We're back with PC Pro, and since this issue was published in the run up to Christmas 1995, there were plenty of toys for all children (both big and small) to hope for, including some top value Pentiums, a review of the fastest PC yet seen, predictions for the Internet in 1996 (little did they know...), and asking whether your PC was alive. Hold on to those Task Manager jokes for just a little bit longer.
After the contents page, we have the full details of the cover disk/CD goodies. You can keep Smartdraw and Cabrio, just give me Wing Commander 4!
The Christmas competition had a cracking first prize: that NEC Versa V notebook was a good choice at the time, and the bundled printer and copy of Lotus SmartSuite 96 combined to give a highly worthwhile productivity package.
A quick jaunt through the letters page takes us to the Prolog, this month focusing on the experience of journeying through the web. The highlighted quote is exceedingly quaint in these more cynical times, and one can't help but stare wistfully out of the window at just how far the online world has changed in thirty years. Naive or just plain stupid you may think me, but we really did take a wrong turn at Albuquerque since then. It is what it is, but it's not great, is it?
Dick Pountain queries the changing definition of the word "sad" with regards to contemporary society in what is such an on the nose column. He labels himself as sad, and proud of it, and I can only agree with him when comparing myself to the criteria. Anyone remember when, over recent years, the term "nerd" kinda became acceptable, at least as far as clothing went? I was a nerd of the nineties, and proud of it. Still one today, and still very not "cool", but what use is "coolness" when it smothers individuality? Oh, and I definitely agree that John Smiths was, and remains today, a foul brew. There again, I live a twenty minute walk from The Grey Horse pub in Consett with its attached Consett Ale Works brewery (or maybe that should be the other way around???), and about thirty minutes from The Blast Furnace Bottle Shop and Taps, so I am fortunate in that respect.
Horizons next, and leading the news is a report on IBM's future plans for a network centric approach to business, courtesy of the late Lou Gerstner, who passed away in December last year. Novell is in the process of ditching WordPerfect, a $1.4 billion purchase from 1994 that would eventually see them sell it to Corel for just $186m. Still better value than a 2020's piece of NFT artwork, or any punt on crypto, but still, ouch! Speaking of money, Barclays, Nationwide, and Royal Bank of Scotland are moving with the times with online-banking options for DOS and Windows users.
Microsoft is the target from European organisations for possible dodgy (say it isn't so???) pricing shenanigans for manufacturers. AMD are buying NexGen in order to keep up with Intel's processor tech, when 586 and 686 were still numbers you could attach to such things, and doesn't that half date that exposition scene in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible where Luther lists his tech needs! And there's an array of Pentium 120 notebooks for those with suitably deep pockets/friendly bank managers/lucrative side hustles.
There's a special report on RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury - do not ignore the signs and I say this as someone who has suffered (no sniggering at the back) from the effects of RSI), before some commentary on the effect Novell's off-loading of WordPerfect might have on the software industry in general (especially concerning competition, something that still rings true to this day).
To the Labs, and this month has an array of seventeen (17!!!) Pentium desktops all at £999 or less, excluding VAT. Not PC Pro's usual target market but something of a sweet spot for price and performance. We get a description of the testing techniques before the absolutely splendid specification table. One thing to note is the "feature score," with additional points for extra warranty, a 15-inch monitor, CD-ROM drive and the like. Some offerings here give you just the basic computer/14" monitor combo, whereas others try for the full multimedia dog and pony show, to varying degrees of success.
Next comes the test measurements, and there's a huge difference in performance for a group with such a small difference in pricing - £949 to £999, yet the same defined specs - Pentium 75, 8Mb of RAM and at least a 500Mb hard drive. Overall performance measurements were taken in relation to a Gateway P5-75 at a baseline of 1.00.
As for the reviews themselves, each covers the basics, offers good and bad criticism, then scores the areas of Performance, Features, and Value for Money out of six before awarding an overall score. And what reading this must have been to those contemplating a specific brand purchase!
Let's take the Brother Professor P75 for example. It was a decent name at the time, yet the combination of ISA-based disk controller (where PCI chipsets were readily available), a slow graphics card, and a poor monitor scupper its chances - leading to scores of 2, 1, and a 1 for an overall of 1.
Evesham Micros was another are another failed contender, this time down to the motherboard chipset that is both slow and experienced some compatibility issues that forced a re-install of Windows.
The rest fall somewhere in the middle, although Opus should be congratulated, if that's the term, for not only providing the slowest machine on test, but effectively matching the Brother machine with a tally of 1, 2, and a 1 for, you guessed it, a final result of 1. Not surprising with a relative performance score of 0.70, falling behind even the Brother.
Two offerings, however, walk away with awards, one for Speed, the other for Value.
Panrix take the Speed one, which the review notes continues a long run of such achievements, coming in at 1.47 overall. Not only do you get fast, well-organised components, you also get a CD-ROM and the Microsoft's Works/Publisher/Money combo. Even the 14-incher is a decent monitor, if held at 800x600, and the only missing element for me would be a soundcard. Otherwise, spot on, earning 6, 5, 5, for a 6 overall.
The Value winner is another familiar name, and as noted, part of the Amstrad empire by this point in time. Their P75 was clocked at 90MHz due to a factory slip up, but worked well enough, and also included everything needed for a proper multi-media PC config. Sure, it isn't the fastest, and suffered from a lack of expansion options, but to give a user a one-stop option, it deserves the 4, 5, 5, and 5 in the end.
There's a look at build quality for a quartet of competitors, before we get to the Labs View, the winners, honourable mentions and parting shots. The runner up for the Speed awards was the Carrera, whilst Time took the Value runners up place. The comment that it was now possible to buy a rounded Pentium/75 for a grand ex is worthy of note, as is the chart midway through the reviews.
Charting the previous six months, the average P75 rocking 8Mb of RAM, 500Mb hard drive and a CD-ROM had dropped from £1,400 ex VAT to a smidge over a grand. A P90 with the same spec went from £1,500 to just over £1,200. The column accurately lists the caveats that apply to just listing prices, 8Mb of RAM vs 16Mb etc, but it does emphasise just how rapidly changing, and relatively affordable, the PC market had become.
In the general reviews section, the fun is kicked off by the Carrera P150, toting 16Mb of RAM, a 1Gb hard drive, 2Mb Matrox Millennium graphics card, full multimedia kit, and a tape back-up drive. At nearly £2,800 ex VAT, it's a top of the range machine, yet hamstrung by the motherboard chipset that isn't quite there yet. Still, scoring 3.11 compared to that P75 above when clocked at 150MHz, and 3.34 when running at 166MHz, it's definitely no slouch.
For those more price-conscious peeps, the AST Advantage 613E gives Cyrix's 5x86/100 processor a run out, also proving that if you want Pentium performance, you should just buy a Pentium. Spec-wise, it isn't too far away from the Viglen of the group test, but £350 more expensive and slower.
ESL have something a bit cheaper but not as slow as you might think it would be. This 486 DX/4 running at 100MHz comes perilously close to the reference Gateway, and at £200 less than the group test. Future-proofing was obviously better with that array of boxes, but the ESL does not disgrace itself.
IBM, after a few years of trying its hand at the consumer market, still keeps plugging away with this Pentium P100 multimedia PC. The problem? It's nearly £1,800 ex VAT. Yeah, no.
Portable fans are covered with the NEC Vera 4000C, a P75 with a 10-inch TFT display. Looks good, performs well, but at a price point that takes it out of the reach of all but the most well-healed personal user - £3,350 ex. Of course, it's a corporate laptop, but one can aspire, surely???
Accessories include laser and inkjet printers, and a good opportunity to roll out Harold Macmillan's 1957 slogan. The Integrex Betajet C (what the hell were they drinking in the marketing department that day?) is hampered by a poor driver isn't really worth the (rather cheap) asking price of £139 ex VAT. What aren't too bad are proposed ink cartridge prices - about £10 for mono, £23 for colour. They genuinely had never had it so good! Why? Because late stage capitalism and the enshittification mantra have conspired to put subscriptions into ink availability. "Honestly, sheep, it's a benefit that you can only print so many pages per month!" as they might as well say. A pox on your houses, printer companies!
As for lasers, Oki's OL 400W is average enough for heavy personal use/small office demands at £379 ex, but HP's LaserJet 5Si, at just over £4k ex VAT, is THE printer for a much larger office headcount.
There's also an Iomega tape drive, and a Casio digital camera - £799 inc VAT for what is described as an over-priced toy, but the one that caught my eye is the Sony MDH-10 Mini-Disc storage drive. Bless 'em, they really tried with that one, but it was not to be.
The Diamond Multimedia Kit 8000 is one of many upgrade kits that will take your beige and boring business box and give it a sprinkle of sound. Comprising of an 8x speed CD-ROM, speakers, and a Soundblaster/Ad-Lib/MIDI compatible sound card, at £450 ex, it's quite the investment. One not worth it given this review, with installation issues, performance drops, and worryingly high vibration when spinning those discs. Never mind, eh?
Being a serious computing publication, the software reviews are a pretty serious lot, with the highly regarded desktop publishing program, Pagemaker 6, receiving a glowing 5/6 over five pages.
Visual C++ 4 gains the same mark over a rather more restrained double page spread, although for those wishing for a bit more on this enthralling subject, the first of a three part intro to Visual Basic begins on page 146, with a further 8 pages of... joy?
The seasonal period means it's time for cheap(ish) tat for stocking fillers. How many novelty mice, mouse mats, and copies of the official national Lottery program do you actually need is another question. Naturally, a magazine subscription is also an option, and for just £15.99 a year, or £35.99 for three. A bargain, I tell you!
For those wishing a more intellectual angle, the Reading Room casts its eyes over the latest reference CD-ROMs, at a time when the Internet could answer your question, but good luck getting video down a 28.8kbp/s modem connection! £69 for the NetGeo Picture Atlas of the World isn't too bad in my humble opinion, but Jesus Christ, I wouldn't pay £99 for a Bible-related disc. Your own personal spiritual pathways may decide differently.
The prickly question of whether your computer is alive or not asks some very interesting questions, and given that we're in the midst of what is very much a bubble that will see tears for many before bedtime, feels ever so innocent and lacking of any marketing jazz. For the record, no it wasn't then, no it isn't now, and can we stop with this AI bullshit. There is a place for it, but not in the creation of any kind of art or artistic expression, and certainly not at the expense of pretty much every consumer piece of tech in the planet. As for whether your PC is alive or not, let's just say that in my experience, trying to get Task Manager to kill an errant program has at times been worthy of a Willian Peter Blatty novel. You can supply your own Tubular Bells sample.
To safer things now, from a 1995 perspective at least, and the look ahead at what the Internet would offer for the following year. Truly a piece of its time, the first key consideration to usage is the speed of access. As the article notes, a one hour chunk of high quality (5Mbits/sec) requires 1.9Gb of storage, and using a good modem at 28.8Kbits/sec, it would take 144 hours to download that data. ISDN would reduce that to a day, but as far as video went in 1995, no cute cat videos for you lot.
Cable would make things better, if you were in a cabled area (and this street in a little County Durham former pit village only received Virgin cable a couple of years back), so for those lucky enough in '96, things were looking good.
There's a box out about not believing the hype as to how many people are on the 'Net, with some telling commentary about how talk of having everyone on the planet connected by 2004 would be impossible as not everyone would have a PC. True, dat, and it would take a few years more, but the rise of the smartphone would change how the masses would access online content. To get there though, we had to get through the WAP years, and kids, it was worse than you could ever know, even if some of the handsets were cool as...
For those with an interest, a feature on tendering processes will have you in rapture, before we get to the usual Real World Computing section with all sorts of tidbits on a wide array of topics.
The last big section of the magazine is the Game Reserve, and offers proof that the PC was evolving as a games platform. Screamer, an arcade racer, could run reasonably well on a DX/2 66, whilst Hexen: Beyond Heretic settles for a simple 486SX at 33MHz, and as an aside, also runs extremely well on a Raspberry Pi 4 under RISC OS - I reviewed the latest updates for that version back in 2024.
TFX: EF2000 was a flight sim I so wanted to play back then, but with a 16Mb-toting Pentium pretty much mandatory, especially in SVGA mode, there was no chance of that! Finally, PGA Tour 96 rounds (geddit?) off the fun with an above average score but suffers from having fewer courses than the previous year's offering. Who says annual releases are a good thing anyway - aside from the C-suite who want big numbers to get bigger each year?.
To the ads, and we begin with Gateway 2000, who take a couple punts at customers this issue. The first one is primarily desktop-centric, and as you can see, there isn't a 486 in sight unless you want a portable. And if you were tempted by that P-75 Best Buy, the review of it is just a few pages back over. Decent, but lacking performance, if you were interested.
The second is for the road warriors of the 90's, and, well, yeah, just goes to show how much they wanted you to spend for the small number of hours the battery would last.
Mesh Computers are another Pentium desktop-only company, and its P75 received fours across the board. In what will become obvious as we go on, a grand plus VAT is a lot to drop on a computer, so finance is available at 18.5%. To sweeten the deal that month, there's a FREE Fiorucci hamper as well. Makes that three years at £38 a month worthwhile, surely?
Carrera would sell you a 486 DX/2 66, and for just £599 ex. Not stupid for a Win 3.11/DOS6.22 machine, but not exactly future proof either. You could chose Windows 95 instead, but adding extras such as more memory would start to make the Pentium's far better value.
Hi-Grade's Notino range of laptops promise to offer the moon on a stick, so to speak, but who in the name of whichever deity you may, or may not worship, decided to put those "joystick controls" there. You ain't gonna be playing Hexen holding a three and a half kilo(!) portable like that??? Makes the One XPlayer X1 Pro look like a sensible life choice! And no, it's not an affiliate link, I don't do such shenanigans.
Colossus are another familiar name of the period, and their machines look surprisingly cheap - just £729 ex for the processor of the moment, the P75. Before you reach for the credit card, understand that this does not include an operating system(!), and the 14" monitor is a cheapo model with a £40 upgrade to a non-interlaced number. So that's £829 ex now. Uh-huh...
MrPC looks cheap and cheerful, but oh-so familiar. and it turn out, it is, as it's a trading name of the same parent company that runs Time Computers. Tempting as those prices are, I'd prefer to spend just a little more. You know, like maybe an operating system so there wasn't just a bloody big beige box being used as a doorstop!
P&P have a decent array of badged machines, including the ever lovely Compaq Contura Aero 4/33c. For a dinky little laptop, there were few who could match it's looks (aside from Olivetti from around the same time), and even today, I'd still like something of this form factor to carry with me. Anyone want to bring back the Eee PC???
We're at the Time Computers ad proper now, and it's notable exactly how much the bottom was dropping out of the 486 market. Less than twelve months earlier, you'd have paid an awful lot more for an equivalent DX/2 66!
Check out the Multimedia PowerStation '95 offer. DX/2-66 with 8Mb of RAM, 540Mb hard drive and modem - yours for £799 ex VAT.
The equivalent from the February 1995 issue of PCW from the same company: DX/2 66 upgrade along with the memory, but a smaller hard drive (340Mb) and no modem - yours for £1,159 ex. £360 cheaper and you get a better spec. What a time to be alive! Not, admittedly, a great time to buy, but the steady-ish pricing days of the late 1980's were long gone.
Watford Electronics Ltd are similarly bulging with 486 and Pentium offers, and with credit offers too. Seems so much more easy to think of that new PC at something like £42 per month rather than £940 in one lump sum. And with Watford, it's only over two years, so that 486 might still be capable as 1998 rolls up. I did say, might!
At least with these two manufacturers, the term was just 24 months. Evesham's was over 36, and at 18.5%... yeah, not great. But if that was the only way you could afford a decently specc'd PC... well, buyer's choice.
Although this did tickle me - new 486 SX 33 CPU's for a tenner a pop. Going back a year, that was your entry level system at around £599 ex VAT, and were selling for around £60 as a part to consumers.
Software Warehouse aims to be your one stop ship for anything and everything you could want to do on a PC, and just look at what options you had! Also note that this was very much the time that you bought and owned the software. For example, Adobe Premier v4 could be had for £348 ex. Today, it's yours for a recurring £21.98 inclusive, or £262.51 prepaid annually. Progress, my ring piece, there's late stage capitalism fuckwittery afoot!
Lastly, we have Viglen, and I always liked the cases they used, especially the compact on for that £999 P75. Finance is again to the fore, 36 months but at a rate of 19.9%! Spend over £1,499, and that dropped to 14.9% but bloody hell, finance companies know how to make money!
That brings us to the end of this issue, and a very interesting one it was too. The last of the numbered CPU models were slowly wandering into the sunset as the more marketing friendly (and trademark-able) named offerings pointed the way forward. Multimedia was king, and Windows 95 was showing there was a future in this GUI malarkey, although it would be a few years before Windows 98 Second Edition finally delivered the goods. And if you detect a hint of wistfulness there, you'd be right, because the current iteration of Windows really does make me pine for Windows of the Nineties. Yep, even 95.
