[mythtv-users] MythTV with Vintage Gear

[aaron]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 17:08, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
>
> From the days when TV sets were furniture, not appliances :-)

Exactly. My girlfriend's TV is around the same vintage as my parents'
(or possibly older, I don't know), but the tube died long ago. So her
dad bought a new TV and installed it inside the original cabinet. :D

One thing I really miss about the old TV... off-screen display. A
separate LED display which always shows what channel I'm watching
*and* the current volume. Give me that over an OSD any day.... of
course, with a PVR (and bypassing the TV tuner) it's not really useful
anymore... but still... :)

>
> I have an old 8086 system somewhere in the garage. It was a "turbo"
> model, meaning you could run the CPU at 4.77 or 8 Mhz. (the slower speed
> was useful for some games that were unplayable at the faster CPU rate).
>
> The CGA graphics card is pretty well useless today, and ISA cards are
> pretty hard to find.

Nice. I never had CGA, we had EGA on our machine. Then we got it
upgraded... there was this Intel Inboard/386 thingy where you pry the
8086/8088 off the motherboard and install another chip that runs with
a ribbon cable to an expansion card which has a 386SX (16 MHz!) and
replacement "high speed" RAM. I think we got the deluxe version with
the 387 co-processor. And we had 2 MB of RAM. And upgraded to VGA
graphics.... the thing was so slow and unstable.... but was faster
than the original CPU. And apparently we had one of the very few kits
that actually worked.

Oh yes, at the same time the hard drive was upgraded from 20 MB (I
think) to a whopping 60 MB! It was so big we had to partition it. 10
MB for the OS (if even that much... might have been 5 MB) and the rest
for data. We had no idea how to fill all that space! ... and then
Windows came out. ;-)

aaron