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I've always wanted to mess with a Pentium Pro system. I wonder how modern an OS you could run if you put your 200Mhz chips on that dualie Socket 8 board and loaded it with as much RAM as possible.....

The Egg wrote:

I've always wanted to mess with a Pentium Pro system. I wonder how modern an OS you could run if you put your 200Mhz chips on that dualie Socket 8 board and loaded it with as much RAM as possible.....

I believe the current Debian Stable ("Jessie") still supports Pentium Pro. No idea on the Windows side of the house, but I'd assume XP would probably run (albeit slowly). Maybe even Vista (but good luck getting enough RAM).

Trivia: One of the Pentium Pros (and the corresponding motherboard) in his collection is from the Micron PC workstation I bought when I quit my full-time job and went full-time contractor back in the '90s.

Edit: Per this notice from Debian, the current release is the last one which will support K5, K6, K6-2, K6-3, DM&P/SiS Vortex86/Vortex86SX, Cyrix III/MediaGX/MediaGXm, Winchip C6/2, Pentium, Pentium MMX, Rise mP6, and VIA C3. (WTF is a Vortex86, anyway?) So it appears that Pentium Pro will even still be supported for a while yet (through the next release, at least).

just brew it! wrote:

The Egg wrote:

I've always wanted to mess with a Pentium Pro system. I wonder how modern an OS you could run if you put your 200Mhz chips on that dualie Socket 8 board and loaded it with as much RAM as possible.....

I believe the current Debian Stable ("Jessie") still supports Pentium Pro.

I just checked and it appears i586 and above are supported.

XP also can run on a i586. Someone tested this with a Pentium Overdrive.

DrDominodog51 wrote:

I just checked and it appears i586 and above are supported.

Yup. See the edit to my post!

just brew it! wrote:

The Egg wrote:

I've always wanted to mess with a Pentium Pro system. I wonder how modern an OS you could run if you put your 200Mhz chips on that dualie Socket 8 board and loaded it with as much RAM as possible.....

I believe the current Debian Stable ("Jessie") still supports Pentium Pro. No idea on the Windows side of the house, but I'd assume XP would probably run (albeit slowly). Maybe even Vista (but good luck getting enough RAM).

Trivia: One of the Pentium Pros (and the corresponding motherboard) in his collection is from the Micron PC workstation I bought when I quit my full-time job and went full-time contractor back in the '90s.

Edit: Per this notice from Debian, the current release is the last one which will support K5, K6, K6-2, K6-3, DM&P/SiS Vortex86/Vortex86SX, Cyrix III/MediaGX/MediaGXm, Winchip C6/2, Pentium, Pentium MMX, Rise mP6, and VIA C3. (WTF is a Vortex86, anyway?) So it appears that Pentium Pro will even still be supported for a while yet (through the next release, at least).

Pretty cool about it being able to run the latest Debian. For Windows, I've used some very low-end stuff on XP (P-233MMX, K6-III), so I'd say it'll almost certainly run. Windows CPU requirements are always a bit hazy (and Mhz can be almost completely ignored), but a quick check shows folks claiming to have run Win7 on a Pentium II. If this is true, I'd expect a Pentium Pro to theoretically work. I've only seen Socket 8 boards with 72-pin and 168-pin EDO, so like you said, getting enough RAM installed might be a problem. Wikipedia claims that Socket8->Slot 1 adapters existed, which would put it into the realm of SDRAM, allowing for higher densities (though good luck finding one).

The Egg wrote:

Pretty cool about it being able to run the latest Debian.

I'd temper that with a warning that attempting to run a full-blown modern DE like GNOME or KDE on it probably won't end well. Something lighter-weight like LXDE (if you must have a GUI), or headless server duty are probably better bets.

Or just use it for that retro Win98SE gaming build...

just brew it! wrote:

Trivia: One of the Pentium Pros (and the corresponding motherboard) in his collection is from the Micron PC workstation I bought when I quit my full-time job and went full-time contractor back in the '90s.

Walnut Creek CD-ROM (ftp.cdrom.com) used a dual PPro system running FreeBSD 4 for several years as their FTP server. IIRC it could handle ~200 simultaneous users, a lot in the mid-late '90s.

just brew it! wrote:

The Egg wrote:

Pretty cool about it being able to run the latest Debian.

I'd temper that with a warning that attempting to run a full-blown modern DE like GNOME or KDE on it probably won't end well. Something lighter-weight like LXDE (if you must have a GUI), or headless server duty are probably better bets.

Better still, a dedicated small Linux like Puppy or Tiny Core.

Whew. I'm glad this just makes me want to get rid of old hardware instead of collecting more. I'd hate to move with that collection.

The only nostalgic piece of gear I care about keeping anymore is the Cyrix chip from my first PC.

You don't even want to know how much room this stuff takes up. Even I didn't know how much stuff I had, as this is the first real inventory I have done since I started this over 20 some years ago. And I am not looking forward to going through all the boxes and boxes of ram I have.....

Plus one more fun thing I found out last night while going through all my old socket A systems, all the batteries have died in them, reseting the bioses....now I have to take all the heatsinks off them to figure out what cpus I have in them...

One more interesting thing was I fired up one of my old systems, got up to the desktop and was still working on a FAH work unit from back in 05, when I had over 30 systems folding. Had to stop doing that though when the electric costs went super high back then.

You have a basement you are putting this into? I'm cleaning my basement and as part of that I have been organizing my old computer stuff. Takes up so much space and I haven't even really gone through the components.

You have inspired me to do an inventory myself but finding time might be a bit harder... the worst is going to be going through the contents of the IDE drives some day.

BTW the Amiga enthusiasts often do the IDE to CF or SCSI to CF stuff. And sometimes more recently to SD as well. There are some IDE SSD for old macs if you hit the lottery some day, too.

I'm fairly certain you still have every piece of hardware I've ever owned. You must have a huge basement!

I've seen his place. It's a walkup (I forget if 2nd or 3rd floor) apartment; AFAIK no basement (if anything, just a storage locker). The apartment is surprisingly well-organized given the quantity of computer parts crammed into it. I have but a small fraction of the amount of stuff he has, and "my" areas of the house (office/closet/crawlspace) are total disaster areas. If I had a stockpile the size of his I would've probably been found crushed to death under a collapsed pile of old PCs years ago...

(Some time back, I really did have a stack of boxes behind my desk chair collapse onto me. Fortunately the boxes near the top only contained lighter stuff so no injuries were sustained. After that I stopped storing stacks of boxes where they can tip over onto me!)

Well...if it makes you feel any better, when I divorced my wife in 2010, she left behind her hoard of Goodwill purchases. Took 4 pickups by an 18 foot box truck to get rid of it all. She managed to fill a 30x25 foot barn about 8 feet high with stuff. I think that makes you an amateur.

So what did you do with it all? Donate it to Goodwill?

just brew it! wrote:

So what did you do with it all? Donate it to Goodwill?

Of course...seemed only fitting.

It probably would have just been easier to get a Goodwill sign and put it on my barn, but I'm not zoned for that.

gerbilspy wrote:

I'm fairly certain you still have every piece of hardware I've ever owned. You must have a huge basement!

it is probably a good thing I don't have a basement lol...or I would prob even have even more stuff

Things will be a bit slower now, back to work again. I still have a decent amount left to put up, but I prob have 60-70 percent of it up now. I will keep adding things as I have time to do so.

When you bought a bunch of my surplus socket A boards eons ago, I told myself that if I ever won the lottery I was going to have a computer hardware museum and have you curate it.

I love looking at old hardware because it brings back so many memories for me.

Sorry things have been going up extremely slowly, been busy with work along with fighting off a touch of stomach flu. Going to try to get some more stuff up later today, and maybe get started on one of my large boxes of ram....

I've thought a few times about begging you to assemble a Win98 Retro gaming rig for me to buy from you. Sans the giant CRT of course, I already have that.

Not dissing your huge collection, but why?

I'm hanging onto a PCI graphics card (for testing purposes) and an original voodoo card for nostalgia, but I loathe having boxes of old hardware taking up space.

Do you have plans for all this stuff eventually?

Chrispy_ wrote:

Not dissing your huge collection, but why?

I'm hanging onto a PCI graphics card (for testing purposes) and an original voodoo card for nostalgia, but I loathe having boxes of old hardware taking up space.

Do you have plans for all this stuff eventually?

Different strokes for different folks. Why does Jay Leno have 286 vehicles to drive when he can only ever drive one at a time ? SF is doing what a lot of us wouldn't mind doing, but we usually sell the older stuff to finance a portion of the new stuff. My stuff trickles down to the secondary and tertiary PCs, so one upgrade can carry over to three of more PCs when its all said and done.

His unique collection will trigger an absolute crap-ton of replies to this thread, as us geeks will get to re-live our past hardware moments by browsing his inventory. I love this thread - most nostalgic thing I've seen on TechReport in a long time.

It's kind of like explaining to a teen how much fun it was to play Quake online when it was the only online game in town - they won't understand it simply because it was something you had to experience firsthand. Today, every game has an online aspect, and the gaming community is spread far and wide.

No, I get it.

It's more that the collection appears to be either a bit random, or incomplete at the moment. Take a car collection for example - every car in the collection has a story which is why the collector is hanging onto it. It's either exotic, rare, or not. The bog-standard everyday cars in the collection are being kept because they have a backstory or history that makes them worth keeping.

I'm interested in what the long-term plan for all this stuff is. For example, if I had all of SF's stuff, I'd whittle it down to just the milestone articles and keep perhaps just the best working example of each.

Chrispy_ wrote:

No, I get it.

It's more that the collection appears to be either a bit random, or incomplete at the moment. Take a car collection for example - every car in the collection has a story which is why the collector is hanging onto it. It's either exotic, rare, or not. The bog-standard everyday cars in the collection are being kept because they have a backstory or history that makes them worth keeping.

I'm interested in what the long-term plan for all this stuff is. For example, if I had all of SF's stuff, I'd whittle it down to just the milestone articles and keep perhaps just the best working example of each.

I agree completely, though I can certainly empathize (I've had to purge large amounts of my old hardware myself on several occasions).

I'm more intrigued by the amount of ho-hum stuff (probably 100+ HDDs, ~75 CD/DVD drives, way too many old NICs/dialup modems). I have more contempt than nostalgia for alot of that, but to each their own.

Yeah it does tend to be kinda random, mostly just stuff I accumulated since the late 90's. Most of this stuff I got free or very cheaply, not going on ebay to buy expensive halo products. Mostly just from the best golden computer era dos-95-98-xp retro computing, mostly stuff that means a lot to me. Plus I do enjoy tinkering and building retro rigs, and running old games on them, so it works out good for me.

I never started this collection to be complete or about anything in particular, just if it fits into the range I want, I get it. All this stuff still works also, and I enjoy having it. Plus if others get enjoyment of examining my collection, that's even better. Retro gaming wouldn't be as big as it is now if others didn't enjoy doing this also.

Oh and also to add, this is really the first time I am doing a full audit of what I actually have, so even I didn't know everything I actually had. Plus fellow gerbils have been asking what I had for years, so I'm giving it to them. Plus it will help me get this stuff a little more organized, with my new master list.

I think that a major boost to retro-gaming is partly in just how reliable older PC adapter cards are.

I've had a number fail, but it seems like the design lifetime for the components in most cards can be measured in decades. In fact, I'm currently wondering if most of the issues I had with addin cards from the 90's might have been the low-wattage case-provided PSUs that I used back then.

Yeah, both the Voodoo and MGA Millenium worked fine last year when I fired them up for giggles. I was a little disappointed after all the effort of getting the OpenGL ICD that the Voodoo didn't have enough RAM for Quake3 arena, but GLQuake still looked and felt good and Half-Life was much better than I remember it. More likely my Pentium 133 was the problem back in those days

More stuff is up, working my way through what is left...made a decent dent in it today. I will be very happy when this is done, i hate trying to figure out what stuff is typing part numbers into google.

Hmm...was digging through dusty workbench drawers this weekend and discovered a PCI card with vintage 3DFX logos and a cryptic inscription of "Creative CT6670" on the back. The Internet says it's a 12MB Voodoo2. I thought I gave that entire stash to Starfalcon, but guess I saved one for myself after all.