I emergency-fixed my girlfriend's dad's laser printer at his business and he gave me a bunch of old computer stuff from storage in return.
Among the fun stuff:
-Zip100 drive (Parallel)
-HP Colorado T1000e Travan tape drive (no idea where I'm going to get tapes for this, but it's a fun novelty to have sitting around)
-Some retro-looking sets of computer speakers that will match my old systems well
-a blue Microsoft serial mouse
-USB optical mouse with retractable cable (cool for my laptop!)
I also got the innards to an HP Pavilion tower from 1996. I thought about taking the whole system, but it had been being used back when everyone at his office smoked and it was just horribly stained up. That, and I don't have room for another tower. Because I didn't take the tower, I left the CD drive and floppy drive, both of which were equally dirty but also relied on the HP case's front to have any sort of front bezel. They'd look terrible in any other machine so I decided it wasn't worth it.
Anyway, the parts themselves, while dirty, cleaned up very well, but now that the machine is just a box of parts without a case (and likely will not have one unless I rig something up because of the proprietary design) I guess I'll just point out the individual parts.
-HP proprietary motherboard. Has a pretty strange design. Despite it already being a tower, the expansion slots are on their own huge riser card, which holds 2 PCI and 5 ISA slots. It is a SiS chipset (chips labeled SiS 5511, 5512, 5513, and 6205) which I seem to recall is a poor chipset, but I don't remember. It has an empty COAST slot and next to it are some sockets for chips, but I have no idea what for-- my best guess is more VRAM for the SiS integrated video. It also has integrated audio but executed in a strange way. It has a Crystal CS4232 chip on the motherboard, and then the actual audio outputs are on a tiny card by "AURA Systems" which is put in an expansion opening on the back of the system, and connected to the motherboard by a ribbon cable. I noticed while testing the machine that Win98 listed it as having an FM synthesizer, so I plan to investigate its usefulness further (didn't have speakers plugged in at the time)
-Socket 7 Pentium 133
-96MB 72-pin EDO RAM (2x32 and 2x16) -- although the machine only sees 64MB when booted into the included Win98. Unsure if it is a limitation of the board or if the two 16MB sticks are dead. I will test them on my other P133 board later.
-Linksys EtherPCI II ethernet card
-8-bit ISA card that says on the PCB it is a SCSI controller, but confuses me because in the installed Win98's device manager, it says that the parallel port Zip drive that I mentioned above was plugged in through it. So I don't actually know if it is an extra parallel port on a card, or a SCSI controller.
-Yet another ISA modem for my junk box
-Quantum hard drive, about 3.4GB capacity (forget exact model off the top of my head)
-Western Digital Caviar drive, about 6GB, circa 1998-- this one has red line on its label and the rest of my similarly aged WD drives have a green line-- what is the difference? Different RPMs?
-AT power supply, was filled with disgusting gunk but I cleaned it up well. I have a feeling that it is semi-proprietary due to the way the power button is hooked up. A cord runs from the PSU that looks identical to the power cable on a processor fan. The power button is then plugged into that through a short opposite-gendered cable. I intended to toss this PSU but after seeing that and being unable to conclude whether it was a proprietary HP setup, I decided I'd hold on to it. I don't think I'll use it much though because it sounds a little unstable (I can definitely hear a change in frequency of its hum whenever the computer redraws the screen, which concerns me... plus who knows how reliable it is after having sat in storage for years after being subjected to a lot of smoking damage and dirt)
I can supply pics of this stuff if anyone's curious... I have a few I took with my phone already but I'm just really lazy and haven't transferred them over.
