NEVER OBSOLETE

Of all the machines an Emachine. Those were the cheapest and worst built computers ever. They were often obsolete the moment they were sold.

I guess that makes the irony even more delicious.

They were never obsolete because, as it says on the sticker (that no one on the internet can ever seem to be bothered to read), that you can replace it every 2 years for new, more modern system for only 99 bucks.

and quite frankly, thats a fucking steal, considering what PC prices were like back in the late 90s, and with how fast technology was advancing.

The trick was closing down your PC company before the two years are out.
For crying out loud, thank you!
Power users didn't flock to these, but they were awesome for a certain demographic. Low skill early tech adopters. Grandma, grampa, mom and dad. Dudes out in rural areas, like my friend's dad, who only needed to use the PC for 30 minutes a day to keep his farm operation running and couldn't give 2 shits.
- Yep.
  Several family members had these exact 433mhz emachines with the stickers. They were not power users, they were not gamers.. They were people who typed with one finger chicken pecking to check email
Ah yes, totally legible sticker

I used to be a retail PC service tech back when these things were new. I remember scoffing at the “never obsolete” tag. They were obsolete while still new in the box.

I worked in retail sales at the time.
customer: "What's the catch?"
me: "It's pretty slow now, if you keep it a couple years, you get to buy someone else's post upgrade for cheap assuming the company is still around, you don't get the replacement from us"
customer: "So what about those Compaq's?"
It's literally a computer. In your home. What would you even upgrade? Get two of them maybe?
- During the era it wasn't rare to upgrade components on the motherboard and ISA/PCI bus cards. We'd had some relatively stable CPU socket standards and you'd do things like change out CPU and ram for upgrades.
  Was this a stupid marketing gimmick? Oh yeah. Was it unreasonable to talk about upgrading a system at home? Not really. We did do it for a while.

My dad is still running this exact computer, but he only uses it to print one certain thing a month

I remember these shit boxes. Fuck these shit boxes. Set that fucking thing on fire and throw it off the overpass.

As much as love the clarity of modern high resolution LCD, I still miss the slightly fuzzy effect CRTs had on the displayed graphics. It was almost artificial AA. When I play old games I wonder why they look crappy. It’s because I can see the sharp edges vs the “soft filter” the CRT added.

It was truly amazing how great SD looked on a 25" tv. 525 scan lines. Bright enough to sear your eyeballs. In a vacuum, they didn't even look fuzzy. But you put a 1080p full screen even on my WQHD and it looks like absolute trash :)
When I was in highschool we installed StarCraft on the school network drive and played it fairly often. One time we were in the design class which has 1 set up with a CRT (I'm not sure why)
Naturally, I launched StarCraft on it and that game fucking came to life on a CRT, the color vibrance was much better, and there was a higher fidelity and depth to the graphics.

I use that case for my work computer! It has a ryzen7 and RTX 2080. I had to hack the front USB to connect it with a modern mobo header, but it works...

Sleeper PCs are an art form
Where’s the radiator?
- Right here, next to the fan:
- It's upward inside the drive bay, using a single 120mm fan and rad, then I perforated the case's top sheet metal with a new grid of holes for outlet airflow. Definitely not amazing cooling performance but hey. I had to slice the CDROM drive in half to make room for it... the floppy drive actually works but not the giant CDROM lol
How's airflow?
Is the floppy drive hooked up? I have a floppy drive in my modern machine.
- You need to get with the times, grandpa. Get yourself a Zip drive.
- Yes I made the floppy drive work! There's a USB adapter hidden in the back, and modular power supply makes it simple to hook up. I actually use them at my job (machine shop) though we normally just use an RS-232 cable connection to transfer files, so disks don't get any actual use. I really wanted to ensure the 3.5 drive worked even though the CD-ROM doesn't work, I had to put the AIO radiator up there instead.
- I haven't seen an FDD header on a motherboard since my P6T (with an i7-920). And even then, it wasn't worthwhile to use it.
  Do you have a usb-fdd adapter? Or just a USB internal floppy drive?

Never say never. The Ship of Theseus is never obsolete as long as regular maintenance occurs

Take me back. I don't like it in the future.....

- Encarta was absolute fire back in the day, seriously
I know a guy who can take you back for $120

120 is a steal!

Even when these first came out you had to know it was silly

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think this was a programme where they would upgrade/replace your setup for free every year or so.
- That's right. There's an insightful blog article if you want to learn the full story.
  You could get your PC upgraded for $99 if you also bought 24 months of dial-up Internet service through them. But you also had to pay shipping both ways, and be out the use of your computer while you did it! That seems so inconvenient I imagine almost nobody bothered. eMachines certainly expected people wouldn't, making the whole thing little more than a carefully calculated marketing tactic. And it worked.
  That said, their machines were very competitively priced even without the upgrade deal, and it really disrupted the incumbents, making them good value machines even if you didn't take them up on the dubious "never obsolete" offer.

viewsonic made some damn fine CRTs...

Mitsubishi Diamondtron or Sony Trinitron. That’s where the good stuff was.
- iirc Silicon Graphics crts were actually trinitrons after 92-3. of course a 21" crt weighed fuck all lol

Run protoweb on that bad boy, and keep it alive 😎

Is that like Compuserve 2000?
- https://protoweb.org/
  It's a proxy server that works kind of like an Advanced version of the Wayback Machine. So old PCs like this, can connect to something like what the internet would've been like when they were first made.
  I have the Protoweb browser on my Linux mint machine, running through wine. It's fun to poke around at, and great for internet archaeology