The Pentium 2

[Michael172]

Right ive started a new unit (along side ccna) at college, hardware its called. basically we need to biuld a PC, all old parts like P4 1.8GHz's's's n stuff. In the crap i found a pentium 2. It was a cartridge....wtf lol.


Am i young ?

 

[germjames]

Yes! I'm only 27 and I've seen used and built PC's from p2 and p3 chips in slot 1 cartridge thingy's. As far as i'm aware the pentium 3 was a way better chip thatn the pentium 4 in many respects. So much so that the core duo is developed more from the pentium 3 when intel finally gave up on the inefficinet pentium 4. Just in case you care

 

[Lee]

Before the PII they were in sockets, then to accomadate more cache which they couldn't fit on the die they came up with the cartridge (slot 1) design. AMD had Slot A at the time.

I remember having a load of pre release PII (Klamath) systems at work. At the time we were working closely with Intel, and the game we were working on was used in that years Intel Keynote speech.

Compared to some of us, you must be young. I hope that doesn't mean I'm old though. lol

The P4 wasn't a great chip. Power hungry and still relying on Intels old addage that clock speed was king. At the time AMD were producing better chips. That all changed with the Intel Core 2 series.

 

[McBunny]

yes very young

 

[bigmouk]

When i started work i had a DX25 or in todays money 0.025 Ghz!!

Windows 3.1 I think aswell.

I think the first pentium machine I got was a P60 or P75 (0.075 Ghz!)

Slow as sh*t!

 

[Lee]

When i started work i had a DX25 or in todays money 0.025 Ghz!!

Windows 3.1 I think aswell.

I think the first pentium machine I got was a P60 or P75 (0.075 Ghz!)

Slow as sh*t!

Amstrad 1512 for me at work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-1512

Then a 1640, and finally an Amstrad PC2386, but only my boss had colour. lol

Next I managed to blag the first DX2 66 with a gravis ultra sound in it.

 

[bigmouk]

Amstrad 1512 for me at work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-1512

Then a 1640, and finally an Amstrad PC2386, but only my boss had colour. lol

Next I managed to blag the first DX2 66 with a gravis ultra sound in it.

lol , I remember my DX25 looking very much like that! Piece of sh*t it was.

That was 1994 when i started work from school. It ran a CAD package in DOS and i remember one job that came in and it took 2 hours just to render it on the screen! .. if you hit refresh by accident it was a nightmare.

Wasnt the first pentium a bit buggy ? P50 or something ??

 

[Michael172]

Jesus lol. Only bulding it for a laugh in some respects. Most are old dells so dont have AGP slots, but stranegly Xp boots up on them quite well. Think we found a celeron lying about.

Im 20. Ive not even seen a cartridge processor before.

 

[Lee]

lol , I remember my DX25 looking very much like that! Piece of sh*t it was.

That was 1994 when i started work from school. It ran a CAD package in DOS and i remember one job that came in and it took 2 hours just to render it on the screen! .. if you hit refresh by accident it was a nightmare.

Wasnt the first pentium a bit buggy ? P50 or something ??

Must have been around 94/95 for me too.

Yeah, the first Pentium chip was well known for being very buggy. I think we managed to avoid them. Some of the guys had DX4 100s, they were s**t!! My first Pentium was a P90 from memory.

I remember playing Motoracer against my boss, and him winning, yet my lap times were faster. It turned out it wasn't clock locked, and my P166 wasn't as quick as his 233. lol

 

[bmh.01]

If you haven't seen a slot 1 chip before you haven't been playing with the things for that long then, i'm only 21 and can fully remember slot 1 fun.

Didn't the first/early pentium chip have a design flaw in it somewhere? Seem to remember something along those lines.

 

[Michael172]

Only been building since the days of my AMD K6-2, even then it was only playing about.

 

[Darren S]

Amstrad 1512 for me at work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-1512

Then a 1640, and finally an Amstrad PC2386, but only my boss had colour. lol

Next I managed to blag the first DX2 66 with a gravis ultra sound in it.

Awesome card at the time. Absolute biatch at times for it to work (drivers mainly) with my other card at the time - a SoundBlaster 16ASP.

Bought mine in Seattle where it was much cheaper than over the border in Canada, where it was made. :S

D.

 

[Darren S]

If you haven't seen a slot 1 chip before you haven't been playing with the things for that long then, i'm only 21 and can fully remember slot 1 fun.

Didn't the first/early pentium chip have a design flaw in it somewhere? Seem to remember something along those lines.

Yep - something about the decimel placing, iirc. Wasn't there a calculation error after seven decimel places or something?

I remember that case where some engineers had a major issue contructing a bridge correctly because they had based their figures from software using early Pentiums.

D.

 

[Darren S]

Right ive started a new unit (along side ccna) at college, hardware its called. basically we need to biuld a PC, all old parts like P4 1.8GHz's's's n stuff. In the crap i found a pentium 2. It was a cartridge....wtf lol.


Am i young ?

Very. If you can't remember sorting out PCs with 386 processors in them.

D.

 

[iain187]

I can remember 386's but I was too young to be building them, thats probably where I started getting into computers! heh

 

[Struggler]

haha i remember when i had a 486, with windows 3.1
but you still had dos-shell to start it
was a 10mhz processor,
but it had a turbo button and it became 20!!!

chips challenge and commander keen were epic games!!!!!!!!

5 1/4" drives FTW,
had to buy a cd drive and get my dad to install it (i wasnt very old)

how young are you,
i remember that and im only 20,

 

[Cookie]

I'm 25, and I think if I had someone working for me that had never seen a cartridge based CPU, I'd lock them in a cupboard and force them to install XP on a PIII 233 MMX enabled system tbh

 

[bigmouk]

Turbo button FTW!!!

Forgot about those, was there a purpose for them ? I could see a purpose now maybe to save a bit of energy but surely you wouldnt save much clocking from 10mhz to 20mhz!

 

[Ex-User (19928)]

If you haven't seen a slot 1 chip before you haven't been playing with the things for that long then, i'm only 21 and can fully remember slot 1 fun.

Didn't the first/early pentium chip have a design flaw in it somewhere? Seem to remember something along those lines.

Same here, I'm 21 and first started playing with PC inards when we had a DX66 which had a button on the front of the PC to make it run at 100mhz.

 

[Mark One]

are we doing the "first PC i owned" competition?
"mines sh!tter than yours"

lets face it though, turbo buttons are serious WIN. I was pretty annoyed when I took apart an old PC to find the turbo button didnt have ANY wires coming off it and was just a dummy

 

[iain187]

LOL I can remember similar dissapointments, maybe i was taking computers apart quite early... i dont really know what age i would have been (21 now)

 

[bigmouk]

I remember spending many an hour on Dune 2 at work on the DX beast. That game was so addictive. Even networked games across the coax !

 

[sn00p]

Pmsl.

The turbo button dropped the clock speed, you were supposed to have it turned on all the time. It made software that had become unusable when higher clock speed were introduced, well, usable again!

 

[Initiale]

Amstrad 1512 for me at work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-1512

Then a 1640, and finally an Amstrad PC2386, but only my boss had colour. lol

Next I managed to blag the first DX2 66 with a gravis ultra sound in it.

LOL I've got one of those upstairs - with dual floppy drives and the colour CGA monitor. And a DMP3160 printer!

 

[Darren S]

Pmsl.

The turbo button dropped the clock speed, you were supposed to have it turned on all the time. It made software that had become unusable when higher clock speed were introduced, well, usable again!

Lol - I remember some of the early games being totally unplayable with the turbo button on. It did have a funky red light when switched on too.

Mad to think, isn't it - that 25, 33, 50 and 66Mhz were like the 'storming performers' of their day. Yet we don't bat an eyelid at CPUs now running quad-cores - with each one at 3,200Mhz.

D.

 

[Michael172]

Aye lol, we shall look back and snarl at 3.2GHz lol.

 

[KDF]

My first computer had a 40mb hard drive and I was in awe at how long it would take to fill !!

Also, installing windows 3.1 from 23 floppies FTW !!

 

[Darren S]

I remember spending many an hour on Dune 2 at work on the DX beast. That game was so addictive. Even networked games across the coax !

Agree - one of Westwood's finest. Had that when I was at uni.

Remember playing the original C&C on two PCs connected via serial cable back then. Sllllloooooowwwwww - lol!

D.

 

[stooby]

Well I had a sinclair QL which had a 7.5mhz procesor with a massive 128kb of ram xD
Still got it infact.

 

[Struggler]

my 486 accually had a digiatal display with the clock speed on it!!!!
was epic, i never turned the 'turbo' off,

and i had windows 3.1, all 23 discs

first computer i ever had,
was the commodore 64! with the tape player

epic machine if i only JUST remember it, (was my dads, i was only a wee nipper)
remember some random game about counting moles, and one with trains.
and the games were on tape, and took about half an hour to load lol,

64k ram, i think it had a 1mhz processor lol

16 colours graphics card all the way!!!!

 

[sn00p]

Uh. Windows 3.1 came on 6 floppies, I remember it well as I used to have to delete windows every single time I wanted to install and play a computer game!

NT 3.1 came on 22.

 

[KDF]

I wasn't actually sad enough to remember the exact number of floppies

I just remember it was a nightmare.

 

[LegoHead]

I remember my good old days with the amstrad cpc464 and pirating games with my mom's old ghetto blaster.

Tapes FTW!!!

 

[sn00p]

I wasn't actually sad enough to remember the exact number of floppies

I just remember it was a nightmare.

pmsl. I only remember because I must have installed it 2^32 times only having a 52GB drive myself...incidentally that drive still works! Quantum don't make them like that anymore.

(Quantum LPS52AT - fook, I even remember the model number without looking lol)

 

[Michael172]

I remember spending many an hour on Dune 2 at work on the DX beast. That game was so addictive. Even networked games across the coax !

Sweet !! lol. Epic bandwidth.

 

[DMS]

Nostalgic threads FTW!!!

 

[Snubbs]

I've got a mate who still uses a Slot based P3 machine. Think its got an FX5200 if my memory serves right. He also recently threw out a slot based celeron (i think it was P3 gen)..... i nabbed it for geeky-ness

 

[PinkoCommie]

If you haven't seen a slot 1 chip before you haven't been playing with the things for that long then, i'm only 21 and can fully remember slot 1 fun.

Didn't the first/early pentium chip have a design flaw in it somewhere? Seem to remember something along those lines.

Yeah, there was an issue with it's floating point operations.

If you did the following:
4195835 * 3145727 / 3145727 = 4195835

You should get the number that you started with.

But on a flawed one you got
4195835 * 3145727 / 3145727 = 4195579.

The first PC we had at home, was actually a proper PC. An IBM Personal Computer/AT. A whole 6Mhz.

Then we had an Amstrad 1286. 12Mhz and 1mb of Ram and a single 1.44Mb floppy. To this later got add a whatcking great big 40Mb (yes megabyte) Hard Card (hard drive and controller maounted on a full length, full height ISA board), this came partitioned into 2 20Mb drives .

This later got upgraded to 120Mb hard drive and 4Mb of RAM. This was difficult, it was an old school BIOS where you could only choose from "types" of hard drive, we had to upgrade the BIOS, not easy, we had to send away for upgraded BIOS chips and then lever the old ones out of their sockets (no helpful ZIF sockets then) and replace them. The hard drive was then setup by tellin the BIOS how many cylinders and heads and other arcane settings. To go to 4Mb of ram we had to buy 4 1Mb simms and then remove the old memory from it's sockets (it came in individual chips).

Ah, the fun old days. I remember installing Wing Commander 2 from floppies. 42 720k floppies IIRC..

That and the days of having a little box of boot disks next to your PC so you could run the different games. One for XMS, one for EMS, one for himem, and loads of combinations thereof.

Then after that it was normal PC's.

 

[bigmouk]

I wonder if in another 15/20 years this will be the conversation ...

"You dont know how good you have it!, back in the day we only had 3/4Ghz quad core processors, we even had to p*ss around overclocking them and even use liquid cooling on some!, Now stop moaning about your qubit quantum cpu !"

 

[McBunny]

my first was a 8086 then onwards and upwards