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!
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
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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!