Tom's Blurb: Thoughts to the Turn of the Millennium

Finally we've reached the end of December 1999, and the 'New Millennium' is waiting at our doorsteps. Many of you might remember their first time thinking of the millennium turn and the anticipation of it as an event too far away to take for real. I was sixteen years old when I realized that I would be almost 34 once we've reached the mysterious 'Year 2000'. At this time 34 seemed horribly old to me and I didn't really ever want to get there, probably representing an established and lame 'old man' without illusions and energy. Back then I had already worked with computers for four years, cracking games for C64 computers, changing operating system codes and enjoying to squeeze the last bit of performance out of Apple II and C64-systems with 6502/6510 assembler coding. Thus computers didn't really mean anything mysterious or particularly special to me, and my anticipation of 'computers in 2000' wasn't shaped in a science fiction kind of way as it was for so many other people back then and still even in more recent years.

Thank God my life since then was nothing short of crazy, unusual, unpredictable and sometimes quite unpleasant or even horrible too, so that I can be proud enough to say, that I have not become 'established', 'lame', 'old' or anything else a sixteen year old boy would think of when facing an almost 34-year old man. I know now that I have gained rather than lost in the last 18 years of my life. Nothing is more valuable than the experiences you make, regardless if you had to learn your lessons in enjoyable or rather very unpleasant situations and therefore I am not feeling one bit bad at 33, although I remember times in my life that I could have done without, as each of us does.

Many people may think that it is unwise to look back rather than looking forward. Especially the younger and more superficially shaped individuals regard this as a waste of time. I am certainly the last person that hangs on to the past, but I know that you can judge and understand the way ahead only by analyzing the path lying behind you. Thus I would like to paint a little picture of the years that this website has 'on its back' since its birth in February 1996, a few days before my 30th birthday. I will do this in my traditional way of looking at those almost four years in an analytic as well as philosophical way, as much as you may hate or love this attitude of mine. Please don't forget that it is neither my profession nor was it ever my intention to run an internationally respected 'website'. My roots are lying somewhere between Cologne, Stuttgart and especially in the University Hospital of Heidelberg, where I spent a considerable amount of time to become a medical doctor and a surgeon at that. There is a large number of doctors on this planet and each of them (or us) has her/his own philosophy, or in some unfortunate and in my eyes hopeless cases maybe not even that. My own philosophy for this profession was always rather different and thus often inconvenient or difficult for many of my colleagues or superiors and not exactly proper for making a quick career. This philosophy that I was touchingly reminded of when I watched the recent movie 'Patch Adams' is what is guiding me still, regardless what I do, and thus it is also influencing the way Tom's Hardware Guide is directed just as well. The most important thing is to understand the patient or reader, to never dare bullshitting her or him, but to be a caring friend as well as a normal human being with all its strengths and flaws, who doesn't want anything else more than help to take problems as well as sorrows of her or his shoulders. The most simple explanation is 'to be the very individual that I would expect if the roles were swapped '. This is a very high goal and it is a tough job to do every new day. I don't claim that I see this website as ever reaching this goal, just as I know that becoming the perfect doctor is just as close to impossible. What I can do however is try; either try good or try bad, but nevertheless never give up improving myself. I have the strong opinion that every person who is tapping himself on his back too much has stopped living. Life means permanent improvement, of course mixed with setbacks too, but the chance of getting closer and closer to the ideal that one should have, unless you've already stopped living a long time ago without even realizing it.

The Awakening - Tom's Roadrunner Page

A few of you might remember when I started 'Tom's Roadrunner Page ' back in 1996. At this time I had surfed the Internet for a good 1 1/2 year and decided to contribute to the online community with something that couldn't be found on the web back then. I simply 'published' the few experiences that I had made with my first Pentium-system on a 'Triton'-motherboard and to my big surprise the website became rather successful in a very short time. When I am talking of 'successful' I don't mean millions of page views. At this time you could be very proud if you served several thousand pages/month. The first break-through came with my 'ctcm motherboard survey '. Without any permission I had 'translated' the little processor-cache and memory benchmark from Andreas Stiller, the icon of the German c't-Magazine. I asked my readers to run this little program on their systems and then submit their results in an online real-time form that displayed the results in performance order right after submission. I had written a little PERL-program for this and the huge success of the survey got me into my first trouble. My English provider UNET disabled the submission-software, because if too many people used it, their server crashed. Within a few weeks I moved my website to the young and at that time rather small high-tech ISP pair Networks , operating out of Pittsburgh in the US. By this time my website was found under the URL 'sysdoc.pair.com' and because I stayed with Pair ever since, this URL is still working today. Pair has been through a lot with me and they have grown with my website as well. Until today I never found any reason to move to another ISP or to run my own servers, because Pair's service has been immaculate for the last 3 years and 3 months. Today Tom's Hardware Guide comes to you from no less than seven dedicated servers, all operated by Pair networks.

Late Fall 1996, The First Motherboard Review

The next milestone in the history of Tom's Hardware Guide was my first motherboard review in October 1996. It was the first hands-on motherboard-review published on the Internet altogether, and the tested board was the Asus P55T2P4 that I had bought and then reviewed. This motherboard was the first Pentium-motherboard that would let you alter the bus-speed from the Intel-default 66 MHz up to 83MHz. The review was a huge success and was followed in November 1996 by the '75/83 MHz Bus Speed Project ' that for the first time showed the advantage of the faster bus and thus L2-cache speed over pure processor core clock. This article received a lot of attention worldwide and many print-publications made own articles out of it. The result was also that many motherboard-makers suddenly included several bus clock settings and Abit introduced their first SoftMenu , which was heavily promoted by me, due to the easiness it offered to overclockers. Abit was actually the first company that jumped on the Internet-bandwagon. They saw the huge marketing potential of websites and half a year later they did whatever they could to supply any of the suddenly new upcoming hardware websites with their products, regardless how small the site was. Today motherboard companies couldn't really do without websites anymore, because it's the cheapest and easiest marketing tool there is and websites still consider it as a favor to receive review-units and tend to give good reviews in return.