Soldering iron and retro hardware

[antus]

Im sure I did have some menu apps back in the day at some stage but this one is just grub to pick between linux and dos/win then once in dos/win its the config.sys menu to pick dos or windows with various combinations of memory drivers and debuggers.

[Ken]

Regular 320g ide on the left, and a huge 190mb on the right, which are still fetching north of $200 today, and this is a huge one for it's vintage, I have a 43mb one buried in a box of drives somewhere in the workshop, and dam are they noisy.

160mb_mfm_drive.JPG (68.33 KiB) Viewed 3529 times

[vlad01]

wow!

[vlad01]

Decided to put my system into a case finally. A full tower corsair obsidian case which supports E-ATX boards (just)

Not the best idea as I do need to replace the board with a NOS one next year when I got some spare cash as these are pricey despite being almost 15 years old.

Had faulty DIM slots, needs regular re-seating and crashes often when bumped. last PCI slots is burned out (accident), CPU fan headers died for some reason, mosfet died that drives them and the last thing I found the other day is the HDD LED driver is faulty. On when the system is off and does not light up with activity. but is lit on all the time when wired backwards which it shouldn't. means AC is coming out of the header as in the off state the LED is lit both ways lol.

Nature of used 24/7 workstation/server hardware. They can be a bit how ya doing after all that use.


Looks good otherwise and way better neater than my daily modern system ironically. The case I have for my daily predates cable management or even bottom mounted PSUs where this case is a current model case which suits the hardware great. Modern looking retro, opposite to a sleeper PC

Great variety of I/O on this one. One thing I love about workstation grade stuff from them is it's a forerunner for the modern stuff today so it's retro but modern compatible, same went with PSU. it used 24pin + 8 pin EPS 12V standard like 6-8 years before it was even a thing in consumer PCs so a modern PSU just plugged in. Back then PSUs were ATX with 5v high amp standards, just when ATX v2 came out with a 4 pin 12v connector. Amazing seeing something so old use today's standards.

[The1]

Loving the retro hardware guys, I haven't got anything old like those in dual sockets, this is about as old as it gets in my storeroom at work. Dell server, dual 800mhz p3 xeons, ultra wide scsi 3, dialup drac card. Love the case design how it slides out to get to the power board below.

[vlad01]

You know what would be cool to have is one of those Silicon Graphics super computers. Onyx I think they are called.


You might notice my PC has 2 NICs. That is because I installed a bios that is AMI in place of Phoenix from a similar rebranded board to get dual core support and stuff like that but makes the onboard NIC inoperable. So got the classic realtek 1GB NIC. Tried a couple of Intel ones but got nowhere with them, they must of died or something so in the bin they went lol Luck I had the realtek as it saved the day.

[The1]

i remember once we bought a new lab on computers at work, they had asus boards, the intel nics that were onboard must have passed by the machine in the factory and ended up with no mac address on the nics, the nics still worked fine but took a while to track down the issue once i noticed all the machines had the same ip address on dhcp.

[The1]

anyone seen this mobo? Rather expensive but you also get 2x ISA Slots and 8 Serial Ports. You could still run it all with an i7!

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Interloper- ... 2246609695

[vlad01]

Board like that are common in industrial machines like commercial printers and stuff alike.

I had seen a similar one with dual Opteron in a EFI vutek printer at work. It must of been during the period when intel had nothing good ie. pentium 4 days.

Now days it's xeons but I think it won't be long before we see epyc hardware in industrial use where throughput is needed. My mate's security/surveillance job sees all their hardware now epyc as they offer more performance per socket on average and cheaper.

I can't wait one day to pick up a used 64 core epyc system lol.

[Ken]

Dual vesa local bus! Those cards were long!

Yeah they weren't afraid to use all available real estate inside the box were they.
Couple of network on the left, a combo sound , modem and gameport card underneath, a couple of scsi on the right, with a foot long ruler underneath.

Or a new still in the (squashed) box IBM display adapter, which IBM sold for a mere $1,495.00 in 1986.

Or a new boxed Omni Labs AMS-8000 Audio Master.

Ruler got a bit boring, so I changed it for this shoot.