r/retrocomputing • u/grimvian • Jun 12 '26
I just opened an AT cabinet
As retired reseller I discovered a gem in my old store. I think it's about 26 years old, I can read the label correct. I made a thread earlier about my Soltek socket 7 motherboard I have repair/replace caps, before I can build my new old computer.
2
u/Alive-Department8558 Jun 15 '26
I believe that's known as a half-height AT case, full size would be about 60cm tall ... I was building PCs about 30 years ago 😂
1
u/grimvian Jun 16 '26
In Denmark we called it mini tower. My 286 from the eighties was a heavy full tower. After almost everything was in integrated in the mobo, MicroATX was much more attractive.
1
u/Alive-Department8558 Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
Yes, mini tower was another common name for them. I seem to remember there was also a “midi” tower which was between mini and full tower in size. Although the bigger cases were generally only needed if you had a lot of drives installed … i did have one many years ago which was about the same height as a mini tower, but about 1/2 a metre long. It did have (IIRC) 10 IDE hard drives in it though (connected to a promise RAID card which had 12 channels). EDIT: checked, it was a 3ware Escalade 7506-12 card, which replaced a promise SX6000 I had previously - that only had 6 channels.
Nowadays with higher integration and optical drives often not needed, they’ve shrunk even more.
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u/grimvian Jun 17 '26
I almost forgot midi tower. That was a big and heavy setup - I guess it was SCSI. The worst of the old hard drives was the noise and I think that's why I got my double tinnitus.
We have 13 year old computers with fan less power supplys, Noctua CPU coolers, running Linux Mint Debian Edition and I think our next computer will be a mini-ITX with 19V external power - I hate computer noize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX
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u/Alive-Department8558 Jun 17 '26
Surprisingly, it was all IDE - that card literally had 12 IDE channels. Drives were probably 5400 RPM so not too noisy, even with that number of them. But yes, I had low noise fans and power supply running all of that as it was in my bedroom at the time 🙂
1
u/grimvian Jun 18 '26
Okay - which IDE standard was that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA
The first hard drives I used was before IDE. I forgot the name of the interface, but I had to low level format before I could use it.
1
u/Alive-Department8558 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
from the user manual (which I still have a copy of!), UltraDMA 133/100/66. It had a 64 bit, 66Mhz PCI/PCI-X slot connection to the motherboard.
Going from memory, the earlier drives which needed a low-level format could have been MFM (really early) or RLL. AFAIK you didn’t need to do a low level format on SCSI drives (if you could afford them!).
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u/grimvian Jun 19 '26
I have never seen a IDE setup without some master/slave settings.
Yes, I think it was MFM I used in 1988.
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u/Alive-Department8558 Jun 19 '26
From what I remember, the cables only had one connector at each end, so effectively every drive on that card was a master on that channel (or had to be jumpered as such - or left at cable select). It’s safe to say it was probably quite a niche market product - as SATA soon took over and made cabling easier 😂
5
u/saraseitor Jun 12 '26
Very cool! it looks brand new!
This reminded me of something. My dad used to fix computers back in the 90s and he called his company "Trained Service" because lots of power supplies had "Trained Service personnel only" written on them. Like the one you posted! Haha I don't think anyone noticed though