I don't get time to do too many changes here these days but even so, the site is
29 years old now and the changelog is getting quite long. There have been many reorganisations over that time, so some of the older links don't lead anywhere in particular.
March 2022 Switched over to a new hosting company and the Red Hill site was down for a few weeks until I got around to recoding a few things which were not compatible with the new host. While I am at it, I am adding a scattering of minor changes, mostly error corrections. Quite a few pages have had minor URL changes, which should mostly be transparent and not break bookmarks.
March 22nd 2013 New entry, the extraordinary Seagate Cheetah X15. I'm not sure why this wasn't in years ago, it was a very notable drive. Also many small changes and corrections; better pictures for the handsome Western Digital 136BA ; new entry, the exotic Seagate Medalist 3655 from 1993. A long overdue half decent picture for the handsome Seagate Medalist SL.
March 20th 2013 New entry, the exotic Seagate Medalist 3655 from 1993. A long overdue half decent picture for the handsome Seagate Medalist SL.
March 19th 2013 New entry, the obscure and rather forgettable Samsung V60.
March 17th 2013 Various minor corrections, in particular fixing broken links to do with the new(ish) Bigfoot pages.
May 20th 2011 New hard drive entries: the extraordinary IBM Ultrastar ZX, a monster speed demon from 1997; the Conner CP3000, a practical little 40MB trailblazer from 1990; and a representative example of a rather modern drive, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 of 2005. Plus lots of new photographs, mostly of Western Digital, IBM and Samsung drives. In some cases, I don't have the actual drive to photograph so I've had to improvise, but never in a misleading way, I trust.
May 15th 2011 Heavy-duty remodelling of the hard drive pages continues. Too many minor updates and new pictures to mention, but there are also new entries, including the delightful little Lapine Titan 3532 from the 1980s, the Quantum Fireball LCT 8 and Fireball LCT 10 from about 1999 or so, and the rather rare old Quantum Prodrive 80AT from 1991. Also from Quantum, the three previously unmentioned Bigfoot variants: the original Quantum Bigfoot, the Bigfooot TX, and the Bigfoot CY, all with pictures.
May 7th 2011 More new drives: the interesting little Conner CFS270A, the ubiquitous Seagate Medalist 1276 now gets its own entry instead of having to share with the Medalist 1082, and the slow but photogenic 6.4GB Fujitsu MPC3064AT.
April 25th 2011 As the remodeling continues, added quite a lot of new hard drive photographs and — for the first time in nearly ten years — new content! The drives are the Samsung P120 series from around 2008, and the glorious old Seagate ST3144A from 1992.
April 15th 2011 A great deal of remodeling work continues. The overall visual makeover is complete in rough-out form, and that will do until a much more fundamental redesign replaces it. Starting with the hard drive pages, an all-new software framework (a lot of php and a little bit of Javascript) underpins a much more comprehensive implementation of the new look and feel. Entries are now listed one per page rather than on great long pages that you have to scroll through (modern so-called "wide-screen" monitors are dreadful damn things, but I have to design for the screens that readers own, unfortunately - the old 4.3 standard was vastly superior) and new indexing arrangements are in progress. Eventually, I will scrap the obsolete shop front stuff and extend the hard drive changes to the CPUs and mainboards. But one task at a time.
April 1st 2011 The visual makeover continues, and seems to have morphed into a content review. Lots and lots of minor changes — a rewording here, a correction there, sometimes a tiny expansion — and for the first time in nearly ten years, I pointed my camera at a hard drive instead of the Australian wildlife. Three drives that always should have had illustrations now do: the 13GB Western Digital 136BA from 1999, the 420MB Seagate Medalist 425xe of 1993, and the peculiar little 40MB Seagate ST-157A of (at a guess) 1989 or so.
March 28th 2011 Started a visual makeover, trying to keep the general feel but make it better suited to current screens and systems, and adding room for a discreet ad or two in the margins.
March 25th 2011 Moved the site onto a new server (still with the same excellent hosting company — Arvixe, I recommend them). Various minor adjustments, none of them very interesting. (More recent note: the company was bought out by new owners a few years later and rapidly turned quite dreadful. Avoid.)
January 31st 2010 There hasn't been anything new here at redhill.net.au in the last five years, and the practical reality is that there might never be — computers aren't nearly as interesting now as they were back in the day, and my primary focus has long since shifted to other projects, notably wildlife photography and practical conservation work. Along the way I've done a lot of web design projects. The most recent was for MacNic Recruitment, medical and healthcare executive recruitment specialists.
One day I suppose I'd better revisit redhill.net.au and make it look a bit less 2005! But I probably won't — there are too many other interesting things to do!
July 20th 2005 Many more detailed changes over the past few days, the majority of them geared to presentation and organisation rather than content. Most of the apparently new content in the from the workshop section is actually quite old, but might be easier to find now. Also moved most of the content pages to new, more logical locations. In the main, you won't notice the difference as there are automatic redirects in place. The CPU section, however, has been split into a larger number of smaller pages so you might have to fossick a little for the part you want: the server can't tell whether the chip you are looking for is now in the first or the second of the two new pages, so it just sends you to the first of the two possible pages and hopes for the best. (By the way, this has provided us with a graphic demonstration of the extraordinary efficiency of the major search engines: the CPU pages have been more or less static for quite a few years, but within just a few days of moving things around, Google and Yahoo were right up to date again.)
Various other changes, such as splitting this page up into two halves to improve load times for people on modems and playing with the colour schemes again. Much cleaner css too.
July 12th 2005 Major updates, starting with a complete reorganisation of the file locations for the hardware guide, carrying on into a revised look and feel for most pages, and a little new content as well.
The obvious change is visual: most pages are now set to look their best at 1280 x 1024 resolution, but still OK at 1024 x 768. 1024 remains the most common resolution on the web right now, but the LCD revolution is changing that fast, so it's probably better to make the change now and be done with it. As always, our aim is to have pages remain viewable at lower resolutions too, albeit not as pretty.
| June 2005 browser stats |
|---|
| Internet Explorer | 61 % |
| Firefox | 26 % |
| Mozilla and etc. | 6 % |
| Opera | 4 % |
| Safari | 1 % |
| All others | 2 % |
We have now stopped supporting Internet Explorer 5. For years now the dreadfully buggy IE 5 has been making HTML coders cry with frustration at its inconsistent ways. Thankfully, it is down to low single-digit market share now, and the time has come to stop wasting time supporting such a horribly broken product. If you are still using it, do yourself a favour and step into the current century by downloading a modern browser (Mozilla, Opera, Firefox, please yourself which one).
Internet Explorer 6 still gets a lot of stuff wrong, but is nowhere near as bad as 5.x was, and most of its rendering bugs have reasonably well-documented workarounds, so we will keep on coding for it a while longer yet. It still accounts for more than half of all visits here but, as you can see, that share is shrinking very fast.
May 19th 2005 Recoded the shonky motherboards page into more-or-less modern css. Made a rather sloppy job of it as time presses, but it looks considerably better than it used to. Tinkered a little with the css too to make the print a fraction bigger. We seem to have too many other projects these days to hold out much hope of more substantal changes anytime soon.
May 17th 2005 First update in a long time. Been busy, among other things, writing code for the Regent Honeyeater Project. Transferred site to new server today. Took out last year's May Special from front pages. As a side effect of the server swap, all pages now claim a last modified date of May 2005, although most are much older than this.
April 30th 2004. CSS hacks to sort out some browser bugs: first in the new front-end section to rectify an issue with the left-hand menu div being too short where the page is long. A cross-browser thing this one: short of hacks, you can code it for Mozilla or Explorer, not both, and IE 6.0 gets completely weird. Now fixed in IE 5, IE 6 and Mozilla. Opera 6 and 7 still get it wrong. Second, an Opera 6 bug. In the CPU pages, Opera 6 can't follow a simple margin rule and needs an explicit "margin-bottom" rule as well. Now fixed.
April 29th 2004. A complete new front end. Recoded the first CPU Guide page in validated HTML 4.0, making minor text corrections along the way. This will break Netscape 4.x completely, and bend Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5 a little, but improve appearance and page load times in modern browsers. Other CPU pages to follow as time allows.
April 20th 2004. Started a revision of the HTML coding, using the 1999 and 2000 mainboard pages as the test cases. No change to the text at this stage
2003 No changes. Too much wildlife photography, not enough playing with hard drives!
September 7th 2002. Minor update to the 2002 drives page.
May 13th 2002. SpinPoint V30 picture.
May 9th 2002. K6-2/500 + picture, better 5x86-100 shot.
May 7th 2002. Maxtor 71336 drive added. New Epox 7KXA picture, the CPU manufacturers section returns with a renewed AMD entry. Others to follow. Many minor changes to the CPU guide to improve layout at 1600 resolution.
May 1st 2002. New Pentium II 233 and FIC PA-2005 pictures, Duron 1000 entry.
April 30th 2002. New Pentium 90 and 133 pictures, added an entry for the Cyrix MediaGX 166.
April 28th 2002. Have most of the site back up again, minus a lot of long-obsolete stuff that won't be missed, and with various improvements to make it easier to maintain. Still a few missing pages, which will reappear over the next few days.
April 27th 2002. Stripped out the entire content of the server and reloaded it, with some streamlined directory structures and filenames, and without a lot of orphan files. In a perfect world, this would work first time. Do I feel lucky?
April 25th 2002. Miniscribe 8425 picture; a new drive entry, the popular Seagate Barracuda ATA IV, an NEC V20 picture, and a particularly interesting view of a 4.3GB Quantum Fireball CR. New 486DX-40 picture, Pentium Overdrive CPU.
April 23rd 2002. Found an example of the very rare Pentium 200 Classic to photograph, paired with, of all things, one of those spectacularly low-rent mainboards from the PC Chips stable, the VX Pro.
April 22nd 2002. Added the Fujitsi M1614 from 1996, and a PC Partner VX board from 1997. Plus various more minor things over the past few days.
April 15th 2002. Added the Samsung P40 7200 RPM hard drive, and another 386DX-40 main board, this one one of the earliest examples. Also an earlier revision of the same 286-16 board that started the 1992 mainboard page, a 486SX-20 board, and the extraordinary Octek Hippo. Plus a whole stack of other boards, which it becomes tedious to list. Cruise around the '92 to 96 main board pages and you'll find them easily enough.
April 12th 2002. Added the Octek Jaguar V 386 main board, the 6MHz 286, and pictures of the Athlon XP 1700 and 1800.
April 10th 2002. Replacement minor pages: About, Employment, and so on.
April 9th 2002. Picture and revised text entry for the K6-2/550—a chip that looks as unlovely in the photograph as the damn things were in real life. The new picture of the Quantum Fireball CX, on the other hand, is well worth a look. Finally for tonight, an ugly shot of a quite extraordinary old motherboard: a DTK 386DX-25 that shows how the big old Baby AT form boards came to be called baby AT.
April 8th 2002. New motherboard pages! Very short so far, and several of the pictures need to be re-shot, but we now have at least made a start on extending the mainboard section back to cover the same sort of time frame as the hard drive and CPU sections. At this stage, that's 1992, 1993, and a 1994 main board pages.
April 7th 2002. Recoded this page. The old plain green was getting boring. It's not quite visually right yet, but a reasonable start.
April 6th 2002. Completed the recoding of the CPU guide with Pentium II and Super 7 page, the 2000 page, and the current page. Not just a recoding, lots of revised and expanded entries, particularly to the current CPU page which is, if not up to date, at least looking as though it might be before too long.
April 4th 2002. Completed recoding the first, second, and third pages of the CPU guide. Lots of new pictures too.
April 2nd 2002. Recoded a page of the CPU guide, in similar style to the main board and hard drive guides. The page in question, for no particular reason, was the 1999 page. Others to follow.
April 2nd 2002. Finished the recoding of the main board guide, a big job indeed. Removed some very dated sections from it, started putting them back in one by one. So far, a lavishly illustrated page on really bad motherboards is up, others to follow at a fairly low priority. Spent quite a while messing about with the hardware guide index too, not completely happy with it yet, but the old green was getting very boring, and at least it's a change.
March 30th 2002. Complete new 1995 main boards and 1996 main boards sections: recoded, with many new pictures and quite a bit of new text. Others to follow.
March 28th 2002. Completed the recoding of the hard drives section.
March 26th 2002. Extended the new coding to the oddball drives page.
March 25th 2002. A comprehensive re-coding of the HTML that underlies the hard drive guide. Still very rough and quite a bit to do with it yet to tidy up, but it's already looking nicer and should be lots easier to maintain. While there has been some attention to the content over the last few years, the base code itself has not been revised in any significant way for five years. The web has come a long way since 1997. Lots of new pictures too, plus the odd new entry here and there. So far, just the main listings of drives, the accessory pages will follow. Later on, we'll take the same idea to the main board and CPU pages.
March 20th 2002. Lots more pictures added to the hard drive guide.
March 17th 2002. Revised substantial parts of the text of the older CPU guide pages, and added quite a few more pictures: 286-10, 16 and 20 to the earliest page, plus the 386SX-16 and 25. For the 386 and 486 era page, the 386SX-33, DX-25 DX-33, and DX-40, a couple of 486DLCs, and then the 486DX-2/66.
March 15th 2002. Added the old NEC DSE1700 to the hard drive guide. Several new pictures of the older drives: Tandon 262, NEC D5126, Kyocera KC-20, Western Digital Caviar AC280 and AC2850, IBM H3256, DALA and Deskstar XP, Micropolis 2217, Seagate Medalist Pro, and Conner Cabo.
March 11th 2002. Final page of the CPU Guide revised. That brings the existing entries all up to date, but a great deal remains to do: several still have no text to speak of, there are lots of new pictures to add, and most of all, there have been quite a few new parts arrive which need to go in, notably the 0.13 micron P-IIIs and the Northwood P-4.
March 10th 2002. Second-last page of the CPU Guide revised.
March 9th 2002. Another page of the CPU Guide completed.
March 6th 2002. Finally bought another digital camera to take pictures of CPUs and drives with. We have had two or three Sony Mavicas before and liked them—we love the simplicity and flexibility of saving pics to either memory card or direct to floppy disc. This one is a Mavica FD-100: a bit big and cumbersome and as always with Sony products much too expensive for what it is, but the best camera we have used so far. Some of the pictures are starting to appear in the pages we are working on at present, the fifth and sixth generation CPU guides, which now sport the new look and are more-or-less up to date.
March 4th 2002. Extended the new look to the first, second, and third pages of the CPU guide. More to follow.
February 28th 2002. Started on a revision to the most recent part of the CPU guide. Considerable housekeeping to various bits.
February 26th 2002. Got tired of the old front pages (index.html and main.html) and combined them into one, with a cleaner look. The front page is the one and only place where it is often tempting to use some fancy coding to give the site a more contemporary look. In the end though, for all their visual appeal, flashy, graphics-heavy sites riddled with Javascript are the roadkill of the information superhighway. We resisted the temptation.
February 24th 2002. Lots! A major re-write of the hard drive guide. Some new drives added, an improved look, lots more detail on the older models. Removed several of the very dated minor pages (some of them had been more or less untouched in three or four years), and put the content to one side to be integrated into the main pages at some time soon.
February 20th 2002. A significant revision and update to the motherboard guide. Something of a new look ... well, a slightly less dated look anyway ... and (at last) a few of the newer boards are listed. Some more still to come.
February 1st 2002. Updated the hard drive links page. Resolved (yet again) to update more often. Some nice new mainboards have come out: maybe them first.
October 26th, 2001. More entries filled out in the current page of the CPU guide, revised the history of Cyrix page. More to come.
October 24th, 2001. Updates and revisions to the 2000 and 2001 hard drive pages.
October 21st, 2001. Motherboard Guide revisions, some new entries. CPU Guide updated for 2000, 2001 now posted in draft form at least—much more detail to add yet, mistakes to fix no doubt.
October 18th, 2001. Small revisions to the early part of the CPU Guide.
July 21st, 2001. A long overdue update to the more recent part of the CPU guide. More to come when we get the chance.
June 18th, 2001. Reformatted hard drive guide to improve appearance at 1280 resolution. We have mixed feelings about this, as it is always a compromise. Mostly we aim to achieve a decent look at the mainstream resolutions: 800 by 600 and 1024 by 768, and to avoid anything browser-specific (because the Internet is supposed to be open to all, not just users of one or another particular commercial product.) But this means 640 by 480 appearance suffers, as do the higher resolutions. It's possible to make it work at a wider range of resolutions, but, alas, at the cost of a great deal of coding time (which we don't have). If we did have the time, it would still be a bad idea, as there is nothing worse than slow-loading pages riddled with Javascript. If you run 1280 resolution, we aim to make all the major parts of the site work reasonably well in it over the next little while. If you are running 1600 or higher, well, you'll just have to use a smaller browser window.
March 13th, 2001. Added new products to the main board guide.
March 3rd, 2001. Substantially updated hard drive guide.
January 5th, 2001. Revised current hard drives page, substantially revised sixth-generation CPU guide. The seventh generation CPU page badly needs updating still. Alas, it's the most difficult one—perhaps next week.