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Thrift Store Old Computer Parts Pickup ID Help :)

iKokomo

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Jan 21, 2014
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I was at a thrift store and I saw these neat looking older, vintage PC parts. I paid less than $4 USD for these parts. One is a motherboard with an unknown Pentium chip in it. There also is 256K of Ram. The other two I am not sure what they are. Please help me ID! :)



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You have a Socket 7 motherboard with a Pentium 166. You are missing the riser for it. I suggest going back to the thrift shop and seeing if you can find it. It will have a bunch of additional slots which would make the motherboard more useful. Unfortunately, riser means LPX and thus strange cases are needed which the thrift store likely tossed. Would need to see the chipset identifiers clearly to figure out permitted RAM types.

The card has Compaq numbers on the label indicating it is an MPEG decoder card. I can't read the chips to verify.

Okidata: Not sure. I think it is a replacement character set for the printer indicated which would give IBM character set instead of the standard Okidata character set. Useless without a ML-92.
 
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Those 30 pin SIMMs are actually parity modules.

Each module has two 1 megabit Samsung memory chips (the KM parts) and one 256 kbit NMB semiconductor memory chip for parity.

With all four, you have 1 megabyte total. You'll need a really old 486 motherboard to utilize those, or a 386/late 286 motherboard. Some 68k macs also used 30 pin SIMMs but 1 meg won't boot all but the earliest crackerbox macs.
 
Yeah, there's a couple of 166Mhz Pentium chips. Not bad for the time. For the early P1 chips... 166 was pretty "badass." I remember most of us had Pentium 75s, and one of us had a 90. I had a Dual Pentium 60, an old server that was used at CompUSA. 166 was super expensive back then.

No idea what that card is. There's four RAM chips soldered onto it... two of them are 70ns chips, and the other two are 60ns chips. I'm guessing maybe 8 megs of ram or something on there?

If I didn't know any better, I'd say those were graphics accelerator chips or it was some kind of graphics card. Perhaps it used the motherboard's onboard connector for the output, and this was just an optional board? It says Compaq in the upper left-hand corner... so I would guess like Capt said... it probably came with the board.
 
I agree with the general sentiment - Compaq LPX motherboard, Pentium 166 (non-MMX,) MPEG decoder card.

The "little card" you have resting along the bottom of the motherboard in the first photo, that looks a little like a RAM SIMM, is actually the cache module that plugs into the shorter slot just above the CPU.

The Okidata are replacement fonts for an IBM printer.

And some 30-pin 256 kB SIMMs.
 
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