My Computer

A reasonably modern machine, in January 1999, looked like this:

ABIT BH6 motherboard
Celeron 300A CPU
128MB PC100 SDRAM
10.2GB Quantum disk
ATI Xpert98 video card
Soundblaster PCI128 sound card
Adaptec 1540CF SCSI host adapter
Generic NE2000 clone ethernet card
Logitech 3-button mouse
(borrowed) 20" workstation monitor
Archive Python DDS-1 SCSI tape drive
"40x" CD-ROM
Odds & ends like ATX case, keyboard, floppy drive

All of which, I'm happy to say, makes a great workstation to run Linux (RedHat 5.2) on.

Update: Feb. 27, 2001

Moore's Law is in full operation. For the same prices as I paid for the components above, I could now get four times as much memory and hard disk, and a 2.5 times faster CPU. But I don't have an excuse to upgrade... yet.

The machine has changed in the following ways:

I'm only using 100MB of the 128MB after discovering that the memory has a bad bit just above the 100MB mark. This is easily done using "mem=100m" as a Linux kernel boot argument.
There is an additional 4GB laptop hard disk in the machine (I got it free)
The SCSI card is now an Adaptec 2940. The old ISA card gave very bad performance under Linux, burning CDs at 4x nearly saturated it. With the new one I can burn a CD and do streaming reads from three tape drives (DAT, 8mm and QIC150) simultaneously.
The ethernet card is now a 3C905B. With this I can transfer 9MB/second with no noticeable CPU load. The old ISA ethernet card gave high CPU load and maxed out at about 850KB/sec.
The video card is now an Xpert2000 (32MB Rage128). Like the other upgrades it was an opportunistic flea market purchase.
There is a PCMCIA adapter, giving two PCMCIA slots just like on a laptop computer. Matthias scrounged this for me. It allows unloading digital camera memory cards automatically (a hack to the PCMCIA "ide" script detects them and unloads them automatically, just insert, wait for three beeps, remove and put back in the camera).
Oh yes, I now own a 20" monitor identical to the borrowed one (HP4033A with homemade VGA-5BNC adapter cable).

The machine currently runs Redhat 7.

Who am I kidding? Who could possibly be interested in this blather?

Update: Nov. 6, 2001

It's hard to believe, but the computer can still hold its own, going on three years old. I upgraded to Redhat 7.2, which finally supports the hardware acceleration features of my video card. This allows fullscreen video playback, using xine and mplayer. DVDs and .asf files even. Not bad for my old CPU, which I'm running at 450MHz and 2.2V these days.

Other than that, the computer has changed in the following ways:

I replaced the CD-ROM drive with a Creative Dxr2 DVD drive, which was a garage sale purchase. This allows DVD playback. Also it reads cheap CD-Rs much better: The cheapest brand I've tried, burned with my burner, only read at about 4x on my old drive, this one zooms through them at 20x.
The memory is now a 256MB PC100 stick from Micron. With the extra chip for ECC, and ECC turned on in the BIOS settings. No more bad memory problems for me!
40GB 7200RPM hard disk (and removed the old two drives)
I removed the DAT drive, as I never used it any more. Backing up to CD-R is so much better.
For the ultimate in modern computer convenience, a 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drive! I used this to archive the contents of all the old non-Commodore 5.25" floppy disks I have, which are in obscure formats (Superbrain CP/M, NABU Xenix and QNX, as well as the odd old DOS disk). Ask me how to decode these formats under Linux.

This means the CPU is now the least modern thing in my computer. But I don't have a good excuse to upgrade yet (anyway, most of my upgrades have been stuff that came along secondhand).

Update: March 28, 2003

I upgraded the computer last November. It's now an A7Pro motherboard with an AMD Duron 1300 on it and 384MB of non-ECC memory (alas, the motherboard doesn't support ECC) running at 100MHz CAS2. This is pretty slow memory for such a fast CPU, but I've done tests and for most practical applications (e.g. audio/video encoding, JPEG image scaling etc.) it doesn't impact performance very much. And it was a cheap secondhand purchase. Other stuff currently in the computer is

An Enermax power supply with variable fan speed (turned all the way down so the machine is nice and quiet)
A 16x IDE CD burner
The 20GB disk taken out of my old server machine
A Hauppage WinTV card that I meant to use to digitize camcorder tapes with, but never really use for anything
The same 40GB disk, DVD drive, audio card, video card, ethernet card and SCSI card as before

Externally, it's still the same old computer because I re-used the case.

I retired the P133 server machine and built a new one with the BH6 motherboard and Celeron CPU from my main machine and a new 80GB disk. The PCMCIA adapter lives in this machine, since my main machine no longer has ISA slots for it to plug into.

I've been running Redhat 8 since it came out.

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