The Nothingness of Wednesdays

Wednesdays always remind me of Winnie-the-Pooh.

If you remember the Blustery Day, it was "Winds-Day". And the wind was, indeed, blowing.

Today it is just a little bit windy, a little bit cooler than normal, with cloudy skies. The kids are almost out of school -- just one more day! And for us adults in the workforce, it's Hump Day. As in, if you can get through Wednesday with your sanity in place, you've gotten over The Hump.

I'm not sure that my sanity is in place anymore -- it's been missing for ages -- but I'm glad that the week is just about half over, and soon it will be Friday and I won't have to sit at work while dreaming of being at home playing with my computer gear; I'll actually be able to be at home playing with my computer gear. In fact, I can hear it calling me right now: "Come play with me! Come play with me!"

But it'll have to wait. There are more pressing issues to attend.

Last night, while sorting through things in the office, I pulled out my old box of motherboards.

It saddens me out a bit to think of all those old motherboards sitting in that little box, doing nothing. At one time, they were the latest and greatest piece of powerful PC processing, and now they're so much toxin-laden residue. Can't even toss them away, because it would cost more than the boards are worth.

Looking through them, gazing fondly at the chips scattered across them, I tried to remember each one's story, when it had been used, what it had been used for, when it had finally bit the dust. Curious, and because some of them didn't have any documentation, I went searching on the web to discover something about their history. First I found this chart on the web that outlines when the Intel processors came out:

1978 - 8086
1979 - 8088
1981 - 80186
1982 - 80286
1985 - 80386
1989 - 80486
1993 - Pentium
1995 - Pentium Pro
1996 - Pentium II
1997 - Pentium MMX
1998 - Celeron (stripped-down Pentium IIs)
1999 - Pentium III
2000 - Pentium IV

Then I looked over the boards and made a list of them, along with their estimated manufacture dates.

1990: AMD 386 DX/DXL-33
1990: Intel 80486
1993: Intel 80486DX-33
1993: Intel 80486 (Dell)
1993: Intel Pentium 90
1993: AMD 486 DX2-80
1995: AMD 5x86-P75
1998: AMD K6-2
1999: AMD K6-2/450
1999: AMD K6-2/475

Hmmm. Looks like I'm more of an AMD geek than an Intel geek. Probably due to the fact that the Intel chips run a bit on the expensive side. And I've always been for the underdog.

Note that I didn't actually purchase these motherboards in the years indicated. Most of the motherboards in the box were purchased "used", because I've been very hesitant to go out and buy brand-new stuff (due to the $$ involved). In fact, if I remember correctly, the first of these was purchased a few years after we got married, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 1995 or 1996. And some of them were given to me by other geeky friends in lieu of money owed for various things. Always better to swap hard-ware than hard-cash!

Some of these boards have gone bad. Some might still work. But these days, what's the point? I'd have to go back and find all the documentation and set them up in cases or test rigs and then try them out, and if they almost work but not quite, I'd have to try and figure out what's wrong with them, and although that might be fun to kill some time on a Saturday evening, usually there's too much going on around here for that kind of thing -- too many other more important projects.

So I'm still thinking of framing them and hanging them up in the office, so at some point I can look back on them and dream of the golden past, when processors were slow and my mind was fast, instead of the other way around.