Friday, November 27, 2020

Just set up my SDF account, donated my $3 for validation (not sure if 
validated yet) and played a bit of Colossal Cave Adventure on here. I'm a 
really big fan of the concept behind gopher, esp. in regards to its use 
with older hardware. I am currently writing this using the edit program 
included as part of MKGOPHER, using one of my DOS machines as a terminal.
 
This one in particular is built from the remnants of an old Pionex machine 
bought from QVC back in the late 90s that I picked up for free for helping 
an old lady down the street move house. Considering the condition it was 
in, I figured it was all a lost cause except for the case, but luckily 
most of the components were still in pretty good shape! I disassembled it, 
cleaned everything up and shelved it all for a bit, but eventually dug the 
case and mobo back out to do a kind of "junker" build out of the parts not 
really good enough for anything else.

Build List:
Biostar M6TLC Slot 1 Motherboard
PGA 370 Slotket
500MHz Mendocino Celeron PGA370 CPU
128MB of 168 pin SDRAM
Sparkle SP5200 RIVA TNT2 Vanta AGP
Soundblaster 16 CT2940 ISA
3Com Etherlink III ISA
1.44MB FDD, DVD-ROM, 20GB HDD
Running MSDOS 7.1 (stripped from Windows 98SE)

So nothing super special - mostly cards scavenged from dead prebuilts, 
mixed with some leftovers from my 486 builds. To be honest though this 
machine has ended up being my favorite of pretty much all of my builds - 
despite more or less picking parts at random and throwing them in here, 
everything has been extremely cooperative and the machine is very capable. 
If I could rig up a keylock and a turbo LED it'd check all my boxes, haha.

My current project however is a fairly modern machine, being built for a 
friend abroad who is hurting for a new computer. Since I'm skulking around 
thrift stores and computer recyclers anyway, trolling for interesting used 
parts at dirt-cheap prices, I suppose it's good for me to give some of my 
hoarded silicon away, especially to someone in need. This build is still 
in progress, and I'll detail it in my next log. For now however, I think 
I'm gonna wrap this up before I get booted from this Telnet connection for 
taking too long, haha.

-Prokyonid