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Spirit_Retro
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2010
- Messages
- 470
Well, I got thinking today that "this is it". If the new Zen chips are not up to snuff- that last segment of enthusiasts holding on to the glories of the past will be moving on to Intel. It's just the way it is.
That got me thinking.... about the old days....
I had been running a dual 800Mhz Pentium III system, which was wicked fast, all through 1999. But it sucked for gaming. And the sound was hosed- always due to the driver not being threaded.
But the machine was used mostly for running OSX alpha builds- yes back then Apple had already put OSX on Intel hardware- at least internally. I was one of the lucky people who got to play with it.
Though- I was a gamer. At that time it was Unreal and Quake II.
A buddy of mine, a software guy from the Netherlands, got all charged up about the Tbird chips around the end of June 1999. And they were hard to find because they were selling out everywhere, also supplies were limited. So we started to hunt for processors... in Chicago- during a heat wave. The kind of heatwave that car air conditioning doesn't help with.
It took a week of calling around and sweaty driving, but we found a mom and pop shop in a seedy area of town that had the chips. We drove up into Old Town and each bought chips and boards. Mine was a 100mhz bus 1ghz chip. I think he got the 900mhz version. Can't remember the boards... MSI? Both were Socket A and cherry red.
At any rate we both adjourned to our respective offices and built our new monsters. I think mine had 128Mb ram and a Voodoo 2. Later I replaced that with a GeForce 256.
That processor was fast... really fast... amazingly fast. Since no consumer/gaming software was threaded at that time, it whomped all over my Pentium III dually. Back then- 15 frames a second was considered the optimum target. That system went well beyond that!
That machine was with me for 15 years. First as my gaming rig. Than as a web server. Then a mail server. Then a DNS server. Then an edge router. And in 2011 when I sold my old house and yanked a set of bonded T1s it became the machine I lugged around for 3 years when I moved.
It was finally abandoned, after the death of my mom, when I had to combine three households worth of stuff (mine, the wife, and mom). It did not make the cut.
I didn't throw it away. It was left as "unworthy of retrieving".
A huge number of friends pitched in to help me move and sort all this stuff, and one of the guys from my Amateur Radio club spotted the pile of old computers and asked if he could have them. There was lots of old stuff in there- even a few Cyrix machines.
He loaded all the machines into his pickup truck and drove away....
In that back of that truck was my fully functional Thunderbird rig, with the cherry red motherboard, and the pencil traces I used to overclock it to 1.2 Ghz.
Goodbye my old friend..... I just didn't have room....
That got me thinking.... about the old days....
I had been running a dual 800Mhz Pentium III system, which was wicked fast, all through 1999. But it sucked for gaming. And the sound was hosed- always due to the driver not being threaded.
But the machine was used mostly for running OSX alpha builds- yes back then Apple had already put OSX on Intel hardware- at least internally. I was one of the lucky people who got to play with it.
Though- I was a gamer. At that time it was Unreal and Quake II.
A buddy of mine, a software guy from the Netherlands, got all charged up about the Tbird chips around the end of June 1999. And they were hard to find because they were selling out everywhere, also supplies were limited. So we started to hunt for processors... in Chicago- during a heat wave. The kind of heatwave that car air conditioning doesn't help with.
It took a week of calling around and sweaty driving, but we found a mom and pop shop in a seedy area of town that had the chips. We drove up into Old Town and each bought chips and boards. Mine was a 100mhz bus 1ghz chip. I think he got the 900mhz version. Can't remember the boards... MSI? Both were Socket A and cherry red.
At any rate we both adjourned to our respective offices and built our new monsters. I think mine had 128Mb ram and a Voodoo 2. Later I replaced that with a GeForce 256.
That processor was fast... really fast... amazingly fast. Since no consumer/gaming software was threaded at that time, it whomped all over my Pentium III dually. Back then- 15 frames a second was considered the optimum target. That system went well beyond that!
That machine was with me for 15 years. First as my gaming rig. Than as a web server. Then a mail server. Then a DNS server. Then an edge router. And in 2011 when I sold my old house and yanked a set of bonded T1s it became the machine I lugged around for 3 years when I moved.
It was finally abandoned, after the death of my mom, when I had to combine three households worth of stuff (mine, the wife, and mom). It did not make the cut.
I didn't throw it away. It was left as "unworthy of retrieving".
A huge number of friends pitched in to help me move and sort all this stuff, and one of the guys from my Amateur Radio club spotted the pile of old computers and asked if he could have them. There was lots of old stuff in there- even a few Cyrix machines.
He loaded all the machines into his pickup truck and drove away....
In that back of that truck was my fully functional Thunderbird rig, with the cherry red motherboard, and the pencil traces I used to overclock it to 1.2 Ghz.
Goodbye my old friend..... I just didn't have room....
