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Comment by jay-saint | Hacker News Reader

Ah the nostalgia. In 1999 I was a sophomore in college and built my first PC that was all my own. I used the legendary Abit BP6 Motherboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 I had a pair of Socket 370 Celeron 366a processors overclocked to 100mhz, which made the system think it had a pair of P3 550mhz cpus.

BeOS was a great OS for experimenting SMP. The CPU monitor in the video would show you the loads for each CPU and you could click the left side to toggle a CPU on and off. You could immediately see frame rates drop and the remaining cpu's usage spike.

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Similar story. I put together a dual-P2/350s on (I think) a Tyan motherboard in December 1998 as a dedicated BeOS host. Wasn't good at budgeting and found myself in another state having run out of money a few weeks later, and had a bit of a challenge getting home.

Parts of haiku remain impressive. Example, there's two performant message-bus mechanisms available via standard system calls:

* The flagship IPC mechanism is the BMessage. You can exchange messages unicast, or broadcast using BRosterm, or pub/sub with StartWatching/SendNotices.

* You can also treat the filesystem as an async messaging system using BPathMonitor. Yes, you can create RAM disks. They have FUSE as well.

It runs pretty well under VirtualPC. There's a trick to configuring the mouse to touchscreen once you've installed the seamless-mouse tools.

Crazy, I have almost the exact same story and the exact same setup. I replaced a new 400mhz Pentium 2 setup with that Abit BP6 board and ran the 366mhz processors at 466mhz or 533mhz when it was cool out (I opened the window to help cool my system). Probably wasn't the greatest investment, since the 400mhz Pentium 2 was still a really nice processor when I did this (early 1999, I believe, towards the end of my freshman year of college).

I ran multiple OSs: BeOS and Redhat Linux to do my CompSci work for school and then Win98 (which only supported one processor, of course) to play games, mainly Quake 2 and Tribes.

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