I thought it would be fun to dedicate a thread to my old Pentium 90 machine (model name was apparently "SkyTower")

We got this PC new in 1994 - this was a beast back in the day. It was a replacement for our 486DX50 and the speed improvement was massive. (It was also a lot more stable as the DX50 used to hang a lot, probably due to overheating or because of the 50mhz bus speed...)





It came with 8mb of Ram, a Mitsumi CD-Rom (that probably failed or was upgraded a couple of years later). IIRC it was a "triple speed" CD-Rom drive and I think they were a bit buggy due to not being x2 or x4... that's what I remember reading. We also had two hard disks in two removable bays - a WD Caviar 31000 1gb my parents used for work and a Seagate ST3491A 420mb I used for games. Depending on who would use the computer, we would unlock one or the other bay with a tiny key to choose which HDD would boot. After a while one bay stopped working, it was probably just disconnected from the inside but we didn't even think about opening the case to check and just assumed it was faulty! Since then, both HDD have unfortunately failed.



It came with a Spea Video 7 Vision864 PCI video card. The card failed a couple of years later and the store replaced it with a S3 Trio64 card.

I used to have a Sound Blaster 1.5 in previous 486DX50 PC and for this machine we got a Sound Blaster 16 because by that time pretty much every game offered SB16 support. We were sold the SB16 MultiCD ASP (CT1750) that also served as an interface for the CD-Rom drive. We didn't know about the ASP stuff, I guess we just assumed it was a better soundcard because it was more expensive! I only found out recently on Vogons that the ASP chip was kind of a scam and was never used in anything... I actually completely forgot it was on the card to begin with.



I also migrated my Roland SCC-1 that I had in the 486 in this PC so I could continue to enjoy midi soundtracks along with the digital sound from the SB16.



It was a great PC and I have fond memories of playing games on it - Need for Speed, Hi-Octane, Slipstream 5000, NBA Live '95, Pinball Fantasies, Sam & Max, Lands of Lore, Inherit the earth, Bioforge, Heroes of Might & Magic II, Theme Park, Syndicate, Dark Forces, Descent, Doom 1 & 2... to name a few.

I used this machine pretty much everyday from 1994 to 1998 and it was also the first PC that I went online with, late 1995 on Compuserve with 28.8k dial-up ISA card modem...

Then it was eventually replaced by a PII-333 machine, put in storage and moved several times between flats. A few years ago I decided to declutter heavily - I saved the parts but unfortunately chose to throw away the case to make room at the time. I have to say the case didn't age well and for some reasons the ISA cards didn't fit properly anymore, the side panels were really difficult to open, and the lock for the extension cards no longer attached securely. (this case used a plastic lock instead of screws to secure extension cards to the case).

Apart from the case I still have all the parts including the motherboard (Intel Plato Socket 5 with gold-top P90) but I can't use it until I desolder the RTC chip (Dallas DS12887) and solder a new one, as the original chip finally died last year... after keeping time for 19 years!