486 DX4 100 was a great system. All the DOS greats worked flawlessly. Also had a Pentium 233 MMX which was nice for Win 95 and the last of the DOS games. I also used to have a Celeron 266 which was my rig for a good long while. Had some great times on that with Jedi Knight and Half-Life/Counter-Strike (with a Voodoo 1 and a Matrox Mystique card).

I'm thinking the new Intel Sandy Bridge processors will become very memorable down the road as well one day.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Totally OT, but I heard about this data migration company from New York a while ago.

Basically imagine yourself hording all this vintage hardware. And in 50 years nobody has this kind of hardware anymore, but there are important historical documents, which libraries and other bodies really really would like to migrate into more future proof formats.

So yea guys, keep collecting and in 50 years you might be able to profit immensely 🤣

nice thought, but the library of congress already has every format ever made. and probably 5-6 of each. I watched a history channel special about the digital transformation that they are doing. They literally buy anything they can get their hands on to preserve the format.

and they have plenty of space to store it all. ^.^

Yes, but not everyone has such vast resources. I believe there is always a demand for outsourcing such "data migration" services. E.g. private customers, businesses, smaller libraries, smaller government customers...

Tetrium wrote:

If you still have that CPU, it's probably an Engineering Sample, you should treasure it! 😉

Yep, it's currently safely boxed up 😀

As I look back the computers I have had are:
A 486 DX4/100 that I used for a long time
A pentium MMX 166
A pentium MMX 233 that was never used that much
A P3/500 that has been around in various incarnations FOREVER (I sill have it)
A couple of k6-2/500s that I keep around for voodoo/glide games
A p3/1000 hat is currently my internet box and has been used for a while

I forgot to add these 2:
Celeron 400 - The forgotten 400Mhz CPU. Ran one fine for a couple years with ME
Celeron 800 - The first 100Mhz FSB Celeron, it was pretty good and a LOT easier to find then any of the FCPGA 100Mhz FSB Coppermines. Mine's being used on a s370 BX board with a V3 3000 AGP.

I didn't own a "good" CPU for a long time after I started with PC's, but ...

P200 non-mmx ... stole it from the guy who ripped me off when I bought a PC from him, and it was amazing. Played all my games perfectly and was a great daddy to my Maxi Gamer Voodoo 1.

P2-266 ... Just had much more grunt in DOS than the P200, and made me realise that dungeon keeper could really be silky smooth (in 320x200). I still did most of my gaming in DOS.

Duron 750 ... made my geforce 3 fly, and never let me down. Windows ME let me down though... many times. I killed this chip when I tried to OC it to play medal of honor with decent frames.

I haven't owned all of these but:
- 233mhz pentium MMX. These were incredibly common as they were the last Intel chips you could get on a lot of socket 7 boards. A lot of people entered the new millenium on a 233 PI (myself included), and ran it for a few years into the new millenium too.

- 100mhz FSB PII chips. A lot of people skipped the 66mhz fsb chips and ended up with PIII 350/400/450 chips (especially the 400). I can't even count how many PII 400 boxes I've come across. Sadly I didn't own one, I waited all the way for a 600mhz PIII coppermine

- The Original Slot A Athlon's. AMD finally had a chip that could beat Intel's chips at the same clock speed (for a little while). The two were neck and neck performance wise.

- The coppermine PIII's. AMD couldn't answer this threat very well until they went to socketed chips again.

- Northwood Pentium IV chips. Nobody owned the Willamettes (well I owned one), but the Northwoods introduced some pretty excessive memory bandwidth for the time.

- The Athlon 64, from the 754 pin socket all the way up through the socket 939 X2 chips. Intel had chips that could compete with them, but they couldn't compete well. When Intel came out with the Pentium D they got a reprieve though, as the X2's were expensive by comparison.

- The core 2. The architecture may have been tweaked a bit, but it's been king of the hill performance wise since it's inception.

-6 core Phenom II chips. Intel should really sell a few 6 core chips for an affordable price. Also, those 12 core opterons are insanely awesome. Lower clock sped, but 12 cores, and support for up to quad channel DDR3.