Intel 80486SX

Recycling Rescue: Hewlett Packard Vectra VL2 486SX-33 PC

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• published: 02 Aug 2013
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Oh YEAH*! Another vintage computer to play with! This came from the same thrift store and recycling depot where I rescued the PS/2 Model 57SLC2 computer and Model M keyboard. In recent times they'd refused to sell me any computers, even with the under the table, cash-in-hand method I'd used before. I didn't expect just offering them $20** would have any chance of working! Wonders never cease. Though this didn't look too promising at first, with the case being incredibly greasy and the sound of something ratting around loose inside, a little cleaning and a new hard drive have this thing working great again. It is amazingly clean inside. Lots of people ask what I do with this stuff, and while I usually don't know for sure until I actually start doing something, I have got a plan for this system, involving OS/2. Right now it's running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.22 for testing purposes. When I actually get around to what I have in mind, there will be a video. Points of clarification: Cirrus Logic was not the first to produce a graphics accelerator for VGA/SVGA. I believe that honor actually goes to S3. Cirrus Logic was the first to produce a fully integrated, low cost SVGA graphics solution with a built in RAMDAC. To my great amazement, this computer's BIOS does support LBA translation for large hard drives, so the 1GB Seagate drive I put in works fine. There is 1 megabyte of video memory on this motherboard, thus making it possible to run in a high color video mode (16 bpp) at up 800x600 resolution. A lower color depth (256 colors, eventually dropping to 16) can be used at resolutions greater than 1024x768. HP (somewhat annoyingly) customized the video BIOS to output only certain refresh rates and to override refresh rate selection by most other software. The Cirrus CL-GD5428 chip is capable of any refresh rate that doesn't exceed its built in RAMDAC's specifications and bandwidth. I can't explain the strange video memory packaging, since 512 kilobyte ZIPs did exist. (I really expected that there might be 2 megabytes worth of video memory, although 1 megabyte was pretty darn luxurious at the time!) Cirrus Logic (and many others) left the graphics market during the early days of AGP graphics adapters, when the competition heated up, ultimately leaving just two big players, ATi and nVidia. I miss the days when there was actually competition in the graphics market. Rather than doing the right thing and keeping support for their former graphics products available, Cirrus Logic dumped all of that onto a company known as Integrated Software and Devices. ISD produced an embedded Linux product and was in turn swallowed up by the "Embedded Software Group". Somewhere along the line, everything pertaining to support for Cirrus Logic graphics products disappeared. The CL-GD542X series graphics ICs consume 1.5 watts of power at most. 1.5 *watts*. Compare that to modern graphics cards, which despite doing a lot more, also utilize power sufficient to run a small country. :-P I suspect that expansion slot artifact on the opposite side of the riser is possibly for a local bus video adapter or disk controller card. I don't know if such a thing was ever produced by HP, or if the slot was ever populated with its connector. One of the read/write heads inside the hard drive has clearly been "snagged" by something. There is also a totally unused platter in place on top of the active one. I've seen that before in Quantum hard drives...maybe it was a way to salvage what had been a larger capacity drive with a dead platter? It has no read or write heads extending to it. * It's probably sad just how stoked I am about this. ** It's a lot better than the 7¢ per pound that they usually get.