First post, by Tetrium
- Rank
- l33t++
So today a friend of mine visited me today and she brought an old computer I knew I was gonna be getting for like half a year or so.
As she told me it had Windows 95 running on it, I had anticipated it would be old, but I was still kinda surprised when I had a first glance at the system case and it turned out to be an AT style system case!
It's in really good shape too, no obvious yellowing and hardly any dust.
Unfortunately the hardware inside was nothing special. Just a VX motherboard (although with 2 DIMM slots, kinda unusual for a VX), S3 ...something with 2 memory chips and 2 filled memory upgrade sockets, an ISA ESS soundcard and a Pentium 166 non-mmx.
But still, in the last 2+ years, this has only been the second AT system that found it's way to my home, AT systems seem to be on the verge of extinction in the wild by now.
I never see them on the streets anymore, there was none during the last queens day (and I saw a LOT of old systems), nothing in second hand stores and noone I talked to who seemed to have such a system gathering dust in a closet.
It's all ATX these days...
Come to think of it, about 13 years ago I got my 1st own computer, a brand new sparkling superfast Pentium 2...WOOO!!
It was super fast! faster then the Pentium 1 mmx's owned by any of my friends and only people using their computers for word processing were still using a 486 or older.
Back then it all seemed to be simple, you had the 8086, 286, 386 and the 486 which were regarded as old in those days.
A Pentium 1 was considered 'alright', provided you had one running at 133Mhz or faster and the Pentium 2 was the newest kid on the block.
And now it's ancient, I mean it was superceded by the Pentium 3's, Athlon, Pentium 4 (in 3 different sockets), Athlon XP, Athlon 64, Conroe, Dual cores, DDR2, Quad core!, DDR3...
The more computer hardware evolves, the more cluttered it seems to become, with the people who can be considered computer hobbyists (imo, who at least has some first hand experience with AT-style hardware and older) slowly becoming total hardware specialists.
In 10 years, we could all write a book about computer hardware, and how it evolved and was viewed, which noone else could write the same way we could because there is so much to tell, and I think im-possible to learn for someone who, in 10 years time, decides to "oh, I'll just go write a book about computers!", because they can't. Ever.
What was before the 8086 is kinda a black area for me anyway, and in 10 years time anything before the dual core will be a black area for the people then. Can anyone imagine that? How could anyone explain how it's been?
Anyway, I'm ranting, and I'm hungry for some toast with peanutbutter 😁
Weird, isn't it?
