Power On Self Test: Your First Pentium (1995)

fortybillion

#1 – 9:12 AM May 28, 2009

.28 dot pitch monitor!

Ouch.

xzzy

#2 – 9:27 AM May 28, 2009

I didn't get my first Pentium until mid '98 (a good 5 years after the Pentium first launched). Which coincides quite well with the time I got my first paycheck at my first 'real' job.

Prior to that was the 486 I had to suffer through college on.

I still have the pentium machine in my closet, it's a laptop so it's easy to not throw away. My 486 processor is rotting in a drawer. ;)

TheCase

#3 – 9:29 AM May 28, 2009

My first x86:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thecase/sets/72157618916175828/

Cowtown2

#4 – 9:31 AM May 28, 2009

I was stuck in 486 land until September of 1998 when I mentioned to my parents that I needed a new computer. They asked my college-freshman self whether I needed a computer or a used car more. Despite living in suburban Richardson, Texas, 1000 miles from anyone I had known more than a month and with our campus apartment consisting of four guys with one 1976(ish) Nova between us, I said I needed the computer more. One AMD K6/200Mhz (2.1GB hard drive, 32MB RAM) later, and I was well on my way to not doing my homework and failing out of Programming 101.

jerwin

#5 – 9:39 AM May 28, 2009

.28 mm dot pitch (according to tom's hardware is good enough for super vga-- 800*600. Sort of the standard of the day. On the 14 inch monitor, this would have been 72 dpi.

Cowtown2

#6 – 9:42 AM May 28, 2009

Wow... I'm getting old. I meant September of '97.

muteboy

#7 – 10:20 AM May 28, 2009

Tiny sent me a non-functional computer, didn't answer their phone, then went out of business. Gateway came up with the goods.

strider_mt2k

#8 – 10:42 AM May 28, 2009

Probably the same love affair I'm having with Core i7.

Good stuff.

Angstrom

#9 – 10:58 AM May 28, 2009

My first Pentium was a Pentium II 266. My father, who was working for IBM at the time, said to me "Wow, with a machine like that you could do anything, incredible! It's like a flying machine!"

My hopes were raised unreasonably high.

Stefan Jones

#10 – 11:03 AM May 28, 2009

The prices are croggling.

Some stuff has barely changed in price, but has gotten a lot better. The 540 MB drive would be a 540 GB drive, for example. But 550 (pounds?) for a processor chip? Even if it included a motherboard, or was a barebones system, that's stunning.

stx

#11 – 11:20 AM May 28, 2009

@Stefan Jones, 550 for the cpu, mb, case & 8Mb memory. That was a good deal at the time, even better considering I could overclock the P75 to 120 without issue.

AirPillo

#12 – 6:21 PM May 28, 2009

This reminds me:

When I was a kid (early 90's) there used to be small computer stores all over the place. They were always so much fun to go to. You'd have tons of neat stuff on shelves and a bunch of games with really tacky, colorful art on them.

I kind of miss that. It seems so many of those small computer places just don't exist anymore.

Michael

#13 – 7:12 PM May 28, 2009

Bear in mind, this is pounds sterling. Don't know the exchange rate at the time, but even generic computers in the UK were way more expensive than in the US, as I remember.

dculberson

#14 – 9:02 PM May 28, 2009

Duuuude. My first x86 was an 8086. It had a winchester hard disk.. It was turbo. 7.14 mhz of screaming amber screened beauty.

By the time I had a Pentium, it was a result of ordering too many when selling custom built computers. Actually, I think it was an AMD 5x86-133. Not strictly a "Pentium." I'm not all that old either. Well, except I guess I am. Whimper.

I did have a Pentium Pro system at one point. Damn that was a big processor.

zuzu

#15 – 9:20 PM May 28, 2009

Actually, I think it was an AMD 5x86-133. Not strictly a "Pentium."

That's what I upgraded my Gateway 2000 486 DX2-50 (which I had previously overclocked to 66MHz) with once even that was too slow to play the latest game: Quake (which was real 3D rendering in software, not 2D+H like Doom).

This was back when 468 upgrades from Intel were called "Pentium Overdrive".

I did have a Pentium Pro system at one point. Damn that was a big processor.

The Pentium II was basically a repackaged Pentium Pro, IIRC.

The Pentium Pro was cool because it supported dual processor probably a decade before dual-core became standard. Back then you needed at least one processor dedicated to WinAMP to play MP3s and not stutter. ;)

jerwin

#16 – 10:13 PM May 28, 2009

IIRC, the Pentium II was a Pentium Pro with MMX.

dculberson

#17 – 8:12 AM May 29, 2009

Zuzu, oh jeez, I forgot about the Pentium Overdrive chips. I had one of those (83mhz, baby!) in an HP as a Linux server for a while. The HP had EISA slots! Yeah!

Playing MP3s was such a huge pain back in the day. Roll the dice, hope it won't stutter. Remember "cooked" mp3s? Web browsers were terrible at handling files so you'd end up with an MP3 that was transferred as ASCII and had all sorts of odd aberrations. Uncook 'em and go!

So this is what old people feel like. Memories that seem like yesterday but were 10+ years ago. Wow!

(Sorry, I just had a birthday yesterday, so age is prominent in my mind.)

Agies

#18 – 9:07 AM May 29, 2009

Dculberson, I remember all of that. For my first year of college I was given the old family computer which was an old Gateway that had started it's life as a 386 before getting a 486 motherboard upgrade and then an Overdrive some time after that. I remember working with my dad to remove the 5.25 drive and install a second hard drive before I left.

I managed at some point to get it to run quake. But it would never play mp3s and let me do other stuff at the same time. I had to look for MP2 files instead.

The next year they rolled out high-speed internet to the whole campus. I showed my parents the networking requirements and they decided to get me a new computer.

mrong

#19 – 10:38 AM May 29, 2009

wow. My parents bought me a packard bell p-60 that we ended up having to send back because it was doing math wrong. Oh man Doom ran badass on that thing.