I was there, Gandalf. IIRC this was because emachines had a type of subscription program for upgrades. They were shit machines, btw. The power supplies were trash and had a non-standard form factor.

I miss the old Gateway cow PCs. This would make a pretty sick sleeper PC to bring to LAN parties.

Just missing this sticker

64 MB RAM and 3D graphics? That's more than most of us can afford nowadays!

That RAM's gotta be worth a pretty penny

Reading the tag it's saying you can spend $99 to upgrade to the latest model every two years as you would a cellphone, fulfilling the promise of you never having an obsolete pc.

Imagine paying $99 every TWO years to get the fastest pc.

If you look at it in a "Ship of Theseus" sort of way this might be true. For example I have a machine that I built in 2006, Over the years parts here and there have been swapped out to the point that the only original piece is the case. I still think of it as the same machine I built in 2006 even though it most definitely is not.

Of course, the ship and my machine both slowly changed over time where as this machine here would just be swapped out entirely every 2 years.

It was obsolete before you even bought it. It has a shitty celeron.

Oh shit AOL 5.0!

In terms of computational power, no, wrong.

In terms of aesthetic style, yes, correct.

Give it a few months. Altman will have us using shit like this again.

I long for the simpler times represented in this image.

Yes. The guarantee is in the computer lease- every two years you come in with your old computer and they replace it with one using the newest hardware.

It was a quite popular setup in the 90s.

My brother got the 400mhz version of this when he went to college. I later got is as a hand me down, for my first PC that wasn't shared with the family. When I later built a computer, I stripped the emachine down and mounted all the parts to a board and hung it on the wall where it still ran. It became the machine I tried installing linux on and stuff.

This annoys me every time it comes up because if you read the fine print, they're not literally saying that the computer will last forever as-is, they're selling a subscription service. I mean you can literally read what it says in the pic: for $99 you can upgrade to a new PC ever two years, effectively meaning that your PC will never be obsolete, so long as you keep paying the fee.

People were calling this out for the bullshit it was back in the day... Marketing wank is marketing wank.

Hey but the CRT it came with still works today and looks better than anything over VGA on dreamcast!

If you post this on Lemmy, sooner or later someone is going to come along and explain how to get this machine to run Linux.

A game port on the front would have been so useful. I hated reaching around the back to screw/unscrew that thing.

My 566i2 had a Celeron with no cache, Windows ME, and a CD-ROM drive. The worst of all worlds. Still loved that piece of shit to death. It ran Halo so badly that a friend and I once managed to snipe each other simultaneously.

Will still probably work as a local server somewhere

A home pc that came with Win98LT... Lite! As in you didn't need the full version which had the nice network components (home server services, network neighborhood, windows firewall, etc).

Bold claims for something with a celeron in it

Country roads, take me home...

I had forgotten about computers being slathered with stickers in the past

This was good spec for windows 98 but celeron 600mhz was like the tail end of 98 just before xp

Your computer rocks but it was obsolete before you even opened the box.

Itll run NetBSD.

Obligatory LGR video

this meme is worth at least two beans, a jeans, and one orb

so i’d say that thing’s still worth a small fortune

It was obsolete thirty minutes after the photo was taken.

My wife's family had that exact model eMachines PC when we started dating. I made it a priority to build her a better PC as soon as I could.