What else could You say than "oh nostalgia" in front of my "newest" rig:

Specs RAW:
CPU: Original Pentium CPU running 60MHz
Expansion slots: 4 PCI, 5 ISA
Display adapter: Diamond Stealth 64 PCI
Sound card: Sound Blaster Pro 2

Since this is not the "most glorious" retro-machine I've built, I have a little story to tell for both of the meaningful parts...

Pentium:
I was 17 years old and in high-school. The year was 1995. I had got a quite nice 486 Dx2 66MHz machine about one year earlier.

My friend told me, that some new cpu had been introduced, called "Pentium". Hmm... strange, usually the cpu:s had had a series of numbers as a "name". He told me that a friend of ours had been saying that "I'll buy one of those Pentiums when they come out, regardless of the costs". Also he told me that finally the same guy had been able to get one of those.

As a common procedure those day we gathered a bunch of friends and went over. There it was, a Pentium... The fella had bought a complete computer. The first notice was, how bad the monitor was. It was a 14 inch Viewsonic, and viewsonics were not that good at that time, at least that 14 incher wasn't. The case was also quite bulky, grey minitower, common also back then.

All right, let's fire up some games! There wasn't any game loaded into that computers hard drive, that could have been able to show any difference between the Pentium and the 486 machines we all others had... sad...

Then came the news about the calculus error in Pentium CPU:s. That was easy to demonstrate, even by using windows caculator! That's about all I remember from "old days" when anyone says "Pentium"; even these days! That's how it goes, I never got a classic Pentium just until recently. The reason for getting one now? To demonstrate the calculus bug the early Pentiums had 😀.

Sound Blaster Pro 2:
When I was even younger than in previous story, 14 years old, I decided that I needed a sound card. So far I had been listening to the beeps of the PC-speaker (or croaks, since "RealSound" etc. drivers had been introduced for outputting digitized sound through PC-speaker). After convincing my father we headed for the local PC store. There they were... sound cards.

My friend had a Sound Blaster 1.5 at that time, and I had been listening to that for a couple of times. It had totally amazed me. How could anything sound "that good". The FM-synthesized music was awesome and there were decent digitized effects in some games, in contrast to the PC-speaker croaking and hissing digitized effects.

Back to the PC store with my father... There were two models available, both from Creative: the Sound Blaster 2.0 and the Sound Blaster Pro 2. We asked the difference between the models and the dealer told us that the pro-model had stereo sound. Since I had been listening to the version 1.5 and already that was amazing and the pro cost almost two times more than the SB 2.0, we got the Sound Blaster 2.0; and off we went. It was christmas time, so the card was wrapped as a christmas present. Oh the glory when I finally opened the packed during christmas eve and listened to the titles I had been playing with PC-speaker 😀.

One of my friend's big-brother bought one of those Sound Blaster Pro 2:s the next year. I remember when he showed us the Monkey Island 2 "bone-dance" -scene and how he was exited about how good it sounded. I couldn't tell a difference between my SB2.0 and that SBPro2.

This christmas, 15 years later, I remembered that old SB2.0 card we had back then. I called and asked if it was still safe at my parents; yes it was with the original box and all the bells and whistles it came with (actually only came with the manual and the disks). I looked up in the interned if there were any SBPro2:s around, since that was the card we never bought (jumped from SB2.0 -> AWE32). I found one card and bought it.

Next thing I will do, is to try the "bone-dance" from MI2 and listen if I missed something back then... I think during the christmas holidays I'll visit my parents and take the SBPro2 with me and give it to my father: "ok, here it finally is, the card we never bought" 😀. I'm eager to see his face when I say that!