VOGONS


First post, by BitWrangler

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Howdy folks,

Thought I'd start a thread about the stuff you swore you had, but you can't find, or keep track of, or it turns up during unrelated to retro PC endeavours, then sneaks back into hiding when you put on the Techie hat again. Sliding back into the fog of the rest of the collection or pile or something. ... and also to celebrate the re-finds, or surprise finds of stuff you forgot about.

So biggest piece that I seem unable to find is a Toshiba T3100SX or something closely related, that I had ~18 years ago, but I can't figure where it went. It might be doing something sneaky like hiding under a bunch of Popular Mechanics mags or something that I haven't needed to dig out since google digitised them, or PM did. I ain't in fit shape to move heavy boxes at a rate of more than one or two a day, so can't do the fine tooth comb search. Thing is really, I have to take the "It'll turn up" approach because I have too many things to play with, so I am not real desperate yet, or at the "I must know! I must have it!!!" stage. A lot of that goes for the rest too.

GFX... Now I keep thinking I have a GF 8800 series... a green one... it got "recorded" on some partial inventories I wrote out 10 years back, I think it was in front of me or nearby at the time, but the darn thing is never around when I want to put it into something... I have a faint idea that it surfaced once in between hardware sessions, like I was looking for VHS tapes or something in the general area, and hey, GF 8800, cool, then poof, gone again next time I think of it. Now a mystery was sorta solved over the last two days, I thought I had two earlier Geforce cards, a GF2mx400 and aaaaaaa... plain jane Geforce?? another Geforce2... wth, why can't I remember... so yesterday, a Geforce256 appeared in the closet, and I may have questions about that in future, might need some repair. Then today, in the basement I came across a Creative Labs GB0010 (GF2GTS) installed in a system, well damn, I don't remember building this one, 🤣... Weirdness, I had somehow half remembered both of the cards and had this weird morphing combo of the two in my head that I couldn't nail down to real hardware. Yah, that's two cards I was thinking were one, I have the GF2MX400 as well. Now this might be another one like that, what I thought I had was a Diamond Monster 3D 2 8MB, the first Voodoo 2 I bought some 15 years back, used, because I'd never messed with them. Now I swear I remember the logo on it, and I swear I remember wondering if I could do SLI with it at all being an 8MB... now what I've got that I know where it is, is a Creative Labs 12MB and a 3DFX/STB 12MB, both very plainly 12MB cards... and I only remembered buying another 1... what the heck... have I got a third V2 somewhere, even a 4th, because I think I was comparing a 12MB card with the 8MB at one point, and why the heck would I put them in totally different places?? So is there another one? another two? IDK

CPUs... I was fairly certain I had an intel DX4-100 and an AMD-5x86-133... but these seem absent from my boxes of CPUs... I have however found an AMD-DX4-100 and an AMD-DX4-120 that I wasn't expecting to have, or forgot about, so now I wonder if I'm crazy and the 100 was an AMD and the 5x86 was a 120, I don't know... I had a vague idea I'd turned up a second Cyrix 5x86 over my original one also, but that hasn't seen light of day either, but I feel like that one is installed in a system at the bottom of the pile, so that's not one I'm "worried" about yet. Another thing is I thought I had a Winchip2, that got written on some old notepads too... that's playing hookey too now... Then there's CPUs that seem to be breeding, I had one K6-266(3.2V)... now I've got 2... I had two K6-2-350s, now I've got 4... must be mitosis 'coz I can't tell between the males and females to separate them. 686PR166s bred as well... 3 of those now. Also got in my head that I had a real P-200, but again think that's in one of the systems in the pile.

Motherboards... now these damn things, despite being larger than VGA cards, and MUCH larger than CPUs have some funny tricks to play... There's one board a 440EX slot 1 with a PII-233 in it that keeps turning up, oh no it doesn't, now it's a 440BX with a 450 in it... well well, I should put that in a case... 2 days later, aha, an empty ATX case, let me go and get that...440EX??? dammit... I'll do something else then... those two are gaslighting me deliberately I know it. One that's gone AWOL that I really want to play with at the moment was a SiS chipset baby AT that was halfass super7 with a 6326 onboard... think it had one of those VX-Pro stickers on it. That one doesn't want to be found for now. Actually a few socket 7 boards absent, I might be looking for a forgotten box, I had several T2P4s, a FIC board and a Shuttle of some description, not to mention a couple of craptastic FXes of some description.

Then completely random crap surprises you, ISA CDROM interface card, CL, just a little short bugger with only the IDE(?) on, weird, C-Cube Mpeg decoder card, forgot about it, but I had it set up aeons ago, only had 1 video CD it worked with. Number Nine Revolution IV... now I wasn't surprised at having A number nine, I was surprised this one turned up in a box of things that I thought had been untouched about 7 years+ in the basement, when I LAST saw a number nine card in my upstairs desk area... do I have two of them??? ISA floppy/SCSI... what's that doing here, isn't it installed in the mid tower upstairs??? It's that mitosis thing again... oh yah, SB16 cards... what works on them? DDT?? I'm beginning to fear an infestation... could lose the whole first floor... j/k.. I probably just overbought a bit... thrift store like "oooh, soundblaster, better grab that to make my surplus retro rigs more saleable, retro geeks love a soundblaster..."

So, wasn't meaning to write a novel (Movie rights still available) but anyhoo, what's hiding from you, what weird crap just turned up from the depths?

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 1 of 55, by Horun

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Hahhaa ! Lost a box of tested modems (ISA and external) recently but found my old Copy-II-Pc card when looking for them. Does that count as lost and found ?

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 3 of 55, by dionb

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I have two Mediavision PAS16s *somewhere* but haven't been able to find either for over a year. Also have a small obscure 8b ISA SCSI adapter that I know must still be around, but despite multiple attempts at actually tidying up haven't been able to trace it.

The opposite is fun though: discovering hardware you didn't know you had or thought was long gone. Usually just after buying a replacement... I ended up with far more STB Velocity 4400 than I needed, and going to a whole lot of trouble to find a working, low-noise ALS100 card with real OPL3 only to find I already had one in exactly the place I intended to store the new one wasn't my brightest moment.

Reply 4 of 55, by gerry

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I had several gateway solo laptops of Pentium vintage many years ago. All had some delicate characteristic which meant they were never quite reliable though they still worked. I had focussed everything on one machine with a slightly larger 13' screen and a P166mmx, it ended up with the largest hdd (2.1g!) and the most ram (96mb!)

and then in a house move years back I think i retained the P166 and allowed the rest to finally go

except that isn't what must have happened, the only one i found much later was an older solo of lower spec (p150,24mb ram, 1.3gb hdd, 12' screen) with no floppy drive and no power cable. It works with a universal power supply but there is really nothing i can do with it now, no role for it to play. occasionally some evidence of the others, in the form of a hard drive or unexpected ram module, shows up in a spares box, like the wreckage of a ship floating in the sea! Part of me thinks i may still have, somehow, retained the P166 laptop - but i know that i didn't really, and its time to let it all go.

on a discovery note - i found a few pci graphics and sound cards i'd forgotten about recently, nothing standout but interesting to have!

Reply 5 of 55, by BitWrangler

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cyclone3d wrote on 2021-05-21, 07:07:

You need to get filing cabinets.

I can barely tolerate those things for designed purpose of storing frequently accessed flat pieces of A4/letter paper... even with stapled business cards, receipts, pamphlets etc included they get suboptimal rapidly, also lot of dead space in the damn things, and that's before realising you can't have random shaped objects over 5" depth in them before they start going sideways and jamming them up (shallow/open sides on the drawers) I had been all "yay, free filing cabinets" to giving them away again a couple of times before I wised up. I have a supply of large shoebox size (approx hightop/ankle boot size) envelope boxes that work nicely that things are getting sorted into gradually.

The organizing is important... the staying organised is the difficulty... I get really enthused in a PC building/using bee and have a lot of stuff out, then there's an "event", births, deaths, marriages etc expected, but, illnesses of me and others meaning I'm out of the house a lot or emergency repairs of cars, the house, appliances, have a recurring habit of disrupting everything, making it all get shoved aside in a hurry or forgotten about for several months, during which time, the event has wiped all memory of what I was doing, and up to a week beforehand, out. My basement space for instance, got emergency cleared several times, once for rebuilding a cylinder head (Blew HG and cracked on fam car) once for a waste pipe starting to seep and having to get plumbers in, and a couple more that take more than a sentence or two to describe. Then I've got a couple of relatives to deal with who act like everything is life or death drama, just talking to one of them has me lose track of a whole afternoons worth of sorting/dabbling. (Captain Jack Sparrow... the problem isn't the problem...) ... it's somehow like I have to reformat my brain and install WindowsME to deal with them every time.

I try writing stuff down as I go, so that I can resume after interruptions, but somehow the jottings seem far disconnected from what seems to be in the area when I resume, if it's more than a week or two. I might need to start doing that Dana Scully doing an autopsy thing, voice recorder, recorded as it happens, no 2 hour blanks because of train of thought derailments before you put it down, but that is a very annoying format to recover info from, unless you transcribe it or find a speech to text solution that deals with technical terms, weird names and model numbers every third word instead of regular English... it's enough to make one seriously consider having a youtube channel or twitch stream just to keep track of your own crap.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 6 of 55, by BitWrangler

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gerry wrote on 2021-05-21, 08:28:

I had several gateway solo laptops of Pentium vintage many years ago. All had some delicate characteristic which meant they were never quite reliable though they still worked. I had focussed everything on one machine with a slightly larger 13' screen and a P166mmx, it ended up with the largest hdd (2.1g!) and the most ram (96mb!)
... (SNIP)

Funnily enough, got a semi similar thing that's an occasional itch in my brain, though I don't find myself scratching at it that much as I didn't personally use the machines in question much, so no attachment. Started off, around turn of millennium got my wife a laptop Ascentia 910n, dx4-75, still useful around that time, XP wasn't out, 9x was still "in". Now I think it only had 8MB or something, which was too constraining, and I was hunting on eBay for a RAM module.... and I came across 2 machines in the same series "spares or repair" cheap, but one of them had more RAM in... so for $20 or so plus shipping I got them... wifeys machine got nice RAM upgrade, think it ended up with 20MB in it.. now out of the 2 left, I thought I got one working and the other hated it's own peripherals, like all the i/o was barfing in 9x, wouldn't PnP .. I think I used one of them a short while.. then I got hold of a Compaq Armada with a P150, which was much nicer, still got that... now wifey got a little dissatisfied with hers, so I thought at that time we found her a P100ish to P120ish thinkpad, with not much palmrest to it, keyboard forward, maybe a 760 series seems most like this vague pic in my head.. which was used a year or two, then at a computer fair, got her a 380XD with 233Mhz which was much better and had sound etc.... still got that. So two out of 6 accounted for... year or two after that.. loans her "old" laptop to a relative, give it back when you don't need it... a few months later.. relative has new laptop, old one just gone, gee thanks. Now, I kinda think it was the first thinkpad, but might have been the best AST. Should have 3 out of 6, but unsure what... Next about 5 or so years ago, acquaintance really really wanted a DOS laptop, just DOS, good to type on, not fussy... now I turn up one of these ascentias, oddly the hard drive doesn't seem to look like one me or wifey used, none of our stuff on it, some unknown's docs and crap, did I swap drives over for some reason?? IDK, anyway, wipe it, put DOS 6.22 on it, checks out fine with dos bench/diag, sell it to guy, he's happy, hear nothing, and he's moved to Manitoba or somewhere a couple of years back... it also only had 8MB in it... 4 down out of 6...

So here's the mystery, neither of the remaining 2 seem to be around anywhere and I don't know what they are. Whether it's 2 ASTs, one and a Thinkpad, or what... Now some days I think I sold the flakey Ascentia, that just happened to work fine in DOS, and only win9x couldn't deal with it... other days I think I took it completely to pieces, because I remember looking at a panel and thinking about overhead projectors... (As one did in the early 00s.) Then I think it must have been the middle Ascentia, so that means best one might be still here... or not, did I just dream the other IBM.... I've got the damn expansion base that came with the spares or repairs ASTs so surely I didn't dream THEM... However, I don't know either whether to find them in my stuff per se, or whether being wifeys machines in first place that she has them squirreled away somewhere. Like I say, I don't really care about these machines so much, it's jut a slight brain itch, that I try and puzzle out when I'm stuck in a waiting room with nothing to do or something.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 7 of 55, by Shreddoc

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Around 2010 I took home a retired Tualatin combo from a work machine.

For years, it was a regular sight floating around in my random disorganised hardware boxes. Every time I saw it, I thought "that'll be revived into a build one day". After that happening about 20x across several years, I eventually decided: "screw it, I'll put this nice combo aside somewhere safer, because I don't like it rattling around with all this other random crap". I distinctly remember having that thought.

Now, do you think I ever set eyes on that combo again? HELL NO. I've done more than one massive clean up around the house in the years since, and it's just "literally nowhere".

The only thing I can think is that I've somehow either sold it, or (more likely) unknowingly thrown it away during an overly-enthusiastic spring clean - "you fool!". 😀

And yet, there will always be a tiny corner of my mind still keeping an eye out for it...

Last edited by Shreddoc on 2021-05-21, 20:07. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 8 of 55, by BitWrangler

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Ah yes, the "Put it in a safe place" trap... I think I've done that with more than a couple of the things I'm missing.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 9 of 55, by chrismeyer6

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I've fallen into this is a safe place trap and then completely forgot where that was. And then out of frustration you just rebuy the damn thing only to find it shortly after the replacement parts come in. This happened to me last week I could of sworn I had more grinder disks but I couldn't find them anywhere so I just went to Lowe's and bought a new pack. I came home and went to put them away in the cabinet in the garage and sure enough there's the pack I couldn't find.

Reply 10 of 55, by BitWrangler

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Developments... I pulled out a box and found the P-200! But to balance out the karma, another SB16 too. Also though, my original original Cyrix 5x86 is in here, and I thought I saw it downstairs yesterday... maybe that's the other one... Or it could have been another DX2-66 or DX2-80.... SOMEONE... who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, had the habit back in the day of pinging the plates off the top of the heatsinks, so the heats could actually sink... I *cough* he, re-used at least one as a case badge I think.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 12 of 55, by cyclone3d

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BitWrangler wrote on 2021-05-21, 16:10:
I can barely tolerate those things for designed purpose of storing frequently accessed flat pieces of A4/letter paper... even wi […]
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cyclone3d wrote on 2021-05-21, 07:07:

You need to get filing cabinets.

I can barely tolerate those things for designed purpose of storing frequently accessed flat pieces of A4/letter paper... even with stapled business cards, receipts, pamphlets etc included they get suboptimal rapidly, also lot of dead space in the damn things, and that's before realising you can't have random shaped objects over 5" depth in them before they start going sideways and jamming them up (shallow/open sides on the drawers) I had been all "yay, free filing cabinets" to giving them away again a couple of times before I wised up. I have a supply of large shoebox size (approx hightop/ankle boot size) envelope boxes that work nicely that things are getting sorted into gradually.

The organizing is important... the staying organised is the difficulty... I get really enthused in a PC building/using bee and have a lot of stuff out, then there's an "event", births, deaths, marriages etc expected, but, illnesses of me and others meaning I'm out of the house a lot or emergency repairs of cars, the house, appliances, have a recurring habit of disrupting everything, making it all get shoved aside in a hurry or forgotten about for several months, during which time, the event has wiped all memory of what I was doing, and up to a week beforehand, out. My basement space for instance, got emergency cleared several times, once for rebuilding a cylinder head (Blew HG and cracked on fam car) once for a waste pipe starting to seep and having to get plumbers in, and a couple more that take more than a sentence or two to describe. Then I've got a couple of relatives to deal with who act like everything is life or death drama, just talking to one of them has me lose track of a whole afternoons worth of sorting/dabbling. (Captain Jack Sparrow... the problem isn't the problem...) ... it's somehow like I have to reformat my brain and install WindowsME to deal with them every time.

I try writing stuff down as I go, so that I can resume after interruptions, but somehow the jottings seem far disconnected from what seems to be in the area when I resume, if it's more than a week or two. I might need to start doing that Dana Scully doing an autopsy thing, voice recorder, recorded as it happens, no 2 hour blanks because of train of thought derailments before you put it down, but that is a very annoying format to recover info from, unless you transcribe it or find a speech to text solution that deals with technical terms, weird names and model numbers every third word instead of regular English... it's enough to make one seriously consider having a youtube channel or twitch stream just to keep track of your own crap.

All the filing cabinets I have have the full height side drawers on them. I didn't even know the other style existed.

They work great for storing drives, fans, coolers, PSUs and cards in anti-static bags. I know exactly where to go when I am looking for a specific type of item though I still have other stuff that floats around and I lose track of stuff sometimes.

Really need to get rid of a bunch of it.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 13 of 55, by PcBytes

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Trying to find a TNT2 M64 from Mercury that I know I have, for installing a new fan on it.

Am still looking for it 🤣

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 14 of 55, by Byrd

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About ten years ago, I was given about 20 x G4 Mac Minis, mostly all were the ones with the "silent" upgrade 1.5Ghz, 64MB ATI GPU, they were decommissioned from a school and used as table risers (!!!), for a good while before being thrown!

I gave away most of them on a fellow Australian forum and kept the unicorn: it overclocked to 1.8Ghz (most others only went to 1.6), put in a nice 160GB 7200RPM 2.5" HD. Such a keeper. Put it next to my G4 Cube and left it be. Dragged it out the other day, and it's a ... 1.42Ghz model, stock RAM and HD. Spent a good half a day looking around for "the second good one". I'm guessing I posted out the wrong one, and the person who got the freebie never let me know ... 🙁

JB

Reply 15 of 55, by Errius

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BitWrangler wrote on 2021-05-21, 16:10:

The organizing is important... the staying organised is the difficulty...

This is true. Mistakes creep in over time. Once every couple of years typically I do a big inventory of my stuff. I go through every box, every cabinet, look under every bed, and make sure everything is in its proper place. It usually is, but I nearly always find things where they shouldn't be.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 16 of 55, by BitWrangler

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Hmmm rescue mission failed, or chasing another ghost ship... I recently came to the realisation that the CT-1330A SBs are more sought after, and I've got a nice clean crisp one, but I also have a picture in my head of one with the stickers on the FM chips all scratched to hell.. and I thought, hmm, if I've got one like that, it might be in less than optimal storage, like one of the junk boxes, so checking out known boxes of loose cards this afternoon... and it's not there.... it may be sitting in a system though... or somewhere really random.... or "somewhere safe" ... which come to think of it is probably the same as somewhere really random.

Nice surprises were: a Pine Tech VLB i/o card that I noticed has a ROM socket on, good for a big drive BIOS I hope. An 8 bit SCSI card, an ATI Graphics Ultra (Mach 8 ) and my old 14.4k modem which for a 14.4 was a hotrod.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 17 of 55, by BitWrangler

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Hmmm there's definitely some stuff that hasn't seen light of day between move #1 and now... I recall playing around with a PODP, possibly it was a 63Mhz one, I was not very impressed with IIRC, however, that could have been frustrated with it. It came to me without the fan module, so I was trying to rig it with another small fan. Must have been running 1x though according to what I've read since. What sticks in my mind though is it's the only CPU/Sink I've actually burned my fingers on.. not quite enough to blister, but to leave a red mark sore for a couple of days. I mean, others, yeah, ow that's hot, but not sizzle cooked flesh hot. Thinking it through, I had most of my parts stored in a large desk and bottom dresser drawer then. I wonder if I've been ignoring a box marked desk or dresser.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 18 of 55, by sf78

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I was positive I had a P60 miditower somewhere, but I guess I didn't? The closest info I could find was an old listing of a P75 that I sold 2-3 years a go. Not that it's the end of the world, but I have brand new Socket 4 board without a P60/66 to go with it and that kinda bothers me. Actually bothers me more than it should as I have evertyhing from P90 to 200 MMX besides the P60 CPU (and a Socket 8 board for my Pentium Pro).

Oh, just remembered that I have recently misplaced 2 NIB Voodoo 2 cards that I got in January for 3€ a pop. 😒

Reply 19 of 55, by BitWrangler

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That situation is particularly annoying, having one motherboard without a CPU, but also another CPU without a motherboard. Another thing with both of those is that's it's hard to find a decent heatsink.

Yeah I tuck my NIB stuff out of the way so it doesn't get scuffed up. I think I know where the 9600 AIW is, and XP Pro (though that was a little crumpled anyway) .. Local seller has HD2600XT for reasonable money, keep wondering if I want to have to look after that for a few years or nah.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.