only supported Win 3.x applications
and sank into irrelevancy.
W h e n W in d o w s 9 8 ar r i v e d , i t fi xe d
many of the teething problems of
Win 95, with a more stable system,
better hardware support, and UI
enhancements. This was also when
the anti-trust lawsuits began, as
Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer
with Windows, itself already
bundled with new computers. Now
Microsoft would dominate not just
PCs, but Internet browsers too.THE PERFORMANCE AGE
3D accelerator cards—such as
3df x’s Voodoo 2, Nvidia’s Riva TNT,
and ATI’s Rage series—would be a
defining feature of the late ’90s. 3D
acceleration brought a new era of
PC gaming. Where previous games
relied on the CPU for all rendering,
these new graphics cards added
a GPU (graphics processing unit),
which took the graphical processing
bur den aw ay f r om the CP U, allo w ing
substantially faster gaming and
stunning graphical effects.
Although 3dfx tried to corner
the market with its proprietary
Glide API, it eventually lost out
to competitors who used market
standards such as DirectX and
Silicon Graphics’s OpenGL. The
ultimate card of the ’90s would be
1999’s Nvidia GeForce 256.
This point is where the CPU race
is whittled down to AMD and Intel.
Until now, things looked great
for Cyrix. The mid-’90s saw 5x86
upgrade chips for 486 machines,
followed by the 6x86 in October- The 6x86 out-performed
mid-level Pentium machines for
less money—Cyrix was becoming
a technological leader rather than
just a budget manufacturer.
Business was good until complex
3D games such as Quake uncovered
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Cyrix’s embarrassing floating point
and integer performance. Cyrix
was great at spreadsheets, but
terrible at gaming, which tarnished
the brand. 1997’s MediaGX helped
improve things, with a system-on-
chip design perfect for laptops and
the budget PC market, but as Intel
continued to advance, Cyrix did not.
Newer-generation CPUs were
really highly overclocked 6x86s—
prone to high failure rates, still
poor at gaming. The Cyrix-IBM
partnership ended in 1998, and
worse yet, Intel soon entered the
budget market with its Celeron line.
Cyrix was out of cash, and its tech
was bought out by VIA in 1999, who
gradually phased out the brand.
AMD, meanwhile, went from
strength to strength. During the
Pentium era, reverse-engineering
Intel’s processors became too
complex, so AMD started designing
its own style of processors, rather
than follow Intel designs.
In 1996, AMD released the K5, the
first Pentium rival, but 1997 brought
true success with the K6. This was
a proper rival to the new Pentium
II, but could work in older Socket 7
motherboards. The K6 series was
wildly successful, with its famous
3DNow! instructions, and cheaper
prices. The successive K6-2 and
K6-3 chips continued to rival
advancing Pentium II and III models,
and would eventually dominate
most of the sub-$1,000 market.
We would end the decade with
1999’s K7 Athlon, the first retail
CPU to break the 1GHz mark.
The ’90s were a time of survival
of the fittest, ending with one
dominant OS and two CPU makers.
Thankfully, the GPU market still had
a few years of diversity remaining.Be Inc. (founded by ex-Apple
executive Frenchman Jean-
Louis Gassée) launched
the BeBox in October 1995,
running its own operating
system, BeOS. Optimized around
multimedia performance for
the masses, BeOS was intended
to compete with both Mac OS
and Windows. Lightning fast
and free of the legacies of old
16-bit hardware, BeOS had
features such as symmetric
multiprocessing for multi-
CPU machines, pre-emptive
multitasking, and the 64-bit
journaled file system BFS.
Although the BeBox itself
was unsuccessful, BeOS was
ported to the Macintosh in
1996, and almost became the
new system to replace Mac OS.
Gassée’s $300 million asking
price was too steep, however,
and Apple went with Steve
Jobs’s NeXTSTEP OS instead.
BeOS was then ported to the
PC in 1998, along with a free
stripped-down BeOS 5.0
Personal Edition, but it failed to
gain more than a niche audience
(Microsoft may also have
worked against its adoption).
Be Inc. was bought out by
Palm Inc. in 2001.
Despite numerous
recreations, BeOS is now
survived by Haiku, a popular
open-source re-implementation
with BeOS binary compatibility
on 32-bit versions.BeOS
The sleek
alternative
In an alternate universe of
Betamax VCRs, where Al Gore was
president, BeOS reigns across
Macs and PCs.IBM may
have been
struggling to
sell desktop
computers,
but it made
a killing
with its new
ultra-rugged
ThinkPad
laptops.Other than the
dull colors,
Windows 95
is where the
PC started to
resemble the
interface
of today.maximumpc.com DEC 2019 MAXIMUMPC 47