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Comment by asadhaider | Hacker News Reader

According to this[0] which is a neat read anyway, it "has 256 MiB DRAM, 256 MiB NAND, and a single Cortex-A7 CPU clocked up to 1.3GHz."

You can run DNS, a VPN, or a small web server even on a VPS with 32MB of RAM so those are pretty cool specs.

[0] https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/modem-pp.html

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My first job was an ISP I co-founded. Our first dial-up system was a classic 120MHz Pentium w/128MB RAM and 4GB harddrive, that served as the terminal server for 16 phone lines and let users start SLIP/PPP or a shell connection. It was not unusual to have 16 users logged into it at once running applications on it.

It also was our main e-mail server and web server, hosting both our own website and several customer websites. We had a second one of the same specs for a few other things and backups, but that was our main workhorse.

[EDIT: They were running Linux 1.0 and 1.2, first with NCSA httpd, then Apache; when we first got them they ran Slackware, installed from floppies; I think we ended up installing Redhat at some point before we retired them; the modems were hanging off Cyclades serial cards; and they were literally hanging - for our first 16 lines we had US Robotics Sportster modems hanging on the wall. (I'm writing this in the hope someone will tell me to get off their lawn and tell me how they did more with less, btw.) ]

Wow, that's probably about the same ram & cpu as my desktop 16 years ago.

I started with a Pentium I, 166Mhz, 16MB, 1GB HDD, and I'm not even that old. I imagine we have folks here that started on a PDP :-)

My P1 would stutter while playing MP3s :-))

I really appreciate that CPU manufacturers started adding dedicated hardware for things like decoding MP3's. Not sure about the machine learning hardware they put in it nowadays, but then, that's mainly Apple who do a lot of that for e.g. your pictures (so they don't have to send it to their servers).

A Pentium II was more than enough to decode MP3's in parallel.

What's interesting is, I used to have this old 486 laptop. With Linux on it, I could run XMMS playing my MP3s and do other things and you could barely tell it was there. In Windows, playing an MP3 file with WinAmp took up so much CPU, you were stuck running only WinAmp.

Windows 9x had preemptive multitasking bolted on as an afterthought. Same engineering flaw that made it so crash-prone, with much of the kernel exposed read/write to the application for backwards compatibility with Windows 3.1. And Windows 3.1 did not have preemptive multitasking at all. Everything was cooperative running in one address space. If an application used anything from that era, the kernel could end up wasting way too many cycles handling the request. This made multitasking under high load dicey at best.

Linux is a fully preemptive OS with a kernel designed to return from system calls quickly, without blocking all the processes in the system. No surprise it fared better.

With mpg123 or mp3blaster (or mocp even) it would run much better.

My off-brand 486dx4 120mhz was the first cpu I had that could play mp3 without skipping in Winamp.

I’m not aware of any desktop CPUs (now or before) that had hardware MP3 decoding. Do you mind enlightening me?

In my interpretation, "dedicated hardware for things like MP3s" doesn't necessarily mean "hardware MP3 decoding."

Intel MMX (multimedia extensions) introduced dedicated hardware to accelerate things like MP3 decoding.

Ah, I understood that as dedicated hardware (blocks) for decoding media such as mp3 (in the same vein as h264 hardware decoders).

MMX is integer math only. MP3s require floating point unless you hand code fixed point version of the decoder. In real life just recompiling with MMX support gives marginal difference https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~barbic/cs-740/mmx_project.html

MMX was pretty useless (reuses FPU registers = cant run FPU code in parallel) marketing gimmick from Intel designed to tick boxes, promoted with fake "designed for MMX" campaign https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/51358-pod-windows-... spoilers: MMX enables one sound filter in the whole game, no speed difference. Ubisoft just made some extra cash by printing this on the box.

MMX was one of Intel's many Native Signal Processing (NSP) initiatives. They had plenty of ideas for making PCs dependent on Intel hardware, something Nvidia is really good at these days (physx, cuda, hairworks, gameworks). Thankfully Microsoft was quick to kill their other fancy plans https://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/11/11/microsoft_said_drop... Microsoft did the same thing to Creative with Vista killing DirectAudio, out of fear that one company was gripping positional audio monopoly on their platform.

> MP3s require floating point unless you hand code fixed point version of the decoder.

This is a weird statement. "MP3 encode/decode requires floating point unless you implement in fixed point such that you don't need floating point." It's perfectly possible to write fixed point MP3 decoders.

Sure, MMX wasn't that great, but it was Intel's first SIMD extension, was definitely intended to help with "things like MP3 decoding," and was followed by a ton of improved extensions with similar goals.

When I was a kid we had a BBC Micro. In university we had CD burners but if you bumped the computer or did anything else while it was burning the CD, the disc was ruined. :P

I splurged in high school for a 4x cdrw drive by Sony.

I had to kill all extra processes or else the machine (maybe the fault of the HDD) couldn't keep the buffer filled and the write operation would fail.

I made a lot of coasters, but that was my favorite time with computers (1999 or so).

They were expensive coasters back then too! When I was in high school, I spent like $30 (was a ton of money to me back then) on blank CDs (like a 10 pack) only to have them all stolen out of my locker. No idea what the thief would have done with them, as CD burners were not common at all.

Oh yes and then right around the time 8x became possible (but cd-r only, cd-rw was still 4x initially I think) someone invented a way to continue after a buffer underrun instead of throwing away the disc. I think that really sold the faster burners because otherwise they were kind of useless for the increased risk of having a buffer underrun skmewhe in the process.

Burn-proof! (a quick search says there were other names for this, but it was all similar technology)

166 MHz? You splurged for a good one! Mine was 100 MHz, the rest was the same though. 16 MB RAM, those weren't the days...

Don't be so sure. I got that PC in 98 (99?).

By that time I think Pentium III was close to launch or even already released.

When I was 6 my parents decided to buy a PC for our home. I think it must have been a 286, but I really don’t remember. I do remember moving to a 386 and then a 486.

Lots of fond memories of norton commander, wordperfect and the old versions of battle chess.

Good times! I wish I had understood back then how much computers were going to change the world. Luckily my parents did.

Same story here. I remember being 5 or 6 years old. We had a DOS PC with an orange CRT display. I think it was also a 286. I still remember the commands to run Word Perfect and this game called Fun House. My first command line experience. Mostly my mom used the computer for word processing and printed off letters on our dot matrix printer.

Peeling off the edges of the pages printed on a dot matrix printer was either super relaxing or super stressful depending on what you had just printed.

I started with a C64, tried copying games from magazines to try. Then I got a 486DX. I don't remember the rest. :D

Commodore 64 -> 286 -> 386 -> 486 -> Pentium ?

(Can't remember the rest afterwards...)

Lucky you! The Commodore 64 to Pentium time frame was only 11 years (1982 -> 1993), and computers were expensive then. Being able to make major upgrades every ~2 years would have been a luxury.

We had an Apple IIe, but our first x86 was a 386 with 2MB ram and a 25MHz processor. I think the HDD was 40 MB.

Amstrad PC 1512 here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512).

I remember they were saving up for many months to get this for me.

When (many years later) I had a P3 (or a P4?), I would switch on my Amstrad and feel warmth in my heart, as if I was hugging an old friend.

8088 with EGA monitor was my first PC. Before that a Tandy CoCo (model 1) 64K. I still have a CoCo.

I was able to play mp3s on my 486 DX4-100Mhz if I remember correctly.

Yes. My 486 DX2-66MHz could do 112kbit MP3s, but was struggling with 128kbit MP3s.

These anecdotes mesh with what I remember. A friend in high school around 1999 had a Pentium 133; it could play MP3s without stuttering but it couldn’t do anything else while it did that.

> started on a PDP

make it CDC 6500

When I was a kid my school got a Sinclair ZX81 with 1k of memory. One 1k computer for the whole school! Once in a blue moon we would get class time on the computer - Our class got to program a 'turtle' to draw shapes on a big piece of paper.

I was so excited about it, and my mom had done some punch-card programming in university and so knew that this was going to be the future.

The Sinclair Spectrum 48k had just come out, and so we splurged and bought one.

We lived in Asia at the time, and games on cassette were difficult to get, so at 10 years old I spent hours typing in BASIC games from magazines, debugging and POKEing and PEEKing to see how things worked.

Great times.

We must be nearly the same age. I remember entering pages of poke codes from a magazine for a game on my Commodore 64. Those really were great (if tedious) times :)

My Athlon in 2003 was partnered with 256MB of RAM and a Geforce 2 MX 200/400.

I bought my first PC in the late 80s. It was an 8086 by Amstrad, with a 4Mhz processor, 512kb of RAM and no HDD. It was running MS DOS 3.30 Plus and I made my first programs in GW-Basic.

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