Surgery on Dad’s Old Computer.
Take a look into old computer parts and compares it with modern one.
It’s this one day when suddenly my mom and dad decided to take out some of the stuff in our store room as we now has a few wooden container outside the house that me and my dad took it a few days ago from factory just few miles from our crib. It’s a very damn heavy box even both of us can’t lift it properly. We brainstormed a few ideas and decided to put wheels on one of the container box so that it can be moved from one place to another easily. Since the box comes with a wooden plank that act as the closer for it, we decided to add hinges and lock mechanism to it so that it can be open like a real box as well as add some protection to it. So, some of the stuff from store room are stashed in it.
Back to our main topic. While digging those stuff that we decide to be brought outside, suddenly I found an old computer that they already kept in its original plastic cover right down the floor. I do reminisce that it’s the first computer that I ever hands on during my childhood, playing some games like Donkey Kong and others from that Emulator King. Took that computer out the room and gathered any other computer stuff together. This time around I made up my mind that I wanna take a look inside the CPU tower to see what does the motherboard and other components looks like.
I put all the computer stuff together for easy finds later. Some of these are very dusty. So the monitor as you can see it’s just a normal decent monitor at that time, a cathode ray tube design monitor. Very heavy, I still believe any kids nowadays can’t even lift that easily. At right of the monitor is — well you probably can guess it already, a printer. For those who never know it’s made by Canon, BJC-210SP. At that time, before industry introduce Ink Jet and LaserJet to mainstream, we have this technology called Color Bubble Jet. Pretty sure it’s one of the early design for home use printer, if not the earliest printer.
If we take a look inside it, there’s only one ink tank. That’s for per session. Meaning that if I wanna print Black, printing document as example then I will need to take out that Color tank and install the only-Black one. One tank at a time. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find the small box where the Black cartridge is stored.
Overall Looks.
Now the lid has been opened and we shall take a look what are inside this case. Since I grew up with the computer already setup for me from the store where my dad bought it, I had no idea how the inside gonna looks like, how the cable management, how many disks, how much storage capacity, how many RAMs and it’s capacity and so on and that’s what I’m gonna tell the readers.
From the outside of the case I do know that it has 3.5 Inch Diskette drive, and Compact Disk drive. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of the Diskette drive before putting it back into the case. The cables and wires are all over the place but that doesn’t hold me back from unscrew the hard disk cause it’s the easiest to be detached from its holder.
I began unattached all the cables and wires from the motherboard to the switches at the case. I believe there’s no such things as cable management, cause all the wires and cables look like “living on their own pace”, there is no “tie em all together of same kind” as well. I disconnect all the cables without take not on them and now regretted it 😅. I mean, I could be power that up again. Nevertheless, I think the drive should be still in good condition prompting me to find for SATA-IDE converter in order to access the drive.
Hard Disk Drive (HDD)
Again, I’m surprised to see this HDD. It got the same size of 3.5 Inch class, but the thickness of the whole drive kinda taller a bit compared to current drive. Shockingly enough the drive only has 10.2 GigaBytes ! Pretty sure Windows 98 at that time is smaller and if possible can be fit into today’s pendrive as live USB (If Microsoft has that such things back then). I recall the old days having to see the drive capacity is almost full to the limit, but have no idea about the numerical values since I was kid back then and not even know what Byte or Bit is.
The Seagate logo back then also differs from nowaday. The drive comes with rubber protective cover to absorb shock if it’s accidentally dropped down. But not today, Lol. The drive kinda heavier than what I have today, not sure how many disks are there in it but I assume it’s just a single disk judging at the total capacity of it. The interface at the time not yet SATA (Serial ATA) but PATA (Parallel ATA), or common people here prefer it as IDE. Been thinking about re-access the drive and boot the legendary Windows 98 on modern system.
Motherboard
Next up is taking out the motherboard. The PCB board that connects I/O of this PC to the CPU. Upon trying to detach the motherboard from the case, the cooler fan for the CPU suddenly falls off from its place. Well, it was very unfortunate for it. The fan and its heatsink were so small, smaller than my palm hand. In this age the whole motherboard is not screwed to the case, only one or two screws are screwed in, the other parts are installed with some kind of “blocker” that can be be attach directly to the case. So apart from taking off the screw, some wiggles are need in order to take off the board.
Initially I have no idea who manufactured this motherboard but after looking closer a few times I came up with sticker that has printed QDI World Class Mainboard on it. A few quick search on the internet finally tells me and I believe it is what it is to be Xplorer II model by QDI. The componenets placement matched to the manual on the internet. Probably due to limitation of spaces on the board, the model name of the board was written (found it few hours later) as small as the manufacturer label the components.
The board consists of parts that are similar on current pattern motherboard, but differs in sizes, generation and placement. There are;
4 5V 32-bit PCI lanes (White).
3 16-bit ISA lanes (Black), this lanes has been succeeded by PCI lanes. Not easily visible due to shadow between the cards, located under PCI lanes.
4 32-bit SIMM slots for EDO DRAM. Deprecated since Intel’s P5 architecture become a thing in 1993.
1 DIMM slots for 64-bit DRAM. Introduced before permanently replaced SIMM as the main RAM slot.
PGA Socket 7 for CPU. Now Intel adapting LGA configuration.
From the look at it, the board looks smaller, probably as same size as mini-ATX in today’s form factor. It looks small but it weight a bit heavier than mini-ATX or micro-ATX form factor, without any attachments.
Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)
Believe it or not, but this is the GPU. Initially I have the doubt just like you as well but looking closer brings me to the words VGA Card on it made the doubt disappears. S3 ViRGE (S3 Virtual Reality Graphics Engine) is the company name, 3D is the model name. It looks lame today without the cooler and fancy heatsink but in 1990s this is the best GPU or VGA card you can get your hands on and explore the tomb with Lara Croft.
The concept of this VGA consists of multiple cold swap integrated circuit module. Well, I’m not sure if adding or reducing the POWERGraphics IC will impact the display or otherwise but I kinda feels so. Then what’s the point of having so many slots if not for the user to fill it in. The port on the left side is the display port. The card only have port, knowing that there’s no other type of display other than this one.
Sound Card
This is the sound card. Back in the day most of the computer depends solely individual PCB for individual functionality. As I shown above Video card also comes separately for video purposes. The design of this card tells me even the smallest ever designed, it still needs additional cable like flat cable above to connect the I/O to the board due to connection distance. This sound card being manufactured by Aztech Labs. Without this sound card no sound can be be heard because this is the only 1st line sound source. The motherboard not even have a sound jack.
On the metal plate side there are MIDI/Game that use parallel port interface, and 3 jacks for Line In, Mic, and Line Out/SPK respectively.
Random Access Memory (RAMs)
As I taking out the RAMs from the slot one by one, it makes me think what kind of RAMs are these. It looks very outdated — yes, indeed, but then all I can see is just couple of logic ICs on a PCB. Been looking to the whole set and found sticker, again, says it’s an EDORAM, which stands for Extended Data Out DRAM. In this period DDR RAM which is parts of SDRAM is not yet introduced. If you take a look back to the above picture of the motherboard, these RAM are slotted in SIMMs slot and not as DIMM. It does make sense that I have 4 sticks that suits 4 slots, but this is more about the package type of the RAM itself.
In today’s world, people were talking about GigaBytes capacity of RAM, even 2 GBs or 4 GBs of capacity are already out of discussion, the fact that today’s system handles programs that use lots of RAM, such as Chrome Browser and Adobe Photoshop. But back in the day not even 1 GBs of RAM being invented yet maybe due to limitations of data transfer, or customer need. I’m probably thinking that most of us didn’t run big programs that use so much RAM capacity, to make it run smoothly. All we know when we hit something, and the cursor keep circling we were told to wait it patiently and that’s what we did.
The capacity that I have for this system is both, 16 MBs and 32 MBs respectively. To think back, that’s very small ! Can’t even run Chrome browser, if Chrome browser already on the use in 1990.
Central Processing Unit (CPU)
Truth is this is the very last component that I took off of its socket. Good to know that this CPU is Intel Pentium MMX, great great grandfather to nowadays iCore (i3, i5, i7 and i9) series. This CPU has 321 pins, which make it only suitable for motherboard that has 321 pins, in this case motherboard that has Socket 7, regardless of the motherboard manufacturer.
In today’s age of time, when I take a look at consumer-graded Intel CPUs, it has no pins but this Intel Pentium MMX has it. A bit of internet digging make me found some historical background about the pins configuration change. This CPU that I own has pins on it because at that time Intel decided that the CPU will be packaged as PGA or Pins Grid Array configuration, meaning that the pins will be at CPU instead on motherboard while in this decade they are using LGA or Land Grid Array pins configuration where the pins are on the motherboard instead on the CPU.
According to some research that I did past few weeks ago, this CPU only clocked at 60–300 MHz of speed, which is thousands and thousands differs from what I referred to Intel Core i3 that can boost its performance up to 4.00 GHz clock frequency.
There is one pin that is bend a bit, even before I pull it from the socket. Make it a bit harder to pull it from the socket knowing that PGA CPU have zero-insertion-force (ZIF) feature. If you take a look at the CPU from the top and bottom, you can see that all the pins are placed further from the die in the middle. Even so they are still connected to each other with many gold tiny strip. I have no idea of why such distance was needed back then, since today’s CPU packs with lots more of pins and have the pins in the middle as well. I mean, I think CPU design back in the day can save more spaces, make the CPU smaller than what I have today.
That’s just something from the 1990s to pre-milennium year. I pretty like to show the keyboard as mouse as well but I guess that’s for another time. The keyboard is very thin, very basic design, ergonomic for that time user. The mouse used to have a track ball underneath it to propagate the movement of the cursor on the screen. Maybe I’ll update back this content some days later.
So, thanks for reading so much till down here. Hope to write you more in the next one. Peace.
