The Cape Cod Disaster | Hacker News Reader

The Cape Cod Disaster

os2museum.com

46 pointseaguyhn20 comments

I remember this. Was running an Athlon box at the time. The RDRAM kerfuffle, and the privacy implications of each part being given a queryable unique ID, scared me off getting a Pentium III system.

Remember that time Rambus tried to get a hammerlock on the RAM industry by claiming patent rights over DDR, the industry's alternative to RDRAM?

> Rambus tried to get a hammerlock on the RAM industry by claiming patent rights

Just to be clear Rambus is still a thing, and still doing this.

>The Pentium III (especially a single CPU) was not a particularly memory-hungry CPU

So CPUs are now wrestling software for memory? What is this supposed to mean?

Relative to its clock speed, the Pentium III had a lot of cache, good memory bandwidth, and low memory latency. And back then, disk IO was extremely slow. These two facts meant that common workloads were more often constrained on CPU cycles or disk IO, rather than RAM access.

I remember Asus refusing to accept that there was any flaw with the cc820 at all, and thus not joining in on the recall, it was my last Asus board for a few years as a result (finally turned back to them in ~2006 with a Core 2).

The lack of that recall on Asus brand cc820 based boards, is probably why one commenter notes that they were easy to find in 2014.

Being from Cape Cod, I was expecting something else from the title.

Also being from Cape Cod I found it completely fitting that the product was expensive garbage.

In order to truly live up to the expectations set by the name customers would have had to have bought it in droves based on some perceived brand image but Intel recalled it before that could happen.

Also being from Cape Cod ... I got nothin' just felt like joining the party. Hey Ian!

Hey Jose!

This is hilarious. I think of the Cape as pretty tech starved, but I see why we all ended up in the comment section of this post!

There's enough of us here to get together once a month!

https://www.meetup.com/South-Shore-Web-Collaborative/

Haha, Plymouth (the big city) is an hour and a half away. I live way out in Eastham...

> I think of the Cape as pretty tech starved

Same, but there are more than we think I guess - either from here, or holed up somewhere for the winter. Hope you are well, stop in the office next time you're around!

Being not from there I sort of thinking about perfect storm etc. They should have added the keywords intel.

Btw I remember every facts of this episode - the ram, the motherboard etc but never get a name for it. Now I have. Pointless I guess. Even bad PR need a name. If you can’t name it you lost.

I'm not from anywhere close to Cape Cod, and I was really confused at the comments for a while. I generally read the comments first, and I was wondering what someone could have done with Pentium chips and RAM latencies to cause some disaster there.

If you're reading the comments first, the domain name next to the title often gives a clue.

> os2museum.com

I thought it was going to be some kind of engineering disaster on the Cape where the computers ran OS2.

Considering that everyone in this thread lives on the Cape, and there's quite a bit of industry and military presence here, I think this misconception is rather understandable.

I expected it to be something about shark attacks on the economy or something. Very confused when it turned out to be about an Intel motherboard.

Me too lol

You local now or just from CC?

Yeah fuck all that noise the single edge contact cartridge cpus were all so over priced for my 13 year old budget so I went with the k6-2 and overclocked that biatch

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