'We had 16 megahertz CPUs, 640k of RAM, floppy disks': John Carmack reflects on the hardware that made Wolfenstein 3D

Founded on February 1, 1991, id Software is responsible for the creation of Doom, Quake, and it picked up the mantle of the Wolfenstein series with Wolfenstein 3D. To celebrate the company's 35-year anniversary, and a day late, John Carmack has posted a video to X reflecting on how things have changed.

"Every day that I sit down to my AI research work, doing petaflops of tensor calculations, I've got above me a reminder of the old days at the dawn of id software."

Behind him sits a sequence of three posters from Nick Derington's 'Ode to id'. This series of pictures recaps moments from Doom and Wolfenstein 3D and is placed in glass frames, above the three monitors Carmack presumably uses every day.

"We had 16 megahertz CPUs, 640k of RAM, floppy disks, 320 by 200 graphics. It was an age of constraints. And code, art, and design had to work closely together to find the very best corner of this tight little box that we were working within. I think we did a pretty good job back then, and I'm grateful that the legacy lives on to this day. Thank you all for playing"

What Carmack is referring to with these PCs are the standard MS-DOS rigs they were using during the development of Wolfenstein 3D. Carmack and the team moved over to higher-specced NeXT workstations—from the company founded by Steve Jobs—for the development of Doom, and he said in 2016, "using the NeXT was an eye-opener, and it was quickly clear to me that it had a lot of tangible advantages for us."

Doom itself has become a standard for testing hardware, with it running with a motherboard BIOS, a pregnancy test, and within Doom itself. This isn't purely because it's easy to run, but also because it's iconic in playstyle and look: that merging of code, art, and design Carmack was talking about.

Nowadays, John Carmack runs AI research company Keen, which led a $20 million investment round in 2022. In that same year, Carmack said the goal of Keen was "AGI or bust, by way of Mad Science!" At the time, Carmack was also a consultant on VR over at Meta, but since appears to have stepped down and away from games on a professional level.