Apart from what was already mentionned, several AGP cards that do not cut it. This includes ATi Rage (non-pro), S3 Trio 3D/2X, etc. They can be of use when PCI, but there is always too much competition in AGP sector for them to be ever used in retro machines. I used to have 4 or 5 rages, all of which went to the bin when I got a PCI one.

nforce4max wrote:

Errius wrote:

CNR/AMR modems at least have curiosity value.

Now those were truly useless even pci modems were at least a fail safe option and didn't need a dedicated slot.

Why did they even create these slots? Might as well just use another PCI slot in its place.

I have a few of those laying around (they came with the second hand systems that I bought or was gifted I think), I keep them for curiosity's sake.

Tetrium wrote:

nforce4max wrote:

Errius wrote:

CNR/AMR modems at least have curiosity value.

Now those were truly useless even pci modems were at least a fail safe option and didn't need a dedicated slot.

Why did they even create these slots? Might as well just use another PCI slot in its place.

I have a few of those laying around (they came with the second hand systems that I bought or was gifted I think), I keep them for curiosity's sake.

The AMR/CNR slots were truly a stillborn concept. I never really understood their reason for existing, a slot with very limited use as opposed to the universally compatible PCI, and which in addition would disable one of the existing PCI slots when used...

I believe it was something to do with the cost of certifying new motherboards with integrated modems with national telecommunications regulators.

Has anyone mentioned those little CF card-sized Microdrives? Tiny hard drives. Very cool, but pretty useless now, since they were never produced with capacities larger than about 4 GB.

The ones made by IBM? I remember they were ridiculously expensive. They would be fairly pointless these days.

Modems, CNR, serial port, printer port and any celeron exept the 1.4 tulatin, for me anyways...

Errius wrote:

Has anyone mentioned those little CF card-sized Microdrives? Tiny hard drives. Very cool, but pretty useless now, since they were never produced with capacities larger than about 4 GB.

I have 4 of them, and they're 6GB each. They see pretty heavy use in my DOS machines. Far from useless.

stamasd wrote:

Errius wrote:

Has anyone mentioned those little CF card-sized Microdrives? Tiny hard drives. Very cool, but pretty useless now, since they were never produced with capacities larger than about 4 GB.

I have 4 of them, and they're 6GB each. They see pretty heavy use in my DOS machines. Far from useless.

Is there any performance or compatibility benefit of them over CF?

Errius wrote:

Has anyone mentioned those little CF card-sized Microdrives? Tiny hard drives. Very cool, but pretty useless now, since they were never produced with capacities larger than about 4 GB.

Yup I have a few. They work great but are quite slow. Best used with a 286 or slow 386 IMO.

Lots of info here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

Seagate apparently made them up to 12 GB.

Man, I saw a MINT in box Diamond Supra V.90 ISA 56k modem in a thrift shop today. For $3. It seriously looked like it had never been opened and the box was factory-new. I left it there.

I think it was exactly this one:

That would have been a hell of a thing to have in about 1996, but these days? Let the gold harvesters have it. 🙁

If it had been a sound or a video card I would probably have snapped it up, even just to pass it on to someone who actually needs it. But a modem is just plain obsolete.

(That said, If anyone wants a minty NIB ISA non-Win modem hit me up. I'm sure it'll still be there for some weeks.)

Has anyone tried this:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Transferring_Da … _Dial-Up_Modems

I assume it's slower than a serial/serial null modem connection

Errius wrote:

Has anyone tried this:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Transferring_Da … _Dial-Up_Modems

I assume it's slower than a serial/serial null modem connection

Yes, I've done it. It's been recently discussed in its own thread here.

For testing purposes I have a ISDN box with several analog ports connected by an internal bus. So I can connect Modems and call each other internally. It is a very easy way to realize such a setup.

That's interesting. These things aren't useless after all. You could get crude networking working in DOS without TCP/IP.

Errius wrote:

Lots of info here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

Seagate apparently made them up to 12 GB.

I popped open a Qrisma 4gb USB drive and it has a Microdrive inside. The 1" drives are newer versions of the 20MB 1.3" HP kittyhawk drives like that found in my Dauphin DTR-1 Windows 3 Pen Computer.

P.S. Only 160K of those Kittyhawks were sold before they quit making them, wonder if the working ones I have are collectable?

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Errius wrote:

Has anyone mentioned those little CF card-sized Microdrives? Tiny hard drives. Very cool, but pretty useless now, since they were never produced with capacities larger than about 4 GB.

Yup I have a few. They work great but are quite slow. Best used with a 286 or slow 386 IMO.

Has anyone ever made any benchmarking of Microdrives, and compared it to old 210mb Conner drives on an old 16-Bit ISA controller.
I remember the norm was aprox some 600/800kb transfer rate or something like that.
Personally I have no memory of harddrives faster than 1mb/s up until 1995/96'ish. They were all sub-1mb/s.

This device has one of the Seagate Microdrives inside: http://www.notebookreview.com/review/seagate- … d-drive-review/

At 3600 RPM, the drive is slower than even the lowest-end 4200RPM notebook drives. That’s part of the give and take though as you scale down the drive size. Even though it sounds slow, in practical terms it’s not that bad. I transferred a directory of family pictures from my computer to the Pocket Drive that included 1,334 files and 2.1GB in 14 minutes.

For a smaller, more practical test, I copied over a ripped music CD containing 22 files for a total of 102MB. The copy to the Pocket Drive took 35 seconds. By way of comparison, the same files were copied to a USB flash drive in 22 seconds, about 60% faster.

Thanks for the link. They have horrible seek time. Transfer rate is actually pretty nice for the 1988/92 time frame.
Seek time back then, was aprox 10 to 12 ms, when doing a test with Norton Utils.