ph4nt0m wrote:

That was how it looked like at the time of purchase. It's much cleaner now :) BTW the barrel battery was replaced with two aero […]
Show full quote

liqmat wrote:

Nice board, but man, that needs a bath.

That was how it looked like at the time of purchase. It's much cleaner now 😀 BTW the barrel battery was replaced with two aerogel supercaps for 1 farad capacitance. A single charge lasts for a few days and they will never leak.

Although this board is huge, the HP Vectra XU came even with a larger one. The beast is loaded with 2 gigs of memory! 128-bit effective memory bus made of two 64-bit interleaved channels each providing either even or odd bytes.

Very nice sir.

More archiving of the items I am coming across. VLB EIDE RAID 1 cache controller. It's a Tekram model under a "Precision Instruments" name. Card was missing, but here is a dump of the driver disk and some scans I made of the box.

The manual is here:

http://www.retronn.de/ftp/driver/tekram/manuals/dc6x0cd.pdf

All of this is now archived over @ -0°:

http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals.htm#P … ion_Instruments

My little bit of the haul is up and running if people are interested in what happened to some of this stuff
Duel Pentium Pro build

chinny22 wrote:

My little bit of the haul is up and running if people are interested in what happened to some of this stuff
Duel Pentium Pro build

Nice! Responded in your thread.

On another note:

Some people have PM'd me about the Great Pentium Pro Haul of 2018 Discord channel and asking to join. That ship has long since sailed and the Discord server has closed for good. It was fun and a lot of people got good deals, but it started feeling like a job rather than a hobby. I would also like to address a few items that have been hinted about my intentions with this haul. I had another thread...

Pentium Pro hardware lot inventory. Pics for kicks.

...where I wanted to share photos of all the items that were obtained, but of course some complained that I was trying to profit and advertise through Vogons. My intention of starting that thread was to share some photos and discuss the cool hardware that was saved, but stopped after the complaints started coming in and unfortunately a large portion of the hardware will not be shared through photos now. I am still very much in the red on this endeavor and Luckybob and a few others know damn well I went into this to save and preserve this new old stock hardware from the recycling center and/or greedy resellers. If I break even, I'll feel lucky.

I'll just say this, I put my money where my mouth is. I discussed this with Qbix, who made it very clear I gain no extra benefits from doing so, which are not my intentions, but as I said in this other thread...

Journey of a Unisys Aquanta HS/6, aka ALR Revolution 6x6

...I am donating 50% of all my new old stock ALR (Advanced Logic Research) dual Socket 8 Pentium Pro motherboard Ebay proceeds to DOSBox, which also supports this forum, after Ebay and PayPal fees. I'm giving back to the developers and the forum that makes this all fun to do in the first place. Those are my most prized motherboards out of the haul and will produce the most financial benefits towards donating to this very noteworthy cause. Cheers.

liqmat wrote:

...I am donating 50% of all my new old stock ALR (Advanced Logic Research) dual Socket 8 Pentium Pro motherboard Ebay proceeds to DOSBox, which also supports this forum, after Ebay and PayPal fees. I'm giving back to the developers and the forum that makes this all fun to do in the first place. Those are my most prized motherboards out of the haul and will produce the most financial benefits towards donating to this very noteworthy cause. Cheers.

You, sir, put the "Heart of Gold" in "Heart of Gold". (If only we could make you a nice hot cup of tea, but our Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser is on the fritz.)

AlaricD wrote:

You, sir, put the "Heart of Gold" in "Heart of Gold". (If only we could make you a nice hot cup of tea, but our Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser is on the fritz.)

Speaking of which, how are you coming along with that beast of a motherboard? Find a case yet?

liqmat wrote:

Speaking of which, how are you coming along with that beast of a motherboard? Find a case yet?

I haven't looked very hard, but it dawned on me recently that the task is both easier and more difficult because I must use an ATX case (more plentiful, but hard to find with a nice clean and retro aesthetic). It's also easier because finding an ATX power supply is much easier and you don't have to deal with potential used or NOS issues, or with fly-by-night makers of really bad power supplies.

I finally found time to archive the First International Computer FIC PN-6210 dual Socket 8 motherboard manual and submitted it over @ -0°.

http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/FIC/F … vision%20A1.pdf

liqmat wrote:

I finally found time to archive the First International Computer FIC PN-6210 dual Socket 8 motherboard manual and submitted it over @ -0°.

http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/FIC/F … vision%20A1.pdf

Is it the same board sold yesterday on eBay for $295? With 1Mb CPUs and a load of extras.

yes! get one today!

I'm late to the game here, but are any of the Dual P2 boards still available?

Maybe. Keep an eye on ebay at this point.

Unfortunately First International Computer has recently locked up their FTP site with a password and their vintage hardware files have become unavailable. The BIOS images for the FIC PN-6210 dual Socket 8 motherboard can be found here. This includes the final release beta revision 1.036. Cheers.

http://minuszerodegrees.net/manuals.htm#FIC

Update: Good news. Looks like their FTP site is back online. - ftp://ftp.fic.com.tw/

Update: Looks like the FIC FTP site is down for good, but the BIOS files can also be found at this mirror FTP: http://cwcyrix.nsupdate.info/ftp-archives/ftp … os/pentium_pro/

Finally testing all the Seagate 80-pin SCA SCSI hard drives that were in the haul (9GB, 18GB & 36GB). I have had about a 40% failure rate since the drives have been sitting in boxes for 20+ years. Unfortunate, but as the saying goes... don't use them, lose them.

If you like the GIF I created above, here is the bigger version you can download and use.

^^ I've had pretty similar luck with "vintage" SCSI drives; they're just not holding up. Meanwhile I have a ton of IDE drives from the single-digit-GB era on up which are still working fine. Seems funny that the industrial parts touted for their "gold standard reliability" back in the day are the ones that didn't last. Granted, an 18GB SCSI drive is like two generations older than a 20GB IDE drive, but still.

xjas wrote:

^^ I've had pretty similar luck with "vintage" SCSI drives; they're just not holding up. Meanwhile I have a ton of IDE drives from the single-digit-GB era on up which are still working fine. Seems funny that the industrial parts touted for their "gold standard reliability" back in the day are the ones that didn't last. Granted, an 18GB SCSI drive is like two generations older than a 20GB IDE drive, but still.

Exactly my thoughts as well. I love the sounds of old hard drives spinning up, etc., but in the end I really wont miss mechanical drives. Solid state is so much better. I forgot how hot these 10K RPM drives get. When I used to do data center work we would always have double hot spares in any given array, if there was room, because of the constant drive failures. Those drives were not cheap and many of them were the 15K RPM variety. The drives I am currently testing are 7200 & 10K RPM. Some are even the more expensive LCV models which you probably know had the larger cache and were geared more for A/V work back in the late 90s and early 00s.

liqmat wrote:

I have had about a 40% failure rate since the drives have been sitting in boxes for 20+ years. Unfortunate, but as the saying goes... don't use them, lose them.

Like a self-winding watch that doesn't get worn... But with the watches you can at least go to a jeweler and they can open it up, and clean and lubricate it...

Burn, baby, burn! Like any good action flick with explosions at the end, my third to last drive in this batch of testing just blew its motor at power on. Ahhh... the smell of burning motor parts and sizzling circuits gets me hungry.

liqmat wrote:

Burn, baby, burn! Like any good action flick with explosions at the end, my third to last drive in this batch of testing just blew its motor at power on. Ahhh... the smell of burning motor parts and sizzling circuits gets me hungry.

it_go_boom.gif

I shit you not, if Yankee Candle came out with a "burning electronics" candle, I'd buy 2.

My car's climate control system smelt like that today. Darn blower motor resistor stopped working again and only 2 speeds: fast or off. Found a puddle of sadness on my passenger side carpet, even though my doors were shut and the windows were closed. Going to order new weather stripping for every door, including the trunk and where the cabin air filter resides, clean the windshield motor shield, and fix the air compressors drip hose as that maybe the culprit as we'll.