9 ms·

Ask Slashdot: How Powerful Is Your Computer? (1999)

54 points by mgdlbp 5y ago

softwarebeware 5y ago
Nice to see that little has changed! :D
retrac 5y ago
Around then, '98 I think, I remember benchmarking the first computer I bought for myself, a Pentium II @ 350 MHz, and being floored to learn that I had just bought a desktop supercomputer! It was in the same ballpark as a single processor Cray Y-MP. I'm pretty sure some Cray Y-MPs hadn't even been retired yet at the time. From about $2.5 million to $2500 in about 10 years, for comparable hardware.
- wink 5y ago
  To this day I cherish the memory when a friend and I got to one of the local computer shops and bought 2 identical PII-350s and, as high school students buying with a random mix of 10s, 20s and the occasional 50 DM bill and the shopkeeper lamenting the students and their small bills on the one hand and being happy to accept this sale on the other hand of course.
- david38 5y ago
  You might be right. It takes time to rewrite software. But damn, those machine cost a pretty penny to run. Still, I would love to have one.
- geocrasher 5y ago
  Indeed! The primary difference wasn't the processing power but rather the parallel capacity of the Cray to solve a completely different kind of problem.
- tomnipotent 5y ago
  Everything from 1997-2000 was really just magical, for lack of a better adjective. In just a few years we saw the Intel Pentium II and Celeron (insane overclock), the AMD K6/K6-2, along with discrete 2D/3D GPUs like 3dfx Voodoo3 and Nvidia GeForce. Thanks to low-ping affiliation, I stumbled into an early Counter-Strike clan known as "The Space Offensive" (TSO) in the Seattle area that went on to be an early participant in the competitive gaming scene as "The Speakeasy Offensive" (after corporate sponsorship). I've been hooked on the cycle of gaming/hardware loop ever since.
  - reassembled 5y ago
    I still have my original Celeron 300A, made in Costa Rica, that I overclocked to 450MHz on an A-Bit BX6 2.0 mobo to play Quake 2. I managed to snag my buddy’s old 4MB 3dfx Voodoo 1 to pair with the one I already had with the VGA pass through cable, an early form of multi-GPU.
    - throw0101a 5y ago
      For some reason I have the box for the Asus CUSL2 motherboard still sitting on a shelf: * https://www.anandtech.com/show/578 https://www.anandtech.com/show/578 (Never bothered to throw it out.)
    - tomnipotent 5y ago
      > to play Quake 2. In just a few years we had Quake 2 (1997) to Half-life (1998), Thief: The Dark Project and Quake 3 Arena/Unreal Tournament (1999). The year 2000 would see Dues Ex, The Sims, Diablo II, Perfect Dark, Final Fantasy IX, and Jet Set Radio... Not to mention Spyro, Red Alert 2, Paper Mario, Majora's Mask, Escape from Monkey Isand, Hitman 47... So much amazing history in such a short period of time (let's not mention popular cinema...)
      - bennysomething 5y ago
        Don't forget Goldeneye!
    - mpalfrey 5y ago
      Did that do much? I know a Voodoo 2 could be SLI'd but first I've heard about this working on a Voodoo 1. I miss those days. I went from a P133 with 72mb RAM (bought a load of RAM cheap in '98) to a P3 500 with a TNT2 Ultra and 128mb RAM in 1999. Technology progressed at an insane rate. Edit, I had a K6-2 500MHz in one machine around that kind of time too. Wasn't as good as the P3 personally though but was cheap and reasonable. Started me off down the path of using AMD CPUs in my builds (Duron, Athlon, Sempron) until I started moving away to Mac laptops predominantly (which coincided with finishing university and writing software for a living)!.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Supercomputers don't so much buy speed as time. A supercomputer is a decade or two ahead of consumer-grade hardware of the time. And it's not just a matter of processor speed. Parallel disk I/O, total memory size, cache, and a number of other tricks factor in. Today's cluster supercomputers are mostly just ("just") racks and racks and racks of fairly standard-grade CPUs, with high-speed switches. GPUs have introduced their own curve into things. They work well for highly-parallelisable problems. Unfortunately, the ones that seem to have caught many people's attention are ultimately somewhat boring.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    there's a thread on slashdot IIRC where a guy explains that a good old cray, due to its massive cache and bandwidth, can crunch number matrices at massive "speed". I forgot the details but basically each cycle the processor could recompute a whole 1MB or 8MB matrix, and steadily so. Whereas a pentium4/core cpu, clocked way higher and more "modern" can only process that amount of data for a small time before all caches are filled and performance plummets.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      People compare supercomputers to general purpose computers and forget things like this - the supercomputer and the program it ran were often designed in parallel to do a particular thing very very fast.
      - agumonkey 5y ago
        Yeah goals impacts architecture. But it's interesting to see that computing systems have parameters and structures. Cycle clock, memory, cache .. they don't paint the whole picture. The constant massive data crunching of a Cray is not visible on frequency. That said, I'm curious about what a 2020 iphone can do, even in HPC numerical contexts..
- iso1210 5y ago
  At work in 1997 they bought a rack full of IRIX graphics processing which costs 000,000s to do a specific task When I started in 2003 the same task was performed on a 2U machine costing in the region of 2k.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  I remember during the 90s, whenever I or anyone I knew got a new machine, it would be noticeably faster than previous machines. Clock speeds rocketed during the era, and you could actually tell just from waiting for Windows to start. Graphics cards did something similar towards the end of the decade, each time a friend got a new one it was a like a whole new world. Since any one person would still be hanging on to their machine for a few years, you could really feel the slowdown when you went back home.
  - Joeri 5y ago
    It wasn’t just that things got faster quickly. Hardware would rapidly become too old to run modern software. My first pc was a 386 33 mhz with 8 mb ram around 1993, and by 1998 software had passed it by to the point where I literally had no use for it except hand it down as a legacy gaming computer to my younger sister. I remember being forced to use 5 year old 386 computer lab pc’s at uni in 1997 and them being too slow to do our programming assignments on. Pc’s also cost way more back then. That 386 was bottom spec and it was still 1700 euro in 2022 money. Being into computers was an expensive hobby.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      IBM-compatible PC's were expensive prior to the late-1990s, but there were plenty of lower-cost competitors in the home computer market.
  - api 5y ago
    I call today's situation "more's law." Clock speeds and single core performance are largely stagnant but the horizontal growth is still amazing. Look at the original M1 in the MacBook Air vs. the M1 Ultra or whatever they call that 48-64 core beast. Single core is about the same. If your load is not parallelizable the M1 MacBook Air will do it about as fast as the new Mac Studio. In the x64 world they continue to squeeze more instruction level parallelism out and push the clock rates slightly higher but those come at the cost of higher power consumption. It's pretty stagnant there too unless you are willing to invest in a refrigerated liquid cooling system and overclocking capable hardware. But on multi-threaded loads the performance is still going up the way single core speeds were from 1995 until 2005. That's because a mixture of smaller process nodes, larger dies, better memory bandwidth, and better core interconnect fabrics are letting the equivalent of a whole data center be crammed into a single package. I think that is going to keep going for a while. We will probably see 256 cores on a desktop machine within 10 years and rack mount servers with 1024 cores in a single 1U case.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
justinlloyd 5y ago
I do not recall my machine in '99. But I suspect it was close to my '98 build. I do recall upgrading the dual Pentium II CPUs to Pentium IIIs around late '99 or early 2000. My personal computer/workstation was a dual 933Mhz Pentium II CPUs on a Tyan Tiger S1834D motherboard, a Creative Labs Nvidia TNT and a Creative Labs GeForce 2 GTS 32MB AGP, a Mylex array controller, 512MB of 133Mhz SDRAM DIMMs, 17x 2GB WD2170W HDDs, and a few 120GB EIDE HDDs, and dual 21" Viewsonic Professional CRT monitors. By the side of my desk was a Silicon Graphics Crimson desk side, and I also had a purple Indigo 2 with the tricked out GPU and capture card and a 20" granite monitor, mouse & keyboard, though by then, those Silicon Graphics machines were getting long in the tooth.
libele 5y ago
"I brake for unix.boys, Windows just breaks." ahaha love this <3
geenew 5y ago
I believe the correct spelling is 'powerfull'.
- mkl 5y ago
  You are mistaken: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/powerfull https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/powerfull
  - geenew 5y ago
    It's just an in-joke, it was a common misspelling on slashdot.
- pieter_mj 5y ago
  all words with this suffix are spelled -ful : powerful, colorful, truthful, ...
  - pieter_mj 5y ago
    I see inside joke. Well, I did read /. at the time.
JimWestergren 5y ago
Better linking to the live canonical URL instead: https://slashdot.org/story/99/02/12/1429236/ask-slashdot-how-powerful-is-your-computer https://slashdot.org/story/99/02/12/1429236/ask-slashdot-how...
- mgdlbp 5y ago
  I was very impressed when I saw that Slashdot is one of few sites to have maintained redirects from all the way back (well, almost; they didn't include the CGI links from 1998! [0]). But I thought it'd be more interesting to see how it all looked back then, both with the old site design and because the comment sort changed when they added the display controls around late 2001, which shuffled comments from old stories and broke up threads that were mostly in sequence before. Trivia: This story predates the meta-moderation system (introduced around 1999-09; story from 1999-02). Notable also that the comment sort today remains unchanged from 2001. [0] http://slashdot.org/slashdot.cgi?mode=article&artnum=427 http://slashdot.org/slashdot.cgi?mode=article&artnum=427 Edit: I wondered about 'late 2001' and looked into it a bit. The 9/11 traffic spike was very close (CmdrTaco on how they handled it [1]), but Wayback shows the threshold control was present already in August. [1] https://slashdot.org/articles/01/09/13/154222.shtml https://slashdot.org/articles/01/09/13/154222.shtml
johnwalkr 5y ago
I had the legendary Celeron 300A and a 3DFX Voodoo2. The 300A was easily overclockable to 450Mhz. I wish I still had it.
tluyben2 5y ago
Ah 1999… my first company made more than we knew what to do with so we had the latest and the greatest all the time. Almost everything ran Linux; we had one NT machine to migrate a company ‘s telco backend off Windows (which gave them a lot of downtime and for them that was literally losing money every missed minute) to AIX (which ran remotely).
wanda 5y ago
I had a ThinkPad 380ED I think. I remember it had a 3GB hard drive, and I'm pretty sure it had both a floppy disk drive and a CD drive -- in a laptop! 166MHz CPU, probably 16MB RAM or something hilarious like that. And it was just this delightful black block, no curves, no ridges or go faster stripes, it was just this smooth black cuboid. It always felt like it was rugged enough to survive a natural disaster, and yet it had this sublime keyboard and a nice screen for the time. I loved that laptop very much. I miss Windows 98 actually, sure it was bad, but the way it looked and felt was just terrific. No nonsense, and yet it had character. It's like someone was saying yesterday about Windows 2000 being the peak, I think they're right. It was robust and simple, it was easy on the eyes, and it wasn't heavy on resources, it was just a decent Windows OS. XP and 7 are both hailed as good Windows OSs too, but I found myself changing both to look like Windows 2000, always switching off all the themes etc. Sure wish Windows 10/11 still had classic theme (yes, I know you can download a third-party app to bring it back, not the point though is it)
hughrr 5y ago
My work computer was a sun ultra 60 then. Felt godly. Then it was replaced with a windows 2000 pentium 3 box which was notably a lot faster.
rjh29 5y ago
> How soon will I be able to buy a machine more powerful than the world's computing power when I was born? An AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is 2.3M MIPS. If you were born prior to ~1977, you are currently able to do this, according to https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/world-computing-power.html https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/world-computing-power... If born after, you still can but you need a lot more money.
hpaavola 5y ago
-99 I bought a computer for the first time with my own money from the summer job i had back then. Pentium 2, Nvidia Riva TNT2, some Sound Blaster, CD-R drive (2x speed, we burnt so many CDs with that) and I think 128MB RAM, but can't remember anymore. No idea what the other components were. I think that all in all it costed about 10 000 Finnish Markka, which would be around 2300 euros in today's money (so adjusted for inflation).
omgmajk 5y ago
Had something like a Pentium 2 300mhz with mmx if I'm not mistaken, and a voodoo 2. Couple of gigs of disk space and iunno how much ram. I remember we later put in 256mb of ram and made it into our firewall running Debian with iptables where it sat until 2011~.
forinti 5y ago
The machine I had in 1999 I had bought in 1996 and it had a Pentium 166MMX with 64MB of RAM. That is about the same as the wireless router I'm using at the moment that is the size of a flash drive and costs about US$20 (https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-usb150/ https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-usb150/).
MisterTea 5y ago
At that point I had just upgraded our Pentium 166 with a Voodoo2 and could finally play Quake 2 in glorious accelerated 800x600 3D. That machine started life as a Micron 486 DX2 66MHz that was upgraded to a Pentium Overdrive which was then upgraded with a Tyan Tomcat III with a Pentium 166. RAM was 32 MB of EDO and video card was an ATI 3d Pro turbo with 4MB VRAM (expandable to 8MB and had built in TV output) Storage was a mix of the 486's original 540MB disk and a 1 GB disk I bought at a computer fair. That was the first gigabyte disk I owned and was ecstatic that I could copy a whole CD's worth of data to my disk. I still have all of the above mentioned parts, save for the hard disks, including the pulled 486 chip. I had The Tyan booting OpenBSD and 9front last year but it had a lot of stability issues. Unsure if its age related or software.
- mpalfrey 5y ago
  Wonder if computer fairs are still a thing. Got fond memories of buying bits at them.
bloopernova 5y ago
I like to play a mental game where I try to figure out the year where a current latest Raspberry Pi is equivalent to the total world computing power. Most of the time I fall asleep before I get very far! ;) Example: The original Cray-1 could process 160MFLOPS, while a Pi Zero 2 can process 5.1GFLOPS. (via http://www.clustered-pi.com/ http://www.clustered-pi.com/ ) The Cray-1 was released in 1975 with over 100 sold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1 -- So the Pi Zero 2 was roughly 300 times more powerful than a Cray-1, and was roughly equivalent to the world's computing power in 1975. I leave it up to the reader to work out other comparisons :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders_of_magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders... can be useful to help you figure out the equivalent computing power of various devices.
- hyperman1 5y ago
  If you see the stuff Feynmann had to work with when creating the first atomic bomb, just about anything is more powerfull. I always wonder if the CPU used to check if I push the power button on my Senseo coffee maker should be considered technology capable of making a nuclear bomb .
- Retric 5y ago
  This is a little misleading due to latency issues etc. I like trying to figure out when you would be better off with say 250 Cray-1’s vs the latest Raspberry Pi.
- johnklos 5y ago
  I think you're making the same mistake as many other modern benchmarks do: GPU compute != general purpose compute. A Pi Zero 2 is easily multiple times faster than a Cray 1, but not 300 times, except for certain very specific workloads. For general code that does lots of math but isn't GPU accelerated, I bet the difference in performance is significantly smaller.
rayiner 5y ago
Pentium II 300 with 64MB. Riva 128 graphics card. Ran BeOS and Linux on it. I think I got my first DSL line (256 kbps SDSL) that year or the next. Magical.
tpoacher 5y ago
Why on earth the article linked to archive when the original is still up? https://slashdot.org/story/99/02/12/1429236/ask-slashdot-how-powerful-is-your-computer https://slashdot.org/story/99/02/12/1429236/ask-slashdot-how... Is this another one of those "the old comments / commenters were better" nonsense?
- cgriswald 5y ago
  Maybe the submitter prefers a functioning back button that doesn’t spam you when you try to leave.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    I haven't visited /. in ages. I didn't know how far it had fallen and am shocked it still gets traffic, given this back button behavior. It is indeed a good reason to never post direct links.
    - thg 5y ago
      Slashdot got sold to Dice a decade ago and went downhill from there. After their absolutely horrible redesign, which I guess they shelved because the site looks as I remember it, the community sort of split into two with plenty people moving over to https://soylentnews.org/ https://soylentnews.org/ Here's the first SoylentNews submission from 2014: https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=1 https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=1 Disclaimer: I'm just (barely) remembering stuff here. No idea what happened to either site past 2014.
  - sigio 5y ago
    What 'back button behavior' are we talking about... noticed nothing when just clicking through a few articles and back, and then back out of slashdot completely. Though it might have been blocked by ublock-origin or some other addon without noticiing it.
    - cgriswald 5y ago
atwebb 5y ago
From the comments, is this early bitcoin mining? >It's even better when you (with permission) install it on all the computers at work and put in on 'invisible' mode. If you want to get technical it's cracking the code for a PRESET quote in a RC5-64 encoded contest message, and if you find the correct key then you get $1000 and x2 if you're not associated with a group.
theandrewbailey 5y ago
In 1999, my dad bought a surplus PC from an office move. A pentium 166, 24 MB RAM, 15" CRT, and eventually updated to Windows 98. The new CDROM drive broke a few days after, and it took months for the neighbor to get a replacement from whatever flaky family member he got it from. In 1999, a useful PC had to have a CDROM drive, so having it out for months felt like forever. We could have gone to Best Buy or something to get another, but my parents were (and still are) such cheapskates. The thing stopped booting in 2001, replaced by a 1.2GHz duron with Win 2000. About 8 years ago, I built a retro PC. I targeted 2000, and got a P3 600, 256 MB RAM, Geforce 2 GTS, 17" CRT, and Win 98. Ball mouse. I turn it on every few months to feel nostalgic. For some reason, I still had the same sound card from that 166 (some Yamaha XG card), so I put it in there, and it sounds so right!
- doubled112 5y ago
  There is something about the MIDI voices (samples? there's a word at the tip of my tongue here) that were built into the cards from back when that snaps me back 20+ years.
  - theandrewbailey 5y ago
    > (samples? there's a word at the tip of my tongue here) Synth? Synthesis? I'm sure that it's a lost art of hearing the sound of one synth over another and identifying it exactly. Hardware ones always sounded much better to me.
    - doubled112 5y ago
      After some Googling, soundfonts was the word, which I suppose would be synthesized into sound.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
what was wrong with the actual URL? no web archive needed http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/02/12/1429236.shtml http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/02/12/1429236.shtml
wazoox 5y ago
My work PC was a Pentium 166Mhz overclocked to 225 Mhz (bus cranked up from 33 to 45Mhz) with 64 MB of RAM, a Matrox Mystique 4MB, two 1.2 GB disks and a SCSI 2x CD burner running Windows 98SE. However my other work machine was an SGI O2 :) R5000 200Mhz 256 MB and 4GB disk (and the video IO card). Back then all the PCs in the company had PUBLIC IP V4 ADDRESSES. Imagine that. And no firewall whatsoever.
dang 5y ago
This is interesting because "Ask Slashdot" at the head of the title is clearly an antecedent to "Ask HN". I always wondered where that came from—I remember when people started posting "Ask HN" shortly after HN was born, and I remember how it struck me as a bit of an odd convention. Are there instances of "Ask $community" from before Slashdot?

54 points by mgdlbp 5y ago

Nice to see that little has changed! :D

Around then, '98 I think, I remember benchmarking the first computer I bought for myself, a Pentium II @ 350 MHz, and being floored to learn that I had just bought a desktop supercomputer! It was in the same ballpark as a single processor Cray Y-MP. I'm pretty sure some Cray Y-MPs hadn't even been retired yet at the time. From about $2.5 million to $2500 in about 10 years, for comparable hardware.

wink 5y ago
To this day I cherish the memory when a friend and I got to one of the local computer shops and bought 2 identical PII-350s and, as high school students buying with a random mix of 10s, 20s and the occasional 50 DM bill and the shopkeeper lamenting the students and their small bills on the one hand and being happy to accept this sale on the other hand of course.
david38 5y ago
You might be right. It takes time to rewrite software. But damn, those machine cost a pretty penny to run. Still, I would love to have one.
geocrasher 5y ago
Indeed! The primary difference wasn't the processing power but rather the parallel capacity of the Cray to solve a completely different kind of problem.
tomnipotent 5y ago
Everything from 1997-2000 was really just magical, for lack of a better adjective. In just a few years we saw the Intel Pentium II and Celeron (insane overclock), the AMD K6/K6-2, along with discrete 2D/3D GPUs like 3dfx Voodoo3 and Nvidia GeForce. Thanks to low-ping affiliation, I stumbled into an early Counter-Strike clan known as "The Space Offensive" (TSO) in the Seattle area that went on to be an early participant in the competitive gaming scene as "The Speakeasy Offensive" (after corporate sponsorship). I've been hooked on the cycle of gaming/hardware loop ever since.
- reassembled 5y ago
  I still have my original Celeron 300A, made in Costa Rica, that I overclocked to 450MHz on an A-Bit BX6 2.0 mobo to play Quake 2. I managed to snag my buddy’s old 4MB 3dfx Voodoo 1 to pair with the one I already had with the VGA pass through cable, an early form of multi-GPU.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    For some reason I have the box for the Asus CUSL2 motherboard still sitting on a shelf: * https://www.anandtech.com/show/578 https://www.anandtech.com/show/578 (Never bothered to throw it out.)
  - tomnipotent 5y ago
    > to play Quake 2. In just a few years we had Quake 2 (1997) to Half-life (1998), Thief: The Dark Project and Quake 3 Arena/Unreal Tournament (1999). The year 2000 would see Dues Ex, The Sims, Diablo II, Perfect Dark, Final Fantasy IX, and Jet Set Radio... Not to mention Spyro, Red Alert 2, Paper Mario, Majora's Mask, Escape from Monkey Isand, Hitman 47... So much amazing history in such a short period of time (let's not mention popular cinema...)
    - bennysomething 5y ago
      Don't forget Goldeneye!
  - mpalfrey 5y ago
    Did that do much? I know a Voodoo 2 could be SLI'd but first I've heard about this working on a Voodoo 1. I miss those days. I went from a P133 with 72mb RAM (bought a load of RAM cheap in '98) to a P3 500 with a TNT2 Ultra and 128mb RAM in 1999. Technology progressed at an insane rate. Edit, I had a K6-2 500MHz in one machine around that kind of time too. Wasn't as good as the P3 personally though but was cheap and reasonable. Started me off down the path of using AMD CPUs in my builds (Duron, Athlon, Sempron) until I started moving away to Mac laptops predominantly (which coincided with finishing university and writing software for a living)!.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Supercomputers don't so much buy speed as time. A supercomputer is a decade or two ahead of consumer-grade hardware of the time. And it's not just a matter of processor speed. Parallel disk I/O, total memory size, cache, and a number of other tricks factor in. Today's cluster supercomputers are mostly just ("just") racks and racks and racks of fairly standard-grade CPUs, with high-speed switches. GPUs have introduced their own curve into things. They work well for highly-parallelisable problems. Unfortunately, the ones that seem to have caught many people's attention are ultimately somewhat boring.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  there's a thread on slashdot IIRC where a guy explains that a good old cray, due to its massive cache and bandwidth, can crunch number matrices at massive "speed". I forgot the details but basically each cycle the processor could recompute a whole 1MB or 8MB matrix, and steadily so. Whereas a pentium4/core cpu, clocked way higher and more "modern" can only process that amount of data for a small time before all caches are filled and performance plummets.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    People compare supercomputers to general purpose computers and forget things like this - the supercomputer and the program it ran were often designed in parallel to do a particular thing very very fast.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      Yeah goals impacts architecture. But it's interesting to see that computing systems have parameters and structures. Cycle clock, memory, cache .. they don't paint the whole picture. The constant massive data crunching of a Cray is not visible on frequency. That said, I'm curious about what a 2020 iphone can do, even in HPC numerical contexts..
iso1210 5y ago
At work in 1997 they bought a rack full of IRIX graphics processing which costs 000,000s to do a specific task When I started in 2003 the same task was performed on a 2U machine costing in the region of 2k.
lordnacho 5y ago
I remember during the 90s, whenever I or anyone I knew got a new machine, it would be noticeably faster than previous machines. Clock speeds rocketed during the era, and you could actually tell just from waiting for Windows to start. Graphics cards did something similar towards the end of the decade, each time a friend got a new one it was a like a whole new world. Since any one person would still be hanging on to their machine for a few years, you could really feel the slowdown when you went back home.
- Joeri 5y ago
  It wasn’t just that things got faster quickly. Hardware would rapidly become too old to run modern software. My first pc was a 386 33 mhz with 8 mb ram around 1993, and by 1998 software had passed it by to the point where I literally had no use for it except hand it down as a legacy gaming computer to my younger sister. I remember being forced to use 5 year old 386 computer lab pc’s at uni in 1997 and them being too slow to do our programming assignments on. Pc’s also cost way more back then. That 386 was bottom spec and it was still 1700 euro in 2022 money. Being into computers was an expensive hobby.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    IBM-compatible PC's were expensive prior to the late-1990s, but there were plenty of lower-cost competitors in the home computer market.
- api 5y ago
  I call today's situation "more's law." Clock speeds and single core performance are largely stagnant but the horizontal growth is still amazing. Look at the original M1 in the MacBook Air vs. the M1 Ultra or whatever they call that 48-64 core beast. Single core is about the same. If your load is not parallelizable the M1 MacBook Air will do it about as fast as the new Mac Studio. In the x64 world they continue to squeeze more instruction level parallelism out and push the clock rates slightly higher but those come at the cost of higher power consumption. It's pretty stagnant there too unless you are willing to invest in a refrigerated liquid cooling system and overclocking capable hardware. But on multi-threaded loads the performance is still going up the way single core speeds were from 1995 until 2005. That's because a mixture of smaller process nodes, larger dies, better memory bandwidth, and better core interconnect fabrics are letting the equivalent of a whole data center be crammed into a single package. I think that is going to keep going for a while. We will probably see 256 cores on a desktop machine within 10 years and rack mount servers with 1024 cores in a single 1U case.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

justinlloyd 5y ago

I do not recall my machine in '99. But I suspect it was close to my '98 build. I do recall upgrading the dual Pentium II CPUs to Pentium IIIs around late '99 or early 2000. My personal computer/workstation was a dual 933Mhz Pentium II CPUs on a Tyan Tiger S1834D motherboard, a Creative Labs Nvidia TNT and a Creative Labs GeForce 2 GTS 32MB AGP, a Mylex array controller, 512MB of 133Mhz SDRAM DIMMs, 17x 2GB WD2170W HDDs, and a few 120GB EIDE HDDs, and dual 21" Viewsonic Professional CRT monitors. By the side of my desk was a Silicon Graphics Crimson desk side, and I also had a purple Indigo 2 with the tricked out GPU and capture card and a 20" granite monitor, mouse & keyboard, though by then, those Silicon Graphics machines were getting long in the tooth.

libele 5y ago

"I brake for unix.boys, Windows just breaks." ahaha love this <3

geenew 5y ago

I believe the correct spelling is 'powerfull'.

mkl 5y ago
You are mistaken: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/powerfull https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/powerfull
- geenew 5y ago
  It's just an in-joke, it was a common misspelling on slashdot.
pieter_mj 5y ago
all words with this suffix are spelled -ful : powerful, colorful, truthful, ...
- pieter_mj 5y ago
  I see inside joke. Well, I did read /. at the time.

JimWestergren 5y ago

Better linking to the live canonical URL instead: https://slashdot.org/story/99/02/12/1429236/ask-slashdot-how-powerful-is-your-computer https://slashdot.org/story/99/02/12/1429236/ask-slashdot-how...

mgdlbp 5y ago
I was very impressed when I saw that Slashdot is one of few sites to have maintained redirects from all the way back (well, almost; they didn't include the CGI links from 1998! [0]). But I thought it'd be more interesting to see how it all looked back then, both with the old site design and because the comment sort changed when they added the display controls around late 2001, which shuffled comments from old stories and broke up threads that were mostly in sequence before. Trivia: This story predates the meta-moderation system (introduced around 1999-09; story from 1999-02). Notable also that the comment sort today remains unchanged from 2001. [0] http://slashdot.org/slashdot.cgi?mode=article&artnum=427 http://slashdot.org/slashdot.cgi?mode=article&artnum=427 Edit: I wondered about 'late 2001' and looked into it a bit. The 9/11 traffic spike was very close (CmdrTaco on how they handled it [1]), but Wayback shows the threshold control was present already in August. [1] https://slashdot.org/articles/01/09/13/154222.shtml https://slashdot.org/articles/01/09/13/154222.shtml

johnwalkr 5y ago

I had the legendary Celeron 300A and a 3DFX Voodoo2. The 300A was easily overclockable to 450Mhz. I wish I still had it.

tluyben2 5y ago

Ah 1999… my first company made more than we knew what to do with so we had the latest and the greatest all the time. Almost everything ran Linux; we had one NT machine to migrate a company ‘s telco backend off Windows (which gave them a lot of downtime and for them that was literally losing money every missed minute) to AIX (which ran remotely).

wanda 5y ago

I had a ThinkPad 380ED I think. I remember it had a 3GB hard drive, and I'm pretty sure it had both a floppy disk drive and a CD drive -- in a laptop! 166MHz CPU, probably 16MB RAM or something hilarious like that. And it was just this delightful black block, no curves, no ridges or go faster stripes, it was just this smooth black cuboid. It always felt like it was rugged enough to survive a natural disaster, and yet it had this sublime keyboard and a nice screen for the time. I loved that laptop very much. I miss Windows 98 actually, sure it was bad, but the way it looked and felt was just terrific. No nonsense, and yet it had character. It's like someone was saying yesterday about Windows 2000 being the peak, I think they're right. It was robust and simple, it was easy on the eyes, and it wasn't heavy on resources, it was just a decent Windows OS. XP and 7 are both hailed as good Windows OSs too, but I found myself changing both to look like Windows 2000, always switching off all the themes etc. Sure wish Windows 10/11 still had classic theme (yes, I know you can download a third-party app to bring it back, not the point though is it)

hughrr 5y ago

My work computer was a sun ultra 60 then. Felt godly. Then it was replaced with a windows 2000 pentium 3 box which was notably a lot faster.

rjh29 5y ago

> How soon will I be able to buy a machine more powerful than the world's computing power when I was born? An AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is 2.3M MIPS. If you were born prior to ~1977, you are currently able to do this, according to https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/world-computing-power.html https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/world-computing-power... If born after, you still can but you need a lot more money.

hpaavola 5y ago

-99 I bought a computer for the first time with my own money from the summer job i had back then. Pentium 2, Nvidia Riva TNT2, some Sound Blaster, CD-R drive (2x speed, we burnt so many CDs with that) and I think 128MB RAM, but can't remember anymore. No idea what the other components were. I think that all in all it costed about 10 000 Finnish Markka, which would be around 2300 euros in today's money (so adjusted for inflation).

omgmajk 5y ago

Had something like a Pentium 2 300mhz with mmx if I'm not mistaken, and a voodoo 2. Couple of gigs of disk space and iunno how much ram. I remember we later put in 256mb of ram and made it into our firewall running Debian with iptables where it sat until 2011~.

forinti 5y ago

The machine I had in 1999 I had bought in 1996 and it had a Pentium 166MMX with 64MB of RAM. That is about the same as the wireless router I'm using at the moment that is the size of a flash drive and costs about US$20 (https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-usb150/ https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-usb150/).

MisterTea 5y ago

At that point I had just upgraded our Pentium 166 with a Voodoo2 and could finally play Quake 2 in glorious accelerated 800x600 3D. That machine started life as a Micron 486 DX2 66MHz that was upgraded to a Pentium Overdrive which was then upgraded with a Tyan Tomcat III with a Pentium 166. RAM was 32 MB of EDO and video card was an ATI 3d Pro turbo with 4MB VRAM (expandable to 8MB and had built in TV output) Storage was a mix of the 486's original 540MB disk and a 1 GB disk I bought at a computer fair. That was the first gigabyte disk I owned and was ecstatic that I could copy a whole CD's worth of data to my disk. I still have all of the above mentioned parts, save for the hard disks, including the pulled 486 chip. I had The Tyan booting OpenBSD and 9front last year but it had a lot of stability issues. Unsure if its age related or software.

mpalfrey 5y ago
Wonder if computer fairs are still a thing. Got fond memories of buying bits at them.

bloopernova 5y ago

I like to play a mental game where I try to figure out the year where a current latest Raspberry Pi is equivalent to the total world computing power. Most of the time I fall asleep before I get very far! ;) Example: The original Cray-1 could process 160MFLOPS, while a Pi Zero 2 can process 5.1GFLOPS. (via http://www.clustered-pi.com/ http://www.clustered-pi.com/ ) The Cray-1 was released in 1975 with over 100 sold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1 -- So the Pi Zero 2 was roughly 300 times more powerful than a Cray-1, and was roughly equivalent to the world's computing power in 1975. I leave it up to the reader to work out other comparisons :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders_of_magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders... can be useful to help you figure out the equivalent computing power of various devices.

hyperman1 5y ago
If you see the stuff Feynmann had to work with when creating the first atomic bomb, just about anything is more powerfull. I always wonder if the CPU used to check if I push the power button on my Senseo coffee maker should be considered technology capable of making a nuclear bomb .
Retric 5y ago
This is a little misleading due to latency issues etc. I like trying to figure out when you would be better off with say 250 Cray-1’s vs the latest Raspberry Pi.
johnklos 5y ago
I think you're making the same mistake as many other modern benchmarks do: GPU compute != general purpose compute. A Pi Zero 2 is easily multiple times faster than a Cray 1, but not 300 times, except for certain very specific workloads. For general code that does lots of math but isn't GPU accelerated, I bet the difference in performance is significantly smaller.

rayiner 5y ago

Pentium II 300 with 64MB. Riva 128 graphics card. Ran BeOS and Linux on it. I think I got my first DSL line (256 kbps SDSL) that year or the next. Magical.

tpoacher 5y ago

Why on earth the article linked to archive when the original is still up? https://slashdot.org/story/99/02/12/1429236/ask-slashdot-how-powerful-is-your-computer https://slashdot.org/story/99/02/12/1429236/ask-slashdot-how... Is this another one of those "the old comments / commenters were better" nonsense?

cgriswald 5y ago
Maybe the submitter prefers a functioning back button that doesn’t spam you when you try to leave.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I haven't visited /. in ages. I didn't know how far it had fallen and am shocked it still gets traffic, given this back button behavior. It is indeed a good reason to never post direct links.
  - thg 5y ago
    Slashdot got sold to Dice a decade ago and went downhill from there. After their absolutely horrible redesign, which I guess they shelved because the site looks as I remember it, the community sort of split into two with plenty people moving over to https://soylentnews.org/ https://soylentnews.org/ Here's the first SoylentNews submission from 2014: https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=1 https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=1 Disclaimer: I'm just (barely) remembering stuff here. No idea what happened to either site past 2014.
- sigio 5y ago
  What 'back button behavior' are we talking about... noticed nothing when just clicking through a few articles and back, and then back out of slashdot completely. Though it might have been blocked by ublock-origin or some other addon without noticiing it.
  - cgriswald 5y ago

atwebb 5y ago

From the comments, is this early bitcoin mining? >It's even better when you (with permission) install it on all the computers at work and put in on 'invisible' mode. If you want to get technical it's cracking the code for a PRESET quote in a RC5-64 encoded contest message, and if you find the correct key then you get $1000 and x2 if you're not associated with a group.

theandrewbailey 5y ago

In 1999, my dad bought a surplus PC from an office move. A pentium 166, 24 MB RAM, 15" CRT, and eventually updated to Windows 98. The new CDROM drive broke a few days after, and it took months for the neighbor to get a replacement from whatever flaky family member he got it from. In 1999, a useful PC had to have a CDROM drive, so having it out for months felt like forever. We could have gone to Best Buy or something to get another, but my parents were (and still are) such cheapskates. The thing stopped booting in 2001, replaced by a 1.2GHz duron with Win 2000. About 8 years ago, I built a retro PC. I targeted 2000, and got a P3 600, 256 MB RAM, Geforce 2 GTS, 17" CRT, and Win 98. Ball mouse. I turn it on every few months to feel nostalgic. For some reason, I still had the same sound card from that 166 (some Yamaha XG card), so I put it in there, and it sounds so right!

doubled112 5y ago
There is something about the MIDI voices (samples? there's a word at the tip of my tongue here) that were built into the cards from back when that snaps me back 20+ years.
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  > (samples? there's a word at the tip of my tongue here) Synth? Synthesis? I'm sure that it's a lost art of hearing the sound of one synth over another and identifying it exactly. Hardware ones always sounded much better to me.
  - doubled112 5y ago
    After some Googling, soundfonts was the word, which I suppose would be synthesized into sound.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

what was wrong with the actual URL? no web archive needed http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/02/12/1429236.shtml http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/02/12/1429236.shtml

wazoox 5y ago

My work PC was a Pentium 166Mhz overclocked to 225 Mhz (bus cranked up from 33 to 45Mhz) with 64 MB of RAM, a Matrox Mystique 4MB, two 1.2 GB disks and a SCSI 2x CD burner running Windows 98SE. However my other work machine was an SGI O2 :) R5000 200Mhz 256 MB and 4GB disk (and the video IO card). Back then all the PCs in the company had PUBLIC IP V4 ADDRESSES. Imagine that. And no firewall whatsoever.

dang 5y ago

This is interesting because "Ask Slashdot" at the head of the title is clearly an antecedent to "Ask HN". I always wondered where that came from—I remember when people started posting "Ask HN" shortly after HN was born, and I remember how it struck me as a bit of an odd convention. Are there instances of "Ask $community" from before Slashdot?