This week it seems to be the week of anniversaries: Two years of Mac OS X, ten years from the Pentium launch, ten years of Red Hat, three years of OS/2 World.
Anniversaries, Anniversaries and More Anniversaries
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Hey, you forgot 10 years of NetBSD last week(March 21)
No, I did not forget it:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3075
It runs at 66 now. 😀 I got that machine in August ’94, and it still works pretty well. It served as a router/fileserver until about two years ago, and that was after five years of desktop duty. Unfortunately, it’s in a pile of parts in the closet at the moment.
Huuuugh heat sink on top, too. I remember that people complained about the power consumption back then. Still, it doesn’t heat up the room nearly as much as my Athlon 1800+. Not even close.
My first system was a 50 mhz 486 at the time and the thing cost a bundle, but was way cheaper than a Mac. And it had Quark Xpress, PhotoShop and Illustrator.
I remember that the first Pentium chips shipped at 66 mhz and the 100 mhz 486 beat it in every benchmark.
So when’s the 10-year anniversary of the Pentium Pro?
Vic
I remember just before the Pentium came out, even mainstream media were reporting on “problems” Intel were having with its high running temperature. Back in those days, few CPUs even had heatsinks on them – the Pentium would be the first to require such a thing. So many people made a fuss about this and the fact that certain programs ran slower on the Pentium than a 486. Of course, they’d soon be proven a bit premature in their assessment as the slowness was attributable to the fact that compilers were not optimizing for the Pentium’s superscalar architecture yet.
10 years ago I was running on a lowly Intel 386SX 16MHz (with Cyrix Math Co-Processor!) and DOS 5. A year after the Pentium launch, I’d be running a 486 DX2 66MHz with DOS 6.21 and Windows 3.11 and soon be introduced to the Internet. It’s been a great 10 years in computing – I wonder if the next 10 will be as nostalgic?
As for the Pentium Pro, it came out sometime in November of 1995, with the Pentium II coming out in 1997 just after AMD launched its K6 which would be a stepping stone towards the Athlon.
I was wrong – the Pentium Pro came out a bit earlier in 1995.
I remember when the Pentium 60 came out. At the time the biggest high street retailer was pushing OS2/Warp as the next big thing for PC’s. Windows 95 was a couple of months away and they thought IBM would use their lead to market and gain some serious market share. Oddly enough, that high street retailer went bankrupt a couple of years after, and OS2/Warp never found its place on the desktop of every PC.
I had a pc with a 386 running at 16mhz, a meg of ram, 40mb hardisk and no co-processor, i think DOS 5.0 was running on it