Post your retro hardware.

some more retro-ish stuff

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I have some older mobos I am going to display in boxes like this also.. soyo dragon platinum and more..
 
Hey, all, having some trouble with my retro box... I will post pix here once it works and not before ;)

I can give full specs on request. I've been rebuilding this system from its original form, and I'm regretting that I threw away all of the original parts (except the hard drive) -- some of them probably still worked.

I'm being vague because I don't want to clutter this thread unnecessarily -- if it's okay, I'll post more info here, but if not... that's what PMs are for, I suppose ;)
 
Perhaps I need to be more blunt. Could someone PM me about my retro rig, and help me figure out what's wrong with it (other than its hardware hailing from about 1993)?
 
Cool !!
I still use a logitech Trackman marble FX for my server stack.

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Old :

Fully funtional 3com corebuilder 2500....I even have FDDI cables.....although I've recycled the other corebuilders....heheh...

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Even older :

Seagate HDD model # ST-251 ;

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We're actually gonna do a quicky q3 tourney thru that corebuilder at our next LAN hawhaw...

:D
 
I have an ISA-16 controller for that HDD, courtesy of eBay... got it by mistake :rolleyes:

I'd love to either get rid of the controller or get a hard drive to make it useful...
 
This is my retro rig. It's simply referred to in my house as "the 386", referring to its original processor (a 25MHz 386SX/SXL CPU) rather than its current config.



System specs:
Athena Power AP-AT30 300W AT(LPX) Power Supply
Pine Technology PT-319A Baby AT motherboard (it's REALLY tiny...)
Onboard TI 486SX CPU @ 33MHz
4MB RAM (4x1MB 30pin SIMMs; board can address up to 8MB)
Cirrus Logic MachSpeed VGA 1060 ISA Video Card
SerTek S521-SA (ESS 1688) ISA Sound Card (w/ onboard CD-ROM controller)
Goldstar IDE Plus V3 ISA HDD/FDD/IO ISA Controller Card
Western Digital WDAC-2250 IDE Hard Drive (255.9MB unformatted)
Generic Floppy Drive (I *think* it's Mitsumi)
LITE-ON CD-ROM Drive (either 16x or 24x; I really don't think it matters on this system)
Serial (DB9M) Two-Button Mouse
BTC 5339 (Clicky LOUD Membrane) AT Keyboard
MS-DOS 6.22 / Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups)

Using a conveniently-located spare eMachines monitor for the display. Still have the original Samsung VGA monitor (13" diagonal... and beige), but it has never been opened and dusted :eek: hence why I'm not using it right now.

This system was originally built in 1992 by a company named Dramen Professional Systems near here in Raleigh, NC. They are still in business, as DRAMEN. (They do high-end server stuff, now, rather than just general PCs.) This is probably the oldest Dramen system still in operation, although I could be wrong about that... anyhow, I rebuilt it to play a game called Museum Madness. It's really fun (especially considering it's intended as an "educational" game), and I wanted to play with it in its native environment, so to speak.

Here, have more photos:








Many thanks to several people...
+ Ricky Lim @ Athena Computer Power Corporation, for helping me with the PSU.
+ My father, for helping me acquire parts from eBay to make it work.
+ My friend Ryan, for helping me acquire *more* parts from eBay.
+ The folks at the local computer shop, for putting up with my questions about antique computers (as well as helping me source a copy of Win311 install disks).
+ The websites DriverGuide and HelpDrivers[dot]com, for providing two drivers that (when put together) actually worked for the sound card.
+ The website ComputerHope[dot]com, for helping me profusely by providing lots of information on positively archaic system configuration tidbits that are only relevant to MS-DOS (and VERY early Windows) systems.
+ The hardware archive at stason[dot]org, for helping massively with jumper settings of various cards that went into (and often back out of, fairly quickly) this system.
+ A few fellow [H]'ers, for helping me figure out various bits and pieces of system configuration.
+ ...and, ultimately, one Bob Menard, for making it all possible in the first place by founding Dramen Professional Systems. Bob will be getting an email about this system shortly; I think he'll be quite surprised in a positive way to hear that some of his old work is still operational.

That's all for today, class, any questions? :D
 
nice overdrive chip! I have some old pentiums somewhere.... one of them with the big gold top on it. :eek:
 
http://www.****************************/articles/steve/yesterday1.jpg
http://www.****************************/articles/steve/yesterday2.jpg
 
My retro hardware is older than most of the members of the [H] - dang kids... There's a lot of "new" hardware in this thread... I am dissapointed. A "pentium" is NOT retro kids... ;)

Cosmac ELF circa 1977 - 1802 8-bit microprocessor, 2K of RAM. Memory board was home-made, power supply was home-made, video out board was home made, as well as the cassette interface. The clear case was also hand made by my Dad and from aviation grade surplus clear polycarbonate. It still powers up. I learned to code on this baby... Assembly for the WIN! After we built the 2K RAM board, we were able to run the TinyBASIC interpreter.
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Here's our Altair 8800b from MITS. We bought the kit in 1976. This is they guy that didn't want to work with some punk ass kid named Bill Gates. The Altair is sitting on a pair of 8" floppy drives - the interface board is hand made / wire-wrapped. Was a bitch to make (still have nightmares 30+ years later....:eek: )

DSC00251.JPG


The Altair still fires up as well.... did A LOT of coding on this bad boy. It has an amazing 16K of RAM. Almost limitless space! Add in the 8" DUAL SIDED floppies (okay, you had to manually turn them over... ) and you had another 256K of storage per disk (128KB per side).
 
that is pretty cool! That's got to be the oldest clear case I have ever seen. :eek:

retro can be anything that's "culturally outdated" so I think pretty much anything in this thread qualifies. :)
 
I"ll bite with the oldest stuff i can find on hand. First up is an old Riva TNT2 gpu:

Second is this old AMD K6-2 500MHz cpu:

Third, even older, is an old Cyrix x86 processor:
 
well I didn't know what to post, so I posted a part of my hardware shelf. it's not the cleanest but it's full of old PC's, screens and printers.
shelf.jpg
 
Alright, I have a few.

One that I just sold is my prototype Creative Labs Sound Blaster, then called "Killer Card":
KillerCardFront.jpg

KillerCardBack.jpg


Then there's my Apple IIc, which acts as both vintage video game system (Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego rocks!) and serial terminal to the quad-Itanium underneath.


And my original Macintosh, manufactured in 1983 (not publicly announced until January 1984, so this is a *VERY* early model.) Yes, it has found a home next to the Apple IIc on top of the Itanium. In this photo, it was using a serial cable and Terminal software to be a serial terminal, and is browsing a vintage Mac website via Lynx.


Finally, a smattering of other vintage systems in my basement 'workshop' a couple years ago. Ones I can readily identify are a Macintosh PowerBook Duo in DuoDock on the far left (with Star Wars LEGO sets on top,) a generic PC chassis (when this picture was taken, it likely had a Pentium Extreme Edition 975 in it,) with an ancient Toshiba 8088 laptop on top. Underneath the desk are a Blue & White Power Macintosh G3 acting as a server (with matching very early Apple Studio Display on the desk,) then the stack of IBMs: PC-AT with one 360k floppy, one 1.2MB floppy, and one 1.44 MB external floppy; IBM PC Power Edition, a PowerPC-equipped "PC" (largely based on their RS/6000 workstation line, but with cheaper parts, like commodity floppy drive and IDE hard drive and CD-ROM;) and a PS/2 Model 77 on top (the PS/2 has since been upgraded with a CD-ROM drive and Microchannel sound card to be my "ultimate 486 gaming rig".) Also on the desk I see what was then my current laptop (Pentium-M 2.26 GHz,) and a couple Apple Newtons.
workshop.jpg


The work area has moved since that point, and now looks like this (with a different grouping of Macintoshes:) What was the workshop before has been completely remodeled into a bedroom.
Workbenchsm.jpg


Finally, here's my daughter playing the original King's Quest on an IBM PCjr:
http://vimeo.com/28044047

Edit: And a web page with a few more: My Computers. In the photo of processors and RAM, the processors you see are the second layer. There is another completely full layer of mostly old socketed processors (8088-Pentium MMX/AMD K7, etc,) underneath what you see.
 
Holy crap, that's a collection :eek: looks like you have a few gigs of SIMMs in that drawer.

BTW, do you have any non-Apple/Mac laptops?
 
Here is something I've got that I think is really interesting:

Summa06.jpg


Summa04.jpg


Summa08.jpg


It's an optical mouse from before I even knew there were optical mice. Thanks to google books I found a review of this mouse in a 1987 edition of Info World: http://books.google.com/books?id=YTwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA62&dq=summa mouse&pg=PA62#v=onepage&q&f=false

It's got a serial plug, an AC adapter, and a mirror like mouse pad that has lines drawn across it.

There are 9 high-res photos of the mouse and it's box here: http://www.le2.net/summa/ or http://www.le2.net/summa/images/
 
Here is mine...
Samsung SyncMaster 920N
Intel P3 600Mhz
Soyo SY-6BA+II
3, 128meg SDRAM 168pin DIMM PC133
ATI Rage Pro AGP 16meg
Quantum3D Obsidian x24 SLI PCI
Creative Lab's SoundBlaster ISA AWE 64 Gold
Lite-ON LH-20A1P DVD Burn
Realtek RTL8139 NIC
Windows98SE
20GB Seagate
old1.jpg

old2.jpg

old3.jpg
 
I have a Asus A7V motherboard with an Athlon TBird 1.1GHz sitting on it. It works, but it's not in use. I also have the original case that this board was mounted on... hmm... ideas, ideas...

Also have a Duron 1.4GHz board sitting idle too.

A Pentium 4 2.4GHz with an GeForce 4 TI 4600 is my server rig. I also have a GeForce 6800XT AGP working just fine... used to play WoW on this P4 rig with that card, lol.

I used to have tons of old stuff, mainly an AMD Am386DX-40 board - the processor was soldered on it. It was a PCChips MB. I had 4MB of RAM on it. It worked... I sold it with some other old stuff I had laying around for chump change a while ago.
 
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starhawk said:
I'm rebuilding an old 386. I'll post pix when it's done, but right now I'm just trying to get an AT PSU to last more than a week. I guess my problem was getting a new one off of Newegg from Athena Power... :( well, their support is freaking bulletproof at least.
Click to expand...

I have two *new* generic AT 300W PSUs on their boxes. Too bad I'm in Brazil.
 
shspvr said:
Here is mine...
Samsung SyncMaster 920N
Intel P3 600Mhz
Soyo SY-6BA+II
3, 128meg SDRAM 168pin DIMM PC133
ATI Rage Pro AGP 16meg
Quantum3D Obsidian x24 SLI PCI
Creative Lab's SoundBlaster ISA AWE 64 Gold
Lite-ON LH-20A1P DVD Burn
Realtek RTL8139 NIC
Windows98SE
20GB Seagate
Click to expand...

shspvr - holy crap, that's a PC Power and Cooling mid-tower! I've had mine for about 10 years and it's still kicking - built like a tank. Air flow kinda sucks, but otherwise it's a fantastic case. Never thought I'd see someone else with one. You just made my day :)
 
BrainEater said:
Cool !!
I still use a logitech Trackman marble FX for my server stack.

-----

Old :

Fully funtional 3com corebuilder 2500....I even have FDDI cables.....although I've recycled the other corebuilders....heheh...

ret8.jpg



We're actually gonna do a quicky q3 tourney thru that corebuilder at our next LAN hawhaw...

:D
Click to expand...

A place used to work for had a college client with one of those at the core. 600+ pcs all on one segment made for a wonderfully shitty network. They had the LanPlex version.

One day one of the college's IT employees decided it would be a good ida to plug a digital AT&T phone system phone into an ethernet port. The LanPlex prompty went WTF OMG I'M SO FUCKING HIGH and locked up hard.

It was never quite the same after that.
 
First we have my old 486DX4/100, complete with SB16, DTC VLB EIDE controller, and Diamond SpeedStar Pro 1M VLB graphics card:

486.jpg


And what do we have next? A 286---in a ZIF SOCKET!

286.jpg


And finally, my pride and joy: A Compaq Portable Plus:

compaq.jpg
 
One IBM XT 5160 - 8088 with 640k RAM, two 5.25" floppies, and a hard drive of indeterminate size (but from what I can gather, it isn't the original 10MB unit - this one's a Rodime r0204e, if you're interested). It works, sorta. I've gotten it to boot to the BASIC interpreter, so the hardware seems to be functional. It just doesn't want to boot from the pre-existing DOS install. Disk seems to work, so I'm assuming that the 20 years it spent in an attic didn't do wonders for the data integrity. If anyone lives in Indiana and has some known-working DOS diskettes (360k), I'd appreciate being hit up.

XT_small.jpg


Then we have this little guy:

119944-TIWall1.jpg


A friend of mine has like five of these laying around. Gave me one of the ones with jacked-up pins. Aside from the fact that it's made by Texas Instruments, I have no idea what the hell kind of processor it is.

Also, my main laptop up until about two years ago:

C400_small.jpg


Looks cheap, but the thing's pretty solid. Ran non-stop for over a year and a half as a webserver, on a PIII.

Still have my first build, somewhere. I moved a couple months ago and cannot for the life of me find the little bastard - 3ghz P4 (socket 478), 1gb ram, and a Radeon 9600 in an ASUS small-form-factor case. Still runs, even after I dropped an allen wrench between the DIMMs. While it was on. Five years ago.
 
That TI chip is probably an old ROM chip. You erase it with UV light.

Also, that hard drive is a 44mb according to Google.
 
Heres my Kaypro II. I had one of these as a kid, bought this on eBay a few months ago. Works 100% as far as I can tell. I just don't have any floppy disks for it.

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Tech-Daddy said:
I have a very similar Panasonic Senior Partner in my garage as well!

Love those lugables!
-=TD
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I had one of those with the thermal printer, I gave it to my friend who is into old DOS machines and he said teh printer still works. Amazing. Unfortunately I do not have a picture of it.
 
The oldest computer that I have in my possession is an AST "Premium 286" 10Mhz, 640KB RAM and 80MB MFM HDD; which was manufactured on September 15, 1988. Seem to recall finding some kind of paper work with it, and IIRC the cost of this computer was somewhere in the $5k neighborhood! Story behind it, since the pictures are mainly just of the bits, is that it belonged to a clients late parents, both of whom wrote movie scripts. Client wanted them off, so had to cobble together some other old hardware (ISA SCSI card, 50 to 68pin SCSI adapter, etc) to save the data as it would've been numerous floppies worth. She wound up leaving the old computer with me, which I'm going to hold onto until my son (4-1/2) is old enough to appreciate how far computers have come in a fairly short amount of time.

How many of you remember working on things like this, eh? :p
DSC_2635.JPG


Took a bunch of random pics back when I did the job; they're at http://www.fastgeek.net/images/286

Have a couple old original Pentium parts lying around, a dual-CPU P-Pro setup and an Apple IIGS. Tons of other stuff, but it's all too new for this thread.
 
valve1138 said:
A place used to work for had a college client with one of those at the core. 600+ pcs all on one segment made for a wonderfully shitty network. They had the LanPlex version.

One day one of the college's IT employees decided it would be a good ida to plug a digital AT&T phone system phone into an ethernet port. The LanPlex prompty went WTF OMG I'M SO FUCKING HIGH and locked up hard.

It was never quite the same after that.
Click to expand...

haha.I bet.

Many years ago , we actually had 3x corebuilder 2500's , setup on proper dual ring FDDI fiberoptic.We bought em for lanning in the q3 days....

To this day , that network was the best/most stable/fastest(ping) gaming network we have ever had....yea sure we might run a nice Gbit network now......good for pr0n , but not as good for gaming.The corebuilder fddi ring gave every user <10 ms pings , and it was sooooo smoooth...

Our clans' 10 year anniversary is happening in a couple weeks , i think we might run some 'gaming network' benchmarks....that corebuilder works fine.

:D
 
Finally, a product which simplifies time consuming and complicated task of ejecting and switching CDs. :eek:

Nakamichi%252520-%2525205%252520Disc%252520CD-ROM%252520Mini%252520Changer%252520%252528MJ-5.16%252529%252520-%252520Top.JPG


Nakamichi%252520-%2525205%252520Disc%252520CD-ROM%252520Mini%252520Changer%252520%252528MJ-5.16%252529%252520-%252520Front.JPG


Nakamichi%252520-%2525205%252520Disc%252520CD-ROM%252520Mini%252520Changer%252520%252528MJ-5.16%252529%252520-%252520Angle.JPG
 
6800ultras in SLI on a DFI UT SLI-DR Expert board.... still fun to mess around with. :) (22k on 3dm03 @ 450/1200 wooohooo! ;))

P1020686.jpg

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my video card gallery

P1020657.jpg


trusty 0550vpmw topless opty 170... one of the best overclockers of all the opterons..

P1020659.jpg
 
revenant said:
6800ultras in SLI on a DFI UT SLI-DR Expert board.... still fun to mess around with. :) (22k on 3dm03 @ 450/1200 wooohooo! ;))

P1020686.jpg

P1020660.jpg


my video card gallery

P1020657.jpg


trusty 0550vpmw topless opty 170... one of the best overclockers of all the opterons..

P1020659.jpg
Click to expand...

I gotta ask.... Where did you get the display cases for the video cards and the cpu? Did you custom make them? Those look so cool, I would love to get some of those.
 
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