Reply 20 of 42, by SirNickity
barleyguy wrote on 2020-02-26, 05:33:Maybe I should just shut up for a while and try to figure this place out. Or maybe I just don't fit in here, and will never figure it out. Is this a matter of wanting to build a comprehensive list of every PC ever? Or do people have nostalgia for certain eras and want to relive that nostalgia? I'm just really trying to understand the motivation.
I always find the back-and-forth between members to be one of the more meaningful aspects of joining a community like this. So, I for one take no offense at somebody asking "but.... why?" if you're genuinely curious. I'm a little less enthusiastic with the "why do you insist on running a mechanical hard drive when flash is so much better" opinions, since everything here is subjective and like pretty much none of it is rational, so why should I defend my foolish self-imposed requirements?
I have a VLB build because my first DIY build was a DX2/66 with VLB. I wanted to rebuild that computer, and that's how I got started again. I rebuilt that one.. and then pretty much all of the other ones I owned.. and then a bunch I never owned before. This hobby has a way of getting out of hand sometimes...
I would say my VLB build is one of the least useful but most sentimental that I own. I love it to bits. I find that era to be the one I most enjoy building from parts. It was the "tween" years, where things were faster and more sophisticated than the "who even made this board?" 386/ISA era, but not quite as solid as the PCI/PnP era where cards could be conclusively identified by their PCI IDs, and manufacturers were no longer too ashamed of their product to put their name on the PCB.
Is it stable? God no. But c'mon, we were using DOS and Win 3.x, with no memory protection, and drivers that might or might not actually be written for this particular version of this video chipset, etc. It was the PC's college years, and the engineers were drunk and looking to plug their cards in to any slot where it would fit. It's amazing that any of it worked at all. Every boot-up BIOS *beep!* is a blessing.
My own build has a VLB ATI Mach64 video card, VLB I/O card, and VLB Adaptec SCSI card. Three VLB cards! And it works fine! Well, I did have to experiment with slot order to get it to boot successfully, and the other day I turned it on and it locks up after the memory count, but I was in there fooling around with drives and may have just left a power connector unplugged. Who knows. See? Adventure!