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Comment by hawaiian | Hacker News Reader

Periodically I daydream about building an absolute monstrosity of a computer with a LiteScribe DVD burner, combo floppy disk reader, iomega zip drive reader, TV/cable tuner, and other older forgotten-about technology. The motherboard will have a LPT parallel port and a serial port of course. I would call it The Tower, keep it in a spare room.

Whenever I would need to access any information out of old media without fear of damaging anything, I'd pop it into The Tower then SSH into it from a rather useless but comfy Macbook 12".

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Ummm.. that is my everyday computer! DVD burner, 3.5" floppy, 5.25" floppy, zip drive, Bt848 based tuner. It's based on an Intel Core 2 Duo and must be pushing 10 years old by now, but it still works. Okay, about a year ago I moved all the data off my floppy and zip disks and unplugged the 5.25" floppy and zip drives to save power (the machine also runs 24/7 as a dns/email/http/file/print server). Still got the SCSI card in a box in case it's ever needed. Sadly, no turbo button.

I mean, I understand you might not have the need to upgrade, but why?

Based on the final comment in GP post, it's because they have information on all of those mediums. If you've been in computing for a few decades, you'll find dusty floppy disks, zip disks, and the like hiding in weird corners. Having the ability to easily read and move that data can be invaluable.

Personally, I can't remember how many old disks and pieces of my computing history that I've thrown out because I can't read them anymore.

It fits my purpose and just works.

The system has a fanless power supply and GPU making it virtually silent. When it's idle it consumes relatively little power as a server. Admittedly with 2GB of RAM and the latest Gnome/Debian it's beginning to lose it's snappiness as a desktop, but it's still usable. Unfortunately suitable DIMMs aren't easy to find anymore, as a memory upgrade would restore that responsiveness and extend its life by a few more years. Chances are I will have to replace it in the next year or so.

Why not also add the kitchen sink! http://www.john-ward.org.uk/personal/john/computers/html/roc... :)

You're going to want Zip, Jaz, and Bernoulli drives of course! Maybe some external SCSI enclosures. And now I'm trying to recall why Ethernet transceivers were necessary...

Throw in the 5.25" to 3.5" and 2.5" reader... and baby, you got physical media!

Don't forget a tape drive and a SuperDisk drive!

> And now I'm trying to recall why Ethernet transceivers were necessary

I think the idea was to decouple the card that went inside the computer from the physical media. You could use the same card for 10BASE5 or 10BASE2 or even 10BASE-T based on the building wiring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_Unit_Interface

Modern datacenter switches are still this way, see SFP+/QSFP.

Not just for that, though it's important--as I understand it, the electronics needed to feed data at high rates over RJ-45 are actually surprisingly difficult. Going much over 10Gbit (currently expensive) over RJ-45 is going to be prohibitive.

The decoupling was nice to have, but i've gathered that the bigger issue was 10base5 cabling was big and inflexible, and connecting to it was a bit of a chore, it was kind of necessary to have a flexible cable between the computer and the tap.

10base2 had a much more flexible cable, and allowed for T's, so it wasn't too bad to route it right to the computer, and 10baseT was also routed to the computer. So after 10base5 was pretty well dead, budget cards lost the transceiver port, although fiber transceivers were useful in niche cases -- if you needed one, you'd have to more carefully select your ethernet card.

It's not all in a tower but I'm in the process of fulfilling my own childhood dream - filling out all the IDs on a Mac SCSI chain http://kalleboo.com/retrotech/perip/#scsitower

What, no SCSI flatbed scanner?

If I only had the space, I would also have CRTs and other goodies. Alas, family in a small apartment :(

Oh the nostalgia. I had a tape back up SCSI drive running on my Tekram and later Adaptec U19160 controller. That was premium hardware with very good Linux support. How I miss those days.

What about 8" floppies -- both hard and soft-sectored so you'll need two drives. And QIC

I still use SCSI zip drives for all my 90s music gear but am slowly porting them across to SCSI2SD.

Akai samplers will physically blow an internal fuse if you forget to switch off the zip drive before unplugging it.

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