While I'm awaiting parts to arrive this week for my i9 9900K DAW machine build, my mind wondered back a few decades, reflecting on the thrill of having the best PC at the time (from a consumer standpoint). How ironic looking at some of the specs from that time frame compared to today. We've come a long ways...
It was the early 80's and I had just ordered my first Intel based PC, an IBM that sported an Intel 8088 processor. This was a huge upgrade from my Commodore VIC-20 which had 5 KB of static RAM, but I had upgraded to the optional tape drive to save my data. Back to the IBM. I could hardly contain my excitement as the Intel 8088 processor would run at a speed of 4.77 MHz. I went all in and ordered an upgrade on the memory that expanded it from its base of 16 KB. Not only did I have this blazing processor, I also had not one, but two 5 ¼ inch 160 KB capacity floppy disk drives to save my data on and boot my OS from – PC-DOS brought to you by a company in Seattle called Microsoft. I also got the twelve inch monochrome monitor, keyboard, and a dot matrix printer. I was king!
Everything at that time was text based. I remember playing some games. One had to use their imagination to picture the scenery and characters. I remember thinking that life just couldn't get any better than this. But it did! Sometime around the mid 80's IMB was touting the XT, the first with an internal hard drive. Oh wow! I could flip that big switch to turn the computer on and it would boot up with the OS without having to use a floppy disk to boot from. The hard drive was a Seagate ST-412, it would hold up to a whopping 10 MB! The XT came with a base of 128 KB of Ram and get this, the 5 ¼ inch floppy disk drive was now double sided and could hold 360 KB of data. Of course I had to upgrade, and I was king again!
I wonder if my i9 9900K build is going to make me feel like a king again?
It was the early 80's and I had just ordered my first Intel based PC, an IBM that sported an Intel 8088 processor. This was a huge upgrade from my Commodore VIC-20 which had 5 KB of static RAM, but I had upgraded to the optional tape drive to save my data. Back to the IBM. I could hardly contain my excitement as the Intel 8088 processor would run at a speed of 4.77 MHz. I went all in and ordered an upgrade on the memory that expanded it from its base of 16 KB. Not only did I have this blazing processor, I also had not one, but two 5 ¼ inch 160 KB capacity floppy disk drives to save my data on and boot my OS from – PC-DOS brought to you by a company in Seattle called Microsoft. I also got the twelve inch monochrome monitor, keyboard, and a dot matrix printer. I was king!
Everything at that time was text based. I remember playing some games. One had to use their imagination to picture the scenery and characters. I remember thinking that life just couldn't get any better than this. But it did! Sometime around the mid 80's IMB was touting the XT, the first with an internal hard drive. Oh wow! I could flip that big switch to turn the computer on and it would boot up with the OS without having to use a floppy disk to boot from. The hard drive was a Seagate ST-412, it would hold up to a whopping 10 MB! The XT came with a base of 128 KB of Ram and get this, the 5 ¼ inch floppy disk drive was now double sided and could hold 360 KB of data. Of course I had to upgrade, and I was king again!
I wonder if my i9 9900K build is going to make me feel like a king again?
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