My first Linux-first setup was a Pentium Pro 200 on a Tyan Titan ATX motherboard, which I bought sometime in 1997. At the time and with the 16-bit perf issues and the Pentium II coming out, the prices had dropped like a rock, but for 32-bit only Linux it was great.
Over time added more memory, a second CPU, and so on, and it was a workhorse through all of college. Held onto it well into the P4 era, as most of the upgrade options would have been a departure from SMP, which felt like a miss.
I had a similar experience. I shelled out for a dual CPU Intel 440fx setup with SCSI disks which was my desktop well into the P3 era, and got migrated to home server where it served for many more years. I think the PPro had the longest useful life of any processor I used.
PPro was a premium chip designed for the 32-bit market; it's the equivalent of Xeon branding. You didn't spend the extra scratch to run Win 3.11 on it.
Of course, looking at his other posts he thinks the 80186 was a failure because it wasn't used in many PC compatibles, so he's pretty limited in his understanding of computer history and economics. Google can only teach you so much.
Ahh, I owned P233 MMX CPU for a while.. It was beast :)
Good memories. I remember I skipped PII cpus and jumped to Intel Celeron 633, then I bought P3 800 and finaly P3 1000.
And they I stayed at it for long time runing Win2000. So long, that mobo IDE controller started to fail, so I had to do replacement. So I upgraded to i5-760 :)
Over time added more memory, a second CPU, and so on, and it was a workhorse through all of college. Held onto it well into the P4 era, as most of the upgrade options would have been a departure from SMP, which felt like a miss.
Of course, looking at his other posts he thinks the 80186 was a failure because it wasn't used in many PC compatibles, so he's pretty limited in his understanding of computer history and economics. Google can only teach you so much.