Firaxis preserves the 33-year-old, $10,000 386 PC Sid Meier used to develop Civilization – and it still works

midian182

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In a nutshell: The Civilization games have been around since the start of the 1990s, entertaining millions of people. The launch date of the series' seventh numbered title has just been announced, but where did it all start? With a 386 PC in 1991 that packs 16MB of RAM, cost $10,000 at the time, and still works today.

Firaxis Games has announced that the next installment of the Civilization series, Civilization 7, will land on PC and console on February 11, 2025.

The studio invited members of the gaming press to try Civilization 7 at its Maryland offices. PC Gamer's Editor-in-Chief, Tyler Wilde, writes that an old leather desk chair and a similarly aged PC and CRT monitor are on display in the building, looking slightly out of place.

The reason for the reverence is that Sid Meier, the man who created Civilization over three decades ago, did so sitting in that chair and using that computer.

Firaxis learning and development manager Pete Murray told Wilde that the PC is a Compaq Deskpro 386. Incredibly, it cost $10,000 at the time, which would be more than $23,000 today.

The machine contains 640 KB of usable RAM, an architectural limitation of IBM-compatible PCs at the time. There's also expanded memory, and Murray said it contains "16 MB of memory," which appears to be the model's upper limit. There's also a Sound Blaster audio card, naturally, though the specific model is not mentioned.

What's surprising is that the PC was still bootable as of last year, though it did require buying some parts from eBay and "creative salvage" from Firaxis' IT department. The hard drive is almost dead, but Murray said there's a pre-release version of the original Civilization on the PC that's still playable.

MicroProse, formed by Meier, Bill Stealey, and Andy Hollis in 1982, was the original developer of Civilization. Meier left the company and formed Firaxis with two others in 1996, apparently taking the PC and chair with him.

In a 2019 Ars Technica documentary video, Meier said he'd saved two of the Compaq Deskpro 386 computers, but one of them exploded when he tried to boot it up due to the dust in the power supply.

Thanks, PC Gamer

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What's surprising is that the PC was still bootable as of last year

What's really surprising is that the machine hasn't self-destructed on it's way into the history of Compcraq's junk piles, as they there were some of the worst made machines of their time, with crappy, bottom barrel parts, most of which were proprietary & produced only for a particular model run, then poooof, they moved on to their next mass-produced pos model and parts for the previous model ceased to exist from that point forward.....

And back then, it seemed like they released some new models every 3 months, so that made the nightmarish parts fiascos even worse...

I managed a pc store back in the 90's, and out of the 12 brands we sold, we had way more returns & refunds on Compcraq's than all the other 11 brands COMBINED...

Hell I remember salvaging & installing parts from several other returned models to try & get one unit or another working so our customers could keep the one they bought & not have to deal with Compcraq's customer (non) service dept...who, just like the guy from Mission Impossible, immediately disavowed any knowledge of how their machines were built or how to fix them or get repair parts for them...

Seems like a miracle that Sid somehow got his hands on one that wasn't complete garbage and used it like he did...
 
What's really surprising is that the machine hasn't self-destructed on it's way into the history of Compcraq's junk piles, as they there were some of the worst made machines of their time, with crappy, bottom barrel parts, most of which were proprietary & produced only for a particular model run, then poooof, they moved on to their next mass-produced pos model and parts for the previous model ceased to exist from that point forward.....

And back then, it seemed like they released some new models every 3 months, so that made the nightmarish parts fiascos even worse...

I managed a pc store back in the 90's, and out of the 12 brands we sold, we had way more returns & refunds on Compcraq's than all the other 11 brands COMBINED...

Hell I remember salvaging & installing parts from several other returned models to try & get one unit or another working so our customers could keep the one they bought & not have to deal with Compcraq's customer (non) service dept...who, just like the guy from Mission Impossible, immediately disavowed any knowledge of how their machines were built or how to fix them or get repair parts for them...

Seems like a miracle that Sid somehow got his hands on one that wasn't complete garbage and used it like he did...

I definitely take your point. But like PCs today, using more expensive components generally results in a longer lifespan. If it cost $10k there's a good chance it had a lot of upgraded components and was thus less likely to fail.
 
What's really surprising is that the machine hasn't self-destructed on it's way into the history of Compcraq's junk piles...I managed a pc store back in the 90's, and out of the 12 brands we sold, we had way more returns & refunds on Compcraq's than all the other 11 brands COMBINED...
Your timeline is skewed. Compaq beat IBM to market with the first 32-bit 386 PCs, and they were at the time hands down the best machines on the planet, far exceeding the quality and performance of the no-name clone vendors that existed at the time. At the time this machine was sold (1991), Compaq was likely outselling all those other 11 brands combined. Compaq also led the so-called "Gang of Nine" clone vendors into decimating IBM's proprietary Micro Channel architecture with the first major "open industry" standard of EISA.

Success wasn't kind to Compaq, though, and by latter half of the 1990s it was indeed suffering both from QC and its own proprietary-hardware issues.
 
"but one of them exploded when he tried to boot it up due to the dust in the power supply" What a dummy, any tech knows you have to replace all the capacitors in over 20year old electronics!! Just got through replacing the capacitors in my Yaesu FT-101E Ham rig built in 1979!!😍😍
 
And people complain about PC being expensive today. My first PC was a Commodore 128 in 1985, with the Commodore 1084 monitor, the Commodore 1581 3.5” floppy drive, Commodore 1541 5¼" floppy drive it cost well over $1000. Using the base price of $1500 with tax, that same PC would cost $4,384.85 today. LOL!
 
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The later model Compaqs were junk as you said. I've seen a Compaq 486 and it was built like a tank. I think you are right about them using some one-off components, but to some extent it was out of necessity -- they made dual processor 486s (and I think even a dual 386) that (if I recall) required fully custom hardware for cache coherency and etc., there was no off-the-shelf chips to do this.

And indeed, 16MB is the max on the 386. It had 32-bit virtual addressing but 24-bit physical, enough for 16MB. (And actually the "IBM SLC2" 486 was a souped up 386 and had the same limitation -- as I found out the hard way. I had a motherboard where I popped a VESA Local Bus video card into it, and found out the combo did not work right at all since the video card memory was mapped above 16MB and the CPU could not access it.)

(Edit: I found out the 386SX had the 16MB limit; the 386DX had the proper 32 bits of address lines for a full 4GB address space. Apparently IBM based this "486 SLC2" off a 386SX and not even a 386DX (it was essentially a 386 that'd fit in a 486 socket, and I certanly wasn't aware at the time that the 386DX and 386SX had different addressing limits. No wonder the 486SLC2 was so much cheaper than a real 486. Bleh.)

That said *extended* (XMS -- eXtended Memory Standard) memory was directly accesible by the processor, given the age it would have had at least 16 SIMMs, and possibly used 64 256KB SIMMs toj get the full 16MB.

The other option is it actually WAS expanded memory (EMS - Expanded Memory Standard). Every system I ever used, this was provided by "EMM386" (or equivalent in FreeDOS), it made the extended memory also available as expanded memory for compatibility with programs that expected to use EMS. This was before my time, I've never seen one, but they actually made expanded memory cards, add in cards with RAM on them. They'd grab a 16-64KB area between 640KB and 1MB, you'd load an EMS driver to use the card (instead of EMM386.SYS, the card would come with some other .SYS file to load), and programs could then access the additional memory 64KB at a time. The CPU itself was still only accessing memory in the first 1MB so this expanded memory could be used even on a 8088/8086 or 286, let alone the 386.

If you want a laugh -- price out what you have now and see what that amount of computing power cost back in the day. The example I've seen is the IBM supercomputer that came out in 2001, 12 teraflops, that cost $110 million. This is about equal to an Xbox Series X that came out in 2020 for... I don't know whatever they cost, under $1000.

I got my Coffee Lake 6C/12T system with 32GB RAM for like $180 used and a GTX1650 in there (which I got when prices were high, paid about $200 for it). The CPU's rated for about 0.3 Teraflops and GPU about 6 Teraflops (so about $3 million for the CPU and about $55 million for the GPU more or less in terms of processing power.) RAM was over $1 a MB too so don't forget to set a side like $50,000 or more for the RAM.

I have an 18TB disk, a 40GB disk in 2000 cost about $7 a GB, that's $126,000 for disks. But that'd also take 450 disks so really you'd be spending $100,000s on a large storage array, and the storage array would take server drives rather than the inexpensive IDE disks, so you'd probably be over $500,000 in reality.

Before that, my first Linux box was a 386-sx 16 with 4MB RAM... we had an 8088 before that and Atari 8-bitsb before that. I figured my current computer would have cost over *$1 billion* dollars at the kind of pricing that was around when I had my 386.
 
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"but one of them exploded when he tried to boot it up due to the dust in the power supply" What a dummy, any tech knows you have to replace all the capacitors in over 20year old electronics!! Just got through replacing the capacitors in my Yaesu FT-101E Ham rig built in 1979!!😍😍
I agree, but he's a programmer. Having been on both sides of the fence, I knew many a programmer who did not know his/her way around the hardware inside the box.
 
"but one of them exploded when he tried to boot it up due to the dust in the power supply" What a dummy, any tech knows you have to replace all the capacitors in over 20year old electronics!! Just got through replacing the capacitors in my Yaesu FT-101E Ham rig built in 1979!!😍😍
Yeah. I had 2 ~18 year old desktops blow caps in the last year. One was running as a DVR, the other I swapped in from my spares to replace the one that blew caps, and it blew caps shortly later. Retired the hard way! ;) To be honest if I found an ancient PC I'd at least blow out the dust but I'd probably just fire it up to. You can see if the caps blow first, then replace, if it's worth it to do so.
 
And people complain about PC being expensive today. My first PC was a Commodore 128 in 1985, with the Commodore 1084 monitor, the Commodore 1581 3.5” floppy drive, Commodore 1541 5¼" floppy drive it cost well over $1000. Using the base price of $1500 with tax, that same PC would cost $4,384.85 today. LOL!

Kind of a better computer than that PC. I hated all the PC's I use before 95 and even past that until 2000 it wasn't amazing. Why PC's became the standard, in the 80's, is mind boogling.
 
Man, Civ on my 386 was a baws game. I had a special 386. My fathers company upgraded in the late 80's and he brought home a lot of pc parts. He was strict and told me, You want a pc, you will build it your self. It was a dual cpu 386 sx 33mhz with 24mb ram but it could only read 16mb. It went straight 1v1 with my friends 486 dx2
 
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