OPTI 486DX desktop



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General Technical Information

HOSTNAME OPTIN
SYSTEM CPU Intel i486DX @50MHz
CACHE (2nd, 1st) 256 KB, 8 KB
RAM  32 MB FPM SIMMs (Max. 32 MB)
SCSI BUS
 1 x SCSI 5 MB/s, Adaptec 1542CF ISA card
IDE BUS 2 x IDE
INTERFACES
 		2 x serial ports and 1 x parallell port
OPTION BUS 1 x VLB/ISA slot, 5 x ISA slots
GRAPHICS Hercules compatible monochrome 8-bit ISA card
HARD DISK DRIVES 210 MB Conner IDE disk
2 GB Seagate Barracuda SCSI disk
CDROM DRIVES N/A
FLOPPY DRIVES
 		1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive
1.2MB 5.25" floppy drive
NETWORK 10baseT 3com Etherlink III ISA ethernet card
AUDIO Soundblaster 16 ISA PnP card
OS NetBSD 3.1
MS-DOS 6.2
YEAR
 1992
SPEED about 23 VAX MIPS
POWER CONSUMPTION (MAX. / MEASURED) 200 / 40 W
COMMENTS I still remember when we had to run Windows 3.11 on systems like these at school... :-)
(but with less RAM)
EST. PRICE '92 (basic 486DX configuration, 120 MB disk, 8MB RAM, SVGA card for VLB)
 		$1,750

History and other comments

This peecee was built entirely by using left-over parts from my several storage places. It's another zero-budget hobby project :-)

If you are observant you notice that the case looks older than 1992. This is correct, it's a slightly modified KYE 286 enclosure. I removed the guts back in the middle of the 90's to replace them with a 486 system I used as my main computer at that time. The enclosure has its original 200W AT PSU, still in working condition, I think it might be from '84 or '85.

I wanted to put togeather an older peecee for trying older *NIX flavours on, since many of them don't run on newer PCI/AGP based peecees. When I got my hands on some left-over 4MB 30pin SIMMs I upgraded the existing memory configuration (was: 8 MB RAM) to a full 32 MB. This should enable me to run almost any older PC OS on it. For the moment it happily runs NetBSD.

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Last updated:  24-6-2008