badmofo
Member
I hope this is the right section, it seemed the most appropriate!
I'm a long time lurker here and thought it was high time I introduce myself and showed off my current vintage PC's. I emphasise current because they seem to change fairly regularly – I upgrade this, I downgrade that. To my surprise a small, nostalgia driven project to recreate my childhood computer has turned into a full blown hobby.
A year ago my mother dropped off a box of old photos, and one of them showed my 14 year-old self hunched happily in front of my first love - a 486SX-33. I’d had access to computers for years before that (my father’s MicroBee, friend’s 286 / 386 machines, etc) but the SX-33 was the first computer that was truly mine, and – at the risk of sounding overly dramatic – it changed my life.
My father bought it for me in early ’94; a cheap ($2000!) no-name clone from one of those fly by night dealers who probably disappeared before we’d even unloaded the heavy cardboard boxes from the back of our rusty old Nissan. I don’t remember the exact specs, but it was a vesa local bus system. 4mb RAM, 270MB HDD, 14” CRT, etc. Not a bad system for the price.
Pretty much all of my software was pirated I have to admit so I didn’t have any manuals, but by trial and error I learnt DOS memory management, X-Tree, and of course all the fatality moves in Mortal Kombat. It was a magical machine, and my “playing” with it taught me skills which serve me well to this day (thanks for nothing, high school). Over the years I added a Sound Blaster, another 4mb RAM, and a hand-me-down 486DX2-66 Overdrive chip.
But at that point my memory fails. Something better must have come along, and I assume I gave the 486 away, or just threw it out in the hard rubbish. I hadn’t given it any thought at all until I saw that photo, when the memories came flooding back.
My humble plan was to hop onto eBay, find a similarly spec’d machine, buy it for a couple of bucks, take delivery of it the following week, stroll down memory lane, and then what? Chuck it in the shed maybe? I was amazed to find that a) forget buying a whole system, even parts are hard to come by, and b) when they are listed, sellers want outrageous amounts of cash for them.
I scoured the web for months – simply finding an AT case took ages. I got a CPU here, an IO card there, and at some stage over the course of my search – perhaps because of their scarcity - I started to think of these old machines as sacred beige relics. I became a collector. I’d spot abandoned computers from miles away; my wife and children rolling their eyes as I slammed on the brakes and hauled them into the car. Before I knew it I had a shed full of random socket 7’s, Pentium 3’s, etc. But I still didn’t have my 486.
Family and friends began tactfully suggesting I had enough old computers. “Do you really need all of those?” they’d ask. To appease them I gathered up a few of the rustier boxes and took them to the local recycle centre.
And that’s when it happened - I found the mother load!
Out the back of the recycle centre were pallets of old PC’s, all destined for scrapping via the ‘ByteBack’ program; a local computer recycling organisation. “So this is where they all are.” I said, trying to control my breathing as I sneakily filled my car with them.
More eye rolling ensued when I arrived home with twice as many computers than I’d left with, but nothing could dampen my excitement. I’ve since been back every other weekend and found several 486’s, a couple of 386’s, and more socket 7’s than you could poke a stick at. It’s a gold mine!
With a selection of rescued hardware and bits bought from eBay, I’ve put together the following couple of systems to satisfy my nostalgia trip (which has since expanded to cover the Windows 95 period as well).
A 486SX-33: VLB motherboard with the OPTI 495SLC chipset. 8mb RAM, Cirrus Logic GD5428 VLB video, 270 Western Digital Caviar HDD, Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 + Music Quest MPU-401 port to drive an MT-32.
And for Windows 95, a socket 7 Pentium 166MMX. 32mb RAM, 2 gig HDD, Sound Blaster 16 + Roland SCC-1 for General MIDI. Ark Logic (ARK2000MT chipset) PCI video card + a Voodoo 2, 12MB 3d card:
One of my other favourite recycle centre rescues is this cool little 386, all complete and runs like a dream:
It’s such a shame that people don’t think to sell these things before chucking them on the scrapheap. They’ve held onto them for so long just to waste them now? I guess they don’t know that some people still value them.
I'm a long time lurker here and thought it was high time I introduce myself and showed off my current vintage PC's. I emphasise current because they seem to change fairly regularly – I upgrade this, I downgrade that. To my surprise a small, nostalgia driven project to recreate my childhood computer has turned into a full blown hobby.
A year ago my mother dropped off a box of old photos, and one of them showed my 14 year-old self hunched happily in front of my first love - a 486SX-33. I’d had access to computers for years before that (my father’s MicroBee, friend’s 286 / 386 machines, etc) but the SX-33 was the first computer that was truly mine, and – at the risk of sounding overly dramatic – it changed my life.
My father bought it for me in early ’94; a cheap ($2000!) no-name clone from one of those fly by night dealers who probably disappeared before we’d even unloaded the heavy cardboard boxes from the back of our rusty old Nissan. I don’t remember the exact specs, but it was a vesa local bus system. 4mb RAM, 270MB HDD, 14” CRT, etc. Not a bad system for the price.
Pretty much all of my software was pirated I have to admit so I didn’t have any manuals, but by trial and error I learnt DOS memory management, X-Tree, and of course all the fatality moves in Mortal Kombat. It was a magical machine, and my “playing” with it taught me skills which serve me well to this day (thanks for nothing, high school). Over the years I added a Sound Blaster, another 4mb RAM, and a hand-me-down 486DX2-66 Overdrive chip.
But at that point my memory fails. Something better must have come along, and I assume I gave the 486 away, or just threw it out in the hard rubbish. I hadn’t given it any thought at all until I saw that photo, when the memories came flooding back.
My humble plan was to hop onto eBay, find a similarly spec’d machine, buy it for a couple of bucks, take delivery of it the following week, stroll down memory lane, and then what? Chuck it in the shed maybe? I was amazed to find that a) forget buying a whole system, even parts are hard to come by, and b) when they are listed, sellers want outrageous amounts of cash for them.
I scoured the web for months – simply finding an AT case took ages. I got a CPU here, an IO card there, and at some stage over the course of my search – perhaps because of their scarcity - I started to think of these old machines as sacred beige relics. I became a collector. I’d spot abandoned computers from miles away; my wife and children rolling their eyes as I slammed on the brakes and hauled them into the car. Before I knew it I had a shed full of random socket 7’s, Pentium 3’s, etc. But I still didn’t have my 486.
Family and friends began tactfully suggesting I had enough old computers. “Do you really need all of those?” they’d ask. To appease them I gathered up a few of the rustier boxes and took them to the local recycle centre.
And that’s when it happened - I found the mother load!
Out the back of the recycle centre were pallets of old PC’s, all destined for scrapping via the ‘ByteBack’ program; a local computer recycling organisation. “So this is where they all are.” I said, trying to control my breathing as I sneakily filled my car with them.
More eye rolling ensued when I arrived home with twice as many computers than I’d left with, but nothing could dampen my excitement. I’ve since been back every other weekend and found several 486’s, a couple of 386’s, and more socket 7’s than you could poke a stick at. It’s a gold mine!
With a selection of rescued hardware and bits bought from eBay, I’ve put together the following couple of systems to satisfy my nostalgia trip (which has since expanded to cover the Windows 95 period as well).
A 486SX-33: VLB motherboard with the OPTI 495SLC chipset. 8mb RAM, Cirrus Logic GD5428 VLB video, 270 Western Digital Caviar HDD, Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 + Music Quest MPU-401 port to drive an MT-32.
And for Windows 95, a socket 7 Pentium 166MMX. 32mb RAM, 2 gig HDD, Sound Blaster 16 + Roland SCC-1 for General MIDI. Ark Logic (ARK2000MT chipset) PCI video card + a Voodoo 2, 12MB 3d card:
One of my other favourite recycle centre rescues is this cool little 386, all complete and runs like a dream:
It’s such a shame that people don’t think to sell these things before chucking them on the scrapheap. They’ve held onto them for so long just to waste them now? I guess they don’t know that some people still value them.
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I had to cull a fair bit of my collection before moving house, but it was mainly Pentiums. My initial plan was to have as many PCs running as many operating systems as possible; but then I decided that my collection needed to be a little more targeted and perhaps more esoteric.