Adventures in Old Computing
When I moved last, most of the old computing gear I had went by the wayside. Most of it wasn’t all that exciting - a lot of mid-2000s Dell Pentium 4 business desktops of questionable use and things of that nature. However, a handful of things survived; an old motherboard here, an LS-120 drive there, some old boxed software I thought had gotten binned. Also in the mix was this old system - a Dell Dimension XPS P133c.
As configured, a Pentium 133 (no MMX) over-clocked to 200MHz with 90something MB RAM, a 450MB hard drive, CD and floppy drives, and a S3-based Number9 video card. I got a wild hair one day to see if it still worked, and it amazingly fired right up and began booting.. Rhapsody DR2. (As an aside, weird computers and computer environments are kind of my thing. I’ve had Sun machines, and an IBM RISC System/6000, have personally owned an NEC Image RISCStation, and for a while ran ETH Oberon Native because why the hell not.)
As configured, a Pentium 133 (no MMX) over-clocked to 200MHz with 90something MB RAM, a 450MB hard drive, CD and floppy drives, and a S3-based Number9 video card. I got a wild hair one day to see if it still worked, and it amazingly fired right up and began booting.. Rhapsody DR2. (As an aside, weird computers and computer environments are kind of my thing. I’ve had Sun machines, and an IBM RISC System/6000, have personally owned an NEC Image RISCStation, and for a while ran ETH Oberon Native because why the hell not.)
Oh my, OpenStep!
Rhapsody DR2 is what became of NeXTStep/OpenStep after Apple bought out NeXT, and they did produce some Intel builds before locking it down to PowerPC for Mac OS X. Unfortunately, this particular install of the OS wasn’t really working - it never really got to the desktop in a usable manner and did a fair amount of crashing, so I set out to convert it to a more normal system. (It does have a Windows 95 sticker on it, after all.)
One thing that I learned pretty quickly: the RAM in there was all sorts of weird, which got swapped for 128MB of all EDO RAM I managed to find (it’s 72-pin!), and P133s don’t really like being clocked 33% higher than they’re supposed to be. Had I thought on that a bit more, I might have kept it running Rhapsody for a bit longer, but that’s not a very useful operating system so it wouldn’t have stuck around.
Anywho, I found some 3.5” disks that amazingly weren’t completely broken and a USB 3.5” disk drive and started rebuilding the system.