Resurrecting a Legacy X86 PC..

[Vipersan]

So ..I found the chassis ..and surprisingly still fairly intact ..
No floppy ..
No CDR drive ...
No hard drives..
But the mobo is installed and has memory in the slot ..
A fairly hi end (for the time) Gainward Graphics card.
..and still has its 20 pin psu ..
One of my crazier ideas perhaps ...
but I MAY even still have the OS on a hard drive somewhere ..
which if memory serves was an IBM 76.8gb IDE..
lol

First job clean with a paintbrush ..
2nd job ..
repace the CMOS battery..

 

[Vipersan]

Here is my first problem ..
connecting a keyboard ..
The port is even older than PS/2
See photo ..
What is the Din style port referred to as ..and can I get a PS/2 to din converter ?

 

[Vipersan]

Looks like We're on our way ..
It posts ..
lolView attachment 106185

 

[Lazarus]

Does it do Prestel .....

 

[Captain Jack]

Pah, that's a 350MHz AMD CPU in there! 486s were maxed out at 100 with DX4 CPUs. Pretty sure I have some in my parents' loft.

I also have an add-on "PC card" for my Acorn RISC PC machine... Cyrix 586 processor at 133MHz running Windows 95!

 

[2cvbloke]

What is the Din style port referred to as ..and can I get a PS/2 to din converter ?View attachment 106184

It's referred to as an AT port, and you can indeed get adaptors, usually quite cheap off ebay, just put in AT to PS/2 adaptor (or PS2, incase of mis-spellings)...

But as pointed out, it's not a 486, it's a very odd AMD K6-2 system (odd as in it has the old AT style board from an era when the PS/2 ATX standard was pretty much the norm), but still worth resurrecting, people are collecting vintage computers that 10 years ago you couldn't shift for 50p, now you're lucky to get 'em for less than £50!!!

 

[Vipersan]

So ..not a 486 ...but I will proceed nonetheless ...cos I may well have the OS on hard drive ...somewhere..
if I'm remembering rightly ..
was win98 se
Pre USB course ...no so USB ports ...but can you fit a PCI usb card ?
I suspect generic usb drivers would be needed if indeed it is possible.

 

[2cvbloke]

Of course ...no USB ...but can you fit a PCI usb card ?

Probably, not sure whether you'd get USB2.0 working or not though, but USB1.1 would at least work...

As for the OS, well, the DOS-based Windows versions would run on anything, you could install 98SE on an Pentium 75 and fire it up on that K6-2 without issue, that's one of the things I miss with Windows, being able to keep OS installs without having to go through the faff of slipstreaming in drivers to make it boot up (did that with my gaming PC to save reinstalling after going from a Core2Duo to an AMD FX-8320e), but that said ISOs for 95 and 98SE are plentiful, and their keys are easy enough to come by as M$ don't really care about those OSes now...

 

[Channel Hopper]

It's referred to as an AT port, and you can indeed get adaptors, usually quite cheap off ebay, just put in AT to PS/2 adaptor (or PS2, incase of mis-spellings)...

But as pointed out, it's not a 486, it's a very odd AMD K6-2 system (odd as in it has the old AT style board from an era when the PS/2 ATX standard was pretty much the norm), but still worth resurrecting, people are collecting vintage computers that 10 years ago you couldn't shift for 50p, now you're lucky to get 'em for less than £50!!!

Hopefully it is for the gold/precious metal content rather than the operation.

I have thrown out more mobos and Pentium/pre Pentium stuff out over the past few years than I care to remember, and yet I still find casings and other when I delve deeper into the shed.

Evan, let me know if you need anything such as mouse/keybooard with the Din connectors etc

 

[Llew]

Nice computer museum 100 yards up the road from me. Problem is, it costs a whopping eight quid entrance fee to look around.
When it started up at the other end of the road, they wanted old PCs etc. I took along my BBC B, its teletext board etc., but they had several already.

Computing History - The UK Computer Museum - Cambridge

 

[Vipersan]

Nice computer museum 100 yards up the road from me. Problem is, it costs a whopping eight quid entrance fee to look around.
When it started up at the other end of the road, they wanted old PCs etc. I took along my BBC B, its teletext board etc., but they had several already.

Computing History - The UK Computer Museum - Cambridge

fwiw ..I still have working VIC20s ...C64s ...a greenscreen PET ...and I think a ZX spectrum..

 

[Archive-8]

My first "pc" was a Sinclair spectrum 128k with built in tape deck and I had the light gun.

I used to play bullseye on it

On of my mates had the 48k (with rubber keys)

 

[Analoguesat]

Try one of the lightweight linux distros on it - Puppy, Lubuntu, etc

 

[davemurgtroyd]

@Vipersan - you've caught the "retro virus" - welcome to the club.

I still have my first PC - an 8086 Sinclair PC200 - Dos 3.3 and GEM gui, 3.5" 720k floppy, no HDD, two external floppies 3.5" and 5.25", two 8 bit ISA slots and also had TV out as well as monitor in a case similar to an Amiga 1200 - I'm tempted to fit nn external HDD to an isa ide card nd try it out with Windows 3 (which apparently will work on an 8086). I also have the first PC I ever built a 200 MHz Pebtium 2. In the shed I have over 2 dozen working (when put away) PCs desktops and towers with processors ranging from 333mHz Pentiums to 1000 MHz Pentium 4s, 2 working VGA monitors and a dozen or more large boxes of parts ( cards, memory chips, AT keyboards, CPUs and heatsinks)

 

[Terryl]

I had the original PC prototype from Zilog, sold it to a PC museum for about 2K, they really wanted it.

Had Bill Gates stopped at the Zilog booth all the first desktop PC's would have been Zilog instead of IBM.

On this prototype you had to type EXeQut (yes just as it's spelled) to get the program to run, the hard disk was the size of your washing machine, and had a tape reader for program entry.

It had a wire-wound mother board with separate cards for the CPU card, hard drive interface and tape reader, keyboard had a cable as thick as your thumb with a 25 pin centronics plug on it, a mouse was a rodent at the time.

It was a desk top but took up half the kitchen table, the hard drive sat next to it on the floor, the tape reader sat on top of that.

I thought I had some photos somewhere but cant find them.

 

[jeallen01]

Other side of the coin! My first PC was a 1989 Viglen 286 but by the time I finally binned it (for a huge Server tower case which still sits - long used - under my PC desk, and, one day, I might even try to resuscitate it) I think it had had about 5 new m/b's, multiple cpus, hard disks and so on.
PS: VS, I have a couple of spare 3.5" floppy drives (don't know if they still work though) in a drawer if you should want them.

 

[2cvbloke]

Hopefully it is for the gold/precious metal content rather than the operation.

There's so little gold in computer scrap that 50p is about as much as someone might get if they got lucky, it is indeed the operation of such machines people are buying them up for, usually for retro gaming and just generally collecting them to preserve a piece of history, I'm keeping my Olivetti M4 Pentium 75 around because it's just nice to go back to something simple that just works, switch it on, start windows, play games, done, unlike today where it's switch on, enter passwords, wait a week for updates, complain about said updates on forums, get forced into an OS upgrade, system gets corrupted and everything has to be started all over again and so-on...

 

[Channel Hopper]

There's so little gold in computer scrap that 50p is about as much as someone might get if they got lucky, it is indeed the operation of such machines people are buying them up for, usually for retro gaming and just generally collecting them to preserve a piece of history, I'm keeping my Olivetti M4 Pentium 75 around because it's just nice to go back to something simple that just works, switch it on, start windows, play games, done, unlike today where it's switch on, enter passwords, wait a week for updates, complain about said updates on forums, get forced into an OS upgrade, system gets corrupted and everything has to be started all over again and so-on...

The processor chips I have in the drawer are so heavy though, they can't be lead circuitry inside. It's not just the gold either, silver, even platinum and then the copper, and less exotic metals.

A DIY guide on how to extract the amber stuff, might get my daughter to do the less complicated stuff after school.

How to Extract Precious Metals From Computers | Techwalla.com


I also have some surplus keyboards with working 'enter ' buttons btw.

 

[Captain Jack]

Back in the early 90's, my uncle did a lot of this 'gold mining' from chips. After boiling away everything but the gold, he was left with half his teeth missing as a result of fumes from the process...

 

[Vipersan]

So ..
I couldn't find the original OS Hard drive ..
probably re-used for some other purpose ..
well it was abot 20 years ago..
lol
I did however manage to build a new one on an old drive ..which did power up to win 98SE ..
BUT
no way could I install a USB card ...or worse...an old 3cm lan card I had ..
So ..
Stage 2 ..
knowing I can now re-build 98 ..I'm gonna try again with an old Jetway 695AS MoBo ..
This one is fitted with A Pentium III 800EB
..but importantly ..does have 2 on board USB and built in audio
probably another fools errand ..
but hey ..
I'm having fun ..albeit frustrating fun..