Computer nostalgia - Post your relics!

[RhondaHonda]

I don’t have any pics to share but remember 4MB of RAM being on sale for $150 as a kid. I got an Apple IIe from a great aunt, that was basically obsolete when I got it. We had Packard Bell and Compaqs as a kid in the late 80s and early 90s and I remember them being expensive!

 

[OVERKILL]

I don’t have any pics to share but remember 4MB of RAM being on sale for $150 as a kid. I got an Apple IIe from a great aunt, that was basically obsolete when I got it. We had Packard Bell and Compaqs as a kid in the late 80s and early 90s and I remember them being expensive!

I remember the Packard Bell systems that had the speakers integrated into the sides of the screen, which had a real high tech look to it!

 

[blufeb95]

MCA was IBM's proprietary solution to the limits of ISA, EISA attempted to be the industry standard, through most of the 386 era 16-bit ISA was tolerated and during the 486 VLB won out in the consumer space and the Pentium era ushered in PCI, although some late 486 boards had it, they're not particularly common, maybe still more common the EISA. EISA though is harder to find because the machines are either still in the store rooms at businesses or they got recycled, also the market for them was business and large businesses probably didn't buy as many EISA systems because the high end server and workstation market wasn't completely dominated by the PC yet going into the 486 era.

 

[OVERKILL]

MCA was IBM's proprietary solution to the limits of ISA, EISA attempted to be the industry standard, through most of the 386 era 16-bit ISA was tolerated and during the 486 VLB won out in the consumer space and the Pentium era ushered in PCI, although some late 486 boards had it, they're not particularly common, maybe still more common the EISA. EISA though is harder to find because the machines are either still in the store rooms at businesses or they got recycled, also the market for them was business and large businesses probably didn't buy as many EISA systems because the high end server and workstation market wasn't completely dominated by the PC yet going into the 486 era.

Oh yes, VLB!! I think I have a VLB card here somewhere too! I have a couple of PCI-X SCSI and SATA cards. The SATA card actually has a celeron CPU, lol.

 

[blufeb95]

Oh yes, VLB!! I think I have a VLB card here somewhere too! I have a couple of PCI-X SCSI and SATA cards. The SATA card actually has a celeron CPU, lol.

I have a system somewhere with a crappy PCChips board that probably has fake cache chips on it, with an 83mhz Pentium overdrive that has a VLB multi-IO card and an S3 805 that I upgraded to 2MB of RAM, I think I installed one of the old versions of Debian where dselect was the main way you installed packages, and I can see why Linus Torvalds was quoted in saying Debian was hard to use.

 

[Pablo]

Funny I remember my sound cards better than the video cards!

I think I had 4 different SB variants the first one then the AWE 32 and 64 and this little guy. Don’t do sound stuff with the kids anymore. Good memories of that.

 

[brianl703]

The SB16 and Aztech cards are EISA, the FM-3485 is ISA. Not sure if I still have any EISA video cards kicking around. I thought I had an old Trident, but I can't seem to find it.

I had never heard of an EISA sound card. Why would they bother, a sound card can't even tax a 16bit 8MHz ISA bus?

This seems to back it up that an EISA sound card was pointless:

Any worthwhile sound cards made for EISA bus? \ VOGONS

www.vogons.org

 

[OVERKILL]

Some SCSI and SATA cards:

 

[Pablo]

I had never heard of an EISA sound card. Why would they bother, a sound card can't even tax a 16bit 8MHz ISA bus?

Now for sure. I thought they did push the limits back in the day for cleaner more channels

 

[OVERKILL]

I had never heard of an EISA sound card. Why would they bother, a sound card can't even tax a 16bit 8MHz ISA bus?

This seems to back it up that an EISA sound card was pointless:

Any worthwhile sound cards made for EISA bus? \ VOGONS

www.vogons.org

For some reason I thought that one of the ones with the integrated CD-ROM controller were EISA, but I don't think that's the case, it's just ISA.

 

[brianl703]

For referne

Now for sure. I thought they did push the limits back in the day for cleaner more channels

EISA was primarily used on servers. Not much need for audio on those.

This is what the card edge on an EISA card looks like, for anyone who has never seen one:

 

[brianl703]

For some reason I thought that one of the ones with the integrated CD-ROM controller were EISA, but I don't think that's the case, it's just ISA.

EISA was super rare, it wasn't common on consumer-grade machines, it was primarily used on servers.

I don't think I ever laid hands on an EISA box.

 

[blufeb95]

For some reason I thought that one of the ones with the integrated CD-ROM controller were EISA, but I don't think that's the case, it's just ISA.

I think they were generally just ISA the interfaces they offered were for single or double speed drives maybe a rare quad speed, not exactly enough to push the limits of ISA even with the crippled DMA at 4.77mhz.

 

[OVERKILL]

For referne


EISA was primarily used on servers. Not much need for audio on those.

This is what the card edge on an EISA card looks like, for anyone who has never seen one:

View attachment 185527

It was also used on Workstation systems, we had a DIGITAL one that was EISA, it was a 486 DX4/100 IIRC (might have been a 386, it's been 30 years).

 

[brianl703]

One of the first Ethernet NICs I ever owned. I had (probably still have, somewhere) two like this. I connected them together with some 4-pair telephone cable I found in a construction dumpster:

 

[OVERKILL]

I think they were generally just ISA the interfaces they offered were for single or double speed drives maybe a rare quad speed, not exactly enough to push the limits of ISA even with the crippled DMA at 4.77mhz.

I'm thinking quad or hex speed era for some reason, in a Workstation box, but I might be misremembering.

 

[OVERKILL]

One of the first Ethernet NICs I ever owned. I had (probably still have, somewhere) two like this. I connected them together with some 4-pair telephone cable I found in a construction dumpster:

View attachment 185528

I have a similar era D-Link here somewhere with all three interfaces on it as well, lol.

 

[blufeb95]

I'm thinking quad or hex speed era for some reason, in a Workstation box, but I might be misremembering.

In a workstation I'd assume they were using SCSI which you may have been able to get higher speed drives, but the proprietary interface drives were typically single or double speed, they may have went as far as quad speed but after that ATAPI really took over.

 

[brianl703]

It was also used on Workstation systems, we had a DIGITAL one that was EISA, it was a 486 DX4/100 IIRC (might have been a 386, it's been 30 years).

It was probably a 386, I very definitely recall that by the time the 486 DX4/100 came around, PCI was out and 486 PCI motherboards were being made.

 

[Pablo]

My first 486 was a DX2/66 EISA

My hard drive card was EISA

Don’t remember the other cards much - video card and sound card - fuzzy memory pre 2000