Happy Birthday, Intel's Pentium

Replacing the 486, Chipzilla cocked a snook with the name as pundits had been confidently predicting it would be called the 80586. But Intel failed to convince the US Patent Office that it could patent a number, so it was named after Craig Barrett's horse instead.

We can count ourselves lucky we don't all have Dobbins in our PCs these days.

Built on a positively agricultural eight micron process and sporting a 50MHz front side bus, the Pentium eventually reached the dizzy heights of 300MHz before it was replaced by the Pentium II and finally put out to pasture in 1999. µ