[SWLUG] Old Computer Bits

[Daniel Morris]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 08:44:59PM +0100, Steve Hill wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Edward Evans wrote:
> 
> > Old but working 16x and 4x(!) Goldstar CD ROM's
> >
> > Sound Blaster 16, ISA soundcard
> >
> > Complete Packard-Bell Desktop system with 160MHz Pentium, 4.3G HD, 40M
> > RAM, built-in video and sound, 14in monitor, speakers, mouse, keyboard,
> > cables, even the manuals and Win95 COA.  I said it was old stuff!
> 
> Wow, this is modern compared to what's in my "computer junk" box, which 
> includes a 486dx4/100, P200 and original SoundBlaster 2.0 (complete with 
> floppies) :)

"My First Linux" is used on its side as the rear of my LJ4 stand, HP
Vectra 486dx2/50, Gravis Ultrasound, 240MiB HDD, 16MiB RAM (had 4 but I
got really frustrated with the speed X ran) and a complete set of
printed labelled SLS 1.01 that my brother-in-law ran off for me.  I
"upgraded to" SLS 1.01 after my first experiments with just the kernel
base set some months earlier, which had mostly been frustrated by the
lack of a floppy disk drive on any of the HP 3000/9000 machines at work
- I think I used a customer machine that was in for repair before the
sysadmin found out where his overnight bandwidth & disk space had been
going!

Highlights of this machine's service were all the C coding for my final
year project to auto-generate VHDL and critically managing to extract
three crucial pages from several hundred in a Framemaker mangled
postscript file that I needed less than twelve hours before the
submission deadline, and taking 26 hours to rebuild GNUPro (gcc from
Cygnus) in '98 that we migrated to using under Linux for embedded (Set
Top Box) development at Sony, which I joked close to the time was an
hour less than my wife was in labour when our eldest was delivered
a month or so later!

 Daniel