It may seem quaint viewed from our world of tomorrow, but back in 1998, people got legitimately hot and bothered by Intel’s move to an amazing—wait for it— .25 micron process in the second-gen new Pentium II. For those too used to our Nanometer ways, the original Deschutes .25 micron processor would be 250 nanometers.

Besides the move to 250 nanometers,  Deschutes also ushered in the 100MHz front side bus for the Pentium II ( although the 100MHz FSB didn’t make it for this story.) The reign of the Pentium II should be remembered for Pax Intel— a time when its chips would bring fear into its competitors who were still trying to make AGP work with Socket 7.

Here at Maximum PC we take the "Maximum" part pretty seriously, covering the bleeding-edge, the next-on-the-horizon and the over-the-top. That's a tradition that goes back to before maximum was even part of our name, back to the days of boot. A fine example of this is boot's Speed Trap feature from May 1998. Penned by current Editorial Director Jon Phillips, this feature highlighted and reviewed three top systems from the year. Read on to see which systems were breaking the speed limit, and which were stuck in the slow lane.

Last week was the very special premiere of our sister site: MaximumTech.com - which made us look back fondly on the day that Maximum PC made it's first appearance. So, in the name of Old School Mondays, we went ahead and tracked down the sneak preview pages of Maximum PC when they first appeared in the final issue of boot. Check out our very first MaxPC pages below and see how much (or how little) has changed over the past thirteen years!

Wondering whatever happened to VideoLogic and the PowerVR technology it licensed to NEC in the late 1990s? Unlike so many other 3D chip manufacturers that flamed out, were acquired, or simply gave up on the consumer graphics market at the tail-end of the last century (3Dfx, 3DLabs, Matrox, Oak, Rendition, S3, and Trident, to name a few), VideoLogic is still going strong. And so is PowerVR.

VideoLogic did change its name in 1999, to Imagination Technologies. 3Dfx ruled the market at the time, leaving many of us to chuckle at Charles Bellfield’s claim that “PowerVR is a technology with long legs.” But Bellfield had the last laugh 10 years later when Imagination licensed PowerVR to Apple for use in the iPhone. You’ll find PowerVR technology in the iPad and in a host of other smartphones and tablets, too.

Bellfield, by the way, eventually left NEC to rejoin Imagination Technologies. He currently heads the company’s North America Internet radio operations as General Manager, PURE North America.