April 2021 by Daniel B.
My first PC was an NEC Ready 9522. It was a great multimedia computer for its time, circa 1995. It had a 100 MHz Intel Pentium processor (no MMX yet) and came loaded with Microsoft Windows 95. The specs are hazy to me now, but I believe the RAM was 8 MB and I upgraded it myself to 16 MB. Back in those days - and this may still be the case - RAM was a commodity and not necessarily cheap. Upgrading your computer's RAM made an instant noticeable difference in performance.The Ready 9522 came with a nice, big set of speakers, but no subwoofer. Interestingly and somewhat uniquely, the sound card was integrated onto the motherboard. So, I'm not sure the sound card was ever upgradable. It was certainly a quirk of the system.IIRC, the CD-ROM drive was quad-speed (4x) and the dial-up modem was 28.8 Kbps. I also believe the hard drive was 1 GB. The hard drive eventually failed and I had to replace it. I remember using Microsoft ScanDisk and the surface scan ("thorough" option, not "standard") found physical bad sectors on the original HDD. Crazy.I ran all sorts of software, mostly games, on the computer. To name some, but not all, titles:- America Online for Windows 95 (1995)- Descent (1995)- Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994)- Hover! (1995)- McAfee VirusScan (1995)- Microsoft Bob (1995)- Microsoft Encarta '95 (1995) including Mind Maze- Myst (1994)- Norton Utilities for Windows 95 (1995)- Phantasmagoria (1995)- Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure (1994)- Silent Steel (1995)- Shanghai: Great Moments (1995)- You Don't Know Jack (1995)What really wowed me with the PC was full motion video (FMV). Examples include the intro to Shanghai: Great Moments starring Rosalind Chao (youtube.com/watch?v=Ry3f…) and the submarine simulator and interactive movie Silent Steel (youtube.com/watch?v=ZIxR…). I just thought the technology was incredible and intriguing. Even though Silent Steel came with the computer, it didn't work right away. I had to go on the web and download and install an MPEG driver to get it to work. Back in those days, it wasn't easy, especially for a kid, so I considered it a big accomplishment when I was able to get Silent Steel to work. Unfortunately, while the visuals were cool, the game itself wasn't very good.Phantasmagoria, on the other hand, remains one of my favorite PC games to this day. Also, for whatever reason, the MIDI music of Encarta's Mind Maze and the point-and-click graphics have stuck with me: youtube.com/watch?v=hT-V…. The monitor was also NEC brand: an NEC MultiSync 17-inch display. It was heavy and clunky. It turned out to have power issues so we returned it (still under warranty) and got a refurbished monitor shipped to us. It was a good monitor for its time.Our family had other PCs before the Ready 9522. Green screen, DOS, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc. This was the first computer I claimed as my own and spent a lot of time on.NEC was also behind the TurboGrafx-16 video game console. It was known as the PC Engine in Japan. It looked awesome, but I never had one (nor did most people).Finally, if you ever had to call NEC for anything in the 90s, you might recognize this music: youtube.com/watch?v=6g4d….
