The
hackaday retro is a really cool lo-fi version of the site intended for using your old school or low power embedded devices. Its fully stripped of styling and scripts, allowing devices with limited memory to be able to access it. Not having anything really old at home, I scoured through the storage room at work. Apart from a few really large (and heavy) NT4 servers, the oldest and portable device I could find was a Compaq Armada 1500c. I found a suitable charger and it booted up! It was running Windows 98, packing a Pentium 2 processor and 32MB of RAM. It had a 10mbps ethernet port but to make it more authentic, I picked up an old external serial 56K modem.
Finding the drivers for the external modem was a nightmare. After plugging in the serial port and turning it on, device manager found it as a communications device. There was no know brand name on the thing so I opened it up to find a Conexant CX06827 chipset. Googling it revealed that it was a generic modem chip so drivers from most manufacturers should work. I found that Zoomtel did a similar modem and still offered the drivers for
download.
Success!
Update: I sent in my entry to hackaday and got a mention on their
successes page. Mine was not very hard and not very retro apart from the modem. Why not
submit your attempt too?
