Qty. 20 to 30 ... 486 DX2-66 VLB Motherboards needed in the Netherlands

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Sat Jan 22 04:46:22 2005

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, Mail List wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Does anyone in Europe, preferably Netherlands, want to get together 20
> to 30 motherboards 486DX2-66, Intel ( or possibly AMD ) with at least 2
> VLB slots for Amplicon Benelux in the Netherlands. They preferred they
> all be the same mfg and model and new or NOS to boot. I think they will
> have to settle for used and mixed variety. I see plenty in Germany, but
> it seems almost no one in Germany uses PayPal, and it seems like it just
> couldn't be cost effective to have them shipped to the US and then back
> to Europe again. I think they should be ones that use a replaceable
> lithium coin cell in a holder because any NiCads from that era probably
> wouldn't hold a charge very well any more, and Dallas type devices would
> be at the end of their service life, and if soldered on, too much
> trouble and significantly expensive to change out. I'm pretty sure they
> would want them tested and with some kind of guarantee, though that may
> have to be accomplished by buying some extras beyond the quantity they
> are asking for. I don't know what their budget is for this, but I did
> think that they needed to make it enough to motivate anyone to get
> involved with it, else it looked like a "do it yourself" type project.
> If anyone in the Netherlands or Germany, that can accept Paypal, can do
> this, let me know. Respond to ...

Hah...You are kidding, right?

If not...good luck finding NOS boards of that vintage in qty that take
lithium cells. Very few 486 designs even used lithium cells. (Actually, I
recall a PCChips board that had 4 PCI, 1 ISA, and 2 VLB ISA slots that
used a lithium coin cell, but I've not seen one of those boards in ages.
PCChips also shipped tons of these boards that supposedly supported the
AMD 5x86-133, but they didn't install the right BIOS chip...)

I've replaced tons of NiCads on these sort of boards to get them running
again and I've yet to see a board of this vintage that has a good NiCad on
it... Heck, one of my pet projects is a cluster made up of a dozen 386DX40
boards that had those awful NiCads installed on them (which I need to get
back to building a rack for).

-Toth
Received on Sat Jan 22 2005 - 04:46:22 GMT