A pair of Celeron 300-A overclocked to 450MHz running BeOS R5, those were the days.

I never ran BeOS or had this motherboard, but I immediately had memories of the Celeron 300A from 1998. Was virtually guaranteed to run at 450Mhz. It replaced my parents’ Pentium 133 which was released just 3 years earlier (I say that now but 3 years earlier for a 16 year old is huge). Voodoo2 came out in the same year. You couldn’t even get this stuff in a prebuilt PC so people taught each other how to build from components. High speed internet was just becoming widely available in North America. Linux was just starting to spread beyond CS people to nerdy young people. Several other OSs and architectures had promise but ultimately failed.

I’m too young to remember the first PC boom, but at least in my lifetime there was never a more exciting time for home computing than 1998.

What i remember most about that era is burning mix CDs of pirated music at about 1x speed, and having to leave the computer alone during that time so nothing crashed.

good reason to go on a bike ride.

strangely enough I was and to buy back my childhood computer at this years Vintage Computer Fest Midwest, amongst heathkits, macintosh, and sun servers - a lonesome Compaq iPaq Pentium III with 8MB RAM, for $25 I was the only bidder, go figure.

My first foray into Linux was because burning CDs on Windows was a crapshoot - but the same hardware on RedHat with nice -20 would let cdrecord finish successfully each time.

Burning cds got me interested in Linux. I found it very unreliable in windows and “cdrecord” or whatever it was called worked flawlessly.

Running this with BeOS was the best computing experience I've ever had. BeOS was good with resources before, but absolutely screamed with dual Celerons.

And the Win2000 experience was fantastic too.

I loved my Beos on that machine, and it was the first time I was writing true multi-processor code.