Building my childhood dream PC

https://fabiensanglard.net/2168/index.html

by todsacerdoti • 1 year ago

189 86 1 year ago

p_ing9• 1 year ago

I can't say a PS/1 would have been my first choice for a 486 platform; I'd imagine there are faster motherboards out there and a desktop (i.e. ASUS w/ SiS chipsets). That said, I had a 486/66, so... (some Dell).

And it looks like the PS/1 is missing VLB, but of course the video card is integrated in this model so that makes sense.

I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card and a Sound Blaster AWE64.

But that's my childhood machine, not the author's :-)

bluedino2• 1 year ago

I was always afraid of a lot of the IBM and Compaq computers because of all of the incompatibility notes or issues I'd read about in README.TXT (usually minor workarounds), and then to a greater extent in getting Linux running on them.

p_ing9• 1 year ago

Linux wasn't too much of a concern when these machines were in their prime. But yes, I remember those compatibility notes.

fabiensanglard7• 1 year ago

I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card

This is exactly what the IBM PS/1 2168 have (see the unboxing section).

p_ing9• 1 year ago

The video frame doesn't render; on macOS Firefox it shows "No video with supported format and MIME type found.", so I missed it. But looking at the pictures, it only has ISA slots on the expansion board, unless I'm missing something.

But I missed that part of your post. I haven't seen integrated VLB before, only slotted. Does this board have an expansion to 2MiB? Though that would only matter if you wanted higher resolution/colors.

AStonesThrow3• 1 year ago

The 486 generation was fraught with bus wars and the motherboard market was rather fragmented.

I once visited a college buddy who had a genuine EISA system, and I believe that I left flecks of drool as I admired the superior electronics and engineering invested in that EISA bus. Of course, nobody seriously purchased EISA if they expected to be compatible with stuff.

My father had a PS/2 50Z, which unfortunately saddled him with the MCA Microchannel bus. A likewise superior bit of engineering that was compatible with virtually nothing. Thankfully, Dad never felt a burning need to trick out his system.

Personally, I enjoyed the standard ISA path on my 286 and 386. It was with some regret that I chose VLB for the 486 board, because compared to the above buses, VLB was a hack and a kludge, and you could smell the duct tape and chewing gum on every expansion card.

However, VLB expansion cards were as plentiful as Star Wars action figures, so I was able to absolutely cram cards into a full-size tower until several generations of Pentiums obsoleted everything except PCI.

p_ing9• 1 year ago

The days of nearly-full slots was great. While by the time I had my first computer, a 386SX (12Mhz?) IDE and floppy controllers had made it to the motherboard, we still had a sound card, modem, video card, potentially game card if no game ports on the sound card, and awhile later in PCI land a 3Dfx card.

Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a purpose I no longer need). SLI is dead. Only those with special needs, LLMs or crypto, would ever fill up the additional slots.

Building computers is now just stupid simple and in my view, sorta brainless. No jumpers, no "must go in this slot #". The only thing I ever have difficulty with is mounting the CPU cooler, the thing is f-ing huge and requires a special very long Phillips screwdriver.

/oldmanrant

Oh yeah, and if you didn't bleed when building a PC, you didn't really build a PC. Now everything is rolled steel for those kitten hands.

vunderba• 1 year ago

Great article. The mention of Cyrix brought back a rush of nostalgia - one of the earlier PCs I built used a Cyrix 686 166mhz processor.

From the article:

8BitDo makes a fantastic modern keyboard inspired by the M looks and feel.

Hard disagree. I found most of their keyboard replicas to be rather cheap feeling. However, their controllers such as the Arcade Stick and Pro 2 are excellent.

I think the closest approximation you can get to an old school model M keyboard with buckler springs is probably from Unicomp. If you don't care about that kind of authenticity I would just stick with something like a Keychron mechanical keyboard and call it a day.

https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/NEW_M

christkv• 1 year ago

I had the same Cyrix cpu and all I remember is that FPU performance was terrible in Quake.

bitwize• 1 year ago

I had a Cyrix 6x86MX and it was good enough for Quake (I played Quake originally on a Pentium-60, and it was fine).

The Quake code was designed to take advantage of the fact that the Pentium could have one integer and one FPU instruction in flight at the same time, thanks to optimizations by an even bigger space-alien wizard than John Carmack -- Michael Abrash. The Cyrix CPUs... couldn't dual-issue instructions like this, so clock-for-clock their performance suffered compared to Intel.

micv• 1 year ago

It was alright in Quake, as I recall, but it really didn't cope at all well with Quake 2 and Jedi Knight.

tos1• 1 year ago

Love the image of the monitor showing Battle Chess! As a side note to all like-minded people that love old DOS games, check out the library of DOS games on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

pjmlp• 1 year ago

The best version of Battle Chess was on the Amiga, though. :)

myth_drannon• 1 year ago

Or download eXodos torrent, 600gb with most of the DOS games ever released already comes pre-configured to run in Dosbox

automatic6131• 1 year ago

You never forget your first teenage dream PC. For me, it would be a 8800 GTX SLI build with a QX6850. And now I've revealed how old I am :^)

p_ing9• 1 year ago

Too young to remember how to configure an autoexec.bat/config.sys for maximum memory in Falcon Gold, too old to forget what a Folder is.

rzzzt• 1 year ago

Fire up MEMMAKER.EXE which makes recommendations after two restarts.

coolcase• 1 year ago

Mine was weird. An Amstrad 1512 but shrunk to about half the length in every dimension inc. monitor. I could probably make that now using 3d printer and rpi!

theandrewbailey3• 1 year ago

A Q9300 + 9800 GX2 (later stepped-up to a GTX 280) was my college build.

criddell2• 1 year ago

More than once I’ve had a TI-99/4a and fully loaded peripheral expansion box and an Atari 800XL on my eBay watch list. I’ve come so close to pulling the trigger but I know it would give me a weekend of fun and that would be about it. Back to eBay it would go for the next impulsive dinosaur.

empressplay2• 1 year ago

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that! We used to rent consoles from Blockbuster; buying an old computer off eBay for a lark and then reselling it is totally fine.

criddell2• 1 year ago

If selling stuff on eBay were easier, I might.

bluedino2• 1 year ago

Reminds me a lot of the IBM 486 we had in school, it was the first Windows PC I had ever seen, most everything else was either an Apple II or an IBM running PC DOS.

It had a CD-ROM, speakers and sound and color and everything. I think it was $10,000, or that's what the computer teacher said.

MrBuddyCasino• 1 year ago

Jealaous of that video game library. Fabien has good taste indeed.

fabiensanglard7• 1 year ago

Every times I think I a "done" I see something I want to add. The technique I used to limit myself is "whatever can fin on the three top shelves".

It worked until I started to store some boxes horizontally.

ungreased0675• 1 year ago

I love this. What a trip down memory lane.

kriro• 1 year ago

My entry was the mentioned 486DX2-66Mhz. Double speed CD-Rom and Sound Blaster. Norton Commander was great, Doom and Pirates Gold where my games of choice.

Also started programming on this one with QBasic and then moved to Turbo Pascal 7 (because I needed a .exe file to be called from autoexec as a password protection vs. my sister which I couldn't do with QBasic :)

Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D

yazantapuz• 1 year ago

Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D

With a friend we destroyed the msdos 622 installation on the new 40 mb hd of my family 386 when deleting tmp files...

samplatt• 1 year ago

That's a pretty familiar configuration... it wasn't a COMPAQ was it?

The double-speed CDROM in mine was a SCSI. The SoundBlaster 16 card was also the SCSI controller card. Fucking weird piece of hardware. Many years later I found another one that ALSO had a 16kbit modem on it, in addition to being a sound card and SCSI controller O_O

Also, your quest of creating .exe's was cleaner than mine. I scoured the non-internet that was available to my rural country town for QuickBASIC, which had a couple of of syntax differences to QBASIC but it COULD compile .exe's!

vincent-manis• 1 year ago

My teenage dream machine was a PDP-8 (the original) and a Teletype ASR-33. Fortunately, I never got it.

musicale• 1 year ago

Fortunately you can connect a replica PDP-8 front panel to an emulator!

https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8

Or an FPGA-based hardware version:

https://hackaday.io/project/180081-opencores-pdp-8-on-fpga

http://fpgaretrocomputing.org/pdp8x/

etc.

ErigmolCt3• 1 year ago

There's a certain romance to those early machines

ok123456• 1 year ago

PS/1 seems like an odd choice since it was intended for the home and small business market. It was IBM's answer to beige box clones dominating everyone who wasn't an institutional buyer and paying for the PS/2 premium.

tokai• 1 year ago

Because of the authors childhood experience of his neighbors PS/1 being much better than his own machine.

marcodiego• 1 year ago

My first x86 was acquired in 1997: a 200MHz pentium MMX with 32 MB of RAM, a 2.0 GB harddisk, a 2 MB S3 ViRGE as video card, Aztech Labs AZT-R 2316 sound card, a 33.600 bps winmodem and 28X (I think) CD-ROM. I soon wanted to install Linux on it. It ran minilinux, a small distro that could be launched directly from DOS without partitioning, relatively well. I also downloaded Debian and prepared the 10 floppies to install it but never got ahead because it didn't support my keyboard layout (ABNT2) out of the box. I eventually installed Conectiva Linux 3.0 (marumbi), a RedHat based distro, on it. It worked somewhat beautifully but had no support for the modem and soundcard.

As my relatives and siblings updated their computers, I inherited their spare parts. My machine got some very interesting upgrades. It got 2 floppy drives (very rare at the time), 2 harddisks, a cd-recorder unit, RAM was upgraded to 64 MB and the modem was replaced by a ne2k compatible network card. I also had a Linux-supported Canon BJC 4200 and a SANE-supported TCE table scanner. Still, I couldn't get the SoundBlaster that my brother had and, sadly, my machine continued without sound support on Linux.

At around 2006 I replaced it with a new self built computer which had better compatibility with Linux than with windows-xp and then this new computer became my first dedicated Linux machine. I found out that Linux eventually got support for AZT-R 2316 at around 2007, but the last time I tried my old computer, it displayed "parity error" probably from oxidation in the memory connectors. I then just gave up on it.

Later on I thought about if it would be possible to install a graphics card with OpenGL support and USB port on one of the remaining PCI ports. I certainly wouldn't be able to install a modern Linux distro on it, but certainly it would work with one of those specially crafted for old computers like TinyCore. With recent kernel changes, swapping maybe smart enough to be usable on SSD with SATA to IDE adapters even in that computer. Now, that would be a dream machine.

dt3ft• 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing. I love the design/theme of the site. Pure bliss.

Waterluvian2• 1 year ago

In Part 2 the photo immediately after “It seems IBM integrated it to the motherboard” completely fooled my brain into believing that I’m looking at the side wall of a garage. The garage door to the left. The opener equipment top-right.

And I’m just immediately fixated on this whole vibe of a life-sized tinkering workspace that’s the inside of a PC case.

somat2• 1 year ago

makes me think of the IBM AN/FSQ-7 built into the SAGE air defense stations, the largest computer ever built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7_Combat_Direction_Cent...

While realistically I understand it was just a bunch of racks and consoles, due to the permanent nature of the installation and the way it was integrated into the building I like to imagine the operators and technicians scurrying around admits bunches of wires and tubes.

Waterluvian2• 1 year ago

Weight 250 tons

So that doesn’t qualify for free shipping, I imagine.

I absolutely love the aesthetic of a big classic telephone receiver attached to the end.

dgfitz• 1 year ago

I can’t help but notice the ship date on both the keyboard and the main unit. It looks like you had already bought the keyboard before the pc itself arrived.

Uvix• 1 year ago

Even if they didn't know the included keyboard wasn't a Model M, they likely knew it was a full-size keyboard instead of the tenkeyless one they wanted.

dep_b• 1 year ago

Could be a fun exercise:

- Commodore 128 with dual floppy drive vs my tape-only C64 - Maxed out Amiga 1000 with a bunch of sampler and MIDI extensions vs my A500 + 512kb - B/W PowerMac G3 fully expanded just because - Dual Celly 300A @ 450 with Dual Voodoo II vs my 450 with single Voodoo II

Nothing after that had this "I really want this, but I can't get it" thing. I just bought what I wanted.

adamcharnock• 1 year ago

The very moment I saw the letters ‘MMX’, a long forgotten part of my brain woke up and said, “I know what that smells like!”

Which is bizarre. But to me it is (apparently) the small of new electronics, plus perhaps the ‘hot dusty things’ smell. It also comes with the memory of playing Pod (a racing game), by Ubisoft (I think). Good teenage memories!

tecleandor• 1 year ago

Oh, that was nice. I think it was one of the first "high fps" games and it looked super smooth...

ghthor• 1 year ago

Pod is a great game, I think I bought a copy from GoG and it worked great.

Played this a lot on my families Gateway computer in early 90s.

liotier• 1 year ago

I did that a few years ago, with the 1990 computer that I lusted over as a teenager: the IBM 8595 AKD (European reference - it is 85950KD in North America)... 486 DX, XGA display, 320 MB SCSI, 64 MB RAM... At that time my computer was a 1988 Olivetti PC-1 (512 KB 8 MHz Nec V40 with CGA and a floppy drive)...

I was awed by the beast... Everything about it screamed over-engineering - even the case was incomprehensibly robust and the power switch had a satisfyingly loud motion... I could even touch its legendary tangential fan... Touching the 20 years-old dream was an emotional moment - I'm glad I did it... The ultimate Windows 3.0 host !

But it had to go after a little while: my two-room apartment was too small for so much awesomeness, so it went to another fan.

agcat• 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing. Its a great writeup

sthuck• 1 year ago

The part about buying a misleading CPU really hit home with me. Man all those small retailers in the 90s were living the dream with their unaware customers.

My parents bought an AMD 486 100mhz at the end of 1995, it was still a viable low end machine for that time but they paid as if it was a Pentuim. Had to somehow make it work up until 2001 with that machine. Don't know if I had a career in tech if I wasn't forced to tinker with it.

ErigmolCt3• 1 year ago

When you can make DOOM run on a potato, everything else feels doable

karon• 1 year ago

Must have been an amazing journey, thanks for the great writeup! I also have a DELL 2007FP, now I'm thinking about getting an AMIGA 1200 again (which I coded on in assembly), and a 1997 Pentium as well :)

mixmastamyk• 1 year ago

RadioShack catalog, lots of suped-up “TRash 80s” and Realistic audio equipment. Super tweeters and Psycho Lite for the win!

jdshaffer• 1 year ago

Reminds me of my first computer... a 386 20Mhz black and white laptop. Ran DOS by default, but you could jump into Win 3.11 with the lovely "win" command. laugh I remembering so wanting a color monitor so I could play games...

theandrewbailey3• 1 year ago

Most of the PCs I had access to growing up sucked in some way, so I have no nostalgia to recreate any of them as entire systems.

In 2013[0], I built a PC with the loose goal of being the best the 20th century had to offer, at least as far as core components were concerned. (I considered 2000 as part of the 20th century for the purposes of this build.) I ended up with a Pentium 3 600 MHz, 256 MB RAM, Geforce 2 Ultra, 52x CDROM drive, and crappy "multimedia" speakers. Somehow, I still had the same Yamaha-based soundcard I grew up with, so that's the only original part of this nostalgic ship of thesis. I threw in a 40GB hard drive, and later upgraded to 250 GB. The 17" CRT, keyboard, and ball mouse are early-mid 2000s and Dell-branded (the PC case is beige and unbranded). The only thing that would complete the build would be a modem, but no one liked dial-up, ever, so I have a fast ethernet card instead. The clock noticeably drifts out of sync by a few minutes every month, so I have an NTP client.

I installed Windows 98 on it, and promptly started playing games I loved growing up, and later, others: Starcraft, SimCity 2000, Road Rash, Chips Challenge, Fallout, and Diablo. It barely runs the original Warcraft 3 (but Frozen Throne refuses to install).

[0] https://theandrewbailey.com/article/120/Project-Twentieth-Ce...

fabiensanglard7• 1 year ago

Did you take a photo of that marvel by any chance?

theandrewbailey3• 1 year ago

The entire thing is sitting on the right side of my desk in my monitor post (not the best lighting though):

https://theandrewbailey.com/article/262/So-Few-Monitors.html

It's still there, and worked the last time I tried turning it on.

geocrasher3• 1 year ago

The 286/12, with its 1MB memory, 60MB RLL Hard drive, and 5.25" floppy... oh and the VGA card and 14" 256 color VGA monitor, and the Panasonic KXP-1180i. It was October 1988. My Dad's boss financed it through the company, and brought it over and set it up for us. And offered 13 year old me the opportunity to call him any time I needed help. And that I did. Between the computer purchase, the endless phone calls, and then a year later ending up on Prodigy's excellent discussion groups, I learned huge amounts.

It wasn't until much later in life that I properly appreciated how much of a sacrifice it was for my dad- a man who could barely read, worked 12-14 hour days, and came home covered in mud and grease regularly- to buy a $3300 computer in 1988. That's about $8000 in today's money.

I don't know if I ever got the chance to thank him properly for it. He died when I was in my mid 20's, self absorbed and busy with my new family.

Thanks, Dad.

fabiensanglard7• 1 year ago

a man who could barely read, worked 12-14 hour days, and came home covered in mud and grease regularly- to buy a $3300 computer in 1988. That's about $8000 in today's money.

The best way to celebrate that kindness is to pass it down to people around you.

geocrasher3• 1 year ago

I agree. And I do my best to do exactly that.

rubitxxx6• 1 year ago

Your dad was awesome.

I tried to get my kids into computers, but it didn’t stick. It’s not the same today as it was then.

geocrasher3• 1 year ago

He was a good man, no doubt. Troubled, which is why he died before he hit 60. That was almost 25 yeas ago, and I still miss him all the time.

empressplay2• 1 year ago

When I had a Timex Sinclair 1000, I wanted a VIC-20.

When I had a Radio Shack MC-10, I wanted a Color Computer 2.

When I had a Commodore 64, I wanted a Commodore 128.

When I had an Atari 130XE, I wanted an Atari ST.

When I had an Atari ST, I wanted an Atari Mega STE.

When I had an Atari Mega STE, I wanted a 486.

I now have all of these!

fabiensanglard7• 1 year ago

Photos!

dottjt• 1 year ago

Maybe not quite related, but I remember as a teenager dreaming about building the ultimate modern gaming PC, because the PC I had kind of sucked. But now that I'm an adult and can more-than afford it, I simply don't want to spend the money. I mean, I still would love to have my dream PC, it's just not worth the value in my mind.

fabiensanglard7• 1 year ago

I justify building computers only when it means I will play coop with my friends or my wife. These shared moment are priceless :) !

rasz2• 1 year ago

IBM PS/1 is that they were upgradable. Contrary to PC clones where everything was often soldered, these came with an Intel Overdrive socket to upgrade the CPU, and extra slots to increase the L1 cache, RAM, and VRAM.

Plenty PS/1 came with everything soldered on and missing pinouts for CPU socket/ram/cache, LPX form factor makes you married to the case. Mom and pop build PCs were kings of expandability, everything standard off the shelf, could continuously upgrade step by step component after component all the way to ~2000.

PS/1 was a funny series of IBM computers. The idea was to make something low end and cheap, that necessitated using common third party components resulting in more standard and compatible PC than stupid MCA/ESDI PS/2 line. Epictronics loves PS/2 line and has plenty of repair videos, its a never ending stream of WTF where they thinking combined with oh well that part is unobtanium now, IBM IBMing.

"Hanging note bug"[9]. I had to go to the next level and get a MIDI card.

SB16 firmware was decompiled and bug patched out, fix requires replacing microcontroller with $3 Atmel. All in all SB16 was a rushed (early reviews complained about glitchy sound, not working ASP) poor product. I associate it with hissy sound and lack of SB Pro Stereo mode support.

BirAdam2• 1 year ago

My teen dream machine was a Pentium 3 with a Voodoo 3. Luckily, this is a machine I now own.

p_ing9• 1 year ago

TNT2 had made the Voodoo3 irrelevant; the Voodoo3 lacked 32bit color output. But I loved my Voodoo2, there was nothing like it at the time. 3Dfx had a couple more years to run on the Glide API.

BirAdam2• 1 year ago

Yeah, it was Glide that made the Voodoo3 my target at the time. Now that I do have one, I love it :-)

ErigmolCt3• 1 year ago

You can feel how much this machine meant to him back then, and how satisfying it must've been to finally track one down and bring it back to life

LargoLasskhyfv• 1 year ago

That looks actually nice. Interesting screen also. Seems rather practical, with all those inputs and optional scaler.

Building my childhood dream PC

Related Stories