Boss told me to clear out some very old computers at work. When I opened it up, I found things that I can't believe what I am seeing. 486DX, and not even DX2. The motherboards are full of ISA bus slots, 30-pin RAMs and L2 cache. Yes! L2 cache on the motherboard! You can actually add L2 cache at that time! So, I took those CPUs out and wonder how they'd sell these days. Back when I was in high school, (boy that's long time ago), I wanted one of these but couldn't afford to. Now I have two for free.
Just in case what you might be interested in how the old computers of AT boxes are connected. You need a IDE/Floppy controller card. If you're lucky, there might be RS-232 and parallel controller on board, but usually you need additional COM/Parallel card. You need extra sound card and, of course, a display card. Early Matsu****a CD-ROMs require proprietary controller cards, later ones use IDE, but you lose fourth hard drive due to limitation on IDE devices. Ever wonder why some people are running SCSI back then?
Oh, BTW, there is another separate socket on the motherboard with 4167 printed in the center. That's for numerical processing unit. Some computers of the time still use 486SX which no FPU is in it.
Believe it or not, those computer can run Tie Fighter very well. All you need is a 486DX 33MHz with 4MB Ram. Speaking of Tie Fighter, that's the game that Lucas Arts should be remaking, not nostalgic adventure games such as Monkey Island or some evil tentacle.
The graphics cards of those old computers at my work are from Trident. Back in the day, people were talking about "2D acceleration" for real jobs. Nowadays, those monster 3D GPUs suck at 2D processing, and a lot of stuff is passed on the CPU instead. So, 2D performance on modern computers is actually suck compared to way older generation with dedicated 2D acceleration cards to run Windows 3.1. Way to go, NVIDIA, ATI, M$ and Intel. You big corporations suck!
There was no sound system on those old computers at my lab. Back in the day, if you want to here some decent midi music while playing Tie Fighter, you need an extra Midi card, which were very expensive back then. Think $200 for "low-end" midi card. Those midi cards don't play FM waveform, so you still need a Soundblaster or Gravis Ultrasound for the job. I still have a Turtlebeach Maui, but somehow lost my GUS.
Back in the days of 486 and early Pentium, there was such thing called "MPEG-II acceleration card," for people doing video recording, editing and replay. CPU power at the time wasn't able to handle MPEG-II. There was one of these cards at my work, but we threw that away last year.
We still have a lot of old stuff, but these are not as excitingly old as these two. Funny thing is that they are so old, that people have forgotten them until we threw away relatively newer stuff first, which tells you how many old stuff is still there. There is still an analog plotter, wait, do you younger people know WHAT is an analog plotter?
Just in case that Alex is still curious of what I was doing on holiday.
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