Moore's Law Part 3: My 3d Computer
It was 1996, and a co-worker at the first web start-up I worked at was selling his old machine. It had been a pretty good machine by 1995 standards… a Pentium running at 133 MHz, if I recall correctly, with 32M of memory (I think), a 4G hard drive, 2 CD-ROM drives and a 33.6 WinModem. It ran Windows ‘95. I paid about $700 for it, and bought a cheap used 17” monitor at the Used Computer Store , my first color monitor.
Finally, I could surf the web at home with something other than lynx . Which, incidentally, hadn’t been as bad as it new sounds — late ‘95 was about the turning point after which there were large numbers of websites that were unusable in a text browser.
Killer apps were Netscape Navigator 2.0, TeraTerm Pro with Tssh (a terminal emulator and its secure shell plugin), Quicken , Civilization 2 .
Moore’s Law doesn’t actually say that computing power/cost doubles every 18 months. But if it did, then 13 years after my Apple IIe one would expect me to have a machine about 29, or 512 times better… except it cost a third as much, so it would only need to be about 170 times better.
The Pentium box had a better chip running 133 times faster, with 256 times the memory, a floppy drive that held more than 10 times what the Apple’s floppy did, as well as a hard dirve that held a little less than 30,000 times as much, a modem that was 112 times faster than the 300 baud modem I first had on my Apple, plus the CD-ROM drives.
I think it made it.
Comments