161–170 of 171 posts
Heh, I remember using my first machine, a 486 for a long time after it was obsolete and reading system requirements like, what do you mean pentium recommended and why the hell do you need 16Mb of RAM. It's interesting to reflect that the old games like Settlers, HoMM 2 or Warcraft 2, that are no worse than modern ones gameplay wise, used to run on something that is so vastly underpowered by modern standards the numbe…
It was pre-internet obviously so obtaining software was very difficult. For years when I was learning assembler I was using a so called "monitor cartridge" that did simple assembly/disassembly, but it didn't support labels and such. I could read about software like "Meta Assembler" that let you use labels and variables and think "wow, I could do so much stuff with that..."
My first PC was sometime in late 90s. A Celeron 233MHz with Windows 95. I wasn't a huge fan of Windows back then. I remember when one of the pc magazines I got had RedHat Linux install CDs. I liked it from the start. The fact my software only modem and Lexmark printer didn't work got me into kernel programming :-)
Fun to think of it now, but I prefer 2026 a 100x :-)
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Audio, video, and 3D animation are still extremely processor intensive. You need something beefy if you're serious/professional about those. Office tools and web browsing are less demanding.
> You need something beefy if you're serious/professional about those But you can get way better results with the lowest end computers than you could years ago. Back in the 90s my grandfather used 3DS Max to map out his future apartment's rooms and start planning furniture, using renders to get an idea of how sunshine would look like at different times, etc. At the time, he did this on an expensive 486 that would tak…
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> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me. Gotta tack on to this thread showing appreciation for parents. We could never afford new computers in the 90s, but luckily my dad could bring home obsolete equipment from work. We were thus always at least a generation behind. I remember my friend's Pentium feeling like sci-fi compared to our 386, but my goodness it completely molded my life! Later, towards t…
My grade school friend got a Nintendo and I wanted one so badly. My parents got me an Apple IIGS instead. I was a little disappointed about the Nintendo, but saw there were plenty of games on the thing, and of course it could do so much more than play games. That turned out to be a very good move on their part.
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Pentium is a bad processor? It's way faster than 486, especially on FP it's not even close.
The original Pentiums (socket 4, 60 or 66 MHz) had the infamous floating point division bug, had underwhelming perf for anything not FP bound (most things), ran hot, and were too expensive for what you got. A DX/4 100 was nearly always a more rational choice. Second gen Pentiums, starting with the 75 MHz, were great.
The FOOF bug was actually discovered on the first step of the later 90 MHz Pentium (which was released with the 100 MHz Pentium, which also suffered from the bug). However this was corrected with a hardware stepping. The 75 MHz Pentium was actually released as part of this later stepping, and it was a binned 90/100 MHz part. There were no first step 75 MHz Pentiums.
My first computer was a 486sx 25Mhz [1] The rig (tower, monitor, etc.) cost around $3,000. We got the SX instead of the DX because it was $500 cheaper. And I wanted a 16bit sound card. (Note that this is in 1992 dollars. Today it would cost over $7,000) My parents didn't have a lot of money, but my great-grand father passed and they used some of the inheritance to buy the computer. I was instantly hooked. In hindsigh…
Mine was the 486 DX 2/66.
The trouble with the 486 SX 25 was IMO that a fast 386 easily beat it. I was part of the demo scene back then and wanted to compete with the likes of Dust, Future Crew.
And: Doom! It could be displayed and run in 800x600 if I remember correctly on a DX 2/66.
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Pentium is a bad processor? It's way faster than 486, especially on FP it's not even close.
The Pentium was great, but the 60 and 66MHz versions were not liked, they ran way too hot.
It comes over as so incredibly insane to me that people from the late 80s (people working with computers! Reporting on them!) would look at their current technology stack and basically go: "I have no idea whatsoever what else we can do with these things, we've reached the end" The lack of imagination is just disturbing.
On the other end, you have people who have no idea how insanely fast computers are today, and how little computing power is "really" needed for most things that computer users do - or how much you can do with one average machine ("Oh no, 1000 requests per second - let's erect another rube goldberg machine to handle that!").
Anyway a while ago I was reading an article authored by a guy who lived through the same era as I grew up laughing at modern developers whom he had asked to size a machine to add all the integers from 1 to 100. Setting aside that 7 year old Gauss found the closed form of that sum (the triangular number formula) in about ten minutes and got the correct result of 5050 without any of the arithmetic busywork, it’s totally insane what some of the answers involved… with some involving the terms “Big Data” (yes, it was that era of hype, before “Crypto” and “AI”) and some even (allegedly) mentioning ‘clusters’. I really wish I could find you a link.
Raise your hand if you have been there and: - tinkered for HOURS to get enough EMM/XMM memory by tweaking Config.Sys & Co to get whatever game running (and having dedicated boot options configured, because you could unload some drivers from mem and could then run other games) :-D
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Was it necessarily a dead end? Considering the ways Intel and later AMD managed to upgrade/re-invent x86 that until x64 still retained so much of the x86 instruction encoding/heritage (heck, even x64 retains some of the instruction encoding characteristics). Had the Amiga retained relevance for longer and without a push for PowerPC I don't see a reason why 68k wouldn't have been extended. Heck the FPGA Apollo 68080 w…
The 68060 is pretty good to be fair, but it never ended up being widely used and Motorola definitely saw PPC as the future. Maybe if these theoretical new 68k Amigas became a huge market hit they could have taken the arch further and it could have remained competitive, but all the other 68k shops had already pretty much given up or moved on already (Apple was already going PPC, Sun went SPARC, NeXT gave up on their 6…
Remember, Intel also barked up the wrong tree with Itanium for 64bit and didn't really let go until AMD forced their hand with x64.