I'm sorry to hear of Mr. Hammond's early passing. My family had a couple computers before, but the first computer that was really mine was a Gateway 2000 486/33. I think I got it around 1991 or 1992. The first and only time I've ever bought MS Windows in a retail box was Windows 3.0 for an older 386sx/16... The Gateway was the first of a continual sequence of machines that shipped with a Windows license built in.
For the time, the machine was relatively sophisticated. It had 8MB of memory and an ATI Mach 8 based graphics accelerator that was basically a single board combination of an 8514/A clone and a VGA Wonder. It drove the upgrade 15" monitor fairly well at 1024x768x8bpp. Over the life of the machine, I added a 400MB disk, a CD-ROM, a 17" monitor and converted it over to Linux 0.9something. It made a fairly reasonable low-end Linux workstation for a kid studying computer science.
Where the machine started to age was in memory capacity and bus bandwidth. Our machine was bought just before VLB became common, so all I/O had to be done over a 1984-era 8MHz 16-bit bus. This particularly killed video performance for anything beyond 8bpp. The 8MB of RAM was also pretty thin by the time Linux was running with X and Emacs. Emacs got the nickname 'Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping' for a good reason, as far as I could tell. Neither of those issues could be addressed without effectively replacing the entire machine, so I wound up replacing it with a later Micron P5-100. Either way, the Gateway was a great machine and very formative for me. RIP, Mr. Hammond.
For the time, the machine was relatively sophisticated. It had 8MB of memory and an ATI Mach 8 based graphics accelerator that was basically a single board combination of an 8514/A clone and a VGA Wonder. It drove the upgrade 15" monitor fairly well at 1024x768x8bpp. Over the life of the machine, I added a 400MB disk, a CD-ROM, a 17" monitor and converted it over to Linux 0.9something. It made a fairly reasonable low-end Linux workstation for a kid studying computer science.
Where the machine started to age was in memory capacity and bus bandwidth. Our machine was bought just before VLB became common, so all I/O had to be done over a 1984-era 8MHz 16-bit bus. This particularly killed video performance for anything beyond 8bpp. The 8MB of RAM was also pretty thin by the time Linux was running with X and Emacs. Emacs got the nickname 'Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping' for a good reason, as far as I could tell. Neither of those issues could be addressed without effectively replacing the entire machine, so I wound up replacing it with a later Micron P5-100. Either way, the Gateway was a great machine and very formative for me. RIP, Mr. Hammond.