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PC won't boot past POST

User is offline   Mark 

#31

This talk about 486 made me remember an old comp I have stored in a closet. It still works. I installed Win95 after I bought it to check that it worked. I used to have a Canon printer that looked to be a match for this but it got thrown out years ago.



This post has been edited by Mark: 29 April 2019 - 06:30 AM

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User is offline   Paul B 

#32

View PostMark, on 29 April 2019 - 06:29 AM, said:

This talk about 486 made me remember an old comp I have stored in a closet. It still works. I installed Win95 after I bought it to check that it worked. I used to have a Canon printer that looked to be a match for this but it got thrown out years ago.




Very cool, I've never seen a 486 that small before. =)

This post has been edited by Paul B: 29 April 2019 - 03:36 PM

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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#33

I've never seen one that small, but I did used to have a compact one. It was a DX2 66 with onboard graphics, sound, and PCI slots! I installed my Matrox Mystique and Voodoo 1 cards in it which was fun. Really easy to take apart too. It even had an infrared receiver for some kind of peripheral communication device. No idea what for. That was a nice little system.
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#34

Epic Pinball requires an FPU? Why? What the hell is it doing to want one of those? That's honestly baffling, part of me is surprised that I never noticed but at the same time, I'm nor surprised as I can't stand pinball in general, much less pinball combined with mediocre tracker music.

The image around 40 seconds into that video looks strangely familiar for some reason.

Also that's NOT a small 486, this is;
Attached Image: DSC00627.JPG

<_<

This post has been edited by High Treason: 30 April 2019 - 02:12 AM

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User is offline   Mark 

#35

Yes, thats compact. But put it in a case with a floppy drive, hard drive, power supply and mounting all the various port connectors and I'll bet its not much smaller than mine. Didn't somebody produce a 386 on a plug-in card?
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#36

The device with he blue and white label is the hard drive, beyond that you'd never install anything you didn't need and the cases (like these) for PC/104 stacks tend to be small. Floppy drives are generally a nono because they contain moving parts and open a hole to the outside world, which is something you really want to avoid where possible in the target environment. My card was produced somewhere around 2009, it uses a Cyrix 486 core at 133MHz on a 66MHz internal bus, largely for the same reasons, no fans are needed so there are less things to break and it's fast enough to do the job, so the 486 isn't dead yet.

I don't know about plug in cards, the PC/104 cards like those plug in as a stack in basically any order you want, they're just and SBC with an ISA interface and, in some cases, PCI which travels along the entire stack end to end. More 'conventional' SBCs typically use a passive backplane in the same fashion, but resemble expansion cards, like this (typically ridiculously priced) one;
Posted Image

But they aren't expansion cards and don't plug into a motherboard, effectively they work in the reverse in that the bus extends beyond the fingers rather than extending to them from an external host, hence plugging into a passive backplane like this;
Posted Image

Obviously both form factors (and they aren't the only ones available) have their own advantages and disadvantages, depending on where they're going to be used. One of their main advantages is the modular nature of their construction, in that when something breaks it's quick to swap out and have the system start up again, which is vital if it's controlling a production line, you typically won't run into these things outside of factories and the prices for them tend to be jacked up to silly levels, but yeah, they're a thing. The extortion has its roots there, because if your factory loses its main line you could be losing many thousands of dollars every hour it is down, so you'll pay the 10x/100x markup to have it running again as soon as possible.
There's a steelworks not too far from here who still ran a bunch of 286 SBCs last I saw.

Much as I hate pushing my own stuff, I did do a video talking about the 66MHz version of the STPC and aspects of industrial computing. It did miss a few points to save time, such as not talking about VXWorks (an OS that scales from bottle capping machines to space probes) nor how the AMD Elan (AMD's less advanced 486 SoC) ended up in supercomputers like the Cray XT3 as a controller.
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