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Computing Archeology

MacGuffinMacGuffin Member Posts: 241 ■■■□□□□□□□
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Friday afternoon I got a call from one of my brothers, he took the day off work to do some house cleaning and he had a computer to dispose of. He asked if I wanted it. I thought to myself that while I certainly had enough computers occupying my basement I could use something newer than what I had. I asked what kind of computer it was and he told me it was a Pentium 2. I thought for sure he was either mistaken or joking, no one has a computer that old, so I told him I'd take it. He said he'd drop it off at my house while he was running errands. I hung up the phone and forgot about it until I got home.

When I got home I found a complete computer system on my doorstep. A rather large looking tower, CRT display, keyboard, mouse, a powered speaker set, and he even dropped off a phone cord and a desktop microphone. That microphone should have been a clue, it looked identical to the one I had that came with a 14.4k baud modem that doubled as a speakerphone. I thought about how that was a modem I bought a very long time ago. I took the pile on my doorstep inside and, since I'm in the middle of some house cleaning myself, I didn't really have a place to put it so it ended up in the middle of my living room floor.

I then noticed another clue, the brand name on the computer case was Gateway 2000. That brand has not existed for a long time. I opened up the case and looked at what I got myself into. Yep, it was a Pentium 2 inside. There was also a lot of dust. He warned me in the phone conversation earlier that the hard drive was destroyed so the first order of business was to find a hard drive. I noticed that for expansion slots it had ISA, PCI, and AGP. At this point I was a bit disappointed with myself because it was only weeks ago I had taken a pile of ISA and AGP cards to be recycled. I would have liked to have one particular card from that pile, an AGP card with dual video output.

I should take a moment on explaining why I was even bothering with resurrecting this artifact of history. Ever since I bought a pile of Cisco gear for my Cisco certification studies I wished for a computer with more than one serial port to hook them up to. I have two 8-port terminal servers and more than 8 pieces of Cisco gear. Having two serial ports would mean less swapping of serial cables to get things done that I could not do over telnet. This computer had two features that made it valuable to me, it has two serial ports, and it works.

I proceeded to remove the ISA modem card and replace it with a PCI ethernet card. It has a CD-ROM drive with a form fitting door on it, making it near impossible to replace and still have the front panel fit back on. It also had a CD-RW drive that, judging by it's color and markings, was obviously added later. I had to install an operating system on the computer to make it work so I tried finding something on CD to install. As most everything now is on DVD this alone was a challenge. After having the computer fail to boot from a Linux CD I had on the bottom of a pile on my desk I determined that either both optical drives were bad or the CD was bad.

I replaced the CD-RW drive with a DVD-ROM drive that I had from a computer that was donated to me previously. That computer died and the working parts resided in my basement just in case of situations like this. I tried several different Linux distributions and none would boot. After some thought and internet research I realized my usual tactics of resurrecting donated computers was not going to work. I had to dig back further in time to find an operating system that would boot this machine. I also began to ponder the sanity of continuing this endeavor.

I searched the case of the computer again, thinking I might find a Windows license sticker so that I could install whatever OS that was on it originally. No such sticker, this machine predated Microsoft Certificates of Authenticity. This is where the age of this machine really sank in. This machine was likely running Windows 95 when my brother tossed it in a closet and forgot about it until this week.

I then had to think a bit about what I wanted this computer to do for me. It had to run some sort of GUI. It needed to be able to run some sort of serial terminal emulator. It also needed to be able to do some basic internet stuff like ping, telnet, and FTP. At this point I was digging deep into the layers of time and stacks of CDs in my basement for something.

I then thought I found something that might just work. I just marveled about how long ago it was that I last used this operating system. I found an install CD for BeOS. Be Inc. was another company, like Gateway 2000, that has not existed in a very long time. It took some work, and a memory upgrade, to get the computer to boot BeOS. I found a couple 128MB sticks of PC100 RAM in a shoe box in my basement and installed it. The computer now has three 128MB DIMMs installed but the processor can only access 256MB of it, a limitation of the memory controller.

After about 12 hours of working on this computer I was satisfied that I got it to do what I wanted. It was fun. I got to revive memories of computing from another time. It might just also prove to be a fruitful endeavor. After spending much of my Saturday on this computer I didn't want to spend the time to hook it up to the Cisco gear in my basement lab. I unhooked everything, moved it from my living room floor to the basement, and decided I'd finish the project later.

This was such an unusual project I thought I had to share this with someone. I hope someone reading this enjoyed the story.
MacGuffin - A plot device, an item or person that exists only to produce conflict among the characters within the story.
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