51–60 of 79 posts
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I miss the scraping hard drive noises with a flickering “HDD” light and a mysterious “Turbo” indicator when my 90s PC had to work hard
Turbo was all about slowing down a 486-/Pentium-class machine to work with programs and some ISA cards that required a slower CPU and/or XT bus speeds.
if you never turn the computer on, why does it matter if it's hypothetically still functional? boot it occasionally, the only thing that keeps a machine alive is someone caring for it
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Power them from a pure sine wave inverter connected to a battery thats being charged. Aka a good UPS
That's not good enough - everything attached to the computer (including network gear, unless it's fiber) must be powered by the same UPS, or you have pathways for lightning current to enter.
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That's not good enough - everything attached to the computer (including network gear, unless it's fiber) must be powered by the same UPS, or you have pathways for lightning current to enter.
Ethernet has galvanic isolation.
Typically the Ethernet shield is also only alibi-insulated from the device's ground. Sometimes not at all. (Personally it's always funny to me to see the fat 1kV/1nF capacitor from the shield to the device ground and then the metal of the socket is just bunched up with basically no clearance against the metal case or something like that). This can of course be avoided by simply using unshielded cable.
I switch most of mine (70-80s) on a few times a year and of them I use a lot (weekend game dev); I have to replace capacitors quite often, but outside that they all work. Unlike more recent (2000+) pc stuff which is all dead. All Sun and SGI stuff still works well though.
I've got an S-100 bus AlphaMicro with bad ram that would probably take a ton of work to get going again.
What’s the point of a retro machine from ‘98? Any application from that era should run natively on a modern machine. It’s past the point of games locked to a certain MHz or special purpose video drivers. If you want a CRT, just get a CRT. What’s the appeal?
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Ethernet has galvanic isolation.
That's functional isolation. Yeah, they're individually tested to 1500 Vrms (or so the factory in china claims), but that insulation is still just the very thin lacquer of the windings and maybe lacquer on the core. There are more expensive (and physically much larger) Ethernet transformers for medical devices and such, these have actual double/reinforced insulation and are tested to much higher voltages. Typically t…
What’s the point of a retro machine from ‘98? Any application from that era should run natively on a modern machine. It’s past the point of games locked to a certain MHz or special purpose video drivers. If you want a CRT, just get a CRT. What’s the appeal?
Theoretically, but practically a lot of late 90s (and early 00s) games don’t run on modern windows.