The First Acer Aspire! $2,500 Windows 95 Desktop PC from 1995

The original emerald green Acer Aspire is a 90s classic! A once-common PC that has become a desired rarity for its styling by Hartmut Esslinger's Frog Design group. And its specs were respectable in 1995 with a 100MHz Pentium, 16MB RAM, 2MB PCI graphics, Sound Blaster Vibra 16 and Windows 95. So let's run the factory restoration CD and explore what it can do!

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● Archive of the 575LB Resource CD and floppy:

● Background music licensed from:

00:00 Acer in 1995
02:38 this Aspire 575LB
04:35 monitor, keyboard, mouse
06:16 award winning style
07:50 motherboard I/O
08:22 inside the case
09:55 hard disk issues
11:02 restoring the HDD
12:18 first startup
13:45 ACE Desktop
15:40 graphics memory
16:35 sound, MIDI test
17:10 voice control
18:00 City Streets
18:55 ISPs, online apps
19:44 TripMaker
20:21 so much is installed
21:14 Asteroids, Fury 3, WEP
22:32 Jazz Jackrabbit Trilogy
23:33 Acer software library
24:23 Let's Explore the Airport
25:50 Pod by UbiSoft
28:15 Duke Nukem 3D
29:28 Tyrian
30:00 value in the slowness

#LGR #retro #computer #Acer #windows

[arlandi]

for me, the hard disk noises are how the computer tells you, its working very hard.

[jeremytimko]

My family had this computer. I remember spending countless hours playing Command and Conquer Red Alert on this thing.

[CarrowMind]

Buying this for $2500 in 1995 was like investing in a car, this was for the entire family to use and wouldn't be replaced for 4-5 years at the very least!

If you had a big family with lots of siblings, then you had alloted "PC Time" every night after dinner and before bed time, each sibling getting between 1-3 hours! It was strictly off-limits to the kids during the day since that's when mom/dad needed it for work!

Since hard drive space was at a premium, you were not allowed to install more than a couple of programs each, which means that you were most likely stuck playing the same video games for months at a time. If you were lucky enough to have the internet so early on, you had to pray that your time with it wasn't interrupted by phone calls, and begged your parents to allow you to use the PC between 6:30 and 8pm as that was dinner time and the "golden zone" when people never called because they were having dinner themselves!

Family PC culture was still a thing all the way up until 2010 or so when PC prices went down dramatically, and the rise in popularity of smart phones negated the need to share one PC for the entire family, but until then it was an interesting time for the PC!

[biggersmaller]

This made me smile. My family was robbed on Thanksgiving of 1995 and our 486 Compaq was stolen as a result. With the insurance money, we bought the grey 75 mhz variant of this PC in February of 1996. It came with a fun “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” adventure game, along with demos for Tyrian and Jazz Jackrabbit. A a 12 year old, it was perfect for getting into PC games that were from the early 90s I missed.

[infinityzr]

this shade of green and if you can imagine it's cousin in purple were certified colors of the mid 90s

[dotisopropyl]

12:44 “I’d like to congratulate you on successfully setting up your Acer computer…”

The moment an NPC actually acknowledges Clint’s quest of P/N and S/N lookups, CD and floppy imaging, bad sector allocating, waiting and retrying. 😂

[kellyngrey]

I'm a PhD historian.
Future historians that specialize their focus on computer technology will absolutely be watching your videos to incorporate into their research and I kid you not, you'll be in someone's footnotes and bibliography.

[MrWolfSnack]

Due to everyone regarding them as E-WASTE and there being NO COLLECTORS [in the mid 2000s and later], you would be AMAZED at how rare a common basic PC will become due to everyone collectively throwing them in the trash in the 90s and 00's and everyone regarding them as garden variety old junk. I just got a Gateway FX-series desktop for $30. You can not obtain this PC anywhere. It took me 6 years to find one and it's a total wreck but it's all complete, just in about 6 billion parts and missing the PSU. The original motherboard is in it which I am very lucky for, those are a $250 part alone.

[PosyMusic]

Ahhh, I cut this out of a magazine back then… For the design. Thanks for making it come alive!

[scoliosis]

I’m 20 and got into retro computing recently, and a coworker at my job still had one of these in his basement, it was his first computer! It now has a new home and I’m in the process of restoring it fully to its original glory!

[amust]

Seeing Pod struggle on a machine that's only 2 years old is a good reminder how fast processors generationally improved back then. Each new generation seemed to make the previous one completely obsolete.

[andrewosborne]

I watched this while waiting for my wife, she was having surgery today. Thanks for keeping me company

[DudokX]

You are telling me that "Frog Design" designed a green PC? lol

Also that introduction video is so 90s, "Information Super Highway." wow

[muratveli]

Almost looks like an early Silicon Graphics computer.

[hotgarbagellc]

If there was ever a video I was waiting for, it's this one, and I've been watching LGR for years. This (or very similar) was the first computer I had any experience with. It belonged to my grandmother. She was an Assembly programmer at IBM for a long time.

I can remember sitting on her lap when I was around 3-4 years old, while she used the machine. I also remember tanking the Windows install not long after I found myself with unsupervised access to it. lol. Sorry Grandma!

Clint, seriously, thank you. Really. More than I can put into words. Way more. This was an amazing walk down memory lane. That deep teal, man, it just brought the memories right to the surface. Makes me smile. Thank you man, if my Grandma was still with us, we'd both be smiling.

[henrysymes]

The Windows 95 startup chime at 13:32 has never suited a machine better.

[RedTopProductions]

I had that same system as a kid! The tower version though. I still have the CDs for all those apps you showed, the CDs did come with the PC bundle originally. I can upload them to the internet archive but I'd assume they're already there. Infopedia blew my mind seeing it for the first time, I couldn't imagine a digital encyclopedia and wondered how so much data could fit on our PC. It aided with my school work so much vs. spending time in the library doing research the old timey way.

[tommylaszloproductions]

@12:37

It's so nice of the Black Mesa Transit System lady to help you setup your computer.

[siliconinsect]

I saved a green monitor from e-waste in the early 2000's because it looked cool. Used it on the bench for testing until recently when the flyback blew. Loved the analog controls and speakers as it was connected to many systems on a daily basis.

Great vid as usual!

[Bjerrk]

Evokes memories of going into my older brother's room to play Quake and drink way too much coke