PC Pro this month have dedicated much of the issue to Retro computing. They are looking back at the past of computing and have covered many aspects of the past.
Some of the interesting articles cover how hardware has advanced over the years, and they even cover retro gaming and show how to get emulators such as MAME and a SNES emulator working.
A couple of the most interesting articles relating directly to the PC are comparing old issues of PC Pro with current benchmarking standards they use.
In one of the articles the writer decided to swap his current computers for an early Windows 95 PC running the first release of the OS. His point was to show that much had changed over the years since its original release to try and quash the people who always comment that not much was really changed with Windows since the release of 95 other than its visual look. This really does show how so much really has changed since then.
The other interesting article is comparing benchmarks from the start to the present.
Sadly the first PCs they ever reviewed couldn't run Windows XP so they instead moved forward 50 issues and used a Pentium 2 333MHz PC for the benchmark, against their current benchmarking standard they use, a Pentium 4 3GHz PC which is itself getting quite out of date. Even by this standard current systems they are benchmarking are often scoring over 2 which means they are twice as fast as the P4 3GHz benchmark system.
And the results? Well on average the old P2 333 was over "50 times" slower than the P4 3GHz benchmark!!! When they did manage to get their benchmark tests to run. The problem was that the benchmarking suite often had trouble trying to record a benchmark result of less than 0.1 compared to the P4 standard test results.
To put this into real world examples, on the P2 it took over 4 hours to complete the Photoshop benchmarking tests. This compared to five and a half minutes for the P4! And for a 3DSMax test the P2 took 28 minutes to render a scene, compared to just 50 seconds on the P4. Quite a large variation you have to agree and such real world speed comparisons would mean a lot if you were trying to do anything that was time critical. It would also mean the difference between wasting days of year life instead of hours on the same tasks!
So Steve, does that "vintage" P3 look so modern now?