Not really. Stuff moved faster but the price premiums were insane. That and the fact that software didn’t keep pace at all means staying on top of the curve was hardly necessary.
It was a transitional period. Components were expensive and there was a higher chance that you'd buy some architecture that didn't go anywhere in terms of evolution and compatability. It was also much harder to educate yourself on the tech. Remember that you couldn't go online and get informed easily like you can today. It was a far riskier market. Additionally, you did need the newest most powerful stuff for the latest games, more so than with modern games. If you wanted to play the hottest games, you needed newest tech. Like a 3D graphics card, preferably a new soundcard, a SCSI CDROM drive, and so on.
Yeah tell me about it :) I remember my dad buying me a brand new Hewlett Packard in 1996. In 1998 I couldn't play any games :D My latest computer I bought in 2014 and it still runs pretty good :D
Interestingly, he abruptly halted the show from one day to the next, as if he were aware that by the early 2000s, computers were no longer novelties but had transitioned into mere tools. People began to show greater interest in the brand, waiting for the Marketing to tell them what they could achieve with their products, rather than delving into the technical intricacies of how they functioned and found by themselves (Thank you Apple ;) ).
@@Lexip_Pixel And by the early 2000s internet was so big that a show like Computer Chronicles wasn't needed anymore. Same with many magazines. You got the computer news and in depth reviews online.
Actually Intel paid ID software to "optimize" the use of Quake and MMX tech. The word pentium is nothing more then 5 or 586 in latin, since Intel wanted to abandon using 386/486 naming scheme. The only reason why Quake ran so well using a pentium was due to the optimised code path. It would run less on a Cyrix or AMD chip. But they would have had the same performance if it offered some sort of simular code path.
@vanderlinde4you do you have a source for that? Quake predated MMX pentiums and I feel like id knew they would be printing money with the game either way. If they could have made it run faster on a 486 they absolutely would have - why alienate a huge sector of their existing customers? Also the reason why Intel went with the pentium branding over 586 is because they couldn't stop competing manufacturers from producing chips named 386, 486, 586, etc due to trademark technicalities, but they could trademark the brand name pentium, and thus the only one able to actually sell "pentium" chips.
@@vanderlinde4you Quake predated the MMX Pentium by 6 months, and it ran so well on the Pentium because they made absolutely maximum use of the floating point unit, there's actually a sourceport project called "486Quake" that's attempting to uncouple the performance sensitive part of the renderer from the P54C FPU, and they've definitely made it perform better on 486/K5/5x86/6x86/K6 cpus... but the new code also allows a Pentium to stretch it's lead even further. Pentium just has a better FPU than its contemporary x86 cpus, even if they were as fast (or faster) for integer operations.
Pentium was about 2x the speed of 486, for integer operations. For floating point operations, the Pentium trounces the 486, they aren't even in the same league, 10x or more performance. This paved the way to fully 3D games.
Early versions of the Pentium clocked at 60, 66 and 90 MHz (P5 5V) had a problem with the floating point unit, which in rare circumstances reduced the accuracy of some calculations. This problem, discovered in 1994, was a major source of embarrassment for Intel, which finally agreed to replace all defective chips with corrected versions. Intel knew about the problem but covered it up until it became public knowledge... And my 486DX4-100 was only few % slower than Pentium 60Mhz... The whole "3d games" change came later with introduction of completly new Penium MMX as it was providing some real boost that was used in games. I think that only Dungeon Keeper was the only popular game that required Penium CPU to work and that game was published in 1997, then there was MMX and era of 3D accelerators(first as an extra card that was cooperating with your GPU)...
@@Bialy_1 The Pentium FPU is fully pipelined. You can fxch with st(n) and keep switching the other argument for the stack based ISA, and it optimized away the fxch so you could have effectively one cycle per operation throughput, a couple of cycle latency, if you pipelined your x87 assembly. The 486 just stalled and executed 20-40+ cycles for each FPU operation, with a long sequence of microcode. Pentium could handle two instructions per clock, back to back, and it had a branch predictor, and even a static predictor. Mysterious branches that branch back are assumed taken (bottoms of loops), those that branch forward are assumed not taken (if checks being false jumping over body or to else). 486 fetch didn't even care if there were branches, it just assumed the next instruction is next, every time, with a pipeline bubble every taken branch.
It came out a year after I got my first pc, an 486 SX 25 mhz. I'd have gladly waited a year without a computer if I knew what was in store and the benefits it'd have on gaming. Didn't end up getting another until years later -- a Celeron 380mhz
Absolutely miss the PC evolution race during the 90s when growing up. Trade shows were a blast with demonstrations. You never got bored, just new wow factors and possibilities happening all the time, endless fun, excitement and new discoveries. At that time I still had a 286 with 1mb of ram! Listening to these guys with multi processors and 1gb ram setup, reminds me of the endless times I dreamed my dad would one day upgrade. Playing games like mean streets, Wolfenstein 3D and wing commander 2 took a toll on our big little PC ;) the sound blaster donated to me by a friend helped breath life into my PC experiences.
That's because this was made over 20 years ago and it was unheard of to need a cooling fan + heatsink in a consumer machine. It's commonplace now, but it was anything but back then. Also, water-cooling is more about reducing noise than inherent cooling efficiency.
Liquid cooling was already in use at scale since 1975, see Cray-1 for details, but passive cooling at most was all that was needed at home prior to this line, hence excitement. :)
@@darrenskjoelsvold These days one can purchase a decently powerful laptop on Amazon, have it shipped and delivered within a week- all for less than an average day's wages. Light gaming, video streaming, documents, browsing. Economies of scale!
The Amiga 1200 was already too slow when it was released. But it's definitely one of the best Amiga based retro machines if you want play old Amiga games.
@@OpenGL4ever Agree, In 1990 Amiga had graphics and sound that I was impressed by playing Flight Simulator. Then they fell apart and intel wiped them out.
@@OpenGL4everIf you added a 68060 CPU it was head to head with Pentium and except the NT Workstations they were running Win95 or even DOS. Amiga kernel and OS is state of art.
I remember having to replace hundreds of Pentium chips in 1994 when they found out they had a massive issue with the decimal point in like the 26 position being wrong, which caused computation problems and giving wrong data. Biggest microprocessor recall in history, and I was on a job site for months doing the replacing! Fun times!!
I remember this being something of an industry joke? That the recalled processors were not "IEEE" but "AIIIEEEE" if used in anything critical? That must have been... 'fun', working on replacements for that.
CPU Galaxy channel has a video testing different 486 chips to find the minimum speed to decode a mp3 file (which are heavy on floating point) A 486DX4-100 was the minimum for stereo, but a DX2-66 could do mono 64kbps files ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-b0zZpzxHSeM.html
Cyrix always had the least performing CPUs, clock for clock. They could never touch Intel or AMD (That had comparable performance to Intel, often more).
@@derek20la I got 486DX4-100 and i was playing MP3, if i remember it was having some issues with very high sampling rate but at that time everything was compresed to super small sizes so it was not an issue.
Not true. For instance pentium 4 was a dead end. They remade pentium 3 into core 2 duo while nehalem (1st I3, 5 and 7 gen) was completely different architecture all along.
@@VRGamercz Netburst overall was a dead-end, but they sure learned how to make a really solid branch predictor off the back of Prescott's 31-stage pipeline
They're pretty devious; they picked a fairly slow 486 (33MHz) to compare with the 66MHz Pentium. In 1993 a more fair benchmark comparison would have been with a 486DX2/66 vs the Pentium 66 to see the Pentium's advantage at the same CPU clock.
Ah! You noticed that, too! I had a newly acquired 486DX/66 PC at the time of this presentation, as the 33 MHz were being phased-out. An issue I had with Computer Chronicles back then was when vendors presented their wares; as they were always tweaked to tip-top performance . . . at a level you couldn't get when buying the same item from a retailer. I recall when PDAs were first being shown on Computer Chronicles, as the presentations were flawless. The same PDAs in the hands of consumers were nothing but headaches with faulty OS and problems with characters recognition; resulting with PDAs fading from the scene for several years afterwards.
@@bloqk16 Good thing for the internet so we can see many different reviews from independent reviewers. That's not to say independent reviewers can't be biased themselves, but we have tons of sources we can get info from to make a better buying decision these days
Say whatever you want unfair comparison, but Pentium was superscalar architecture 486 was not, and nothing could match that, essentially allowing instructions such as multiplication, division normally take 6-12cycles virtually to be executed in 1cycle.
BTW. I worked as technician in company making pipes. And literally way how CPU "pipeline" works is based on exact same principle pipes are made - joints formed. Because for eaxmple heating takes 60s and forming 15s it's better to have 3-4 separate heaters 15s each an heat 4 pipes simultaniously. Same trick in car manufacturing will cause one car to exit line in time that is equivalent to time of longest step on that line. In world of CPUs split instructin into chunks: decode, fettch, execute, store thanks to pipeline every 4 cycle instruction will virtually take 1 cycle because pipeline was able to hold 4 instrucions at once and execute simultaniously At that time every other CPU had to become internally RISC and had to split instructions into chunks. Pentium was game over to 486, AMD 486, Cyrix, Motorolla 68k etc. Doom's day 1993 - Apple, IBM, Motorolla had to introduce PowerPC there was no other way. Maybe they cheated bit - good observation, but it was indeed a game changer anyway
@@KabelkowyJoe That just raises more questions. They could've put the Pentium against a DX2/66 with a workload that the Pentium would've benefitted from. They didn't. Why not pit it against a 386 SX/25 in that case? Sans 387.
Stuart Black My computer engineering professor used to tell me that, back in the day, interest in neural networks and artificial intelligence would wax and wane every few generations. When the newest craze in neural networks came about it was primarily because of the move away from random forests to deep learning.
I believe the perception neural network was proposed in 1959. Deep learning probably in the 60s. It's really the availability of computing power, free and open source livraries, and abundance of data that ushered in the current mac ine learning craze. The theory has been around decades. Over a century if you consider statistical methods.
Actually, an attempt to use an artificial neural network for image recognition took place already in the late 1950s. For obvious reasons, it was implemented in hardware rather than software.
I collect and restore vintage systems as a hobby. Try to build them to as much original spec as possible. It's a lot of fun sourcing parts and making these machines live again. So cool to watch these videos when this stuff was cutting edge.
Wow, that Gateway 2000 demo takes me back to 1995. I was at school and ordered a Gateway P5-75(mhz). Got the thing in two days. Came back to the dorm from class and saw some boxes in the mailroom with cow-spots. Checked by mail box and had a message. Big day. PC+CRT+Printer = $2300 It was from Gateways "open box store" so I got it "cheaper" 😂
1GB of RAM is a vast amount, software just became more sloppily written as better hardware became cheaper than the pace of development for the bloatware we use today.
@Chesty McStudmuffin I hear that, it's part of why I moved from Windows 10 to Manjaro Linux as I have 120GB SSD for the boot drives in my systems, and by time I got everything I needed installed along with updates on Windows 10 I was using about 70GB of space, however on Manjaro I'm using just under 20GB due to tighter code, and no bloatware.
@@CommodoreFan64 Windows 10 really needs a good thin out, it has that much shite in it that no one uses. I know windows XP you could thin right out at the time, my pal got that down to less than a gig, on his drive.
@@procta2343 Personally I feel Windows 10 needs to be scrapped, with MS moving fully over to a full Linux kernel based OS, and just having a team to help with Wine development, to get more older Windows software to work if someone really does need it. Then software devs. would have no choice but to write tighter code, and we would get way more hardware support as well. In reality I know that won't happen anytime soon, but one can dream. 😔
I bought my first pentium pc in 1996, 3 years later, but was a 166MHz one, with 32MB of EDO RAM, 2.5GB HDD and the first accelerated 3D vga (3D Blaster PCI with Rendition Vérité V1000), and that still was quite expensive.
+Despiser Despised nice! I bought it to play Quake @ 640x480. There were a bunch of games with a Rendition accelerated version, but I don't remember many.
I remember my school mate spend quite a bundle on almost the same setup with the largest monitor ever in 1996. My mind was being blown away by the 2gb HD and thinking who would need that much space hahaha, it was the best PC setup I knew of. Testing games on it was a show of performance for me. Duke nukem, quake, need for speed heck yeah!!
If you had a 2.5 Gig harddive in 1996, it was probably one of the most expensive parts in the system. I remember still paying a hefty price for 2.5Gig in June 1997. I bought my first whole 1Gig drive in 1996, and that one also wasn't cheap.
I used to watch this religeously as a kid thanks to you Stuart for the killer format and fun times. My first pc was a compaq portable 3.. Mmm amber screens
It's almost like this was recorded over 20 years ago and tech was quite a bit different. Whodathunkit?!? Lol, I love these low-effort comments on every one of these videos.
@@activelow9297 The Pentium 4 was a misleading jump, though. The pipeline was spread out over more stages in order to increase clock speeds (which no doubt would be useful in marketing against AMD), but that ended up making it inefficient. It sometimes even performed worse than the Pentium III.
@@bonchbonch It still was a 9x jump in clock speed in a very short period of time... and the Pentium III never went away. It went in disguise as the Pentium M, and then finally the Core Duo, which was 2 Pentium M's on a single die. The Pentium 4 architecture might have been a dark alley but by 2004 they were pumping them along at 3.986 Ghz, speeds which were not reached again until the late 2010's.
@@activelow9297 Right, it was a jump in clock speed, but that was misleading in terms of actual performance due to the flawed design that led to those high numbers, so it's kind of a meaningless milestone, unfortunately.
They cancelled the P60 because it was such a heat pig. I don't think the P66 was any better? In fact I think the problem remained with the P90 too. But after the P90 they got temperatures under control. I had a P200 and it ran OK. I couldn't afford the P233 top of the pops chip at the time. Well, I could have afforded it but I just couldn't justify the premium it commanded. I scrapped a PC not long ago that had a P233 in it and seeing the chip made me laugh. Stuff isn't even worth the electricity it burns to run today.
you did to run it in full screen and not in a tiny box on the screen, look at philscomputerlab's test. a 486 was the minimum that doom looked okay on, and even that couldn't give you a full 35 fps in full screen and several doom wads would choke it
I agree with that. Played Doom 2 on my 486 Sx25. The frame rate on the last level where all the demons get shoot out the Icon of Sin killed the FPS. Played on my friends PC P75 the FPS was crazy fast. 🤪🤪👍
Funny how everyone was so impressed and satisfied by the performance of the pentium chip. Next time you're excited about the next iPhone know that in 20 years people will be laughing their asses off.
Not really. We are long past Moore's Law, we are pretty much at the limit of miniaturization. The user experience with apps is not significantly different now than it was 10 years ago. Pretty much everyone could pick up an iPhone 5s today and not have a significantly degraded experience with its core functions... this isn't comparable at all to the exponential rate of advancement in the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s.
What is so funny? I was 16 when Pentium came out and it blew everything off the map. Appreciate the fact that you wouldn't have anything without the success of these chips in their time.
Looking back at the slow machines of the day, I don't laugh, I'm thankful to not have to use them anymore. Though, the software was tens of times more efficient than today's software.
I remember when I started my first job in high school in June 98 working all summer and then some just to save up just under $600 to build my first real gaming machine with an AMD K6-II 550Mhz CPU, thinking I was getting a deal doing it myself, and just a few days ago I bought a used Lenovo Thankcentere M53 off eBay for my aunt to use as a basic web machine on Chromium OS, and it cost me $47.58 LoL!
@@CommodoreFan64 Today you can build a Xeon workstation with a Titan V and 128GB RAM for just over $6000. PCs have become truly affordable. I remember my dad buying a 486DX/66 in late 1995 due to a massive price drop when the second generation Pentium arrived and the 486 was considered obsolete. The price was still over a thousand dollars, and that's with 16MB RAM, a basic SVGA card, a basic Sound Blaster card, a 28K modem and a 14" CRT monitor. It could still play most games decently when it was brand new, but two years later, no new games would even launch. That's when I saved enough to buy a Pentium-166 and an original 3dfx Voodoo card, when the Pentium II and Voodoo 2 were already out, and older tech became significantly cheaper in an instant.
@RectalDiscourse Yup, which is why middle class and up got PC's and peasant kids like me got an Atari ST until PC's could be bought for few hundred on the second user market.
Our first home computer was a Compaq Presario with an Intel Pentium for around $2000 back in 1996. My newest desktop was only $749 with an i5. That is true progress.
Boy this brings back memories being one of the small group of people who were involved in the development and testing of the original 60/66MHz Pentium microprocessor (P5 project).
Why were there distinct 60 and 66 MHz Pentiums? Was this due to the yields? P75, 90, 120 were also weirdly clocked. was the P133 the only CPU with true 33 MHz bus? I have my doubts about the 100, was it 25x4 or 33x3?
Oh man, when I was growing up, it was a good weekend when I happened to catch an episode of Computer Chronicles on my local PBS station. As a teenage geek, this show was AMAZING.
1993: "3999 for a Gateway Pentium 1 PC with 16MB and 512MB storage, that's not bad." 2021: "2200 for a M1 Pro liquid retina XDR with 16GB and 512GB of storage, that's insane."
OEM margins have also vanished. PC manufacturers in the 90s were making the same general % as margin as Apple does today, but the PC space is far more crowded and so successive generations of price competition have driven commodity PC prices way down. The downside, of course, is that with thinner margins the actual quality of the PCs you buy nowadays is far less than it was in the 90s and the customer service is significantly worse.
Multitasking was an earth shaker, and everyone valued it... Save for Commodore corporate higher ups, who let their edge slip through gross incompetence. I don't think the IBM compatible would have ever been usurped, but Commodore could have wiped Apple off the face of the earth and proved a viable alternative.
@@jesuszamora6949 I read ppl try to downplay multitasking like it was unimportant. And I think that stems from the fact that it's not about doing something to make multitasking work, it's about just using the system in a more natural way, so it's invisible until you use a system that can't do it. Pre-emptive Multitasking - Amiga 1985 Mac 2001 (had to switch to OSX)
Amiga workstations was doing first hollywood films pre render CGI combined with Silicon Graphics for final render like Jurassic Park in 1992 and much more then and before while PCs and Apples could do just simple spreadsheet office use or some cad basic 16bit games including Pentiums with few words pcs and apples was 10 years back
@@dmtd2388 The very first Manchester United "Multimedia" CD had an opening title animation (not by me but a friend) that was done on an Amiga A500 That I had upgraded to an 68020 @16 MHz no HDD. He got a job at the company that was making the CD (he was freelance before) and when he started he couldn't believe the amount of money they was spending getting Macs to render 3D (top end hardware and latest software) and it was terrible, so he asked me to bring in my Amiga (I had considerably upgraded mine) to demonstrate what could be done with so much less. I did so, and blew anything they could do away. But none of that mattered, they were going all in with the Mac. So he would work at home on his system, bring it to mine to render then take it to work for many of the projects. He hated that for a fraction of what they were spending they could have had so much more and so much better.
Things have changed a lot, actually. Entry-level machines no longer cost six thousand dollars (.99 / .44 inflation rate -> 4000+2951 in 2019) and, of course, we have made great leaps in processor capability since then.
So they tested a 33 Mhz 486 vs a 66 MHz Pentium? No wonder Stewart commented "you are trying to sell these machines" to the Compaq guy. A total scam demo just to sell the Pentium based machines. 66 Mhz 486 were standard in 1993, there were absolutely no reason to use a 33 Mhz one, other than to make the Pentiums look greater than it was.
@@Mr_Meowingtons 486-33 vs P-66 = 3 times as fast unoptimized. While I keep hearing 486-66 was standard, It wasn't by a long shot. They should be saying 486-66 was the focus for sales, but that's not what most ppl had (some had better but by a vast majority most had worse). But the real reason is, that it's much harder sell if you show only marginal improvements (you know kind of like the last few gen of processors). Marketing YAY!
Perhaps so, but it was already known possible as Moore's law was well established back then. What they didn't predict was what exactly we would be doing with our devices on a day to day basis, such as watching old videos of CC's.
yeah this is back when hardware upgrades improved the speed of your software now days more cpu power means more core and the code has to be made to use those extra cores or it's pointless to get more cores
Watching this in 2024 and it brings back memories of working in clean rooms in the 80's and 90's. I've even worked in a couple of Intel fabs here in the SF Bay Area. Exciting times for computer geeks back then. I just dug out a Pentium 4 gaming computer I built in 2004. Dusted it off and plugged it in just to see what happens. Fired right up as if it was 2004. Other than an electrolytic capacitor that needs replacing on the ASUS motherboard, it's in great shape. I think I'll set it up to play all of my old games that I still have.
@@captainkeyboard1007 They we’re referring to a hardware bug with floating point calculations in early Pentium CPUs. It was widely reported at the time and led to a big recall. Pentium based PCs being bad at math became a running joke and meme for many years afterwards. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
@@DanielMarkstedtR Thank you for typing the facts that I missed by not being given chances and opportunities to work on the microcomputers by employment. Now that I have not been working since 1997, I bought my first microcomputer, namely Cybernet, a Windows-based computer in 2002, a Canon color laser printer, and a Canon scanner. I worked with Microsoft Office XP Professional and Microsoft Publisher 2002, that was run by Windows XP Professional. I learned a lot about using the different program applications by myself, that I would unlikely learn in a job. Once again, thank you for typing to me.
What a trip down memory lane. I started designing programs back in the early 1980's. I am now watching this video on my brand new M2-Max MacBook Pro. Amazing to see how technology has advanced since the early, modern "computers".
My first PC was the lower spec Gateway 2000 for about $2900, with the same case as in the video. That thing was a beast compared to the office computers. Even though I have upgraded and built many computers since then, I could not bear to throw that Gateway out and still have it in my basement.
@@RWL2012 GiB is what happens when a bunch of idiots who want to rewrite history on behalf of the device/hard drive manufacturers so that they can make more money for less, disregarding many years of consistent usage before that.
@@RWL2012 "A gibibyte (GiB) is a unit of measure of capacity used in computing. The prefix gibi originated with the binary system for measuring data capacity, which is based on powers of two. One gibibyte equals 230 or 1,073,741,824 bytes. The binary prefixes include kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi, exbi, zebi and yobi." searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/gibibyte-GiB
What I wouldnt give to have my old P133. Full tower,overclocked to 166, 2 HDDs, cd rom, cd rw, sound blaster, lemmy music tunes, star wars tie fighter, lost in time, STTNG A Final Unity, and the sound that beast made while running was so good.
I went with my mom to a local computer trade show in something like 1994 or 1995 to buy a desktop computer direct from a vendor among 100's of vendors. Wild times.
I wanna go back to this time, I don't like technology today. I mean today we can enjoy fast internet, large storage capacity, powerful computers... But I would trade all that for RE living time back them. Simplicity, not over complicated shit, no social media, no internet dependencies, no trolls commenting every single article, technology was a luxury for entertainment and work and not some millennial obligation that kids take for granted these days, the thrill of finding out about new games and stuff in magazines, lan gaming and I could go on forever
Back then it was for enthusiasts. Now every Chad builds his PC and only plays games and uses it for porn or Facebook. Zero interest in computers for their original purpose.
RonJohn63 funny as in old or archaic we used to buy the motherboard unpopulated of cache ram chips and had to put them in the sockets ourselves. then card slot came out and the cpu and cache memory was moved to that card slot. and now they put the cache directly in the cpu module itself
expensive as hell, our school library pentium machine was £5,999, and each cartridge cd rom come in at a whopping £100 a pop, but it was bleeding edge at the time, I remember loading encarta and being blown away at the graphics, the school was sold a publishing package costing another £4,999, and included software, camera, mic, a scanner/printer, and various other bits n bobs, that pentium HP machine will live long in the memory as the first true multimedia capable pc I used, although at the time it was simply god level tier to a skint 12 year old kid, ten years later, you could buy the same machine for 25 quid.
My first PC was a Gateway 2000 Pentium 233 Mhz MMX processor running Windows 95 as its operating system. I fondly remember watching this episode a few years before I bought my PC.
There was something magical about a slow screen update actally being able to watch the cursor run from top left to bottom right that I remember on my Apple II.
@@1pcfred My monitor IS a TV. And even the act of unpacking and displaying a HD RU-vid video in real time would be beyond what a hundred Pentium could do.
@@GaryCameron my Pentium CPU played video. I was still using a dial up modem back then so I didn't have the bandwidth to stream a video. Heck I sent someone a video file once and it took 9 hours to transfer a file. At 49 kilobits a second. We couldn't believe it even finished. We were all like yeah. I had a P200 MMX myself. I also had a P90 but that PC had a bad HDD so I sent it back.
@@1pcfred I had one back in the day too, and I remember you could play video but it was a lot lower resolution and frame rate. Also the compression used was a lot less. Mp4 was impossible at more than thumbnail resolution. MMX improved performance somewhat. The windows 95 good times and Weezer music videos that were included typifies what to expect.
I bought one of 60hz version. The chip alone was $800. I bought it at the 1993 Pomona Computer Show. My friends were all jealous. I bought it with my student loan. The loan came in on the day before the show and I couldn't resist. I think I had a 100 mb hard drive and 8 mb of ram. It played the Star Wars Xwing game with ease. Awesome system for its time. The entire system cost about $2000.
+MegaBojan1993 Bloatware has slowed down modern PC to the point no chip can keep up. A 75Mhz Pentium is faster than modern 4Ghz Quadcores at opening spreadsheets and word processing.
I'd recommend the Pentium 90. They're lightning fast, and we've got some in stock now. With an 800 megabyte hard drive, you'll be all set. Or we could you save you a few bucks and upgrade what you have. Once we swap out that motherboard and hard drive, um, you'll be better than new
"There's lots of computationally intensive applications going on simultaneously" _mspaint drawing circles on top of each other_ 90s were different srsly
Back than a Samsung Galaxy 5 could have taken both the client and server market with ease. A moment of silence for Solaris and Silicon Graphics and their respective CPUs. We had a monster Silicon Graphics mainframe on campus and rooms full of their workstations. At times working on a Windows PC or DEC terminal was infuriating. We found relief in the Silicon Graphics labs, still crashed at times, but so much faster and more reliable.
HYPER! DSG "Back then... A Samsung Galaxy 5 would had NOT exist... as guess what?... IT DID NOT EXIST!!!" No kidding, brain damage ? Or just lack of reading comprehension skills?
wow...the leap from 386/486 to nowaday ryzrn/core i 13th gen. i still remember my old 386 dx2 processor.. running DOS 6.1 until now with my Ryzen 5 3600...what a leap in tech in just under 50 years
1992-1993 PC speedup - 300%. 2012-2019 PC speedup - 30%. With 90-s spedups, my i7-2600 would be obsolete in year 2015, but it`s still gonna serve in years to come... Thank you very much, Intel.
@Dee Furman Physics don't forbidd us having 36-core processors and supporting software. We hit a wall with litography and cpu frequency, but that doesn't stops us from having multicore processors, with bigger socket size. It's all matter of Intel's and AMD's interes and profit.
tdrewman That's $4000 for a system with a newly released processor and very high specs, not just any old computer. The price is significantly cheaper now if you spec out a similar level of system (~$2,500). And Apple computers are significantly cheaper than their counterparts back in the day. A new MacBook now is $1299, which is $799 in 1994 dollars. A low spec Apple PowerBook from 1994 would have started at $2250 in 1994 dollars. So entry level laptops from Apple are almost 1/3rd of the cost that they used to be.
lookoutforchris the thing about apple is that they could sell that hardware slot cheaper then they currently are, Thiers nothing special about it other then that supercar, and USB c.
Macs back then were best low budget choices for small business and family, oh how things changed. I remember my mom's company was all using MAC before, after they got government funding, all switching to new Pentium and windows 3.1/3.2.
+Advection357 That sounds like the PC I got in 1995 except I paid $5000 Australian dollars for it. Didnt have a nic or sound card or cdrom drive. I had to buy those separately and there was no usb. I think it had a crappy S3 Virge video card but it ran Mechwarrior 2, NFS2 SE, Duke Nukem 3D and Doom 2 flawlessly. and of course, Windows 95, Autocad12, Photoshop 5?, MSOffice. Was a great machine. Still works to this day!
Watching this, all may seem outdated, but actually here you start seeing modern day stuff. graphical user interfaces, image editing, multi media capabilities etc. - basically PCs a present day user would understand and be able to do basic things with, like writing documents, watching photos, play games with. but if you go back to the 1986 video of the i386 launch you suddenly realize how much has changed in only 7 years. clunky much more expensive machines that only operate via command prompt, take an awful lot of time to just find and exchange some words in a text document, and have absolutely no way to reasonable handle anything we know of today. 7 years! if you use a 7 year old PC today you are probably completely fine with its power for everyday stuff. its hard to imagine today how fast things changed from the 80s to the mid 2000s. you bought your dream system and 6 month later is was completely outclassed, not in like it run a game 30% faster, but more in a way that it allowed completely new things to do with.
Really enjoyed that. Wow 30 years ago. I feel like a time traveler knowing how far computers, mobile phone, cloud computing , social media and the internet have come. Everything seemed so expensive back then $4000 for a 66mhz cpu?! $37 for a VHS tape! Going to check out some of this series.
The beautiful people saturation is unusually high in this episode. Beefcake was difficult to focus on, I kept wanting to ask him to crack an engine block in half.
+swarfega I'm in the healthcare IT business and I can guarantee no one has a very good RIS/PACS/EMR system. It doesn't exist. You’re lucky if its reliably functional, if not quirky broken.
+DOG Oh US Healthcare!! Has nothing to do with health or care, just profit. The industry goes to extremes to cripple any order upon it. And the medical part is a joke in science. Oh, medicine... you have been obsolete since healthcare...
I remember getting a castoff AST P60 to play with as a kid. I found a little jumper on the motherboard marked 60/66. I flipped the jumper and added a fan. That was the easiest overclock ever. It played Quake and TIE Fighter pretty well. Eventually when I got cable internet and had a few more PCs, I made it into a router running FreeBSD and it ran my basement LAN for several years without an issue. I believe that P60 had both of the early Pentium bugs but it was never an issue for what I was doing with it.
It's so valuable they ask the cost of things, it's a timestamp on the change in value. Some reviewers today are averse to saying how much tech costs in their reviews because 'prices fluctuate'. I like price info to compare value on the used markets.
+jednoucelovy wikipedia says you can check for the bug by going to the calculator and typing 4195835 / 3145727 , if it doesn't say 1.33382044913624 then you have a bad chip!
Remember my First Pentium 75Mhz, played alot of old classic games on that system for many years, then each upgrade advanced performance even more. Amazed at how far things have come since those classic days of Computing history. Went from Single Core Desktop System, to Dual Core, Quad Core, and Finally 8 Core/16 Thread with my Intel 10700 Currently. (Still using Quad Core a bit with my Secondary Gaming Laptop) Though I've seen nowadays can even get 8 Core Processor in Portable Laptops now, unheard of in the past for sure
