The gentleman who "Broke the 1GHz barrier" with one of these boards also wrote the first Linux credit card terminal software, which was awesome, simple and quite reliably rugged.
I had caught a small office client that needed new desktops all around just as someone cut an amazing sale on these boards. The cheap Celerons were of course abundant so these folks got dual CPU workstations with Voodoo3 graphics cards for an incredible price and wound up being an extra effective company for a couple years due to the Quake3 matches boosting morale.
I think I still have a couple of those on the pile. As I recall I had one running my house audio up til 2008 or so, probably holding a SoundBlaster 64 card.
Loved my BP6, tricked out with dual overclocked Celeron chips and was my daily driver running Win2000 in the most absurdly large case ever, just in case I needed to install many hard drives and CD ROMs! Lots of empty space.
It ended its life doing service in a data centre for 4 more years as a temp WAP Gateway running Red Hat 8.something. Only motherboard I ever got excited about.
The BP6 is what got me interested in SMP, but I really moved into SMP with the Tyan Tiger MP (and then MPX when my MP got replaced under warranty, don't remember why). That machine "survived" (with motherboard replacement) from 2001-2007(or 8) when I moved to an Abit IP35-Pro with a Q6600 that lasted me as my daily driver for 10+ years.
I had one of these for years, with two 400 MHz Celerons clocked up to 500 MHz. The setup was not really stable, though. Used it on Windows NT4, Linux and FreeBSD.
I used it with 2x 466Mhz Celerons on stock speed. It was my first experience with SMP. When compiling something with 'make -j1' on one CPU, Netscape 4.5 would run smooth on the other CPU.
It did crumble under load though. Compiling C++ software would fill the CPU caches and the shared memory bus at 66Mhz could not handle all the I/O.
It was imcompatibled with the Alcatel Speed touch USB (ADSL modem): after few minutes, the PC was rebooting. The driver was not SMP compatible. It took some weeks before I could change the modem, "hopefully" a friend in the same school year had the same motherboard and the same issue.
Ah memories... Had this with overclocked Celerons and the Thermaltake Golden Orb[1] coolers. Looked awesome!
Was my first experience overclocking as well. Quickly learned the difference between boot stable and still working after a night of Prime95.
Was my first SMP programming experience as well. Had been writing multithreaded code for a while before, but never had access to anything but a single core machine. Most of my existing code promptly crashed on the BP6. Took a while to realize access to OS resources had to be managed as well.
Ended up running Citrix Metaframe on NT4, so I could do remote login. Got me hooked on RDP, the primary reason I've never been able to use Linux as my main desktop.
Had it for many years until it was just too slow and noisy. Felt sad when I had to get rid of it.
I never ran BeOS or had this motherboard, but I immediately had memories of the Celeron 300A from 1998. Was virtually guaranteed to run at 450Mhz. It replaced my parents’ Pentium 133 which was released just 3 years earlier (I say that now but 3 years earlier for a 16 year old is huge). Voodoo2 came out in the same year. You couldn’t even get this stuff in a prebuilt PC so people taught each other how to build from components. High speed internet was just becoming widely available in North America. Linux was just starting to spread beyond CS people to nerdy young people. Several other OSs and architectures had promise but ultimately failed.
I’m too young to remember the first PC boom, but at least in my lifetime there was never a more exciting time for home computing than 1998.
Running this with BeOS was the best computing experience I've ever had. BeOS was good with resources before, but absolutely screamed with dual Celerons.
Have spent weeks to hunt down two identical CPUs for it, then somehow managed to insta-kill the first one during installing the cooler. Hell yeah, those coolers were monstrous beasts back then, hard to tame, with a locking mechanism invented by the Devil itself. After that never had a dual-CPU setup...
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I had caught a small office client that needed new desktops all around just as someone cut an amazing sale on these boards. The cheap Celerons were of course abundant so these folks got dual CPU workstations with Voodoo3 graphics cards for an incredible price and wound up being an extra effective company for a couple years due to the Quake3 matches boosting morale.
I think I still have a couple of those on the pile. As I recall I had one running my house audio up til 2008 or so, probably holding a SoundBlaster 64 card.
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It did crumble under load though. Compiling C++ software would fill the CPU caches and the shared memory bus at 66Mhz could not handle all the I/O.
It was imcompatibled with the Alcatel Speed touch USB (ADSL modem): after few minutes, the PC was rebooting. The driver was not SMP compatible. It took some weeks before I could change the modem, "hopefully" a friend in the same school year had the same motherboard and the same issue.
Was my first experience overclocking as well. Quickly learned the difference between boot stable and still working after a night of Prime95.
Was my first SMP programming experience as well. Had been writing multithreaded code for a while before, but never had access to anything but a single core machine. Most of my existing code promptly crashed on the BP6. Took a while to realize access to OS resources had to be managed as well.
Ended up running Citrix Metaframe on NT4, so I could do remote login. Got me hooked on RDP, the primary reason I've never been able to use Linux as my main desktop.
Had it for many years until it was just too slow and noisy. Felt sad when I had to get rid of it.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/583/7
I’m too young to remember the first PC boom, but at least in my lifetime there was never a more exciting time for home computing than 1998.
And the Win2000 experience was fantastic too.
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/i815epacorp6a815epd/index.html
Have spent weeks to hunt down two identical CPUs for it, then somehow managed to insta-kill the first one during installing the cooler. Hell yeah, those coolers were monstrous beasts back then, hard to tame, with a locking mechanism invented by the Devil itself. After that never had a dual-CPU setup...
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/cooling-systems/socketa-cooler...
Had the Spire WhisperRock III