They were not very popular by that time but non the less there had to be some demand or they wouldn't have existed. Baby AT boards are pretty rare to find these days as it is let alone a late model. These were meant for those who didn't want to replace everything but wanted some sort of an upgrade. I am sure that there must have been some demand from industry.

I came into possession of a huge full tower case about a decade ago, solid steel construction, about a meter high. And it had a Socket 370 baby AT motherboard with a Celeron 733 in it.

I ended up trading it to someone else I think. But for the brief time I had it, it seemed pretty nifty.

As for Pentium 2's... our family upgraded from a 486 to a P2 266, which we stuck with for about 5 years.
I'm just guessing here but I think that many people bought their first computer, or upgraded their DOS machines, in the windows 95 era, so around the time of the Socket 7 Pentium. Win 95 was a pretty big step over 3.11/DOS. (At least, I remember many of my friends getting PC's with Win95 around that time). That was also about the time that dialup internet started becoming popular in Australia.

I guess that people who just bought a PC a couple of years ago weren't ready to upgrade, and the Pentium 2 was only out for about 2 years before the P3 came along. By the time they were ready to upgrade the P3 and its Celeron counterpart were on the market.

Also if you've got any Celerons that are less than 533MHz (either slot 1 or socket 370), they are based on the Pentium 2 core.

I think that's the case you gave me, DK! 😀

It's pimpin' now, dual S7, Rendition, 3Dfx, AWE64 Gold, it's got room for it all! 😁

One day I'm going to re-paint it and oxy-clean the front panel, it's going to look rad.

Nah that's a different case... the one I'm talking about above, I traded about a decade ago. Redhatter gave me the one that you have now. I had grand plans for it which never came to fruition. Glad to hear it lives on 😀

I had one of those AT Socket 370 systems as well. Celeron 800 on a very slow SiS-based board.

And here's a 478 AT board! 😳
http://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/2 … 1/etc_p4xb.html

PIIs were common in my area back in 2006 or so. I think I had five or six PIIs I rescued from the dumpster. These days, the dumpsters usually contain PIIIs and Dell 2350s (the old AGPless P4s that shipped with WinXP and a healthy 128MB of RAM) 🤣

In the early 2000s Baby AT PIII motherboards were immensely popular for budget builds 'round these parts, apparently they allowed for system builders to use up their AT case stocks and provided a way for the budget conscious consumer to upgrade their aging AT-based PC.

Boards like the dual Socket 370/Slot 1 PCChips M748 were a very popular choice. With its socket/slot design and integrated everything it became the de facto standard for low budget builds and upgrades. For a good time they were everywhere - homes, schools, businesses, you name it.

Cheap Chinese motherboards like the M748 and the M598 in Baby AT form factor are what really brought computing to the masses here - builders churned them out and people bought them in droves because they were truly affordable. It marked the time when PCs became really mainstream, many families who couldn't afford a PC before were buying these and getting on the Internet for the first time. For what regular people did back then (early Internet, word processing, DOS games) performance was more than adequate.

Even though they were everywhere around me I've never used them much, at home I jumped from a K6-2 500 to an Athlon XP 1700+ but I do remember that the M748s would fly with Windows 98SE, apparently XP was tolerable but most systems I've seen stuck with 98SE until retirement. People were still using a lot of DOS based programs back then and XP didn't became a necessity until 2005 or so.

This brings me an intriguing question. When did Baby AT cases stop being made? I've got one that was manufactured in 2000 which sounds pretty late to me and it would help to explain the popularity of the M748s - AT cases stuck around for a long while.

I have a M748 with a Slot 1 PIII-500 that I picked up from the curb a while ago. I think it'd feel right at tome in that AT case from 2000. 😁

at home I jumped from a K6-2 500 to an Athlon XP 1700+

OT, but I did a similar jump. Pentium II era Celeron 400 on i810 to Athlon XP 1800. That was the best day of my life at the time. Still have the Athlon.

All but 1 of the old (pre 2000s) PCs I've acquired in recent years have been Pentium IIs. One of which I upgraded from a Pentium II 450 to a Pentium III 450 partially because I was getting sick of the sight of the Pentium II 😀. Not that there's anything wrong with them, it's just that the vast majority of my old PCs and related stuff were Pentium II and Pentium II era, and I decided I wanted something other than a Pentium II, even if the difference was as little as Pentium II 450-Pentium III 450.

Oh god, the PC-Chips M598. The first computer my father built for me was based on one of those. He clearly wanted to keep costs down.

That motherboard was such a piece of crap. No AGP slot, horrid layout with cables all over the place, SiS 530 integrated graphics that lost DirectDraw acceleration if you updated past DirectX 7, instability at 100 MHz FSB (yes, I tried PC133 RAM)...needless to say, I don't miss it one bit.

As for Pentium II-era hardware, I found that a Pentium II 233 MHz system was way too slow for my liking when it came down to late 1990s games. I figure that if I'm going to build a retrogaming system, I'm better off using Pentium III or 4-era hardware (on a mobo with ISA slots for sound cards' sake, of course) and underclocking if necessary.

Asus P2B-B + Powerleap+Celeron 1400mhz ! Woot-woot.... 😁

http://www.ebay.com/itm/251035899463

(no, I did NOT buy this one!)