Ideas for an antique computer
 

Hello,

I saw many posts with people asking what to do with old computers, and the usual suggestions are turning it into a media centre, server, firewall etc, but usually by "old computers" people mean something along the lines of a 1ghz processor, 512mb ram and similar.

I have an (over 15 year) old pentium-S (100,mhz) with 8 (or 16, don't remember, and don't have it here)mb of ram computer with a broken mouse port that can't use USB. It has no sound card, and the graphics are.. well, you can imagine...

So media centre is out of the question, and considering the hard drive has about 500mb, it would be rather pointless to set up a server with it.

Using puppy or DSL seems pointless since there is no mouse, so i would rather install something more basic with only the command line..

So if anyone has any ideas, please share them =)

EDIT: Oh yea, also I don't really have much use for a firewall, and I mostly use wireless, so the computer would probably stay offline (no usb - no wireless - no internet). I might use a second computer as a gateway though.

Some good ideas about Linux on old hardware is here: http://kmandla.wordpress.com/

Anything you could do with that computer could be done more efficiently as a background process or virtual machine on a modern computer. It is literally a waste of electricity to turn it on. Sorry to be negative but I would recycle/donate it.

I agree with snowpine. However, if you have any interest with tinkering in electronics there are lots of stuff you can build that will interface with a legacy parallel port or communicate with the serial port i.e. robotics and home automation. No need for graphics, just a CLI, compiler and a soldering iron..

I wouldnt go as far as 'anything', but all I can think of that would be better in any way on the old Pentium-S is 'old school' gaming (doom, quake, etc.).

Hmm.. thanks for the quick reply. I always had an interest in electronics, but unfortunately never the skills or knowledge needed... but i will keep that idea in mind. As for the old school gaming, it might be a good idea to try. Is there any distro (even outdated is fine) that would support such an old system or should i try to build one myself? Also how many of those old games could be played on linux?
I remember the days of doom and warcraft 2, vanguard ace and so on, and it would be good to re-live those moments =)

Another idea that crossed my mind, and the only obstacle is no wireless, is installing a basic system with a curses irc client and lynx. This is mainly for nostalgic reasons, but I often find myself experimenting with various distros, and it would be useful if i could read online help while, for example, figuring out which video drivers to use with arch, or simply having something to do while gentoo is compiling (havent tried it yet, but its on my to-do list).

A pentium 100 you say...

Well, it would be good in the following applications:

• Doorstop
• Footrest
• Shot Target
• Boat Anchor
• Table
• Ballot box

Seriously. I consider it a waste of money to run. But, if one were so inclined, you could install OpenBSD on it and another NIC and use it as a filtering firewall...

There are atari and nintendo emulators that run from the CLI that would run on it. But you would need the old style serial Joysticks,.. or use the awsd method.

You could also use it as a flower pot, or a litter box.

Well, thanks for the ideas. For now i think i will just leave it in the basement, and perhaps one day when i am really old fix it up with old games and enjoy remembering childhood. =)
Also i might disassemble it to show a friend who is learning about computers in college different hardware parts.

well the beauty of linux is it will run on larger drives then the bios supports provided you have a /boot partition in the first 1-500 megs of the drive, you could get yourself a 1-500G IDE hard drive and turn it into a file server using nfs or sshfs

I was not aware of this, good to know. But would the processor speed be an issue when indexing larger filesystems? I also have to check if the power supply is strong enough.

You'd be better of using good old DOS, or even win98/win98SE instead of a linux distro.

Power supply shouldn't be an issue. HDD access speeds would be. If you've got UDMA/33, you might just hit 30MB/sec transfer speeds, which is slow these days.

Hi,

For that era hardware, you can use early Slackware versions. slackware-3.3/ would be a good starting point.

Interfacing using the ISA buss is simple & straight. Loads of projects that could be developed over a few weekends.

I suggest that you look at Digital Logic Theory, Blacksburg Group. They have a whole series on Digital Logic & supporting circuits to learn. Most is 8 bit but you should learn the basics then expand.

You can purchase breadboard kits and a few TTL/CMOS chips from Digi-Key to experiment. You really do not need to solder until you finalize something. Bread-boarding uses small solid awg wire for inter-connections.

There are I/O boards that you can purchase as kits or just the board. You would then need to source the components to build the control/decode section of the board. This board could then be used to interface your circuits to the PC via ISA. Designing the decode circuits is not that hard but to start out it would be best to use a packaged board.

Embed would be another area to learn digital theory or experimentation.

Look at another thread post #8 & #29 are posts that will help you. Heck, the whole thread is informational: Assembly language or Digital Electronics for brain sharping.

HTH!

yes it might be a bit slower, but then again accessing files over a network in general is going to be slower, so it might not really be noticeably different in indexing then any other network share, i used a 100mhz pentium as a file/nis/dhcp server for several years (up until about 4 years ago, when the machine finally just plain old died) and didn't really have any problems.

The computer originally had win95 on it, and at some point i put 98SE there but that was years ago, and i have no idea where the CDs might be, or the activation codes for that matter. DOS is a good option to consider.

onebuck, what you are suggesting seems like it would take a reasonably large amount of time and a lot of learning in the field of electronics. As i said, i am really interested in that, and i will keep it an option, but right now i am mainly occupied with learning linux and basics of security and networking. Still, thanks =)


It occured to me that the computer could be used as a router, with some tweaking. I was actually researching this several months ago and as far as i remember there are several distros designed specifically for this. I would just have to connect two network cards (and optionally a wireless AP) to it and obtain the info from my ISP. Do you have any experience with something like that by any chance?

You could always throw FreeDOS on it…or is that what you meant by "DOS" anyway?

smoothwall express would be one distribution
another would be ipcop
coyote linux is a router distribution that fits onto a single floppy

that would be a decent use as well