Rich's Random Retro Reviews

I've had an eBay saved search for a particular item for what must be the last nine years. It has been for our very first PC we had back when I was 13-14. No, not the Packard Bell - they're relatively easy to come across, no this was a Digital Starion 917. Digital as in DEC - as in Digital Equipment Corporation. As far as I'm aware, DEC PCs weren't sold here in the UK - or if they were I certainly don't remember ever seeing them in magazines or in shops. Ours was bought from a US military PX (Public Exchange) that as a member of the Royal Air Force, my Dad was allowed to use when we lived in Germany. They sold food, clothing, footwear and many other American things we couldn't get in the German or British stores.  When visiting the store once, they had a really decent deal on a PC, which my Dad took advantage of. The PC was the aforementioned Digital Starion 917 and he bought the matching 17" monitor to go with it. Until that point we had been using an LC475...

My current 'itch' as my friend Wolf calls it, involves the PCs running the original line of Intel Pentium CPUs. Our first PC was a 100MHz Pentium and the Packard Bell I've mentioned was a 133MHz model - upgraded to a 200MHz processor in the dim and distant past. The Elonex server from the construction company I've mentioned is also a 100MHz Pentium. The accidental motherboard and CPU purchase I made also has a 200MHz CPU, so I'd say I've got a fair experience with processors of this vintage but there was always one that I lusted after. The 166MHz Pentium with MMX technology. Off to my favourite marketplace of choice, eBay, the transfer of some funds and a week later this arrived: I haven't tested it yet, but I finally have one! Woohoo. I'm not sure which machine to put this in yet. Do I upgrade the test bench? Or do I put it in the accidental mother board and CPU purchase then put the 200MHz CPU into the test bench? Not entirely sure yet. 

Don't ask me why, but I have had a fascination with Apple's Rhapsody operating system for THE longest time. I did have a few VMs a while back that had Rhapsody DR1 for Intel, Rhapsody DR2 for Intel, OpenStep and NeXTSTEP but I'd never tried it on physical hardware. When I got the Elonex server from my Dad's storage a couple of years back, I did try and install a custom Rhapsody DR2 image to a compact flash card that Action Retro had created. but none of the graphics cards I had worked with it in anything other than 640x480 in 256 colours.  Well recently I got "The urge" again - that and the Elonex server was now in pieces and more easily able to mess with it's config. I downloaded the Rhapsody ISO from machintoshgarden.org and burned it to CD, then wrote the floppy disk images to some spare floppies. Along with the CD was a PDF with a list of compatible hardware so as with anything retro, off to eBay I went, in search for a compatible graphic card. The ATI...

Yeah, so I kinda bought another motherboard and CPU, which is almost identical to the ones I pulled from the Elonex server mentioned in another post.  The one on the right in the image above is the original mother board with its 100MHz CPU (and fancy new old stock heatsink and fan) and the one on the left is the new one. They're very similar except the new one has a DIMM socket for RAM along side the four 72 pin SIMM sockets. The CPU is also 200MHz and it came with 32MB of RAM and a graphics card - all for about £25. I couldn't say no really. I have no clue what I'm going to do with it but YAY for cheap retro hardware. 

I'm in a Pentium PC craze and I'm trying to build myself a test bench for a socket 5/7 motherboard. Why? Well - the computer/case that I'm using is HUGE, dirty, yellowed and is missing the side panels and doors. A test bench would allow me to quickly swap out hardware for different operating systems or swap CPUs or RAM for testing performance. I blame RMC was playing with a Packard Bell Multimedia Executive PC on his channel recently and I got mine out of the attic, however, the machine is special to me, so I didn't want rip it to pieces.  So whilst up there, I decided to get my old Elonex server/PC out to use this as a basis for my test bench. This PC was the Novell NetWare 3.12, then later 4.11 server for the office of the construction company I used to work at. When we upgraded to NT 4 this machine was defunct and I was allowed to bring it home.  I took it to pieces and laid it out on a piece of cardboard but it was a mess and stuff everywhere, so I decided to try a...