Just finished reading redhill. That brings back memories!
My first job was in a store in rural Australia roughly the same size as Ballarat. Sadly I was out front on the shop floor rather than out back which defined the business really. 1 side of the workshop was for photocopiers, faxes, cash registers and printers. I’d say this was the companys main business. The other half was the PC techs which was probably on par with the shop floor out front selling the stuff as well as toner, software, etc.
Oktek branded PC’s is what we sold, (which he mentions a motherboard) and frankly they were rubbish! They suffered the same problems as the PC’s that came in for repair components simply refused to work with each other. But put the same part in another PC and its fine! Octek simply didn’t have the R&D to check that all the parts worked properly together. Our 1st PC was a Osborne 486/66(was a big brand in Australia). And apart from the PSU its still going strong to this day. Since then I got a Gateway (who had brought Osborne) P2 400 and even after changing video cards, sound cards, Nics, its still for more reliable then my friend who had Octek 486 then built his own PC’s
In the end we got a local shop built Celeron 500 and I built a Athlon XP machine but never had the same reliability.
I didn’t last long in that shop I’m a techie not sales and ended up moving to Sydney to work for a out sourcing IT Dept. I was “Mr Hardware” for a while but dealing with brand name PC’s which usually out live their useful life I didn’t keep up with whats what in hardware and worse have forgotten a lot of what I did know! Hence why I’m at vogons!

I've always enjoyed reading redhill - for some strange reason I never get tired of reading it 😦

OMG REDHILL IS AWESOME!!

Its very easy to understand it..!

Agreed on redhill 😁 .

Here's another one I like [I know GH has it in his signature 😉]:

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/search/label/Midi

I have even thought about trying to do a site like redhill myself - but I really do not have enough hardware - not even close. And I got rid of a lot of earlier stuff (something I am regretting today). I wish I had kept that old 486 DX4 I had - with its Conner disk and VLB video card.

ncmark wrote:

I have even thought about trying to do a site like redhill myself - but I really do not have enough hardware - not even close. And I got rid of a lot of earlier stuff (something I am regretting today). I wish I had kept that old 486 DX4 I had - with its Conner disk and VLB video card.

It's a helluva lot of work to do such a feat! It's why I never bothered, but people here do post some bits and pieces in lengthy quality posts like the ones about their retro rigs. Some posts here are top-notch!

How about some reading not related to Wintel?

PDAs/Palmtops
http://pdadb.net
http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/windowsce/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus (SL5000 and later are full-on Linux)

Macs
http://lowendmac.com/
http://www.everymac.com/

SGI
http://hardware.majix.org/ (+ Sun, HP, DEC, etc)
http://www.siliconbunny.com/mirrors/www.tc.um … u/dols0011/sgi/

Really old
http://www.old-computers.com/

swaaye wrote:

How about some reading not related to Wintel?

Dunno.

The thing is, people here like playing older games, sometimes getting into old hardware in the process and most people coming here are most familiar with Wintel, especially for gaming.
Though I think DEC made some interesting designs back in the early7 and mid-90's, I felt it had not enough to do with the people who come here.
But feel free to add more links 😉

It's not that I wanted the OP (and the rest of the thread) to be the most perfect "for people new to retrogaming" thread ever, I basically only wanted to make a good start and we'll see how things move from there 😉

Just remember that DOS only became dominant around 1994 or so. Before that, Amiga and Apple were pretty much on equal footing with it for gaming.

http://jesusnjim.com/pc-repair/limitations.html

regarding file system limitations, and other stuff

It's informative, but it sure could be presented better, what with all that stuff about RAM and handles per user process (!?).

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/har … ze_barriers.htm gives better explanations and is more readable, even if it doesn't have as much information.

swaaye wrote:

Just remember that DOS only became dominant around 1994 or so. Before that, Amiga and Apple were pretty much on equal footing with it for gaming.

While I agree wityh you, I wanted to stick to only PC's.
For one, my knowledge about non-PC systems is quite limited (it would result in mindless copypastes which is not what I want) and secondly I wanted to stay within the area of PC's as I feel the vast majority of the rigs mentioned here on Vogons are PC's and people tend to try out PC's but with different ages, all in 1 long compatible line (sorry it's late....ok it''s not late but I'm dead tired as I type this 😜 )

Win9x/ME: 229=536,870,912 bytes=512MiB RAM Maximum.

MSFN proved this limit is relatively easy to circumvent. Sometimes 9x will work with more memory out of the box. It's a reason for me to not include it and the presentation is messy. The thing is, it's real hard to make a pick from all the millions of webpages available on the net.
At any rate, this thread is still relatively short so links are easy to find at this time 😉

And thanks Jorpho, your link has been added. Dunno how I could've forgotten about the harddrive limitation. For some reason I think that article is a nice one, though there's a good chance theres an even better one out there 😉