Show off your old and retro computer parts

[Dabombinable]

9 hours ago, Bearxor said:

I don't go out of my way to collect CPU's  - but I have amassed a collection of them from work on computers through the years.

Far more variety than my collection. Either 1 CPU for a certain socket, or a lot of redundancy due to having a top-end for Slot 1/S370 with a lot of low end that are pointless (I've got 2x Celeron 333...but why bother when I have "450"A, or Celeron 633 when I have a PIII 667).

[Block0]

I love collecting old RISC type processors from SUN HP DEC ect. Here are my favorite parts of the collection:

 

 

HP Visualize FX-4 A4553-66503 without the texture module 

 

 

Sun Ultra Sparc 1 167mhz processor

 

 

Some other misc cool chips, the bottom left HP one is relatively unknown and I couldn't find any information about it on the internet. the IDT chip is 4k of cache, the Motorola chips I don't know too much about, and the bottom left is some misc EEPROMS, a 6502, an Intel math coprocessor, and an unknown processor.

 

These are my favorite floppy disks from my collection. I got these in hopes that I could use them with some old HP 9000 or HP Visualize workstation/servers 

[Block0]

On 3/14/2023 at 2:58 PM, Crunchy Dragon said:

I love it. That's so funny, I wonder if there was an issue with PCI-X, RAID, and SCSI.

 

Be a fine joke if PCI-X didn't have enough bandwidth to run 4-6 SCSI drives, so the only way you got all the capacity was with low end drives.

I love the higher end solutions that come from this era, like workstation graphics cards or HBAs. 

[Fordle]

Dad gave me this gem. If anyone was around for this can you explain it to me.

[da na]

37 minutes ago, Fordle said:

Dad gave me this gem. If anyone was around for this can you explain it to me.

 

 

Not quite sure what explaination a Pentium needs, it's just a classic x86 CPU.

[ApolloX75]

55 minutes ago, Fordle said:

Dad gave me this gem. If anyone was around for this can you explain it to me.

 

I used to have a dozen pizza box HPs I got from my high school when I was in Grade 11 or so, all equipped with 133MHz Pentium 1s and 32MB of SDRAM. Around 2004 I think, I scavenged everything out of them, but took one and slapped like 192MB of RAM into it, clocked it as high as it would go, jammed a TNT2 into it's AGP slot and stuffed three PATA 20GB Maxtor drives into it. Put Windows XP on it and gave it to one of my best friends who didn't have a computer of his own. He must have used that thing until  2009 or so, it was a tank.

 

He played Diablo, BG2, Fallout, Doom etc on it for years. I wonder if he still has it.

[Fordle]

1 hour ago, da na said:

Not quite sure what explaination a Pentium needs, it's just a classic x86 CPU.

I know it is a Pentium. But I want a context into when and how it was used and with what parts and how fast it was.

[Kilrah]

P133 like this was what I had in my first PC. Looks like that under the cover. Not much more to say you can't find with a simple search...

 

[flibberdipper]

1 hour ago, Kilrah said:

Not much more to say you can't find with a simple search...

Wrong, you could say it's all about the Pentiums.

[SimplyChunk]

Ok, In admit it.  I'm THAT dude

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos&ab_channel=alyankovicVEVO

 

Anyways.  The 'Pentium' is just an 80586 basically.  With the rise of competition from AMD and Cyrix however,  Intel wanted to differentiate from the norm of 8086, 80286, 80386, and 80486. They even got a catchy name out of the marketing drive for it.  The 'Pent' in it meaning 5. 

[Huggles]

DId you say... 80486?  I wish i still had my older CPUs....

[BrianTheElectrician]

12 hours ago, Fordle said:

Dad gave me this gem. If anyone was around for this can you explain it to me.

Best I can make out is it's a 100mhz pentium, which coincidentally was also our first family machine. Hardware wise ours had 8mb of edo ram, a diamond stealth 64 2mb pci video card (S3 trio64 chipset), a 33.6k modem and sound blaster 16. It was spec'd 16mb ram but my dad downgraded to 8mb because it saved $300. Also had a 1gb Wd caviar 11000 ide hard disk and 4x cdrom drive. Came running windows 95, and we later upgraded to 32mb of ram. The pentium 1s used either socket 5 for the earlier ones (75-166mhz), or socket 7. The very early 5v 60 and 66mhz ones were socket 4. The later pentiums and pentium mmxs are good paired with a voodoo 1, and the earlier are really 2d only for era correctness.

[Kilrah]

3 hours ago, BrianTheElectrician said:

Best I can make out is it's a 100mhz pentium, which coincidentally was also our first family machine. Hardware wise ours had 8mb of edo ram, a diamond stealth 64 2mb pci video card (S3 trio64 chipset), a 33.6k modem and sound blaster 16. It was spec'd 16mb ram but my dad downgraded to 8mb because it saved $300. Also had a 1gb Wd caviar 11000 ide hard disk and 4x cdrom drive. Came running windows 95, and we later upgraded to 32mb of ram. The pentium 1s used either socket 5 for the earlier ones (75-166mhz), or socket 7. The very early 5v 60 and 66mhz ones were socket 4. The later pentiums and pentium mmxs are good paired with a voodoo 1, and the earlier are really 2d only for era correctness.

Our first family PC was P133, also 8MB, 1.2GB HDD and also one of those S3Trio64V+ video cards.

My own 133 I built from parts people were throwing out a few years later had 32MB at start, then went to 96 I believe. Some of it was bad and caused corruption of any floppy disk I'd try to write to as I understood later, and probably was responsible for the frequent registry corruption on W95 too...

 

That freaking S3Trio64V+ also had me improvise my first Win95 install, preserving all data... Back then I was allowed to use the PC for games for like 1 hour a day when parents were there. Obviously when they weren't I'd sneak in and play. One day I installed a new game while doing so and the PC wouldn't boot anymore afterwards. Obviously I now had to fix it without being discovered, and astonishingly managed to do so, reinstalling Windows, Office, making everything look like before and all files where they were supposed to be.

 

Then saw a note in the game manual "oh don't install this product on a machine with an S3Trio64V+, it'll wreck your system". smh.

[Dwnld]

I got no idea why I've kept these because I didn't even buy them. I just grabbed them from an old PC that was about to be recycled. In theory they are in working condition but can't test even the hard drive as it's not using a "normal" IDE connector.

 

I do have my first PC parts I built excluding the case just so I can play some retro games on Windows 98 SE and Win2K.

[Kilrah]

2 hours ago, Dwnld said:

it's not using a "normal" IDE connector.

Because it's SCSI, not IDE

[ApolloX75]

9 hours ago, Kilrah said:

and probably was responsible for the frequent registry corruption on W95 too...

Honestly I think that was just a feature of Windows 95.

[Bitter]

Know what'll cause consistent corruption? Overclocking your PCI bus to get more SATA bandwidth for your RAID-0 array! I could clock the Asus P4 board up to some kind of pretty ludicrous speed on the PCI bus before it hard crashed or wouldn't post but there were side effects. Strange ones! I lost a collection of media, not like they were corrupt and wouldn't play but they were all intermingled with each other! Open a song and it would play part of one song then cut to another, open a video and it would be 3 different ones in one file!

 

It's been so long I can't remember how fast, but I think the SATA controller was on it's own PCI bus on the chipset? They were SATA 150 ports and I want to say I OC'd the bus from 33 to around 40mhz which would be right around the full 150MB/S. Ye Olde days lol.

[Dwnld]

3 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Because it's SCSI, not IDE

Well, that explains it. I wish I had a way to DBAN the drive so I could sell it or something. I'm sure that someone needs a hefty 120 MB HDD for something...

[luckybob77]

16 hours ago, Dwnld said:

Well, that explains it. I wish I had a way to DBAN the drive so I could sell it or something. I'm sure that someone needs a hefty 120 MB HDD for something...

No need.  Those IBM drives are as stable as a drunk on a skateboard in a canoe.

 

I happen to be a safe place if you are looking to offload scsi equipment.

[luckybob77]

Those two full size drives make me happy.

[da na]

10 hours ago, Schnoz said:

Found a crapton of old hard drives in my university's e-waste! They're a motley crew of IDE, 68-pin SCSI, and SCA-equipped drives, all the way from full-height 5.25" drives to today's standard 1/3-height 3.5" drives. A few notable drives I'd like to point out:

 

• Top left: Fujitsu M2249! This thing is probably one of my favorite drives. It makes a whole bunch of mechanical noises (including clicking relays upon spin-up), and there are even multiple flashing status LEDs on the PCB.
• Top center: Digital 940002-035s. These are odd in a few ways. First, they're actually 426MB drives made by Seagate. Second, they spin at an odd 4400RPM, and are some of the only 1/2-height drives in this lineup.
• Lower-center right: Seagate ST19171N: One of the first Barracuda-branded HDDs. Replete with 9 platters and a solid aluminum top, it's a relic from back when Barracudas weren't cost-cut into oblivion.

 

 

• Top left: ST39102LW. This is a 10K Cheetah, with a capacity of 9.1GB. If you hold this one in your hand, the amount of rotational inertia it possesses while operating is absurd.

 

Awesome! I have a few of these but man... those tall 5.25" drives are beautiful.

[flibberdipper]

10 hours ago, Schnoz said:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Man you're really just reminding me that I have a lot of stupid hard drives to add to my totally-not-a-hoarding-list. So far, this is all I have on it. The Bigfoot, Fireball, and ATA IV are all drives I had growing up that I would absolutely kill to have functioning, good-health examples of (especially the Bigfoot). Honest to god, part of the reason I absolutely love my 5640RPM WD Red 8TB's is that they give me the same feeling as the old drives: They're clunky motherfuckers that make all the right noises, the only thing they're missing is the spindle noise of the Quantum drives.

[da na]

10 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

Man you're really just reminding me that I have a lot of stupid hard drives to add to my totally-not-a-hoarding-list. So far, this is all I have on it. The Bigfoot, Fireball, and ATA IV are all drives I had growing up that I would absolutely kill to have functioning, good-health examples of (especially the Bigfoot). Honest to god, part of the reason I absolutely love my 5640RPM WD Red 8TB's is that they give me the same feeling as the old drives: They're clunky motherfuckers that make all the right noises, the only thing they're missing is the spindle noise of the Quantum drives.

My workstation has three HGST Ultrastar 7K, two Seagate Cheetah 10K and four Toshiba 15K. Alone, the drives don't sound too great but all running together it's spectacular. Spindle noise from the high RPM drives plus the low clunky noises of the 7K (and the higher pitched click of the 15Ks) is fantastic.

[da na]

Asking for a friend... is it worth buying an IBM ThinkPad Transnote? Found an estate sale lot with a pretty dirty one in untested conditon. I've heard of them but I can find little information online. It didn't sell too well because of its odd mixture of a drawing tablet, laptop, and FlipTouch display, but that's what makes it interesting to me.

Spoiler

Last time I gambled on an ebay lot retro device I got a rare Casio PDA for $15 so might as well give it a shot?

Also just realized I'm the second top poster in this topic.. woohoo!

[da na]

My father (who is big into Apple II stuff) just sent this picture of his two recently repaired Disk IIs with clear cases from MacEffects.

He has them hooked up to his IIe, which he's also planning to get a clear case for in the future.