Comment by voidspark
2 months ago
> slightly beefed up (say, dual or quad CPU) typical early ‘90s gear.
Early 90's Intel was the 486 33 Mhz. It barely had enough performance to run the TCP/IP stack at a few hundred KB/sec, using all of the CPU just for that task. I think you forgot how slow it was. Pentium II is where it starts to get reasonably modern in the late 90's. Pentium Pro (1995) was their first with multiprocessor support. It was moving so fast back then that early/mid/late 90's was like comparing decades apart at todays pace of improvement.
166MHz pentium with 128MB (not a typo, kids!) of memory felt luxuriously snappy and spacious, including with tabbed web browsing in Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox… running BeOS or QNX-Photon. Not so much under Linux or Windows.
Not so far removed from a multi-CPU Pentium at 90 or 100MHz, from the very early Pentium days.
I guess what I had in mind was first-gen Pentiums. They’re solidly in the first half of the ‘90s but “early 90s” does cover a broader period, and yeah, 486 wouldn’t quite cut it. They’re the oldest machines I can recall multitasking very comfortably on… given the right software.
128 MB was almost unheard of back then.
Pentium 66 - 1993
Pentium 90 - 1994
Pentium 166 - 1996
More than doubled the performance in 3 years. Two orders of magnitude from 1990 - 2000.
There was no multi-CPU Pentium. Not until the Pentium Pro in 1996.