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It's a PC, you type DIR
— Cathode Ray Dude
The thing you are looking at is a cuboid frame made of aluminium extrusions, 40x30x20cm in size, covered in sheet metal (galvanized steel, 0.6mm thick). It was built around a Zida 4DPS mainboard with an AMD Am486DX4 on it (the "enhanced" version, i.e. with writeback cache), running at a ludicrous 120MHz. It is equipped with 16M of RAM, about half what the mainboard supports.
The mainboard itself is from 1995, has both PCI & ISA slots, and with the CPU probably represents the tail end of the 486 era.
The graphics card currently installed in the machine is an S3 Virge/DX based PCI card from 1997. There was no particular reason for using that, I just happened to have a box of them that I bought for cheap at an EBay auction.
Status: Technically working, case mostly complete
TODO:
The picture above shows a PC-AT style clone case, the label says "AT Olymp".
I originally got the machine from a friend whose parents wanted to toss it out. I ended up having to replace quite a number of the parts to restore it to working order. It originally would only boot sporadically until finally something near the cache card released magic smoke. A percussion cap had ejaculated inside the PSU. The machine used to have 3 hard drives installed, all broken. One was in a swappable frame I that removed, hence the gaping hole in the 3rd drive slot.
It currently has a J-Bond A340C-H mainboard installed with an AM386DX, running at 44MHz, a bit faster than the 33MHz Intel 386DX on the original ECS 386S . The AMD CPU is a soldered on laptop variant, the Intel 387 from the original mainboard was transplanted.
The new mainboard has 8M of RAM installed and 128k of SRAM cache installed, similar to the old configuration. No fixed storage yet (other than floppies).
The PS/2 keyboard is trash-picked and cleaned up. It connects to the mainboard via a PS/2 to AT adapter.
Status: Technically working
TODO:
A walk through the installed components, new and replaced
The picture above shows a Sun Blade 100 that I got my hands on. Sun Blade is a series of UltraSPARC based workstations that Sun Microsystems started selling around the turn of the millennium. It apparently has nothing to do with blade servers.
Having grown up with only x86 based PCs (safe for occasionally seeing a PowerPC based Mac), I was eager on the chance to get started playing with SPARC hardware and the software ecosystem around it.
Status:
TODO:
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