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View Full Version : Bye Blue


st63z
03-22-2003, 01:15 AM
Hello D&M

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030321/sff019_1.html

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/030321/tech_sonicblue_6.html

Vincent M Ferrari
03-22-2003, 01:17 AM
It's sad... I had so many Diamond Video cards...

My first MP3 player was a Diamond Rio 500...

Sonicblue took over... Came out with great products... Made no money...

It's a sad day :cry:

st63z
03-22-2003, 01:21 AM
I still remember my snazzy Diamond VESA Local Bus video card, that I added max EDO SIMMs to... :)

Vincent M Ferrari
03-22-2003, 01:22 AM
I still remember my snazzy Diamond VESA Local Bus video card, that I added max EDO SIMMs to... :)

I remember that Diamond made my first VLB video card after having 8 bit ISA VGA cards... My God, this is so sad...

I remember buying RAM for one of my Diamond cards also... Those were certainly good times. I also remember how bloody huge those cards were AND they didn't have heatsinks :-)

Kati Compton
03-22-2003, 01:39 AM
I had a Diamond VLB card... I was the envy of my geek friends.

Weyoun6
03-22-2003, 01:59 AM
Ah yes... Stealth 64.... Hated that card....

Janak Parekh
03-22-2003, 02:08 AM
I had a Diamond VLB card... I was the envy of my geek friends.
Ah, but do you remember which one? I remember how l33t I felt with the Diamond Viper VLB -- it had a Weitek 8900 GPU and a 9000 "video playback coprocessor".

The Stealths weren't that bad, weyoun6. :) In any case, wasn't the Stealth 64 PCI? Or am I confusing models now?

--janak

Weyoun6
03-22-2003, 02:24 AM
The Stealths weren't that bad, weyoun6. In any case, wasn't the Stealth 64 PCI? Or am I confusing models now?

Trust me, if you had my experience with the card, you wouldn't be saying that they were not that bad. That thing never worked right.

As to it being PCI, I dont quite remember but since the computer was circa 94ish (P90) it could have gone either way.

Stealth 64 -> :microwave:

Janak Parekh
03-22-2003, 02:30 AM
Trust me, if you had my experience with the card, you wouldn't be saying that they were not that bad. That thing never worked right.
OK, I did a bit of research. The Stealth 64 was built on an S3 864 chipset. No, I didn't have that many problems with this card. Honestly, it was probably this:

As to it being PCI, I dont quite remember but since the computer was circa 94ish (P90) it could have gone either way.
Nope, that was almost definitely PCI. 99% of Pentiums sold were PCI-only. It's possible you had one of the early PCI mainboards, and that was a source of the problem.

--janak

Weyoun6
03-22-2003, 03:51 AM
My motherboard wasn't PCI only. In fact it was mostly legacy (I forgot the name) plugs. That may have been the problem. This is suprising that after almost 10 years of the name Diamond and Stealth being swearwords in my house, that it was the motherboard's problem.

Wow...

Icebaron
03-22-2003, 05:21 AM
I'm still using a viper v-550 in my main desktop... the card has survived through three PCs. I'm not a power gamer so I never bothered to upgrade.

Janak Parekh
03-22-2003, 06:10 AM
I'm still using a viper v-550 in my main desktop...
Well, the V550 is about 4-5 generations ahead of the card I was talking about. The V550 is a pretty darn decent nVidia TNT AGP-based card -- and you can still download updated drivers for it. The card I'm talking about won't fit in any modern computer.

(I'm sounding older by the minute... :oops:)

--janak

Ekkie Tepsupornchai
03-22-2003, 07:35 AM
I do remember that one of my first custom cards was a Diamond Stealth (had a whopping 2MB of RAM on it). I think that card was for my DX2/66 machine... that card was meant to replace the 1MB Trident video card that came with it.

:oops: I can't even remember the bus standard on that one... PCI came with the Pentiums and ISA had been the de-facto legacy standard for several generations... was it IDE?

Janak Parekh
03-22-2003, 08:22 AM
:oops: I can't even remember the bus standard on that one... PCI came with the Pentiums and ISA had been the de-facto legacy standard for several generations... was it IDE?
No, as Kati said, it was VLBus (short for VESA Local Bus).

--janak

Ekkie Tepsupornchai
03-22-2003, 11:01 AM
:oops: I can't even remember the bus standard on that one... PCI came with the Pentiums and ISA had been the de-facto legacy standard for several generations... was it IDE?
No, as Kati said, it was VLBus (short for VESA Local Bus).

--janak
It's been so long, I had to have VLB spelled out for me to remember that it was the pre-PCI standard (originally thought VLB was referring to a model number)!! :oops:

Kati Compton
03-27-2003, 04:16 AM
Anyone remember EISA? ;)

Vincent M Ferrari
03-27-2003, 04:17 AM
I had a 486 Dx-40 that had an EISA slot... Never did find a damned thing to go in it though :lol:

Janak Parekh
03-27-2003, 06:05 AM
I had a 486 Dx-40 that had an EISA slot... Never did find a damned thing to go in it though :lol:
Except ISA cards, of course. :D

Now Micro Channel, that was a beast. Those driver information disks were annoying as anything.

--janak

Ekkie Tepsupornchai
03-27-2003, 09:57 AM
Now Micro Channel, that was a beast. Those driver information disks were annoying as anything.
As I remember, Micro Channel was like our BetaMax of personal computing... architechurally superior to the x86 design... but a day late and a dollar short!!

Icebaron
03-27-2003, 03:39 PM
Now Micro Channel, that was a beast. Those driver information disks were annoying as anything.

--janak

Several months ago, I finally broke down and threw out my old IBM PS/2, as I was moving and wanted to get rid of some of the more massive items. This was the big daddy, the server tower... I swear that thing weighed at least 70 lbs. I actually had a microchannel ethernet card installed and a super trimmed linux install on the ~20 meg hard drive. It couldn't do much more than telnet, but it was a fun project.

Janak Parekh
03-27-2003, 05:16 PM
As I remember, Micro Channel was like our BetaMax of personal computing... architechurally superior to the x86 design... but a day late and a dollar short!!
Make that many dollars short. The real reason it failed was because of IBM's insane licensing fees. Rumor has it that IBM was peeved about not getting any money out of the PC clones, so they set up a expensive cost structure when the PS/2s came out. Of course, the whole idea tanked. Even though EISA, VLB and PCI came out much later, MCA really never got enough adoption due to those costs.

This was the big daddy, the server tower...
You mean the PS/2 Model 80 (http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/alf/ps2_80041/)? Yeah, that was a heavy unit. I saw one in the hallway in our building a couple of weeks ago.

--janak

Vincent M Ferrari
03-27-2003, 05:23 PM
Yeah, that was a heavy unit. I saw one in the hallway in our building a couple of weeks ago.

I didn't remember that one until I saw the picture. Jeebus. I remember moving servers in my school with the computer teacher and somer sucker... er... volunteers. That damned thing was a back-breaker, even for my young strong 15 year old back and with all the help.

But Janak, were they just keeping it there for nostalgia purposes or was it still functional?