[HN Gopher] A Brief History of Cyrix
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       A Brief History of Cyrix
        
       Author : zdw
       Score  : 57 points
       Date   : 2024-11-03 20:47 UTC (6 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
        
       | beardedwizard wrote:
       | I attended a charter school that got some kind of deal of cyrix
       | based windows pcs. It was no end of headaches and compatibility
       | issues. The school chronically mismanaged money and it seems like
       | cyrix was being pushed in edu as low cost.
        
         | anon27394 wrote:
         | I had the same experience with Cyrix processors (6x86). They
         | were not suitable as a drop in replacement for Intel
         | processors.
         | 
         | Oddly enough, I also had the pleasure of using them at a
         | fiscally mismanaged charter school.
        
       | platetone wrote:
       | I owe my entire career to the high school internship I had in the
       | IT department at Cyrix in Richardson, circa 1996. It was awesome.
       | Learned everything about building PCs for employees and Windows
       | networking. So much free hardware walked out the door -- usually
       | stuff that was slightly out of date, just stacks of it
       | everywhere. Spent the next three summers there through college
       | too. It was really exciting there at that time, Internet age just
       | taking off. They had beer at 4PM on Fridays out back.
       | 
       | Everything went downhill with the series of acquisitions. Anyway,
       | I'm grateful for my time there... I can trace where I am now
       | directly back to the guy who first gave me a chance there.
        
         | Sindisil wrote:
         | >> Everything went downhill with the series of acquisitions.
         | 
         | Story old as time, seldom (though not never) ending well.
        
       | flomo wrote:
       | I was going to post about something, but according to Wikipedia,
       | the IBM 486SLC found in super slow PS/2 crap computers had
       | nothing to do with the Cyrix 486SLC. Learn something new
       | everyday.
        
       | tirant wrote:
       | It's very interesting to learn about Cyrix and how innovative
       | they happened to be. Back in the 90s most of us, at least in
       | Europe, learned about Cyrix from either friends or shop clerks.
       | And back then Cyrix had a terrible reputation, they were
       | considered almost as illegal Intel CPU clones. AMD also had a
       | terrible reputation until they released their Socket 7 AMD K6
       | CPUs and later on their Super Socket 7 K6-2, K6-3 CPU's just
       | before their amazing Athlon and Duron family. Cyrix never
       | regained any reputation, and slowly their offerings ended up
       | mixed with VIA or Centaur CPUs. Celeron and AMD CPU's were
       | already cheap enough so no one was buying Cyrix anymore to just
       | save $20-$30 on a $1000 computer.
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | Yeah it was always something to get, if one couldn't afford the
         | real Intel CPUs as means to a discount in white label PCs.
        
       | ofrzeta wrote:
       | I had a Cyrix 486 somewhere around 1992. Working with Windows NT
       | and Visual C++ turned up subtle problems that could be worked
       | around with some compiler switches.
        
       | cjaackie wrote:
       | I remember the excitement of scoring a surplus Cisco asa 5505 for
       | a reasonable price and immediately cracking it open to see what
       | was inside. To my amazement - the cpu had an AMD logo! I went
       | down the rabbit hole of finding out what this mysterious chip was
       | and turns out it was one of the cyrix/via/amd Geode SoCs
       | mentioned by the writer.
        
       | deepsquirrelnet wrote:
       | My dad built our first windows 95 computer using a Cyrix chip. I
       | can only assume it was a 6x86 from reading this article.
       | 
       | We had so many issues with it that we eventually replaced it with
       | an intel-based HP. But in those days we were upgrading from
       | 133MHz to 350MHz in the span of about a year and a half (ca.
       | 1997).
       | 
       | By the time I built my first computer in college, the Athlon XP
       | was breaching 1GHz, triple the clock speed in another 3 years
       | time.
       | 
       | Fast times with "slow" computers. But it was sure fun to feel
       | these major leaps in computing practically every year.
        
       | Clubber wrote:
       | My first computer gig was me and a buddy upgrading his dad's
       | office with Cyrix chips. 486 133MHZ I believe. We made $800 and
       | to a college kid, that's all the money in the world. I bought a
       | JAZ drive with my share.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-09 23:00 UTC)