| THE CREEPING NETWORK COMPUTER HARDWARE GUIDE More than you ever wanted to know about Pre-Pentium PC Hardware |
|
Yes, to my CORE, I'm a hardware guy. I love hardware. I love that dusty metal filings, ozone, and muted pot-roast smell of a vintage 286 fresh out the Explorer from the thrift shop as I open it up to unlock all the creepy x86 hardware mysteries held within. I'm basically the computer version of that guy up the street with six cars in his yard that all run, but he's constantly shifting parts about between, all the while blasting hair metal and yelling "in a minute" across the propoerty to his significant other.
So that's what this page is about, my 20+ year adventures in ripping apart vintage IBM Compatibles and hot-rodding them. Everything from cases to caches to CPUs to cards - written in my strangely snarky if a bit contortionary style where I straddle the line between everyman-and-geek like a Harley Rider lane splitting. Be warned though, I am posting up some TREMENDOUS walls of text here, not everything is current (past experiments to pass on experience), but not everything is old either (ie slapping a 256GB mSATA SSD in a 486 DX4-100 using a Kingwin SATA adapter and a VLB HDD Controller and actually USING all 256GB of space for all the partitions so I can store all my CD-ROMS as ISO Files on the F:\ partition). Basically, all of my retro-PC lunacy exposed to gawk at, or learn from (take your pick). After all, I was webmaster of the ORIGINAL IBM X86 Vintage Computer Website: The Creeping Network (2001-2021). So grab a coffee, put on some tunes or a good YouTube playlist when you read this, I like to write huge "Walls-O-Text (TM)" with too much detail and occasionally snarky/sarcastic/silly commentary and Family-Guy-Like rememberance. And take a gander as I prepare the hardware to do things like put pre-Pentium PC's on the internet, force them to record 4 tracks of electric guitar, run software the developers say will make the computer explode (and actually run them well), and spit in the eyes of the guy who thinks his IOT enabled house with more power than the NEC World Server is cool! Remember, LGR has IOT too - but he can do it from his 286 IBM AT - and his can't get hacked.Data Dumping Everything I know about vintage PC Motherboards Focusing on the 8088-80486 era Processors All about computer memory from a hardware standpoint Hard Disks and Hard Drive Interfaces for legacy PCs Graphics Cards & Monitors for vintage PCs and various stuff on them PC Sound Technologies and Sound Cards Detangling the PCMCIA Expansion Bus Vintage Computer SoundCards, MIDI Networking, and related More than you ever wanted to know about vintage Laptop LCDs My Somewhat Inexperienced Thoughts on the Hand 386 and Book 8088 sold on AliExpress in early 2023 A bit of an Abridged section on Tandy 1000 Hardware Page on the NEC (UltraLite) Versa Laptops (1st gen) 1993-1996 A guide to NanTan, Kapok, Sager Laptop Computers - aka "FMA Laptops" 3M MicroTouch LCD Touch Panel Information Information on the Words Plus/Words+ AAC Devices, including mine |
