Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "PC Motherboard Evolution" video.

  1. Yeah, helped keep you regular.
    4
  2. Yeah, I would say Intel had trouble keeping up with PowerPC machines throughout much of the 1990s. Its architecture was simply not as efficient.
    3
  3. I, too, used to be a disbeliever. Until I saw this ... https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/modding/orac3_part5/1/
    2
  4. It’s because USians can’t pronounce “maths”.
    2
  5. The 1980s called, they want their geek jokes back.
    2
  6. Motherboards of non-Microsoft-compatible PCs were quite interesting, too, at least into the 1990s. Worth looking at Apple Macs from that era, for example. Your 1999-vintage Gigabyte board had one measly little USB connector head, but the Apple iMac G3, the first mass-market machine where the only expansion available was via USB, had already been available for about a year. And now, we have new architectures like the Raspberry π, which are making the non-Microsoft-compatibles interesting again.
    1
  7. I have an easy way of remembering which is which: “purple” has the same number of syllables as “keyboard”, and “green” has the same number of syllables as “mouse”.
    1
  8. Unfortunately, Apple’s trashcan design was ... well ... rubbish. Impossible to upgrade in any meaningful way. That’s why it was abandoned.
    1
  9. In those days, “serial” specifically meant RS-232C/422/423.
    1
  10. The 386SX was “cut down” in only having a 16-bit memory interface, as opposed to full 32-bit in the 386DX. I remember colleagues wondering what was the point, why not buy a 286 machine instead. I, being a software guy, was vociferous in pointing out the 32-bit future compatibility that the 386SX offered as a reason to go with that chip. I felt that too many of the people around me were focused on hardware issues, forgetting that software issues were, in the long term, much more important.
    1