Looking for a 486 system...

From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Sun Mar 2 16:13:01 2003

--- James Rice <jrice54_at_charter.net> wrote:
> As far as finding an older system, except for the 386 that is kind of a
> museum piece, we scrapped eveything below 1ghz a couple of months ago.

Oy! I have *one*, count it, ONE, machine in my entire collection
*over* 1GHz, only because the AMD chip was a throbbing $95 (it replaced
an 800MHz chip). On my day-to-day ops, I spend most of my time on this
P-133 laptop, and on a P-III 350. If people want to throw sub-GHz hardware
away, I'll gladly take motherboards, CPUs and RAM. :-) I'd like to
put together a 600MHz machine together for Daphne/MAME, but not enough
to spend "real" money on it.

As I've written about here before, I have a device programmer that
does not like fast machines. I think part of it is that ISA speeds
went from 8.00MHz to 8.33MHz when 386s and the like came onto the
scene (to simplify the bus controller design). I have not done the
experiment of taking a 486-25 and cranking everything down. It's
been less effort to keep an 8-bit or 16-bit machine around. I suppose
in the future, when _this_ box dies, I may have to resort to the slowest
ISA machine I can find, and playing with BIOS settings, disabling internal
and external cache, etc.

-ethan
Received on Sun Mar 02 2003 - 16:13:01 GMT