Remember the day...

[scrubman]

Here we go! HAHA With all the new SB excitement and my safe jump up on the bandwagon, I had a moment that took me back in time. I remember when (before internet) my best method to see if a new chip was worthy of my hard earned dollars was running a test on it at the local shop. My test was typing "dir" at the command prompt and watching to see how fast the file names would scroll up the left side of the screen! Boy when I first saw a 386 scroll those files so fast I almost couldnt read them it was love at first sight! :wub: I remember it like it was yesterday!!

Now, the chips automatically downclock to 1/3 the cpu speed when I do a "dir" at a command prompt, in a window, on 64 bit OS, running on a solid state HD. ^_^

So yeah, I built my first PC a while ago and it was an AMD 386DX40. I had been using 8088 and 286 prior but only at work. I sure love the evolution of technology! :biggrin:

 

[firewolfsm]

The rest of us will still be able to say we around for the single core days, 20 years from now...when cores will be too small to count.

 

[hans007]

i remember being like 6 years old, and playing with a Z80 epson cp/m box. it felt totally fast and awesome and made me turn into a programmer...

now we have 4gb sticks of ram for $35...

 

[pcgeek11]

The good old BBS dayz. That was a good time. 2.4 modems and all.

 

[Hulk]

In the early 90's I used to test cpu's by seeing how fast they could do Coreldraw extrusions. By '98 or so they were near instantaneous.

 

[Gryz]

2.4kbaud modem ?
Man, those were fast !
I remember I had a 1200 baud modem at home, dialing in on a terminal server, telnetting to my SparcStation at work. That was in the days when all of the Netherlands was connected to the Internet via a single 128Kbps leased line to Virginia.

Heck, I remember many years earlier, at my first job, they had a 300baud modem. They used it to log into a Data General machine in another city. That was amazing, saved you a 120km drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Eclipse
That DG machine was for a company's administration. During business hours it had 12 data entry typists working on it all the time. It had 512KB ram. Two harddisks, one 100MB and the other 200MB (sweet!). Both HDDs were the size of a refridgerator. That was in the days when every vendor had their own OS. AOS/VS on the DG. IBM hadn't even released the PC.

I actually remember seeing the first Pong machines, when I was already a teenager.

 

[Rubycon]

Scrolling in DOS was also a function of graphics adapter speed too.

My favorite test starting with Windows 3.0 was solitaire. I got very good at beating the game just to watch the cards fall. Or in the case with the Stealth VRAM on my AMD 386DX-40 - exploding.

Sol.exe in XP was "fixed" so the descent of the cards was independent of the system speed. The fix for that was to delete the copy in the compressed folder and ignore the file protection warnings while copying an earlier version ripped from an NT 4.0 Workstation. BAM! Cards fall so fast it's like watching a firecracker explode! Deal again? :wub:

 

[lupi]

my first "wow" computer speed moment was watching a computer show displaying a demo of the original falcon game, and it was movin fast.

 

[ljtatej]

Yeah I used solitaire as a bench on Windows 3.0 also. I had a 386sx-25 and when I went to a dx2-50 it blew my mind. Also a good turning point was the voodoo1 cards...I was truely amazed!

 

[Piano Man]

Yeah I used solitaire as a bench on Windows 3.0 also. I had a 386sx-25 and when I went to a dx2-50 it blew my mind. Also a good turning point was the voodoo1 cards...I was truely amazed!

Yea, voodoo1 changed the game. I remember firing up Descent II with that paired to my ATI Mach 32. I don't think I've ever seen that kind of leap in gameplay since.


I as well used the falling cards in solitaire for a performance check. That and games that weren't time/clock locked, like the old Oregon Trail game. It would play so fast on my Pentium 60, by the time you could react to seeing someone get cholera, the whole family was dead

 

[BD231]

I remember the day my Athlon XP became to slow for the internet, I had no idea there were multi-core chips being made.

 

[drizek]

I was too young to benchmark back in the day, but I do remember my 100Mhz to 133Mhz Turbo button.

I so wish computers still came with Turbo buttons.

 

[mv2devnull]

I so wish computers still came with Turbo buttons.

Asus does have "Turbo Key" on some P7P55 series boards.


386SX-16 to 486DX-25 was a personal "fail". First, DX2-50 appeared just a month later. Second, favourite game of the time had nice (easy) framerate on the first setup, but was way too fast on the second.
There was a memorable event with the 386SX. First, a purchase of a sound card. The clerk at the shop did ask: "How did you find us?". Second, hearing audio with the PC.

I used to whistle with the modem way before having a "PC". :whiste:

 

[mjrpes3]

That was in the days when all of the Netherlands was connected to the Internet via a single 128Kbps leased line to Virginia.

LOL are you serious? That's crazy.

 

[hans007]

i remember as a kid, the "benchmark" was watching this space shuttle ray tracer. my cellphone could probably do it in a nanosecond now, but i was always wowed by it back then (well that an space shuttles were so cool in the 80s when they were brand new)

 

[VirtualLarry]

I remember testing my overclock, using the 32-bit version of PKZIP. I had a bunch of big .ZIP files sitting in a directory, and I wrote a batch file to loop testing them, and checking for the return code. If your overclock was unstable, PKZIP would report errors in otherwise good ZIP files. Ahh, those were the days.

(That tested the integer pipeline.)

Later on, in the Athlon XP days, I would run the OpenGL "pipes" screensaver, which heavily used the FPU pipeline of the CPU. When it got overloaded/overclocked beyond what it could handle, it would screw up drawing the pipes, they would be miscalculated.

(That tested the FPU.)

Nowadays, we have purpose-built stress-testing programs. We've got it easy now!

 

[IndyColtsFan]

See sig. Yes, I actually do have the Commodore 128 on my desk and cabled to a 42" 1080P plasma TV 8 ft away.

 

[Edrick]

my first "wow" computer speed moment

Coming from an original IBM PC jr., I am still waiting for a "wow" computer moment.

I guess thats what happens when I upgrade to every new CPU at least once a year. So many incremental upgrades dilutes the "wow" factor.

Bring on quantum computers!!!!

 

[AstroGuardian]

The first time i started measuring computer performance was after i saw the first Need for Speed at a local fair. It was running @ 800 x 600. Those days i had the AM386DX-40.

 

[scrubman]

by the time you could react to seeing someone get cholera, the whole family was dead

HAHAHA now thats a funny benchmark!!

This is all awesome stuff you guys! Bringing back lots of memories! A few more that stand out after reading more of your comments:

my first 3D card - Canopus Pure3D
first SLI - Voodoo2 (oh how Quake flew with that!)
Windows 95 - watching actual full frame rate movie trailers that I think were included with it! Liam Neeson was is one of them. Nice step up from the animated gif pron clips!

 

[Avalon]

I remember firing up the original leisure suit larry on my dad's shiny new 386 IBM on a 5 & 1/4 floppy. Fun stuff.

 

[ImpulsE69]

While I had many short lived experiences in between, I grew up with an Atari 800. Technically in terms of ownership, I went from that to a P133 with a blazing 28.8 modem. Ahh those were the days.

Years before all that, I remember a friend of mines parents had Compuserve and it output all text to an 80 column printer (no monitor). It was crazy. I don't remember why it was set up that way, just that it was funny to watch him hold the feed wheel while it spit out line after blank line so he woulnd't waste so much paper.

 

[aigomorla]

Now, the chips automatically downclock to 1/3 the cpu speed when I do a "dir" at a command prompt, in a window, on 64 bit OS, running on a solid state HD. ^_^

lulz.. at most the directory file in a 386 was what? 5 megs? 6 megs for games?

I remember throwing them on a floppy using Xcopy to move from one system to another when i damaged one of the floppy disks from installation.

Ahh.... good old days.. lolz..

To think the average zip drive has 10x the capacity of a hard drive back in the 386 dayz.

 

[Golgatha]

The rest of us will still be able to say we around for the single core days, 20 years from now...when cores will be too small to count.

Me: Sonny, my first computer was an AMD 233.

Wipper Snapper: 233 cores?

Me: No Megahertz boy!

Wipper Snapper: That's really slow old man, just like you...snicker.

Me: Get off my lawn or I'm gonna mega hurts you!

 

[aigomorla]

Me: Sonny, my first computer was an AMD 233.

Wipper Snapper: 233 cores? whats that? an ARM processor?

Me: No Megahertz boy!

Wipper Snapper: Geeze old man.. my iphone is faster that that.

Me: Get off my lawn or I'm gonna mega hurts you!

Fixed.