Youtube would have been in its infancy wouldnt it?
It was all about MySpace, Facebook and Live Messenger back then.

I remember playing GTA3 and even Vice City my P2 400, The game did lag but I played so much I could counter act it with my timing.
Those 2 games and C&C generals were probably the newest games I played, then 2006 got a laptop and went traveling so wasn't doing much gaming anymore anyway

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-06-30, 20:04:

Youtube would have been in its infancy wouldnt it?
It was all about MySpace, Facebook and Live Messenger back then.

the idea that 2005-2009 is "long ago"... and yet in some ways it really is, reading those names

giantenemycat - did that machine go online ok? in that time the 'cost' in cpu and especially ram of going online was becoming higher and higher, especially as early "social media" appeared

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-06-30, 20:04:

Youtube would have been in its infancy wouldnt it?
It was all about MySpace, Facebook and Live Messenger back then.

YouTube was definitely going strong, I think we first got the internet around September '05 and I remember it already coming up on Google whenever you searched for videos. I told a friend about this cool new site I found and he basically said 'duh, everyone knows about YouTube'.

giantenemycat wrote on 2024-06-30, 16:01:

But this is how I first experienced the internet, YouTube, Skype, Windows Live Messenger, everything. Somehow what is essentially a mid-1998 PII Deschutes 450 MHz with SSE tacked on carried me and my family through to the end of the noughties, with LimeWire and who knows how much malware & bloat dragging it down even harder.

if early youtube did work good on that, the question is whether that SSE actually did do something similar to what the marketing for p3 was originally claiming? youtube originally used h.263, i think. can't find any info offhand on whether this was decoded with SSE support or not. the codec is a couple years older than SSE, but then again it wouldn't be that suprising to see even a p2 450 handle 240p streaming...

gerry wrote on 2024-07-01, 20:47:

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-06-30, 20:04:

Youtube would have been in its infancy wouldnt it?
It was all about MySpace, Facebook and Live Messenger back then.

the idea that 2005-2009 is "long ago"... and yet in some ways it really is, reading those names

giantenemycat - did that machine go online ok? in that time the 'cost' in cpu and especially ram of going online was becoming higher and higher, especially as early "social media" appeared

I don't recall any issues...somehow. Likely the lower standards played some part in that, but then again everything was 240p at the time. Probably the only thing that made it usable is the SSE instructions - I doubt many of the programs would have run at all without it.

At least maxing out the RAM by adding another two 256MB SDRAM sticks I'm sure would have made a world of difference and cost a single penny, but a few years prior my dad tried to upgrade our previous PC. It ended up being the wrong type (probably got DDR?) and he was too embarrassed to return it, so I suppose that put off the idea of upgrades forever.

auron wrote on 2024-07-01, 23:35:

giantenemycat wrote on 2024-06-30, 16:01:

But this is how I first experienced the internet, YouTube, Skype, Windows Live Messenger, everything. Somehow what is essentially a mid-1998 PII Deschutes 450 MHz with SSE tacked on carried me and my family through to the end of the noughties, with LimeWire and who knows how much malware & bloat dragging it down even harder.

if early youtube did work good on that, the question is whether that SSE actually did do something similar to what the marketing for p3 was originally claiming? youtube originally used h.263, i think. can't find any info offhand on whether this was decoded with SSE support or not. the codec is a couple years older than SSE, but then again it wouldn't be that suprising to see even a p2 450 handle 240p streaming...

Maybe it well and truly did. It is wild to think of a 450 MHz CPU streaming a video via flash player up to 2009, although wasn't 144p an option back then as well? I'm also wondering if SSE was just a hardcoded requirement for browsers and other programs back then, but it's hard to find out.

giantenemycat wrote on 2024-07-01, 23:19:

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-06-30, 20:04:

Youtube would have been in its infancy wouldnt it?
It was all about MySpace, Facebook and Live Messenger back then.

YouTube was definitely going strong, I think we first got the internet around September '05 and I remember it already coming up on Google whenever you searched for videos. I told a friend about this cool new site I found and he basically said 'duh, everyone knows about YouTube'.

Youtube launched 14th Feb 2005.
It was in its infancy back then, it wasnt going strong at all. It took a long time before people even started using it.
I remember it all very well indeed.

giantenemycat wrote on 2024-07-01, 23:55:

auron wrote on 2024-07-01, 23:35:

giantenemycat wrote on 2024-06-30, 16:01:

But this is how I first experienced the internet, YouTube, Skype, Windows Live Messenger, everything. Somehow what is essentially a mid-1998 PII Deschutes 450 MHz with SSE tacked on carried me and my family through to the end of the noughties, with LimeWire and who knows how much malware & bloat dragging it down even harder.

if early youtube did work good on that, the question is whether that SSE actually did do something similar to what the marketing for p3 was originally claiming? youtube originally used h.263, i think. can't find any info offhand on whether this was decoded with SSE support or not. the codec is a couple years older than SSE, but then again it wouldn't be that suprising to see even a p2 450 handle 240p streaming...

Maybe it well and truly did. It is wild to think of a 450 MHz CPU streaming a video via flash player up to 2009, although wasn't 144p an option back then as well? I'm also wondering if SSE was just a hardcoded requirement for browsers and other programs back then, but it's hard to find out.

2048x1536 was an option I used back then.
21" Eizo CRT 😀

giantenemycat wrote on 2024-07-01, 23:55:

Maybe it well and truly did. It is wild to think of a 450 MHz CPU streaming a video via flash player up to 2009, although wasn't 144p an option back then as well? I'm also wondering if SSE was just a hardcoded requirement for browsers and other programs back then, but it's hard to find out.

i don't think so, the requirements for old firefox versions are still out there on their official site. even 3.0 in 2008 just had this:

Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
52 MB hard drive space

4.0 in 2011 did introduce an SSE2 requirement, though. as for 144p, this was an option for mobile and in fact is - as of now, they actually still deliver 3gp 144p mpeg-4 part 2 video for old phones.

auron wrote on 2024-07-02, 00:16:

i don't think so, the requirements for old firefox versions are still out there on their official site. even 3.0 in 2008 just ha […]
Show full quote

giantenemycat wrote on 2024-07-01, 23:55:

Maybe it well and truly did. It is wild to think of a 450 MHz CPU streaming a video via flash player up to 2009, although wasn't 144p an option back then as well? I'm also wondering if SSE was just a hardcoded requirement for browsers and other programs back then, but it's hard to find out.

i don't think so, the requirements for old firefox versions are still out there on their official site. even 3.0 in 2008 just had this:

Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
52 MB hard drive space

4.0 in 2011 did introduce an SSE2 requirement, though. as for 144p, this was an option for mobile and in fact is - as of now, they actually still deliver 3gp 144p mpeg-4 part 2 video for old phones.

Browsers were not the RAM-guzzling, CPU-cycle-sucking monstrosities they are now back then. Some might disagree with me, but my sense is that Chrome really started this trend of the browser just guzzling everything you can throw at it. The fact that everybody started treating the browser as an operating system and writing ever more sophisticated "web applications" did not help...

Once upon a time, if you were "just going to browse the web" you needed a lower-performance computer than if you were going to do other things. Oh how the world has changed...

VivienM wrote on 2024-07-02, 00:31:

Some might disagree with me, but my sense is that Chrome really started this trend of the browser just guzzling everything you can throw at it. The fact that everybody started treating the browser as an operating system and writing ever more sophisticated "web applications" did not help.

I most defiantly agree.
Running Windows Remote Desktop servers became a bit of a nightmare as you would have however many people logging in simultaneously.
Everything behaved well with IE but with more and more sites requiring chrome, server resources also went up.

But as you say it was part of the transition from traditional programs installed locally to browser based interface (although still typically hosted on a in house server)

gerry wrote on 2024-07-01, 20:47:

giantenemycat - did that machine go online ok? in that time the 'cost' in cpu and especially ram of going online was becoming higher and higher, especially as early "social media" appeared

One of the things about the lifespan of IE 6 is that it severely constrained web developers' instincts to make pages as resource-intensive as they've become now

VivienM wrote on 2024-07-02, 00:31:

auron wrote on 2024-07-02, 00:16:

i don't think so, the requirements for old firefox versions are still out there on their official site. even 3.0 in 2008 just ha […]
Show full quote

giantenemycat wrote on 2024-07-01, 23:55:

Maybe it well and truly did. It is wild to think of a 450 MHz CPU streaming a video via flash player up to 2009, although wasn't 144p an option back then as well? I'm also wondering if SSE was just a hardcoded requirement for browsers and other programs back then, but it's hard to find out.

i don't think so, the requirements for old firefox versions are still out there on their official site. even 3.0 in 2008 just had this:

Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
52 MB hard drive space

4.0 in 2011 did introduce an SSE2 requirement, though. as for 144p, this was an option for mobile and in fact is - as of now, they actually still deliver 3gp 144p mpeg-4 part 2 video for old phones.

Browsers were not the RAM-guzzling, CPU-cycle-sucking monstrosities they are now back then. Some might disagree with me, but my sense is that Chrome really started this trend of the browser just guzzling everything you can throw at it. The fact that everybody started treating the browser as an operating system and writing ever more sophisticated "web applications" did not help...

Once upon a time, if you were "just going to browse the web" you needed a lower-performance computer than if you were going to do other things. Oh how the world has changed...

I think it's when mainstream sites could get away with dropping IE6 support than the rise of Chrome although the two are definitely interrelated.
Remember that Chrome brought in a JIT JavaScript interpreter (V8) and all sorts of stuff aimed at fast JavaScript. Before that, JS seemed limited to things like forms validation, and there was somewhat of a sense that pages should still work with it shut off ("graceful degradation"). There was definitely a 180 on that at one point, the more JavaScript the better. Also notice you can't print (and for those who roll their eyes at printing, "export to PDF") anything anymore, they don't break apart into pages and instead you get something resembling a screenshot.

The only CPU guzzlings browsers had done back then was all from Flash. Flash banner ads also used to be a thing, weren't cached well and ate all the CPU for very unoptimized vector art. Youtube was unaccelerated Flash for the beginning also, already efforts then to download the FLVs and play them directly in something else.

I think it was Flash Player 10.2 (preview/beta was called "square") which added GPU-assisted rendering.
I vaguely remember that GeForce 8 was minimum requirement for Nvidia cards, not sure about ATI/AMD.
Flash Player was one reason I had switched from S3 to an Nvidia card back then.

auron wrote on 2024-07-02, 00:16:

i don't think so, the requirements for old firefox versions are still out there on their official site. even 3.0 in 2008 just ha […]
Show full quote

i don't think so, the requirements for old firefox versions are still out there on their official site. even 3.0 in 2008 just had this:

Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
52 MB hard drive space

4.0 in 2011 did introduce an SSE2 requirement, though.

I'm typing from my Pentium III running Firefox 45.9 ESR, released in 2017. This is the last release that will run without SSE2.

looking at it again, the specs for 4.0 were for recommended, not required hardware: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/4.0/sys … m-requirements/

i don't know if them mentioning SSE2 specifically means that from that version on it's optionally used for better performance, or they just arbitrarily decided to list p4 as the recommended cpu.