(Not sure if this thread belongs here or in General; if a mod disagrees with me posting it here, feel free to punt it over... 
)
I do remember mine. It was summer 1997, my - by now 10 years old! - Amiga 500 was just so waaay way past its prime it wasn't even funny, even though I had installed a CPU "accelerator" in it - a 14.4MHz 68000 with a bit of SRAM cache, which actually worked pretty damn good really; it actually gave an almost 100% speedup in many programs. I had also bestowed a 2MB "chipram" expander and a 'flicker fixer' on my humble Amiga, so I could get progressive scan video at 720*480ish (plus some overscan) on a Commodore original hires monitor (which was about as far from a TCO 97 compliant unit as you could possibly get; it attracted ENORMOUS amounts of dust!)
At the time I was still young, and a giant Amiga fanboy, absolutely convinced of the evils of the wickedness of Intel, Bill Gates and the unbalanced clunkyness of PC hardware in general, the evils of Windows (and its associated bloat), and so on. However, reality had been catching up with me faster and faster for the past couple years; Doom, Duke 3D and other increasingly complex games forced me to finally give up my old trusty workhorse.
So I - involuntarily - caved to the pressure, but I did so on my own terms. My first PC would not have an Intel CPU. Instead, AMD would be my knight in shining armor, my salvation so to speak.
I read up on the internet on what components I wanted - using Anandtech, HardOCP and other early sources to find out what I should pick. So the deal became:
* AMD K6 166MHz CPU (couldn't afford anything faster - it was probably about 40% cheaper than Intel's Pentium 166MHz at the time)
* ASUS TX97 PCI motherboard (one of the very first to support SDRAM DIMMs, 3-pin "smart" fanheaders, USB and UDMA ATA-33), featuring 512kb onboard page-mapped SRAM cache and up to 128MB of memory, but only caching the first 64MB though.
* 32MB SDRAM (16 was the norm at the time - I wanted to push the envelope a little.)
* Hercules Dynamite128 video card featuring the Tseng ET6000 video processor with 4MB MDRAM. It had no 3D support whatsoever, and its video acceleration was pretty much non-existant - much to my chagrin when the DVD revolution started. But initially it worked pretty well.
* Creative Soundblaster AWE64 PnP (it was shite, it really was.)
* Quantum Fireball ST 3.2GB HDD (first generation that supported UDMA-33!)
* Some CDROM unit which I can't recall; probably a noname brand.
All packaged in a then-typical PC-beige sharp-edged steel chassis with a PC-beige plastic front bezel, powered by some noname power supply. Well, they were all noname power supplies back then I guess! Nobody paid much attention to that particular component as I recall, not that it mattered very much back then, as the entire PC drew only about half the amount of power of a regular lightbulb, if that much even! I remember my first CPU in particular had a VERY small heatsink. It was only about 10mm high, made of extruded aluminium, with a small 40mm fan screwed on top.
It comfortably ran Duke3D in 640*480, but 800*600 was too much for it. There the framerate started sagging. I recall the motherboard still worked just fine at the time when I replaced it for a VIA Apollo MVP3-based board with an AGP slot and 2MB cache around 2000ish so I could get some decent 3D graphics going, and I actually tossed it out last year... A little sad perhaps, but I'd kept it around for so long stowed away in a closet, and it was SO obsolete anyway. Even more obsolete in a way than my now even older Amiga actually. I still have the video card by the way, it's lying on my kitchen table right now in fact. Still works too, to the best of my knowledge, unless the caps have dried out or something... My very first network add-in card still works in Windows 7 64-bit, which gave me a big lulz. It's gotta be over 10 years old now, so nobody better accuse Microsoft of not properly supporting hardware, haha!
Anyone else feeling somewhat nostalgic over old (PC) hardware? I know we get bitchy as soon as our PCs become older than three years or so and nothing recent runs very well on them, but it's cool methinks to think back and what things USED to be like around the dawn of personal computing. Others started gaming on PCs much earlier than I did, thankfully I wasn't a part of the 286/386 days with really crappy ISA video boards and just as crappy MFM/RLL HDDs etc; I held out until PC hardware had become at least somewhat decent.
Even so, when we today buy flash memory sticks that hold a THOUSAND times the amount of RAM computers had less than one and a half decades ago for a price that's so cheap that they could practically be tossed in for free in a packet of cornflakes your mind kinda boggles. People who were around back then remember how enormously expensive storage was compared to now. Not just RAM, but also HDDs were quite a bit more expensive than today. Right now you can pick up a 2TB drive for a very very low price, and that's the top of the line. Back then, a top of the line HDD could cost nearly half a month's salary, and in the late 80s it was the entire month's salary, lol!
And it hasn't even been that long....! My. How time flies.
)I do remember mine. It was summer 1997, my - by now 10 years old! - Amiga 500 was just so waaay way past its prime it wasn't even funny, even though I had installed a CPU "accelerator" in it - a 14.4MHz 68000 with a bit of SRAM cache, which actually worked pretty damn good really; it actually gave an almost 100% speedup in many programs. I had also bestowed a 2MB "chipram" expander and a 'flicker fixer' on my humble Amiga, so I could get progressive scan video at 720*480ish (plus some overscan) on a Commodore original hires monitor (which was about as far from a TCO 97 compliant unit as you could possibly get; it attracted ENORMOUS amounts of dust!)
At the time I was still young, and a giant Amiga fanboy, absolutely convinced of the evils of the wickedness of Intel, Bill Gates and the unbalanced clunkyness of PC hardware in general, the evils of Windows (and its associated bloat), and so on. However, reality had been catching up with me faster and faster for the past couple years; Doom, Duke 3D and other increasingly complex games forced me to finally give up my old trusty workhorse.
So I - involuntarily - caved to the pressure, but I did so on my own terms. My first PC would not have an Intel CPU. Instead, AMD would be my knight in shining armor, my salvation so to speak.
I read up on the internet on what components I wanted - using Anandtech, HardOCP and other early sources to find out what I should pick. So the deal became:
* AMD K6 166MHz CPU (couldn't afford anything faster - it was probably about 40% cheaper than Intel's Pentium 166MHz at the time)
* ASUS TX97 PCI motherboard (one of the very first to support SDRAM DIMMs, 3-pin "smart" fanheaders, USB and UDMA ATA-33), featuring 512kb onboard page-mapped SRAM cache and up to 128MB of memory, but only caching the first 64MB though.
* 32MB SDRAM (16 was the norm at the time - I wanted to push the envelope a little.)
* Hercules Dynamite128 video card featuring the Tseng ET6000 video processor with 4MB MDRAM. It had no 3D support whatsoever, and its video acceleration was pretty much non-existant - much to my chagrin when the DVD revolution started. But initially it worked pretty well.
* Creative Soundblaster AWE64 PnP (it was shite, it really was.)
* Quantum Fireball ST 3.2GB HDD (first generation that supported UDMA-33!)
* Some CDROM unit which I can't recall; probably a noname brand.
All packaged in a then-typical PC-beige sharp-edged steel chassis with a PC-beige plastic front bezel, powered by some noname power supply. Well, they were all noname power supplies back then I guess! Nobody paid much attention to that particular component as I recall, not that it mattered very much back then, as the entire PC drew only about half the amount of power of a regular lightbulb, if that much even! I remember my first CPU in particular had a VERY small heatsink. It was only about 10mm high, made of extruded aluminium, with a small 40mm fan screwed on top.
It comfortably ran Duke3D in 640*480, but 800*600 was too much for it. There the framerate started sagging. I recall the motherboard still worked just fine at the time when I replaced it for a VIA Apollo MVP3-based board with an AGP slot and 2MB cache around 2000ish so I could get some decent 3D graphics going, and I actually tossed it out last year... A little sad perhaps, but I'd kept it around for so long stowed away in a closet, and it was SO obsolete anyway. Even more obsolete in a way than my now even older Amiga actually. I still have the video card by the way, it's lying on my kitchen table right now in fact. Still works too, to the best of my knowledge, unless the caps have dried out or something... My very first network add-in card still works in Windows 7 64-bit, which gave me a big lulz. It's gotta be over 10 years old now, so nobody better accuse Microsoft of not properly supporting hardware, haha!
Anyone else feeling somewhat nostalgic over old (PC) hardware? I know we get bitchy as soon as our PCs become older than three years or so and nothing recent runs very well on them, but it's cool methinks to think back and what things USED to be like around the dawn of personal computing. Others started gaming on PCs much earlier than I did, thankfully I wasn't a part of the 286/386 days with really crappy ISA video boards and just as crappy MFM/RLL HDDs etc; I held out until PC hardware had become at least somewhat decent.
Even so, when we today buy flash memory sticks that hold a THOUSAND times the amount of RAM computers had less than one and a half decades ago for a price that's so cheap that they could practically be tossed in for free in a packet of cornflakes your mind kinda boggles. People who were around back then remember how enormously expensive storage was compared to now. Not just RAM, but also HDDs were quite a bit more expensive than today. Right now you can pick up a 2TB drive for a very very low price, and that's the top of the line. Back then, a top of the line HDD could cost nearly half a month's salary, and in the late 80s it was the entire month's salary, lol!
And it hasn't even been that long....! My. How time flies.
