Memory lane: Hardware that really exceeded expectations

I was going through my old parts and just reminiscing over some of the great stuff I've acquired over the years. Today, they are just old parts, but at given times some of this stuff was not only great for its time, but either ahead of its time, truly innovative or just really impressive.

I'm not just talking about the newest thing--the newest thing is always faster and better--but the things that just made you stop and say, "" and even now you look back on it fondly--or maybe even still use the device (or even entire machine if it was an innovative laptop or desktop).

I've got quite a few of these, "wow" things, but I'm curious what others will come up with--but to kick it off....

The Gravis Ultrasound sound card was league's ahead of its time with wavetable music synthesis instead of the synthetic tweets and boops that came out of the soundblaster and other soundcards of the time. I can remember dropping this thing in a old P90 and playing Doom for the first time with it--the difference was like night and day.

These things used real-world sound recordings rather than artificial computer-generated waveforms to base a musical instrument on; so a piano sounds like an actual real piano, a trumpet like an actual trumpet, etc. The ultrasound and its successors (Gravis Ultrasound Max, Gravis PnP, etc) offered remarkable MIDI playback quality and you could hook a keyboard up to them with a large set of instrument patches that could be stored in RAM, with up to 32 hardware audio channels. You could even download and load different sets in 2, 4 or 8 mbs depending on how much ram your PC had.

Really a great piece of computer history....

 

i remember how i bought a 19" tft in the days 17" where expensive and een 15" ones not worth the money. it was the first pc item i bought myself (and it was cheaper than the 17" ones ).

my pc (previously 17" crt) now looked like it was 3-4 times as fast. it was a tremendous difference. till today, the best pimping of my system.


later, i could for the first time use what was called final scratch those days. it allows you to play, on a turntable, a vinyldisk, but hear an mp3 on the notebook. it allows realtime putting the needle arbitary and it skips to the right place on mp3. it allows scratching, tempo adjusting, etc, all in realtime.

it was at first, one of the most inspiring experience of augmented reality i've ever head. scratching ac/dc as well as others on vinyl was just wow. every dj and non-dj around just smiled when he was able to touch it. it was just so magic.


now recently, i bought some studio speakers and could listen on them to some high quality high precision music on them (it was goa/psy trance it's the most clean produced music one can find). it was night and day to hear that track on the studio speakers. i've never heard anything sounding that clear and perfect. close to an orgasm my ears felt happy like never before.

they're all not that old things i remember. i started late in the computer business myself.

 

3Dfx Voodoo card for me opened up a whole new world of non-pixelated hardware accelerated gaming (for its time).
Aureal A3D was also something that did very neat things with sound.

 

same here, though I didn't have the original voodoo, I bought the Voodoo2 when it became availible.... P120, 48MB RAM, 1,6GB HDD, Voodoo2 PCI-gfx, Windows 98 Those were the days. So many bugs, bsods, virus, reformats and reinstalls, LOL....

 

Yes those were the days, I had a Celeron 300A OC @ 450 Mhz running a cheap voodoo 2 12MB, beat the pants of my dad's PII 450 with standard GFX that he paid like 3 times as much for. Just imagine if you could OC today's processors by 50% with stock heatsink/fan combo and no voltage changes.

 

Yeah, that's when overclocking really meant something....today's overclocks to squeak an extra 10 percent hardly seems worth it....

I thought the voodoo would get some accolades, and it was cool, but for me the ground breaking videocard was the geforce3 ti series. That was after 3dfx went belly up and nvidia bought all their technology and rolled it into the geforce3 ti series and--this was key--added vertex and pixel shaders, which made directx possible.

The geforce3 was still kicking butt 1.5 years after it came out as game developers only scratched the service of the card's abilities