Populating the Black Tower with PCs
It took about three week-ends to finally get the Black Tower assembled and in place. Now it was time to go through all the old PCs in the garage and see which ones were still running. Because these machines were all going to eventually be networked into a cluster, I named them with the traditional Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc designations.
Alpha Machine
The first machine I installed was actually one that I was using on a regular basis. It is a 233 MHz AMD K-6 with 64 MBytes of RAM and 5 GByte hard drive (in two partitions). It has Win98 and all of the applications I normally use, but I put this PC on the Level 1 and have the monitor and keyboard normally connected to it. University Linux is on the Alpha machine, of course, and I boot it off a floppy when I want to have it in the Linux mode. I plan to use the laptop more for everyday tasks and try to leave the Black Tower PCs to run just Linux.
Beta Machine
The Beta PC is an old friendly 66 MHz 486 with 8 MBytes of RAM and something like an 80 MByte hard drive. One of the kids had it for a while and so the case was hand-painted in a kind of sickly blue. Even so I still love this machine and it has a place of honor on Level 3 of the Black Tower. At one time this was a state of the art PC and I still maintain that I could do everything on that old machine that I now need a multi-megahertz Pc to do. When it was new it ran Windows 3.1. I remember using Word and the orginal Netscape browser on that PC with a dial-up Internet connection. University Linux was easy to get running on Beta. Best of all, the BIOS has an "ignore keyboard test" setting so I don't need a keyboard attached to it just to boot up. The Beta machine is strictly a DOS box so I have a batch file to run UL. I can just turn it on, and a few minutes later I can log into it over the network.
Gamma Machine
The Gamma machine in the Black Tower is a stray. Someone brought it home because a friend's office was upgrading and they were just giving away their old PCs. I think I know why. Gamma is a Compaq Prolinea 4/50S. Prolinea must be Latin for "really slow" because even at 66 MHz, this 486SX seems to labor. Worse, Compaq has a habit of making the BIOS impenetrable, so it sits in the Black Tower with a keyboard next to it. This is also strictly a DOS box, although the original owners were running Win95 on it at one time, hard as that is to believe. But it runs UL nicely and has a useable network card. So it sits next to the Beta machine on Level 3.
Delta Machine
The Delta machine is something of a mystery. No one knows where it came from. Like coat hangers, PCs in your garage just seem to appear sometimes. Delta has the distinction of being the oldest, slowest PC in the Black Tower so far. It is a 386 SX running at 40 MHz with 16 MBytes of RAM. Delta is so old, it does not even have a fan on the CPU! UL runs fine, if a bit more slowly. The controller card won't run the floppy drive anymore and the BIOS allowed for disabling the keyboard test on boot up, so it is true "blind box" and it sits on Level 3 next to Beta and Gamma. Delta, however, is also important as a test bed for embedded computing. There are low-cost 386SX single-board computers available now that have 16 MBytes of RAM and a 16 MByte Disk on Chip. Maybe someday University Linux will be hiding in a junction box running on such a machine. Delta will be used to see how feasible control and data capture will be on the most limited of embedded platforms.
Gamma Machine
The Gamma machine is probably the fastest PC in the Black Tower. It is a 500 MHz K-6 machine with 64 MBytes of RAM. It is a Compaq Presario, and so naturally the BIOS has been dumbed down so that it is practically useless. It has a CD drive and might be a candidate for upgrade to one of the bigger Linux distributions. But right now it runs University Linux (really fast!) and we use a floppy to start it up. It has Win98, but even with all its clock speed, you need a calendar to time its boot up under Windows. Rather than just trash that just now, however, a floppy is a handy way to simply proceed directly to UL. Gamma has a tall (some might say pretentious) case so it sits next to Alpha on Level 1.
There is still one more PC in the garage, but it won't start up. Probably a power supply, but for now I am going with five PCs in the Tower. If I get time I might see if I can get the sixth one running. As a result of putting all the old PCs into the Tower, I now have an assortment of old spare monitors.
Nothing can now stop me from Taking Over the World!
Alpha Machine
The first machine I installed was actually one that I was using on a regular basis. It is a 233 MHz AMD K-6 with 64 MBytes of RAM and 5 GByte hard drive (in two partitions). It has Win98 and all of the applications I normally use, but I put this PC on the Level 1 and have the monitor and keyboard normally connected to it. University Linux is on the Alpha machine, of course, and I boot it off a floppy when I want to have it in the Linux mode. I plan to use the laptop more for everyday tasks and try to leave the Black Tower PCs to run just Linux.
Beta Machine
The Beta PC is an old friendly 66 MHz 486 with 8 MBytes of RAM and something like an 80 MByte hard drive. One of the kids had it for a while and so the case was hand-painted in a kind of sickly blue. Even so I still love this machine and it has a place of honor on Level 3 of the Black Tower. At one time this was a state of the art PC and I still maintain that I could do everything on that old machine that I now need a multi-megahertz Pc to do. When it was new it ran Windows 3.1. I remember using Word and the orginal Netscape browser on that PC with a dial-up Internet connection. University Linux was easy to get running on Beta. Best of all, the BIOS has an "ignore keyboard test" setting so I don't need a keyboard attached to it just to boot up. The Beta machine is strictly a DOS box so I have a batch file to run UL. I can just turn it on, and a few minutes later I can log into it over the network.
Gamma Machine
The Gamma machine in the Black Tower is a stray. Someone brought it home because a friend's office was upgrading and they were just giving away their old PCs. I think I know why. Gamma is a Compaq Prolinea 4/50S. Prolinea must be Latin for "really slow" because even at 66 MHz, this 486SX seems to labor. Worse, Compaq has a habit of making the BIOS impenetrable, so it sits in the Black Tower with a keyboard next to it. This is also strictly a DOS box, although the original owners were running Win95 on it at one time, hard as that is to believe. But it runs UL nicely and has a useable network card. So it sits next to the Beta machine on Level 3.
Delta Machine
The Delta machine is something of a mystery. No one knows where it came from. Like coat hangers, PCs in your garage just seem to appear sometimes. Delta has the distinction of being the oldest, slowest PC in the Black Tower so far. It is a 386 SX running at 40 MHz with 16 MBytes of RAM. Delta is so old, it does not even have a fan on the CPU! UL runs fine, if a bit more slowly. The controller card won't run the floppy drive anymore and the BIOS allowed for disabling the keyboard test on boot up, so it is true "blind box" and it sits on Level 3 next to Beta and Gamma. Delta, however, is also important as a test bed for embedded computing. There are low-cost 386SX single-board computers available now that have 16 MBytes of RAM and a 16 MByte Disk on Chip. Maybe someday University Linux will be hiding in a junction box running on such a machine. Delta will be used to see how feasible control and data capture will be on the most limited of embedded platforms.
Gamma Machine
The Gamma machine is probably the fastest PC in the Black Tower. It is a 500 MHz K-6 machine with 64 MBytes of RAM. It is a Compaq Presario, and so naturally the BIOS has been dumbed down so that it is practically useless. It has a CD drive and might be a candidate for upgrade to one of the bigger Linux distributions. But right now it runs University Linux (really fast!) and we use a floppy to start it up. It has Win98, but even with all its clock speed, you need a calendar to time its boot up under Windows. Rather than just trash that just now, however, a floppy is a handy way to simply proceed directly to UL. Gamma has a tall (some might say pretentious) case so it sits next to Alpha on Level 1.
There is still one more PC in the garage, but it won't start up. Probably a power supply, but for now I am going with five PCs in the Tower. If I get time I might see if I can get the sixth one running. As a result of putting all the old PCs into the Tower, I now have an assortment of old spare monitors.
Nothing can now stop me from Taking Over the World!
posted by Documatrix at 9:52 PM
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