VOGONS

Ressurrecting an old 486 that survived some 25y on my attic and OS/2 BBS on it

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First post, by KuraakaBBS

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I guess I got that disease of nostalgia that is going to be expensive I suspect. But anyway, while it lasts, it is enjoyable and inspiring. May be even useful for something.

I will probably create some sort of blog here, about the experience, as so far it has been interesting. As HD was dead, but I had a copy of my BBS backed up with all ancient echo areas full of ancient messages.
But resurrection is going to be pretty demanding process. Even before I could get past BIOS startup, I discovered that my 35yo keybord had non working keys. So I fixed this. Then I had difficulties in finding working Hard disk that is big enough to accommodate operating system, but small enough BIOS would recognize it. As a result I have now a full box of hardrives. About 20. Then I had to find out correct jumper settings of different HD's that work correctly and boot.
Every reinstall of OS/2 takes 1h. Every change in configuration requires restart, another 2.5 minutes. Then my only serial mouse did not work. Etc. It took a whole week until I managed to install stable version of OS that I am not going to replace.

The latest problem is with Network card. I suspect it is a hardware problem, as totally randomly network either works after boot or does not work. But a network card I need to have, as this BIOS has year 2000 problem. After every restart OS needs to take correct date from NTP server.

I will describe every problem in detail and solution to it as well, so may be it is useful to someone else stuck with similar problems and disease 😀

Reply 1 of 3, by gerry

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this is a cool thing - to find an old pc like this. maybe a picture will be good? some folk may recognise the pc brand etc

As a result I have now a full box of hardrives. About 20

So, looks like 20 more projects coming up soon then 😀

Reply 2 of 3, by debs3759

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Welcome to the hobby.

If it's taken that long to get the OS setup how you want it, I highly recommend a full system backup both before and after installing your other software. A system that is almost 3 decades old IS going to have something else fail, and you don't want to have to go through the whole process again if that something is the drive 😀

I look forward to reading your adventures.

See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.

Reply 3 of 3, by KuraakaBBS

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This is the hardware. The last purpose it was used for was a router/DHCP server and maillist manager for a diving center, as fidonet in Estonia was dead.
That SiS motherboard was bought to function as BBS in 1995. Originally it had i486DX-25 CPU that was overclocked to 40MHz. And 16Mbytes of memory. It started as a DOS/Windows machine. But within months I installed OS/2 in the hope that I could run BBS in the background while I can use it for other purposes. But yea, it did not work too well. Only some basic stuff worked ok.
So I got accustomed to OS/2. My BBS ran on Maximus.
AS hardrives were pretty tiny back then, and very expensive. (I had 420Mb HD for OS/2 and BBS) then there was not much space for files. So I cheated somewhat. I bought CD changer that could accommodate 6 CD's. Which gave me 3.9Gb for files. That addition came in 1996.
In 1997 My BBs became full fidonet node. 2:490/44 and it had 2 normal US Robotics Courier modems and third node had ISDN connection up to 128kb/s.
But soon after that in 1999 Estonian fidonet practically ceased to exist. It was internet that killed BBS's. My BBS also was left to operate on just one node and in 2001 I pulled the plug, and I put it to some use in a diving center I helped to run.
So it worked there until 2005 when it moved and did not need services it was providing.
In 2016 I started it up again, but HD failed under my eyes, giving more and more bad sectors, until it was dead. And since then it spent it's time in my attic.
I think that sometimes around 2002 I sold CD changer and upgraded memory to 64Mb and processor to AMD 486DX-2 80MHz.

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