a couple of years ago, my manager was going through all the old computers in the attic at the office, salvaging useful parts and hard drives and sending the rest to be recycled. there was a wide range of computers from the company's roughly 20-year history, including one of those kinda-cool translucent plastic imac g3 towers with the handles, but one machine caught my eye - a beige 1999 pentium ii desktop.

I asked if I could have it and he said yes.

my main reason for taking it was that it represents an era of computing that's rather hard to recreate in the present day; emulation such as dosbox covers the dos era, up to around 1997, and newer (~2002-present?) software tends to work fine on modern windows, but in between is a sort of no-man's-land of 3dfx drivers, early directx and clunky antipiracy measures. there are quite a few games and software programs from that era that I'd like to experience again and have no easy access to.

to my surprise, my manager had not removed the hard drive (or anything else) from the computer, and it still had an operating system installed! to my further surprise, that operating system was xubuntu circa ~2007, and there was a disc in the drive - discovery by daft punk. it had been given a second life as an office jukebox at one point. I'm also a fan of reusing old tech; my current media centre computer is a 2008 athlon64 machine I got for free from a friend.

I had also set up an office media computer before the pandemic - a hewlett-packard mini tower running solus, with spotify installed via snap, and a couple of internet radio stations “installed to desktop” via chrome.

I didn't have a password so I couldn't log in to the computer, but the drive was unencrypted, so I burnt an iso of 32-bit antix and used it to browse the disk. nothing too interesting, just some ripped CDs.

next I burnt a copy of windows 98 (shhh…) and set about installing it. the installer kept failing at the same point - eventually I realised I had re-seated a ram stick incorrectly. next I had to set about installing drivers; this computer has a single usb slot, which is novel to me for a computer of this era, but win98 doesn't have a mass storage driver by default, so I had to burn a driver cd to be able to transfer files over usb.

after it was all set up I realised the video card - an ati mach64 from 1994 - was really underpowered for late-'90s gaming. I'm not really sure what to replace it with - a 3dfx card springs to mind but I don't really know anything about them. as I understand it they supplement an existing 2d card with a passthrough video cable. an agp directx card from the xp era might also work - manufacturers would have continued to supply win98 drivers for quite a while.

gaming aside, there's some other software I'd like to use - one example that springs to mind is flying colours, a kid-friendly paint program that makes use of stamps, interesting dithered-gradient fills and brushes, and palette cycling to create animated effects (flames, waterfalls, sparkles, etc.) - palette-cycling requires 256-colour mode and it's hard (impossible?) to get working correctly on modern windows.

speaking of which - since adopting this computer, I have ditched windows in favour of linux on my other computers. I've actually found it's much easier to get software from this era running via wine; as its embarrassing recursive acronym states, it is not an emulator but instead redirects windows system calls to native implementations of those calls. as such, things often end up working more smoothly; games that would only ever run fullscreen can now run in a window, for example.

so, I'm finding the pentium ii less of a necessity, but I'd still like to use it. unfortunately, after setting it up after moving house I've found that it won't boot from disk or cd-rom anymore. I've installed a compactflash drive and I'm going to try to boot from that for further diagnosis.

annoyingly, I only have one computer monitor, and my tv does not always understand the pentium's display resolutions, so setting it up is a clunky affair that involves borrowing my main computer monitor. I'd quite like to get a vintage beige CRT for it, but they're expensive and hard to come by now.

largely my experiment with this computer has been a failure, but it's been very interesting to me. it's satisfying to hear the weirdly loud fans and ticky hard disks spinning up, and to experiment with hardware and software. I'm very interested to try some alternative operating systems on it, like serenity, haiku and react. maybe next time.

max bradbury, 20/03/2021