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I built myself a new PC

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Pentium100:
Well, not new, more like "new for me".

I had this old motherboard for a long time, though at the time I did not know much about computers or how to connect the board. A few weeks ago I found it in storage and decided to try to make it work.

It turns out somebody took all the crystal oscillators, one transistor and the CMOS battery off it. Thankfully, the values were written on the board for every component (unlike modern boards where it's written R1 and the resistance is not given), so I bought new oscillators and the transistor and soldered them in place.

Then I fixed the power supply socket (one pin was broken), found an AT power supply and connected it. The board did not turn on at first, but after I pushed the chips into their sockets a bit harder it started working. I of course connected a video card and later a FDD/HDD controller and a floppy drive.

Now I only need the CMOS battery, it should be a 3.6V rechargeable one, I should be able to get one at my local electronics store.

So, what are the specs? You probably suspect they are not very good, anyway:
CPU: Intel 80286, 8MHz (probably, maybe 12 or 16)
RAM: 1MB, 80ns
Slots: 4x ISA 16bit, 2x ISA 8bit

It plays old DOS games quite well, I can now play one game for which my first PC (P100) was too fast.

BIOS only recognizes the standard types of HDDs, but I had a 100MB HDD somewhere and IIRC it conforms to one of those types. I will install Windows 3.1 to it when I find the HDD.

So, how do you think this PC will run Vista and Crysis? :)

RAM is interesting - this board does not use SIMM, but instead there are sockets for the RAM chips. I also have a ISA memory card with 128K of memory, but I do not know how to make DOS recognize it (it probably needs drivers that I do not have).

There is also a socket for the math coprocessor but I do not have it.

For now this PC is without case - the motherboard is very big (almost full size AT, so a bit bigger than EATX) and I do not have an empty case big enough.

bork:
It will only manage 20MB in a disk partition, so you will end up with 5 drive letters.  Still have a copy of MS-Dos 3.4 laying about. 

Pentium100:
I have MSDOS 5 install disks, though all of my working 5.25" floppy drives are in other computers. Wikipedia says that normal FAT16 support appeared with DOS 4, so Windows 3.1 should support it, so, up to 2GB partitions.

HiddenJumper:
I'm even more impressed that you had some of the parts still lying around for an old board like this. I would be impressed if you could load Win95 (highly doubtful) onto it, unless if the specs for Windows 95 is alot lower than I remember.

Sitting back and looking at the specs puts things in perspective on how fast computer technology has devoloped over the past 30 years. Just think, 30 years ago the thought of having something like the iPad or Netbooks probably didn't cross most people's minds.

Pentium100:
Windows 95 will not work on it. Even Windows 3.11 needs a 386, so Windows 3.1 is the latest version that supports a 286. Linux, too, needs a 386.

As for the other parts - yea, I have a lot of them, just do not know where most of them are. I found another motherboard (with a 386SX), but it is also missing some components, namely the oscillators (and this time the frequencies are not written) and more importantly, the BIOS EPROM chips. I also remember a yet another motherboard but I do not know what CPU is there or where it is. I also remember some really long (video?) cards and some other cards. Maybe if I find that other box, I'll find a XT-IDE controller as I have one such drive (I do not know if it works though). Also, maybe I'll find an ISA SCSI controller, that would be great as I have an unused ~500MB SCSI drive (other drives are in use).

The board was made in 1988 (at least BIOS copyright says so).

Here is a screenshot of its first boot
(click to show/hide)
It stopped because I did not connect the keyboard at the time, I was just trying to get the board to turn on and progress beyond POST code 0x03 (it would not display a code at all or stop at 01, 02 or 03).
But yea, this full sized computer (that needs an external floppy controller) is slower than my Psion Series 5 PDA that was made in 1997. OTOH, people could use this computer for work and simple games, even though it has so little processing power compared to "slow" 1GHz CPUs.

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