The original PlayStation has turned 25. I spent many an hour with one of these units flying anti-gravity racers in wipEout, driving fancy sports cars in Gran Turismo and being a hyperactive bandicoot in Crash Bandicoot. Here’s a trip down memory lane with a full teardown from iFixit.

The PlayStation is notable for the simplicity and straightforward construction. I still think the grey slab intersected by a few circles is an iconic, timeless design, and back in the 90s it really looked like something from the future had materialised in our lounge room. At the time, the graphics were simply amazing – it was such a leap going from 2D bitmaps and sprites to 32-bit, full 3D graphics.

Long gone are the days when you can take apart a piece of consumer electronics with a #1 Philips screwdriver and a plastic pry stick.

Compared to the original PSX, even the 6-year old PS4 completely blitzes it in terms of specs.

The original unit had a single-core, 32-bit MIPS CPU running at 33 MHz, 2 MB RAM and 1 MB of VRAM and a double-speed CD-ROM drive. The PS4 on the other hand has an AMD Jaguar CPU with eight 64-bit Intel x64 compatible cores, a GPU that can hit 1.8 trillion operations per second, 8 GB RAM and a blu-ray drive. It’s also got ubiquitous built-in Ethernet and wifi for internet connectivity and a hard drive for game and save data storage.