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Anybody using a Pentium prior to the 133?

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Unknown_K

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From what I remember the Pentium took off (home use) around the time the P133 was released, before that systems were kind of pricey and people were still using high end cheap 486's. The older models (especially the 60/66) were not that common and judging by what I had seen at recyclers most pentium systems were 166 and 233MMX with a few Cyrix in the mix.

So how many people actually have the older models in their collection (machines not just CPU) and what do you use them for if anything?
 
I have a Pentium-90 that I use occasionally. Big nearly indestructible Micron tower which stores lots of spare parts with PCI, EISA, SCSI for a good system to test old hardware. I used over the past few weeks for the identification and reading of floppy disks. It is unfortunate that I haven't been able to find a very cheap source of a second CPU because sometimes OS/2 SMP seems like something fun to try.
 
I don't have a "system" but one of my two main DOS boxes has a P60 gold top. I had originally used that MB and chip because I thought it would work w/o a CPU fan (my P133 does just fine), but it's a bit flaky without the tiny fan (no heat sink) that I added.
 
Ole Juul said:
I don't have a "system" but one of my two main DOS boxes has a P60 gold top. I had originally used that MB and chip because I thought it would work w/o a CPU fan (my P133 does just fine), but it's a bit flaky without the tiny fan (no heat sink) that I added.
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I never seen a heatsink/fan combination on a P60/P66 they seem to use a glued on huge heatsink for cooling. I wonder if Pentium 1 heatsink/fans are going to get rare (have a few new ones in stock).
 
Unknown_K said:
I never seen a heatsink/fan combination on a P60/P66 they seem to use a glued on huge heatsink for cooling. I wonder if Pentium 1 heatsink/fans are going to get rare (have a few new ones in stock).
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Lots of nice gold tops which look great, were ruined by those glue-ons from what I've seen.
 
I recently installed Windows 98SE on my Pentium 75 with 16 MB memory. It was painful both to install and use. Actually that one is better off in MS-DOS land, and I should rather save Win98 for my stripped Pentium 200MMX.
 
My personal mail handling computer is a Pentium 90. It replaced my 486 machine when that one's scsi board failed and took the motherboard with it. It runs and runs. Current uptime 441 days.
Disks are even older than the original 486 (1990 and 1991, the oldest scsi disk from 1989 finally gave up a while ago).

-Tor
 
carlsson said:
I recently installed Windows 98SE on my Pentium 75 with 16 MB memory. It was painful both to install and use. Actually that one is better off in MS-DOS land, . . .
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Indeed, I think it's the perfect machine for DOS.

I wonder how many were made. The OP is probably right though, the 133 is when things took off judging by how few 60 or 75mhz machines are around.
 
We did have a Pentium 75 somewhere at work at one time. Maybe several. They've probably been dumped a long time ago. The Pentium 90 box I've stacked away in a corner to be my mail server is probably the only Pentium left in the building.

-Tor
 
You're probably correct about anything before 120 or 133 MHz were for early adopters. I remember when our student computer club bought our first Pentium in early 1996, we settled for a then maxed P133 even if it dug a hole in the cash register.
 
P133's were huge back in that day. There are still lots of chips out there as well. I have a 133 Dos gaming machine and a original Gateway P4D-66 that i use for games as well. More of a nostalgia type of thing than anything.. beyond DOS there kinda useless..
 
Perhaps it's an artifact of selective memory or something, but it seems to me that 90Mhz Pentiums were actually pretty common. At its introduction it was expensive and rare for home use but it stuck around as a "budget option" for quite a while after the 133-200Mhz models came out. (The last Pentium desktop I let into the house, around 2002 or so, had a P-90 in it.) What *is* rare is Pentium 75-100Mhz machines equipped with the CPU-introduction-vintage "Neptune" chipset. Those "budget era" P-90s I kept tripping over all had either 430FX/VX boards or horrid PCChips/OPTi knockoffs, demonstrating that they'd been equipped with an "obsolete" CPU from day one.

It is *specifically* 90Mhz machines I recall as common. I think the reason was that near the end of the sales life of the CPU vendors would price the 90Mhz chips at practically that same price as the 75Mhz ones while still asking a "significant" premium for the 100Mhz models. (It'd literally be something like $75 for the 75, $79 for 90, and $99 for the 100mhz. For the seriously bottom-of-the-barrel crowd that spread would make the 90Mhz the obvious choice. I was in that crowd when I bought my first Pentium-class machine, and as a result ended up with... the AMD K5-90. Same price structure as the Intel chips but yet another $15 or so cheaper. Whee.)
 
I jumped from a 486-133 AMD (OC to 160) to a Cyrix 686 166 for about a month but switched to a Pentium 133 because the cyrix just overheated too much (and the FPU sucked and Quake just came out). After a while I upgraded to a p233mmx and purchased a second board (BTW I built all of my computers after the 286) which had a cheap AMD K5-133 (still have that CPU on the shelf). That P233MMX was on a TX board I sold down the road, was smart enough to keep my M-tech HX Pentium boards which cached much more then 64MB.

Still have a few PCChip Pentium boards that came in AT cases I got from freecycle (wanted the cases). The big deal about VX/TX at the time was they could use a SDRAM DIMM, but that didnt help much down the road since they could not deal with higher density DIMMS and you generally only got one DIMM slot.

I had looked into early dual P1 motherboards but never found a real use for one other then novelty so I never purchased one, they might be too pricey now to bother.
 
I still have my old P90 on an Asus P54TP4 (430FX) board in storage.
One of the most solid systems I used.
I should try to find a case for it.
 
Unknown_K said:
I jumped from a 486-133 AMD (OC to 160) to a Cyrix 686 166 for about a month but switched to a Pentium 133 because the cyrix just overheated too much (and the FPU sucked and Quake just came out).
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Sometimes I think I'm the only person on earth that liked the Cyrix 686/166+. I had one and I thought it was a great CPU for running Linux on. Integer performance was *very good* and I never noticed a heat problem. Granted it was the improved "6x86L" with the IBM label, not the early infamously hot one.

(If you want to talk about overheating CPUs try the first-model K6-233. Smokin'!)
 
Never had the K6-233, all the K6 chips I had were K6-2's (got a 400 for a project in the late 1990's since it was speedy and cheap). The K5 I have kind of soured me on AMD and I spent the next few years buying new P2/P3 CPU's switching back to the Athlon XP when the 1500+ came around. Before that AMD 486/160 I had a ton of other 486 AMD chip along with a Cyrix 486/40 and before that an AMD 386/40.

My 686-166 Cyrix was the first version of that chip and it ran very hot. It was very good for most tasks, but like I said Quake came out and the FPU was king for gaming, which is what drove my upgrades back then. Kind of funny how I loved Cyrix 387 chips and even the Cyrix 486 CPUs had a decent FPU section but Intel (maybe by accident) realy guessed correctly and made the Pentium the FPU king at the correct point in history when it was needed.

I do like the K6-2+ found on some laptops (kind of like a K6-3) that extra cache and 550 mhz makes then nice to use.
 
I have a socket 4 mainboard and a Pentium 60 but I don't really do anything with them, mainly just used for benchmarking/testing. I was disappointed to find that my Pentium 60 did not have the FDIV bug.

Back in the day I skipped the first Pentium generation as I went from a 486SX-25 to a Pentium II 266.... the difference was astounding :)
I did see plenty of Pentium systems around but they were pretty much all socket 7, 120MHz or higher.
 
Chuck(G) said:
P90s used to be particularly common in laptops--I have a Dell Latitude with one. My HP Vectra VLB came with a P75.
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Yea, I have quite a few early model Pentium 1 laptops, but those chips are the mobile versions and seem to have come late in the Pentium timeline. When the early desktop pentiums were around laptops were probably still 486 or even 386.
 
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