Question for collectors or owners of an old PC and other tech related things.

[Lenovich]

(Sorry for simplified English, learnt from youtube)

 

Hi, how do you define and separate Computer eras of PC history?

 

There is 3 obvious ways. 

1. By decades. 80s - 90s etc

2. By operating systems. DOS - Windows - Mac.

3. By hardware. 486 - Pentium.

 

But, old PC and Mac can efdective run more than 5 years and belong for two decades. For example my first PC(1996 build) works until 2001. Almost 3 PC generations born in 5 years, from Pentiums to 1 Ghz  processors.

 

What yours thoughts?

[GenericFanboy]

I dont collect pc's as a whole. Seperate parts, So new generations are a bit of a new era to me. 

 

As for actual pc era's, i'd think you'd go by achievements. New this new that, For example. The new threadripper seems a bit like a new era. To me atleast.

[MartinKweh]

I think you can consider it with transistor count. Every time it doubles? 

[GenericFanboy]

Just now, Martin2132 said:

I think you can consider it with transistor count. Every time it doubles? 

Thats a good one too.

[Jurrunio]

Performance leap / core functions that changed the whole situation imo. E.g, Ryzen bring 8 cores to the masses and then later, 64 cores to consumers (back then you can't even buy 64 core CPUs yourself, you need to buy a prebuilt server with board and case and more), or if you go older, when hardware t&l became a thing, invention of tessellation etc. Basically, when something that shreds last gen to bits comes out.

[Lenovich]

5 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

Performance leap / core functions that changed the whole situation imo. E.g, Ryzen bring 8 cores to the masses and then later, 64 cores to consumers (back then you can't even buy 64 core CPUs yourself, you need to buy a prebuilt server with board and case and more), or if you go older, when hardware t&l became a thing, invention of tessellation etc. Basically, when something that shreds last gen to bits comes out.

3D graphics adapters make a leap forward in between CPU era. I can remember when 3DFX was a thing in DOS games.

[Jurrunio]

18 minutes ago, Lenovich said:

3D graphics adapters make a leap forward in between CPU era. I can remember when 3DFX was a thing in DOS games.

yup, failing to integrate hardware T&L killed the company rather quickly

[Gegger]

i say every decent leap

 

mainly new kernels or large performance jumps

 

switching from DOS to NT was one

[Lenovich]

4 hours ago, Gegger said:

i say every decent leap

 

mainly new kernels or large performance jumps

 

switching from DOS to NT was one

What about mac?

[Gegger]

3 hours ago, Lenovich said:

What about mac?

new product lines, ppc to intel

[Marbo]

For me it's about a significant changes in the industry. 

 

This is home computing not business. 

 

70s and early 80s kits. 

 

80s prebuilt low priced 8 bits

 

Late 80s shift to what I see as a crossover point between the micros and IBM compatibles eg atari st and amigas

 

Then going through the 90s where various standards for home pcs were set. 

 

From around 2000 I don't think a whole lot has changed. Apart from the obvious speeds and performance of components they have stayed relatively similar. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

13 minutes ago, Marbo said:

From around 2000 I don't think a whole lot has changed. Apart from the obvious speeds and performance of components they have stayed relatively similar. 

There were some big leaps in the 2000s and 2010s.

 

We went from single core to dual core in the early 2000s, for example. At the time, that was a pretty big leap. The Pentium 4 also debuted Intel's Hyperthreading technology.

[Kilrah]

Generation and whole platform changes for me. RAM type is a relatively good metric as until recently a major platform change meant different RAM as well. 

[Marbo]

3 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

There were some big leaps in the 2000s and 2010s.

 

We went from single core to dual core in the early 2000s, for example. At the time, that was a pretty big leap. The Pentium 4 also debuted Intel's Hyperthreading technology.

Yep I see the single to dual cores as a biggie, I actually thought it was earlier. 

 

But then from dual core to 64 cores is fundamentaly the same. 

 

I think if I were to collect from post 2000 they would have to be by age. Until the next big change. 

 

I think going from silicon to whatever comes after, atm I haven't a clue what that may be, is going to be the biggest since the IC . But I also think there will be a fundamental change way before that. 

 

Maybe a processor based on neural networks or something about the way we interact with our pcs. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

4 minutes ago, Marbo said:

But then from dual core to 64 cores is fundamentaly the same.

Obviously not counting the jumps from 1 to 2 sockets, and from 2 up to 4 sockets.

[Marbo]

28 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Obviously not counting the jumps from 1 to 2 sockets, and from 2 up to 4 sockets.

This is just my opinion, for the purposes of classifying a collection. 

 

I see no difference, to me multi core is multi core whether its 2 or 200 

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 hour ago, Marbo said:

This is just my opinion, for the purposes of classifying a collection. 

 

I see no difference, to me multi core is multi core whether its 2 or 200 

What about dual socket single cores, such as Athlon MPs?

[Marbo]

2 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

What about dual socket single cores, such as Athlon MPs?

In 1982 the BBC micro had a slot to add a second cpu. I sure it wasn't the first but hat was a cheap(ish) home micro. 

 

 

In terms of the original question here, this is how I see it. 

 

 

The pc I have on my desk now is essentially the same as I had 15 years ago. 

 

The 80s IBMs and compatibles I would look at as alpha, the 90s going into beta and 2000s PC 1.0

 

With all the incremental changes since then that number has risen but again imo I'm not sure we're at 2.0 yet. 

 

This doesn't mean I'm playing down the advancements. We're not doing anything that much different with our pc's, we're just doing it better and faster. 

 

The biggest leap I've seen over the last 20 years has been the ssd. But it's going to take a bigger leap than that for me to think we're up to 2.0

[Kisai]

On 2/20/2020 at 11:12 PM, Lenovich said:

(Sorry for simplified English, learnt from youtube)

 

Hi, how do you define and separate Computer eras of PC history?

 

There is 3 obvious ways. 

1. By decades. 80s - 90s etc

2. By operating systems. DOS - Windows - Mac.

3. By hardware. 486 - Pentium.

 

But, old PC and Mac can efdective run more than 5 years and belong for two decades. For example my first PC(1996 build) works until 2001. Almost 3 PC generations born in 5 years, from Pentiums to 1 Ghz  processors.

 

What yours thoughts?

By the connectors.

 

DOS Era (1980-1994) - ISA BUS, no PCI cards, no USB ports. The best you could get as a "pure DOS" system was a 486 with no PCI cards. For all intents an upgrade from an 8088 to a 80386, or a 80386 to a Pentium were significant upgrades, but only to the CPU, it wasn't until "GPU" type cards came on the market that PC games could compete with game consoles.

 

Win9x Era (1995-2001)- PCI and AGP Video cards, USB 1.x ports

- Win2K Era (doesn't count)

WinXP Era* (2001-2014) PCIe video cards, USB 2.x ports, DDR.

- Vista Era (doesn't count)

Win7 Era (2009-2019, counts but overlaps with XP and 10) PCIe 2.0/DDR3

- Win8.x Era (doesn't count) 

Win10 Era (2015-Present) PCI 3.0/DDR4, USB 3.0

 

*For all intents, the XP era ended the day Windows 8 was released in 2012, but Microsoft utterly bungled it by making too many stupid changes, so people on XP and 7, refused to upgrade, and mostly only got 8/8.1 and 10 when they replaced a system. Windows 7 was still being shipped on New PC's in 2019 to corporate licenses.

 

The theory that still holds is that each PC can be held on for 7 years, or upgraded for half the cost mid-life (after 3 years.)  You will usually not get a chance to do two incremental upgrades however. So if you are buying a PC at the tail end of a tech change (eg DDR1/2/3/4 , PCIe1/2/3/4) then you max out what you can get, because you're going to have to stick with it for 7 years with possibly no upgrade path.

 

Right now the 2014 cutoff are the Haswell parts. Haswell Intel parts are DDR3/PCIe3/USB3.0 parts, Skylake is DDR4/PCIe3/USB3.1/USB-C/Thunderbolt/NVMe parts. So if you have a Skylake system, you have no incentive to upgrade short of maybe upgrading the RAM and GPU in your system until PCIe4 parts are widely available, which currently aren't really.

 

However if you're just sitting on a DDR3 system, it's completely possible to double the SDD speed by switching from SATA to NVMe M2 drives. You can double the memory speed with DDR4. But the CPU speed is really not anywhere near doubled, if you had a i7-4770/K and compare it to an i9-9900KS, you at most gain 34% per core, but the TDP also goes up 34%. That to me tells me that the core capability is pretty much the same. Now if you actually look at the multi-threaded number, it's a bit of a different story, since the cores double, the score should also easily double, but the improvement is 220%. So this tells me that's probably not a good value, even coming from Haswell. I'm better off looking at the RAM and SSD for a speed improvement.

 

FYI, I didn't use the 4770K, because that's not the CPU I have. There's another way to evaluate this as well.

 

Divide the ST by the MT rating and see which is closer to the physical core count. So Haswell is 4.38 (109%), i9-990KS is 7.17 (89%) , and Ryzen 9 3950X is 11.97 (75%). So if you're trying to aim squarely at performance per core, the i9-9900KS is further ahead than the Ryzen 9 3950X, but neither I'd call "100% efficient".

 

At this point I wound up sitting out the race for the Ryzen 9 because none were ever available to buy, and other options weren't much of an upgrade otherwise. 

 

Now what doesn't last 7 years? 

- Laptops, due to fixed GPU power ( I was able to hang on to one laptop for 10 years, but it's usability was pretty much gone after 4)

- All-in-One (iMac) systems, due to the parts generally being of the laptop variety with no GPU upgradeability and the screen just barely lasting as long.

- Mac-mini style ITX/mATX systems where you can't fit a full size GPU into it.

All of the above, have a "generally useful" lifespan of 3-4 years, and then it needs to be replaced with a newer model before the OS forces you to stop using it. I have a 2006 MacMini and a 2012 Macmini. By my own use logic I should have bought a 2018 model, but didn't, since what I needed the mini's for probably won't come up again for a while. I would much rather have a Mac Pro, but have no present use case for one, and Apple's lack of attention to that market segment makes me wary of buying something with parts I can't replace since I may be stuck with it for 10 years.

 

So yeah, roughly 7 years for a full replacement is pretty much par for the course.

 

One thing I do want to mention about DOS-era hardware. Because of the unique nature of the x86 DOS era, there's a lot of parallel incompatible parts (eg sound cards, video cards, cd-roms, hard drives, etc) so while you could hang on to a system for 7 years, you probably added a card to the system that necessitated sacrificing something else. It wasn't until the VL-BUS that the Super I/O and hard drives got moved to one card (which would previously been two or more cards) and PCI based motherboards eventually put the Super I/O on the motherboard, thus freeing up more space in the system. It wasn't uncommon to see a XT/AT/386 with all the ISA slots filled (VGA card, Hard Drive, Floppy drive controller, Super I/O, Sound card (doubling as a CD-ROM controller), Modem, EMS/XMS memory card) 

 

I actually did fill a 386 up once, but some parts are just not worth having. Like sometimes the hard drive and floppy drive controller are the same card, sometimes you have two hard drive controllers on separate cards, super i/o and floppy on another, Modem's and serial ports couldn't share IRQ's, Sound cards couldn't share IRQ's with the parallel port, etc. When PCI came out, the world changed pretty darn quick.

 

[Unimportant]

On 2/21/2020 at 8:12 AM, Lenovich said:

(Sorry for simplified English, learnt from youtube)

 

Hi, how do you define and separate Computer eras of PC history?

 

There is 3 obvious ways. 

1. By decades. 80s - 90s etc

2. By operating systems. DOS - Windows - Mac.

3. By hardware. 486 - Pentium.

 

But, old PC and Mac can efdective run more than 5 years and belong for two decades. For example my first PC(1996 build) works until 2001. Almost 3 PC generations born in 5 years, from Pentiums to 1 Ghz  processors.

 

What yours thoughts?

I'd say it depends on the type of software you're interested in. For example, if you're interested in gaming possible era's could be:

• ISA era, you need ISA slots for soundblaster AWE/Gravis ultrasound cards, which are required to get the incredible soundtracks in some games of old.
• 386+ era. Able to address more then 1MB of RAM trough protected mode, many DOS games of that era simply don't run on sub 386 systems.
• 3Dfx glide era. 3Dfx had it's own API, called glide. Many games of that era were hardcoded to glide and don't run on anything else (besides software rendering). So hardware that can support a Voodoo/2 card could be grouped together. (PCI 2.1 slots, windows 95/98 driver support, ...) 

[Beerzerker]

The introduction of 64 bit computing capability from AMD's socket 754 in 2003 was a huge milestone in itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_754

 

14 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

What about dual socket single cores, such as Athlon MPs?

Because this involved two physically separate CPU's talking to each other I'd have to call it a milestone too, just not one that really stands out vs others that could be named.
BTW I"ve got one of those setups here.