When I moved, about 10 years ago, I threw away most of my old computer parts, including my first PC called "8088XT 10Mhz Turbo System" up to my 80486DX 100MHz mainboard and processor. What I still have, is a 900MHz Athlon processor with mainboard, an AMD K6-2 350MHz board and CPU ... and several other defective mainboard I have replaced for friends over the years. Today I took pictures of some old hardware parts, which can't really be used anymore, as they aren't compatible even with Windows XP, which is really old (15+ years).
This is a 10Mbps network card, which I bought for about 15 USD and used it in our first neighborhood network in ~2001. At first we used coaxial cables with terminators at each end and had very frequent problems. On it we shared a 128Kbps unlimited internet connection (paid about 40 USD/month, out of which 5USD were for the cable modem) and played multiplayer games like Starcraft, Warcraft 2 ...etc.
Later we switched to a switch-based network and the card went into my sister's PC, as it only supported 10Mbps on the UTP cable too.
This was our first switch ... to be more exact it's the replacement switch for the original one, which died after a thunderstorm. It was mostly our fault, as we strung a cable between two apartment buildings right between the tops. Lighting didn't strike it directly, but our building's lightning rod got struck and created an electromagnetic field strong enough to fry ALL our switches and a couple of network cards.
All in all this was our first real network, running at 100Mbps between 6 users, later between ~25 users, as we expanded our network and got faster and faster internet.
This is a simple 100Mbps network card, which survived the lightning strike, because it was not in a PC at that moment, as its connector was broken and the cable kept falling out ... At one point it was installed in a Pentium II 266Mhz server, which I built for better bandwidth management and user blocking with the Wingate app. The server had 3 network cards, as I managed to combine two 256Kbps internet connections together (for browsing only).
This is an ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP video card with 8MB memory. I didn't use it at all, as I got it from one of the old PCs I bought for peanuts ... I only wanted the cases, as they had 6 x 5.25" bays.
I used this IDE/ATA133 controller card in the large computer case, which had 6 x 5.25" bays (I later added two more bays). At one point I installed 8 DVD writers in it with two of these cards and could copy four DVDs on-the-fly, but only at 4X (15 minutes/4.7GB).
Anyways, into a large box in the attic they'll go, along with other interesting parts, which I'll include in a later blog post.
