On Sunday 06 July 2008, Adam wrote: > In my ongoing quest in cheapness, I re-acquired an old, and I mean OLD, > tower. Is there anything useful I could do with it, or is it just good > for parts, if any? It's a 100 MHz i486DX, 420 MB HD, 40 MB RAM, CD-ROM > drive (remember when all that was SOTA?)
> Here's the fun part, I hope: If I can get this thing running, what could > I do with it (preferably without putting any money into it)? Play really old DOS games, if you care to. These days I normally use something like an old 100 MHz Pentium Pro for such things when I get the itch, but there are cases where 100 MHz is just... too fast. Many of the really old DOS games (like X-Com: UFO Defense, or the original Civilization) were not programmed to use timers, and so the speed that the game runs is dependent on how fast the CPU is. After a certain point the game becomes... unplayable. Most of these games are 'abandonware'. The DOS games that do use timers can usually be played through DOSEMU on Linux. A second application I can see would be to load a really old distribution of Linux to see what it was like then vs now. Like maybe Slackware 3.0, Red Hat 2.1, or Debian 1.0 from 1995 -- which I believe is when the switch from a.out to ELF file format happened. The third application would be to run some old hardware you wanted to use for some strange reason that required an ISA slot. A logical question is: "Like what?" and no, I don't have an answer for that. i.e. an old box is probably best used for ... nostalgia. :-) > I don't /think/ that I need it as a server, firewall, router, or > anything like that. Slide show? Phone dialer or voicemail system? > MP3 jukebox? The start of a computer museum? I'm sure you guys can > come up with some interesting things I could do with it. Thanks > very much in advance! A 486 can play mp3's, but just barely; last I used mpg123 from a Linux command prompt on a 486DX50 it required about 80% CPU to accomplish it... with nothing else running. Might be better done from DOS using the Cubic Player if you can find it. (It's since gone open source as the Open Cubic Player, but the old Cubic Player had a neat graphical spectrum analyzer mode that the new OCP doesn't have.) I don't know about a 486, but I use old computers as server testbeds. i.e. you want to deploy or change a network service on a real server, but you don't want to break what's there until you have the new service configured and working -- so the safest thing to use is a test box. I know this isn't something you need right now -- just mentioning it because it's the one actually *useful* use case I know of for old hardware. ;-) -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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