Rage Adventures

 Recently while I was reading old PC Word magazine from July 1998, I saw Ati advertisement: It looks like normal ad from this time but if you close up, yo can find out that graphic card which this man holds are a little bit out dated for 1998. Firstly lets look on the right red side of the advertisement. There we can see the boxes of Ati Rage Pro cards so called Xper@Work and Xpert@Play which were good and mature late 1997 product. But if we do close up to the lest side of ad and look closely what cards the man is holding we will see that those cards are not from the Rage Pro line: Those cards PCB contains old style  28 legs bios EPPROM chips. Which in later 1997 Ati cards were replaced with smaller rectangular 44 pin bios chip. So from right side we have: Ati Rage II: 3D Xpression+ PC2TV 4MB EDO Full version of this card looks like this: (source: http://vgamuseum.info/images/zaatharen/ati/rageII_fhq.jpg) Next will be:  Ati Rage II: 3D Pro Turbo 4 MB SGRAM (not to be...

 Officially Intel Pentium II had it's premiere on 7th of May 1997. Initially this processor was oddly expensive and until early 1998 there were better alternatives as AMD K6 233 and Pentium MMX 233.   At lunch there were two speeds available of PII: 233 MHz and 266 MHz. 300 Mhz variant join later during summer of 1997. Until September of 1997 the only available chip set for Pentium II was 440FX which was modified Pentium Pro chip set. It lacks modern features like SDRAM support, UDMA-33  and of course AGP port. Those lacks was solved in 440LX chipset which was officially shown at atumn 1997 and the real career of PII begins.  Pentium II processor on its cartridge (called SECC-1) had clear identification of date code when it was produced. On top view in second row, second digit mean year code (7- 1997, 8- 1998, 9 -1999, 0 - 2000 - but I had never seen 0) and the third and forth digit is week of the year. For example R7380547 means that it was produced in 1997 at ...