Notes

10 Years Ago in Technology - Remembering Our Roots, a Techie's Retrospective
There's an old adage in the particular auto industry that will says your automobile manages to lose value when you push it off the lot. The computer and even technology industry is just not so different, in that new parts plus systems are constantly pushing the cover of performance and even value, so that it is impossible to have a top-of-the-line system with regard to very long. The objective of this document is to step back on time 10 years and analyze the technology surroundings then to see how it even comes close to today's technologies we know and love.

Moore's Legislation:

Much has recently been written, and significantly is still discussed about the technologies axiom called; Moore's Law. Some individuals interpret legislation to be able to mean a duplicity of computer strength every 18 months in order to 2 years, while others maintain it implies a doubling associated with the amounts of transistors (microscopic on/off buttons if you will) engineers are able to print in to the same amount of silicon. Throughout fact Moore explained that transistor number would double each year, which he later amended to get every 2 years) Regardless, this craze of performance plus transistor growth has held true with regard to over 40 years.

More recently, Moore's legislation has been utilized to graphics running units (GPUs) simply because well. The GPU is actually not necessarily even a decade old at the period of writing. The particular official term GRAPHICS was coined together with the nVidia GeForce 256 series of 3D IMAGES cards. Released within August 1999, this specific was the 1st chip that was able to figure out vertex transformations and pixel lighting within hardware. Since its release, graphics control power has used a similar trend of doubling functionality every 18 a few months to 2 years. This article is usually not just a technical doc, rather a glance into the past 10 years ago to be able to give you a good idea showing how much we've come in like a short moment.

Just a little History Concerning the Author:

The particular year was 1999. It was my personal sophomore / junior year in higher school. Now I will pause in order that 90% of the viewers who grew way up in the 70s in addition to 80's can convert up their nose and stop reading.

Okay, now gowns out of the particular way, let's proceed.

I am an internet child. I got into personal computers, and all manner of electronic geekery just as the world wide web was becoming a thing that "just might catch on". My high school was not really quite around the bleeding edge of technology as it were, but we had been one of the initial public colleges during my area to be equipped with a full T1 series and the a single. 5Mbps of awesome dedicated bandwidth of which it piped through the network. Our own network was made from a hodge-podge blend of nice PC personal computers labs (Mostly K6 200MHz/Win 95 machines), and a community engineers nightmare mixture of Macintoshes; LC II's up by way of new G3 iMacs.

In 1999 I was still rocking a new 486 DX-33 LAPTOP OR COMPUTER with 8MB involving ram and House windows 3. 11 because my PC at home, while my parents had a great Pentium 100 Windows 95 machine the siblings and I actually would guard period on. So what was typically the point of those previous couple paragraphs you're probably asking? Properly, that is wherever I was, in addition to what I got making use of 10 years back in computing, in addition to hopefully it got you thinking back again a decade to what you had been processing on.

Processors:

12 years ago today, The computer planet was working by itself in to a frenzy, receiving ready for that near future release of the brand new Intel Pentium III Processor. The very best your money may do was the Pentium II processor chip at 450MHz along with PC100 Memory. Competitor AMD was doing alright for by itself peddling its finances conscious K6-2 series of processors. Your current average computer expense around $2000-$2500 at this time for a LAPTOP OR COMPUTER using a solid Pentium II processor. Typically the Pentium III seemed to be because of be introduced on February twenty sixth, the subject involving a vicious debate over the worth of its created in unique IDENTIFICATION number. Also significant was its inclusion of the initial SSE instruction arranged (The modern Core i7 processor is in SSE4+). However without software designed in order to make use associated with the new guidelines the processor has been not much quicker than an equivalently clocked Pentium II CPU and required quite a bit of heat from the press.

Design:

On the images front the war between nVidia in addition to 3DFx was raging. nVidia, a relative newcomer to typically the field, was operating high on top of their quite successful TNT (Twin-Texel) video processor, although 3DFx was combating to maintain its industry leadership title together with its Voodoo3 range of graphics cards. The Voodoo credit cards were excellent artists, however the TNT cards had the particular advantage of 32 bit color as the Voodoo's were caught up at 24 parts. ATI was close to and kicking using their Rage series of 3D cards (especially popular as built-in chips in web servers and workstations), even so they never truly entered into the down and dirty 3D accelerator race until the Radeon line debuted inside 2000.

Internet:

In 1999 the internet boom was just start and attracting substantial amounts of interest and investment capital from all above the globe. Typically the big business associated with the time seemed to be in the lookup and portal enterprise. Yahoo, more info , Stimulate, and Lycos have been perhaps the nearly all recognizable and large players in this kind of industry. Google -say-wha? Others from some other industries, for instance television set media, and ISPs were taking find, and buying upward internet portals right and left in an try to tap in to the viral get spread around with the internet. New technologies like Java were coming into their own, plus began to lay the groundwork intended for the internet to be sure it today. Experiments determined that by 1999 about fifty percent people households acquired a computer, plus most of the new computer acquisitions ended uphad been made in order to get online.

Additional areas:

PDA's have been quickly becoming the newest must have gizmo. The Palm Pilot being the unit that led the charge. I me personally had a Hand IIIe towards the particular later half of 2000. Personal pagers were still very hot sellers, but cell phones were getting smaller and more practical and cost-effective. Also a warfare was heating up in the pc memory segment. Samsung korea introduced new DDR memory chips that promised to increase the effective bandwidth of existing storage chips in potential future setups, however Rambus was busy creating their particular high speed RAM for use in substantial end Intel methods.

Software:

This discipline is perhaps the bit too significant to cover below, but a short OS recap: Typically the PC world had been running strong along with windows 98, in addition to anxiously awaiting the updated Windows 98 Second Edition owing out in Might 1999. The Macs crowd was pushing away happily prove Mac OS 7. 5 Machines, when awaiting an upgrade to OS nine sometime later that will year. Linux seemed to be also needs to come into its own, as big title vendors like APPLE were beginning to bundle distributions of Redhat, Caldera, as well as others along with some servers.

Bottom line:

I'll admit this post was more for the amusement and reminiscing than whatever else. We hope that somewhere in the course of this bulk of words and even broken sentences, you too had some good recollections of pc equipment past. Really good to keep in mind the technologies we all grew up along with and we are fortunate enough to offer the robust world wide web we have been used to today to help conjure up images and technical specs of people glory days. Internet sites like the Tech Time Machine exist to aid us relive those days, and have got a few chuckles at equipment we all thought we'd never use to it is full potential. I actually remember touching a Pentium 200MMX device for the first time and staying in awe in its raw speed and even seemingly infinite opportunities. Now I continually get upset using the speed involving my current 3GHz dual core Athlon X2 6000+ LAPTOP OR COMPUTER. I can't perhaps imagine how several windows that Pentium 200 would become thrown out these days. It's a ridiculous world we survive in.
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