My Digital Story

Over-clocking!

Pentium

Oh the Power!

486

Getting More!

The advent of the "pentium" line from Intel

really changed the computer landscape. This is

when I started building my own computers,

customizing the parts, overclocking my Pentium 90mhz

to run faster than meant to, added in more ram, a better

video card and was able to connect to the internet and

download new music files called "mp3"s!!! All of this was

done on my snazzy new Operating system, Windows 95!

386

486s were the end of the line for the "86"

series. These were screaming machines,

with 16mb of ram, a CPU that ran at 40mhz,

16bit colour screens, Windows 3.1

(with networking!) and GAMES! Commander

Keen, Doom, Wolfenstein 3-D, Myst, Wing

Commander. Too many to recount.

Moving on up!

Oh the 386! More RAM, faster CPU,

better display, faster modems 14.4K!

But, best of all, Windows 3.1! Graphical

user-interfaces at last! A mouse! And the

introduction of the 3 - 1.4 "Hard" floppy disks.

286

The Mhz RACE!

After the XT, the 'upgrading' every

few years was a constant, always moving

our way up the "86" line. The 286 had a

faster processor, more colours (8 bit colour!)

more ram, and more hard drive space.

(OS = MS DOS)

AMD

My Digital story

by Aaron Mueller

My first PC!

IBM XT

Soon after the mid-90s, another CPU maker

entered the market. AMD began producing

cheaper and more "over-clockable" CPUs that

could be unlocked with a simple pencil, using the

lead to connect to soldering points. This was the

start of the CPU race, and the climb from megahertz

to GIGAHERTZ (OS = Windows 98), my computer

was a DURON 700mhz, overclocked to 900mhz!

Oh, the power! This first IBM PC,

based on the 8086 processor was screaming!

We had 1mb of RAM, a 20mb Hard drive, and

an Orange and Black screen. I even believe we

had a 9600 baud modem for dialing up to BBS

(like Schoolnet). The operating system was an

early form of MS-DOS

My First Video Game System

(aka early computer)

Atari 2600

GigaHertz

Pentium 4

This amazing machine was the

first to bring the digital world into

my life. I spent many hours playing

with this!

My first Computer!

IMAGES

All FLIKR images were

used under a "creative commons"

license

aPPLE IIE

Atari - http://www.flickr.com/photos/unloveable/2387664919/

Gameboy - http://www.flickr.com/photos/unloveable/2400086035/in/set-72157604384079256/

The next leap in computers was up into

GIGAHERTZ range! Computers were

running extremly hot, as they had massive

amounts of electricity running through them

My Pentium 4 ran at 2.1ghz, with 1gigabyte

ram, dedicated 3-d videocards, 60gigabyte

harddrives and Windows XP!

Sega - http://www.flickr.com/photos/21687872@N04/2342885687/

My second video game system

At last! My very own computer

5 1/4 'floppy' disks, 2 colour screen

no hard drive, but lots of games,

word-processing, and Oregon trail!

This computer had no "operating system"

You had to boot up the computer using a

special disk, and then load up whatever program

you wanted to use.

NES - http://www.flickr.com/photos/woolner/2172489041/

My fourth video game system

Sega Master

System

My third video game system

Apple IIe - http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmatting/144862832/

Nintendo

XT & 386 - http://www.frontier-electronics.co.za/early_computers.htm

Game Boy

This machine was revolutionary!

A light gun, lots of

COLOUR

Acer Aspire One - http://www.acer.com/aspireone/

and many cool games!

All other photos were either my own, or freely available

I had to wait many years to get my

first NES, but it was worth the wait.

Super Mario Brothers, Duckhunt and

many other great games!

Finally! Gaming on the go! The

Game boy changed the nature of

video-gaming, making it portable!

Multi-cores

AMD Athlon

Once Intel and AMD had really maxed out

how many Gigahertz they could squeeze out of

one CPU, they began putting multiple CPUs on

the same "core". My next computer was a

"Dual-core" AMD Athlon X2, running at 2.1ghz, I

over-clocked it to 2.2ghz. OS was Windows XP

for many years. Multi-cores allowed more programs

to run concurrently without slowing down the system!

Getting Smaller!

My Computer

Smart Phones

Intel i5

Netbooks

Droid

Intel i5 Quad-core processor, running

at 3.4ghz. It also has 8gb of RAM, a 128gb SSD Hard Drive, an AMD 6850 Video Card, 1tb HD, and all the regular stuff (keyboard, case, dvd burner, etc).

I've been able to 'over-clock' this computer to run it at 4.3 ghz using just the stock cooling fans. It is a great gaming machine and has been working great for almost 2.5 years!

Now that desktop computers are more

than powerful enough to handle most things

we throw at them, I addressed a different need,

portability! Computers needed to be able to travel,

fit in my backpack, connect wirelessly to the net,

and last all day without plugging them in.

(CPU = 1.6ghz single core, 1gb of Ram, 160gb of

hard drive space)

The next phase in this digital story is the

smartphone revolution. A continuation of

need to have more computing, right in my pocket,

this Motorola Droid is a full linux based computer,

programmed by Google with their special "Android"

operating system. CPU = 550mhz, 256mb of ram,

large screen, 16gb of storage, and all sorts of connectivity!

My Current Smart Phone

Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Getting a little old,

this phone has been rooted and now runs

Cyanogenmod. Until my next new smart phone comes out, the

Motorola Nexus 6

I'm looking forward to this new phone

as it is a continuation of the "nexus"

line, which means stock Android,

lots of updates, and the new Android L,

Lollipop OS. Hopefully it goes on sale

soon in Canada~!