Greg's Dream Hardware Page

This page was originally written on Feb 8, 1996. It's interesting to look at how much has changed since then (as of Sep 30, 1998), and at what hasn't.

On the one hand, we have...

• 200+ MHz P6
  This was written when Pentium Pro was just recently out, and before AMD and Cyrix proved the horrors of Pentium architecture by building faster, cheaper processors based on RISC cores. In the meantime, Intel also bought DEC's alpha chip design, so that there are really only two contenders: Intel and IBM-Motorola-Apple. This is not (IMHO) a good sign. Today I might say "600+ MHz Alpha" instead.
• 64+M burst EDO RAM
  EDO was new in 1996, now it's passé. Besides, memory is dirt cheap, at less than $1/MB. At the time, 32M was over $100, and most machines couldn't handle more than 128M. Today I might say "256 MB 100+MHz ECC SDRAM".
• 4M(?) sync-burst cache (as suggested by jch)
  Jonathan escaped CMU and went to work for the evil empire. (Which means he spells HTML with silent L.) Don't know where he went after that. I'm awful at keeping track of my friends. Anyway, no one, AFAIK, actually has that big of a cache. I don't know why not. Hell, give me a 512kB L1 cache and I might be happy.
• 4+M caching busmastering PCI FW-SCSI-II card
  
• 3 2G FW-SCSI-II drives
  
• 16G Exabyte 8mm tape drive
  (for "growth" capacity)
• Jaz drive
  
• Combined 8x CD-ROM / Doublespeed CD-Recorder
  
• 2400 dpi 30 bit color scanner
  
• 4M PCI video card at 1280x1024x24bpp
  
• 20" monitor
  
• 100Mbps PCI ethernet to talk to my gateway:
  • Modest 486 box
  • 100Mbps ethernet
  • T1 to the outside world
• A keyboard with the control key in the right friggin' place
  
• Real 3 button mouse
  
• Lexmark 1200dpi postscript printer
  
• 32-bit wavetable soundcard with ROM+RAM tables
  
• Yamaha or Kurzweil velocity sensitive MIDI keyboard
  
• Some sort of dream stereo system to connect this to
• 14.4k voicemail/fax device
  (who cares about modem?)
• Whopping huge (2400+ VA?) UPS with network interface
  
• Running Linux, and only Linux
  (psu: If I wanna run something else, I put it on a Jaz disk and don't clutter the rest of my system with it)

On the other, we have...

• "Disposable" 486 system, no case, no local bus slots
• 4M RAM, maybe in 30 pin 1M simms
• 1 100-200M IDE drive
• ISA VGA or minimal SVGA controller
• Fixed frequency 14" monitor
• Optically isolated PLIP connection to server
• Stack of bare ISA prototyping cards
• Running something like "Real Time Linux" :-)

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