Digital Archeology

I found some old computers on an auction sale. Despite a sizeable crowd of ~150 people no one besides me bid on the machines. The machine below is one of the units purchased.

It features a removable PATA hard drive, a “stiffy” 1.44MB floppy drive, ~ 8MB of RAM, a Monochrome Display Adapter and an Intel 80386 CPU (sadly without the 80387 maths coprocessor).

Looks clean, less likely to blow up when powered 💪.
It boots… and has Linux on it ‽

Much to my surprise the machine presented a LILO prompt after POST implying a Linux installation. That’s crazy! A Linux installation on a South African 386, near unbelievable.

mmm, fsck from April 1997, last booted Septyember 1998. It belonged to conexio.co.za and this was srv.conexio.co.za… cool!

A functional fsck from April 1997. Unfortunately not present on this screen was the machine’s indication that it was last booted on the 24th of September 1998… that’s almost 20 years ago 🙈

More to follow.