My first “supercomputer”: Pentium MMX 233MHz in 1998
In Jul'98 I put together my first “supercomputer”, and ever since my home PCs have had not just an outstanding performance but also a huge number of external peripherals. This PC had 64Mb of RAM, run DOS 6.2 and Windows 98 and was based on an Intel Pentium MMX 233MHz CPU: note how small a cooler it required.
This PC was first assembled with a graphics card ATI Graphics XPression (2Mb of memory!) that
I got in 1996.
In Dec'09 I replaced it with the “novelty”, the
ATi Xpert@Play 98, with its impressive 8Mb (!),
which I bought during a trip in New York.
The card, shown below, came in the very large and spectacular box
shown on the right:
To this card I plugged the new Diamond Monster 3Dfx (which needed a separate PCI slot), needed for the new effects nowadays we give for granted in games and simulators: rendering 3D objects on the monitor's flat image, applying to them texture bitmaps with deformation, changing the colours following their orientation with respect of the sun, reflecting surfaces and other effects.
Finally I installed the Creative SoundBlaster AWE32 3990, an ISA sound card I had acquired back in 1996, with many features and firsts: it had two slots to insert additional memory modules, it was the first home computer card with a “wave-table”, it stored its own collection of basic sampled sounds and could work in tandem with Vienna “sound-font” software, allowing to produce and reproduce via the PC sampled musical instruments, either via MIDI files or playing on connected MIDI keyboards. The card was very long and did not fit in small cases:
Having abandoned the “desktop Baby” format, from now on I always had maxi-tower cases. The next picture shows the drive bays. In the top bay there was a tape-cartridge backup unit, a novelty for home PCs at the time:
See below the lower part of the case with everything installed: six expansion cards! The AWE32 sound card had to be placed on the very bottom to prevent interference with air circulation: it was so long that its right hand side, not supported by the ISA connection, curved downwards as shown in the picture. I later added a support to the right-hand corner. The motherboard, with generous 4 PCI slots and 4 ISA ones, was a Soyo 5VD5 / 430VX:
So what where all those expansion cards? Two were PCI: graphics card and Monster 3D. Four were ISA: Zoltrix 336VSP 33K modem, FM Aztech Sound Galaxy FM 601 radio (!), SCSI and sound. The SCSI card was needed for the HP PhotoSmart S20 photo scanner, which I used for years until I finished scanning a selection of 8000+ pictures (prints, negatives and colour slides dating back to the family's years around 1900):
The printer was the sturdy HP890C (I apologise for the poor quality of the downloaded picture!):
Another novelty was the ThrustMaster F-16 FLCS joystick and its companion the Mark II throttle: they carried plenty of programmable buttons and connected via a single MIDI plug, although a Y-MIDI-cable was needed to share this with the MIDI music keyboard:
Yet another MIDI Y-cable was used to connect another novelty: the pedals. They could be used either in flight simulation as rudder or in auto races as brakes and throttle.
See below the back connections, duly labelled:
See below the back connection cables, nothing extraordinary by today's standard, yet plenty back in 1998. Notice the base of the pedals on the floor:
For 17 years we lived in our own lovely apartment in Buenos Aires's Santa Fé ave. Eventually we lost it all to the crisis at the end of the 1990s. See below “my happiness corner” at home in 1998, based on a piece of furniture that I designed and had custom-made (and still use, suitably modified):
Our beloved cat Sara was always inspecting the place (looking in vain for a real-life “mouse”?):
