Computers bend to user needs.
Some people think certain computers, such as Apple or Commodore, stayed exactly as they were sold. This is not true.
My Commodore 64 was expanded with extra RAM, extra ROM, and the Graphic Environment Operating System. My Apple Macintosh LC II was fitted with a third party aftermarket floating point accelerator card. Neither machine stayed as it was sold.
Likewise, many retro PC fans imagine a computer as a frozen moment in time where every part and every piece of software comes from the same catalogue release. That is how computers looked in shop displays, but it is not how I observed anyone using a PC at home.
My home PC was frequently reconfigured by being patched, upgraded, and adapted to my ever changing desires.
Most companies that sold PCs wanted two things:
Because of this, they usually chose the cheapest graphics card that worked at the point of sale. In the mid‑1990s this often meant cards like:
These cards were good enough for Windows and basic games. They are found in computers were built to run what was shown in the shop, not games that would be released a year later.
Most buyers did not plan to upgrade their computer right away. If they knew they needed better hardware on day one, they would have bought a different machine.
What usually happened was:
Upgrades happened because of new needs, not because people thought they could build a perfect future‑proof machine.
Reality meant many home computers lived through more than one hardware generation:
Today these combinations may look strange or unbalanced, but at the time they were normal. The graphics card was usually the first thing to change, and it may have changed more than once.
Old computer magazines often described new graphics cards as:
“An upgrade for your existing PC.”
They expected readers to keep most of their system and only replace what was necessary.
Most people did not plan to build a PC with a slower 3D card plus a faster one.
But these combinations were common because users added 3D accelerators after they needed them. Once that happened, the PC no longer fit into a single era.
There is more than one way for a computer to be historically accurate.
Some people like to build computers with strict rules, using only parts from a certain time and place. Those builds are useful for:
They mirror a possible configuration, but home computers rarely stayed in one configuration.
Refusing to patch is often less historically accurate.
Many old games did not work perfectly when they were first released and some did not run at all without patches or hardware changes.
Having a game failing to start was not an unrealistic state. It’s like today, where software sometimes crashes and loses work. Both are failure states. Both are historically accurate.
Applying patches from magazines was period accurate behaviour.
Instead of one perfect moment, a computer moves through different states:
Each state is real and historically valid.
Home Gaming Computers were never frozen in time when they left the factory. Treating them as if they were is a misunderstanding of what they were designed to do.
Computing Culture. There Is No Such Thing as an “Era-Pure” Home Gaming PC.
Computing Culture Essays, 2026.
https://github.com/computing-culture/essays