Al's Computers
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The History of Al's Computers

Year Computer Description
1981 Sinclair ZX-80 Basic, 16K RAM Pack, Cassette Storage
1983 Commodore 64 Basic, 64K RAM, Floppy Storage, 300 Baud modem
1986 Home built XT DOS, 640K, Dual 360K Floppy and 20MB HD, 4.77MHz, 1200 Baud modem.  I designed a turbo board later (8MHz), and added the V20 chip (Norton - 2.1 times faster than an XT)
1988 Bentley 286 DOS, 1M, 1.2M Floppy, 70MB HD, Hercules, 12MHz.  Added BocaRam card later to give it 3M, and a 3.5" floppy.
1991 Gateway 486 DOS / Win31 / OS2, 8M, 1.2 & 1.44M Floppies, 210MB HD, VGA, 33MHz, 14.4K baud modem.  I gradually upgraded the machine until it had 40M, 1.2 & 1.6GB HDs.  Added SCSI CD-ROM and Tape drives.  After lightning took out the modem, I graduated to 33.6K baud.  Upgraded the 14" 1024NI for a 17" 1776LE.
1996 Home built Dual Pro I yanked the 486 MB out of the Gateway Tower and added a Tyan S1662D Dual Pentium Pro MB.  I  loaded 1 Pro 200/256,  64M, upgraded to video to a Matrox Millenium PCI and upgraded the SCSI to Adaptec 2940.  I kept the hard drives for a while still running the same OSs.  Then came OnSale,  3 9Gig FW SCSI drives.  In late 1997, Win 95 and Win NT went onto the drives.  OS2 finally met its match with Win NT 4.  I have continued to upgrade this beast with 384M RAM, went Duals with Pro166/512s overclocked at 200, Yamaha 4416S CD Burner, SCSI Zip, another SCSI CD-ROM, and a scanner.  Just recently upgraded to a ViewSonic P815 monitor (sweet!) and Viper V550.
1999 Home built Pro #2 One computer is just not enough.  With the advent of the cable modem, a server was now in order.  From all the stuff I collected from the auctions, a server was born.  Price target $700.  I took a Micronics Invader ATX ($49 OnSale), leftover Pro 200 from the Dual System upgrade (value ~$100), 64M DIMM ($100), the old 1.6G HD, add an IBM 9G 7200rpm IDE HD (nice) ($170), ATX Case from Micro X-press (Awsome case for $40), IDE CD-ROM ($40), Floppy ($20), Intel EE Pro 100+ ($70), the old Matrox Millenium (value ~$50), RF Keyboard / Mouse (Egghead Auction $55).  No monitor required, the P815 has dual inputs.  At this point, the home 100Mbps network was born as well.  TZO, InterNic and I are wed into the Domain Name of "ahannan.net".  Sambar Server (Free) is loaded and we have Web and FTP services.  Total $674.  Update - Another OnSale Auction addin - Iomega Ditto Max Internal 7GB Tape Drive added for $36.
1999 Netfinity 7000 I am addicted to Auctions.  OnSale puts up brand new IBM Netfinity 7000 Servers w/ 2 - Prentium Pro 200/1M and 512MB RAM, Dual UWSCSI, 12 disk SCA bays and 5 addl. bays.  One sweet machine at one great price.  So of course I had to buy 4 - IBM UWSCSI 9GB hard drives to stripe up under NT.  And since it can take 4 processors, I had to get 2 more.  Moved most of the stuff off the 'Home built Dual Pro' and use it for occasional Win95, OS/2 stuff and some Linux.  WinBench 98 Business Disk - 2720, High-End Disk - 6970.  Significantly outperformed a PII Xeon 400 w/ a single UWSCSI drive.
2002 Buy or Build? After doing a little research, I am beginning to formulate what my next upgrade will be.  An upgrade must perform at least 10 times faster than its predecessor.  When I went from a 486-33 to Pentium Pro 200, the following performance improvements occurred.  Processor Speed - 6X, Processor Cache - 6X, Bus width 2X, ISA / PCI Bus - 8X, plus Video and Disk performance improvements.  So here it is - Dual (maybe Quad again) Intel Itanium processor (IA-64) running at least 1.2GHz and hopefully running 2M of full speed cache.  1GB of 2 or 4 way interleaved RDRAM, Ultra 160 SCSI or better, 8 - Stripped hard disk drives, AGP 8X.  It is hard to specify speeds of devices 2 years off, but I think you get the drift.  Speed improvements come from: Processor Speed - 6X, Processor Cache - 6X, Bus Width - 2X, 64bit/66MHz PCI - 4X (maybe 133 or 8X by then), AGP 8X / PCI - 8X plus disk drive performance increases.  As we approach 2002, I will tune the specifications.
2015   I have some catching up to do!  So out of date.