'99 is an interesting year for me. I got fired from my job as store technician with Special Reserve (UK-based mail order PC retailer) and got a job in London. This is the only time in my life that I ever owned a bang-up-to-date rig, albeit an off-the-shelf one from a shop. I bought a Pentium III 733Mhz (Coppermine - still have the CPU, got rid of the mobo years ago) on finance. Pretty sure it had a TNT2 card in it at the time, which I later upgraded to a Radeon 8500 when it first came out. I really don't remember much from these years as I was pretty out of touch with gaming etc. but I played a lot of Rollcage Stage II and Carmageddon TDR 2000, possibly also X-Wing and Tie Fighter Collector's edition. It was also the only time I bought a complete system.

tincup wrote:

stamasd wrote:

Oi! My 300A was not stable enough at 504MHz in Linux, was good enough for games in Windows at that speed but eventually I got tired to go into the bios and change the speeds every time I booted another OS so I kept it at a stable and cool 463MHz most of the time.

but it was rock solid at 450. It was the bees knees at the time - like cheatin' the devil...

It was very stable even at 463MHz for me, courtesy of Abit and their special 103MHz FSB. 😀

In 1999 bought Celeron 300A. Asked the seller to choose the specimen wich hold 450 MHz OC. 😀 It worked at 495 MHz too. 128 Mb. Video TNT2.

In 1999 I was studiing on the university (Informatics, what else 😁). My computer was the following at that time:
- Aristo MVP3 motherboard (AT/ATX form)
- AMD K6-2 3DNow! 300Mhz CPU
- 64MB 100Mhz SDRam
- 5.1GB Quantum Fireball HDD
- S3 Savage 4 32MB AGP
- 1.44" Sony FDD
- Initio SCSI controller
- 4x Panasonic SCSI CD Writer (we could ask money at that time for wriing CD-s, but mostly in 1998 only)
- Big AT/ATX tower
- Daewoo 15" CRT

I was born in 2000 so I can't say I built a PC in 1999, but for anyone curious, the PC in my signature is a "1999 Build" I finished a few months back. I think it's pretty accurate for strictly staying in the time frame of 1998-1999.

Drop about 384mb of ram and maybe the 1999 part will be more believable. 😀

leileilol wrote:

Drop about 384mb of ram and maybe the 1999 part will be more believable. 😀

True... I don't have any 128mb PC100 sticks laying around though... plus I got the 512mb for free from my summer job (a.k.a. I stole it from one of my school's old computers they were recycling 🤣).

Pentium 166 with....

17" CTX monitor
32MB RAM
S3 Virge 4MB
AWE 32
2 HD's which were... (I think) 2gb and 4gb.
Not sure which CD-ROM drive at that point. Would have been either 10 or 24x.

Was still using this system until late 2001 when I built a new one.

It would've been my 1997 build still, just with an upgrade to already out-of-date Voodoo Rush based 3D accelerated graphics that year:
ASUS P/I-P55T2P4, Pentium 200MMX, 32MB EDO, WD Caviar 2.1GB HDD, Hercules Stingray 128/3D 8MB, Vibra 16, Creative 24X CD-ROM, 17" CRT.
It was definitely already feeling old by then, and things just kept on advancing super fast. Still ran Counter-Strike playably until there was a major performance hit around beta 6.5.

Not much, was in the navy that year so not much time for computers. Had my old P166MMX with Voodoo2 for the times I went back home. Mostly played HL. Later in -99 I bought an TNT2 (PCI since the motherboard didn't have an AGP-port). In the beginning of -00 I build a new computer around a AX59 Pro, K6-2 450 and the TNT2 I kept.

Well, I was barely a year old as of 1999, but I can tell you what I had in 2001, when I got my first computer, a hand-me-down that passed from my father to me. If you think 3 is at least a little early to have one's own computer, it definitely was, but it shaped who I am today. Without that I probably wouldn't ever have become very interested in computers.

It was some sort of NEC consumer desktop circa ~1997. It was equipped with a Pentium MMX 200 and 8MB EDO RAM. It had a 1.2GB hard drive with Windows 95 OSR2. The graphics card was either an S3 Trio 64 or ViRGE, but the monitor I was using quickly killed the card somehow. I used that for a year until it died and I got my mother's old Sony VAIO with very similar specs (swapping the 200MMX for a 166MMX and 8 for 16MB RAM) when her Pentium II 450 went to my older brother when she bought a Northwood Pentium 4 along with my dad, whose PIII-450 Quantex machine went into duty as a router/firewall for our home network, to which my machines were never connected.

Early 2005 saw me with a Optiplex GX1 tower with a PII-350, 128MB RAM, and WIndows XP, where later 2005 saw me with a brand-new Dimension E510 with a Prescott P4 @ 3.2GHz, 1GB RAM and 160GB hard drive with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

That's probably as recent as I should get.

I was still kind of young in 1999, my fist PC was in 2003 ish.
If I recall the PC we had then was something this...
compaq pc with a PIII 450 or 500 I cant recall, 128mb or ram. 20gb hard drive and I think it had a ati rage card.

At the time I was using some Pentium Pro-equipped unit, IIRC 150MHz or so, equipped with an ATI mach64 variant (I still have the diskettes oddly), some Sound Blaster or a clone, parallel Zip drive, and 2GB HDD. I recall using it with Win95, 98, DOS, and even NT 3.x, often experimenting with it in software just to see what would happen. I no longer have the unit, sadly, but I credit it with starting my love for computers in general.

Occasionally I also used a iMac G3 at one of my parents' offices. A lovely system, but grr, those hockey puck mice were a pain.

Pentium MMX 166@200MHz
64MB EDORAM
Intel 430VX Board Shuttle HOT555A IIRC
S3 Trio 64V+
late (cheap) Soundblaster 16 ISA
Monitor Siemens Nixdorf MCM1503
1.7GB Seagate HDD
6.4GB Seagate HDD
16x CD Drive IDE
1.44 Floppy
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 8MB (not having 12MB didnt bother me at all back then)
HP Deskjet 820CXI
Quadral SAM40P Amplified Stereo Speakers
FlyCam Supra (Parallel Port)
Microsoft Serial Mouse
Medion Erazor Joystick
10Mbit PCI SMC Ethernet Card
Windows 98SE
ELSA Microlink 56K Internet V.90 Modem (Serial Port) - Gateway to the Web
I wish I knew the case! I was hoping to spot a similar one on vogons. I still know exactly how it looks

I had a Pentium MMX 233 with a TX motherboard and an AWE64 GOLD back in those days. I cant recall any of the other bits and pieces. It ran Nintendo and Sega ROMs beautifully.

Dell Dimension P90 (originally with FDIV bug)
Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446
~ 1 GB HDD
32 MB ram (IIRC)
4x IDE CD-ROM

A little while later, I installed a Mediavision Deluxe, a thin net ISA NIC, and upgraded the P90 for a P100 with a superior heatsink. Ran Slackware 2 and Mandrake 6 quite nicely.

i had a supermicro P6SBA with a pentium III cpu
soundblaster awe64Gold

i was super proud of this board for some reason
i felt like it was invincible indestructable. probably because it was so much better then all the 486 + 386 i had before it 🤣

forget which cpu i had.. i think it was the entry level 450mhz katmai PIII
i think i upgraded the cpu because this board lasted me up untill around 2002/2003 when i got a asus p4p800se i think..
i remember being super pissed when i upgraded because i had to lose the 64gold due to no ISA slots

MS-5189? (it was an via apollo pro133a)
Pentium 3 1024MHz!!!
384MB SDRAM PC133!!!
40GB HDD!!!
ATI RADEON 7200 !!!!! (idk if it was a mid end or low end for that time)
and the best part, the crazy nedion 19" HD CRT monitor (hell, that was heavy)

back in 99 I was working with a system of the following specs (and was replaced the next year by a K6-2+ 500)

Cyrix M2 Pr300 (233MHz)
32MB Ram
S3 Virge 2MB
1GB hd

Early 2000 I upgraded to the following:

AMD K6-2+ 500
128MB SD133
8.4GB Samsung HD (terrible drive)
3DFX Voodoo Banshee 16MB
Sound Blaster Live (not sure if this was in it on the build or afterwards)

Tertz wrote:

In 1999 bought Celeron 300A. Asked the seller to choose the specimen wich hold 450 MHz OC. 😀 It worked at 495 MHz too. 128 Mb. Video TNT2.

Pretty much the same. Except I never hand picked my Celeron or even bothered to OC it. I had:
Intel Celeron 300A
Abit motherboard (can't remember what model)
Riva TNT2
128Mb RAM (later exanded to 196Mb)
SB128 PCI sound card
20Gb HDD