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Building my childhood dream PC
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#22PS/1 seems like an odd choice since it was intended for the home and small business market. It was IBM's answer to beige box clones dominating everyone who wasn't an institutional buyer and paying for the PS/2 premium.
Because of the authors childhood experience of his neighbors PS/1 being much better than his own machine.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#23I can't say a PS/1 would have been my first choice for a 486 platform; I'd imagine there are faster motherboards out there and a desktop (i.e. ASUS w/ SiS chipsets). That said, I had a 486/66, so... (some Dell). And it looks like the PS/1 is missing VLB, but of course the video card is integrated in this model so that makes sense. I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card and a Sound Blaster AWE64…
The 486 generation was fraught with bus wars and the motherboard market was rather fragmented. I once visited a college buddy who had a genuine EISA system, and I believe that I left flecks of drool as I admired the superior electronics and engineering invested in that EISA bus. Of course, nobody seriously purchased EISA if they expected to be compatible with stuff. My father had a PS/2 50Z, which unfortunately saddl…
The days of nearly-full slots was great. While by the time I had my first computer, a 386SX (12Mhz?) IDE and floppy controllers had made it to the motherboard, we still had a sound card, modem, video card, potentially game card if no game ports on the sound card, and awhile later in PCI land a 3Dfx card.
Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a purpose I no longer need). SLI is dead. Only those with special needs, LLMs or crypto, would ever fill up the additional slots.
Building computers is now just stupid simple and in my view, sorta brainless. No jumpers, no "must go in this slot #". The only thing I ever have difficulty with is mounting the CPU cooler, the thing is f-ing huge and requires a special very long Phillips screwdriver.
/oldmanrant
Oh yeah, and if you didn't bleed when building a PC, you didn't really build a PC. Now everything is rolled steel for those kitten hands.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#24My first x86 was acquired in 1997: a 200MHz pentium MMX with 32 MB of RAM, a 2.0 GB harddisk, a 2 MB S3 ViRGE as video card, Aztech Labs AZT-R 2316 sound card, a 33.600 bps winmodem and 28X (I think) CD-ROM. I soon wanted to install Linux on it. It ran minilinux, a small distro that could be launched directly from DOS without partitioning, relatively well. I also downloaded Debian and prepared the 10 floppies to install it but never got ahead because it didn't support my keyboard layout (ABNT2) out of the box. I eventually installed Conectiva Linux 3.0 (marumbi), a RedHat based distro, on it. It worked somewhat beautifully but had no support for the modem and soundcard.
As my relatives and siblings updated their computers, I inherited their spare parts. My machine got some very interesting upgrades. It got 2 floppy drives (very rare at the time), 2 harddisks, a cd-recorder unit, RAM was upgraded to 64 MB and the modem was replaced by a ne2k compatible network card. I also had a Linux-supported Canon BJC 4200 and a SANE-supported TCE table scanner. Still, I couldn't get the SoundBlaster that my brother had and, sadly, my machine continued without sound support on Linux.
At around 2006 I replaced it with a new self built computer which had better compatibility with Linux than with windows-xp and then this new computer became my first dedicated Linux machine. I found out that Linux eventually got support for AZT-R 2316 at around 2007, but the last time I tried my old computer, it displayed "parity error" probably from oxidation in the memory connectors. I then just gave up on it.
Later on I thought about if it would be possible to install a graphics card with OpenGL support and USB port on one of the remaining PCI ports. I certainly wouldn't be able to install a modern Linux distro on it, but certainly it would work with one of those specially crafted for old computers like TinyCore. With recent kernel changes, swapping maybe smart enough to be usable on SSD with SATA to IDE adapters even in that computer. Now, that would be a dream machine.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#25My entry was the mentioned 486DX2-66Mhz. Double speed CD-Rom and Sound Blaster. Norton Commander was great, Doom and Pirates Gold where my games of choice. Also started programming on this one with QBasic and then moved to Turbo Pascal 7 (because I needed a .exe file to be called from autoexec as a password protection vs. my sister which I couldn't do with QBasic :) Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying…
> Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D
With a friend we destroyed the msdos 622 installation on the new 40 mb hd of my family 386 when deleting tmp files...
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#26Thanks for sharing. I love the design/theme of the site. Pure bliss.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 486 generation was fraught with bus wars and the motherboard market was rather fragmented. I once visited a college buddy who had a genuine EISA system, and I believe that I left flecks of drool as I admired the superior electronics and engineering invested in that EISA bus. Of course, nobody seriously purchased EISA if they expected to be compatible with stuff. My father had a PS/2 50Z, which unfortunately saddl…
The days of nearly-full slots was great. While by the time I had my first computer, a 386SX (12Mhz?) IDE and floppy controllers had made it to the motherboard, we still had a sound card, modem, video card, potentially game card if no game ports on the sound card, and awhile later in PCI land a 3Dfx card. Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a p…
> Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste'
Made worse by the video cards being ridiculously fat. As an example, the one I have is two slots wide, and protrudes over the third slot; my motherboard has a PCIe x1 slot there, which is made unusable by that. The fourth and last slot of my motherboard, a PCIe x4, is clearly intended for the Thunderbolt card (there's a special connector near it on the motherboard for the sideband signals), but I can't see much use for Thunderbolt on a tower desktop, so it sits empty.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#28In Part 2 the photo immediately after “It seems IBM integrated it to the motherboard” completely fooled my brain into believing that I’m looking at the side wall of a garage. The garage door to the left. The opener equipment top-right.
And I’m just immediately fixated on this whole vibe of a life-sized tinkering workspace that’s the inside of a PC case.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#29[deleted]
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The days of nearly-full slots was great. While by the time I had my first computer, a 386SX (12Mhz?) IDE and floppy controllers had made it to the motherboard, we still had a sound card, modem, video card, potentially game card if no game ports on the sound card, and awhile later in PCI land a 3Dfx card. Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a p…
> Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' Made worse by the video cards being ridiculously fat. As an example, the one I have is two slots wide, and protrudes over the third slot; my motherboard has a PCIe x1 slot there, which is made unusable by that. The fourth and last slot of my motherboard, a PCIe x4, is clearly intended for the Thunderbolt card (there's a special connector nea…
Yep, I have a 4090. It runs adventure and zork like no one's business.