Guy Kewney

You can now buy a motherboard not specifying the type of processor-mounting technology, the number of hyper-transport tracks or the virtual machines you want, but the colour of the PCI sockets into which you'll plug your network and graphics cards.

This should come as no surprise. When turbo-boosted cars first appeared, I drew the attention of a friend to the appearance of their exhaust pipes. "I'll bet that, within a year, people will be selling add-ons that look like that," I wagered.

Within a year, you could buy a clip-on exhaust tip that turned a narrow-gauge single pipe into a twin-pipe chrome-plated super vent.

Does this mean that people can no longer tell the difference between a fast machine and a slow one unless it says 'fast' on the side? Do all machines run at the same speed because of the internet? I don't think so.

Recently, I went to Swindon to officially 'open' a new museum of computing (www.digitalhistory.org.uk) at the University of Bath, which had a display of pioneering personal computers. There were some classics on show, as well as some classic dogs.

For instance, there was a BBC Micro, which had long-term success and moved into all sorts of permanent installations and applications, as well as a cut-down version of the Acorn, known as the Electron.

In its day, this would have been expensive at half the price, because it didn't run any BBC Micro software properly.

There is also a Jupiter Ace, basically a Sinclair ZX81 with a Forth language interpreter that replaced the standard Basic chip. It contained a full implementation (4K of Rom) of the Forth language, and multitasking, on a Zilog Z80 processor - 8-bit processor bus and 16-bit address bus.

You wouldn't want to use any of the machines in the museum to actually do any computing work, though.

OK, there are some classic games that only work on the Spectrum; even the emulators which people have concocted for the Spectrum can't get over the fact that they can be played properly on the original.

There are some cult games, too. For example, Elite on the Beeb is a very different game from the PC port version.

You had to be there, though, to know what a tedious job it was to load software off an audio tape cassette at 70 bits per second using Cuts (Computer Users Tape Standard) modulation. You had to write your own software, in rotten Basic implementations.

There's no comparison between the computer and a car: a 20 year-old car is still a useful machine, while a 10 year-old PC is a 486 with 30MB of disk space and 640K of memory, which is useful for nothing.

It's easy enough to understand why people are decorating their PCs. Whizz-kids going to Lan parties carrying a full-sized PC case on their backs don't have the same conviction you used to get - that they have something special. The visual effects on an Xbox are better than some workstations.

The gap between the Pentium III and Pentium 4 wasn't exciting. However, this will change and the reason is something that I warned readers about six months ago: the shift to 64-bit.

Intel used to argue that nobody would want a 64-bit desktop. Its Itanium was going to be a server-only platform that was going to kick the stuffing out of big Unix Risc platforms. Compatibility with the 8080 chip would finally be forgotten. The x86 was history.

AMD decided to keep the ghost of the 8-bit world alive and the Athlon 64 was born. But I want a dual-processor Opteron workstation with a new nVidia graphics chipset on the motherboard and I'll be sure to find games that run on it.

Nobody is going to port a version of Quake onto the IA64 platform, but it will be easy to get them transferred to Athlon 64.

In the past, when we shifted from 16-bit 286 to 32-bit 386 systems, compatibility was the primary focus. Intel had to get it 100 per cent right.

However, with Intel having abandoned x86 compatibility, AMD's requirement isn't so onerous. It just has to be noticeably more compatible than Itanium, which isn't hard.

From what I've seen of the Athlon 64, it will fly on games. There will be no need for flashing lights on the motherboard if it really makes that much difference.

Yet, I suspect now that the fashion for decorating cases has started, it may turn out to be a trend that won't go away.

I've seen flashing LEDs mounted on the corners of cooling fans, ostentatious Peltier device-cooling systems and green transparent plastic cases. Moore's Law may be with us still, but the fashion bug is even harder to kill.

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