My First System Build

[FredEx]

I'd worked at Motorola at the main campus in the US and in 78/80 we built a continually modified system in the computer club. I was the only tech in the club, the others were engineers. We built the first 64K memory board available for the SS100 buss. The advantage of being at Motorola is we got pre pre-released parts to use. Nobody then had 64K memory to build with, except us. It was based at first on a Motorola 6800. After that it was updated to a 680?...it had not been named yet. So, on to my own stuff.

Well, not much left. This is the first system I built for myself. I had bought a couple before. This build was done in 1994 (I think..getting old hard to remember ). Everything cost $4000.00 US, roughly 2500 pounds. A couple things I'm fuzzy on the details...look for the ? when I'm not sure.

Inwin Full Tower Case 423mm D - 197mm W - 610mm H ( 1.0mm Steel )
ECS K7S5A motherboard
AMD Athlon 1000 (messed up, put Pentium 100)
1 Gig of memory (fully loaded)
WD HDD 1 Gig
AOpen Branded Video Card - Memory ? Max available then
CD Drive ?x Max available then
Sound Blaster Pro
250 Watt PSU
Tape Back-up Drive - forget maker 250 M with firmware mod to 350 M
AOpen Branded (ViewSonic) 19" CRT ... weight was about 36 kilo.

My very techy friends thought I was crazy. I'd hear, "Fred, what the hell you going to do with all that power? You will NEVER fill that hard drive, what a waste!" I eventually added 3 more hard drives. When at Motorola in the computer club in 78 we were called crazy for designing and building the 64K memory board. Some things never change, there are always doubters out there that will try to limit you. SCREW THEM!

Okay, this is all I have left:

 

[hmmblah]

lol, love old nostalgia rigs. I think you have the CPU listed wrong though. That's an AMD board.

 

[SnW]

Can it Fold ?

 

[FredEx]

lol, love old nostalgia rigs. I think you have the CPU listed wrong though. That's an AMD board.

OOPS, I did put the wrong one. I'll edit. That was the previous system. :crazy:

Can it Fold ?

When I built a newer system I let it run 24/7 doing SETI and eventually it died and I never bothered to look into what was wrong. I started gutting it to fix other people's old systems and it got put in the back of a closet.

 

[FredEx]

A friend came over and saw this post, he asked why I no longer use the case. I built a new system and still used this. I had set up SETI on it after a while. This case in its day was HUGE and it is heavy, but compared to newer cases, it is not very wide and not very deep. The Compaq midtower case I use now is as deep and actually wider. It is not a great case compared to what we can get now. You'd never put a big air cooler available now in it and get the side cover on it.

 

[Mgutierrez33]

Old rig is old... Glad you kept some of it long enough to at LEAST post pics of it here, LOVE seeing old ass tech from time to time. Kind of puts into perspective how far we've come and what we actually take for granted with our modern computing: we think nothing of throwing terabyte hard drives and anywhere from 8-32 GB of RAM, coupled with processors that run Ghz clock speeds across MULTIPLE cores and video cards that churn out physics calculations and video rendering like mad... all while consuming less power than what would have been required to even ATTEMPT this back even a decade ago. Some of the things these machines do now would have simply been impossible then (who remembers the Apple Macs in their grade schools with the floppy drives and The Oregon Trail?). Good stuff man, good stuff.

 

[FredEx]

Old rig is old... Glad you kept some of it long enough to at LEAST post pics of it here, LOVE seeing old ass tech from time to time. Kind of puts into perspective how far we've come and what we actually take for granted with our modern computing: we think nothing of throwing terabyte hard drives and anywhere from 8-32 GB of RAM, coupled with processors that run Ghz clock speeds across MULTIPLE cores and video cards that churn out physics calculations and video rendering like mad... all while consuming less power than what would have been required to even ATTEMPT this back even a decade ago. Some of the things these machines do now would have simply been impossible then (who remembers the Apple Macs in their grade schools with the floppy drives and The Oregon Trail?). Good stuff man, good stuff.

I would LOVE to have the money I spent on that to spend now. I paid something like $250.00 for the 1 Gig hard drive. :crazy: I'll have to shoot a pic of a board from an old system I used to repair at a computer company called, Inforex.

 

[CPMFW]

looking forward to this

 

[FredEx]

Here are some pics of one of the boards I repaired for Inforex. This is out of the IKE 1301. The IKE had a propietary processor board, a board that could be propagated with up to 264 TTL and CMOS chips, it did not have a single chip processor. Also the 1301 would come with tape storage, a 12.5 IPS/800 BPI reel to reel tape drive. Options were a card reader and a HUGE Winchester 1 Meg hard drive. The single platter in the hard drive was 20" (508 mm) and the overall hard drive was much larger, about 30" (762 mm) square and 10" (254 mm) high. The magnet coil for the heads was half again larger than a good size coffee cup, the read/write head pad alone was as large at a US quarter. The character code was EBCIDIC, not ASCII. The original idea for the IKE was developed by a few IBM engineers and the IBM heads thought there was no market for it. They bought the rights (IBM owned their idea...intellectual property) and started Inforex.

I was a Senior Tech which meant I repaired any part of the system. You name it, I had repaired it, but mostly did the various reel to reel drives (newer models had newer style), the communications boards, video, rebuilt hard drives and power supplies.

This board I'm showing is a BRAU. It is the same basic board for most of the system, just the chips and wiring changed. We'd have KAU (Keyboard Adapter Unit), TAU (Tape AU), MAU (Memory AU), PAU (Processor AU) and on and on. A system had those 4 basic boards and then it was built on.

This BRAU is a Bi-synchronous Remote Adapter Unit. A major pain in the ass to repair and I was the only one crazy enough to do it. Company rule was, after 20 hours attempted to repair a board was scrapped, then you exceeded the value of the board. Logs of others that had tried went that high. I never spent more than 4 hours before I'd scrap them. The BRAU board allowed communication between two systems. The board is basically 13" (330 mm) square. The back cover is missing, it came in that way, forget trying to repair it then, you'll see why. The wiring is called, infobonding. It is point to point wiring using 30 gauge magnet wire. The red wires would be a revision done to the board...a sort of firmware upgrade.

 

[mehere]

blooming heck fred that last picture give's me a headache just looking at it

 

[andrevautour]

the images in the original post are not showing up.

 

[FredEx]

the images in the original post are not showing up.

Imageshack went goofy one day and some images disappeared. I re uploaded them.

 

[andrevautour]

Imageshack went goofy one day and some images disappeared. I re uploaded them.

thanks!