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About this machine

This was what started it all! We had a family 486 and Pentium 1 growing up, but this was the first computer I built myself. I'd wanted my own computer for years, and coming second place in a primary school writing contest gave me the funds!

The debate I had at the time was going with a Pentium Pro, or the Pentium MMX. I chose the latter because I thought the higher clock and multimedia instructions would make it better for games, but then I proceeded to use it to learn programming and do tinkering instead! Either way, the CPU was paired with a generic Octek Socket 7 motherboard, the last of the classic AT designs before the world shifted to ATX. I resisted upgrading it to an AMD K6, preferring to keep it as I original built it.

When the original family 486 was thrown away (sadly!), I was able to harvest the 5.25-inch Panasonic HD floppy drive, and the Sound Blaster 32 ISA card, both of which I thought made sense to put into this machine. There's a lot of family history in this banged-up box, and it still works as well as the day I cobbled it together.

Today, it serves as my Windows 97 machine (what we all used to call Windows 95 OSR2+).

Photos

Components

System

Component	Part	State	Memo
Hostname	ami.lan		First anime crush, first PC!
Case	Beige DIY Baby AT		Needs sanding and repainting
Dimensions	#TODO	-
PSU	Speed ATX-580W		With -5V rail and AT-ATX adaptor

Motherboard

Component	Part	State	Memo
Motherboard	Octec Rhino 12+
BIOS	09/03/97-580VPX-SMC669-2A5LDO0AC-00
Chipset	VIA Apollo VPX/97
CPU	Pentium P55C MMX 200 MHz
RAM	64 MiB SDR UDIMM		Like to upgrade to 256
L2 Cache	256 KiB		Surface-mount

Cards

Component	Part	State	Memo
Graphics	Creative Graphics Blaster CT6700		NVIDIA RIVA TNT
NIC	Compex ReadyLINK RL2000-PCI		My first NIC!
SCSI	-		Need to source
Sound	Sound Blaster 32 CT3600 PnP		IDE controller died, but I don't use

Storage

Component	Part	State	Memo
FDD A	Panasonic 5.25-inch 80-track		Needs deep clean
FDD B	Mitsubishi 3.5-inch HD		Replacement, but same model
IDE 0	SanDisk Ultra 16 GiB CF card		Works great with IDE adaptor!
IDE 1	-		Need another UDMA CF card
IDE 2	Mitsumi 32x CD-ROM		CRMC-FX3210S
IDE 3	-

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