Wednesday, 03 May 2023
Computer Timeline
...show me your computer timeline, and I tell who you are ;)
1987 - Atari 800 XE with XC12 datasette (family home computer, shared with older
siblings), PAL CRT-TV, 320x192px, BASIC
1988 - used Atari VCS game console
~1989 - older brother with Copam PC-AT, AMD 286 8/16MHz, 640KB RAM, 20MB HDD, Hercules
Graphics Card (TL ET-1000?), 720x348px, IBM DOS 3.3
1990 - my own Amiga 500, A520 RF, later A501 512KB memory upgrade and 14" 1084S CRT,
640x256px, AmigaOS 1.3
1996 - used PC, 486DX 33MHz, 32MB RAM, 120MB HDD, 14" CRT, 640x480px, Hercules
Dynamite 128 2MB video card, MS-DOS 6.2.x+Win95
1998 - AMD K5 100@133MHz, 15" CRT, 800x600px, Diamond Viper 330 (Riva 128) 4MB, Win98
~1999 - upgrade to Pentium 233MHz, SuseLinux+Win98
2001 - AMD K6-2+ 550@600MHz, 512MB RAM, 19" CRT, 1600x1200px, SuseLinux+Win2000
2003 - Pentium 4 1.8@2.95GHz, 1GB RAM, 2x17" CRT, 1024x768px, Nvidia GeForce 4 MX440
64MB, SuseLinux+Win2000/WinXP
2008 - Lenovo Thinkpad T61 (type:7659), 2x2GHz, 4GB RAM, 14.1" 1440x900px, X3100
iGPU, UbuntuLinux
2008 - MaschinaI (first dedicated machine for GPGPU and chess programming purpose)
AMD K8 X2 2x2.5GHz, 8GB RAM, 22" LCD, 1920x1080px, Nvidia 8800 GT 512MB,
UbuntuLinux+WinXP
2012 - MaschinaII, used AMD K10 X4 4x1.8GHz, 8GB RAM, Asus Crosshair Formula II MoBo
with 3xPCIe, Nvidia GTX 580, K20, ++, UbuntuLinux+WinXP
~2013 - ~2015 - GPU and chess programming hiatus
2015 - MaschinaIII, same as MaschinaII, with AMD Fury X 4GB GPU, ++, UbuntuLinux+Win7
~2019 - Laptop + Google Cloud Computing with Nvidia V100
>2021 - MaschinaIV, used Core i5-6500 4x3.2GHz (Skylake 14nm with AVX2 from 2015),
32GB RAM, Intel HD530 iGPU, Nvidia GTX 750, AMD RX 550 GPU, UbuntuLinux+Win10
++ = a couple of used GPUs with different architecture to tinker with GPGPU.
I tried in 2019 to switch to Cloud Computing and stop collecting GPU architectures, but it did not work out, hence I did set up Maschina #IV with some entry-level hardware to tinker with computer chess.
I intended in 2008 to drop the desktop PC and use just a laptop for my studies, but then came the desire to tinker with GPGPU.
Retrospectively, the 90s were jumpy for me, went from 68k@7MHz to 586@233MHz.
...still run some oldies via emulators on my laptop.