Old computers - how did they do it?

Chucking out some old computers the other day, we found a 386! with this "FPU chip" add-on!! Looks like it was originally a bog-standard intel 386 40mhz computer, without the FPU, then later they may have added this chip to it... but what I want to know is:

How could people have used computers so slow?!? I just don't get how it could be possible! especially now when everybody has at least 1ghz, 256mb ram, 20gb HD etc! (my slowest computer that i use is a p2-350 - as a firewall)

http://www.uploadit.org/files2/171103-cyrix_fasmath.jpg

Put it this way. In those days - That chip was probably pretty fast :)

Its called a maths co-processor, and you can't judge yesterdays computers by todays standards.

When i went from a 386DX33 to a 486sx25 it was a huge performance increase. (yet it didn't have a maths co-processor)

It was amazing, and even more so when i went from 486sx25 to a 486dx100. (to play the original C&C). Those where the days when you could install a complete game with 20mb of disk space.

TiG

given that my 1st 486sx only had a 120 mb HD - 20 meg was a lot !

My 1st computer was an Amiga 1200 with an o3o/822 CPU 2mb Chip and 16Mb Fast RAM and a 120Mb drive so all you PC types can moan all you like :P

here's a great trip down memory lane :

http://cpu-museum.de/

i think i started with a 486 dx50, with an 80mb hard drive, and win 3.11, and i think i managed to just squeeze windows 95 on it :)

Quote:

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Originally posted by www.josh.org.uk


How could people have used computers so slow?!?

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Easy!

Turn it on - go make a cup of coffee, fiddle with your paperclips.
Open word/whatever you might use at the time - make another cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette, play with your paperclips.
Type your document
Send it to the dot matrix printer (or variant) - Make a cup of coffee, have a sausage roll.
Come back to find that Windows 95/3.x froze whilst saving your document - "Accidentally" spill coffee allover the keyboard.
Go home after a hard days work

:cool:

Quote:

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Originally posted by Moby-Dick
given that my 1st 486sx only had a 120 mb HD - 20 meg was a lot !

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heh, by 486sx time i had 261mb disk :)
386dx only came with 89mb tho..

and 20mb was for a big game. UFO enemy unknown one of the best games ever would run off the CD in them days :)

I remember paying £200+ for a CDrom and soundblaster pro 8 bit sound card. OMG those where the days. (even in those days i was an early adopter :D )

TiG

Quote:

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Originally posted by gamezfreak
Put it this way. In those days - That chip was probably pretty fast :)

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I dunno about that - the co-processor says cyrix on it ;)

You have to remember that most software did less and needed less (CPU power and storage). Though my first HD based machine (Amiga 1200) felt *far* faster than the Windoze PCs of the day.

They wernt slow, Software moves ( or should ) at the same speed as performance, back then having a 2.4Ghz p4 with a gig of ram and a 9800 pro wouldnt run Pong much better :)
Point being, they are only slow if you run newer software on it, they can handle software made in there time period as well as pcs made in this time period can handle software from this time period

That and software back then was better optomized. The squeezed every last oz of performace out.

Take my Amiga for instance. Only uses a 25mhz 68040 and 840MB HD, and 8MB RAM, yet it boots in less than 2 seconds to a full GUI.

As was said, software was better optimised then and had less bulk.

NS

In 10 years time a P4 3.06 will be considered as slow as a tortoise... Put it that way.

Tbh Win3.1 runs pretty quickly on those old machines.
True, you can't do much, but the OS runs well. 95 will be considerably less fast though. It's slow as a bitch on my 100MHz laptop with 8MB ram.

mmm, BBC model B was my first computer. 0wnage. Probably before most of you lot were born.

Lol, I have an old 386 laptop under my bed, quite possibly as old as a dinosaur. Has NO o/s on it, but runs wolfenstien 3D quite well! the unit is HUGE.

My first computer was a Tandy TL-2 8MHz 286 with 640K of RAM! It had the ultra-amazing 20MB HD, and hummed along with DOS 6.22 as the final OS. Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon and Test Drive / TD II / TD III were the order of the day, and so was MS Word. Norton Commander managed all my major file ins and outs, as it was an ANSI-based GUI for DOS file management. After that, I took a lengthy gaming and OS hiatus to use consoles-only for gaming, and came back to the computer fold about 6 months before I went back to school... got a Celeron 466 MHz Mendocino core with 32MB of RAM (or was that 64?...) and 2-8Mb adjustable SiS video. I think I spent the first 2 weeks just marvelling at how fast the thing was. And the 6GB HD! Astounding!

In between the two comps, I had used evreything from my first "Turbo'ed" 16 MHz 286, to 386s and 486s (SX and DX flavoured, DX4 - the first "true quad-pumped" Intel), and eventually the P1s... 60, 66, and 75 MHz flavours. I recall being rather disappointed with them, especially with the FPU bug.

Later, I remember astonishing friends by actively rippping my one friend's P1-233MMX Aptiva apart cause I was bored one day... they all got a lesson in hardware!

Now, in this age of P4EEs and AMD Bartons and FX-51s, I sit here, still marvelling at how far we've come, and still realize we're in the infancy of computers. Every time I go to play any game, or open a certain app... I smile. When the pop-up box of doom appears, I chuckle. I just say... "Remember when the Tandy would take forever to load Test Drive, or writing to a 720K floppy was an arduous task? This isn't so bad!".

Hang in there, the ride has just begun!

yep, people actually used to write programs in assembly language back in those days. these days its a lot cheaper for everyone concerned (except us) to put the cost of running the software onto getting powerful hardware, and the hardware companies love that too!

Nox

Erm.....anyone remember loading programs by cassette??

Commodore 64 anyone?

:D

ive got an old VIC20... which i believe was a commodore? i think?? lol

Reading all this is like taking a trip down memory lane again.

I started young had a BBC model B when i was 4, even learnt to program in basic on that. Think ive still got it somewhere, garden shed probably.

First proper PC at 11 was a tiny little Zenith Data System 386sx 20, 4mb ram, 42mb HD and a supper fast ;) 256kb onboard GFX.
It worked a treat was really good, guess what still got that too.

Had loads of odd bits and pieces after that. Real shame i had that system for a good few years and it ran nearly everything. You cant do that these days 4months and somethings too slow

Quote:

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Originally said by Bill Gates back in the day

640K ought to be enough for anybody!

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My first "computer" was an ATARI 130 XL with a California Access Drive and a Star lc-5 printer. When I wanted to play a game from a cassette, i would set it to start reading lock the door tight, come back ina about 30 minutes praying that it didnt lock up. These were gewd times! then came my AMIGA 600 and my first PC... I consider AMiga teh biggest jump though.....

Well, my first pc (not counting the speccies ;) ) was a 486sx 25Mhz beast.

Sadly, we only got 2mb of ram, only a few months before Doom came out - not only the Most Important PC Game Ever (at the time) but one that shocked everyone by demanding an unheard of 4mb. 4mb of ram to play a game! Lazy coding, I tell you ;) If Gods would play fine in 640k then anything should!

Then I sold my bike to buy a soundblaster pro... Anyone remember the software Creative used to send out? Dr Sbaitso, the talking psychiatrist proggie ? :D

Dr sbaitso, that was a comical piece of software, spent a few hours laughing at that.

Quote:

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Originally posted by www.josh.org.uk
How could people have used computers so slow?!? I just don't get how it could be possible!

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How can people use software so bloated these days? :D

'Back in the Day' that would have been an adequate machine to run something like AutoCAD 10, a pro CAD package.

But back in the day, we didn't need to see a file flap and fly onscreen from one folder to another to know it was done - a DOS promt did the trick with less overhead.

Amusingly, a 486 with Win 3.1, Word 6 and Pegsus Mail probably still does (more than) what 80% of the home computing population needs, at a useable speed!

Its true, all software thesedays is bloatware, look at the actual differences between Win98 and WinXP, now look at the system requirements, disk space usage alone is a joke...

take a look at workbench (amiga) basically a wimp environment at 220k, comparable to win 3.1 on 6 discs, comparable to win 95 on cd -> win98 -> xp. bascially does exactly the same thing... driver files alone are clocking in at 20+mb, 100 times larger than an entire OS !!!

Nox

Well after my Amiga 500,

I picked up a LuckyGoldStar (before it was LG)

386-SX25 with a 80mb Hardisk.

Jezee that machine was great, Dune, Dune2, Monkey Island, Battletech Creseant Hawks Revenge, Wing Commander and the mission packs (even the original X-wing a few year later), PowerMonger etc.

Those were the days when games were coming on leaps and bounds or it seemed that way...

Amiga 500
386-SX25
486-DX25?? (needed a DX to play Links!)
486-DX80
Pentium 90
Pentium 120
K6-200
P2-400
Athlon 1500

Now my humble 1Ghz Notebook, and that is two years old.

The best machine? gotta be the 386 under dos, once you got the Autoexec.bat and config.sys working, I never seemed to have serious problems running a game unlike these days.

Amstrad CPC6128 my my first serious PC :cool:

how can you class an amstrad as serious? :P

Nox

I had a Commodore Vic20 ;)

First computer, I had a 386. My mum got it from work. A huge tower case, weighted about a tonne.... had a nice carry handle (for a crane to lift it maybe)

It ran Doom :) which was extreme, however i completed it but never got to any credits, i killed some of those fat horse things in the last level, then everything blacked out.....

Anyway, that was hit by the millium bug, i thought i could aviod it by putting the clock in windows *i forget which* back to 1989.....sadly it didnt work. ;)

Will

the first pc i owned was a 486 cant remember what speed, all i know was thit it was slow, however, orevious to that i used an amiga 500 which by then was slow as hell, were just spoiled now with the speed of PC's. I can remember having to wait 10 mins for word to open.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Nox
how can you class an amstrad as serious? :P

Nox

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Hey - CPM ownz DOS man!

The amstrad was a very tidy bit of kit in its day. 128K bank switchable RAM and a built in floppy drive, colour monitor in all!

It was fairly expensive too (Im from New Zealand so back then it was worth a lot and we didnt have any other Amstrad products)

I loved that little machine. I performed my first overclocking experiment on it and replaced the 4MHz Z80 with an 8MHz one. Dont think it worked thught because it was crystal locked :rolleyes: :P :D

could go back to a Spectrum or Amstrad but that would be cheating? they were more toys compared to a computer.

My Commodore 64 (had 64Kb of ram/cache) pwns joo all. I had hundreds of hacked/pirated games. I would call the "servers" directly BBS back then, there were a few in my town. 2 of them even had harddrives!! with tons of games. I had demigod access to the hidden subdirectories. For the coolest games & programs. (my friend would freak and call long distance & overseas and download european hacked titles) It would take me all night long to download a game that took up most of a floppy. First I was at 300 baud with a modem that I dialed on an old fashion phone, listened for the other computer to pick up, then unplugged the handset and put the wire in to the modem. Then later I got an incredible 1200 baud modem that even dialed itself.

Games to name a few: Rampage, Conan (took 2 sides of a floppy!), Outrun, HyperBall, all the old arcade games(pacman, pitfall, poleposition, galaxa, etc), Summer Games, WinterGames 1 & 2, Zork,

We would use blitz to hide the basic progam that would be the game menu for each floppy with mulitiple games.

I would lug my 5 1/2 floppy drive (the size of a modern CPU) over to my friends house so we could make copies faster.

I used CrackerJacks to fix the copied games that wouldnt work after copying (fixes the missing piece).

100 ?"who rules?"
200 input s$
300 if s$="chris" then 500
400 goto 100
500 ?"damn straight, I own you bitch"

& that is why old computers ran well.... (see my program above! :) )

I first had a cpc 464.

When i left finished university to start my career, the company i first worked for had 400mhz machines running windows 3.1. THIS WAS IN 2000! I had to take serious backwards steps to learn 3.1.

Quote:

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Originally posted by starside
I first had a cpc 464.

When i left finished university to start my career, the company i first worked for had 400mhz machines running windows 3.1. THIS WAS IN 2000! I had to take serious backwards steps to learn 3.1.

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In my first job out of Uni (in 1998) everyone used proper old-style terminals (IBM mainframe - I was a COBOL programmer for my sins). Only the managers had the 'luxury' of proper PCs and terminal emulators...

Quote:

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Originally posted by www.josh.org.uk
How could people have used computers so slow?!?

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By using something called windows 3.1 ;)

You ever seen it running on anything new-ish? It beats the rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish outta WinXP for speed.
And they call this progress :rolleyes:

Dragon32-->Speccy +2A-->Amiga 500-->Amiga 1200-->Various PC mutations--->Barty 2500+ etc etc

:D

My miggy still rocks, but I've not got the space for it anymore, but when I do I'll probably fetch it down and stuff linux on it or something :D

First ever computer - Sinclair Spectrum 48k (rubber keys!).

Then on to:
Commodore 64
Amiga


Then, at age 11, my dad found I was tinkering with his PC more than he was, so he said I could have it so long as I forfeited the games computers I had - I took him up on that and I never looked back :)

IBM PC XT 8086 4.77MHz, 640k RAM, 20Mb HDD (the kind you had to park the heads on manually before shutting down the computer), EGA 16-colour monitor capable of an amazing 640x480

Upgraded the CPU to a "Turbo XT" one at 10MHz, got a maths co-processor to help me generate Mandelbrots quicker

Later got an MCGA colour monitor - 256 colours at 320x200 resolution! The future is now!

Got Leisure Suit Larry and finished that in 7 hours flat, even figured out the key-combo to bypass the age verification questions :)


80286 12MHz came next, 1Mb RAM, 2 x ESDI HDDs (the size of house bricks) - a "proper" 16 bit PC at last!
Can you say "VGA graphics!"? :D


...80386 33MHz, upgraded to a DX2/66...

...80486 DX4/100...

...Pentium 100... (first student loan :p, by now I think I was up to 32Mb RAM and a 120Mb HDD hehe)

...Pentium 200 MMX... (I need a FAN for my CPU?!? that's insane!)

...P2 266MHz...

...P3 500MHz...

...P3 1GHz...

...AthlonXP 1600+ and P4 2GHz (current systems)

I've had a couple of dabbles with AMD CPUs somewhere around the time of the first Pentium CPU, but that really put me off anything non-Intel for a LONG time.

I absolutely love tinkering with PCs and upgrading - these days the damn things are so complex they are tempremental because of it - I swear the old PCs you could toss down stairs, remove bits while they were powered on, etc and they would carry on trooping :D

There is a big difference between a fully optimised compacted
operating system to be stored in ROM and a software based
operating system to be loaded into ram.

You find you get a lot more extra's on those disks installs than
you find in ROMs i.e. no soltitare game and all the other odds
and sods.

I totally disassembled windows 3.1 taking out all the rubbish
to leave the core 3.1 operating system and the file manager
all on one 3.5" floppy disk, made a great recovery system.


First computer was a BBC Model B wonder how many remember
the first GUI interface for the BBC? bet not many it came late on
I was amazed at getting it going and having a graphic calculator
on screen you could drag around with the mouse cursor man it
was amazing for a machine with 32k of Ram.

1st PC was a 386DX40 AMD CPU 8meg of ram, 80 something meg
Quantum Hard-Disk running windows 3.1 it was as speedy as a
fast thing 8.9mips of processing goodness at a cost of £1500 way
back in the days of 1992/1993

The good old days :D

Quote:

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Originally posted by Zathras
mmm, BBC model B was my first computer. 0wnage. Probably before most of you lot were born.

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Apple II in my case, and that was circa 1979.

But the first computer I USED was in, IIRC, 1973 (maybe 72). It was an ICL 1905 mainframe with a couple of DEC PDP-10's as FEP's, if I remember correctly. Program input was via a teletype terminal or via batch submission using optical marked cards, and we were very lucky because we could store programs locally on 7-hole punch tape. I've still got some of those punch tape jobs somewhere.

Any the "kids" that think a 386 was unbelieveably slow ought to have used some of the earlier machines. My first 386 ( a Wyse machine) was a 386/25 with FPU, a 338MB SCSI hard drive, 150MB tape streamer, 16MB ram, VGA grpahics and a 14" colour monitor. That little lot was state of the art and (though I got a discount via contacts) was worth a couple of hundred quid short of £10,000.

I kid you not - ten grand. And that was the THIRD generation of PC I'd owned :D

The thing was, they didn't do as much. You'd be surprised how much CPU power running a GUI like Windows sucks, and the early versions of Windows were a farce. Yet in running DOS-based accounts programs, word processors like WordPerfect, Wordstar etc (and MS Word wasn't even a glint in Gates' eye at that time) the performance was just fine. Mind you, graphics program like CorelDraw and Micrografx Designer were slow, and benefitted immensely from increasing CPU power, and AutoCAD was sheer agony on those those early machines - it could take MINUTES to redraw a complex model, even in wireframe mode. You could almost benchmark the improvements in performance of graphics programs from each CPU generation by using a sundial, let alone a stopwatch.

So, as has been said, it wasn't that most things on early machines were slow, it's that the more demanding tasks simply didn't exist. Forget watching (let alone editing) movies, forget fancy graphical games and forget things like voice recognition, OCR or biometrics.

Not only were machines expensive (like that £10,000 386), but so was software and accessories. My first version of AutoRoute was £2500, but was a business tool in those days. My first sound card was over £200, and my first CD-ROM drive was over £300. The 330MB hard drive in that PC I mentioned was worth £1500 on it's own, and I first had a CD burner (Yamaha CDR-100) when a quad-speed burner was almost unheard of, and cost £2500 ..... and the software to drive it (DOS-based Personal Scribe) was a further £2000.

Yup, £4500 ( :eek::eek::eek: ) for a 4x CD-writer (no rewrite), and blank CD's were £15 each wholesale. I even paid £45 once for a box of 10 3.5" floppies, because 5.25" was the standard, and some people were still using 8" floppies.

Not only that, I was testing inkjet printers before the first colour machine came out, and THAT was only going back to 1991. The original HP Deskjet 500C was a £750 machine!


It might come as a shock to the younger generation, but the computer revolution is a relatively recent thing. Access to PC's, especially at home, was rare even as recently as 20 years ago, and home computers were all-but unheard of a mere 30 years ago. Life was different then. Believe me, VERY different. No DVD's, no MP'3, no internet. Even the CD revolution (and I mean audio CD's) took some years to get off the ground. Computer games, if you could find them, were very crude indeed, graphically. Anyone remember Wizardy when it first came out? The 'graphics' was a tiny (about 1.5" square) box, with a very simple line-art representation of the corridor you were walking down, yet, my goodness, the HOURS of fun we had from those simple games. They lasted MUCH longer than most modern games do. The graphics may have been simple, but the gameplay was often MUCH better.

It might age me some, but I've been actively involved with computers and programming for more than 30 years, and I have two older brothers that have been in it for at least 10 years longer than THAT. How's that forgetting in on the ground floor. :D

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Originally posted by Howard
[advar]

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HOward - waht is with your advar!!

- when ever its on the screen my moniter starts humming like mad!!

First 'computer', 1974, Hewlett-Packard 9820 with 1.5K (yes K) RAM, with built-in strip display, thermal printer and card reader. These cost somewhere in the region of $10,000 each. We wrote REALLY lean code in those days. Its amazing what you can pack into 1500 bytes if you try.

Even today in my office I have a 133 mhz PII system which monitors sensors around the installation where I work. This has run 24/7 since it was last booted into windows (98) about 2 years ago. It never crashes! It also happily surfs the net and does a bit of WP.

you know, I am sure I remember reading something about MIT having recompiled windows 95 properly, and removed all the rubbish from it, and got the whole thing down to using less than 5 megs of memory..

as for cyrix maths co-pro's.. at the time, they were the best.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by joshwa

How could people have used computers so slow?!? I just don't get how it could be possible! especially now when everybody has at least 1ghz, 256mb ram, 20gb HD etc! (my slowest computer that i use is a p2-350 - as a firewall)

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My Dad uses a 486DX with Win3.1 (in enchanced mode) with 4MB RAM and a 250MB HDD - all this as his main machine. Runs beautifully. Don't even need a heatsink on it :) We only got him of his Amstrad PCW a few years ago.lol

My Mum uses a 600MHz P3, with 128 SDRAM, 40gig HDD with XP Pro (uber slow though)

Therefore not all people have omething over 1GHz! ...donations welcome ;)

If you look at the www.computing.net forums, there are people who worship 3.1 systems!

I love it, no spyware and wot not. But tis not on the net!

This thread is ancient!

I was doing a search (I must be the only person who does it) and it came up with this

Ive got an IBM laptop with 16mb ram, 100Mb HDD `486Dx and wait for it..an orange plasma screen that would burn your retina off you even if you had sun glasses on!

EDIT: must put up some pics

cool - the slowest computer i'm using now is a p2-233 laptop with 164mb ram, and windows 2000 - i use it for wireless internet access, and a bit of dreamweaver, :) does the job even though it's got a 12" 800x600 screen :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by joshwa

How could people have used computers so slow?!?

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better question for you Josh.....how did people WRITE SUCH GOOD SOFTWARE with such small ram and low cpu power?

Dont wanna sound TOO OLD here, but Elite on Spectrum....in 48k.....with coluor and sound....
I mean...

HOW!!!!!??

a driver for a modem is bigger than that....a WORD DOCUMENT is bigger!!!!!

That was an entire 3d gaming engine AND trading engine AND Universe...!!!!!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nox

how can you class an amstrad as serious? :P

Nox

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The CPC was quite a decent machine - specially when using CPM - which had some great utils at the time.

ZAK - indeed... and in less space than Windows uses for a poxy calculator?

That is the difference betweenn REAL programming - and using compilers.... Imagine what companies could do these days if they trained people to actually program in assembley code?

True but imagine how long development would actually take in assembly..it would be so very efficent but time and money consuming. Thats amazing how 48k could include so much zak..think thats 384000 bits(?)..so small!

from first to last
commodore 64 im not including games consoles like the intlellivision jobbie
wife
kids
pentium 120 with 1.2 gig hard drive this machine is still running at my Aunts house
amd t bird 1 gig system still running
amd xp2800 system still running
loads of shuttles
amd64 3200 system with 6800 ultra
back to shuttle sn85
back to amd64 3000 winnie to be watercooled
to be continued

My dad still uses a P90 as a server and 2x 133Mhz machines plus an old laptop for his mountain bike lap timing business, Timelaps. (yes the website does need an update graphically, but all the info is there) Edit: view in IE :( for best results.

The lap timing software was written specifically and runs fine from dos. He even has a spare Olivetti 386sx for an extra PC when needed!!

All he does is transfer the results from the P90 (win 3.11) on floppy to his home PC (built by yours truly) and then updates the website so the results are up within a few hours of the finish of the races. Still the best in the biz. :rockon:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by zaphod

True but imagine how long development would actually take in assembly..it would be so very efficent but time and money consuming. Thats amazing how 48k could include so much zak..think thats 384000 bits(?)..so small!

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49152 to be exact - not including any memory taken out for the screen (6912 bytes typically on the 48K Spectrum)

i used to have a 386 with 4mb ram and 2 40mb hdds. those were the days. used to play 4d sports boxing 1.4mb and wing commander. Later upgraded to a 486dx33 some of the older games were too quick so i had to turn the turbo button off.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zak33

Dont wanna sound TOO OLD here, but Elite on Spectrum....in 48k.....with coluor and sound....
I mean...

HOW!!!!!??

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Funny you should mention that... I work with the guy who did the speccy port of Elite. ;)

My first was a speccy (if that counts), first PC was an 8088, it was **** slow, 4.7MHz of pure power and a massive 20MB HDD. :p

The chap from Torus software? Their work on Gyron (I think i've got the name right?) was pretty incredible as well!

My commodore 64 was slow, but at the time there was nothing really faster to compaire it to.

I have a 486 DX 33MHz and it is just as fast for word processing as my 2.53Ghz Athlon 64, it just looks less pritty while doing it. It boots faster as well, just to PC-DOS 7 instead of windows 2000.

The C64's 6502 was 1Mhz - as compared to the Spectrum's z80 at 3.5~Mhz ... although sometimes one did have the edge over the other in performance....

You lot!

Ben

Well, someone at work found an IBM 6x86MX PR300 (233mhz) (IBM manufactured version of the Cyrix) chip today, so we proceded to try and blow it up - it didn't happen, but I might have to try and find a socket 7 system to see if the chip still works...

I had to do a retro build a few months back. Needed ISA slots and the only one I could find at the time took a cyrix chip. The days of the cheap 3rd party CPUS

I did a retro build last month - an entire AMD K6 500Mhz machine (except power supply) inside a modern motherboard box, with holes cut for CPU fan, Mouse, Monitor, etc. I installed Windows XP on it (yes, it did run), and was going to use it as a firewall, but got bored and overclocked it. 520Mhz, fine, got to 550 with no apparent problems, 600 it crashed after POST, and 700 it burnt. Good fun while it lasted!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jonny

I did a retro build last month - an entire AMD K6 500Mhz machine (except power supply) inside a modern motherboard box, with holes cut for CPU fan, Mouse, Monitor, etc. I installed Windows XP on it (yes, it did run), and was going to use it as a firewall, but got bored and overclocked it. 520Mhz, fine, got to 550 with no apparent problems, 600 it crashed after POST, and 700 it burnt. Good fun while it lasted!

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lol - i did that too: with a K6-2 500 @ 550
http://www.joshwa1.pwp.blueyonder.co...x_big_fan1.JPG

LMAO - that is exactly what mine looked like! Still have all the bits here - burnt out unfortunately. But I'll do a proper one someday in a metal box, same dimensions, and use it as a firewall.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by oralpain

I have a 486 DX 33MHz and it is just as fast for word processing as my 2.53Ghz Athlon 64, it just looks less pritty while doing it. It boots faster as well, just to PC-DOS 7 instead of windows 2000.

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Same with me, 486 DX with 2 megs RAM. Loads DOS 6.2 + Win 3.1 in under 30 secs, ready to do WP.

My first PC (I've used slower, but it was the first I claimed as mine since my mom wasn't using it) was a 486sx 33 with 4MB RAM and 200MB HD (the sticker said 120MB - guess they must've upgraded it). I upgraded the RAM to 12MB for a whole $80 (worth a lot more at the time). I even installed Win95 on it at one point so that I could play some games I otherwise couldn't (thanks to the virtual memory management). It was slow, but it served me well till I moved on to a P2 400. And that served me well till my Barton 2500+. I really should upgrade more often, otherwise, my next upgrade might include a CPU with 8 cores lol.

I had a 333mhz P2 (1998) Celeron 450Mhz (April 2005) AMD K-6 500Mhz (May 2005) and A64 3000+ (June 2005).
Hows that for poor upgrading?

I can beat that.

BBC Micro -> P75 -> AMD k6/2 533 -> Duron 600(!!!) -> Athlon XP 2000 -> Athlon XP 2600 - > Athlon 64 3000+.

And I still have the BBC micro running ;)

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Originally Posted by Dougal

And I still have the BBC micro running ;)

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That was real programming :p

Did my first game on it.

Made a nice little skiing game.

It also taught me to back up correctly.

Power cuts are not nice..........

Power cuts? Ha, you had it easy :) You should have managed the ZX81's tape loader... at least the BBC was better for that :-)

I did have a spectrum, but that came after the P75.

Picked up the system with around 1000 games for £30. Was asked if I wanted it for £50, said "Oh, its not worth that much".

Meh.

Saw a nice ZX81 for £30 a while back in the Boro, sold it on for about £80

The oldest machine I must have used would be a BBC Micro. Didn't really use it all that much though - the first machine I used properly was an Acorn Archimedes. Great machines - I still have fond memories. There some decent games on there as well.

In the past, I played around on 286s, 386s, 486s, and then we finally got a 133mhz PC. After that, we got 333mhz PCs - they're still lying around the house. My first PC all to myself was a Duron 800, followed by an Athlon 1.2ghz, followed by an Athlon XP 1800+, followed by a Mobile Barton 2500+. I still miss the Arc.

Used the aacorns at school.

They kinda got on my nerves for one reason or another.

I used the Micro to teach me french time, luverly little game based on Notre Dame

RISC-OS ruled.
Seriously. I loved that OS.

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Originally Posted by Dougal

They kinda got on my nerves for one reason or another.

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Blasphemy! Handy thing about them in schools is that the OS (RISC OS) was stored on a ROM, so that the kids couldn't tamper with it.

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Originally Posted by Agent

RISC-OS ruled.
Seriously. I loved that OS.

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Much better response! I wish they had been more successful, although one part that I forget the name of is still going strong (the bit that designs processors I think).

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Originally Posted by mike_w

so that the kids couldn't tamper with it.

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Thats probably what annoyed me.

I remember getting a win95 machine in year 6. I was the one that taught the teachers to play that wicked skiing game.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mike_w

Much better response! I wish they had been more successful, although one part that I forget the name of is still going strong (the bit that designs processors I think).

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ARM (Advanced Risc Machines)

Weren't the arms used in the gamecube?

hehe nice thread... i had a BBC Micro were you had to type to games in as commands:devilish: 0|_|) $|<()()|_ will live on:devilish:

I feel the need for a bit of cross-linkage ;)

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.p...ghlight=garage

386 co-pro was a 387 IIRC

The Acorns are brilliant (they live on). Very stable, quick just everything about them was is great.

Also the OS was (I heard) written in several languages taking solid stable bits from each.