Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

[Topcat]

At it again on another boring Sunday afternoon... My stepdad gave me this one about a decade ago, its sat in the attic ever since. Lazy day, so what the hell. I didn't even know what it was until I did some checking... It's a Pentium 100MHz with 16mb of blistering fast EDO RAM! Has a PCI 4MB Matrox GPU and an onboard AMD 10-base-T ethernet controller with AUI & RJ45 connections.

CMOS battery was dead of course, and hardmounted to the board....so, motherboard removed.



The culprit:


removed:




Stole a socket from a junk board. Mount points lined up perfect, and shazam!


This system has no BIOS menu. You have to boot it off a floppy to their 'sofpaq' utilities to even set the time. It was actually a neat security feature for workstations & servers back in the day, it kept people from monkeying around in BIOS's that didn't know what they were doing. Thankfully, Compaq still has this stuff on their site!! I get that downloaded, and of course the floppy drive wouldn't read. Cleaned the heads, and away it went. Had to dig into my stash of floppy disks!!



The mega cool configuration program:


Now for a true retro OS....NT4!! Had to boot off the floppy....this was before booting from optical was a standard feature.



HOLY SHIT!! I haven't seen this screen in 17 years!!


OS installed!! I had a creative labs PCI128 sound blaster....and yes, creative still has the NT driver on their site!! The GPU driver was available on Compaq's site.

Here's a super cool retro program... WINFILE!!


BCN from Netscape Navigator 4.78


BCN from IE 5.5


Buttoned back up!





I really had to dig into the archives for this one.... Programs & service packs from archives I havent had out since the migration to win2k! I was really rusty with the operation of NT....but it all comes back to you pretty quick. I did diddle with the jumpers, as the FSB was set at 50MHz (x2 @ 50MHz = core speed of 100MHz). I set it to the highest it would go, and that was 60MHz, so its running @ 120MHz now. Mega overclock!!

Thanks for viewing today's stroll down memory lane!

[shovenose]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

Wow... seeing the site on that old of a system is impressive. And if that "BIOS Setup" thing allowd you to move a mouse... well then the latest trend of point-and-click UEFI BIOS certainly doesn't seem that impressive if they had it back then. LOL

[Per Hansson]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

Wow, that BIOS is really really impressive!
But I'm curious about the case, the mobo only has like 1U of space, what's the space behind it for?

[Topcat]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

Wow, that BIOS is really really impressive!
But I'm curious about the case, the mobo only has like 1U of space, what's the space behind it for?

Theres a riser card on the bottom of the CPU board, the other side of the case has ISA and PCI slots, 2 PCI and 4 ISA. GPU is a matrox millennium, and of course the creative 128 is PCI. No ISA cards installed, strangely enough...

Yes, for the age of this thing, the BIOS setup program was actually pretty cool.

[Compgeke]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

And if that "BIOS Setup" thing allowd you to move a mouse... well then the latest trend of point-and-click UEFI BIOS certainly doesn't seem that impressive if they had it back then. LOL

The GUI BIOS has actually been around since at least the early 90s, if not the late 80s. AMI WinBIOS and the Thinkpad BIOS being the two most common.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

very nice to see that your site still can work with retro browsers like netscape and ie5. lately, i've been seeing a trend of certain retro sites overupdating their website software and/or encryption until u can no longer access them with retro software browsers or they dont display right! stoopid and bird brained decision of the site owner/admins! good to see bcn isnt like those nub retro sites!

[linuxguru]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

There's a fair chance that it has a Pentium with the FDIV bug (unless it has already been replaced under the Intel replacement program). If so, you can still contact Intel and have it replaced with a newer stepping without the bug. They used to give a P200 MMX Overdrive Processor as replacement for a while, but YMMV.

[Topcat]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

I'm cooking up yet another retro system...and this one is a really rare/unique one thats elderly enough to be considered 'vintage' yet still usable!! Its fun reviving this crap!

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

That type of BIOS setup was more typical of the early-1990s and late-1980s. Not so much with 1994 and later...

I usually think the 386 era when I see that kind of thing!

I think the Compaq DeskPro 386s had the same type of BIOS setup...

[Topcat]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

just for shits & grins, I looked on ebay for 72-pin EDO SIMM's. Found 32mb (the largest supported by this board) for $$3.00ea shipped....so for $18, the memory is now maxed out @ 192mb. High times!!

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

errr is the ram limit for 16 bit dos 32mb or 64mb of xms+ems mem total? 192mb is overkill! tho win98se and winnt4 wont complain. win98se can go up to 512mb before problems start to surface and tweaking will be needed to re-stabilise the system.

[Topcat]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

As shown above, its running NT4.

[Topcat]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

Well this one comes to a close as well. A few changes were made. The video performance was extremely poor (not that I expected it to be good), but it was worse than it should have been. Upon examining the Matrox GPU, it was a denutted Compaq version Millennium, which has a whopping 512k memory on it. Any resolution above 800x600 would only display in 16k color. 1280x1024 would only display in 256 colors. Ick....so I rummaged through my junk PCI GPU box and after trying a few crap GPU's, I stumbled upon one that actually had a sink on the processor. I had no idea what it was, its only marking was "permedia 2v". After some googling, it turned out to be a 3D Lab's Permedia GLINT v2 8MB, supporting open GL/Glide. Was a hell of a gaming card back in the day. 3D Labs site still had the NT4 driver available for it, as if by some miracle!! The 192mb of RAM also showed up in the mail....and now we're really rockin!!

I also did some Firefox homework. The last version of Firefox that was supported by Win9x & NT was 2.0.0.20....so yea....

To follow tradition, this final post was made from it.

One last look at the innards

The GPU & CL128 audio


Full memory banks


Win NT logon screen in 1280x1024 in true color


Display & task manager


Firefox 2.0.0.20. It displays correctly compared to IE5 and Netscape 4.78.


That concludes this retro machine........until the next one!!

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

lol nice find with the kickass pci gaming card, boss. will this whole system be put up for sale in the store? keke~ or do u already have ideas for it?

[Topcat]

Re: Another RetroPuter, Compaq DeskPro 5100 Workstation

lol nice find with the kickass pci gaming card, boss. will this whole system be put up for sale in the store? keke~ or do u already have ideas for it?

They're all for sale....but with my silly high prices, it'll sit with the rest of the collection a long time I'm sure.

I have yet another one building up as we speak. I'm collecting parts. This one goes back into the AT form factor days and utilized an extremely rare motherboard configuration.