Intel’s Pentium Turns 20 Today

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Has it really been twenty years since Intel launched the Pentium?

Following Intel's previous series of 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386, and 80486 microprocessors, the company's first P5-based microprocessor was released as the original Intel Pentium on March 22, 1993. Marketing firm Lexicon Branding was hired to coin a name for the new processor. The suffix -ium was chosen as it could connote a fundamental ingredient of a computer, like a chemical element,[4] while the prefix pent- could refer to the fifth generation of x86.[3]
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I think it was a 50mhz... I had a 75 oc'd to 90 for a long ol time.
 
Remember when they moved to the slot 1 design and introduced the Celeron? You could buy a cheap Celeron 300 and over clock it to 450 which was bad ass back in the day, lol.
 
yep.. the Abit BH6 + celery 300a... I had mine at 464mhz I think... more than 450 for sure. it was such an upgrade from the K6-200 I was rocken before... lol. blew it out of the damn water.
 
revenant said:
yep.. the Abit BH6 + celery 300a... I had mine at 464mhz I think... more than 450 for sure. it was such an upgrade from the K6-200 I was rocken before... lol. blew it out of the damn water.
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That's right, man that seems like a lifetime ago. I had a K6, what a POS! How high up did the slot 1 go? I seem to remember 700MHz maybe?
 
The first pentiums were 60 and 66mhz and produced more heat than my toaster. The second batch was P75 to P120. Some of which you could easily overclock. As I recall hearing it, the processors were made at one speed (90mhz for p75-p90) and then tested. The speed at the majority of them passed was what they were branded as. So a p75 might work fine at 90mhz by changing the jumpers.

I have a tray of P75-p100 processors at home. Not even useful enough to be paper weights.
 
First Pentium I saw was a P60. Very high end stuff at the time.

A couple years later I was able to get a second hand P100. Now what made this so memorable was that I couldn't free up enough base memory (640k) for some games to load the Sound Blaster drivers. However because the CPU was 100Mhz, I could stick my radio really close to the computer case and set it to FM 100Mhz and actually pickup the sound of the game. Granted it was noisey as hell, but to a 12 or 13 year old it was an amazing accomplishment!

The mid 90's were trully the most amazing time for computers. We had new and exciting technology. Optical media, 3D video cards, harddrives that were finally starting to be more then "enough". Windows wasn't a seperate program anymore. Transitioning from BBS's and direct modem games to "online" play. Today things are pretty amazing, but no real new technology has come around and its kind of boring.
 
then there was the pentium pro, with it's larger rectangular gold top ... oooo aaaaah ;)
 
az_max said:
The first pentiums were 60 and 66mhz and produced more heat than my toaster. The second batch was P75 to P120. Some of which you could easily overclock. As I recall hearing it, the processors were made at one speed (90mhz for p75-p90) and then tested. The speed at the majority of them passed was what they were branded as. So a p75 might work fine at 90mhz by changing the jumpers.

I have a tray of P75-p100 processors at home. Not even useful enough to be paper weights.
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I imagine the P60 was cool by comparison to today's CPUs. As I recall, the P60 was the first heatsink I'd seen with a fan on it. Everything prior was passively cooled.
 
I still have a Pentium 233mmx system that works and believe it or not I can surf the internet with ! Just goes to show you nowdays if your not into development or games all this new hardware is not needed.
 
According to the keychain I have from Intel itself the pentium came out in 2012 but was flawed. perhaps they mean the first without the floating point problem.
 
I got to RMA my p90 due to the floating point error. This was my first ever big boy rig.
 
ashman said:
Remember when they moved to the slot 1 design and introduced the Celeron? You could buy a cheap Celeron 300 and over clock it to 450 which was bad ass back in the day, lol.
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I have a firewall running at my parents house on a Celeron 300A :)
 
Sitting on top of my screenless Latitude D620 laptop...

biw9xl.jpg


1zo9kqp.jpg


...in no particular order:

Cyrix Cx486DRx25 - 25 MHz
ULSI Systems 387 MathCo - 25 Mhz
AMD 386 - 40 MHz
Intel 386 - 25 MHz
Intel Pentium (gold top) - 75 MHz
IDT WinChip2A - 200 MHz
IBM 6x86 P200+ - 150 MHz
AMD K-5 PR 100 - 100 MHz
2 Zilog Z80
AMD 8088
Paradise 3830IC/PVC2 Video Controller
AMD Athlon M - 1100 MHz
AMD Athlon - 1.33 GHz
Mobile Intel Pentium 3 - 450 MHz
AMD 286 - 12 MHz
Intel 286 - 10 MHz
Intel Celeron M 540 - 1.86 GHz
AMD Sempron 3000+ - 1.8 GHz ??
Intel Pentium Pro 256 KB - 180 MHz
Intel Pentium - 200 MHz

:p
 
Had a P120 for a while then moved to a dual processor PPro180 rig. Yeah...my age shines through.
 
I eventually had 3 rigs after my 486 60mhz rig (yea it was badass rocking 8 megs of ram).

First I got a machine that had a P133mmx, was given a Cyrix 166, which ran noticably slower then my P133 and had my project machine 2xPro150's.

Interesting time, even though computers were a headache back then they were the most fun.
 
Yay. I want to go back and relive 80's and 90's. It's boring now.
 
westrock2000 said:
First Pentium I saw was a P60. Very high end stuff at the time.

A couple years later I was able to get a second hand P100. Now what made this so memorable was that I couldn't free up enough base memory (640k) for some games to load the Sound Blaster drivers. However because the CPU was 100Mhz, I could stick my radio really close to the computer case and set it to FM 100Mhz and actually pickup the sound of the game. Granted it was noisey as hell, but to a 12 or 13 year old it was an amazing accomplishment!
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I didn't even know that was possible.
 
There is a Cyrix 486 clone still running 24/7/365 in our lab. I took the last true Intel 80486 out of service in 2011.

While there WAS an 80487 chip, it was very rare. Only the GeldingSX486 could use one.

In a stroke of marketing brilliance, Intel disabled the co-processor of the 80486DX and sold them cheaply as SX chips in an attempt to crush the competition while at the same time keeping the price of the true 486 in the stratosphere. The 80486DX-33 was $1100.

The Pentium name wasn't marketing brilliance. It involved lawyers. Intel tried to sue everyone who was making 486 (386?) chips, and a judge ruled a number by itself could not be retroactively copyrighted.

So if Intel wanted a unique name for their next chip, it could not be 586 as planned. It had to be word. And the word Five was already in common use.

You could buy a Keyfob with a real Pentium core embedded in plastic directly from Intel. These were the ones with the math error coded in them that were halted on the assy line. Intel did not discover the math error, a "hacker" did. OPPSS... I mean a PC Guru.

Sadly my fob was lost in a burglary. They even stole the furniture. The house was empty.
 
IIRC,

The 80186/80187 chips were only used in industrial controls. You can find them inside Mitutoyo MicroPak100/120 Coordinate Measuring Machine computers. Most of those are in the dump.
 
Sidebar - My First 80287...

When these were released they were in short supply. A friend of a friend told me about a guy who could get them. I was directed to a seedy part town and met a guy in a parking lot. His name was John Smith and he was Asian. It was in a bulk pack chip tube and $275? It was like a drug deal. I just prayed it really worked, and it did it ever! WOW! When I tried to call for another, the phone was disconnected.

Ahh... the good 'ol days.
 
My family got the first consumer Pentium in '93. Computer cost $3000 in large part due to the 1500Mb hard drive. Also the first time I was introduced to point and click adventure games. Who would I be today if they hadn't got that computer?
 
Here's something disturbing I was thinking about earlier. When the Pentium came out you could still find restaurants and rest stops that had the hand dryers in the bathroom that was just a cloth loop that got turned endlessly.

Yuck!

cotton-towel-hand-dryer.jpg
 
westrock2000 said:
Here's something disturbing I was thinking about earlier. When the Pentium came out you could still find restaurants and rest stops that had the hand dryers in the bathroom that was just a cloth loop that got turned endlessly.

Yuck!

cotton-towel-hand-dryer.jpg
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I remember seeing those when I was kid going over the road with my Pops..He owned a trucking business, and I LOVED big trucks (what little boy doesn't?!?!?). I would wipe my hands on my rear end and have soggy pants before I would use one of those even then!

On topic, I had a Packard Bell (ohh yea) P100 system that had just came out with Windows95..She had a whopping 8MB of EDO ram, a Massive 1GB HDD, and a 2MB Videocard..I played the shit outta Jane's ATF (my favorite game to this day aside from Tribes 1) on it!
 
ccityinstaller said:
I remember seeing those when I was kid going over the road with my Pops..He owned a trucking business, and I LOVED big trucks (what little boy doesn't?!?!?). I would wipe my hands on my rear end and have soggy pants before I would use one of those even then!

On topic, I had a Packard Bell (ohh yea) P100 system that had just came out with Windows95..She had a whopping 8MB of EDO ram, a Massive 1GB HDD, and a 2MB Videocard..I played the shit outta Jane's ATF (my favorite game to this day aside from Tribes 1) on it!
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I played Janes ATF on a my P75, That was the days of a real printed manual that hundreds of pages long.
 
westrock2000 said:
Here's something disturbing I was thinking about earlier. When the Pentium came out you could still find restaurants and rest stops that had the hand dryers in the bathroom that was just a cloth loop that got turned endlessly.

Yuck!

cotton-towel-hand-dryer.jpg
Click to expand...

those didnt turn endlessly they were on a roll and once the roll came to an end they stopped rolling and had to be replaced.
 
rhexis said:
those didnt turn endlessly they were on a roll and once the roll came to an end they stopped rolling and had to be replaced.
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How can you be certain that they didn't contain pixie dust, unicorn horns, and were powered by rainbows so that they could simply yank new towel out of the fabric between space and time and then return used towel to the same to be cleaned by the gnomes that exist in the great between before being fed back into the roll machine?
 
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