What to do with mid-90s PC?

Hardware
#1

I picked up an ancient, beige, beautiful PC from a friend over winter break earlier this year. The thing still boots—the BIOS is (c) 1996, and I think it's running Win95. I just put it together for fun, but now I'm wondering if there's anything to do with it. The hard disk (2 GB!) has some corruption I think, so some things don't work, like the mouse.

I was thinking about hanging onto the case and doing a build in it, just for fun, but there's no cutout for the rear panel. I'm also not positive that a modern mobo would fit, and it's missing some screws, has some dents/stains…I also don't have $600 to splash away on a joke build. The monitor is great for emulating classic games and Counterstrike, but I'm leaning toward wiping the disk and throwing the tower away.

So: any ideas on what I should do with it? Do you know any museums that are looking for Socket 7 Pentiums?

#2

well first go to vogons and ask this , becuase most people here are going to say throw it away becuase they dont have a working knowledge of 20 year old pc's and their usefulness.

but essentially you have the makings for a dos glide machine

1 Like
#3

WHY though?!?

Could be some fun to be had with it still. Playing games on period hardware... trying to get it to connect to the modern web and be usable... etc.

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#4

omg tmi man..

or did i quote a small section of a sentence then take it out of context

2 Likes
#5

@FaunCB would have a field day with this.

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#6

U wot bitch?

2 Likes
#7

Guy wants something to do with mid 90s pc

#8

If its not a celeron I will send you 2 40 GB IDE drives and a Dos 7.2 floppy + a W2K CD to make that thing a glorious masterpiece.

2 Likes
#9

My fav thing to do is render modern youtube videos down to a proper format so the machine can play them back. It makes me feel as if the pc is doing something very modern and useful.

In my opinion , any computer that can play back watchable quality video still has a modern day use. lol

#10

Also pebtiums are boring to me. I don't get excited by little endian nonsense.

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#11

i can pitch in a mobo and a ISA sound card

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#12

I found it with a VGA card, a sound card, a network card (dial-up bitchezz), and a CD drive in it (as well as a floppy ofc). I didn't test the disk drive, but the sound works. Think I could install DOS or something from a CD? I've got some blanks I think.

Fun fact I had to splice a ps/2 keyboard with a big-sized DIN cable to get into the bios. I think I ended up running the signal thru the cable shielding to make the pins work but it's fine.

#13

gold recovery

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#14

CD is a waste because DOS is only MB big. Like 1 mb big for DOS 7.2.

#15

Start a YouTube retro hardware series explaining old crap... No matter it's irrelevant anymore, people will jump all over that...
Also you can play some retro games on it...

1 Like
#16

Put a $3000 system in it, with that case it would be like having anti-theft enabled 24/7. Nobody would think twice about stealing it.

#17

Circa '96? That's around when socket 7 and Pentium MMX first appeared IIRC.

Of course, it could still be something else, 486 DX4 100's were still a thing back then for some cheaper machines and there were AMD and IBM/Cyrix 6x86 on the market too.

I don't think I have any of my kit left from 20 years ago other than a 3DFX Voodoo 2 from 1998.

That being the case I would be putting that in there and installing DOS for some retro gaming. I'd possibly consider a Win 98 install as well, but win 98 was shit even back then.

As for hard disks I'd think about looking for an IDE to SD Card adaptor. That's what I did when I rebuilt a an Amiga 1200. 4GB SD Card is faster and larger than any mid 90's HDD. http://amzn.to/2kBF8hv

#18

If you do throw it away, set the destination of "dump" to my home address plz kek

#19

Hm if I used an SD card maybe I could avoid the whole cd/floppy install problem. I'd have to replace the drive anyway so that seems like the way to go. A 4 GB card is only 50% efficient though lol.