I just bought 12 non-working boards with various battery and other damages. I just love working on these boards and bringing them back to life. The best part is seeing a board POST again after a difficult repair.

GigAHerZ wrote:

Intel486dx33 wrote:

GigAHerZ wrote:

Damn, where are those flea markets you guys can visit and get stuff from!?
I went through 5 different goodwill-like places in my home town, and they are only selling clothes and shoes...

You need to go to computer recycle centers.

I've contacted many electronic waste recyclers - they don't allow anyone to come and investigate their stuff. They just want to silently do their job by recycling everything on their own.

I'd think this would be a question of other people's data protection. Lots of old IT stuff holds loads of data, and the recyclers probably don't distinguish between data carrying equipment and non-data carrying equipment like CPUs, RAM, Videocards etc. ..

In some places ewaste (and recycling in general) is more about exploiting subsidies and government contracts than the resale value of the materials extracted - It doesn't matter that you (or anyone else) is willing pay more for a PC or component intact that they worth in scrap value because they have to do everything according to policies to receive the grant/contract money that is the bulk of their income.

I don't know about other countries but environmental regulations are pretty strict here. Waste collection plants can't just give away hazardous material to people who drop by and ask. Same with car dumps. They have to recycle what they can and safely dispose of the rest. They are responsible for everything that happens at that plant and government agencies inspect and regulate every step. If they give away toxic waste to people they risk losing their licence.
Civilian organized collections at schools are the best sources for e-waste here.

That's true for Germany as well. Once something was given to recycling, they are not allowed to do anything else with it. It's even a crime if they do.

@H3nrik V!, i did emphasize that i will take out all storage devices and leave that to them. I'm not interested in harddrives and other stuff like that.
For them, it is nuisance to do something that is not a standard boring everyday life...

Bought this early 90s Adaptec AHA-1542B for my 386 build

£3.99 on eBay.

Miphee wrote:

I just bought 12 non-working boards with various battery and other damages. I just love working on these boards and bringing them back to life. The best part is seeing a board POST again after a difficult repair.

That looks like it'll keep you busy for a while 😀
My joy of repairing what appears to be an Abit AN4 was cut short when it POST'ed and reported keyboard error.

Today I'm wondering whether I should purchase what appears to be an ISA video card combined with an ISA and floppy controller - novel, but would it work without its original motherboard?

mpe wrote:

Bought this early 90s Adaptec AHA-1542B for my 386 build

It probably has drive size limit of 1 GB.
But there was BIOS/firmware update for up to 8 GB - most likely distributed in the form of ROM chips, nowadays nowhere to be found.
If your card happens to support more than 1 GB, some may be interested in those ROMs contents...

I have the 1542CF, which should use the same BIOS (the cards looks the same, too). It has the option to enable support for >1GB under DOS 5.0, so I guess it has the newer BIOS.

derSammler wrote:

I have the 1542CF, which should use the same BIOS

Very unlikely, even impossible.
B is configured by jumpers only.
CF only has DIP switches for the most basic settings, the rest is configured in BIOS.
Also, CF supports Fast SCSI, so the microcode must be different as well.

Thanks. I am fine with the 1GB limit if there is really one. I will be using it with scsi2sd adaptor which breaks my 8GB SD card to as many emulated SCSI disks as I need. In general I use <512MB disks/partitions for DOS anyway.

I can check the limit.

Grzyb wrote:

Very unlikely, even impossible.

Why should this be impossible? The BIOS can detect on which card it is running. It says "1542B/1542C/1542CF" in the BIOS' title screen, so... Adaptec mostly made BIOSes for larger groups of cards, not individual ones. But not really important, since I have no equipment to dump the ROM anyway.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

These are from the 1990’s era. Advent AV370 speakers with subwoofer. They sound pretty good with good base for there time. They […]
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These are from the 1990’s era.
Advent AV370 speakers with subwoofer.
They sound pretty good with good base for there time.
They are NOT as nice as Klipsch Pro media 2.1 speakers but these Advent speakers work with
Powered sound cards like the Media Vision PAS16.
The AMP on the sound card does not seem to bother these speakers.

Wow !
These speakers sound really good.
I forgot how good they sound.

derSammler wrote:

Why should this be impossible? The BIOS can detect on which card it is running. It says "1542B/1542C/1542CF" in the BIOS' title screen, so... Adaptec mostly made BIOSes for larger groups of cards, not individual ones. But not really important, since I have no equipment to dump the ROM anyway.

Then maybe there is a chance, after all... note to self to try that some time!
Some 1542 ROMs can be found here - http://minuszerodegrees.net/rom/rom.htm

GigAHerZ wrote:

@H3nrik V!, i did emphasize that i will take out all storage devices and leave that to them. I'm not interested in harddrives and other stuff like that.
For them, it is nuisance to do something that is not a standard boring everyday life...

Same here in France, they just stonewall (=blatantly ignore) you if you ask, I heard it's per [unnecessary] EU regulations... One day when calling a recycling center, they just told me that they don't recycle computer stuff and bam the guy hung up.

As promised, I got some more pictures of the IBM Industrial Computer.

It's a neat computer.
Pentium MMX 166
16MB RAM
2x IDE HDD, boots into PC-DOS
4x IBM Artic186 controller cards
1x IDE Fujitsu DynaMO magneto-optical drive.

The case is a mix of extruded aluminum and steel.

I don't have the space for it, so it's going up for auction sometime today.

Friend of mine bought very old Chicony notebook (386?) without PSU brick. Power connector is a bit strange (pic). Do you know that type? It looks like smaller mickey mouse plug, but we don't know how to find similar...

Photobucket sucks. Got this 16 port 10/100 switch from a thrift show for $10. Good for integrating old systems with 10mbs nics in to gigabit networks.

Miphee wrote:

I don't know about other countries but environmental regulations are pretty strict here. Waste collection plants can't just give away hazardous material to people who drop by and ask. Same with car dumps. They have to recycle what they can and safely dispose of the rest. They are responsible for everything that happens at that plant and government agencies inspect and regulate every step. If they give away toxic waste to people they risk losing their licence.
Civilian organized collections at schools are the best sources for e-waste here.

In The Netherlands the only way to get electronics for free is to get them before they end up at a recycling company (contacted them in the past but it doesn't make economic sense to them to sell some stuff). Sometimes I am lucky at my municipal waste disposal station, where I can find old pc hardware (and old radio's), among tons of washing machines and refrigerators, every now and then. Unfortunately their staff size has increased over the last 2 years, so that means more surveillance on what customers are doing, which makes it risky to grab stuff from the electronics container. The last couple of months have been as dry as a desert over there though.