Computers of today versus those of the past

[paininlife]

lol yeah agree wid ya all,but think it lyk this , may b 20 years later our nxt generation wil b making fun of today's monsters lyk i7 975 or i9

 

[Deific]

^

lol tis true, in 20 years we'll be lolling at how we thought i7's were great and just how inferior they are compared to <insert>

 

[Corasik]

. Then came IBM PS1....all proprietry but the beginning of the modern PC

Actually then came the PS/2 in April 1987, it did away with ISA expansion slots in favor of MCA (which were probably a more advanced tech than PCI when it was released, but IBM's royalties for MCA were much higher than intels for PCI.

With graphics ranging from MCGA to XGA depending on what you spend it was a huge improvement over EGA on the AT's.

Luckily 3rd party's quickly made VGA clone cards for AT's with ISA slots .

The PS/1 was released in 1990, and actually was intended as a "home PC" not a business model. It returned to ISA slots, and in some ways was more "AT" than the PS/2.

 

[JonJ678]

Didn't think people were laughing at this thread, some interesting things written here. It's good to know there's people on these boards who have been in the game that long.

@Super, netbooks with basic copies of linux on are awesome if you can get the wireless working

I'm only a young one. 450MHz pentium 3 running 98se, which I broke frequently. It was the family pc too, so windows lying in ruins every other weekend didn't go down that well

 

[Corasik]

Of course, it's a joke. Supercomputers means "clusters" or something similar. So even such structure aged 15 years or some (Cray T3D, 300GFlops)

To be fair, the Cray T3D only achieved 300Gflops in the 2048 node version (2048 cpus!!!!!) But the Cray was sold in configurations starting with as few as 32 nodes, A high end i7 could keep up with a T3D with as many as 512 nodes (more or less). Quite an achievement for a CPU that uses just a handfull of watts .

Dual i7 server motherboards (ok Xeon 5500 series) are commonplace, and its not beyond a stretch of the possibility for an enthusiast to network a pair of these together to form a system with enough computing power to outperform a 2048 Cray T3D, and thats not even considering GPU's

Some supercomputers these days even use intel and amd processors just like our PS's. Nasa's intel based system is the 4th fastest in the world, and has 51200 cores! (Xeon 54xx series at 3.0Ghz) 487005 GFlops!!!

 

[AMG]

my first PC was some apricot thing with a 133 P1 or P2 can't rember, that system ran strong for what 10 years not sure if its still going now through I will be suprsied if it was

 

[Amonlym]

(in response to OP) home pc's have moved on massively, and are probably a lot closer to yesteryear super computers, but you cant compare these gflop ratings without using the same method for computing it.

tbh a 15 year old supercomputer is very probably going to thrash an overclocked beast of a pc when doing the task it was designed for as these things even 15 years back had truly immense per processor ram bandwidth, tiny latency massive inter cpu connection and a LOT of cpu's. - ignoring this tho and taking kinda raw numbers

if you want to compare, perhaps take the compute rate of a modern super computer based on x86 chips, divide by the number of cpu's and compair that number to an old servers compute rate.

lets take: http://www.top500.org/system/9708 (#2 worldwide!) 150152 cores = 37538 cpu's working to make 1059TFlop = 28 MFlop per cpu.

calling from 11 years ago: http://www.top500.org/system/3740 with 1.61Tflop. only 1582 MFlop ahead of the modern cpu. i doubt there was a 57 fold improvement in supercomputers in 4 years (to give a 1995 (15 years old) super computer 28 MFlop)

using very rough (guess mostly) calculations a 133mhz pentium 1 = ~66mhz athlon xp which in itself is about a 50mhz single core athlon 64, in itself about a 40mhz single core out of a phenom2 or 33mhz single core i7. div/4 = 10mhz phenom2 or 8mhz i7. whese run at about 3ghz so, between 300 and 375 times faster... (ignoring gpu compute)

 

[jamiehavok]

my first pc was a 486sx2/66 with 4mb ram in 1993/1994. that was allready out of date by then. i needed a dx2 and 8mb of ram by 1995 to run most games and by the end of 1995/96 you needed a pentium due to the dawn of 3d!

 

[m3csl2004]

To be fair, the Cray T3D only achieved 300Gflops in the 2048 node version (2048 cpus!!!!!) But the Cray was sold in configurations starting with as few as 32 nodes, A high end i7 could keep up with a T3D with as many as 512 nodes (more or less). Quite an achievement for a CPU that uses just a handfull of watts .

Dual i7 server motherboards (ok Xeon 5500 series) are commonplace, and its not beyond a stretch of the possibility for an enthusiast to network a pair of these together to form a system with enough computing power to outperform a 2048 Cray T3D, and thats not even considering GPU's

Some supercomputers these days even use intel and amd processors just like our PS's. Nasa's intel based system is the 4th fastest in the world, and has 51200 cores! (Xeon 54xx series at 3.0Ghz) 487005 GFlops!!!

It really makes you think what you could achieve with folding and seti and the like - how many pc's are there in the world???

 

[remy87]

Pentium 2 @ 400mhz
64 or 128mb ram not sure
10gb harddrive

Before that my dad had one however was too young to notice that stuff.

 

[boosfuk]

My first PC was a 4.77Mhz (?) IBM PC back in 1982. I remember actually using it productively to help with my job using the original Multiplan spreadsheet as well as wasting hours playing Wizardry.
Over the years the biggest difference to me is that until recent years the PC was never fast enough for the current games of that time. It was always a battle to get vaguely playable frame rates and much time was spent tuning the settings & streamlining dos/windows. Nowadays even an average PC is easily fast enough for most games (OK I'll mention Crysis before anybody else does) with only compromises on resolution and detail levels depending on the graphics card.

 

[twist3d0n3]

we had a p2 350MHz, 64Mb ram, 4mb ATI rage pro agp card, 8.4Gb HD....

cost nearly 2 grand (i admit, it was from pc world )

 

[Combat Fighter]

My first computer was some Atari that had about 16k memory on it. It did not have a hard drive or floppy, it just had a cartridge that you plugged in the middle. This was in the mid 80's.

 

[JoshAFC]

I started out with a Pentium 90 Mhz, 8 Mb RAM, 800 MB hard disk, 4 x CD-ROM all running Windows 95. I'd used 386/486's with Windows 3.1 at school, though that was our first PC at home.

That was 15 years ago. It's almost scarey when you think about how things will have developed in another 15 years time.

 

[PistolPete]

My first PC I bought brand new back in 1997 (for £1,200) had a slower CPU, less ram and less storage than my current mobile phone. The only thing it beats by phone for was the 800x600 resolution whereas my mobile is 800x480.

 

[Zenduri]

My first computer was a spectrum zx128k with top loading tape drive and the loading screens that many a stoner would be happy to watch. That was 1989-90

I never really bothered with them outside of school until 1998 when i bought my first true PC.

P2 400mhz
some random mobo
128mb crucial mem
6.7gb HD
Intel740 graphics card (required no fan!)
Soundblaster awe 32
Win 98
floppy drive
Cd drive
15 inch Monitor

custom build for £754 inclusive of Vat Bought on 10th oct 98... i only found the receipt for this last year among some old paperwork.

I ran that until 2005 then used it as a foot stool for a few years before binning it.

 

[domthecondom]

to young to remeber the specs but i remeber it ran Windows 3.1 YEAAAAH! that was the DOS BOY and my dad bought a new Harddrive 4GB gosh he was proud. I remeber playing the original Leminx and Prince of Persia on it.

The first PC that was mine was a Athlon 2200+ 256mb of ram and a Geforce 4MX YEAH GOOD TIMES 60GB HDD

 

[nheather]

Over the years the biggest difference to me is that until recent years the PC was never fast enough for the current games of that time.

Oh and don't forget having to make the highly creative bootdisks to leave as much of the 640KB RAM free to be able to play the game.

I remmeber have a set of boot floppies specially tuned for certain games.

Cheers,

Nigel

 

[fizzle-187]

to young to remeber the specs but i remeber it ran Windows 3.1 YEAAAAH! that was the DOS BOY and my dad bought a new Harddrive 4GB gosh he was proud. I remeber playing the original Leminx and Prince of Persia on it.

The first PC that was mine was a Athlon 2200+ 256mb of ram and a Geforce 4MX YEAH GOOD TIMES 60GB HDD

Same. Things change rapidly nowadays.

 

[Combat Fighter]

to young to remeber the specs but i remeber it ran Windows 3.1 YEAAAAH! that was the DOS BOY and my dad bought a new Harddrive 4GB gosh he was proud. I remeber playing the original Leminx and Prince of Persia on it.

The first PC that was mine was a Athlon 2200+ 256mb of ram and a Geforce 4MX YEAH GOOD TIMES 60GB HDD

60GB that big? My first HD was 130MB