Modified somewhat from the original Dec 14/97
Every day I meet with someone who asks me about Windows '95 and Pentiums. I have made it no secret how I feel about about Windows '95 in spite of the fact many market it with their computers. Anyone who reads my columns, which are published all over, knows it takes a live fish to swim against the current, any dead fish can float down stream that goes with the current. I refused to support OS2 when it came out and now we hear IBM is no longer supporting it. I refused to embrace WIN'95, but learned it, so I was capable of supporting it. I have been impressed by the design of it, however given the number of systems I support (over 2000) I do not wish to have my support staff taxed beyond their limits. It takes us the same number of people to support 130 WIN'95 installs as it takes to support 1900 computers with WINDOWS 3.(x). My head technician is a Windows '95 guru and I believe without the aid of a computer he could walk circles around 95% of Microsoft's techical support staff. A short time ago I predicted Bill Gates would release a fresh and different version of windows which I labelled WINDOWS '96/nt. Many stores in town produced faxes from Microsoft which denied this. We now have the "Alpha" verson of WIN '95(osr2) on the streets. It was released for sale sometime around Feb 97. It will, of course, make the 4,000,000 or so people who ran out to buy the prematurely released WINDOWS '95 just a little put out.
Really now, what else would you expect from Bill Gates? Did you think he would just release WIN'95 and then lay down and die? Hello, this is Bill Gates, we're talking global donimation, richest man alive, my age, Bill Gates here. Let us not underestimate his team. It takes time to cook a roast properly, WINDOWS '95 is a very large roast. It needed more time to cook then was allowed. Media pressure forced early release. Microsoft ego is a very large thing. I have been tempted for some time to design a computer that would be NT based. NT is expensive, but it is the best operating system on the face of the planet. My head technician knows WINDOWS '95 probably better than anyone in this town, as supporting consultants, we don't have a choice but to learn this stuff. When a store sells a system with WIN '95 they don't have to support it, the builder does. Since they are not the builder, they get off SCOTT FREE. [Dead fish] It is the salesman's job to embrace whatever head office sends them, and make it sound great.
Last month(Jan'96) we built a prototype computer and aptly named it "The fastest 486 ever built" We claimed it would outperform most Pentiums on 16 Bit app's especially the "off the shelf" versions which seriously lack comparable performace, to what can be custom built. It is a little like comparing Hand built Rolls Royce to the "off the line" Cavalier or Tempo. Fortunately the price thing doesn't apply here. An "off the shelf" is designed to be sold at a profit to both the manufacturers and again to the store that advertises and sells it. That doesn't leave much room for quality.
How can a 486 outperform a Pentium?
When pentiums first came out, they were overstated by Intel. They have good potential for the future. Many people who bought these futuristic machines already had slow proprietary machines and wanted to have state of the art in place, for the future. So they spent thousands of dollars for extra ram, 64 bit video card with vram etc. Had they spent money like that on the 486, it would have been really fast too. Many had bought an "off the shelf", which could not handle that kind of upgrading, so they didn't have much choice. So let's take a 32 bit, 486 with a 120 mhz processor running on the 40 MHz cycle of the board. With a 16 bit app like WORD 6.0 for windows. Now add a 2 meg Diamond stealth video card with vram and test it with 16 megs of ram and a 1.2 gig hardrive formatted with DOS using LBA mode. This is a very fast system utilized 50% of the chip capacity. Now take WINDOWS '95/97 or NT in a 32 bit system and use the entire roadway and what do you think the result will be? Wicked!
So compare that to a Pentium 75 with 8 meg and utilizing a Trident 9440 video card with 1 meg of dram. Same app but only a quarter of it's capacity. You guessed it! No contest! You pay big bucks for a technology 3 years ahead of it's usefulness. 1996, the 486's are severly advanced if you know where to get the good parts and how to design them!