High Treason's Museum

Systems

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High Treason's Museum - Systems - Hayley \ Quick Overview

Hayley under initial testing, running JNOS/1.11a and serving a test page to another (unseen) system.

Note: This page is really old and needs updating. It doesn't have proper thumbnails, has missing icons and all manner of problems. Compare with, say, Krystal's page, which is more recent and more representative of how things should look.

A terrible idea? Perhaps not, the Intel 486DX is a fairly efficient processor consuming less than 5 Watts of power at full speed. The whole system uses less than 50 Watts in part thanks to the use of a Compact Flash card, a device drawing less than a single Watt.

This system is pretty simple and doesn't possess anything particularly unusual by today's standards. Still, despite the stock ISA Only BUS and a lack of Video power, it would be a decent low power 486 system and of both systems ran ISA Only it would catch Hooker in most benchmarks 1:1. A part of me thought that perhaps setting it up as a nearly-headless Web Server was wasting it, but look at it this way - as a Web Server the system is not only useful to me for quickly checking spec sheets, but it then has a use to anybody interested with access to an internet connection. The JNOS Server is only serving static HTML, but it is capable of some simple CGI applications and Server Side Includes that are never used here.

The motherboard is an American Megatrends Series 39 Baby Voyager from Week 42 1991. This motherboard would have been expensive at the time as no faster platform was yet available for x86 and it supports Weitek Co-Processors (The Weitek 4167) used in demanding CAD, Database and other heavy mathematical operations from the time. Better still, the motherboard has an in-built Host Adapter providing regular I/O ports like Serial and Parallel along with a Floppy connector and IDE Interface for Hard Drives, very uncommon, especially on a standard form factor.

Initially I used a different Ethernet card, the Intel EtherExpress 16. For reasons unknown this card disagreed with the OPTi 82c930 being installed - both of the configuration managers would get into a spat and neither card would operate. Strangely the 3Com 3C509 which simply refused to work in Hooker worked immediately in this system, so provided it does not fail it shall remain installed. Both cards are 10Mbit/s Full Duplex cards and vastly outrun the 0.85Mbit/s line that your are receiving the pages over. Some day the speed may prove an issue as the card would be flat out around the 1MB/s marker, but as practically no file on this site is anywhere near that large it is likely nobody would really notice. The maximum speed for the ISA BUS in this system is around 7.15MB/s anyway, so even if I could use a faster card the bandwidth would quickly hit another wall.

The video card has a boring job and rarely leaves text mode. Only once in every 24 hours does the system display anything in graphics mode - a 640x480 image appears for five seconds when the system reboots. With only 256KB of RAM and the Western Digital WDC90C00 VGA chip it would never be a high performance machine in that department, but the card is still overkill here. Under normal circumstances - such as on a gaming box - these cards would simply be "Adequate" for a machine in this class, you could go faster but you probably wouldn't notice outside of very specialist applications or Microsoft Windows / Linux. The image which displays at boot is included in the gallery below and is the exact same file the system calls at boot (It legitimately calls it from the Web/images directory just like this page) to cause a delay. The only reason it exists is because the system reboots so fast that the Ethernet card does not always have a chance to set its configuration back up and this causes the packet driver to fail and, by extension, the Web Server won't work for the next 24 hours. I was wondering how to halt the system for a few seconds and remembered ShowJPG has a "Wait-then-exit" parameter which provided a convenient way to set a delay in milliseconds which was slightly more fun than just pausing the MS-DOS display.

The system does feature a sound card and a CD-ROM drive, but more because I don't have a bay cover for the case. These devices might be disconnected to save power in the future. The CD-ROM drive itself is an unknown speed, it was made by Panasonic (Matsushita Kotobuki Electric) but uses a regular IDE interface. The OPTi 82C930 sound card is a decent Sound Blaster Pro compatible card and, in the case of this one, has a real Yamaha YMF262, though I have another with a clone (LS-212) which sounds identical. These cards generally offered four CD-ROM interfaces, both a Line and Speaker out and decent compatibility. Their drivers also appear to use very little memory. In fact, if you're running DOS and don't want to fork out for a real SBPro I would recommend one of these, the compatibility is pretty good too and OPTi's software is certainly useable if you want to mess with that. The sound card's drivers also feature a graphical installer.

MS-DOS 5.0 was chosen as it seems to leave more memory free than MS-DOS 6.22 and JNOS seems to live in the first 640K (Conventional Memory) of RAM. Annoyingly I only have DOS 5.0 on 5.25" 360K diskettes and I didn't have any spare 3.5" 1.44MB ones to write to, you don't want to know how difficult it was to install DOS on this thing - let's put it this way, it involved abusing Windows 7's UAC, a dodgy Virtual Machine with a fake VHD linked to the flash card and excessive levels of swearing.

At some point, this machine will probably be switched over to a UMC U5S-33 to save power.

Smashed Windows

High Treason's Museum - Systems - Hayley / Specs

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Pictures

The AMI Baby Voyager (Series 39) Motherboard from 1991 prior to installation. Note the density of the components despite this being a full length board - very impressive integration for the early 1990s.

8MB of 30-Pin SIMM RAM are installed in the board. This is more than I require, but I cobbled it together from what I had and this is what I ended up with. Most of it is the old RAM from my 386 - since upgraded to 32MB.

The motherboard features an integrated Host Adapter, so Floppy, IDE, Serial and Parallel are available out of the box without having to purchase a card. This was almost unheard of in 1991, especially for a board in the standard AT Form Factor.

The CPU was included with the board and is - like the board itself - in mint condition. It is an SX419 model which runs hotter than the later, SL-Enhanced, versions of the processor. It was replaced with an SX810 for this reason and stored safely. The motherboard supports 33MHz Operation only.

A socket for a Weitek 4167 is provided. This Co-Processor is not compatible with the Intel x87 and required programs be compiled specifically for it. Generally it was only an option on high-end systems used for CAD, Database operations or heavy mathematics, possibly for science.

The BIOS is split into ODD and EVEN Bytes on this board. Also note the unusual cache chips and their arrangement, one chip must be left absent in 256K mode as per the directions in the manual. Notice the AMI branded chip nearby, I wonder if they made it themselves or simply relabeled.

The motherboard model is written in copper at the edge of the motherboard along with the serial number. Something about this just oozes quality.

The rear of the motherboard shows a clear solder mask and a strange 3D effect caused by the thickness of the board. This is at least a 4-Layer board because the center layers cannot be seen through at all, this was probably pretty costly in 1991. It looks awesome.

The 256K VGA Card with Western Digital WDC90C00 chipset is a rather bulky looking thing with a split BIOS, DIP RAM, lots of crystals and a clunky looking chip right in the middle. These were decent video cards.

The original Intel Network Card. Unfortunately it and the OPTi card don't play nice with each other so it was swapped out with a 3Com. It will, however, be installed in a different machine at a later time.

The VGA, Ethernet and Audio card can be seen installed in this photo taken during the testing phases. Whilst it is now tidier, the configuration has not really changed since.

This image displays for 5000 milliseconds so the NIC firmware has a chance to catch up, otherwise the packet driver fails to load and, by extension, this Web Server. The system was named Hayley for one reason - it was the first thing that came into my head. Don't have any other systems named after cartoon characters, so there's a first I guess.

You can click the above pictures to see full size versions in a new window

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Hayley holds a few records:

• Oldest 486 in my collection - Motherboard from Week 42 1991

• Largest number of pages served on an MS-DOS system

• Most hours running unattended

• Least powerful 486 I own

• Among the cheapest - Approximately £35 cost to complete

Ooh-laa!!!

Feel the music!