The earliest dated article still active on Tom’s Hardware Guide is dated July 1, 1996. It was an article about CPU softmenus, something we pretty much take for granted today, but at the time was only available on select Abit and QDI motherboards. I’m not 100% certain that Tom’s Hardware Guide made its debut on July 1, 1996. In fact, I’m pretty sure it didn’t. But without a firm birth date, today’s as good of a day as any to look back at the very early days of a venerable PC hardware website.
The article referred more to Abit than to QDI. Dr. Thomas Pabst even said the QDI softmenu was just something he’d heard about, that he was using an Abit motherboard. , Maybe more than one Abit motherboard, but in these early days, the hardware makers weren’t sending him stuff. He was reviewing stuff he bought with his own money.
What a CPU softmenu is
If you’ve built your own PC using off-the-shelf parts, you’ve probably used a CPU softmenu. When you insert the CPU, the CPU doesn’t necessarily come up running at full speed. You have to go into the BIOS and tell it what speed to run the CPU at. Depending on the board, it may let you overclock, or it may not.
But this was a really new and novel thing in 1996. Before the CPU softmenu came about, you had to set your CPU using jumpers or DIP switches–usually jumpers–on the motherboard. Sometimes there would be a legend printed on the motherboard to help you out. But usually, you had to dig out a manual and find which jumpers set the bus speed, multiplier, and voltage. Somehow I never damaged a CPU by setting my jumpers wrong, but the opportunity was there.
Jumpers were cool, because in some cases, jumper combinations that weren’t in the manual did something. Another early Tom’s Hardware article told how to get an 83 MHz bus speed out of certain Intel 430HX-based Socket 7 motherboards.
The motherboard he was using didn’t have the 83 MHz bus speed, so it must not have been the legendary Abit IT5H. The date on his review of that board is January 1997, so a few months later. I actually bought that board on the basis of his review.
But being able to change CPU settings without opening the case and fumbling around for jumpers was very nice. It wasn’t something I needed to do often. But since I could do it without opening the case, I actually found myself doing it more. So did he, like, every time he booted into DOS.
Was this the first Tom’s Hardware article?
I really don’t think the CPU softmenu article wsa the very first Tom’s Hardware article. First, going to archive.org and viewing the oldest snapshot of the page and looking at the news link, he has diary entries going back to June 26.
In the truest ’90s Internet fashion, he talks as much about his personal life as about the site. It was a very different time, yes. Since he could talk about his girlfriend being in the hospital in June 1996, he had a following before that, and, therefore, articles before that. A really popular web site only had a few thousand regular readers at that point, so a popular website was like living in a small neighborhood or town where everyone knew what was going on with everyone else. Those days of innocence are long gone. You don’t dare divulge details like that lest foreign adversaries snarf them up and use them against you later.
But the third paragraph of the article gives an even stronger implication this wasn’t his first:
However, for the performance hungry visitors of my website this is the perfect way to tweak the system performance from the comfort of your chair. You even can run Quake at higher settings as Windows95, which wouldn’t run at the same settings, without ever opening your computer case.
What he was saying in other words was that you could clock your system higher under DOS than under Windows 95, so when you booted into DOS to play Quake or another DOS game, you could overclock without having to open your case.
In 1996, when you were publishing your first piece of content, you didn’t assume you had visitors. It took time for people to find you, and in those pre-Google days, people generally found you before the search engines did. If you didn’t have an audience before the search engines found you, chances are the search engines wouldn’t boost you all that much. Just making that statement alone suggests he already had traffic.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.