Debian won't even boot; it apparently needs more memory. FreeBSD 4.1 boots, but seems to have Issues with Disk Manager (I can probably work around them, but we'll see). Newer versions of FreeBSD either have trouble with the IDE, or won't boot at all (probably because they expect a 686). I'll have to reserve those for the Dell, I guess.
In any case, I managed to get FreeDOS installed. At some point, I need to find and install the OPTi drivers for the sound card. I'm also considering putting the 80GB in so I can dual-boot a Unix of some sort.
The man page for wipe(1) is delightfully, pants-wettingly paranoid. While it's certainly good to be careful (and HTTPS is good, too), it seems like it spends more time fretting about the DHS and magnetic-field microscopy than getting to the actual point.
It also shows its age, too. This is a very late 1990s/early 2000s view of computer security; it's much, much easier to pull off SIGINT and social engineering attacks now than it was In The Year 2000. Back then, you were probably right to be worried about people seizing hard drives and such. Thing is, though:
Complaining about the DHS/FBI/CIA/NSA/Illuminati/Nostradamus/Cthulhu isn't going to help someone use the program. Save it for your blog, dude.
While magnetic field microscopy attacks are possible, they were approaching the realm of impracticality even in the late 1990s, and it would be tedious, expensive work now for very little gain (especially considering that HDDs are not the main storage for a lot of people's personal data anymore; the Flash in their phones is). Also, data recovery places' methods are less James Bond or Mission: Impossible and more MacGyver: Most of the time, they just swap in parts (heads, controllers, etc) from a known good drive and use those to read the discs.
Gutmann's paper was written at a time when there were still quite a few stepper-motor and dedicated-servo drives around, and the tiny inaccuracies in those older servo systems could be exploited. Since then, embedded servo has taken over entirely, and even Gutmann himself has said that on today's larger drives, overwriting with zeroes should be enough.
The government (the US goverment, at least; local and state governments are different) is the least of your worries when it comes to everyday life. Phishing and ransomware attacks by private concerns are much more common and far more destructive. Most of the information here isn't useful unless you're an activist being targeted by political enemies or a hostile government.
Lastly: Encryption was black magic in 2000, largely because the existing methods of using it were slow and difficult to operate, and unless you were in the US (or got equipment completely made outside of the US, say, in Germany), you were almost certainly going to end up on someone's shit list. AES and the loosening of US export regulations did a lot to change this, as did the patents on D-H and RSA expiring. HTTPS by default is no big deal now, and if you want to encrypt your hard drive using something like BitLocker, that's not a big deal either.
so i'm guessing the bit about hard drives secretly copying EVERYTHING is also pure tinfoillery?
And if you're that worried about "residue" left on the drive these days, they're cheap enough that you could just take a hammer to it and recycle the bits. (Or do what a couple of people on YouTube did and sic some aqua regia on it, but I doubt many people have access to that.)
The 486 won't boot FreeBSD from the HDD for some reason (it keeps complaining about read errors, which makes me wonder if there's a timing issue involved or if the DVD-ROM is interfering), so I'm going to try years-old Debian (4.0, the first one with kernel 2.6) now.
Also, the floppy drive emulator that philscomputerlab on YouTube is much cheaper than I expected; it's only about $20. That would save me a whole lot of time, especially on the 486.
The IDE works fine once I'm in FreeBSD or Linux, everything installs properly (supposing I'm willing to wait), but the fucking thing cannot boot from HDD once the install completes. I can't even get GRUB to load!
This thing clearly has either BIOS issues (very odd, considering it's a Phoenix BIOS) or damaged hardware that's just good enough to work in DOS and Win9x. I'm not sure which.
I could install my 1542 and the 4 GB Conner I have handy, but with only two slots it could possibly fit in, I'd have to give up either the network card or the non-broken VGA. No thanks.
Fuck it, I did it anyway. The Conner 4 GB (which I haven't had a chance to thoroughly test since I got it) had a few bad sectors, but reformatting it through the Adaptec BIOS made it work. It's installing FreeBSD 4.1 now...will see if it can boot properly shortly.
OKAY FUCK YOU PACKARD BELL IT BOOTED INTO FREEBSD FROM THE 1542
Either the IDE interface just doesn't like the Seagate, or it's expecting to work with grotty old things like the ST-157A that implement the original WD1003 spec and not ATA-≥2. I'll deal with it later, I need to sleep.
In the meantime, I've been studying DTC's old MFM controllers because I find them fascinating. The DTC-078 and its relative the DTC-331 are data separator/ENDEC chips, and seem to be similar to the Adaptec AIC-250 though without address mark handling. The weird "CR BOX" (DTC-291) is the VCO module, and judging from the schematic of the DTC-510A on Bitsavers, it's a 74S112 J-K flip-flop, a 74S124 VCO, a delay line and some support logic. Later boards use a PDIP version, the DTC-339
Bwahahaha, I found a 5287 (the RLL version) that uses a National 8462/8463 ENDEC and data separator pair instead of the DTC-078. Take your custom chips and shove 'em, DTC.
I let my room cool off some (it gets really stuffy in here with the door closed), and that seems to have helped with the 486's stability. It's still slow, though.
The fan in the power supply is dying. It was made by a brand that's still in existence (ADDA), so getting specs was easy, but the replacement is a Delta because I wanted ball bearings, and it was a bit cheaper than a new exact replacement.
The fan is in, and working quite well. I had a few missteps with it (particularly with the new fan not quite fitting the same way as the old one, despite both fans being a standard size >.<), but it does work. I just left one the one screw that was hitting the new fan out.
Also, it turns out that my troubles booting from IDE were some sort of timing issue with the Seagate drive I was using (it may be strapped wrong; I'll have to check). I put a 4 GB Quantum in, and FreeBSD boots right up. This is good, because I think the Conner 4 GB SCSI is indeed dying. :/
As for future plans? Building a kernel on this is slow even compared to my Athlon XP 2200, so I built the kernel there instead. I'm going to install it over NFS when I have the time. I really want to see if this cheap sound card I got actually works (without having to fiddle with the DOS drivers, since those, rather annoyingly, require Windows 3.1 to install).
PC - originally introduced with single voice square wave with n-bit frequency divider. A decade and a half of crappy soundcards would follow, such as the soundblasters with a single, noisy 8/16-bit 64KB stereo waveform and/or bottom-of-the-barrel Yamaha FM chips.
okay hold up
The first Sound Blasters were crappy when it came to PCM, for sure, but FM really doesn't deserve the reputation it has in the PC world. I suspect this happens because a lot of PC games that didn't use the PC speaker or the PCjr/Tandy PSG skipped over FM entirely and wrote for the MT-32 or the Sound Canvas...and stuff written for those two (more powerful) synths doesn't sound very good on an OPL! Applications where the OPL was written for directly, like the Genesis, sound great and don't have nearly as much of a stigma.
You know, it's amazing how a phone made just 6 years ago is nigh-on unusable, whereas I can still browse a good chunk of the web (albeit slowly) on a 15-20 year old PC just by installing a free Unix.
I put Linux back on the lappy. Windows 10 was turning out to be a dog...much slower than it should be, and every time it needed to switch graphics cards it would freeze until the switch completed. Extremely annoying.
So for shits and giggles, I decided to pull out the iMac G4. When last I messed with this, I was having severe problems getting the video to work; apparently, the Nvidia chip in this model is fatally allergic to nouveau and needs nv to work at all.
I figured I'd update to Debian testing to see if the problem was fixed, but guess what? powerpc isn't in testing, just in unstable! Fine, let's intall unstable then. I get that done, and...no change. Nouveau still crashes the GPU and turns the sscreen into a light organ. It looks like Linux is completely unusable unless I remote in or use a very old version.
Fine, let's try FreeBSD! It hs a POwerPC version!
...it crashed before the installer even finished probing devices. Fucker.
God dammit. netBSD time, I guess. If this doesn't work, the newest OS this piece of shit will be able to run will be OS X 10.4.11 (which is throughly outdated now). I'm getting angry at this point.
NETBSD IS A HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS TO INSTALL ON MACS. Sysinst (which works on just about everything else) is useless here. You have to create all the partitions manually, do a bunch of setup work....not even Solaris was this bad! I had to look up a cheat sheet just to figure out what to do!
Still, though, unlike Linux and FreeBSD, this seems to work OK. It's installing MATE from pkgsrc, which will take a while because this is still a 800 MHz, single-core PowerPC.
I gave up trying to build MATE because it was taking entirely too long. Unfortunately, XFCE isn't any better because it also depends on GTK, which takes forever to compile without outside help.
Oh, and cross-compiling won't help because several critical packages (Python in particular) don't support it.
I decided to give distcc a try agIn. It's been years since I last tried setting it up, and I remember it not being that peppy back when I last tried it, but that it's set up correctly it works quite well. The only problem is that distcc seems to be really, really sensitive to network latency...and it also doesn't help that the iLamp only has 256 MB in, and I can't afford to add more memory at the moment. Oh well, it's going faster than it was!
Having a direct connection to the lappy helps a little, but the lappy has a bad Ethernet jack, and if I'm going to buy parts, I'm going to try expanding the memory on the iMac first. It seems like it's "forgetting" the network port when it's swapping too hard.
I pulled the 486 back out for more Fun With Old OSes (and one new one, namely FreeDOS 1.2), and so far FreeDOS seems to work OK (though I'm not sure why Wolfenstein 3D keeps crashing), and FreeBSD 4.x does okay but is extremely slow.
Also, my DVR-104 finally died. I was trying to boot a newer FreeBSD on this and it made some odd noises and stopped loading. After that, it wouldn't recognize any of the discs I put in it. Looks like I'll have to dig up an IDE DVD drive from someplace.
Oh yeah, and I finally tried out the floppy emulator I bought. It does work, though the on-USB format is a bit odd: It's just a flat-file of 1.44 MB images, one after the other, as if it were on tape.
I managed to dig up a working IDE DVD drive out of another machine, and so the 486 can boot and install from CD again, though I've noticed that as the OSes get newer, the wisdom of running them lessens as newer OSes are really, really slow on a 486-class machine. (And this is with a Pentium OverDrive 83 in!) FreeBSD 11 won't boot at all from hard disk due to what I assume is some weird BIOS crap (yes, again). It does boot and run from CD, but as noted, it is not fast. I'm considering trying NetBSD 7 again—one last go at it for Unix on this machine before I give up and just leave it in DOS.
I need some sheet metal screws to mount the FDD emulator (as the factory holes are off by a bit), so I've put the 486 aside for now.
I'm currently playing with the Dell laptop, and it's amazing how much faster everything is on it despite being clocked at only 366 MHz. Is the Pentium II's IPC really that much better?
I had a 486 for, like, the last year of high school, though it was a hackjob and really slow because we were using memory boards meant for an AT in it.
So I finally got NetBSD going on the 486, and it works, but it's really,*really* slow. I think this machine is simply going to be happier in DOS/Windows 3.1. Anything else is pushing it, and I question Windows 95's usefulness for DOS games.
The floppy emulator experiment is over for now. While it's certainly easier to keep things organized using a flash key than actual floppies, the problem is that I don't have a Windows machine to run the special software the emulator needs to format the key properly. I could use another emulator in a different machine as a go-between, but that's also a pain. On top of that, there's no speed advantage using these like there would be with, say, an LS-120 or a USB floppy drive; these emulators attach directly to the floppy bus, and the floppy bus never added a provision for buffered seek like ST-412 did. So the real floppy drive is back in for now.
This thing really is happiest in DOS and Windows, so Windows 98 SE is going back on.
I'm pretty sure the on-board video memory is shot. To fix it, I would need to remove the old video memory and the video memory expansion connector, then solder in new video memory. It'd be a lot of work for a video chip that wasn't all that great even in 1993 (no ROM VESA BIOS, no high color support, no blitter). I have the CIrrus back in, and I'm hoping that freezing problem I had before doesn't come back.
The god fucking damn Cirrus card is still freezing no matter what I do. If I recall correctly, the only thing that helps is using the standard VGA driver...which means 640x480 in 16 colors. >:P
Either this card is busted and I need a new one, or the weird-ass chipset in this thing is allergic to Cirrus chips and I have to try a different brand. Either way, I'm fucked regarding Windows 9x right now, and there's little I can do about it because I don't have any money. The best I can do on short notice is install Windows 3.1 and see if the SVGA driver has issues (though this also means my sound may not work, since it's jumperless and this thing doesn't have a PnP BIOS).
Okay, I have the 486 to a point where I can call it done for now. DOS 6.22 + Windows 3.11 is indeed a good combo for this machine. However, that damn OPTi sound card really, really doesn't want to work properly. I did some rearranging (including pulling the fan off of the Pentium OverDrive, which, yes, you can do that), and managed to stuff in my network card, a real Sound Blaster 16, and the Cirrus, and so far everything works.
Kind of. I can't get sound effects to work in Doom 1.9. I have no idea why, since digital audio works fine in DIAGNOSE.
Next, I want to get sound working in Windows and see if CANYON.MID plays.
While it's fresh in my mind (and before I forget again): Those funny Mac-looking cash registers with the two huge keyboards attached to them, the ones a lot of fast food places used to use in the 1980s, are Positran terminals. It turns out that Positran themselves are still in business as a contract manufacturer, but I don't know who they may have sold their point-of-sale business to. I want to say PAR.
It seems "Comtrex" was an early point-of-sale specialist that concentrated on dining applications, kind of like FasFax or Micros. Their trademark is dead and was never reassigned, which I'm assuming means they're long out of business; a company in the UK is using the name, but I don't know if they're related. Also, they share their name with a cold medicine, which makes them hard to search for. :P
In other news, I did a build for a PC here that used an MSI MicroATX board that's actually a little smaller than MicroATX. It reminds me of those teensy 386 boards Biostar and *cough*PCChips*cough* made back in the day.
Update on the "huge white thing": Whilst poking through the trademark database looking for something else, I did notice that AM International (Addressograph-Multigraph) had a trademark registration for a fast food cash register system. I seem to remember the particular Big White Things that Burger King used being AMs, so this is definitely pertinent.
Comments
FUCK.
I'm going to have to put a SCSI card in to install anything other than DOS, aren't I.😡
Either the IDE interface just doesn't like the Seagate, or it's expecting to work with grotty old things like the ST-157A that implement the original WD1003 spec and not ATA-≥2. I'll deal with it later, I need to sleep.
I had one of these back in 1993, and no, PB didn't make it. The first three letters of the FCC ID are "A3L"—it's a Samsung.
Oh, and cross-compiling won't help because several critical packages (Python in particular) don't support it.
I decided to give distcc a try agIn. It's been years since I last tried setting it up, and I remember it not being that peppy back when I last tried it, but that it's set up correctly it works quite well. The only problem is that distcc seems to be really, really sensitive to network latency...and it also doesn't help that the iLamp only has 256 MB in, and I can't afford to add more memory at the moment. Oh well, it's going faster than it was!
That was almost 20 years ago, holy crap