Question Which CPU was your very first one?

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RAIDGoblin said:
I guess, I'll never forget how much laughter I had from my classmates when I told them what PC I was using, but it did the job and saved me from needing to spend money - that is until it's motherboard died, tech doesn't last forever 🙁
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I used early Autocad on 8086 PC, I would enter coordinates and go get a coffee until it showed on the screen but did a lot of work.
 
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CountMike said:
I used early Autocad on 8086 PC, I would enter coordinates and go get a coffee until it showed on the screen but did a lot of work.
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nice, so long as you were patient 👍

You're comment has reminded me, I lied about my "first CPU" on this thread, I totally forgot about my first laptop, it was a hand-me-down from my dad, and it had a broken screen but it was too old so I couldn't get the part, the solution was to take the screen off and sit it in front of a monitor LOL

I used it from my final year of primary school, through to first year high-school (when I got my second laptop and then built my Pentium 4 desktop)

It was an old dell latitude (I can't remember what CPU it was, I'll see if I can find it in the roof), and it ran windows 98, and I used command line when I could because it hardly had any RAM, I often left it to load pages while I went to get coffee or a snack
 
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TravisPNW said:
Since we are in a retro thread I just want to mention that everyone should check out "Computer Chronicles" on Youtube... most everyone should be familiar if you were around in those days. I can remember watching it here and there and it covered everything computers from the early 80's til the early 2000's. Gary Kildall was a co-host.

The show really is an amazing trip down memory lane. I just watched an episode the other day about MS Flight Simulator (which has been around even longer than Windows) and watching that state of the art 1982 version on screen and comparing it to the 2020 version was entertaining.

As said upthread I started on a Commodore Amiga 500 and didn't go PC until the late 90's with Windows 95 and my Pentium 75 that I soon upgraded to a 200MMX.... and this show covered the Amiga as well as Mac.
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I’ll take a look at those YouTube videos.
 
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magbarn said:
80286 10Mhz. I swapped out the 20mhz crystal for 24mhz so it gave me 12 MEGAHERTZ of cpu power. that's how we used to overclock. You also had insert each ram chip in each little socket. That was lots of fun too.
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You had good motherboard if you was able to do such stunt. 10 MHz motherboards usually had PLL chip with low work clock speed which freaked out on higher clock speeds, rendering board unusable. For fun facts - older "keyboard size" computers often had video signal forming tied to CPU clock frequency and on different CPU speed picture on TV screen disappeared.

Though I admit that tinkering with hardware at that time was harder, but with magnitudes larger fun factor if things went as expected 😉
 
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RAIDGoblin said:
that doesn't sound that different from the 32 bit Pentium 4 PC that I'd been using up until very recently, that also served me well through high-school and in engineering college, it ran Auto-cad in XP strangely well
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Trying to install XP on the old PC always returned a blue screen after the "Press F2 to run ASR", guess the mobo isn't compatible with it at all, an ECS K7VMA. 1MB graphics card that ran some ancient games and a NES emulator.
 
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1995-96, my roommate jumped on to the Win 95 craze and the PC desktop was a thing to own.
Computer City sale.
Packard Bell 100 Mhz P5 Pentium. It had 8 megabytes of ram and a 1 gig HD. I remember it like it was yesterday, the salesman, Mike(you liar), said we'd never need more than that in our lifetime.
We made it about three months before it was upped to 24 megs of ram and a genuine Intel piggyback overdrive upping it to 166 Mhz, and a Rendition Verite 3D card.
Then it actually lived up to the hype.
 
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LolaGT said:
1995-96, my roommate jumped on to the Win 95 craze and the PC desktop was a thing to own.
Computer City sale.
Packard Bell 100 Mhz P5 Pentium. It had 8 megabytes of ram and a 1 gig HD. I remember it like it was yesterday, the salesman, Mike(you liar), said we'd never need more than that in our lifetime.
We made it about three months before it was upped to 24 megs of ram and a genuine Intel piggyback overdrive upping it to 166 Mhz, and a Rendition Verite 3D card.
Then it actually lived up to the hype.
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“1 gig HD” - That’s only a bit larger than a regular CD!
But who needs more than that, right? 🤣
 
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My first one was a Pentium 75 Mhz, bought in 1995. Overclocked with a motherboard jumper to 100 Mhz. Then in 1998 upgraded to the legendary Celeron 300A (300Mhz), overclocked to 464Mhz from BIOS. Both with stock cooling etc. Overlocking at that time was actually easier than it is now. 🙂
 
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Krotow said:
It was just before MP3 inventing and CD ripping craze. Then 1 GB HDD became a bit too tight and 10 GB appeared. At least MP3 and DiVX compressed videos (against rules, I know) libraries was main cause why folk started to buy larger HDDs 😀
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That's actually very true! Oh, the time (and electricity) I wasted ripping CDs and DVDs back then. And most of the movies I never even watched again. (sorry about off-topic)
 
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HWOC said:
My first one was a Pentium 75 Mhz, bought in 1995. Overclocked with a motherboard jumper to 100 Mhz. Then in 1998 upgraded to the legendary Celeron 300A (300Mhz), overclocked to 464Mhz from BIOS. Both with stock cooling etc. Overlocking at that time was actually easier than it is now. :)
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Yup there was much more headroom available. Now CPU's seem to come with factory overclocks near their max. You're lucky to get 10% these days vs. the 50% o/c like the celery 300A which was hugely popular while I was in college.
 
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HWOC said:
That's actually very true! Oh, the time (and electricity) I wasted ripping CDs and DVDs back then. And most of the movies I never even watched again. (sorry about off-topic)
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True. I didn't ripped videos - had a bit too weak computer and honestly was too lazy for that. But managed to rip all my CD collection (like 50 discs) into MP3 before moving to live in Germany for a year. It was before outsourcing hype when software developers was still sent to customer to do their job in actual place. Now I'm shrug imagining that my ripped collection in Germany most likely will be defined as counterfeit with a short trip to jail for me.

magbarn said:
Yup there was much more headroom available. Now CPU's seem to come with factory overclocks near their max. You're lucky to get 10% these days vs. the 50% o/c like the celery 300A which was hugely popular while I was in college.
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Correct. At 1990-s with good cooling it was quite easy easy to get even 80% gain if you won in silicon lottery. If you didn't then CPU and motherboard burning in real flames also was quite possible. Nowadays all overclocking capable hardware is thoroughly tested for possible limits and usually you already are working with factory overclocking even without knowing that. RAM XMP profiles are exactly about that. And it is much harder to get outside accepted limits as well.
 
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magbarn said:
Yup there was much more headroom available. Now CPU's seem to come with factory overclocks near their max. You're lucky to get 10% these days vs. the 50% o/c like the celery 300A which was hugely popular while I was in college.
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I think what's different today is that "overclocking" means two different things.

Most people seem to talk about raising the turbo boost limit, which I attribute this to be a factor of how Intel treats the multiplier setting. Changing it limits how high the CPU is allowed to change the multiplier when it comes to turbo boosting or whatnot. AMD however, fixes the clock speed to that multiplier. So if you set a 50x multiplier on Intel, it'll still downclock when nothing's going on but boost to 50x (I think this is 5.0GHz as BCLK tends to be 100MHz). Doing this on AMD means setting it right to 5.0GHz (assuming a BCLK of 100MHz) and it won't change. However, there's still the method of forcing the base frequencies of the processor to something faster than the default. You can still do this on Intel's CPUs, but this is the behavior if you fix the multiplier on AMD's CPUs.

In any case, since you know these processors can achieve a higher clock speed, you can generally still see a significant improvement if you force the base speed to say the lower end of the turbo boost limit. But of course, you just won't see the turbo boost.

I believe the community calls pushing the turbo boost ceiling "dynamic overclocking" (especially since "turbo boost" appears to be called dynamic overclocking in the first place) and increasing the base frequency "static overclocking"
 
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Intel 386sx 12 mhz on a board with empty co-processor socket, 2 mb of individual ram chips on board, 2 mb of empty sockets and four 1 mb SIPP sockets and dos 5 installed on a 250 mb hd.

Got it off Ebay in 97 for $50.
 
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Since somebody mentioned CDs and data CDs. I got one of first ones for my Atari. When data CDs showed up they were way larger capacity than contemporary HDDs. For a time we thought that HDDs may become extinct. Who would need a bulky 5.25" 120MB HDD when there's 700MB cd ?
 
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Robert Gonzalez said:
Intel 386sx 12 mhz on a board with empty co-processor socket, 2 mb of individual ram chips on board, 2 mb of empty sockets and four 1 mb SIPP sockets and dos 5 installed on a 250 mb hd.

Got it off Ebay in 97 for $50.
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At 1997 386SX-12 was already completely obsolete in userland, at least here where I live. Too slow even for still popular DOS/text mode software eq. accounting systems.

CountMike said:
When data CDs showed up they were way larger capacity than contemporary HDDs. For a time we thought that HDDs may become extinct. Who would need a bulky 5.25" 120MB HDD when there's 700MB cd ?
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It was not mainstream thinking. CDs still required specific and quite expensive hardware. Price for internal IDE CD reader alone was like 200$ at 1994. And they was read-only. New software suites at that time took more space on drive too and development environments - 3...5 times more. Hard drive miniaturization and capacity surge around that same time to 250 MB and above came very timely.
 
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