Scored a pretty cool retro PC for free

[oeuvre]

It’s a massive old high end computer from 1996. It sports a 200MHz Pentium, 128mb RAM, a 4mb Matrox Millenia PCI video card, a SoundBlaster AWE32 ISA sound card with SIMM RAM, a 3COM network card... and a slew of SCSI drives. No SCSI card though.

So, the things it needs are...

An AT/DIN to PS2 keyboard adapter so I can use a regular PS/2 keyboard with it

A PCI SCSI-2 card for those SCSI HDs (it did not come with one)

Maybe an IDE HD as well

Check out the pictures. http://imgur.com/a/0O85a

[axur-delmeria]

Nice.
Try checking if there's enough L2 cache on the board. Intel Pentiums don't have any on-die L2 cache, so the motherboard has to provide it.

I also suggest replacing the CPU heatsink with a taller one if space allows for it.
Finally, it seems that the board supports the Pentium/MMX, if this manual is any indication.

[thinkpadcollection]

Handle these hard drives with care.

This motherboard does not make sense for high end rig. This is ASUS brand which is best for anyone with smart buyers could buy which I knew them well still. This board does have cache soldered down of 256K with tag SRAM chip next to brown cache slot. No need to look for another cache. About this P/I-P55TVP4 chipset is VX which is cacheable up to 64MB yours ram is twice that, will have performance issues. For a good rig like this should look for ASUS P/I-P55T2P4 (HX chipset) which will handle all this 128MB total cached and allows dual tag sram with 512MB cache, in this configuration allows 512MB total. Otherwise look for another HX chipset based motherboard of known good brands.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[oeuvre]

I don't have a SCSI controller + cable for these drives unfortunately.

EDIT: Cleaned up the machine, moar pictures! http://imgur.com/a/aNdws

[Norway Pad]

Congrats on your find! And that's probably one of the biggest towers I have ever seen.

What was the exact purpose of something like this back in the days? It must have been made for something special, or to contain some special hardware. I have never seen anything quite like it..

[MisterB]

Whew, that is a lot of computer. I have some old scsi cards that I would part with for not much more than the shipping cost. As I remember, one is SCSI II and III with both wide and narrow connectors. No drivers or software for them and you will have find those for yourself. I haven't looked at them for quite some time but at least one of them is adaptec which shouldn't be that hard to find drivers for.

[Saucey]

Oh boy... that massive Seagate HDD is nice.
I wish you best of luck finding a SCSI card and cables, I'm sure one of those hard drives will be able to fund good projects if they are in working order.

[oeuvre]

Thanks. I had ordered an Adaptec 2940UW PCI SCSI card + cables on eBay and it turns out... everything works perfectly. Scored a free 6GB IDE hard drive from an internet friend as well.

It's running MS-DOS 6.22/Windows for Workgroups on one SCSI drive, NT4 Workstation on another (dual boot) and Windows 95 on the IDE drive (BIOS has option for IDE or SCSI boot). I did take out the 5.25" drive since it even further slows the boot process and is insanely noisy (even compared to the other drives)!

Pictures
http://imgur.com/a/Mscg3