5x86 Intro

In July 2018, I found an ebay listing for a 5x86 133Mhz desktop machine with a video card, network card, 16M of RAM, a clone Sound Blaster card, a CD-ROM drive, and a 650M hard drive.

The motherboard is, I believe, a BEK-P407. I was able to find images that are scans of the instruction booklet here. There's a local copy here.

From that, I deduced I was able to get 128M total, so I ordered 128MB (2X64MB) FPM PARITY 60NS SIMM 72-PIN 5V 16X36 DIMMs off eBay. On installation though, the system wouldn't start. Swapping around the old DIMMs and the new in different configurations, I could only get 20MB total. I am not sure why yet.

I initially triple booted it with OS/2 Warp 4, FreeDOS 1.2, and Slackware 11. I got the network card working on each install, as well as the sound card. In addition I also ordered from eBay:

• A new serial mouse (the one I got with the computer could only scroll horizontally)
• A new Gravis Gamepad

Then I decided I needed more disk space for the OSs and the software/games I was planning to install, so I purchased from eBay:

• 2 compact flash (CF) card –> IDE adapter cards
• 2 CF cards, 1x2GB and 1x8GB
• Various splitters/adapters/cables for molex connectors, floppy-sized power connectors, and PATA IDE cables

The first extra IDE cable I got wouldn't fit the motherboard due to the cable having a blocked out pin and the motherboard not having that. It seems damn near impossible to cheapely find old PATA IDE cables that didn't have a blocked pin, so I got an adapter to handle that sort of cable. Then I set up the disks like so:

• Primary Master: 8GB CF card through adapter
• Primary Slave: 2GB CF card through adapter
• Secondary Master: none
• Secondary Slave: CD-ROM drive

In future posts I will go over the installs of different OSs I've done, as well as the minor physical restoration of the desktop.