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HELIOS - THE TRANSPUTER OS

wow, great video! would love a filestore and winchester one day but now properly hard to come by.

I ran both types of CPU back in the day. I still own an old dual Pentium pro dual CPU server which is just sitting getting dust on it lol, Like your videos guy .

There's a release of OpenBSD where the release notes talked about all the software projects that got replaced because of incompatible licensing, and XFree86 was one of them, the other two being ipf (firewall - OpenBSD wrote their own and the other BSDs jumped ship) and Apache. By the way, a video on the history of the BSDs would be a good idea if you're looking for content suggestions - it's got everything, university professors toiling away, AT&T gets involved, there's a court case that blows up in the bad guy's face, and a fork happens that begins the era of public code access via anonymous CVS.

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It was definitely a lemon, and a huge failure of marketing. It’s bad performance running 8/16 bit instructions being a problem was 100% foreseeable as a problem. The Pentium II was a big improvement, and the P3 improved latency, cache, and clock speeds, making it a major improvement. P4 was their next big disaster, until their IDC designed the Core Architecture based on the P3, while incorporating some of the P4 features and a similar external interface.

21:29 Hold Up 🧐

My dad used to run BBSes back in the day, and there was this other guy he was in competition with, where they'd continually try to one up each other. In the mid 90s Dad started an ISP and was surprised to discover his BBS competition was now his ISP competition, having opened one up just up the road

I worked at a Motorola fab in the late ‘90s, when the 68000 gave way to the PowerPC. The 68000 series was a popular CPU in its day. The 68040 running at 33 MHz and above, and the 68060 were really great CPUs. But RISC was taking over. The variety of RISC CPUs being made in the ‘90s was great to watch happen. Especially when the Wintel platform dominated sales. But neither Windows nor Intel were the cutting edge. All the RISC CPUs were fascinating to me.

I was porting apps from Win/Mac to OS/2 2.x and 3.x way back when. I feel old 🤣

4:20 There's a name here that should raise eyebrows - Bell Laboratories, now that place had a finger in a LOT of pies. Given the fact that the second Nobel they won was for the transistor, I'm not at all surprised to see them in a white paper for RISC.

The Pentium Pro wasn't a poorly performing chip, but at the time of its release, it was lacking in a vital feature - while it was very efficient with full 32-bit software, it performed very poorly on 16-bit software, and that was a big chunk of the software people were actually using at the time. They corrected that in the Pentium II, which made it a better processor in the real world. "Lemon" isn't really the right word, though, but it had a serious issue.

Thanks!

Hello, do current gen cable modems work by modulating and demodulating? Or is it simply the name that stuck?

I had one of these that I brought home from work. I never did bother with it, being the only board I had was a server board with non standard power connectors. Plus I had a iP233MMX system that I figured was faster.

Great review of a sometimes unfairly maligned processor. Ran NT3.51, NT4 and FreeBSD in multi-boot on it as a developer back in the 90s. Still have the two DEC PWS 200i & 180I machines, both dual-processor.

In the 80s we had the 8088,8086,386 Then the early 90s 486,586,686 The P1,P2,P3 Then the 2000s we had the P4 and that really made a difference having a 4 core P4 at 2.4 ghz I don't remember what was after that But in the 2010s we had 8 core and 16 core CPU at 4 Ghz It is crazy how far we have come in just 30 years Microsoft really changed the world Then the smartphones changed it again and opened the Internet to the regular people and the social media showed us what regular people are like, and it is ugly

"Just have a look at VAX." I had an assembly programming class in university on a VAX 4000/500 running VMS 6.1. I remember the professor saying that it was considered to be the Cadillac of assembly languages.

Same thing as the Itanium, which was a good CPU as long as the code was 64bit. But crap windows had 32bit stuff mixed (or worse), so it only shined (again) in Linux and BSD but windows sucked, as always.

What is an Intel anyway? I've always had a Windows computer my whole life. Same as most people I know or maybe an Apple. I have never heard of the Intel computers.

Whyyyy didn't we pronounce it "sexy"? 😄

Why do you call DR DOS "doctor DOS", but you don't call MS DOS "Mizz DOS"?

It was a great processor. Got hot and needed fans.

So thats why Duke 3d can slow down a p3 despite it being a much older game.

The Pentium Pro is the Beginning of P6 style arch,

Do a video on how MMX (or was it SSE) hampered performance.

Good vid, matches my memory. I ran Nextstep on a ppro180, overclocked to 200, and it was much nicer than the P133 I also had. Until i was able to replace it with a Tyan board running dual celeron300…

Intel's Pentium III and IV were the worst with their DIMM-like connector needing to be reseated every other day, eventually wearing its socket out completely. Criminal is when Carly Fiona and whozit @ Intel murdered Alpha 64-bit CPU in some sort of crazed Cocaine-fueled insane love-tryst generating their assault upon DEC with Compaq's inept purchase.

What about the 80186 and the 80286 (Bill Gates had some pretty nasty words about the 286)?

P6 until 2007? r you forgetting that the "CORE" CPU's that camein 2006 was a continuation of the Pentium M AND it is all "P6) so it lasted all the way to 2008 on desktop as a 6 core single die CPU.

It wasnt good for games, didnt have the MMX extensions, etc, but had some advanced features for its day, such as quad pipeline among other things, it served its designed purpose very well.

I had a 36GB U2W SCSI 10K drive back at the end of the 90's and that was top tier device. Only thing faster was a 15K. When online games started becoming popular, in many titles, such as Battlefield 1942 and later BF2, you got in as soon as you were able to fetch the level data. And whoever got into the match first, would have the best selection of vehicles, helicopters and planes. I'd get in half a minute ahead of the next guy, and people would be wondering how I' d be all the way to the enemy base in my Mig or F-35, before the first opponent even connected. SCSI was great, because it used at least 8% less CPU, due to handling its own addressing. Plus, it was like having a mini RAID. Every platter could do parallel read/writes, while an ATA drive only dead sequential instructions. I absolutely loved SCSI. I still have a milk crate full of SAS drives, that I can use in some 10 year old machines, but there's almost no point at doing that anymore. Plenty of SCSI converters that work with flash type storage. SCSI as a standard is still good, but old loud mechanical HD's are functionally obsolete, unless one wants their PC sounding like a jet engine.

In the 1997-1998 era I unwittingly became the administrator of an OS/2 2.1 machine. It was a "legacy" system by that time, a 486 PC that was being used in the research lab where I worked to run a chromatography system. A quite expensive system too, and the problem was that the application software and drivers for the custom hardware (it was being accessed through a SCSI interface of all things) only existed for OS/2. So it became my task to maintain that machine in good working order, and to reinstall the OS and application+drivers when someone inevitably and periodically broke it in an unfixable way. I still have somewhere that boxed copy of OS/2, with the full set of 17 1.44M disks. Because when I left that place I asked if I can take it, and since that system had finally been decommissioned a little while before they had no more use for it and gave it to me.

Um has everyone forgotten the fact that it wasn't just mmx that was added to the Pentium 2, they made some much needed tweaks to its internals so that it could run 16 bit code a lot faster than even the original Pentium, that's part of the reason they were so fast back in the late 90s, the other of course is more clock speed.

Even on current CPUs there are penalties for mixing register size aliases, however they are not as absurd as a full pipeline flush and the majority of programs just use the full registers anyway

my first PC i bought was an IBM Aptiva with 1.19GB HDD, 133MHz Pentium, and 32MB RAM if im not mistaken. windows95 ran fine

So much gold in these. I've used this processor for a short time but don't remember much.

I used to manage a 24x3 fibrechannel raid array. Loved the tech, hated having to rebuild it. It was like 10 TB. Which doesn't seem like much, but it was 10 TB of raid 5 with very smol drives in comparison to today.

I remember having a dual processor board that would run two chips, dont think the os ever utilized it correctly

We switched to Pentium Pro machines to use Win NT with Visual C++. It compiled code dramatically faster than the original Pentiums. IIRC, Microsoft's original goal was to have Windows 95 be much more of a 32-bit OS but had to make more and more 16-bit concessions as 95's development progressed. Due to the long lead time for CPU development, Intel made the Pro for an OS 95 didn't turn out to be.

After the P6 Intel made completely new architectures in Itanium and NetBurst. But as you know they turned out to be dead ends. So they threw them out and went back to the Pentium M and used it as the base for their new 64-bit Intel Core. Although the michroarchitechtures have been heavily modified over the years, most (if not all) of Intel's processors since then are derived from the Pentium Pro.

Man this takes me back! Back in the 90's I had a real job while in college and overbuilt a PC centered around SCSI devices. It was the best CD copier/game server on campus :-P

Was in college for Graphics and Animation in the 90s, and needed something to DOMINATE Softimage3D in WinNT.. My PPRO200 with an OpenGL Card absolutely made all the Vanilla Pentiums look silly. Didn't care a bit that it barely ran Duke3d at a decent framerate. It did what it was good at better than the SGI systems at a fraction of the cost. Kids who thought the Pro sucked probably thought hammers should be better screwdrivers too.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the z-modem protocol which eventually became the default used by most BBS's due to the much greater performance, particularly over reliable connections. It was a radical change from the xmodem base of previous protocols.

I worked at an isp using these with NT 4 and loved them. I had no idea about its lemon reputation

in its day the Pentium Pro was really good, it was a tad expensive, but it was good. mind you I only ran it on NT4.

I liked spacewar.exe :(

I worked at intel SSD on the partial system Touchstone Paragon that first broke the 300 GFlop barrier, the rest of the system that broke the 600 GFlop barrier. I had left to go back to school before the whole system was combined to break the 1TFlop barrier. Iirc, that was done at the customer site because we didnt have the space to assemble the entire system. I've talked to quite a few of the engineers and technicians over the years that have many memories from those days. I wish i could live another 300 years to see what this all turns into.

I was using Linux at the time of Pentium Pro. I was confused why so many were saying how bad it was.

Thanks!