thinking of the "ultimate" retro x86 PCs - what bits to seek/keep ?

Sean Conner spc at conman.org
Fri Jun 3 17:09:58 CDT 2016


It was thus said that the Great Swift Griggs once stated:
> On Thu, 2 Jun 2016, TeoZ wrote:
> > The ultimate gaming 486 would have an EISA+VLB motherboard.
> 
> Yes, I would agree on that. However, since I'm mostly interested in 
> running older Unix variants and DOS, games aren't at the top of my value 
> system. Don't get me wrong, I love games, and I'd surely have a few loaded 
> with DOS. However, I'm looking for something special. I have this foggy 
> memory of a small, white, NEC (or maybe it was NCR, or or or... crap. I 
> just can't remember) slimline desktop machine that was a 486 and had a 
> SCSI2 interface right on the mobo and had an external SCSI2 header, too. I 
> know it had two or three expansion slots, but I didn't get to pop open the 
> box to look at what kind of slots they were. I've been google image 
> searching for a while trying to find it again. I saw them while doing some 
> contract job back in the 90's. The green LED on a SCSI terminator caught 
> my eye (as well as the fact that I liked the case design).

  Sounds somewhat similar to the server (email and web, on the public
Internet co-located) I used up through 2004-5.  It was an NCR-3230 system
and was a 486.  I used a similar unit at home as a router (fun times getting
three network cards working on the thing).

	http://www.flummux.org/images/tower/index.html

  -spc (I think I had that for five, six years.  And the few times I had to
	reboot it was due to moving it, or someone tripping over the power
	cord. It was a robust little box.)


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