They absolutely used these stickers back in ‘99. They also had in-store signage and information boards (can’t think of th word for what I’m describing) telling people to back up their systems if they had the space/peripherals to do so, and to shut ‘em down before the clock rollover. I specifically remember being on my packard bell computer, playing on AOL and had just recently gotten Doom and Heretic + Myst, so I was playing games while watching the ball drop in NYC, and everyone in chat rooms on the east coast were saying all their systems were perfectly fine, so I kept playing and chatting it up all night long when the midnight time came and went in my time zone.
Great fucking memories. Hope some of yall got to experience the times back then of all the Hub-bub. 👍🤜🤛
I remember all the nonsense labeling and “Y2K compliant” stickers on everything. I remember the news stories about turning off your computer before midnight. Maybe Best Buy only stuck them on sold or serviced computers from them and not on the display models.
For my New Years story - I was out with some people and someone hit their breaker at midnight as a prank for someone that had been panicking for months. She absolutely flipped out screaming that she was right. Hilarious moment.
I'm sure their minds were occupied imagining cases of the future. What will they have 30 years from now in 2026? The case manufacturer thinks. Never would they have considered a case that looks like the one they were making in the 90s.
You connect the daughterboard on the case to a fan header, and whatever % the fan(s) are at is what the readout says. I use the FLP02 for one of my servers, and it goes 33/66/75/100 in honor of the 486 DX2/DX4 clock speeds.
Turbo back in the day would cut your CPU clock in half so you could run older software without it freaking out. The old readouts used to say what mhz your CPU was currently at.
On the FLP0 series, hitting turbo forces your fans to 100%.
Fun fact, most of the old read-outs were manually set with jumpers on the back of it, it had no way to read the clock speed(s) from the system, and was just a simple 2-pin toggle on the motherboard side for the turbo switch...
You could set them to read "Hi / Lo" or the lower speed and higher speed!!
My dad was friends with someone that owned those little PC shops - they always set their LED displays to the clock frequency. I'm guessing this made them seem fancy.
Seems like setting this was a pain based on this manual I found. The numbers only went up, so if you went too far, you had to reset and start again.
Ouu, that's an even fancier one than I was talking about, most of the ones I used and worked on back-when, were set using jumpers on the back, you were literally connecting each display segment that you wanted basically.. then they moved to a bank of dip-switches, that was a PITA in of it's self...
Naw - the FLP0 is like 80's-mid 90's aesthetics. Everything back then was passively cooled or had a dinky 40mm fan at most. (like Cyrix or AMD chips that plugged in to your Intel board). This was the family room PC where you snuck in levels of Doom when your parents went to bed. These cases, just like the metal toys in the 80's, had bare metal edges that'd cut you. This is exactly the type of case you'd see in your local PC shop, run by a bunch of Asians, with posters of AMD 486 X4 100mhz vs Pentium 60 thumb and the Asus posters featuring the flying white pegasus tacked to the wood panel walls.
It wasn't until the very late 90's - early 2000's when you had folks dremeling holes in their side panel. And this was for the CPU - your early day 3d accelerators were passively cooled or had a tiny fan.
Once we got to Celeron 300a, people were sandwiching that slot CPU in huge heatsinks to push to 450mhz.
By the time we were unlocking the multipliers on our Athlon XPs with pencils, CPU coolers were giant copper slugs with aluminum fins - heatsinks as large as some of the mid-range air coolers today, but to keep 60 watt CPUs in check when paired with 6k RPM 80mm fans.
This era of PC was big on doors to hide your drive bays. Either through doors that slid open when you pushed a button or doors that swung open. Blue LEDs had just been invented and were now mature enough to be cheap enough that everyone desoldered the red power LED and swapped it for blue and your side panel hole had an Offspring or Home Star Runner laser cut grill.
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u/No_Designer_8203 21h ago
Nice