Since I’m now retired, I’ve resigned myself to accepting the reality that I’ll never actually find a use for any of the 486 motherboards that have multiplied on my storage shelves over the years … or the mountains of zip drives, AT power supplies, 10base2 coaxial network cards, 24K modems, memory modules in a dozen bygone form factors, and so on.
It’s taken me the better part of a month, but I’ve finally cleaned out three decades of stuff and hauled about 150 cubic feet of now-useless technology to the local e-waste depository.
One thing I couldn’t part with, though, was my first PC, a genuine IBM 5150, plus a box of spare parts for it. (Okay, I kept my Commodore 64, too, but that wasn’t actually a PC-class computer.) That 5150 is a collector’s item–and was the source for a lot of memories.
I hauled the IBM out of storage, hooked everything up, turned on the power, and …
[INDENT]PARITY CHECK 1
2040 201
[/INDENT]
Drat.
I grabbed a screwdriver, some extra chips from the spare parts box, and proceeded to troubleshoot. In 10 minutes I had it up and running again–and all without referring to any notes or reference books.
For those of you too young to remember when memory consisted of discrete chips on the motherboard: [indent]
IBM POST code 201 means POST encountered a memory error;
2xxx means the bad memory chip is in Bank 2;
xx40, when converted to binary, is 01000000, so the bad chip is the 2nd of the 8 chips in that bank.
I replaced the 4164 chip in the 2nd socket of Bank 2 with one from my spare parts box.[/indent]
Now, I don’t know whether to be impressed I remembered how to do that, or alarmed at how much useless and obsolete knowledge my brain must be holding onto.
Maybe there should be a way to do a Spring Cleaning of the mind.