Comment by p_ing
4 months ago
I can't say a PS/1 would have been my first choice for a 486 platform; I'd imagine there are faster motherboards out there and a desktop (i.e. ASUS w/ SiS chipsets). That said, I had a 486/66, so... (some Dell).
And it looks like the PS/1 is missing VLB, but of course the video card is integrated in this model so that makes sense.
I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card and a Sound Blaster AWE64.
But that's my childhood machine, not the author's :-)
The 486 generation was fraught with bus wars and the motherboard market was rather fragmented.
I once visited a college buddy who had a genuine EISA system, and I believe that I left flecks of drool as I admired the superior electronics and engineering invested in that EISA bus. Of course, nobody seriously purchased EISA if they expected to be compatible with stuff.
My father had a PS/2 50Z, which unfortunately saddled him with the MCA Microchannel bus. A likewise superior bit of engineering that was compatible with virtually nothing. Thankfully, Dad never felt a burning need to trick out his system.
Personally, I enjoyed the standard ISA path on my 286 and 386. It was with some regret that I chose VLB for the 486 board, because compared to the above buses, VLB was a hack and a kludge, and you could smell the duct tape and chewing gum on every expansion card.
However, VLB expansion cards were as plentiful as Star Wars action figures, so I was able to absolutely cram cards into a full-size tower until several generations of Pentiums obsoleted everything except PCI.
The days of nearly-full slots was great. While by the time I had my first computer, a 386SX (12Mhz?) IDE and floppy controllers had made it to the motherboard, we still had a sound card, modem, video card, potentially game card if no game ports on the sound card, and awhile later in PCI land a 3Dfx card.
Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a purpose I no longer need). SLI is dead. Only those with special needs, LLMs or crypto, would ever fill up the additional slots.
Building computers is now just stupid simple and in my view, sorta brainless. No jumpers, no "must go in this slot #". The only thing I ever have difficulty with is mounting the CPU cooler, the thing is f-ing huge and requires a special very long Phillips screwdriver.
/oldmanrant
Oh yeah, and if you didn't bleed when building a PC, you didn't really build a PC. Now everything is rolled steel for those kitten hands.
As someone with those "special" needs (if 10Gb/25Gb Ethernet and HDMI-capture are that special), it is incredibly frustrating.
The CPUs all come with enough PCIe lanes for a single dGPU at x16, x4 for the PCH/chipset, and maybe another x4 for a single M.2 SSD. If you aren't building a bog standard gaming PC with one SSD, one huge GPU, and nothing else, you get a configuration that doesn't match what you need. Bifurcation is hit-or-miss, if you can even physically get to the second PCIe slot, if that slot is even big enough. Random M.2s are linked to the PCH with random modes and bandwidths that change based on other configuration options.
All due to the stingy lane count on consumer platforms, again, targeting the lowest common denominator. It was even worse before Ryzen came out and offered a generous 24 lanes (16 for a GPU, 4 for the PCH, and 4 for an SSD) vs Intel's 20.
Of course, PCIe lanes aren't free, but somehow, having "I/O" targeted workloads means you also must go and spend 2-5x as much for "workstation" or server class motherboards, which also are engineered to a common "usual needs" spec that add in a bunch of shit I don't need, and usually require sacrificing single-core speed unless you get top of the line $10K+ server CPUs that draw 5x the power.
What I'd really like is instead of 4 lanes going to the chipset, I wish all of them did. Or at least, all of them went from the CPU to some switch chip that would allow me to set which lanes go to what slots, and have a software configured lane/bandwidth allocation. 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0 is 48 lanes of PCIe 4.0 is 96 lanes of PCIe 3.0, which is more than enough, but trying to actually unlock all of that bandwidth is still limited to the hardware configuration of the motherboard, and no way to reallocate unspent bandwidth. Instead of it all being hardwired for specific configurations, to the CPU directly OR to the chipset, I wish they were all wired for x16 (or x4 for the M.2 slots) direcly to some switch chip, which is then fully wired to the CPU's remaining lanes after PCH/chipset connections. If I need to stuff 4 slots with x16 cards, but they only run at 3.0 speeds, that would still leave 8 lanes of PCIe 5.0 I could allocate elsewhere.
I'm sure this is probably technically impossible, or would be incredibly expensive, but a man can dream.
> Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste'
Made worse by the video cards being ridiculously fat. As an example, the one I have is two slots wide, and protrudes over the third slot; my motherboard has a PCIe x1 slot there, which is made unusable by that. The fourth and last slot of my motherboard, a PCIe x4, is clearly intended for the Thunderbolt card (there's a special connector near it on the motherboard for the sideband signals), but I can't see much use for Thunderbolt on a tower desktop, so it sits empty.
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TFA is a great read, although the PS/1 being a turnkey system, the author didn't need to piece together a lot of compatible accessories to make a great system.
"LEGO for Adults" is a very apt analogy I began to hear recently, about PCs in those days. It was an exhilirating feeling of self-determination and control for aficionados, that you could walk into a huge Fry's Electronics and there may be an entire wide aisle dedicated to sound cards, and most all of them would be compatible with your system -- the same situation with video cards, disk controllers, anything on PCI, not to mention the RAM and other accessories.
A desktop tower PC in those days was like a blank slate. I purchased my 386 "barebones" and upgraded piecemeal, because what better way to spec out the perfect system, and spread out the costs, than waiting a few months in-between expansion cards or accessory purchases? It was sort of a miracle that I upgraded the 386 so extensively, that by the time it was time to purchase a 486 system, all I needed was a motherboard and a disk, because the rest of the spare parts were all duplicated from past upgrades!
However this sort of self-assembly of PCs has long passed us by. Another interesting inflection point for me was reached in 2018. I decided I had no need for a desktop machine, and during the purchase of my ThinkPad, I was able to go direct to Lenovo.com, and spec out every detail of the machine to my heart's desire, building a truly custom system just through their website's storefront interface. It was custom-built and shipped direct from China, built to last like a battleship. Perhaps those days are bygone as well, at this point.
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> Oh yeah, and if you didn't bleed when building a PC, you didn't really build a PC
Can confirm - I recently built an AT system from fully disassembled case, as the case was gross and all parts/screws/plastics needed a bath. My hands were very rough by the end, lots of small cuts!
I was always afraid of a lot of the IBM and Compaq computers because of all of the incompatibility notes or issues I'd read about in README.TXT (usually minor workarounds), and then to a greater extent in getting Linux running on them.
Linux wasn't too much of a concern when these machines were in their prime. But yes, I remember those compatibility notes.
> I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card
This is exactly what the IBM PS/1 2168 have (see the unboxing section).
The video frame doesn't render; on macOS Firefox it shows "No video with supported format and MIME type found.", so I missed it. But looking at the pictures, it only has ISA slots on the expansion board, unless I'm missing something.
But I missed that part of your post. I haven't seen integrated VLB before, only slotted. Does this board have an expansion to 2MiB? Though that would only matter if you wanted higher resolution/colors.
It is in the unboxing page. ASTRA.EXE shows the video card and the bus: https://fabiensanglard.net/2168/unboxing/#:~:text=The%20inte...