Does it include DIY hardware?

If yes, then rudder pedals made of several pieces of wood, rollerskate wheels, 50Ohm potentiometer, some nuts, bolts and washer and a piece of wire.

It was back in 286 era, and I made it for Flight Simulator 3.0 I think...

CASI Apollo VP2 s100 bus computer portrait machine
Tektronix 4696 ink well with maintenance cart inkjet
Seiko Colorpoint wax thermal printer
Grappler c/Mac/GS (came with a c64)
Fuji nc2 printer
HP Rugged Writer, single handedly the most unreliable piece of crap I’ve owned, couldn’t friction feed and kept ripping ink and paper

Hp 9 pin vga color monitor, nice screen and the only one that worked with the 9 to 15 pin adapter I had, no idea what the point was, it was incompatible with 15khz so why?
Videonics mx-1
Faroudja ld 1000 video frame doubler (wish I could get this repaired)
Sharp GS-p21 (would still use it if the belts didn’t keep crapping out, terrible design)
Kodak Flashsync 4000 RGB targa camera
Sony RGB Flatbed video scanner (targa out)

I got this weird little embedded system out of a large scientific apparatus that was being recycled. It came in a bespoke metal enclosure which was barely bigger than the motherboard itself. Inside is a bog-standard socket 7 ATX board with a P133 - well, if you can call a rather neat industrial-targeted board with six ISA slots & onboard S3 graphics standard.

Still, this part works about how you'd expect:

It was the support gear that was originally installed that's a little unusual. Here it is populated in its original configuration:

Yeah, the entire thing was controlled by this arrangement of THREE ISA & one PCI card, strung together in situ with ribbon cables. Note how ATX power is delivered TO the motherboard through the bottom card, which is how on/off is handled. NONE of what would be front panel connectors are hooked up (i.e. no power switch, etc.), and there wasn't even any internal storage. The ethernet card didn't have a boot rom either, so it must have booted via one of the custom cards. It looks like the entire PC subsystem here only existed to collect data, process it, and then feed it back out to another component in the thing this came out of. You'd probably read its output externally with a laptop or something.

To be honest, I'm not even sure how I'd start poking at this thing to figure out how it worked. I know what it came out of, and it's NOT something common that you'd find in any old lab. I'm wild-ass-guessing a production run of maybe tens of thousands before that particular model became obsolete.

HanJammer wrote:

Does it include DIY hardware?

If yes, then rudder pedals made of several pieces of wood, rollerskate wheels, 50Ohm potentiometer, some nuts, bolts and washer and a piece of wire.

It was back in 286 era, and I made it for Flight Simulator 3.0 I think...

You cannot post that and not post pictures. Give us the goods!

I had a Snappy, a parallel port device that could grab screenshots from an analogue video signal. It came with a copy of Kai's Power Goo.

emote wrote:

I had a Snappy, a parallel port device that could grab screenshots from an analogue video signal. It came with a copy of Kai's Power Goo.

I had a snappy for “business “ purposes to upsell cheap little b&w pictures but it wasn’t capable of hot swapping the video cables (didn’t have a switch box, not that it would have helped) and fried the snappy along with the very expensive Innovion video toaster feeding the video, thankfully we were under the maintenance policy to get “free” repair but it sucked being shut down 2.5 days in the middle of a big event

@xjas: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Thermo-LCQ-Acquisiti … 70/264274711521

It's apparently something called a Thermo Finnigan Scientific Mass Spectrometer DAQ Acquisition / Controller Computer

what a name

Errius wrote:

@xjas: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Thermo-LCQ-Acquisiti … 70/264274711521

It's apparently something called a Thermo Finnigan Scientific Mass Spectrometer DAQ Acquisition / Controller Computer

I think pretty much all industrial stuff has 10 word names. I work at a lubricant company and the lab there is chock full of gear whose only update in decades has been to adapt the serial interface to serial-over-USB and we end up supporting it because why shouldn't IT know how to calibrate a titration device?

Actually end up applying my retro knowledge fairly often in the lab since some of their equipment never got new drivers after Windows 98 or XP, a lot of it still runs on serial, etc. And then there's the software which is always either VB4 or ancient Java which only runs on 1.4.2 or whatever version.

I had one of those amstrad 386/megadrive combos that I purchased from cash converters for £5 around 2002. Couldnt get it to work (only found out recently about the monitor that is needed) so it ended up in landfill 🙁

I have 55Kg IBM 10Mbyte Hard disk.

xjas wrote:

Inside is a bog-standard socket 7 ATX board with a P133 - well, if you can call a rather neat industrial-targeted board with six ISA slots & onboard S3 graphics standard.

Looks like a perfect platform for a DOS-oriented Pentium-1 build. Looks like it's a 430TX motherboard? Probably supports Pentium MMX which can be slowed down with SetMul...

Onboard S3 graphics = perfect for DOS compatibility.

One of the two PCI slots would be great for a Voodoo card.

And you can have several ISA sound cards as well... E.g. ESS ES1868 for compatibility and GUS for games that support it.

That data acquisition computer would have been rigged to a mass spectrometer

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

AlessandroB wrote:

I have 55Kg IBM 10Mbyte Hard disk.

Those look like top-loading washing machines I think?

red-ray wrote:

Do these guys count?

This somewhat reminds me of Power Rangers in nuclear protection suits 😀.
And these also have some similarities to the recent Terran Troopers in CarBot cartoon style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MDa2jwH5d0

xjas wrote:

HanJammer wrote:

Does it include DIY hardware?

If yes, then rudder pedals made of several pieces of wood, rollerskate wheels, 50Ohm potentiometer, some nuts, bolts and washer and a piece of wire.

It was back in 286 era, and I made it for Flight Simulator 3.0 I think...

You cannot post that and not post pictures. Give us the goods!

🤣, I no longer have it... I think I dismantled it 20 years ago or so although I thing I could try to draw it 😉

My weirdest hardware are pair of PC104 modules, and perhaps some ISA FM tuner cards, all else is pretty mundane...

I bought a telephone switching device with a huge backplane and several proprietary boards. Don't know why, it was at a recycling center and it looked neat. When you plug it in and flip the massive black power switch, a couple relays click and a bunch of lights flash on the front of the machine.

I say telephone switch, but I'm not exactly sure what it does. I'll take some pictures when I pull it out of storage next. I've been thinning the herd so to speak lately, but I think this is something I'm going to keep, if only as a neat decoration.

Does an answering machine from 1957 count as well? Still own it, so it's not completely on-topic. 😉

I still have this boxed up.
Maybe I will do something with it some day.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

I still have this boxed up.
Maybe I will do something with it some day.

Holy fuck, that's atrocious.

Who looked at that, and thought "yep, that's a good idea. Let's make it."?