- Joined
- Jun 14, 2002
- Location
- Hampton Roads. VA
A walk down memory lane. Show us some older hardware and tell us how you used it.
Amid the monthly shuffle of new product announcements, it is very easy to forget about the older stuff that allowed us to move from point A to point M. I still can't help but marvel at how engineers have been able to consolidated and reduce the size of boards and chips. Many of this items listed below had as many as 20+ ICs on them. Nowadays, that same device has but one chip.
While I was cleaning some of the older hardware that was sitting in my closet (I have about 6 containers of the stuff), I decided to empty one of the containers out. Once I started empting it out, I could tell each layer was taking me back in time. The closer I got to the bottom of the container, the older the hardware was. I haven't touched this stuff in many years. Most of the stuff came from my father. He used to build these things computers in my den back in the K-Pro days (anyone else remeber k-pros? These are the days when Computer Shopper magazine was very thick and you could spend weeks reading through one issue). Many of the items are pre 1988, while some are only a couple years ago. Some of the items I pulled out of this box included :
-(3) socket3 motherboards - VIA and UMC chipsets - All with Vesa local bus goodness
-(2) socket7 motherboards - OptiViper and SIS chipsets
-Syquest EZ-Flyer - this thing ate zip drives for lunch
-NEC 6x4 CD changer. I loved this one....I hated the dos drivers though
-Hollywood DVD decoder - not old at all....I may use it in an upcoming HTPC
-(6) NICS
-Sound blaster 16 - one of the first models
-Sound blaster Live....still works fine, but the secondary output port is blown
-Pentium III 550 cart...no idea of it works anymore
-Western Digtal ISA Video card .....Speedstar 24x/Paradise
-Diamond ISA Speedstar /w Tseng labs chipset
-Olicom Token ring NIC
-Yamaha based sound card ISA - I liked this one alot, some time
afterwards, I had a PCI based yamaha sound card....YAMAHA MIDI ruled
-Crystal based sound card ISA
-Opti based sound card ISA
-ISA Modem from an AST computer....no idea how I got it
-(4) controller cards
-(3) ISA modems
-(4) hard drives - conner, seagate and 2 WDs
-1 5 1/4 floppy
-ISA ram board
-ISA floppy controller - 1983
Amid the monthly shuffle of new product announcements, it is very easy to forget about the older stuff that allowed us to move from point A to point M. I still can't help but marvel at how engineers have been able to consolidated and reduce the size of boards and chips. Many of this items listed below had as many as 20+ ICs on them. Nowadays, that same device has but one chip.
While I was cleaning some of the older hardware that was sitting in my closet (I have about 6 containers of the stuff), I decided to empty one of the containers out. Once I started empting it out, I could tell each layer was taking me back in time. The closer I got to the bottom of the container, the older the hardware was. I haven't touched this stuff in many years. Most of the stuff came from my father. He used to build these things computers in my den back in the K-Pro days (anyone else remeber k-pros? These are the days when Computer Shopper magazine was very thick and you could spend weeks reading through one issue). Many of the items are pre 1988, while some are only a couple years ago. Some of the items I pulled out of this box included :
-(3) socket3 motherboards - VIA and UMC chipsets - All with Vesa local bus goodness
-(2) socket7 motherboards - OptiViper and SIS chipsets
-Syquest EZ-Flyer - this thing ate zip drives for lunch
-NEC 6x4 CD changer. I loved this one....I hated the dos drivers though
-Hollywood DVD decoder - not old at all....I may use it in an upcoming HTPC
-(6) NICS
-Sound blaster 16 - one of the first models
-Sound blaster Live....still works fine, but the secondary output port is blown
-Pentium III 550 cart...no idea of it works anymore
-Western Digtal ISA Video card .....Speedstar 24x/Paradise
-Diamond ISA Speedstar /w Tseng labs chipset
-Olicom Token ring NIC
-Yamaha based sound card ISA - I liked this one alot, some time
afterwards, I had a PCI based yamaha sound card....YAMAHA MIDI ruled
-Crystal based sound card ISA
-Opti based sound card ISA
-ISA Modem from an AST computer....no idea how I got it
-(4) controller cards
-(3) ISA modems
-(4) hard drives - conner, seagate and 2 WDs
-1 5 1/4 floppy
-ISA ram board
-ISA floppy controller - 1983