Happy Birthday, Intel's Pentium
14 today
MARCH 22 1993 saw Intel ship the first Pentium processor, clocking in at an astonishing 60MHz.
Replacing the 486, Chipzilla cocked a snook with the name as pundits had been confidently predicting it would be called the 80586. But Intel failed to convince the US Patent Office that it could patent a number, so it was named after Craig Barrett's horse instead.
We can count ourselves lucky we don't all have Dobbins in our PCs these days.
Built on a positively agricultural eight micron process and sporting a 50MHz front side bus, the Pentium eventually reached the dizzy heights of 300MHz before it was replaced by the Pentium II and finally put out to pasture in 1999.
The INQuirer
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