Today I put this together:
Some of you may have seen my tweet about it earlier. The part that was really interesting for me is that a former student was chatting with me over IM while I was assembling it, walking me through some of the things that have changed since I last built a white box machine. (Several years)
He also chatted with me on Wednesday, because along with being uncertain about how to put the things together, I also wasn’t sure what kids are buying these days. 🙂 I was struck by the notion that memory is once again meant to be bought in pairs. It made me chuckle a bit, because I remember buying 30 pin memory in sets of 2 or sets of 4 because you had to. It was also the era that CPU fans weren’t heard of, and we had to worry about IRQ and memory address settings on our ISA cards. But I digress.
It was a fun time, and great to see a student and friend doing so well.
Oh, and for those of you wondering what the computer is for — I’m trying to see if off-the-shelf hardware might work to replace some of our Mac hardware that has fallen out of warranty. If the EFI-X chip I bought works well, we might be able to save some money. If it doesn’t work well, well at least I’ll have an interesting triple boot machine. And that’s pretty cool.
I hope you’re having good luck with this. It looks great.
memory in pairs? is that for when one forgets?
CPU ?
IRQ ?
ISA ?
EFI-X ?
triple boot, is that for turning the computer on and off several times in a row, without using it in between (MOM shakes head)
AND to think I don’t even have to comment for you to know I was here.
Wow Shawn, it doesn’t look like my computer, is it a computer, like mine is a computer or has it a different kind of function?