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In 1997 “Titanic” was a hit at the movies, Mars Pathfinder was
exploring the Red Planet, and Tiger Woods broke several
records at The Masters. Seem like yesterday? In that same
year, computer workstations with Pentium MMX technology blazed
at an unheard of 200 megahertz, boasted 32 megabytes of RAM,
and came equipped with hard drives approaching 2 gigabytes in
size. It wasn’t cheap. Both processor speed and memory had
more than doubled from the year or two before. Hard drives had
quadrupled in size, and all this power commanded a price just
short of three grand.
Todays off the shelf models make the glory year of ‘97 seem
ancient by comparison. With its radical new NetBurst
microarchitecture, Intel’s Pentium 4 processor has ushered in
a line of CPUs able to reach speeds up to 2.8 gigahertz,
though few current applications require such robust processing
power. In a mere five years, speed hasn’t doubled; it has
increased 10 to 14 times! If ‘97’s Pentium MMX was a racecar
hugging the track at 200 miles per hour, the Pentium 4 clocks
in as a rocket sled peaking at 2,800 mph! System buses, the
primary pathway from the CPU to its high-speed peripherals,
have gone from 100 megahertz to over 500. Standard RAM
packages now start at 128 megabytes, with 512 not unusual in
business class machines. That’s like a weight lifter whose
world-class bench lift suddenly increased from 375 lbs to over
6,000 lbs.
And hard drives? In the summer of 2002, Western Digital
introduced the first 200-gigabyte devices in its WD Caviar
line of 7,200 RPM hard drives. That’s a 100-fold increase in
five years! In fact, it would only require about 100 of these
drives to hold all of the text currently stored in the Library
of Congress, estimated at 20 million volumes. Such capacity is
so extreme that most business systems today sell with hard
drives in the 20 to 40 gig range, a mere ten to 20 fold
increase from 1997.
Best of all, prices have fallen, nearly by half, allowing more
consumers and small businesses than ever before to take
advantage of this remarkable progress.
Who Can Keep Up? With
the computer industry moving at breakneck speed, no business
without its own IT department can hope to stay abreast of the
latest opportunities, advantages, or, for that matter,
threats. Products and peripherals have become a blur of ever
expanding possibility.
“That’s exactly where Shiloh comes in,” said Gerry Halula,
Regional Sales Manager. “Yes, we provide the best in
comprehensive service, but thirty years experience has given
us a unique vantage point when it comes to the rapid advances
still underway. Customers can leverage their relationship with
us, using Shiloh as an outsourced IT department. You can count
on us to be on top of everything that works. If we have to
maintain it, the reliability better be there.”
That’s why Shiloh uses only Intel Pentium processors and
proven A-Open components, including motherboards, video cards
and Rewritable EIDE drives. Each PC comes with a year of
maintenance built in, and is configured to be the best
solution available for your business.
Just as you rely on Shiloh Service to be at the forefront with
regard to networking, security, and virus issues, rely on us
to have researched and have available the best in
workstations, servers, and peripherals.
“The technology is advancing even faster today than it has
over the last five years,” concluded Gerry. “The specialists
at Shiloh can analyze the options available, providing
solutions that make sense within your budget and have a proven
reliability.”
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