The "Roadrunner" machine of 1997

The Internet Archive shows us that the PC of Dr. Thomas Pabst, creator of Toms Hardware Guide - in December 1997 was the following beast of a machine:-

• CPU: Intel Pentium II, 266 MHz, overclocked to 300 MHz
• Graphics: Matrox Millennium with 4 MB of RAM
• Hard disk: 1 Seagate Cheetah ST34501W (up to 18Gb and "Unsurpassed formatted data rates of 14.5 to 21.3 Mbytes per second"
• Modem: US Robotics I-Modem external (yup, a modem)
• CD-Rom Drive: Plextor 12Plex - a SCSI 12x CD-ROM



As we all know, in 10 years our 4Ghz quad-core CPU, 4Gb RAM, 1Tb HDD machines will look as ridiculous as this - which is a sobering thought. Happy computing!