Archives for July 2022

Our third PC bought in 2005 in Mauritius

8 July 2022 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

This would be our last custom PC after the first one bought in France in 1997 and the second one bought in Mauritius in 2003. We purchased the following components:

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Motherboard: Abit KV8 Pro
RAM: 2Gb
Storage: 160Gb HD
Video: Inno3D Nvidia GeForce FX 5200
Audio: Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96

For the first time ever, I had a 64-bits processor, the fantastic AMD Athlon 64 with AMD64 technology. The processor would boot into 32-bits mode and Linux would transition it to 64-bits where it became a completely different (and much better) processor. In fact, Intel would license the AMD64 technology after some time. At that time, I was running Gentoo Linux in 64-bits mode and it rocked!

I also had a whopping 2Gb of RAM which was a lot for the era.

I purchased the Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 to run X-Plane 9 under Linux and it worked really great on the PC (and also on the iMac I would buy a few years later).

Finally, the PC also had a Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96 which was a professional audio interface. It came with a break out box which took one bay of the computer. This had a number of connectors including audio ins and outs (in both analog and digital), a microphone number (with a good preamp), a headphone out and two MIDI ports (which I used with my trusty Kawai K4 synthesizer). I remember paying a large chunk of money to purchase the Terratec but I had a great time composing music using it.

I sold the Terratec to a friend of my brother-in-law when I moved to an Apple iMac in 2011 and, shortly after, purchased a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (which is still running great!)

Our second PC bought in 2003 in Mauritius

8 July 2022 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

We used our first PC bought in France for some time (with a new hard disk of course) and, five years after returning to Mauritius, decided to upgrade. I bought components from a shop in Port-Louis which does not seem to exist anymore (Professional Computers) and I got:

Processor: AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Motherboard: Asus A7V333
RAM: 256Mb
Storage: Maxtor 80Gb HD
Video: Inno3D Nvidia MX440 64Mb + InnoDV DV1000LE
Audio: Zoltrix Nightingale Pro 6

The processor was still an AMD but, instead of getting a K6, I upgraded to an Athlon XP aka a K7. The AMD processors were still so much better than anything Intel had at the time. They were more efficient despite running at lower frequencies and I loved the architecture. As a computer scientist with some computer engineering background, I could appreciate how good the AMD designers were.

I remember having a dual boot system with Windows XP and, probably, Ubuntu or Mint Linux.

We opted for an MX440 graphics card which was, in fact, an Nvidia Geforce 4 MX. I remember that the graphics performance were not fantastic (short of the real Geforce (non-MX) 4) but the card was cheap and, at that time, I had started to play less and use my computer more for music, programming and the web. I didn’t really need top-notch graphics performance.

But I still purchased an InnoDV add-on card to provide a Firewire port to the computer. I used that port to transfer videos in DV format (720 x 576) from my Sony DCR-TRV18 camcorder to the computer for editing. USB was not used for video at that time. The software I used for video editing was Sony Vegas and TMPEGEnc for encoding the rendered videos into H264 (a video codec which was quite new at the time). Interestingly, I would trade the camcorder for an Ethernet switch a few years later after moving to Full HD video…

I was still making music but I settled on the Zoltrix Nightingale Pro 6, a very cheap audio card, which, for some reason, contained a very good audio chipset, the C-Media CMI8738. At that time, I had just discovered software instruments such as mda Piano and Crystal and they worked fine on the card.

Our first PC bought in 1997 in France

8 July 2022 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

Christina and I bought our first PC when we were still studying in France. It contained the following components:

Processor: AMD K6-166.
Motherboard: Asus TX-97E.
RAM: 64Mb.
Storage: 4Gb HD.
Video: Matrox Mystique + Creative Labs Voodoo2.
Audio: Guillemot Maxi Sound 64.

Concerning the AMD K6-166 processor, I had spent days and nights reading on AMD vs Intel and, at the end, opted for the K6 which was, at that time, a processor with a fantastic architecture (compared to, say, the Netburst architecture of the Intel Pentium 4). I also loved the fact that I was different as most people conservatively chose Intel. Poor them… At that time, I hadn’t yet converted to Linux and I was using the quite good Windows 98 SE. The custom PC was sold with 32Mb of RAM but I asked for more. At that time, 64Mb was enormous!

Allow me to tell you a very painful story, one of my most painful memories in fact… The 4Gb hard disk we had on the computer contained all our university work collected over five years. Just prior to returning to Mauritius, I decided to remove the hard disk and go to a friend’s place to backup it on CDs. But we couldn’t find an adequate screwdriver and, as time was running short, decided to ship it to Mauritius by boat without any backup. When the computer arrived, it worked once (and I remember making a demo to my dad of everything I had on it). It never worked again and Christina and I lost everything! I am still very very sad (and, before you ask, I don’t have the hard disk anymore so there is absolutely no way to get the files again). Since then, I backup everything religiously!

In 1997, 3D was slowly becoming a thing! At that time, most computers came with 2D graphics cards (like the Mystique). To be honest, these cards could do some 3D but they were very limited and the image quality and frame rate abysmal. To play 3D games properly, one had to add a true 3D card and I had the Creative Labs Voodoo2 which was then the best 3D card in the world! I remember finishing “Quake” on it but also playing “Under a killing moon” with Christina.

I am a music composer and producer. I started at the beginning of the 90s with the Amiga and, of course, when I bought my first PC, I needed to get a good sound card for it. I settled for the Guillemot Maxi Sound 64. This was a professional audio card which I used both to connect a cheap controller keyboard through MIDI (which I gave to Frank, a good friend, when we left France) but also to output audio using the synthesis capabilities of the card. I remember using Twelve Tone Systems Cakewalk at that time for composing my music and also Sony Sound Forge for audio editing.

This was our first ever custom-made PC. Lots of memories… including losing all our work. But we did use it to write our thesis and do all our assignments and, in some ways, this little computer did make Christina and I what we are today.

Pity about the files lost though.