tamber

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

Cat of many shapes. Usually fat.
Gender: Fucked.


As old as the Web.



I am going to ramble about so much garbage.

Some of it will be mechanical, some of it electronic, some of it will be software, and most of it will be of little interest to anyone; but here it is all the same.


yingtaurberus: zhree heads, not one brain


Tamb's Big ol Bundle o' Links
furryhelix.co.uk/~tamber/linx.html

posts from @tamber tagged #retro tech (derogatory)

also:

Anybody want a beige-box P3 machine?

Specifications
  • Compaq Deskpro
  • Coppermine-core Celeron at 730MHz. Mind-blowing 128KiB of Cache
  • Intel 815 onboard graphics
  • It has sound. It has IDE. It has USB. It even has a PCI ethernet card.
  • It has a dead CMOS battery
  • There's ... an extra hard-drive wedged into the spot where the CD drive used to go, and held in with elastic bands
  • Some hand-written notes on the side of the case, that will probably come off with solvent

Hell, while I'm at it... anybody want an SGI Octane2? I got it back when computer-touching was a hobby I enjoyed, and those times are gone.

Specifications
  • SGI logo Octane2. It's big. It's heavy. It's loud. It's Blue
  • I think I installed OpenBSD on it because I was having trouble with the IRIX install? I have 'ISOs' of the IRIX 6.5 Foundations and 6.5.29 Overlays discs.
  • 1 360 MHZ IP30 Processor
    • CPU MIPS R12000 Processor Chip Revision: 3.5
    • FPU MIPS R12010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 0.0
  • Main memory size 1024 Mbytes
  • Xbow ASIC Revision 1.4
  • Instruction cache size 32 Kbytes
  • Data cache size 32 Kbytes
  • Secondary unified instruction/data cache size 2 Mbytes
  • Integral SCSI controller 0 Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
    • Disk drive unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
  • Integral SCSI controller 1 Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
  • IOC3/IOC4 serial port tty1
  • IOC3/IOC4 serial port tty2
  • IOC3 parallel port plp1
  • Graphics board V6
  • Integral Fast Ethernet ef0, version 1, pci 2
  • Iris Audio Processor version RAD revision 12.0, number 1

If anyone does want either of 'em, and doesn't mind travelling to just outside of Manchester, UK, to get 'em, you're quite welcome to it. Hit me up on discord, or telegram, or whatever. (Or send me an ask, i guess? That's a thing that exists.)



tamber@carbon$> uname -a
Linux carbon 2.6.32-5-686 #1 SMP Tue May 13 16:33:32 UTC 2014 i686 GNU/Linux

A friend asked around for anyone with a Pentium 3 machine, if they could run some benchmarks to help out someone's thesis. So I dug my old home server out of the cupboard it's been lurking in since ... a long time ago.

Anyway, there's a real vintage air to a Linux install from about a fucking decade ago; even if the install is hopelessly broken now, because enough shit's moved on and I don't feel like putting the effort into fixing it.

And, like, the curse of retro-tech PC shit: even if I did fix it, what do I have at the end of it? It's an x86 box with linux on it, that's not special. It's a fucken Pentium 3 Celeron Compaq with less than half a gig of ram, in a beige-box desktop case.