motherboard and gave it to a friend.

 

 

[Matt_B]

We could always rest assured that any advantages a 90s Mac held over over other computers in terms of productivity would be more than offset by the amount of time their users spent evangelizing about the product. ?

[Keatah]

My 1st PC still has the capability to be meaningfully productive in this day and age.

 

The RIVA-128 put Nvidia on the map. The TNT2 Ultra solidified their position by dominating over 3DFx. 
 

RIVA-128 was my first encounter with correctly implemented 3D acceleration on PC and I was not disappointed. Even though there wasn’t a lot of software, I had seen enough to know it was the way forward.

[zzip]

10 hours ago, Keatah said:

Now OTH I appreciate the walled garden stability of iOS and iPhone. Not interested in hacking or proving my bravadacious mastery of tech on business tools.

Eh,  if you just want a phone and only want to store photos, music and video, don't mind dealing with clunky iTunes app to get anything slightly advanced done, and don't mind paying more for apps,  then iOS is fine.

 

If you want to do anything slightly more advanced--  store any type of file without needing special apps,  attach USB SD card readers without needing expensive extra hardware, and a bunch of other use cases I encountered that I can't recall right now,   you would find Android a lot more accommodating.   

 

I publish apps for my company to both stores, and dealing with Apple is a lot more frustrating since they are far more likely to reject your app for reasons that make sense only to them.

[Keatah]

6 hours ago, zzip said:

Eh,  if you just want a phone and only want to store photos, music and video, don't mind dealing with clunky iTunes app to get anything slightly advanced done, and don't mind paying more for apps,  then iOS is fine.

Main use is photos, SMS, reading the news, and watching youtube. The only thing I want done better is exporting photos. And if I should ever switch to android it will be because of that.