Comment by alabastervlog
2 months ago
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.