The Pentium is now 30+ years old

[eXeler0]

Watched an old Computer Chronicles episode about the Pentium systems that came out early.
So officially the Intel Pentium was launched on March 22nd 1993. So its now really under the Retro-label ;-)
Not sure if there were systems on sale from day one but there was definitely a bunch of them out there in 1993. Gateway’s cheapest Pentium set up was $3000 which is >$6000 in today’s money.

Historical reminder: The PowerPC (601) was also launched in 1993 but later that year, (so its not quite 30 years yet), well before the 68060 (1994) and of course Apple had already decided long before that they would switch to PPC after the 040.

[duga]

Got a P90 in August '95.

Cheers.

[Snoopy1234]

Still have dad's office Pentium from '94-95 sans HDD. Was great to go online to BBS's with a 14-38kb modem and use XTree, Eliza and play Blake Stone.

[Megalomaniac]

A shame they didn't call it the 586 to keep up the theme, apparently because you can copyright a name but not a number, so using a name meant AMD and Cyrix's couldn't give their clone processors the exact same name. It took a couple of years for even the initial P60 to become a home mass-market processor, I think a DX4-100 (and probably a top-end 68060) was faster in most cases, but the technology went so much further later. Plus the Pentium name lived on into the late 2000s (the decade). It hurts me to say it, but happy birthday Pentium.

[TCD]

Got a Pentium 60 in 1994. It was interesting to see how it performed quite a bit better in games than the 486 DX2 66. So yeah, happy birthday Pentium

[Tigerskunk]

Got a Pentium75 in 1995. Good times...

[Retroplay]

[ImmortalA1000]

But if I do the calculations on an old Pentium PC I get a different result than "30" years hehe

[fxgogo]

I only realised now that I never owned a 586 gen Pentium machine back in the day. I went from a DX4-100 to a Pentium Pro 200Mhz. I do own one today however, a 133Mhz, and I do appreciate it more nowadays.

I think when Intel chose a name rather than a number for competitive legal reasons they inadvertently gave a personality to their chips.

[HomeLate]

My dad bought a Pentium 60 back in '93 or '94. It had the FDIV-bug and I remember exchanging it for a bugfree one at Intel.
I no longer own that one, but I have an Intel Socket 4 mainboard with another bugged Pentium 60 :-)

[eXeler0]

I was pretty hardcore pro-Amiga when the Pentium was released. My brother got a P90 (or was it a P75?) in 1994 and that was before the 060 was a thing on the Amiga so for a while i was jealous of the performance although to be fair, it was beyond what I could afford back then anyway,
First PC I got was actually some sort of Cyrix 686 so never had my own Pentium back then. These days I have a couple of them and they are nice retro systems for mid 90s PC gaming.

Regarding the bug in early models, yea should probably have named the thread ”Pentium is now 29.9999976 years ;-)”

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

A shame they didn't call it the 586 to keep up the theme, apparently because you can copyright a name but not a number, so using a name meant AMD and Cyrix's couldn't give their clone processors the exact same name.

There was a nice joke regarding the critical error in floating point of the early Pentiums:

"There was 286, 386 and 486. Why Intel named the new processor Pentium and not 586? Because when they added 100 to the previous one, they got 585.9999254"

[amigasith]

When I got my Pentium 120 back in 1996, the performance boost was quite nice, coming from a 486SX-33.

However, the real performance boost only came later on when I upgraded to the legendary Celeron 300A (Pentium II class), which happily overclocked to 450 MHz. That was a huge jump and I still own that very system to this day. It still happily runs at 450 MHz by the way And it's getting regular use, too.

The Pentium 120 system I don't miss that much, to be honest. For me, it was just an intermediate step to the Celeron 300A.

[wiz12]

Coincidentally Intel have just dropped the "Pentium" name after all these years in favour of "Intel Processor".

[ImmortalA1000]

I had a Pentium 120 in 1995 and when that stopped working Gateway replaced it with a 166. After that me and a friend went to some PC builder and from their junk/trash bins we built a complete 233mmx PC from those freebies and all I had to buy was memory and a cheap HDD from ebay. I also had a Toshiba Pentium 120 laptop from work between 97-98. It's probably the era I was most active in. Never had anything before my 486 25mhz PC and abandoned PC between Pentium II and the XP Pro Athlon XP2000 CPU completely.

[XPD]

Went on a training course after college, and talking to a tutor there one day and he was insistent that there was absolutely no way CPUs could pass the DX2/66 speeds. Next week, the DX4/100 was released

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by amigasith

When I got my Pentium 120 back in 1996, the performance boost was quite nice, coming from a 486SX-33.

Almost the same for me, I came off of a 486 DX-33 And the P120 was pretty much severely outdated a month later. Good times :/

[Karlos]

Pentium was a bit meh. Pentium Pro, on the other hand. That was a nice chip.

[NovaCoder]

Oh wow, makes me feel old!

I skipped the first couple of Pentium chips because they were slower than the DX4/100 (I was running a superfast IBM Blue Lightning 75Mhz 486 at the time). I think my first Pentium was the 75 Mhz (P54C) which I then upgraded to a P90 (which was happy to be overclocked to 120Mhz). I had that P90 running at 120 Mhz for at least 4 years after that as my main gaming PC.....great CPU.

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Pentium was a bit meh. Pentium Pro, on the other hand. That was a nice chip.

I remember in the late ninties this guy telling me his system had a pentium pro. I remember thinking that guy must hate money.