What's your oldest piece of hardware that's still alive? - Old school stuff

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movq movq Offline | 06-06-2015, 04:49 AM | #1
Long time nixers
Here's mine. This was my fourth computer, IIRC, bought around 1996:

Code:
CPU: Pentium 133
RAM: 64MB
HDD: 8GB IDE
GPU: S3 Trio64
NIC: Realtek 8029
SND: Creative SB16
KBD: IBM Model M
MOUSE: Some serial ball mouse with three buttons

It's not the original machine, though. Especially, the NIC was added much later. When I bought it, it had 32MB RAM, a different graphics card, and most likely a different hard drive. I had to replace the CPU because a very noisy fan was "glued" to the original CPU -- I just couldn't get it off. It now runs an identical CPU model but with a larger, quiet fan.

Given that my previous machine was an IBM Model 80 (and an IBM Model 30 before that -- meh, today I really regret giving that one away), it was a huge step forward: That Pentium was the first one to come with Windows 95 and it was able to play high resolution videos. Remember Good Times? Incredible at that day.

At some point, this machine ran SuSE Linux 6.1. I don't have that around anymore, though. This morning, I installed OpenBSD 5.7. Dead simple and works quite well. It took me a minute to get the serial mouse to work in X11 (notes), but now it runs fine:

To me, that's pretty amazing. This machine is about 20 years old and it can still run a modern operating system. Okay, well, you'll have a harder time getting Linux to run because that Pentium 133 is an i586 -- most current distributions require at least an i686 processor.

In the photo above (case.jpg), have you noticed that bay with the red LED? That's the hard drive. You can unlock it and pull it out. I have a second case just like that (https://uninformativ.de/files/p133/hard-drive-case.jpg) with MS DOS and Windows 3.11 installed. It's Windows for Workgroups, so there's even a working TCP/IP stack. I was too lazy to switch hard drives today, so here's some older photos:

As you can see, it's connected to a modern LCD screen. I simply don't have the space to use a CRT monitor.

Every once in a while, I boot this machine for nostalgia's sake. Most old DOS games just work as they should (remember, that machine is already way too fast for a lot of DOS games). Browsing gopher holes on OpenBSD without X11 almost reminds me of using a dial-up modem to connect to BBS systems.

Most importantly, using the P133 reminds me that today's computers are insanely powerful.


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What's your oldest piece of hardware that's still alive? - by movq - 06-06-2015, 04:49 AM

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