I've been building up a collection of vintage computers to just play around with, a luxury I've never had until now due to not having the money to buy what I want on eBay. The Goodwill a few blocks from my house used to specialize in electronics, but now is just general purpose. It's not bad, in fact I've actually found some neat clothing at that location, so it's not entirely a loss to get rid of the electronics. Besides, there are still two lone shelves in a corner for electronics, and I have found a ton of stuff that interests me.
A number of desktop PCs with monitors, mice and keyboards to pair, a Bell & Howell 2580, a Blu-ray player, obscure peripherals like a CPU slocket card, a laptop Litescribe drive in a box, new-old-stock 720K 3.5" floppy diskettes, as well as some practical things such as a mid-80s clock radio from General Electric that I use and can rely on are all things I've picked up just in the past year. All things the Goodwill back in The Old World would never have. A buddy on IRC questioned why I was so happy to buy three Dell Precisions from the mid-2000s for $5.99 a piece, and as I explained, the crappy 2009 eMachines tower I bought a month or two after moving here was the first time I had seen ANY used computer for sale since 2012.
So I've been buying any computer equipment I can think of a use for just to see what I can do with it. What am I doing, exactly? Just random stuff. I plan on writing more articles about all of the stuff I have and am yet to buy, but for now I will talk about a computer I actually didn't buy at Goodwill or even this year. Let me introduce you to my Dell OptiPlex GX270.
I've had this computer since around 2010-ish, and it was originally the property of my school, as indicated by the tag on the top that reads "LAB 0314". The story of what that school did to all of their old PC equipment is absolutely deplorable, and I will save that for another day. What I will say about this computer is that the school didn't want it on account of it being "completely broken" and "unsalvagable". Ten year old me took the computer home and fixed it in five minutes. When I say "fixed", I say that very loosely, because the problem with the computer is that at some point a student had removed the hard drive from the boot list. I went into the BIOS, added the master hard drive back to the top of the boot priority and it started right up. To whoever the school hired as the IT person, way to go, above and beyond.
Windows 98 is something I have always wanted to play around with since I was a little kid, because by the time I had learned to use a computer (Which was at the age of two in 2003) every computer I ever saw was running Windows XP. When I bought that 2009 eMachines at Goodwill (Which I named Mr. eMachines) I wanted to run Windows 98SE on it, but found the motherboard chipset just couldn't handle it. It would work, but the video output was locked to VGA mode. Not SVGA, as pretty much everyone my age has used, but 640x480, 16 simultaneous color VGA. It was... not fun. Then I realized this GX270 I had sitting in a dark, dank corner of the basement on its side for untold years uses a varient of the Intel i865 chipset, which is notable for being one of the last Intel chipsets to natively run Windows 9x. The badge on the front may say "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP" but that's merely a suggestion. This is now a Windows 98SE machine, though and through.
So after all those years of wanting to use 98, what do I think of it? Well, as a 21-year-old boomer I have to say it's basically just a primitive precursor to Windows XP, with the added bonus of being able to run DOS software without installing DOSBox. That's basically it. But it's not entirely pointless, as even though most non-DOS software for 98 will run on XP in compatibility mode, there are a few things that warrant keeping it around. Take for example this Palm m100 PDA I bought at another Goodwill location for $9.99 + tax.
It comes in the box with all of the documentation and accessories, including the driver CD and a serial cable. The driver CD contains an organizing program for Windows aptly titled Palm Desktop, which you can use to create appointments, contacts, memos and what-not on a full sized computer and then sync it to the PDA so you don't have to fill out massive amounts of data on the tiny touch screen. You just create your data on the program, connect the PDA to your computer with the serial cable, press the HotSync™ button on the cable and boom! Everything syncs automatically! Except you have to start the sync program yourself separately from the organizing software, but, whatever.
This something that the 98 machine is good for. First of all, the m100 is from the year 2000, so it's kinda not period accurate to use it on an operating system from 2001, but other than that my XP setup is running on a Dell Dimension E521, which does not have a serial port. The OptiPlex GX270 does. I took a picture of the first transfer on my iPhone to share on IRC, not just to show it working but also because it was the first time I ever used a serial port in my life.
How was it, I hear you ask? It's basically just like syncing a modern smartphone with a computer, only a lot slower because I configured the connection to run at 9600 baud. It can run a bit faster, but hey, the frustration sells the authenticity.
Though the authenticity of this setup is a bit questionable, because during the brief time I was trying to get 98 running on Mr. eMachines I thought I could crudely fix the standard VGA problem by ordering a PCI video card. So I went to eBay and bought a Matrox G450 for $35.00, free shipping. Once I realized the GX270 in the basement had official drivers that would allow it to run 98 natively I abandoned Mr. eMachines, but now had a video card in transit. Figuring I might as well use it, I put it in the GX270. Here's the thing about the Matrox G450: even though it was billed as a gaming card it kind of sucks as a 3D accelerator, even for games of the era. But as a 2D accelerator it's absolutely perfect, if not a bit excessive. What do I mean? Well, get this. The G450, released in 1999 has two video outputs, a VGA and a DVI, Matrox refers to this as Dual-Head. The VGA head has a max resolution of, are you ready? 2048x1536 @ 60Hz. I have no idea what monitor in 1999 could handle this resolution, as even in 2021 I don't have a monitor that can handle that. But I do have an Acer P235H from 2009 that can do 1920x1080 @ 60Hz, so... yeah. Full HD Windows 98 on actual hardware.
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So other than that, what else can I use this for? Well, I happen to have a Creative Sound Blaster Live! that came from God-knows where and it's been floating around the house for as long as I can remember it. So it's in the GX270 as well. Other than the standard CD and Wave playback I could get from the onboard sound it also has it's own MIDI processor. I've heard more than a few people say Sound Blaster MIDI sounds like crap, but I think it sounds much better than the bastardized Roland SoundCanvas SC-55 port Microsoft includes with Windows. So whenever I want I can listen to this surprisingly accurate MIDI of Montana by The Mothers of Invention, minus Frank Zappa's killer guitar solo. And with the Sound Blaster Live! sound font it doesn't sound bad to me at all.
And being that Windows 98 is built ontop of MS-DOS I can play Quake right off the CD-ROM without going through the hell of installing it through DOSBox. It's a bit of a moot point seeing as the Matrox G450 allows me to use GLQuake with acceptable results, but hey, features are features.
There are also things I can do with Windows 98 that I can do with many other machines, including the XP machine I have sitting at the same desk (See THIS picture), but it's just neat to see it running in 98, whether because it's more authentic or just a novel experience to run it on something so old. Take for example, HyperTerminal. HyperTerminal is included with Windows XP, but why would you want to use it with XP when you have it installed on 98? I wanted to use it to watch ASCII Star Wars, but it seems that towel.blinkenlights.dl is down and has been for some time at the moment I'm typing this. So instead, I used it to connect to a BBS. I can't say "dial up a BBS" because I'm using TCP/IP over a LAN, but it's better than nothing. Here you can see HyperTerminal connected to bbs.fozztexx.com, and yeah, it works.
I found this post which is a little strange:
===================================== Message #9934 (270 unread) Subject: Re: Compaq Portable 386 From: DrWhat Date: 2021-07-27 05:04:05 Connection: ASCII telnet at 1200 bps Replying to: 48KRAM, message #9928 > Sounds like an awesome machine! I > never liked Compaq "back in the day" > but now I would love to have a cpq > portable. Same here. Back in the day, Compaq was -- Press a key -- overpriced. But now I understand why. The (overall) quality of the Compaq Portable 386 is amazing. Other than the rotting keyboard cable, nearly everything works fine. The floppy didn't work anymore, but I could have probably fixed that. But I'm replacing all 5.25" drives with Goteks just because getting media is getting harder and those disks are going bad. And the hard drive seized up - which is no surprise since it wasn't meant to last that long. -- Press a key -- But I can say that I have a 1987 computer with a flash drive. 8)
As somebody on IRC wrote: "Other than the rotting keyboard cable, nearly everything works fine... it's only had two of the most major parts in the whole computer fail completely"
Other than connecting to BBSes over the internet, I've used HyperTerminal a few times to transfer files to my Windows XP machine over my LAN. For some reason the only protocol I have found that works is Kermit, everything else fails instantly. Other than that, it's fun having both computers side-by-side and being able to type on one computer and have the text appear on the other. When it works.
Other than that, what are some other things I've done with the 98 machine? Well, I installed mIRC 2.1 and tried to connect to FurNet, however it stalled upon the server issuing a CTCP VERSION request. I guess FurNet doesn't take too kindly to IRC clients that probably have a gazillion security exploits, but not was all lost as I was recommended to try connecting to DALnet. It worked, so check that off the list. I will note about version 2.1, it doesn't have a whole lot of features... at all. Pretty much the only features it had was the abiliy to connect to one server at a time, list the channels on that network, send and recieve private messages, and save a list of favorite networks. It even uses the Windows 3.1 GUI for the settings, which is strange as I didn't think this runs on 3.1. It begs the question: What was version 1.0 like?
I could go on and on about the other little things I've been tinkering around with, but I don't want to make this too long. I just wanted to give an introduction to the kind of experimenting I've been doing. I have plenty of other machines to mess around with, so if there is a specific subject that I think warrants an article, I might write it. Might, mind you, as I don't really have an interest in making content at all. I wrote this article on a whim, and I expect any future articles will also be written on no predictable schedule. So until then, Take care, and carry on.
Argot
Page created: Saturday, October 30th, 2021
