Dave Gilbert's Machines

I've got quite a few machines hanging around the house (some of which you can see on the picture on the home page) - here is a description of them....

Dual Athlon 1.53GHz (Gallifrey)

Gallifrey was bought at the end of 2001 and is my main machine. He has a Tyan Tiger S2460 motherboard with a pair of 1.53GHz Athlon MPs and 512MB of DDR RAM.  This is pleasently fast.  Running Debian Linux/unstable he is equipped with a pair of IBM 61GB 7200RPM IDE drives, a Memorex CD-RW, a DVD player and a Zip.  A Promise IDE card provides the extra IDE channels needed.  An ATI Radeon AGP graphics card provides very nice 3D graphics (nicely supported by Open Source software) into one port of the same Samsung 950p+ 19" monitor that Tardis is connected to (below).  A 3com 3c905 network card connects him into the house network.
The hard drives shift a sustained 40MB/s (from the start of the drive) each; they are striped using Linux's LVM code to provide in excess of 59MB/s of nice high speed disc.  One pair of partitions is mirrored (using Linux's MD drivers) and this is used as my home partition.
A real, clicky, original IBM keyboard provides the final touch!.

DEC Alpha 533MHz (Tardis)

Tardis was bought at the end of 1997; he is a 533MHz DEC Alpha 21164a on LX motherboard with 320MB of SDRAM, 2MB of cache and 34GB of disc. The disc is an IBM 34GB Ultra-66 IDE drive connected to the onboard controller. I've not had much luck with the Promise Ultra 66 controller I bought for it. A 3DFX Voodoo 3 16MB/PCI card connected to my Samsung 950p+ 19" monitor provides a suitably nice display. It does suitably fast 3D stuff when used with the DRI in XFree 4.x

He runs Linux (Debian/unstable) fast - and almost never swaps. A Focus Electronics 5001 keyboard (bought second hand for 3 UK Pounds) is connected to 'Tardis', and has a nice clicky feel and a lot of extra buttons.  An end of line, 2x DVD Rom drive provides entertainment in the form of attempting to get the Linux DVD project working on the machine.

He is not a DEC made machine; its actually a DEC Alpha on DEC Motherboard put together in the same way as any clone PC

Sun JavaStation Krups (Mocha)

A nice little machine rescued on the way to a skip.  He has a particularly nice case and is disc and fan free.  He is netbooting Linux/SPARC (Debian) off Gallifrey.
 

Pentium 2-400 (Dalek)

This is the replacement speedier machine for my dad to replace Gort. (and its actually his machine).  This was bought early in 2001 second hand as a base motherboard/processor/a little RAM and case.  He runs Linux/Debian  and his 192MB of RAM and faster processor means that StarOffice and Netscape run at a much, much more friendly speed than Gort.
 

HP-9000-735 (Sauce)

This machine was obtained in April 2001.  He is actually a 730 upgraded to 735 - Linux/HP-PA boots on it - although thinks its actually a fast 730; perhaps this is something to do with the upgrade.  He is actually graphics card less and runs its serial port to one of the other machines asconsole.

Pentium P90 (Gort)

This was my main machine prior to Tardis and now acts as the firewall/Masq box connecting us to the internet using ADSL - which makes downloading and updating Debian wonderful!. Gort also drives our Samsung ML4500 laser printer.

Geofox One (Mulder)

I bought this in April 1999; it is a clone/varient on the Psion 5 - unfortunatly Geofox went bust, but the people who built it from them produced these machines afterwards at a very fair price.

It has 16MB of RAM and an 18MHz ARM 7110 processor. I intend to run Linux on it. Its most unusual feature is the glidepad (instead of touchscreen as used on Psion 5) - this can be seen in the attached picture (on which my penguin can be seen considering Linux/ARM).

Acorn Archimedes A440/1 (Klaatu)

Prior to Gort, Klaatu was my main machine. It was bought about 1990 and has a 25MHz ARM3 processor, 4MB of RAM, a 100MB SCSI drive, a 20MB internal MFM drive and an external 5.25inch full height 64MB MFM drive (clunky!). It runs RISC OS 3.11, and Linux.

Acorn Archimedes R260 (Oaktree)

This machine was salvaged from the University where I used to study; its got 25MHz ARM3, 8MB of RAM, and 120MB SCSI drive; but is a bit touchy - it tends to crash about once a day - it sounds like its a heat related problem.

Acorn Archimedes R140

Another rescued machine; my Dad uses this for DTP and various bits and bobs - 4MB of RAM and an ARM2 processor.

Acorn Archimedes A310

My first Archimedes, bought in about 1989, its got a massive 1MB of RAM, 20MB MFM hard drive and an ARM2 processor. It spent most of its life in my fathers Pharmacy business running a Patient record and labelling program that I wrote. Now my mother uses it for wordprocessing.

ICL Perq 1a

Now we get onto a more unusual machine; this is another machine rescued from the University. This has 1MB of RAM, a 27MB, 14inch, belt driven, hard drive - and boots Unix! It also takes two people to lift and can keep my bedroom warm on a cold winters night. Its 1MB of RAM consists of 136 DRAM chips, and its processor is a bit sliced design occupying a double (triple?) height eurocard. Its most unusual feature is that its got loadable Microcode. Built circa 1982.

DEC EBSA285 - StrongARM/PCI development system (Decade)

This machine has been loaned to me by DEC for help in the Linux/ARM porting. Its got a 233MHz StrongARM processor and is a PCI board plugged into a back plane.

Sun IPX (Sol)

I bought this machine in early 1999 cheaply from Speedie computers; it has the nice 20" Sun monitor (somewhat touchy though) and is bought for cuteness and the fact I can run SPARC/Linux. The original Sun 4 keyboard is especially nice.

Connected to Sol is a set of SCSI peripherals which used to be connected to Tardis: a DDS-1 DAT, Zip drive, and about 6GB of disc. Sol gets mainly used for tape/Zip access and is used as a secondary high quality X display when I'm doing things like debugging the X/kernel setup on tardis.

SGI Indy (Dino)

Dino was bought off eBay at the end of 2000; he has an R4600PC processor and 64MB of RAM. Pretty fast machine, and a particularly cute blue case. Boots Linux/MIPS nicely

Amiga 1200

An Amiga 1200 with 6MB of RAM, a SCSI hard disc and 68030 processor expansion. Aquired, for the cost of postage, at the end of 1999. I intend to get this running Linux/m68k, but at the moment I know almost nothing about Amigas.

Sun 3/50 (Neutron)

The Sun 3/50 with its 68020 processor and 20MB of RAM and a colour graphics card and a nice Sun monitor. This boots Linux/m68K  - I junked the damn heavy disc pack which came with it (it was bigger and heavier than one of the other machines).

Apple Newton MessagePad 120

A few years ago, some friends and I bought a batch of about 30 nonworking Newtons, mostly 100's with a couple of 120's - we got about 25 working and made a nice little profit - and also got ourselves some newtons out of it. The sports an ARM610 processor. It doesn't get used much.

Acorn Pocketbook 2 (~=PSION 3a)

This is a PDA with 2MB of RAM and a decent keyboard with an x86 processor (NEC V20??). Besides some minor software tweaks and the rearrangment of two or three keys on the keyboard this is otherwise identical to a PSION 3a.  Unfortunatly he has suffered a broken hinge.

BBC Master 512

A 6502 machine built by Acorn Computers; with 128KB of main RAM, and an 81086 processor (with 512K of RAM) added later. This was my main machine prior to the A310 and was bought about 1986. Now my dad uses it for a bit of wordprocessing and spreadsheet work.

BBC Model B (Series 7)

This BBC spent most of its life working at my fathers Pharmacy running a labelling program which was the precursor to the program which ran on the A310; at that time it ran with no disc and for some of the time ran from ROMs blown using the Acorn ROM filing system. It was bought in about 1984. 32K of RAM.

BBC Model B (Series 3)

My first computer, about 1983; at various times in its life its had upto around 130K of RAM in it what with RAM boxes on its 1MHz bus, shadow RAM, sideways RAM. I've had to take a lot of the expansions out because it doesn't seem to want to boot with them now its getting old.

This has been through the wars a bit and has a bit of repair work soldered onto the underside of its motherboard after its user port VIA shorted solid and took out some power tracks around the processor.

386sx laptop

An Amstrad 386sx 'laptop' with 4MB of RAM and a 30MB hard disc. Donated to me at the end of 1999. The person who entitled this machine 'laptop' must have been having a particularly bored day or one hell of a lap! Intended to be used for portable amateur packet operation.

Other odds and sods

There are the disembowled bits of an RML 380Z whose case has been reused for other duties; a ZX80 is somewhere around but I don't really know where, many printers (Canon BJ200, a couple of Epson FX80s, an RX80, an MX80 ish rebadged by Sharp but with a worse character set, and a Brother 1724), lots of disc drives (including a pair of 100tpi 5.25" drives which I wish I knew what they were used in!), and lots of other computational bits and bobs.

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