Magazines of Yesteryear - What Micro? - October 1991

It's been over six months since the last "Magazines of Yesteryear" post and I thought it about time to re-visit the topic with a look at a thirty-five years old issue of What Micro dated October 1991.

As per the cover, we've got a boat load of product recommendations, a review of Wordstar for Windows, and a look at the Silicon Graphics Iris Indigo, but let's begin with the news.

Amstrad were updating their venerable PCW range with the new 9256 and 9512 models, taking the opportunity to ditch the obsolescent 3" floppy drive with the now de rigueur 3.5" format. It would leave 1.5 million existing users in the lurch if they upgraded their older kit, but the company were seemingly happy to wash their hands of that particular problem and leave it to third party suppliers. Whether existing users would upgrade was another question, and one I'll come back to later. There was also more info on Amstrad's new ANB-386SX laptop, as well as the Series 5 desktops. Ranging from a £399 8MHz 8086 with 640Kb of RAM and no hard drive, to a 286 running at 16MHz with 1Mb of RAM, a 40Mb hard drive and VGA colour for £999, they were much of a muchness, although the 5286 would gain an extra SKU prior to Christmas with the Family Pack.

Toshiba's new T2200SX was the first of their offerings to use a new slim form-factor floppy drive from Citizen, and the first to permit the use of Jeida cards for additional RAM or storage. Having already appeared in handheld PC's, these were the coming thing for laptops, although at £125 for 128Kb capacity, they make today's storage prices look anaemic. There again, the T2200SX was listed at £3,795, so it wasn't just a storage thing. Still, that money for a 20MHz 386SX and a 60Mb hard drive... ok-ish for the time. 

Tandon were the other big hardware news story, with a new range of machines taking over their existing offerings, weeks after lowering the prices on the older kit. As Dame Angela Lansbury sang that year, a tale as old as time. 

The In Brief section of shorter reviews handed out a 3/5 for Publisher for Windows (when Desktop Publishing was a thing), whilst Microsoft Works for Windows achieved a 5/5, which wasn't at all surprising given what it offered for the very reasonable (contemporary) sum of £145. 

The Silicon Graphics Iris Indigo received a page and a half review, with a final score of 3/5. A powerhouse  for the time, it offered a 33MHz R3000A RISC chip, R3010A floating point unit, 8Mb of RAM (expandable to 96Mb), and a SCSI port for additional connectivity. Storage consisted of a 3.5" floppy, hard drives of 236 or 432Mb capacity, and space for a 1.3Gb DAT drive. When attached to a 17" monitor displaying a resolution of 1,024x768, it sure looked the dog's danglies, and on-paper was roughly twice as fast as a comparable 486. Whether that meant it was good value for money was up to you. What Micro considered it passable. Diskless with 8Mb of RAM would set you back £6,709. Add a 236Mb hard drive and you would pay £8,490. Take the spec to 24Mb of RAM and that 436Mb hard drive, and you were nearing £12,000! Wowzers!

The cover story is next, and What Micro's annual survey shone a light on what their respondents were using. As you can see from the graphics, desktops ruled the hardware world. As for processors, there was still a decent chunk of 8086 users out there, but by now the 286 was being squeezed out by the more capable 386SX, whilst it's daddy, the 386DX, remained the champion of the mainstream power users. The 486 was truly a top end chip in 1991, as its relatively small market share proves that, but there's a fair sized wedge of non-Intel owners. This would have included the obvious 68000-based hardware from Apple, Commodore and Atari, as well as NEC's V20 (8088 pin compatible) and V30 (8086 pin compatible) chips. Going further out on a limb, I'd also suggest Z80's, as not all PCW's went into a home. 

For the main hardware and software categories, there's a "best seller" as provided by the survey data, versus a "What Micro Best Buy" that the magazine offered as an alternative, with a couple of honourable mentions in box outs for variety. Scores out of five were given for Performance, Build Quality, Extra features, and Value for Money, and prices were ex VAT as this was a serious business publication. Data was sourced via monthly, quarterly and annual figures from Romtec, with additional data from Inteco and Dataquest - two are vaguely familiar, but we're talking half a lifetime ago.

First up were 286 Desktops, and really, by late '91, a 286 was the absolute very least any buyer, home or professional, should have been considering. Just about able to handle Windows 3 (and much more able with more than 1Mb of RAM), it would be a decent workhorse for those wanting to spend under a grand. Olivetti had the Best Seller in their PCS286 but only managed a middling 3, 4, 2, 3. The key failing here was the price. As the article notes, £1,099 would get you a 386SX from some vendors. Viglen were the Best Buy with an £899 offering that included DOS, Windows 3 and associated manuals. The only improvement would be to the RAM, but adding an extra 4Mb would cost you £356. IBM and Tandon were the alternates, but to be honest, the Viglen was the one to beat here, and it deserved its 4, 4, 5, 5.

IBM were given a full bite of the apple in the 386SX Desktop fight, but it's not a great result. A score of 2, 5, 2, 1 is a much deserved verdict considering the asking price of £3,319! And for a 16MHz processor with only 2Mb of RAM as well! Remember what was said above about the price of 386SX's? Yeah, that. All day! However, if you were of the "nobody was ever fired for buying an IBM" crowd, maybe you would splash the cash on this PS/2 Model 55 MCA doofer. Not that the Dell competitor was hugely better. Oh, value wise, it's a knockout - a 20MHz processor for a more palatable £2,298 and that included 4Mb of RAM (although wait until we get to the Elonex 386DX!). the final 5, 4, 4, 3 rating was down to that still rather high price. There again, Dell were aiming at IBM and Compaq, and that pricing was just fine for this battle. The latter received a box out, alongside ICL's SX, but it's time to move on. 

Speaking of Compaq, they were the Best Seller in the 386DX category, up against 80's and 90's UK favourite, Elonex. And this one wasn't even close. Compaq's 20MHz machine gave you 4Mb of RAM, a 110Mb hard drive and DOS (no windows) for £3,895, earning it an initially promising but ultimately doomed 4, 5, 2, 1. There's some consolation from the boxout, where the 386/25e model was matched with IBM's Model 70-M61, but it's Elonex who walked away with the DX title. The scores of 5, 3, 4, 5 do not lie, and nor did the price. £1,395 for a 33MHz chip was very good. Corners were cut (2Mb of RAM and only a 40MB hard drive), but there's a ton of room for costing in upgrades to surpass the Compaq's spec for a lot less wonga. 

We end the desktop pairings with an ICL Best Seller and an AST Best Buy. And once again, the best seller struggled against the mag's choice. The former landed with a cost of £5,270(!) for a machine that gave you a 25MHz processor, 4Mb of RAM and a 100Mb hard drive. Despite the lack of VRAM for the VGA chipset, the final verdict of 4, 4, 1, 1 centred on the absolutely monstrous asking price. And as for memory upgrades, jumping to 8Mb would have set you back £795! AST's Bravo 486/25 dropped the hard drive to 85Mb, the RAM to 2Mb, and suffered from a questionable display, but your credit card would only get hit for £3,440, so hey, 4, 3, 3, 4 was more than enough here. Tandon and Compaq round off the box outs. 

Here we must pause, gentle reader, and discuss terminology. Laptops back then were something you could, but maybe not should, use on your lap - they were big, heavy, but also capable. Notebooks were lighter, as their nomenclature hints at, with true(!) portability central to their use. Mains portables were a unique sub-class all of their own and thank any deity you please that battery technology (as well as other areas) has advanced massively since the early 90's! The scoring has changed here too, with points awarded for Performance, Screen, Keyboard, Build Quality, Extra features, and Value for Money. 

Laptops pitted Toshiba's 3100SX against Amstrad's ALT-386SX, and despite a track record going back several years, the Tosh (3, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2) fell to Alan's lappy (3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 5). Both featured a 16MHz chip, but where as the 3100SX rocked a gas plasma display and two (count 'em) battery compartments, it cost £3,095 when packing an 80Mb hard drive. The Amstrad, however, featured a more common LCD display for a highly reasonable £1,999 with 80Mb of storage, and only £1,699 with 40Mb. Coming in at around 15lbs in weight, their batteries were only good enough for two hours (the Amstrad), and two and a half hours (the Tosh, but you had two with that one so party times ahead with the Toshiba!) - but those durations were about average for the period. The key point here was value, and Amstrad had a winner there. Two Compaq's went head to head for the honourable mentions, but one was a three year old 286, and the other a hugely expensive 386. 

286 notebooks saw Toshiba (3, 3, 4, 4, 2, 3), against Dell (3, 2, 4, 4, 4, 4), with the former's 1200XE priced at £1,795 compared to the 212n's £1,399, and to be honest, no matter the aesthetic appeal of a traditional Toshiba notebook, the Dell was the much better, and cheaper, option. Another defeat for the Japanese giant. Compaq's elderly LTE 286 and Commodore's C286LT (a re-branded machine also offered by Sanyo) did not inspire much thought beyond the Dell. 

The Compaq LTE 386s/20 (5, 4, 2, 5, 3, 3) came in at £3,295 in the 386SX notebook category, whereas Tandon's NB/386SX (5, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5) would have set you back £2,699. The latter featured more storage (40Mb vs 30Mb), and as these were genuinely more portable than the laptop offerings above, could justify their prices, especially compared to the Amstrad. There's a hell of a difference between that laptop and the 6.6lb Tandon notebook. Whilst the Compaq was good, it just wasn't £600 better than the Tandon. Toshiba's expensive T2000SX, and Arche's Messenger 386SX both only packed 16MHz processors (the two main choices run at 20MHz), and as such provided scant alternative comfort.

The last hardware category was an automatic win for Toshiba and their 3200SX (4, 5, 4, 4, 4) as it was one of the few mains-only portables still available for sale, and the only one covered by the magazine. There was, of course, a reason for this: colour. Yep, this Tosh could be had with a mono screen for "just" £2,850, but to experience the true glory of 256-colour VGA, that price soared to £6,695. Dealer prices were a good deal cheaper at around £4,129 ex VAT, but you were paying for the screen - and TFT's were niche at this point in time. The added benefit of a battery-less device was the ability to make use of the sheer size of the portable and add expansion slots - one full length 16-bit and one half-length 8 bit in this case. 

The software categories were awash with long lost names, which make this quite the tour down memory lane for those of us old enough to remember such halcyon days. The scoring categories varied per software area, as did the actual ranking - there's still a Best Seller award, but the second choice was now an "Alternative" award. Other options were covered as and where applicable. 

That age old favourite, word processing, was suitably first and foremost, and wouldn't you know it, Wordperfect 5.1 took the top place. I recall a brief period of usage at college, but the newer machines were equipped with Word by 1995. Wordstar 6.0 handled as a good back up (both would set you back about £400), but the big surprise (or maybe it shouldn't be), was that Word for Windows was only good enough for a box out place. There again, it was still early days for Windows 3, and DOS users had the benefit of the much more powerful established packages. What Micro did seem surprised by the prevalence of IBM's Displaywrite 4, but what's the world without a little corporate craziness? Well, actually...

Pagemaker version 4.0 was the market choice for Desktop Publishing fiends, although Timeworks Publisher PC would have been a great  alternative, especially as it cost less than a fifth of the big name package. 

Spreadsheet fiends would have been in rapture with the classic offerings from Lotus - Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3.1 and Release 2.2 were clearly the favourites. Why the two versions? Well, 2.2 was for what the magazine classed as "low power" users (think 640Kb of RAM), whilst 3.1 was for the posh peeps and their 1Mb plus machines. Either way, 1-2-3 was the one to beat, yet the alternative, Supercalc version 5, actually received a higher score. Again, the reason is not surprising - it may have lacked a few features compared to Lotus, it only cost £79 as opposed to £395/£475 respectively. Excel version 3 flew the flag for Windows, but as noted, it's only competition back then was Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows. The times they were a-changing. 

In a way, kind of a busman's holiday, databases were led by the unimaginative but hugely selling dBase IV v1.1. However, that low score of 2 was down to an reliance on its historical significance, and the alternative (although now labelled a best buy), Superbase, was a tad cheaper but much better value for money.

The final software category was that of integrated packages, and who would have guessed it, it was Microsoft Works. Accounting for nearly a quarter of all integrated package sales, it was a no-brainer, and for just £145, there was no question that for home and small business users, it did what it needed to do. The Windows version would become synonymous with PC bundles as Windows made greater in-roads in to the home user market. 

Printers were the last group to be rated, and whether it was non-Postscript lasers (The Hewlett-Packard Laserjet III and Brother HL-8V were both priced at £1,749), or Postscript lasers (Apple's Laserwriter IINT and IINTX - £3,595 and £4,595 -  against Qume's Crystalprint Publisher II and Publisher Express - £3,750), these were very mush professional level devices. 

Dot-matrix printers were still an option for those who required basic services and a side helping of tinnitus. Espon's LX-400 (£169) and Brother's M-1309 (£239) were fine 9-pin choices, although the Epson FX-1050 held 8% of the market (at £599 too!), and Star's venerable and seemingly herpes-like LC-10 held 7.3% market share. I mean, that printer was always front and centre in the Amiga mags I read at the time, and it could be found for far less than its RRP of £199. Hi-Voltage further on in this issue had it for £104 (they were also the reseller chucking out Toshiba 3200SX's with a third off. 

If 9 pins could be good, then 24 could (and I only say could be better), for which Epson's LQ-400 (£255) and Citizen's Swift 24 (£365) did the job. Once again, Epson and Star battle in the box out - the LQ-550 held an 8% share (sounds eerily familiar), and the LC24-10 a 7.3%... hold on, what??? Oh well, that's what the data said, apparently. As with the 9-pinners, that Star could be found below RRP: £150 from Hi Voltage for example. 

The most popular inkjet was, and this is geuniely not hard to believe at all, the Canon BJ-10e. Truly a classic printer of it's type and time, it's 30.3% share was well earned. It wasn't the best desktop inkjet - it was more for portable consideration, but it straddled the different needs of users well. Another familiar name, the Hewlett-Packard HP500, was a gnat's todger (I've been listening to "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" recently) behind at 27%. Apple also showed up, and gave an idea of how popular the Mac was in professional circles as it's Stylewriter hit 12%. The best buy was yet another Canon, the BJ-300, and in truth, none of these offerings would have been a bad choice. 

We have arrived back at full reviews now, and a proper gander at Digital Research's DR-Dos 6. The review loved it, and considered it far better than Microsoft's MS-DOS 5. Which was lovely. It truly was. It meant fuck all, because Redmond already had the DOS market sown up, and it was not about to let go if it. There again, history is awash with products that were genuinely better than anything from the then House of Gates, but their time was not to be. That wouldn't, didn't, and still does not stop people from avoiding Microsoft's wares, and as regular readers know, I dabble in Linux, use a Mac as a daily driver, and will always have a special place for RISC OS, foibles and all. And even the Mac is slowly slipping out of favour...

Wordstar for Windows managed a 4 out of five for blurring the lines between a word processor and DTP, and as above, bless 'em for doing it. However, Word was already planted firmly in the Windows market and the developer would be acquired a couple of years later. Interestingly, and this is still on my radar to try out, the DOS version was re-released for free back in 2024 as detailed by this article by Liam Proven on The Register, and the download can be found here. 

The Radius Full Page Pivot offered a feature that can be easily found on many monitors today - the option for landscape or portrait view. A 15-inch display, user had the ability to reach 1,024x768 in 256 colours courtesy of a dedicated interface card. Very well specified, the only fly in the ointment was the price: £1,049 for the monitor itself, £329 for the controller. That exceeded the dealer prices for NEC 20" displays (without the tilt option, obviously), but still, there would have to have been a highly specific use case for justifying the spend. And no, that doesn't mean topics for retro-themed YouTubers to make videos about in the 2020's!

A guide to maths co-processors for 286 and 386 machines delivered a verdict the Intel's chips were not worth the ask, and that the Cyrix and IIT products offered better value for money. Whether you actually  needed a co-pro was another question. Number crunching, yes, but for the average user, not really. 

Accounting and word processing are given a couple of masterclass articles, before the question of renting or leasing is raised for businesses. The cost varied massively, and considering how long you might need such kit for, I'm struggling to see the point outside of avoiding a huge capital outlay. However, since the current AI drive is making even basic kit a bit of an extravagance, maybe such financial means will return. Not exactly progress, is it?

The monthly buyer's guide takes in vast array of desktops (11.5 pages), portables (4 pages), printers (6 pages), and monitors/display controllers (2 pages), before we get the the final page opinion comment, and the views of Karl Dallas on the new version of Windows: 3.1 - and times have not changed, given that the author bewails Microsoft's broken promises on v3.0, the supposed improvements of 3.1, and the fact that no matter how little you paid for the upgrade of the .1 version, it was still too much. 

Adverts, and we begin with a Commodore commercial and their "Quality PC Business Systems" range. They were still hawking a monitor-less XT-class in the PC20 for £499 ex VAT, topped out at a 386SX-20 for £1,049. You get DOS 4.01, but no Windows on the machines capable of running it. 

Amstrad's most recent desktop, the 4386 received a full page for what was, in essence, an executive paperweight. It wasn't a bad bundle per se: 20MHz SX, 4Mb RAM, 80Mb hard drive, DOS and Windows, yours for £1,499 ex VAT with a mono monitor, £1,699 ex VAT for the 10" Sony Trinitron display. It was just expensive for the spec. You can understand Amstrad aiming for more lucrative areas outside of their traditional markets, but the 4386's RRP was not price competitive compared to other, up and coming names such as...

Elonex, and their PC-320X. Ok, only 1Mb of RAM, but you got a 100Mb hard drive, greater expansion, bigger 14" monitor, as well as DOS and Windows for £1,125 ex VAT. Even factoring in a £50 per megabyte upgrade cost, still cheaper than Amstrad's RRP. 

Fortunately for them, that RRP was at best advisory, and Hi-Voltage would send you away with a 4386 for £1,285 ex VAT. That's much better, although here I'll hope you note the prices of the 3000-series and the PCW's...

Commodore's second ad was for their higher end stuff, and once again, they seemed to have been living off their name, as those prices, whilst not terrible compared to younger firms like Dell and Compaq, were not great value either, and still with no monitors as standard. Windows makes an appearance though, so... yay???

A Silica ad, because you know, tradition, custom, ancient by-law and all that. Also, note that although the ST-FM was always a fine home computer, by late 1991, it was very much past its best. 

From a consumer perspective, 1991 was the year the 286 finally reliably dropped into three figure territory when you included VAT. Yet when Amstrad's 5286 Family Pack arrived (at £999 ex VAT, although that RRP very quickly dropped), it was criticised for being over-priced at a time when canny shoppers could get a 386 for the same money, and in that sense, the 286 was a dead-chip walking. Windows 3 (and 3.1) were much happier on a 2-4Mb 386, and it wouldn't be too long before 16 and 20MHz SX-equipped kit was similarly down below a grand. That was (and is) very real spending money, but as the ST and Amiga aged out, and hard drive-toting 386's with SVGA displays were showing computer gamers exactly what the PC had developed into, those home users with an eye on the future and desiring capable hardware knew where to look. 

As that was happening, the lower end non-x86 hardware was being priced out of the market. Compare the PCW to even the base models of the 3000-series. A 3086 with 30Mb hard drive and a mono monitor was just under a ton more expensive than a top of the range PCW - and sure, the printer was extra with the PC, but you would have had a much more capable system with regards to software choice with the 3086, and when 286 prices came down even further in 1992, that signalled the definite end of specialised offerings like the PCW. Even taking into account the absolute corporate bin fires of the popular 16-bit formats, the age of ubiquity for the PC had dawned, and although it would take a couple of years to become truly apparent, the seeds of its dominance had been well and truly sown. 

Magazines of Yesteryear - PC Pro - Issue 15 - January 1996

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.