So I work in a science faculty of a big uni. We're having a massive clean-out which means a LOT of stuff is getting tossed out of the labs & offices. As much in dismay as I am at the sheer amount of stuff that will probably end in a landfill, that does mean free gear for me!
Most of the computer stuff hasn't been that interesting, lots of P4s with DDR memory, etc. I did build a couple of extra gruntwork machines for my office & home and harvest some nice Antec ATX cases - call me weird, but I really do believe a P4@3GHz with 4GB RAM and a nice video card can still do useful work! Hell that's practically a modern machine by my standards.
Managed to nab a few gems too - and took loads of photos as always. Here are a few highlights of what I saved from the skip over the last couple weeks:
Check this guy out - big AT tower case, quad floppy drives - you better believe I'm gonna take that!
Okay, no, it doesn't have four floppies, it has two blank faceplates that they made *look* like floppies. But the two real ones are nice, especially the 5.25".
It even came with a 720k DD disk full of old survey data. If it still works I'll reformat it for my MSX.
Lots of expansion cards, let's open it up...
Hmm, eight 30-pin SIMMs and FDD/IDE & serial+parallel controllers on ISA cards.
(BTW what is that *long* ISA slot on the bottom? I don't recognize that slot type!)
HOLY crap, a 386DX/25 with a Cyrix Fastmath copro.
I haven't seen a 386 system "in the wild" in
years. Most of them are either long gone or in the hands of enthusiasts. This one was probably sitting in the corner of someone's lab forever and they finally tossed it to save space. Luckily, I was there.
Here are the cards I removed already when I snapped the mobo. ISA network card and a Trident VGA card (shame it's not a Tseng.) The long one with the DB9 port I had my hopes up was going to be an MDA card but on closer examination it's some kind of data logger. Still cool though.
UMC chipset, AMI bios... quality stuff for the time.
Ewww... to clarify, that is
dust, not exposed leakage on the battery terminal. But yeah, that thing's going away as soon as I can find my long-nose side cutters.
UNFORTUNATELY... I did test it and it didn't work. However it seems to be just a faulty PSU for now, hopefully there are no deeper problems. The HDD was removed for destruction as per university disposal policy which is kind of a shame - I would have loved to get my hands on whatever 40 or 80MB clunker was in there, but who knows if it even worked. Maybe this would be a decent use for the 128MB CF card I have lying around.
Anyway, onward to...