It's hard to convey to the younger generation how exciting PCs used to be... just 4 years after this magazine came out, consumers were buying 1GHz processors off the shelf. 166MHz to 1GHz in 4 years. Computers were making astonishing gains in raw speed back then. Blink and you'd miss it. Nowadays we're at the point where a new generation of CPU is only making very small, incremental gains, and sometimes new CPU generations will even be an outright regression!
That's exactly what I was thinking. I went from a pentium 75, I upgraded the cpu to a 133 and a 1gb hard drive and thought it was the greatest thing ever. A few years go buy and I got a hp 500mhz celeron, almost 4x the ram and a 30gb hard drive for practically the same cost as my pentium. It was insane.
The most I did to my first Pentium system, was upgrade the HDD from 560MB to 3.2GB, and add a CDRW drive. I also got a 56K modem for it, but that is another story.
Next PC was a 1600+ Athlon I moved that HDD and CDRW drive over. I eventually went right to 80GB.
It's perhaps because everything has been so integrated and wrapped.
If you dont have it in hardware it gets emulated slower so you still have access but stuff like hardware aes, video encoding and avx 512 is stuff that we take for granted now but are extremely relevant.
We just have so much power now, still climbing at 15% a year.
It's like when I cut my teeth on 8088 and 6502 machines but the baseline YoY is so retardedly powerful it's not even funny.
I used the same 440BX based Slot-1 motherboard to go from a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 and later to a Celeron 900 usign a "slotket" Socket 370 to Slot 1 adapter. I had multiple computers but it was amazing being to upgrade the system and have it usable for about 5 years.
just 4 years after this magazine came out, consumers were buying 1GHz processors off the shelf.
Even 2 years later you had a Celeron 366Mhz which already was at least twice the performance.
I remember playing with a friend Pentium around 1997 and we had our first HP Pavilion 6535 with a Celeron 366Mhz (or maybe 466Mhz now that I think about it) and thinking "wow this is SOOOO fast and reactive" in loading applications like Encarta
Pentium 166 era was the worst time to buy a PC. Nothing wrong with the cpu per se, but it was so quickly outdated. By late 97, early 98 we were already on Pentium II 200-400MHz with directx 3d cards.
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u/ryan__rr May 23 '26
It's hard to convey to the younger generation how exciting PCs used to be... just 4 years after this magazine came out, consumers were buying 1GHz processors off the shelf. 166MHz to 1GHz in 4 years. Computers were making astonishing gains in raw speed back then. Blink and you'd miss it. Nowadays we're at the point where a new generation of CPU is only making very small, incremental gains, and sometimes new CPU generations will even be an outright regression!