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Even 10-15 years later, multiple CPUs and 128Mb RAM was quite uncommon. How much did this beast cost back in the 80s? Edit: Max configs were up to $250,000 ($
by kingo55 2y ago
Even 10-15 years later, multiple CPUs and 128Mb RAM was quite uncommon.
How much did this beast cost back in the 80s?
Edit: Max configs were up to $250,000 ($663,937.02 today) back then according to this price list: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/Apollo_Price_List_Jul88.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/Apollo_Price_List_Jul88....
- userbinator 2y agoDual (50% overclocked) Celerons on a BP6 was a relatively common enthusiast setup in the early 2000s. 128M of RAM was also not a huge amount then.
- kingo55 2y agoYes, I remember getting my Tualatin Celeron in 2003 with 256mb RAM. It was a beast compared to my friends machines at the time. :P
- jojobas 2y agoYeah, "Toilets" were the way to go.
- DaoVeles 2y agoI had that as well, and also grabbed a Sempron 3100+ a few years later. Both those chips are in the class of punching way beyond their intended weight. Tualatin for its over clockable head room. The Sempron for its oddly large L1 cache for the spec.
- ChainOfFools 2y agoIt was a good time to be buying Intel when they were naming their chips after Oregon cities.
- system2 2y agoPentium 2 was released in 1997 and was released with maximum speed of 450 MHZ which could be overclocked much higher.
- hypercube33 2y agoIn 98 I ordered a p3 500mhz with 128mb and planned to upgrade to 384mb. before it even shipped out to me Intel announced the 550mhz irrc or 10% faster. two years later at least 50% faster with the 700mhz and copper mine. Things moved rapidly back then.
- rasz 2y ago500 was released in February 99. 550 4 months later, 700 five more months later. $700 worth of CPU performance from February 1999 could be had in a low end March 2000 system with $130 CPU. In 2001 500MHz system was already obsolete.
- cellularmitosis 2y agoYeah. My first PC build was in 98: PII 300MHz / 128MB RAM. No way a P3 500 was available at the time.
- rasz 2y agoNo Pentium 2 could be overclocked much above ~500MHz due to the way they were all manufactured. 10% is not really much higher.
- system2 2y agoI vividly remember pushing 233 to 300.
- adastra22 2y agoFrom 1988 to the 2000’s is a LONG time.
- userbinator 2y agoThe comment I was replying to was talking about "10-15 years later" (i.e. 1998-2003).
- supportengineer 2y agoQuite a few Unix commands and concepts are exactly the same!
- anthk 2y agoFrom 1988 you would watch b/w or 4 colours on PC made for offices being really expensive, and from y2k you could play DivX videos and TV at home. And from 2k-2k1, even under Unix at home too (something unthinkable by 1988) with some nice GNU/Linux distro :D. The technology change from 1988 to 1998 was really huge, much more compared to what you could get since 2010 until today.
- supportengineer 2y agoYou should look up “Commodore Amiga”, it was way more powerful than PC
- anthk 2y agoThe 486 and later the Pentium killed it.
- snvzz 2y agoThe PC being effectively an open platform killed it. (if not Commodore's incompetence. E.g. Apple did manage to hang on)
- TheAmazingRace 2y ago
- garciasn 2y agoI bought one in 1998 or 1999 with dual 366s OCd to 700 each; anything over 700 was too unstable for my setup. I kept that thing running until 2008 or 2009. Great machine.
- K0balt 2y agoDual 450s running at 900 was the price/power sweet spot for a while :)
- rasz 2y agoTell me more about 450MHz socked 370 PPGA CPU that could be overclocked to 900MHz.
- K0balt 2y agoThey were bare (no plastic) Slot1 not socket 370 iirc? I don’t remember whether it was the base or the multiplier or both that you tweaked, but there was a bunch of Celeron 450s that would run at 900 typically with standard voltage and decent cooling. IIRC they may have been pIII-900s or 800s that got binned down due to bad cache. Or, maybe im remembering wrong and they were 266s clocked to 450, and people were slapping them into dual slot boards to get “900”? That kinda feels like maybe it was that? It was a long time ago, man, idk. At any rate, every one we bought from MA labs in COI CA for a couple of months clocked up with no problems. We must have shipped a couple hundred of those golden celerons before they dried up.
- sitkack 2y agoMy friends and I all built BP6 machines. Such a wonderful workstation machine. I donated mine to the PC recycler when I moved in 2005. It still is my favorite beige box unix workstation.
- to11mtm 2y agoI was too late to the party for the BP6... I was however lucky enough to be able to get a Tyan Tiger MPX alongside a couple of 'Morgan' core Durons... Can't remember if they were 1.0 or 1.2GHZ... But wow that thing was -nice- on Windows 2000 and held up better than most than other systems I built in that era (Although, in retrospect that may have been because most other builds I did suffered from the capacitor plague...)
- sitkack 2y agoThis does look like an interesting board https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S2466_Tiger%20MPX https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S2466_Tiger%20MPX
- to11mtm 2y agoIt was pretty fun. The -intended- purpose was Dual Athlon MPs. That said, AFAIK some early AXPs could be used, many later ones could have the bridges 'repaired' to allow dual operation. Early Morgan core (Model 7) Durons however could also run MP. One big pain point however, the built in USB was broken on early revs (but hey, they bundled a PCI USB2.0 card to compensate) but also the chipset was... -meh-. But wow it was a solid board!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bee_rider 2y agoAnd those 10 years were the 90’s, advancement was crazy back then.
- jeffbee 2y agoSo true. A year or two after this machine, you could have bought an AT&T StarServer "E" with 4x i486 CPUs and 2GiB total memory, for dramatically less money.
- wmf 2y agoI assume a 486 was dramatically slower than the Apollo PRISM (which looks reasonably well-designed by today's standards).
- jandrese 2y agoIt was probably not dramatic if it was slower at all, there is a reason so many of those workstation processors died out in the 90s.
- stare_spb 2y agoWell, with a performance of ~22-25 MIPS, PRISM@18Mhz was about 2.5 times faster than original 25Mhz 486DX and roughly on par with 1992 486DX2 66Mhz.
- rasz 2y ago2 MFLOPS for 33MHz and 4 MFLOPS for 2/66MHz 486.
- actionfromafar 2y agoI at first thought a 486 was probably faster, but that Apollo CPU has 64 bit data path apparently. It might have been a beast. I didn't even know Apollo used anything but Motorola 68k CPUs.
- supportengineer 2y agoThe FAA command center had rooms full of them.
- antod 2y agoYeah, to put it in perspective, in 1988 I was still dreaming about an Amiga 500 or 2000 with less than 1% of that RAM.
- DaoVeles 2y agoWe were still a year away from the 486. And that wouldn't become common in the home for another 3-4 years.
- cellularmitosis 2y agoYup! A while back I made a little timeline for putting things like this in perspective. https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840b51f7f965059 https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840...
- mysteria 2y agoToday a top of the line Epyc Genoa system can have a total of 256 cores and 12 TB of memory, spread out over two sockets. I wonder how that'll look 10-15 years from now.
- lmm 2y agoI used to have an Alpha server from that vintage with I think 512MB of RAM. Came on two daughterboards full of 32K (or maybe 16K) SIMMs.
- lproven 2y agoAlpha first shipped in 1993: http://www.cpu-collection.de/?l0=co&l1=DEC&l2=Alpha+AXP http://www.cpu-collection.de/?l0=co&l1=DEC&l2=Alpha+AXP Half a decade later, which was a long time back then. Comparison: 80286, 1982; 80386, 1985; 80486, 1989.
- nineteen999 2y agoI had a Alpha 21164PC[1] on an 164SX motherboard with 512MB RAM back around that time. That thing absolutely flied. I installed Debian on it and I remember compiling and running Gnome 1.x from scratch on it. Fun times. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21164#Alpha_21164PC_(PCA56) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21164#Alpha_21164PC_(PCA...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- johnklos 2y agoTrue, but there were wonderful exceptions. For instance, the Mac SE/30 (1989) could take up to 128 megs, and the Amiga 3000 (1990) was designed to allow for even more (although only 16 megs on the motherboard, but 256 meg Zorro III cards were available in 1993). Later, some m68k Macs like the Quadra 605 allowed for 128 meg SIMMs, and the PCI Power Macs really took things to a new level. The Power Mac 9500 could take up to 1.5 gigs of memory in 1995. It's a shame that no computers really distinguish themselves like that any more, aside from high end server systems.
- mjg59 2y agoEh to be fair I think the main reason Zorro III RAM cards didn't appear until way after the first Zorro III machine is that Zorro III wasn't coupled to CPU speed so sticking RAM there wasn't great from a performance perspective - you really needed to use the CPU slot to extend beyond 18MB (remember the 2MB of Chip in addition to the 16MB of Fast) in a useful way
- ChainOfFools 2y agoThe studio I worked at during that time actually did have a CPU slot based memory extension that can handle I believe up to 256 Mb, this would have been around 92 or 93, but I'm not sure how early it was offered on the market that's just when I started there and it was already in the shop. I don't recall the name of it though but I remember that it was a peculiar PCB design, with part of it resembling a breadboard. I think the name started with Ex, like Excelsior or Excalibur or something like that.
- the-rc 2y agoYou didn't mention what machine this was on. Since you mention a breadboard, are you sure it wasn't an addon to an existing CPU card? Perhaps the X-Calibur, that plugged into the Commodore A3640? That's a bit later, though.
- mciancia 2y ago> The Power Mac 9500 could take up to 1.5 gigs of memory in 1995. > It's a shame that no computers really distinguish themselves like that any more, aside from high end server systems. Well, intel mac pro from 2019 could take up to 1.5TB of ram while I would guess standard back then for PCs was 16-32GB at most. So should be comparable (1.5GB vs 16-32MB of ram in 1995)?
- billforsternz 2y agoI'm triggered every time I see things like "$663,937.02 today". I just can't help it. There should be a word for [mindlessly] reporting the results of a calculation to arbitrary precision when only one significant digit of precision is warranted. There probably is such a word in German.
- russdill 2y agoI really love it when this has clearly happened in US children's books. Things like, "ate nearly 551 pounds of food per day!" or similar.
- kstrauser 2y agoYou and me both! When I see something like "a blue whale can be nearly 100 feet (30.48m) long", I want to throw a math book at the author. "Nearly 100 feet" is "nearly 30 meters". "About $250K" is "about $660K today" at best.
- grecy 2y agoIt's almost like everyone should just adopt the system of units and measurements that makes the most sense and is used by the very, VERY vast majority of the world.
- kstrauser 2y agoAlso true but not relevant here. That original example of overly precise dollar amounts would still be an issue. The root cause isn’t units, but innumeracy.
- grecy 2y agoSure, that example would still exist, but the example of C to F and Meters to Feet would be gone forever. Add in Miles to Kilometers, pounds to kilograms and all the rest and you've reduced the problem space dramatically.
- billforsternz 2y ago