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While T1 connections have been largely displaced by modern, and far cheaper, fixed broadband and wireless, some businesses still opt for the T1 standard due to its famed reliability. Weird Al wasn’t the only one that understood the virtues of a T1 line – even Comic When I first saw this episode of The Simpsons, I didn’t know what a T1 line even was, but I knew I wanted oneīook Guy on the Simpsons knew he had to have it, despite the eye-watering costs.
![anthem pc still stuck anthem pc still stuck](http://media.vandal.net/m/49089/anthem-201892105142_1.jpg)
With data rates at a blazing 1.554 megabits per second, this was one of the fastest ways to connect to the Internet in the late 90s, and was available over twisted-pair copper or fiber optic cabling. Weird Al mentions he “installed a T1 line” to his house. While pairing such an underwhelming CPU with a (still) very large amount of RAM would be ridiculous, it’s absolutely possible. There are dozens of possible configurations using a Pentium-class processor, 128 GB of RAM and a compatible motherboard. I feel like Weird Al’s character would absolutely be the type to build his own Pentium-powered computing cluster, so we’ll call this plausible.Īs mentioned, putting together such a system today is relatively simple, even by ‘home’ standards. At the time, Cornell’s Wintel-based AC3 Velocity Cluster technically supported hundreds of gigabytes of RAM across its dozens of nodes. If Weird Al really wanted more than 4 GB of RAM and needed to use Pentium processors, he could have built his own supercomputer. PAE was introduced to the Linux kernel in 1999, but still wouldn’t have been able to support 100 GB of RAM.
#Anthem pc still stuck windows#
Physical Address Extension (PAE) was available on Windows 2000 Datacentre Server, which increased the amount of addressable RAM for a 32-bit processor to a gargantuan 32 GB, but this is still a far cry from the 100 GB requirement - not to mention that Datacentre Server wasn’t released until 2000, and was only sold to large businesses.
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The new breed of ‘Pentium’ processors support 64-bit instructions, and each processor can easily address up to 128 GB of physical memory. The original Pentium processors were based on 32-bit computing standards, and therefore only supported a maximum of four gigabytes of RAM. More importantly, these new Pentium-branded processors are able to realize Weird Al’s still hefty requirement for one-hundred gigabytes of RAM. The new breed of Pentiums are obviously going to eclipse its 90s ancestors due to clock speed and architecture improvements, as is clear in these benchmarks. These are budget x86-64 processors branded with the Pentium label, so they count. Intel still markets Pentium-branded processors, and their existence can be tentatively traced back through to the original Pentium cores and P6 microarchitecture from the 90s, including the Pentium III. The Pentium III Processor (Coppermine, 1 GHz) After all, two megabytes of L2 cache doesn’t come cheap! Money is clearly no obstacle when he’s calling Bill ‘Money’ Gates for tech support. Even with roughly the same clock speeds, the Xeon Pentium III variants would have pipped the home-oriented Pentium III, and it’s safe to assume that Weird Al’s PC-obsessed doppelganger would have opted for the server-class CPU. At the same time, the Pentium III Xeon was also available with the ‘Tanner’ core. However, would it have even been possible to reach these lofty computing goals at the time of the parody’s release? Let’s check out both of these threads.Īt the time of recording It’s All About The Pentiums, the Intel Pentium III was dominating the home computer market, specifically the ‘Katmai’ variant, advertised with clock speeds ranging from 450 MHz to 600 MHz. Even with the ongoing chip shortage and other logistic shortfalls, everyone now has the opportunity to start cruising cyberspace like Weird Al and truly become the “king of the spreadsheets”. The lyrics are a real goldmine for anyone that is a fan of 1990s computing, but what stands out to me is the absurd hardware that Weird Al’s character claims to own.Ībsurd by 1990s standards, maybe. In the track, Weird Al takes on the role of ‘king of the nerds’ with his rock star-esque portrayal of a nameless personal computing legend, someone who de-fragments their hard drive “for thrills” and upgrades their system “at least twice a day”. More than twenty years after its release, this track and its music video (with Drew Carey!) are still just as enjoyable as they ever were, with the track’s stinging barbs and computing references somehow only improving over time. If the vintage computing community ever chooses an official anthem, count my vote for It’s All About The Pentiums by “Weird Al” Yankovic.
#Anthem pc still stuck code#
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers.