Man builds his dream 1990s IBM clone PC as authentically as he can in 2025
This is a series of posts that provide a stunning level of detail and attention to a man's dream PC from his childhood. A major bit of nostalgia for me having grown up around the same sort of machines and worked on computers in that era with my father.
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Marvin Upgrade
Marvin, our entertainment home server, got an upgrade today as I added a new hard drive, where the previous 4 TB drive had been reaching its capacity. My Linux admin skills are far from complete, and I had to wrestle with a few things along the way. But, at this moment, files are transferring and backups are being made.
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Introducing Michigan J. Frog
I didn't have a good sense of how long building it would actually take, but I figured it couldn't take as long as the movie marathon!
As I told a friend, I grew up building computers. I worked for my dad's business "sep Computers." (sep was dad's initialism for 'Specialized Engineering Products' but he eschewed capital letters and periods leading to many people thinking it was pronounced "sepp" rather than "Ess Ee Pee.") We did GeekSquad style work before GeekSquad was a thing. I built computers, pulled network cables, etc. But that was from roughly 1990-2005. I did build my last rig ("Marvin") but that was still around ten years ago. Things change, though not as much as I feared.
I was excited at the prospect of this new machine. After spending a few weeks evaluating options I settled on a build and got input from a few people. Once I had the build, I worked with a buddy of mine and traded Magic product for the parts. Over the past week-and-a-half the parts came in, and last night the final piece arrived.
So, I got up this morning, and starting around 7:00 am, I began putting it all together. I took it slow, and as soon as I hit something I wasn't completely confident in I pulled up manuals and double checked or found the answer. Overall, I'd say 95% of it was stuff I was familiar with, but there were a few things which were new and I had to learn.
First, this computer has a NVME SSD drive. Looking at the motherboard I couldn't find where it connected. I searched and hunted before eventually giving up. I referenced the manual and found where it was, under a plate which wasn't obviously labeled.
Second, I am utilizing an all-in-one watercooling unit from Corsair. My only previous experience had been heat-sinks and fans. This is largely the same concept, but I was very nervous to make sure I installed it correctly and had fans going the right directions, etc. This unit was also the last piece of hardware to arrive, because the original hardware spec used the upgraded version which had three fans - unfortunately that was too large for the case I had selected. So I had to order a replacement.
Otherwise though, it was all the same core concepts, plugging in wires. Screwing things down, etc.
I did make mistakes though.
- I had to unmount and remount the watercooling unit four times as I kept discovering it blocked access to things I needed access to.
- I also ended up removing the cover plate which goes around the motherboard's ports on the back of the machine, as I had mounted the motherboard and gotten very far in the build before I realized I hadn't set the motherboard correctly and some prongs intended to keep tension were unfortunately positioned inside of ports rather than on top of them. A minor issue overall.
- I installed the graphics card without removing covers on the video ports. The NVIDIA card had small covers on the three DP ports and the HDMI port, without realizing I had left them on, I mounted the card. Unfortunately the case was such that it held those covers in place and I couldn't remove them without removing the card. Again, a small issue.
One realization I had was how far computer cases have come. I can recall many times cutting myself on the cut metal inside cases, but the case I used was smooth and there was nowhere for me to cut myself. Not to mention the pathing to enable hidden wiring, etc. Just very cool steps forward in a very subtle area of the computer technology.
Once I had fully assembled and wired, I turned the machine on and it booted up first try. I have to admit, that felt pretty good.
As noted by a friend, I like themes with my naming schemas. The two Raspberry Pi computers I use in the house are both named for professional soccer coaches. So when it came time to name this machine, for a while, I was going to use 'Foghorn' but this morning it came to me to name it after the top-hat wearing frog.
I've spent a good bit of today getting Michigan updated, installing software, etc. It's using wifi and I'm seeing decent speeds, but I am wondering if I should run a network cable to this corner of the house for the machine. We'll see. Maybe a summer project. I'm also considering upgrading the keyboard from my Microsoft ergonomic one to something more nerdy, a split-hand ergonomic keyboard like the Glove80 or the Voyager but I'm not ready to pull the trigger on any of those purchases yet. We'll see.
Aside from getting Michigan up and running, I also had to spend some time relocating Marvin (the old machine) to its new home, out near the router. It's going to live-on as our dedicated media server. The move was simple enough, the biggest has was I had to spend some time sorting out its ethernet networking as it had been running on wifi and the ethernet had to be manually re-enabled. But, some googling and working on it got it solved and it's all set up.
As for gaming... Last week, I was discussing this build with a friend. I joked that one of my metrics for judging the computer's speed would be how fast it could make a new world of Dwarf Fortress. I just set Michigan to run with the maximum history and other settings which would make it really work. I watched the processor and it never went above 25%, which I was somewhat surprised by - I would have assumed it would just peg the processor during the world building phase. Now that I think about it, I'm assuming it only uses so many threads, etc. Concurrency doesn't really work for that and thus it can't take advantage of the extra cores in the processor. Which makes sense.
That said, it did work amazingly fast compared to the other machines I've played Dwarf Fortress on.
The Specs
PS - Only twelve more hours of downloading Baldur's Gate III.
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A sense of scale for data amounts
Get a sense of scale for computer storage...
- Byte of data: a grain of rice
- Kilobyte: a cup of rice
- Megabyte: 8 bags of rice
- Gigabyte: 3 container lorries
- Terabyte: 2 container ships
- Petabyte: covers Manhattan
- Exabyte: covers the UK (3 times)
- Zettabyte: fills the Pacific Ocean
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Why DisplayPort was a game changer after HDMI
I use DisplayPort on my home PC, but had no idea where it came from or why. This was a fascinating look into it and what it enables.
The DisplayPort (shortened as DP) interface was explicitly designed to be a successor to VGA and DVI, originating from the VESA group – an organization created by multiple computer-display-related players in technology space, which has previously brought us a number of smaller-scale computer display standards like EDID, DDC and the well-known VESA mount. Nevertheless, despite the smaller scale of previous standards, DisplayPort has since become a hit in computer display space for a number of reasons, and is more ubiquitous than you might realize.
You could put it this way – DisplayPort has all the capabilities of interfaces like HDMI, but implemented in a better way, without legacy cruft, and with a number of features that take advantage of the DisplayPort's sturdier architecture. As a result of this, DisplayPort isn't just in external monitors, but also laptop internal displays, USB-C port display support, docking stations, and Thunderbolt of all flavors. If you own a display-capable docking station for your laptop, be it classic style multi-pin dock or USB-C, DisplayPort is highly likely to be involved, and even your smartphone might just support DisplayPort over USB-C these days.
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Spacetop, a laptop with no screen
Instead of a screen it uses tethered AR glasses. Interesting concept from this article. At $2,000 it's a steep purchase for early adopters, and with only 1,000 initially available it's definitely not going to be showing up everywhere. But I think this concept has some interesting space for technology to play in. Screens burn a lot of battery and add a lot of cost to machines. I'll be curious to see how those who get the real device report around things like battery life.
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If any of you could begin using more trackballs for your computer, I'd appreciate it. I've used them for over two decades and they have barely improved and continue to suffer from collected dirt and gunk on the bearings. Where mice moved to lasers, trackballs still rely on the bearings to roll the trackball. Please help make them more popular so companies will invest in innovation for them.
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An engineer wants to bring the Lego computer bricks to life
I said aloud, "Oh that's cool" to no one but myself when I read this.
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A look at very early computer games for business simulation
A fascinating look at some of the very early (1950s) mainframe computer games used for execs and college students to study business models.
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Introducing the new and upgraded Framework Laptop
I'm excited to see they are updating the laptop and that this hopefully means continues sales and growth for the company. I don't need a new laptop, and probably won't for a few years (knock on wood,) but when I do - I will be seriously looking at Framework.
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Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer
The YouTube algorithm knows me well. It gave me an hour long lecture that discusses the amazing engineering of the computer that drove the Apollo mission to the moon. Dense and well communicated, I quite enjoyed it.
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Today is an exciting day. It's the day I get a new work laptop. I don't think it is much of an upgrade, at least I know the RAM on the machine is equal to what I currently have, but I am always eager to move to a new PC. It lets me shed the various apps and bits which accumulate like barnacles, the longer you use a machine. The one I am using has a few issues that I am hoping the new one solves or improves. Fingers crossed.
Also, an excuse to get out of the house.
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Alan Turing's chess computer
I think I came across this article while looking for the previously posted old computer engines. This is a nice little article discussing Turing's chess engine. Notably he acted as the computer with it, there was no computer able to originally run it. So he had to do the math by hand and would take around 30 minutes to calculate a move.
Sadly the "code" for it has been lost. In the 2000s, Chessbase (then a giant in chess computing) built a chess engine based on the Turing engine. But it was overall underwhelming, and later removed (though I can find no reason why.)
Here is an excellent companion article, which covers more of the methodology that went into Chessbase's Turing engine.
It's still interesting to read about. I became aware of Turing's chess love when I was reading the biography of Claude Shannon, who was a contemporary of Turing and the two bonded over chess (and, of course, their national roles in WW2.)
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12 Learnings of Claude Shannon
Written by the authors of the excellent biography of Claude Shannon, they distill learnings down into a list of 12 things and lessons for life. I greatly enjoyed the biography and learning about someone so important to the development of the modern computer and who possessed a keen intellect beyond what most possess.
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