First post, by st31276a
I am absolutely delighted to have discovered this forum. Given what has become of the internet lately, even more so.
I have been scanning and reading the old hardware section piece by piece for the last month as I have time, now up to page 180. I really enjoy the detailed discussions about what hardware people use for what purpose and their knowledgeable discussions about it and their experiences with it, just for the sake of reading it.
Until I found this forum, I did not realize "retro" computing was a thing; I thought some people just use old stuff for various reasons, some not even for hobbyist nature. Usually because old stuff is free. (except when you really want something specific it seems)
I have, for example, a 200MMX with 64MB SDRAM on which I installed Red Hat linux 8.0 when it just came out, it has been running pretty much 24/7 ever since in various roles: web server, packet filter nat router, network bridge, samba master browser and wins server, squid with huge lfuda cache, some custom monitoring stuff, direct connect hub, mysql database, etc etc etc. It has a Seagate Medalist 1276a (the one with the aluminium tape around it) that I dug out of a broken packard bell somewhere around 1999. That disk must have nearly 20 years of power on hours on it, the bearings have been singing for the last 10 years but no bad or slow sectors whatsoever. This computer has worked to death some other larger ide drives I used for data storage through the years in it, but not that one. This computer is a "retro" computer by what seems to go through as retro computers on this site, although for me it is still a very useful computer.
Another system I have that might go through as an edge case "retro" machine, is a dual 3GHz socket 604 Irwindale I built early 2006. I used this computer as my main desktop until late 2017, when I built myself a more modern dual Skylake. When I built it, memory was hideously expensive. An affordable amount was 1GB, but I stuffed in 2x1GB regardless, because dual channel. The board is an Intel SE7525RP2 workstation board, I added 2x2GB a couple of years later. The system is currently running the latest Fedora on an Evo 860 ssd connected to a small jmicron pci express sata controller I had lying around. It has 6x 2TB sata drives, two on the motherboard ports and 4 on a silicon image 3124 pci-x card, in an md raid6 configuration. It runs nextcloud, so that the phones and laptops and stuff can all sync to it. It is also used for backups and archiving. It runs great. By no means retro in my book, but a very interesting machine nonetheless. It even ran gta4 like a boss back in the day. Windows Vista was slow on every computer I saw it on, except this one.
I recently rediscovered an old office pc someone threw out years ago, sitting on the shelf in the garage. I booted it for fun and saw it ran windows 98 and was still working fine. It is a 400MHz Mendocino in a slocket on a GA-6VA 2.8 (Via 691 based). I promptly put in the voodoo2, another 64MB dimm (128 total) and a 3c905b to connect it to the internet. (this is why I discovered this forum...) I threw out the noisy Aztech POS and put in a CT2920 with the 1703-A DAC. Since I have not really used windows at all for decades (used to use 95, 98, Server2000 as desktop os because xp looked like a children party 😁 and afterwards vista and 7 as a curiosity, did everything on Linux by then) I decided to keep it as is and use it for nostalgia's sake like the time capsule it is. This is probably real retro computing. I imaged the hard disk, a 6.4GB Fujitsu, and put unreal and ut99 on it so that I could play some of my favourite games in glide. It ran really shittily, so I pushed the memory timings as tight as the bios can go, which improved it a lot. I tried the via memory interleave enabler tool, but it made no difference, guess the bios already does it. I have a 466 mendocino chip lying in a box for an easy "upgrade" and a 666 Coppermine (133x5) that can possibly run at 100x5 in this board if the vrm agrees, but I am undecided if I want to change it (yet?) - the shittiness factor is part of the experience of retro gaming right? I could just fire them up on something new if I wanted them smooth, that is not the point in my opinion.
I have some 286 and 386 boards and adapters and a couple of mfm drives (st225's and so on) which I cannot really use for anything useful, maybe that stuff is retro?
Anyway, thank you for this great forum. I enjoy it a lot.