psipsy

Another computer side-project I have going on is what I call The Wayback Machine.

It's a Windows 2000 computer running on Pentium 3 hardware. The reason I went with that combo is because it's old enough to see some deprecated standards (such as 5-1/4 floppy drives and early IDE), but new enough to have some basic modern-ish functions, such as USB, NTFS-formatted drives, and an ATX power supply. Also the hardware was cheap. I was able to get the P3 and mobo from ebay for $28. I could have found one for less but I was paying for the luxury of it being pre-tested. The built-in USB was limited to 1.1 but there are USB2 PCI cards that work fine with it. The motherboard has a hard limit of 512MB of RAM but for W2k, that's fine. And there are AGP video cards that have just enough oomph to work with modern displays. Aside from a few cheap parts, I already had much of the remaining necessary hardware hanging around. Including a Zip drive.

One option I looked at was a motherboard with genuine ISA slots but the price of those shoots way up. Here is why: Various businesses, in various fields of manufacturing, use computer-controlled equipment in their daily operations. And much of that equipment (including the computer) was bought a long time ago. Well, the equipment itself runs well enough, but the computer controlling it doesn't fare so well. That's when it gets tricky. The old computer interfaces with the machine via an expansion card, most likely an ISA card if it's from the 90s, and for whatever reason, the company that made the machine either doesn't make a PCI version of that card (which would enable use of a much newer computer), or would rather their customer buy an entirely new machine, or went out of business entirely.

So, the business is faced with the following choices: Either replace the whole machine at great expense plus all the downtime involved, or attempt to fix the computer that controls it. That means going to ebay and looking for a similar motherboard. If they have to get into a bidding war over a late-90s motherboard, then so be it. Dropping $200 for an incredibly obsolete computer part is a bargain compared to the hundreds of thousands (or millions!) of dollars involved in replacing the entire machine. How do I know? Because my employer has had to do the same thing for the same reason. Sometimes if I'm lucky, I can get away with just soldering in new capacitors (something I won't do outside of work). Considering my total cost for the Wayback Machine was less than a used ISA-equipped motherboard, that's why I didn't go for that option.

Funfact: Nixsys is a company that specializes in making motherboards with a combination of legacy ISA slots and support for older operating systems with more modern features, like SATA and dual-core processors.

Originally I wanted to run W2k off an SSD via a SATA card but that had problems. The motherboard needed updated to make PCI cards bootable, and to apply that update required a working Windows install. So I dug out an iffy-but-usable 120GB hard drive and slid W2k on that, and did the update from there. Nope, still wouldn't boot from the SSD. I guess it just wasn't meant to be, so I left the 120GB in.

Now for the first test. I had found a 250MB (yes, MB) hard drive that did not seem to be viewable by anything else, so I put it in the Wayback Machine. It took longer to boot up because of the slower protocol, but it saw the hard drive and its contents, which I quickly backed up to a flash drive. Alrighty then.

I tried using a 5-1/4 floppy drive I had lying around but it didn't work with it. I keep forgetting that a lot of older things like that weren't entirely plug-and-play and had jumper settings to fiddle with. Then before I could try anything else with it, the 120GB drive started to crap out. Luckily it didn't take much effort to clone that, since W2k took up less than 3GB, with all updates, drivers, and applications added in. Fortunately, I had a second 120GB hard drive that was just kinda hanging around.

FunFact: Plastic boxes meant for ammunition storage are great for storing hard drives. The dimensions are just right, and there's a weathertight seal on the lid. Toss in a few silica gel packets for good drive storage.

What's next for The Wayback Machine? I dunno, maybe I'll find a known-working 5-1/4 floppy drive and put that in. A SCSI card is also an option, if I can find one.