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Geek Culture / The evolution of your CPU history

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Phaelax
DBPro Master
20
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Joined: 16th Apr 2003
Location: Metropia
Posted: 14th Jul 2017 08:31
Just for fun and a trip down nostalgia lane, can you remember every computer you had? I watched a video recently that mentioned an Athlon 1500 from 2001 and I was like no it's not that old, I barely had 500mhz back then.... Rather than show me how far processors have come, it just reminded me I'm older than I thought as the cpu I thought I bought around '01 was actually in '99. Still, in 2 years the speed tripled.

Now this is just a list of my personal computing lineage which doesn't include work PCs, or the useless Cyrix chip we used in highschool.

1. Motorola 68000 @ 7.16 MHz (Amiga 500)
2. Pentium 75
3. Pentium 133
4. Athlon 500 (my first build and the cpu was a giant cartridge)
5. Athlon Thunderbird @ 750MHz (this is where AMD became known for their very hot temps)
6. Athlon MP 1600 @ 1.4GHz (AMD's names began to mismatch the actual clockspeed with the XP/MP series)
7. Pentium 4 @ 2.8GHz
8. Core 2 Duo @ (can't remember)
9. I7-3770k @ 3.5GHz
10. i7-7700k @ 4.2GHz


At some point I know I had a 486 DX4 but it was after I already had a P75. I can't remember what my Core 2 Duo was clocked at, but it was at this time when clock speed no longer meant the fastest. I bet I made a post on this forum when I bought, I wonder if the history goes back that far?

It looks like for awhile I upgraded whenever the speed doubled, with the exception in the more recent years. I still haven't gotten to play with my new i7 just yet. The acrylic case I'm building for it just needs the right glue, which I'm impatiently waiting on to arrive in the mail probably not til next week I bet. (this saturday if I'm lucky)

Didn't realize I've had so many computers until I started writing down the progression of them all. These were all desktops, I didn't include my laptops which were a 486 ibm thinkpad, a PowerPC apple, and my current Asus with an i7. It's late, I'm bored, and this is my trip down memory lane. I imagine there's a few older folks around here who's history goes back even further than mine and will list ENIAC or something.

"I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended." - Linus Torvalds
Dark Java Dude 64
Community Leader
13
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Joined: 21st Sep 2010
Location: Neither here nor there nor anywhere
Posted: 14th Jul 2017 09:00 Edited at: 14th Jul 2017 09:03
Ahh, it's so neat to see how things have progressed over the years. I'm only 19, but even in my lifetime, and more specifically the amount of my life that I've actually been cognizant of technology, I've seen huge improvements.

I don't have specifics, but the first computer I really used was crappy even for its time. This must have been around 2007 or so. I was only 9 then, whoa... Intel Celeron, and it really couldn't run MS Flight Simulator X that well. The funny thing is, my dad still uses that same computer to this day. I kid you not, it takes a good 15 minutes from power button to usability. That's nothing though. My dad also still uses, on a daily basis, an HP Pavillion from 2000. Windows ME. No idea the processor, but I think an 80GB HDD. It was a stunning computer in its day, and amazingly, it still does everything he wants it to (email, printing stuff, whatever else he uses it for). It's ironic too because he also has a pretty modern smartphone and also uses a very decent Lenovo laptop that's just a couple years old, and works with modern software at his job every day. I don't know anybody that has the "if it aint broke, don't fix it" mentality more than he does.

The next computer I recall using was my mom's laptop, a bottom tier Compaq laptop with an AMD Athlon 64x2. No idea the speed, I just remember that it ran Vista, was slow, and got extremely hot. That and, my sister also had the exact same laptop, and BOTH crapped out within the same month. Quality design for ya.

Then I got my first computer, a little HP laptop with some sort of Pentium dual core processor. Meh. Decent hardware for everyday browsing but the HP bloatware killed it!

Over the summer of 2012 I built my first computer. Triple core AMD Athlon at I think 3.6 GHz, GTX550 ti card... Gaming machine on a budget it was; I think I did it all, including monitor and OS, for under 400 dollars. I skimped way out on the motherboard, which is almost certainly why it crapped out randomly when it was only a couple years old.

Now I have my current laptop, which I bought in the summer of 2013. Even now, 4 years later, it's overkill for what I need. It's a Lenovo Y500 with a quad core 3.2 GHz i7 and some sort of nifty mobile GPU (that I never use, since I'm not a gamer; no idea why I bought the thing). It is overkill, but it'll last me a good while longer. As a matter of fact, I really rarely use it in laptop configuration. Right now, as almost always, I have it closed on the other end of my desk, connected to an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard. It's really nice though, to have the flexibility of a desktop for most things but portability when you need it.

I've actually been looking at buying some silicon wafers from eBay lately, just as a decorative/collector/super cool sort of thing. A lot of the wafers I'm looking at come from the later 80s or early 90s, and it's fascinating how far technology has come since then. Especially in terms of fabrication feature size. Even around 2004-2005 we were looking at the transition from 130 nanometers to 90 nanometers. And now we're down to what, 11 or so? And the Intel 4004 started at 10 micrometers, or 10,000 nanometers! Incredible stuff.
Yes!
Ortu
DBPro Master
16
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Joined: 21st Nov 2007
Location: Austin, TX
Posted: 14th Jul 2017 20:36 Edited at: 14th Jul 2017 20:48
Couldn't tell you the specs on any of them, but in general terms:

The first computer my family had was a Tandy probably around '87 - '89, EGA graphics, no hard drive, it booted from floppy into DOS. I remember using an even older IBM at school a year or two before that. Played a lot of the old Sierra games on this one, Quest for glory 1 & 2, Colonel's Bequest, King's Quest etc.

we had that one I think until Windows 95 came out and we got a Compaq. I remember using Prodigy on this one, which was sort of a precursor to the internet. Spent a lot of time here on DOOM, Ultima 7/serpent isle/underworld, simcity, lords of the realm

The first I bought myself was an HP in '98, i really loved that one for a coupe of years, saw me through many rounds of SC1 and Diablo1, Asherons Call 1. Dialup AOL & AIM, had a geocities site.

Switched to an HP laptop in 2001 I think or whenever XP came out, that didn't last long, built my first pc from scratch in late 2002 and this one lasted through till 2008/2009 with some upgrades along the way. By this point I was up on a cable connection with time warner/roadrunner

Replaced that with a Dell i3 4.0GHz 2core/win7 that I still use today as my primary development box, again with some upgrades every couple of years ram/gpu/psu and the like. Upgraded to win10.

Also now running a self build with an i5 4690k 3.5ghz 4 core, SSD, with a gtx770 and win10 pro for gaming, backed with gigabit internet on google fiber.

Looks like my history mostly followes Windows releases. (Vista and 8 dont count! )

Definitely come a long way in any case
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BatVink
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Joined: 4th Apr 2003
Location: Gods own County, UK
Posted: 15th Jul 2017 09:21
I don't remember every computer, but roughly...

Dragon 32 - 1984 - 32K RAM, 8-bit, 8Mhz
486 DX2 66Mhz - 1995 (ish). Could have bought a Pentium but wanted a Printer too and couldn't afford both.
PC with Cyrix CPU, probably a Pentium II - 2000 - I concur with Phaelex, Cryix was horrendous.

Since then all of my PCs have been an evolution of motherboards, CPUs, memory, cases and everything else. This is the analogy o f my PC:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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Kevin Picone
21
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Joined: 27th Aug 2002
Location: Australia
Posted: 15th Jul 2017 16:18
6502 / 6510 / 6809 / 68000 / 68020 /030/ 040

i don't remember any PC i've had to the misfortune of ownings specs.. but terrible would be basically cover it..


the All in One HP thing i'm using now just to browse has this in it
Processor Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU N3050 @ 1.60GHz, 1601 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s) which

it's slower than my 13 year old desk top... it's the most pointless system i've ever owned... then again another with x86 instruction set in it.. is a pointless mess

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