List charter mods & headcount... ;-)

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Thu Jun 17 02:53:35 2004

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004, Teo Zenios wrote:
> From: "Tothwolf" <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
> > On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> >
> > > But there definitely will be, at some point, very topical
> > > discussions about Windows and PCs of the 1990s. For example, see
> > > any Vesa Local Bus motherboards or interface cards around anymore?
> >
> > Quite a few actually... I have a fair number of VLB and EISA based
> > systems still running, and at least a couple boxes of assorted VLB
> > boards in storage. (I'm still looking for certain types of boards for
> > software testing though...)
>
> I have to admit that VLB boards (other then cheap IDE ones) are kind of
> hard to find even on eBay. Good thing I have quite a few for my 486/66
> system. Besides standard video, HD controllers, and SCSI cards were
> there any other type of VLB cards (video capture, etc)? I don't remember
> any.

Most of my cards came from "computer graveyard" type shops that I used to
hunt though in years past.

I don't remember any video VLB video capture cards, but the ISA type were
common, and were usually just connected to the VLB video card in a VLB
system (though the Diamond Viper VLB has no expansion connector...
supposedly just an oversight during the design phase.) There were some VLB
sound cards, but I doubt they really made any use of the VLB bus.

I do have some VLB NE2000 based network cards. I've never done any sort of
benchmarking on them though, so I have no idea if they are any faster than
an ISA NE2000 card. I suspect that they might actually be a little slower,
since the drivers are not as well tested.

The boards I'm really after are things like the Promise caching EIDE
controllers, S3 based and/or Diamond brand video cards (any bus type),
some SCSI controllers (I don't think I need any more Adaptec 1740/1742
cards though!), and probably other boards I can't think of right now. I
have my fair share of junk ISA cards too (and if anyone needs a particular
model of ISA IDE/IO card, I might just have it...)

While on the subject of EISA stuff...I finally got my hands on a nice EISA
testbed platform not too long ago, but it doesn't have any hard drive
mounting sleds. The system is a Dell Poweredge SP5100-2, and it came with
4 Adaptec AHA-2742 in some of the slots. Those are a dual channel bus
mastering fast SCSI controller, and are great for my stacks of cdrom
changers and such. I added two more AHA-2742 cards, so it technically now
has 13 fast SCSI channels (12 add-on, 1 built-in). Anyhow, if anyone has
hard drive sleds or the brackets for mounting drives in the bays of that
system laying about, contact me off-list.

-Toth
Received on Thu Jun 17 2004 - 02:53:35 BST