PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

PC 99 System Design Guide

PC 99 System Design Guide (PC 99) is a book-length document that defines required, recommended, and optional (neither required nor recommended, but must meet the standard if included) characteristics for several classes of PCs, including Basic PC 99 (further subdivided into Consumer PC 99 and Office PC 99), Workstation PC 99, Entertainment PC 99, and Mobile PC 99.

PC 99 is the penultimate member of a series of documents, which began in 1990 with the first MPC standard, and continued with the PC 95, PC 97, and PC 98 revisions. PC 99 was formalized in mid-1998, took partial effect in July 1999 for systems to be delivered in Q4 1999, came into full effect January 1, 2000, and defined the standards for systems and components delivered through late 2001. In some ways, PC 99 was unrealistically far ahead of its time—for example, in recommending Device Bay and 1394 as standard storage interfaces. In other ways, it was far behind—for example, in requiring only a 300 MHz processor and 32 MB of RAM for some configurations. Some portions are skewed to Intel CPUs (e.g., an L2 cache requirement was cut from 512 KB to 256 KB when Intel shipped Coppermine Pentium III CPUs with 256 KB L2 cache—probably not a coincidence), while many others are skewed toward Microsoft operating systems. Neither of those is surprising in the document that defines the Wintel standard. All of that said, PC 99 was and remains an important document because it defined the direction of PC ...