From 1988 to the 2000’s is a LONG time.

The comment I was replying to was talking about "10-15 years later" (i.e. 1998-2003).

Quite a few Unix commands and concepts are exactly the same!

From 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.

You should look up “Commodore Amiga”, it was way more powerful than PC

Although the Amiga was quite a neat piece of kit when it first came out in 1985, I disagree with your comment unfortunately. The custom chipset sorta "froze" the Amiga design to a particular level and it was very hard to make meaningful upgrades, unlike PCs, where you could slap a new CPU into the CPU socket, or a new video accelerator, sound card, etc, into the ISA or PCI busses.

Yes I realize there were accelerator cards for Amigas later on, like the BlizzardPPC, but they weren't an officially supported option by Commodore (most accelerators came out after Commodore was pronounced dead in 1994) and were more like kludges.

I was a Amiga fan until the mid 90's, and you're spot on. The Amiga was too difficult to iterate on. Chip set upgrades like AGA were far too little, too late. (And forget about ECS, which barely added anything a normal user would care about.) By the time AGA was out, 386 systems with SVGA, Soundblaster, etc were cheap and common.

As a collector, this is why I prefer Atari ST family systems over Amigas. Because they are simpler from the jump, they are easier to work on and less finnicky - floppies being a prime example of this... as Commodore liked using aggressive GCR encoding instead of IBM PC standards for formatting diskettes. For everything else, PC based hardware is just more familiar and flexible for me, since that's what I grew up with.

The Amiga was definitely the more exotic platform! I learned a ton from Amiga OS though. It was my first exposure to a "real" operating system with libraries, multitasking, IPC, etc. Once I got a Linux box though, I never looked back.

Very fair! Amiga did bring a good bit to the table, and on paper was certainly better than the ST. I kinda wish the Amiga came with an MMU.

The 486 and later the Pentium killed it.

The PC being effectively an open platform killed it.

(if not Commodore's incompetence. E.g. Apple did manage to hang on)

I 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.

Dual 450s running at 900 was the price/power sweet spot for a while :)

Tell me more about 450MHz socked 370 PPGA CPU that could be overclocked to 900MHz.

They 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.

Yes, I remember getting my Tualatin Celeron in 2003 with 256mb RAM. It was a beast compared to my friends machines at the time. :P

I 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.

Yeah, "Toilets" were the way to go.

It was a good time to be buying Intel when they were naming their chips after Oregon cities.

Pentium 2 was released in 1997 and was released with maximum speed of 450 MHZ which could be overclocked much higher.

In 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.

500 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.

Yeah. My first PC build was in 98: PII 300MHz / 128MB RAM. No way a P3 500 was available at the time.

No Pentium 2 could be overclocked much above ~500MHz due to the way they were all manufactured. 10% is not really much higher.

I vividly remember pushing 233 to 300.

My 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.

I 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...)

This does look like an interesting board https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S2466_Tiger%20MPX

It 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!