When 16 MHz was enough… until my laptop showed up 20,000 times faster
Here we are in 2025. i9s, fast Ryzen CPUs, Xeons with a gazillion cores — computers nowadays are fast beyond belief. But it all started somewhere! Intel kicked off the PC revolution with the 8088 CPU (add Wikipedia link later as a reminder). This article is a journey back in time: from the CPUs we had when I was a little kid, to the first processors I owned myself in my early builds, all the way to the latest CPU in the workstation I’m using right now.
Again — buckle up for some CPU mayhem! 🙂
The early days
Before our first personal computer, we had an MSX game computer. It was my introduction to the computer world: to programming, to peeking and poking into registers to see what they did, and to my first real look at computer hardware. Our MSX broke a few times — especially the game ports in the front, usually after we dropped our joysticks again or got tangled up with our feet in the cords. I wasn’t the one fixing it; that was my dad’s job (thanks, Dad! 🙂 )
Atari PC4
Let’s start the x86 journey, shall we?
I was about 12 when we got our first personal computer: an Atari PC4. An 80286 machine with 1 megabyte of memory and a whopping 60 MB hard drive.
AMD 80286 @ 16 MHz — check!
Colani bigtower
We skipped the whole 80386 era entirely. About four or five years after the PC4, we bought ourselves a new machine: a Vobis Colani big tower equipped with an AMD 80486 running at 40 MHz.
AMD 80486DX @ 40 MHz — check!
Operation Braindead!
My first computer entirely paid for with my own hard-earned money, back in 1995. A real “screamer” of a machine: an AMD 80486DX2 running at 66 MHz, with 4 megabytes of memory and a 1.1 gigabyte Quantum Fireball hard drive. At the same time, the fastest CPUs on the market were Pentiums already cruising well above 100 MHz.
AMD 80486DX2-66 MHz — check!
Overclocking
This was also the first CPU I ever overclocked. With help from a friend, we pushed this bad boy to 80 MHz by changing a few jumpers.
1995-1998
Upgrade era one. I absolutely loved the Super Socket 7 days.
- AMD K5 90
- AMD K5 120
- Intel Pentium 200 MMX
- AMD K6-2 300?
All running on AT motherboards — and I had a soft spot for Soyo boards!
1999
ATX, baby! My first ATX build was an Asus P2B mainboard with a Pentium II running at 350 MHz.
Shortly after that build I discovered the legendary Celeron 300A, which could be overclocked to 450 MHz. I just had to have one — so I bought it, along with an Abit BH6 mainboard and a ComputerNerd Whopper cooler with four fans. The result: a proper bad-ass machine running Windows NT.
Intel Pentium II 350 @ 350 MHz — check!
Intel Celeron 300A @ 450 MHz — check!
2000
Another upgrade! I (think I) swapped the Abit BH6 mainboard and installed a Celeron 566 MHz, which I overclocked to 850 MHz.
I brought this machine to WAN Null and quickly discovered that the CPU wasn’t stable at higher temperatures. Oops!
Celeron 566 @ 850 MHz — check!
For the readers: WAN Null was an outdoor LAN party in the Netherlands (August 2000). Hehe.
2001-2007
These are the ones I can remember:
- Intel Celeron 933 MHz
- Intel Celeron 1400? (Tualatin?)
- 2x Intel Pentium II 350 (Netserver)
- 2x Intel Pentium II 500? (dual board, BX chipset)
- 2x Intel Pentium 4 1800 MHz (Flitspaal.nl servers)
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
…and I probably missed a few along the way.
Also worth noting: my first laptop in 2004 — a Pentium 4 Northwood 2.8 GHz beast. My second laptop followed in 2007, powered by a Core 2 Duo.
2007 – now
Laptops:
- Another Core 2 Duo (unknown specs)
- HP ZBook 15, i7 CPU (?)
- BTO 15″ laptop with an i7 CPU
- Ryzen 7 5800H
Servers:
- DMP 1 GHz x86-compatible CPU
- Lenovo E145 (AMD 2-core CPU)
- Intel Pentium G5400
- Intel i3-8300T
- Intel i7-9700T
- Intel i9-9900T (inbound)
- Raspberry Pi (yep, it has to be included!)
- Intel i5-12400
- Intel Atom (on a mini x86 single-board, Kickstarter)
…and I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few more.
Verdict
From a 16 MHz single-core 80286 to an 8-core / 16-thread Ryzen 7 5800H in just 36 years — what a ride. Back in the 80s, nobody could have imagined that the CPU industry would explode the way it did. An 80286 was cutting-edge back then. Today, the CPU in my smartwatch is already far faster than that old 286!
Now imagine if we were all still running DOS on today’s hardware, or firing up Windows 3.11 on a modern CPU — that would be cool! And just think how insanely fast Windows XP would run if it were still supported on my current machine.
What if… what if.
Hehe.
80286 @ 16 MHz — FTW. Thank you. My x86 journey started with you.
Brain out!