This Old Mouse

One of my first builds getting back into retro computer in 2019 was a Slot 1 Pentium III. I wanted to do a Socket 370 Pentium III build for a long time and I now finally have that done. It was a long wait as I ordered a Socket 370 motherboard from a seller on eBay from the Soviet Union. I have bought several items from him and he always sells top quality stuff, so I don't mind the extra wait. The problem this time was that the shipment got held up in Poland for an extra month and a half, so when it finally arrived, I was relieved. There were 3 major versions of the Pentium III over it's lifetime, Katmai, Coppermine(T) and Tualatin. The 1.4GHz Tualatin is the one a lot of retro enthusiast go far as it is the fastest and last Pentium III. There is one caveat on doing one these builds. The Tualatin needs an updated chipset to work properly. The one I have is an Intel i815e revision B. I made sure of this when I got the motherboard.  I did something a bit different with this build.

My last blog post was about my HP Vectra 286/12 and how I never owned an AT class 286 computer until then. Well one other computer type I never owned until now is Socket 8 Pentium Pro. These were terribly expensive back in the mid 90s usually in the $4000-$5000 range and those were entry level models. The Socket 8 platform was built around the Pentium Pro CPU. It was the successor to the Pentium. It has some very advanced features was definitely designed around 32-bit Operating Systems. It could run 16-bit code, but unfortunately it did so slower than the Pentium CPU at the same clock speed. Intel would correct most of that with the Pentium II that came next. I got my current system on eBay for a very reasonable $200 plus $30 shipping. The asking price for a Socket 8 motherboard and CPU alone is usually much more than that, so I was very happy with this deal. Here are the specs of the computer as I bought it: Midtower case with four 5.25" plus three 3.5" drive bays. Three exp