An adamekp production

1. Welcome back to the past
2. Turning on for the first time in 19 years
3. (Electric) tension is needed
4. Pimp my RAID

[Magyar] Hello and welcome, it was a long time ago since I wrote anything to my blog. Back then I posted some chapters from a community book, written in a literature-themed forum by a lot of people.

But now I'll present you a blog series about my hobby: retrocomputing. Okay, the term is a bit broad, because I might not be interested in everything in the computer science from the past; but I'm specifically interested in reassembling and reviving the first ever computer I've had, a 486 from 1995. Yes, reliving some childhood memories - but if we look behind the curtains, we'll see that basically this path led me to where I am: a server and cloud application system administrator.

So, let's talk about the computer in question. It's an AMD Am486 DX4/100 clocked to 100 MHz from Summer 1995 (even Wikipedia states that this particular model has been introduced in 1995, so it was probably the most recent model back then). It featured 4 MB RAM, a 420 MB (400 MiB) hard disk drive, a 3,5" floppy drive, a 14" SVGA monitor, a Cirrus Logic video card, a keyboard, a mouse, and MS-DOS 6.22 with Windows 3.1. It has cost 170000 HUF for my parents. Remember, it's 1995, the average full-time job salary was 38900 HUF.

Taking off from Chicago's Meigs Field - private archive

The machine has later been upgraded: it received a Dexxa joystick, a Sony CD-ROM drive, a Sound Blaster 16 sound card, and a pair of Genius speakers. The mouse has been replaced with a Microsoft one as we didn't feel the other one ergonomic enough. At Christmas 2001 I've got my second PC, a Pentium III. The 486 has been stored in the attic until some of my moves with my own family. When I found it and tried to turn it on, it didn't succeed - I don't remember anymore whether the new PC came because the old one was already broken, but more to the repairing later.

So, the second one was a Pentium III-based machine with a 6 GB hard drive, Windows XP, and a 56k modem. Yay, the Internet! I already knew the world wide web from the school's library, but having it at home - it was a miracle. Okay, one had to dial in only in the evenings, when the calls were cheaper, and there was no surfing allowed during the regular calls between my dad any my grandma (none of us had any cell phones, only landline). And one didn't only have to pay to the phone company - either you had an internet subscription with a monthly fee, or bought some prepaid cards. Luckily I've found out that a popular news portal offered the service for free, so we had to pay only for the phone usage - but it led to pretty high bills as well. After some time we came to the conclusion that a 384 kbps ADSL line would cost the same as the monthly usage, and the line would be freed up as well.

The third configuration was an AMD Sempron 2600+, then an Athlon II X2 came if I remember correctly, and since then I've built my computers myself: first an AMD A8 5600, and last September a Ryzen 3 3100.

Back to the original topic: after nearly two decades of inactivity at some point in time I had an idea to take a look at the computer whether I can turn it on. Well, it didn't succeed at first. But more on that in the next episode of the series...