I want to get a sense of which PC category was at the same time as which Mac categories
There's no general enough forum section to post this, so maybe it can work here!
There's a big chunk of mac history that's opaque to me, when I switched away from B&W computers and into DOS around 1992. That's the Jobs-is-away-from-Apple period where they launched tons of series of macs. I want to map it out in my mind in the order it appeared, but:
-I can only digest broad strokes; anyway it's probably best not to dwell on details
-I KNOW you can't draw direct comparisons at all times
-Some multi-platform games can help bridge the gaps in my mind
-maybe Just a year by year rundown would be enough.
-I probably have a lot of inaccurate assumptions - don't judge! I just want to learn, maybe some others can too.
-I mostly am interested in getting comparisons between 1988-1997, at least at first
An existing timeline can help, but there's a lot of gaps remaining still:
source: https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~viettran/history.htm
The gist of my experience with PCs is roughly, again in broad strokes:
1981-1984: the first IBM PCs, followed by XT, then AT, these machines have STAYING powers in elementary and high school computer labs all the way to the early 90's where I lived
1984-1987 the era of 286s and EGA graphics prominence
1987-1994 386s (well into 1993 around me) and 486s dominate, VGA slowly trickles in. the PC games EXPLODE with the last 3-4 years of that time slice with the likes of Apogee, id Software, Microprose, etc
1995-96 Pentium + Win95 is what everyone wants
1997-2006 3d accelerator cards are now mandatory, pentium 2, 3 then 4 appear at steady pace
2007 multiple core cpus (core 2 duos, then i3, i5, i7, i9)
These are some of the matches I have in my head for whatever reason and I want to know how accurate they are
-Power Macs ought to be the answer to Intel's Pentium lines, right? G3 = Pentium 3? G4 as midway between P3 and P4? No idea.
-Quadra is like a souped up 486 equivalent?
-Centris is a budget quadra?
-What did the Mac II bring to the table especially late in the line, like iivi and iivx? are they essentially misnamed out of class mac iis compared to the start of the line? 486 equivalent? early pentium?
Multiplatform games that can act as anchor points for comparisons:
-Civilization 1 ran well on a 386 in VGA, so anything obtained around late 1989 and into 1990 was fair game
-DOOM is the game that ran well on extremely souped up 486s with a VLB video card, so this puts it in the realm of possibility in the late 1994, 1995 range. Most people didn't have that window open to them (ie me, stuck with a 386) so they just waited to own a pentium and run it flawlessly.
-Quake 1 was a squarely later pentium 1 game and up, so it ran well on mid-1996 pentium 1 (a few iterations beyond the very first slow pentium 1s of 1995)
There's no general enough forum section to post this, so maybe it can work here!
There's a big chunk of mac history that's opaque to me, when I switched away from B&W computers and into DOS around 1992. That's the Jobs-is-away-from-Apple period where they launched tons of series of macs. I want to map it out in my mind in the order it appeared, but:
-I can only digest broad strokes; anyway it's probably best not to dwell on details
-I KNOW you can't draw direct comparisons at all times
-Some multi-platform games can help bridge the gaps in my mind
-maybe Just a year by year rundown would be enough.
-I probably have a lot of inaccurate assumptions - don't judge! I just want to learn, maybe some others can too.
-I mostly am interested in getting comparisons between 1988-1997, at least at first
An existing timeline can help, but there's a lot of gaps remaining still:
source: https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~viettran/history.htm
The gist of my experience with PCs is roughly, again in broad strokes:
1981-1984: the first IBM PCs, followed by XT, then AT, these machines have STAYING powers in elementary and high school computer labs all the way to the early 90's where I lived
1984-1987 the era of 286s and EGA graphics prominence
1987-1994 386s (well into 1993 around me) and 486s dominate, VGA slowly trickles in. the PC games EXPLODE with the last 3-4 years of that time slice with the likes of Apogee, id Software, Microprose, etc
1995-96 Pentium + Win95 is what everyone wants
1997-2006 3d accelerator cards are now mandatory, pentium 2, 3 then 4 appear at steady pace
2007 multiple core cpus (core 2 duos, then i3, i5, i7, i9)
These are some of the matches I have in my head for whatever reason and I want to know how accurate they are
-Power Macs ought to be the answer to Intel's Pentium lines, right? G3 = Pentium 3? G4 as midway between P3 and P4? No idea.
-Quadra is like a souped up 486 equivalent?
-Centris is a budget quadra?
-What did the Mac II bring to the table especially late in the line, like iivi and iivx? are they essentially misnamed out of class mac iis compared to the start of the line? 486 equivalent? early pentium?
Multiplatform games that can act as anchor points for comparisons:
-Civilization 1 ran well on a 386 in VGA, so anything obtained around late 1989 and into 1990 was fair game
-DOOM is the game that ran well on extremely souped up 486s with a VLB video card, so this puts it in the realm of possibility in the late 1994, 1995 range. Most people didn't have that window open to them (ie me, stuck with a 386) so they just waited to own a pentium and run it flawlessly.
-Quake 1 was a squarely later pentium 1 game and up, so it ran well on mid-1996 pentium 1 (a few iterations beyond the very first slow pentium 1s of 1995)
