Been exploring the 486 ISA SBC concept. Never even knew they existed until just recently. Hopefully getting one of those soon 😀
Was involved in transferring an old passenger ferry to new owners in the Mediterranean a couple of weeks ago. Before handing a ship over, you go through it and take care of anything valuable in the exclusion list, like power tools, computers, etc. While doing that, I had a look in the phone exchange room, and found what looked like an old computer in an industrial tower case the size of half a shoe box. No cables connected, obviously not in use. Had very limited time, so basically just opened it up and had a quick glance. Never took any photos, regretting that now.
Inside there was an ISA backplane, the SBC, a couple of serial/parallel port controller cards, NIC, graphics card, hdd, floppy drive. I believe the IDE and floppy controllers were integrated on the SBC card.
The CPU had a small passively cooled heatsink (interestingly kept in place by a toothbrush handle jammed in between it and the PSU 😁). The SBC had PS/2 ports for both keyboard and mouse. Also, the ship had its keel laid in 1999. One can assume this kind of equipment was installed in the last phase of the construction, a couple of years later. I've understood that these SBCs were still made well after the heyday of 486, using late models like DX2 66 and DX4 100.
I believe the SIMMs were 30 pin ones, but might have gotten that wrong in the hurry. The computer was really cramped, easy to miss the details. All the 486 SBCs I've found documentation for so far uses 72 pin ones.
Given the above, I'm hoping it's a high end 486 of some kind.
Now it's stashed in a wooden crate, together with my personal effects, in a container hopefully on its way to Sweden as of writing this. Can't wait to get it in my hands, and start going through it and bringing it back to life 😁 Always wanted a 486 computer, but got quite limited space in my computer corner, so had to prioritize until now. The small form factor of this might just change that.
Will of course document and post the project here once it arrives 😀