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my kind of computer nostalgia
Thursday, May 13 2021
This morning when I went to use my new incarnation of Wolverine only to find that the BIOS now had suddenly started caring about the things I'd been warned it would care about. Apparently a tiny jumper I'd jumped on the motherboard to prevent one of the BIOS' complaints wasn't actually jumping anything, and the BIOS also demanded sensor signals from both the CPU fan and the case fan. All these problems were easy to fix; I fixed the tiny motherboard jumper I'd installed yesterday and then used a long wire to connect the case fan rotation sensor to the CPU fan's rotation sensor. (Evidently the motherboard doesn't run tests on the case fan to make sure it speeds up when it sends a faster PWM signal.)
The new Wolverine is fast by the standards of my computers, but it turns out that Moore's Law has actually made a little progress in recent years. For less than $500, I can put together a computer running nearly four times as fast as the current Wolverine based on an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X. The processor would cost 300 dollars, I'd need a $50 motherboard, and I'd have to buy $65 worth of DDR4 RAM (16 GB). Everything else is stuff I have already.
With this in mind, I put some motherboards I'll never use into the laboratory's deepest storage, back behind the desk in the southwest corner. These motherboards included one designed for Pentium IIIs and one designed for Pentium 4s (the worst processor Intel ever designed). I will keep a few Atom and Socket-7 motherboards more accessible than deep storage. I like Atom motherboards because of how little power they use, and I like Socket 7 motherboards because they're one of the few things into which an ISA card can still be plugged. But other than that, it's difficult to see any use for a computer older than a 64-bit member of the Core 2 family. I have some nostalgic interest in older computers, but not for Pentiums II-4, not for pre-Pentium Intel, and not for PowerPC at all. I am, however, interested in MOS 6502, Motorola 6809, Motorola 68000, and AMD K6. One of the reasons I love ISA is that I have actually built electronics that interfaced with it. But I have no interest in other old interfaces such as AGP (my cardboard box full of AGP video cards should probably go into deep storage too).
This evening Gretchen made spaghetti with broccoli, similar to the way I do it. It could've gone either way (Asian or Italian), and initially I was thinking I'd go with red sauce. But then I went with the fresh Asian peanut sauce Gretchen had made and I'm glad I did.
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