Dell D510 Laptops (serial and LPT1)

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DWS
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Dell D510 Laptops (serial and LPT1)

Post by DWS »

Pretty sure these laptops have a DB9 serial port and DB25 printer port. Price seems reasonable, not sure if anyone really needs old hardware like that since USB to serial etc exists and seems to work pretty well, but here they are in either case.

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/it ... 451994708/

Here's a pic of the back side. My first job I worked on these, they were all over the plant, but they were a really reliable model. Not a super power house, but it also is from the win xp days =).

Image
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Re: Dell D510 Laptops (serial and LPT1)

Post by In-Tech »

I have a couple of these left too, they work well with WinXP and mainly kept them for my pocket programmers and DataIO programmer, Eprom programming stuff that was parallel port. Now I have usb programmers and 3 Dell D630's, one with XP for older software, one with Win7 and one is a dual boot solid state drive, XP and Win10. Good workhorses :)
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Re: Dell D510 Laptops (serial and LPT1)

Post by DWS »

Pretty sure you get parallel port and db9 serial on the D630's too, we had those at work as well. You might need the docking station to get the physical interface.

Image

We were running E6410's if I remember the model right, got the E6430's in and right after that I moved on to another job.
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Re: Dell D510 Laptops (serial and LPT1)

Post by MudDuck514 »

I have a Lattitude E6400 that has physical ports as well as the Pro2x Docking station and 130w power adapter.
Runs XP, &, or 10 easily enough though it only has a 160GB HDD.

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Re: Dell D510 Laptops (serial and LPT1)

Post by DWS »

Pretty sure the E6400 should be SATA, you could upgrade the drive in it to an SSD for faster response/boot times and longer battery life. Should be able to throw atleast a 1TB drive in no problem. I think 2TB or 4TB was the line where you had to make sure the bios supported the larger drive.

We had something like a 4-5 year life on computers, the 6400's went away near the end of the time I was there, and I helped setup the E6410s when first came in as my 3 week temp job that turned into a workstation tech job (printers, computers, touch of networking, patch panels, etc). If something broke down, our flip phone was the one called or the proper channel was help desk. We had a pager at first too xD. Makes me feel old >,<.

We had a few super computers on site too, I think they were something like $25k and were "clients", the server was a 16 blade server (16 computers in one housing sharing resources). The blade server was going to be something like $250k. They took their physics based flow render from taking 3 weeks down to 3 days, or maybe it was 3 days down to 3 hours. Which ever it was a massive improvement from the Linux machine someone before my time built for them. Funny the Linux box was behind a door that required special access to unlock, while the 3 $25k ones ended up at the users' cubical and really anyone could go see it. Big old monster SGI boxes. Looking at pics, the case of the Octane III matches, but it wasn't a blade server, it had 2 or 3 of Nvidia's FX series graphics cards if I remember right. Basically a pretty balling server board for the time with the graphics cards that were like $5k each. Yay, old memories of my first job, only 2 jobs ago xD.

Also note, the wheels under the computer, it's not the standard width, it was about 2 computers wide, and it was so tall it wouldn't fit under the desk in the cubical or it just barely fit. I kind of remember having to adjust the height one night (midnight worker).

Image

The blade server was something like this, drawings but you can kind of get a sense of the scale. It shows 8 power supplies, don't recall how many it really had. I'm thinking that was around the time of dual and maybe quad core CPU's, so 16x 4 cores would be 64 cores, out of this world for back then, now you can get an AMD Epyc cpu with up to 64 cores, and my current desktop has 16.

Image

If you can't tell, I kind of liked my first job =), got a 50% pay increase to go be a database admin for a year though, then went self employed. Guy that hired me in retired, so I probably don't have an inside contact anymore. You can't get directly hired in, it's all contract workers and if you get really lucky, you get to be a direct hire. One of the new programmers at the time I talked to was fresh out of college, first programming job, $80k/year. He didn't even seem to like programming and some of the trouble shooting I helped suggest ideas (I didn't know databases back then), and I was making enough sense he fixed the problem in like 15 secs after a quick test. He was pulling the last 10 error logs but instead of pulling the logs by date and adding the data that way, he was selecting like the type of logs, joining say the app name to it, etc then ordering by date and such. I know now he was doing a full table scan on the logs table with several millions of lines. I guess that kind of what kicked my interest in databases for the job I got offered later.
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Re: Dell D510 Laptops (serial and LPT1)

Post by vlad01 »

SGI, wow! that's a blast from the past. Looking at the logo that must of been the time the company went bust and got bought out.
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Re: Dell D510 Laptops (serial and LPT1)

Post by DWS »

Yea I suspect so, I left before they got the blade server online. Tim and Tim were working on it, they called their little group T^2 (T squared). I was more of a grunt worker, midnight's, and fix stuff that could be done overnight when things were dead. I think we did pretty good, something like 1500 workers or so, and 6 pc techs kept the computers/prints up and going. We had carts that went in the "breaking rooms" which was a real extreme environment. The material's dust was semi conductive so it would cause the computers on the carts to have ram errors pretty often. Blow out the dust and it would work fine again. I did get to do a little programming in that job, but I only did AutoIt if I remember right because that's what Dell used (that was who the contractor was for my 3 week job), and a tech at another location used it so clearly was approved to use. I even made a script for my boss so he could check our times to make sure we reported things right. I don't think he ever thanked me, but I guessed how the website worked for managers and added a field for him to change the username in the url and it worked first try and of my understanding, no one had any bugs with it. Guess I got lucky with my first script in that lang. Annoying time reporting system, had one system for tickets, and a different system to report time. Every ticket had to have a time segment attached to it. I worked to get stuff done, not keep track of time, so 99% of my reporting was guessing and making it work for the 8 hr time target.

Those SGI computers blew me away back then, I think they were just under 200lbs or 300lbs each (shipping weight, so pallet and box etc included).
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Re: Dell D510 Laptops (serial and LPT1)

Post by MudDuck514 »

If pagers and flip phones make you feel old, what would the original Motorola brick do for me?

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Re: Dell D510 Laptops (serial and LPT1)

Post by In-Tech »

I enjoyed everything you posted. Let's do some 8 bit stuff, including the network stuff. hehe
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Re: Dell D510 Laptops (serial and LPT1)

Post by DWS »

I bought an "MAN" network router system from a guy that bought scrap locally and resold it to the scrap yard. It did 10/100 so not too old. I've pulled computers apart of scrap with 10mbit cards that installed in ISA slots (been a while since I got to say ISA lol).

First computer I had was a commador 64 from the local plant (I worked for their sister company). Black and green screen, DOS days. I could play tetris and a few other small games. My mom took some classes for DOS and GW/Q Basic so I got to see those books eventually. Started a tiny bit in batch scripts then once I got a dumpster drove Apple it happened to have GW Basic on it, so started poking at that. So many commands were missing but that's what kick started my programming. I preferred the CLI over the GUI except for games lol. I started programming around 10, so I had a bit of a head start. I had no one to teach me though and I'm not a fan of reading books, so I pretty much jumped to the reference sheet and started playing with commands that sounded like I could use them.

My first phone was before the flips, but I was in school still too. It was too expensive to keep active and I had to pay my own way, so I only had it active for maybe 3 months and made calls on it like 10 times lol. Actually I think I still have it. Pretty sure even back then I lived in a dead zone. I currently live in a dead zone, nearest tower is Verizon (I've physically drove to it and took the number down to look it up). I think the spec was 120ft tall, it's pretty flat around here but lots of trees.

8 Bit stuff... humm, my parents had an Atari, but I very rarely got to play it, maybe 2-3 times in my life. I guess they viewed it as a collector's item and didn't want it broken. NES was the majority of my childhood for game consoles and pretty sure that was 8 bit. I've repaired a fair few of the NES's, through hole CPU and PPU is so much nicer than the next gen SNES with all the SMD stuff.

Back around 2004ish I was repairing ps2's and xboxes and eventually ran into the mod chips. I was nothing special back then, just a little side money. Funny I went off to work, went self employed, and now I'm poking at the opposite side of the mod chips (JTAG/BDM). Super new to that side of the coin, but I have a hair of experience in everything but actually doing it.

I wish there was some sort of thing like the Arduino back when I was growing up. I always wanted to know how the board level logic worked.

I'm in my 30's, so I guess that puts me at having my mid life identity crisis xD.
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