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OCAU News |
Five Years Ago on OCAU
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Monday, 8-August-2005 02:54:28 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Here's some more historical catchup. If you're interested in the previous Five Years Ago on OCAU newsposts, they're here, here and here.
We're only up to October 1999 so far, so actually it's nearly Six Years Ago! On the 12th of October 1999 much of Sydney's CBD lost power due to a fire in a distribution centre, which made for an exciting day at work, especially with only a few months left of the "Y2K is approaching!" panic. Meanwhile, I was still playing around with various mendocino Celerons, but P3-450's @ 600MHz were another popular overclock. The first-generation (Slot A) Athlons were rare, with some hardcore guys getting their 600/650 units to over 800MHz. Overclocking Athlons was tricky, because the "Golden Finger Devices" hadn't appeared yet. We still had to deal with a poor selection of PCI/AGP divisors, with high FSB overclocks throwing the PCI and AGP speeds out of whack, corrupting HDD data and in some cases frying video cards. As I recall, most of my spare time was sucked up by the game Driver. :)
We had our first motherboard review, of the AOpen AX6BC Pro, a Slot1 board that we commended for stability and reliability. Amazingly, it was only about a year ago that I replaced that board in my (then) girlfriend's PC. Not because the board died, but because she wanted a faster CPU!
Some other tidbits:I know a lot of this stuff looks really ghetto nowadays, but it was cutting-edge at the time. In fact, many of the commercial products we see nowadays are extensions on ideas dreamed up by hobbyists in the past. Anyway, on the 20th of October 1999 I noted a petition (all links dead now) about Intel's supposed anti-competitive practises involving the supply of BX chipsets to Athlon motherboard manufacturers. Interesting stuff with AMD's recent lawsuit against Intel. Nick Arrowsmith sent in his nutty P2 @ 140MHz FSB.. he actually emailed me a couple of months ago, having upgraded to an Athlon64 4000+. Nice to hear. :)
One other cool thing from October 1999 was the opening of our Forums, in their very first incarnation, on the 26th. Who would have known they'd turn into the monster they are today. :)
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