My dad found his order form from our 3rd computer

$5778 adjusted for inflation.

2 CD ROMs drives AND a zip drive? This guy fucks

My dad bought one for me 🥰 so i that i can become a scientist one day but then I discovered porn and now I work at McDonalds.

I was going to be extremely impressed at the 64 GB of RAM until I realized that said MB.

Such a throwback though, that iomega zip drive was cutting edge.

Even back then you had McAfee bloat preinstalled

Dude! You're getting a Dell!

It's been 25 years and their invoices look the same

So funny story, if this is the first-gen (Blue) Dell XPS, we also bought one similarly spec'd.

Dell shipped it to us and when it arrived, it had 64 MB of ram instead of the 128 MB we ordered it with. Rather than sending us out new ram, they shipped us ANOTHER whole XPS. They never asked for the first back.

Seems like overkill

How will you ever fill up 8.4gb of storage

The Sales line doesn't work...

Surprisingly the Customer Service Line did still. Neat.

Dude, you got a Dell!

You know you're an old geek when you look at the spec and go "300MHz PII? 64MB RAM? that's late 96 or early 97... Or cheap 98, but it's shipped with win95, and ooh la la IE4.0 pre-installed, definitely late 96 or early 97" and then you see the invoice date, and recognize it as Clinton's 2nd inauguration.

I know modern audio purists probably still use them, but I completely forgot that sound cards were always an additional thing!

That was a beast of a system back in its day. Your dad was clearly a PC connoisseur.

I remember when we upgraded to a Pentium III and later put an aftermarket Voodoo card in the thing after much begging on my part. That was the first PC I had that felt genuinely "powerful" to me.

Man, my first homebuild out of college was an absolute monster with 8MB of RAM so I could run NT at home. $640 just for the memory. I did cheap out on the CPU and only got the 75MHz Pentium, though we ran 90s at work. Wing Commander III was awesome on that thing.

"It's an investment in your family's future, sir..."

So OP, do you now do clickity clacks professionally for money? Did that included edutainment software suite do the trick?

I just saved a pair of altec Lansing computer speakers from becoming ewaste at my work. They're easily 20+ years old but still work decently enough! I just use them to play music when no one else is in the office.

That was after computers got significantly cheaper, too. The adjusted prices for PCs in the 80s were insane. My family got an Amiga 3000 in 1990 because my dad had an expense account he could only use for computers and didn't really need it for work that year... it was something like $4,500 which would be about $10,500 today. Same for his office PS/2, which was just a 486.

Can it run Crysis?

The only thing I miss about ZIP drives is that when you are holding one of those huge disks, you feel like a hacker in a 90s movie

IDE DVD ROM drive and a hardware DVD decoder.

Dude, you could play DVDs? On your computer! Wow, truly it was the future.

For the kids, this would've been a top of the line beefy set-up. I would say in '98 you would find a 1gb hd, a 120 Pentium, and 16mb of ram in a typical home that had a computer.

Remember things upgraded fast back then, by '00 your average Joe would be buying Pentium iii's with 600mhz and a DVD drive! Woah!

My dad had the >$4k receipt for our 1988 286 until this death recently

A 300 MHz Pentium II in early 1996 is insane. No wonder it cost so much!

I remember getting my first computer in 1998 and it was an AMD K6-2 and it cost approximately $1200.

I have a very similar PC in the kitchen right now. It was my first PC. Pentium II 400, 32MB RAM, AWE64 ISA, DVD Decoder card, etc. That DVD decoder card was definitely an upsell though. That AGP graphics should have been able to do mpeg decoding in hardware.

Powerhouse rig

You only paid $35 tax on a $3000 computer?

Our first desktop was a 365k. It cost $5600 Canadian and my father had a program at his work that allowed him to buy it and pay it back in payments. It took him 5 years to pay it off.

Well, we know he overpaid by about 1500 dollars...

That mouser was so comfy (first consumer optical)! You could spin it out, but then again also overclock it.

And not to brag, but I bought (also my third computer) a Celeron 300A at that time & overclocked it from 300 to 450MHz making it the fastest Intel CPU for years. Those were some good days.

Intellimouse is a timeless classic

My man got that dual DVD setup in 1998! I got my first own computer when i was 15 in 2001 and it had a DVD tray and I thought I was cool af. Watched the first DVD the same day and a few days later I got a DSL modem and I was king of the world. It ran Delta Force like a dream.

64MB ram? Go wild!

An iMac with upgraded RAM and a USB drive of your choice woulda been cheaper. Weird.

A thousand times as much RAM as my 2nd computer.

Wow. That seems really expensive for that time. I guess it must have been top of the line?

I wished I had better memory or still had the receipts for my home built 486 gaming rig (Matrox Mystique gfx card) around 95(?) or the year old Mac G4 I bought around 99 or 00. I swear it was well below half that^1. I've always been too cheap to get top of the line computers lol.

1 (ed) looking up the old specs and prices... If it was a G4 450 it cost $2500 new and I got a refurbished model. I guess I am misremembering the price. (Wtf was I thinking, spending that kind of money on a damn computer lol. It served me well for years and years though).