School years are wonderful

The first bell rang and they reminded me about school again.

When I went to school, even though it was 1994, I was far from computers and saw computers only on TV and in encyclopedias.

And so my dream came true

They turned out to be standard Hewlett-Packard VectraVE stations, which were equipped with a standard CRT monitor, keyboard and trackball mouse. These fully equipped workstations were mass-purchased and installed in Moldovan schools. According to urban legend, they were purchased with money from the sale of 21 MiG-29s in 1997 USA for $40 million, of course, not without “its” corruption scandals. Therefore, most of the students in Moldova from 1998-2008 surely remember. Played the first games and mastered MSPaint Word and Pascal.

Well, I found piles of system workers and chose one “patient” from them.

So there’s only one power button and a floppy disk drive on the front panel. Also two unoccupied trays for CD-ROM or other expansion devices.

Here we can observe the ports

• parallel port LPT

• Serial COM port

• standard PS/2 for connecting mouse and keyboard

• VGA video output

• Paired USB !!!

• and a separate network card

I was surprised that USB was already there, while such stations were supplied with the Windows95 operating system, which did not have built-in USB drivers, and what’s more, Win98 did not have them either.

Corps

Then I decided to open the system tray… where it is enough to separate the latch on which the front panel was held

here they showed how to remove the casing from the side… by the way, the VE5 166MMX SERIES4 model is indicated

With little effort, the corps leaves. With repeated dissection, access to the insides takes less than a minute and with bare hands.

Inside, a view of the insides of the computer was opened – by the way, the plastic upper casing is additionally lined with metal.

Looking at the layout of the system unit, it can be seen that it is divided into 2 sections:

Since everything was developed as a single unit, the layout of the motherboard with instructions for system switches is attached directly to the case.

RAM

There were three DIMM slots on the motherboard, which are installed parallel to the airflow from the main fan.

This machine was equipped with one strip of 16 MB DIMM RAM manufactured by NEC from Ireland.

Network map

These stations were delivered connected to a single computer network. Which we used “to the fullest” when we played Quake2 with each other in our school days. Which at the time looked incredibly cool, unlike standard single-player games. All of this was connected using an external network card (because for the last 20 years they are already built-in).

With a bunch of different elements located both in China and by AMD itself: as processors, they are the same.

Processor

The central processor is hidden under a comb radiator without a cooler… Apparently, this cooling was enough then.

It is unfastened with a simple latch. Probably, after a large amount of time, the thermal paste hardened and turned into glue, and therefore, in the process of removal, the radiator came out together with the processor.

It turned out that there is Socket 7, and the Pentium I processor itself is made in the Philippines.

Intel Pentium

Ports for external ATA devices are located almost on the side of the motherboard. By design, they are pressed against the board, being one behind the other and immediately exit into another compartment without interfering with air circulation. For convenience, they are equipped with a tab, for which it is convenient to pull them out of the connector.

Also, the board is unusually equipped with a “hedgehog” radiator, which probably cools the power transistor.

After removing all the wires connected to it, you can try to pull the board out from the bottom of the box. Since it was held in the socket of the side expansion board, you need to get it from the other side… Manually move the metal rib

Just push the latch and pull. And with a light movement of the hand, the entire motherboard comes out of the grooves.

After pulling out the motherboard, they found a sticker saying that this board was assembled in Malaysia.

A rubber anti-sag bumper is attached to the back.

Like modern boards, all elements are placed on one side.

This machine came with a Q5C3CD chip, memory frequency 60 MHz, type SDRAM, bus bit rate 64 bit, date of manufacture 1997, VGA S3 Trio64V2/DX chip Q5C3CD, memory frequency 60 MHz, type SDRAM, date 7. , VGA although this line was developed in 1995

and North Bridge SiS 5581 and South PC87317VUL

The ports I talked about earlier

• parallel port LPT

• Serial COM port

• standard PS/2 for connecting mouse and keyboard

• VGA video output

• Paired USB manufactured by Foxconn.

  And this is 1997. Before that, I thought that they only collect iPhones and motherboards after 2008, but it turned out that it (Foxcon) was founded in 1974.

  All additional devices were connected via an additional expansion card

On which there are 3 PCI + 1 on the other side and 3 ports of the 16-bit I/O bus ISA

Since the motherboard does not have a built-in sound card, external ones were used (not on this machine).

Hard drive

Next, the hard disk was pulled out – exactly pulled out, because to get to it, you had to pull on the ring of the substrate to which it was attached.

After removing it from the metal substrate, I found out that it was a standard 3.5-inch Quantum hard drive with 2 (two!) GB. The film is more important to us now.

Peripheral devices

There were no peripherals other than the floppy disk drive, although a place for them was allocated and hidden behind a tin cover

An ATX power supply manufactured by DELTA ELECTRONICS was located above the hard disk

During analysis, the date of manufacture was noted on the case from April to October 1997 – with the possibility of production until 2000.

After analysis, I had to collect it all. Get somewhere a keyboard and mouse with PS/2 and a monitor. Which is not so easy nowadays

After that, the station took on a divine appearance

The time has finally come for the final resolution.

Launching

After pressing the start button, after the crunch of the 28-year-old hard drive, the screeching of the drive immediately became nostalgic. After beeping to reset the BIOS time, it booted up.

The monitor, of course, failed – it did not want to process signals below 85G. Well, even then, 60 Hz was enough, on the CRT monitors that came in the kit… and a message from the monitor popped up, which interfered. And there was no other monitor.

Windows98 SP2 appeared to be installed there, although Win95 was installed there when I studied.

A bunch of shortcuts and files left by former students

Old school My documents with files

A Kangaroo program that teaches algorithms was also found.

As well as games

Quake ||, which we used to play online at school, never started … (rather corrupted the running game files).

And at the end, you can turn off the computer.

Result

Of course, there were no other goals, except to close the gestalt and learn about what is inside the first computer of my childhood.

We see a standard Pentium I station still running.

I can say that the layout itself looked quite solid, heavy, sometimes even too much metal, the elements are designed and placed for convenient access to them… and this was in 1997. Everything was done for quick and easy replacement of elements. Literally with bare hands.

He was also impressed even then by the deep cooperation that arose during production. Elements for the American company Hewlett-Packard were collected from all over the world: Philippines, Thailand, China, Ireland, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc.

And finally, we can say thanks to these computers for introducing us to the world of personal computers and the first computer games played for hours on them, which we watched at that time only on TV.