Dual CPU PC Compatible Mongrel System

Specifications

mongrel

Now you're probably wondering why a guy with so many spiffy computing platforms at his fingertips would stoop so low as to buy himself a dodgy PC clone. Well, I had sorta missed builing up systems out of cheap off-the-shelf parts, mongrel systems as I call them, hence the name "mongrel". Secondly, I had received a data DVD from a lovely gentleman by the name of Bruce Ray and my Mac wouldn't read it. Regardless of whether I was running OS X, OS 9, or Linux, the slot loading drive in my iMac would spit it out. The G4's I tried it on did the same. A PC at work had no problem reading it.

What the hell is up with that?!

Anyhow, I really wanted to access the contents of the DVD and was willing to spend money doing it. Besides, I'm always up for yet another computer. So I bought a motherboard with a Pentium-II and installed Windows 2000 on it as the x86 Linux distributions I had were so old that they didn't support DVDs. I transferred the files I was interested in to my Mac via FTP and burnt them to a CD.

Two days later I became totally fed up with Windows, as I did several years earlier when I abandoned it, and happily deleted the partition to replace it with the latest Suse Linux distribution! Now I can access the DVD without Windows. Life without windows is a sweet life!

Since then I came across a motherboard with two Pentium-III CPU's in it, stuck it in the box and gave the old one to a friend. One thing you'll notice in the picture above is the inclusion of a 5.25" floppy drive. I still have quite a few big old floppies of assembly language programs I wrote in TAFE. Occasionally I pull them out to laugh at. The picture below shows how messy it is inside.