Can anybody figure out the year of this? Content suggests mid-90s but I haven't been able to pin it down.
Edit: wow you guys. I'm impressed. 2003 it is.
Edit: wow you guys. I'm impressed. 2003 it is.
[Edited because I misinterpreted part of the original text]
That being said, he also says "The central processor in my computer contains about 10,000,000 transistors.", which would have been around 1999 (The Pentium III series had ~10M transistors in 1999, per Wikipedia's transistor count table).
Based on the evidence the other posters mentioned, and: "In the last few days the entire area of mainland Italy was hit and some 50,000,000 people were left without electricity."
and Google finding this (only blackout that size that comes up): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3150788.stm
I do find it a bit bizarre that he cites his CPU's clock rate in Mbps, though, since it makes it a bit more difficult to identify his particular CPU. Further, processors in the early-mid 2000s had 10x as many transistors per chip. Although, it's not unreasonable to assume he was simply using a computer that was several generations old.
edit: ah, I see. Specific pointer to relative dates in the article. Good catch!
Also, your post spurred me to more searching: http://babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/people/dmh/engineering/eng...
File modification dates between 30 Sept and 06 Oct 2003! The easy way to do it :-)
I assume it was a mistake, and he meant MHz. The numbers work out pretty well, interpreted that way (4MHz and 16KB RAM vs 900MHz and 128MB RAM).
Assuming this refers to the introduction of GUI based desktops (1984), I'd say this was written around 1999. I think that would match to the 40GB disk and 128MB memory as well.