HARDWARE SHOWCASE

Quantum 8 inch Hard drive. I bought this drive from ARE surplus way back in the day. It came out of a rack mount system. This drive has a clear cover allowing you to see all the platters, heads and other mechanical workings. We would take this drive to computer shows as a prop to attract customers. The drive uses a 120vac motor. During shows we would power up the drive, it would make all sorts of noise and everyone would come running over to see what it is. The controller board had its stand offs replaced with taller ones to aid in showing off. One goal would be to get the drive running to see if it can still hold data. 36 MB Quantum hard drive. This is an eight in diameter platter MFM hard drive that I picked up from ARE-Surplus. We would bring this drive to computer shows to help draw in customers to our tables. The spindle motor ran off 120VAC so when we would fire it up the spindel would make all sorts of noise. We would power it up from time to time just so that everyone could hear it.

That old stereo One of my colleagues at work gave me his old Panasonic Stereo. It was one of the higher end models and worked great. We just had to clean up some of the dials. I thought about keeping it, but I wouldn't have much of a use for it so I sold it to a guy in Poland.

Dell RAM Tree / RAM expanders / Riser cards or SIM trees as I've known them as being very rare. They were not an option for most PC's and even if you found one that fit the data lines and addressing needed to make them work was most likely not there. Even on one of my builds I found that the three memory slots were really just one slot. You can install One double sided stick in slot one or two single sided sticks in slots two and three.

If you put sticks in all three you get some weird RAM amounts or the system bios just complains and beeps at you. The riser cards that I have were from a dell workstation. They use RAM BUS RAM! I even have a bunch of RAM BUS to stick on them. One day I'll need to find the system that uses this riser card and try them out. , mx-005pjr-12417-2b0-00bb, mx-016mwp-12417-27v-001m, sc129-r13, SCI29-R13 backplane, fw82803aa These are very kool. It's an adapter to take one RAM slot and turn it into 4 RAM slots.

I first saw something like this back in the days of 30pin sims called a RAM Tree. It would take and convert one 72 pin sim into 4 30 pin sims. The DELL RAM expander works with Rambus ram and these adapters will only work in the Dell systems that support them. They also may not have the address lines to support larger modules. I found these in a recycle bin so no clue if they still work.

8 Inch Floppy Drive. This is massive and cool!. My dream one day is too turn this into a USB 8" Floppy drive. With today's new arduino technology this can be a dream come true. now to find some free time.

Video Beam Projector fro the 1970's. This thing has three 8" raytubes, Red, Green and Blue and puts out a ten foot wide screen.

Toughbooks. The old Panasonic Toughbooks were my favorite type of laptops. I came across three of them. One was a 386, and the other two were pentiums. The best thing about them was their durability. The hard drive caddy alone was $60 since it had a gel pack for protecting the hard drive. One cool feature was how the cd / pd drive was hidden under the keyboard.

Dual Pentium Pro 200 motherboard. aa 668325-503 s03984941 E139761 intel pciset sb82371sb chip set. Dual Intel Pentium Pro 200mhz CPUs. K880521EX200 SY032 256K. I've had this motherboard in my collection for a long time and love it. Always wanted to build a custom case for it and get it up and running.

Old server RAM. These tall SIMs have always intridged me. Mainly just for servers I have collected a hand full of them.

Custom Nintendo games. Making my own game from scratch is great. Using an EEPROM eraser and programmer I can build my own game. For testing I modify an old game so that I can test chips. I purchased some brand new PCB's and the NesMaker software suit. A friend and I tried writing a game in NASM, but all we manage to get, was garbage on the screen with part of a sprite that moved up and down. The NesMaker software is much easier to use. I have two ideas for games, one is more original and has different mechanic to it. That one would be very hard to make since we will have to add some custom code to NesMaker. The other one is the Swedish Chef game where you have to run back and forth managing food ingredients and other shenanigans.

CPU collection Here is a picture of my small CPU collection. My favorites are the dual 8088's that I have. No idea how the "dual" part works but still cool. I also like the 486DX100's. The two that I have are in systems, the same goes for the Pentium200's. Those ones just look so cool.

14 inch Dia Removable Hard Drive Platter by BASF. Picked this up from a place that I worked at. They were scraping out a rack mount computer system. I really wanted the entire hard drive but it must of weighed 300 lbs and definitely wouldn't fit in my Fiero. I took one of the removable platters. It's amazing just how big these were. I sold mine to some place out in Nevada so hopefully they are being put to good use.

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