The iBorg – Pentium 150 MHZ

The Maker

 

.|iNTEL on the iNSiDE|. Part I |.


 

 

I was out doing not much of anything and picked up a nondescript AT tower with stuff inside.  Being an AT case and beige I thought perhaps the worst I’d find is that there might be something I could use in “The Little Bird” build to enhance it a bit more.  Best case I have an adventure making it run again.  Every retro junkie knows that is how it starts but rarely where it goes.  Before doing anything at all I did a little cleanup to the case. There was no cd-rom, no floppy, nothing to show it has been used for much before. It is a typical baby AT case, power button, reset button…dirt…

 

Everything seemed to be in pretty good shape overall. 

I just cannot resist a beige AT case computer so it came with me.

 

When I looked a the back… “Hey Wait  a minute no extra goodies!”  Still I had to have it! 

(The glare in the pic is a bonus, no, no, don’t thank me, it’s a gift!)  

At least we have an AT board and power supply,  so there is hope it still works.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time to do a little discovery and take a peak within.

 

Inside was not too dirty despite sitting for a very long time.  Another good sign.

Typical of the era, AT keyboard port, 9 pin serial, 25 pin serial, parallel port, AT Power Supply.

Looks like there probably were expansion cards in this once upon a time.

In typical fashion the whole outer case slides off from the back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s take a look under the hood.

 

 

Fairly straight forward,  3 ISA and 4 PCI slots,  some ram and wires,  power supply.  Not too dusty inside  (I cleaned it a bit before the photo).  We shall see below this is an AOPEN Board AP5VM.  

AOPEN actually still has some info on this board found here:  AOPEN AP5VM Info.

  I do not have the USB header to connect to the port on the board, perhaps I’ll track one down at a later date.  This computer has an Intel P150 in the socket and some ram so let’s put fire in the hole and see what we get.   There is only to be a little joy this day.  The clock battery has run down and it is a Dallas so that module needs to be replaced because even dropping to BIOS and setting time and date and any drive parameters, even floppy, are lost when rebooting out of BIOS.

 

 

This Dallas module is soldered to the board rather than sockets and my iron tool isn’t getting hot enough to remove it.  (many frowny faces).  I luckily do have friends who can do this so this is where we leave this iBorg for now.  I have sent it with Infinate (because he knows stuff) to see if he can change the Dallas module to the replacement I bought.  He is a busy tech guru so time table is extra flexible.

 

 

We will revisit when I get this board back. I also sourced an 8x ide cdrom drive. 1.44 floppy and small hard drive for it!

 

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