“Heck, I may someday even see if I still have some of those 8086 and 286 machines are still functional after all this time, lol! “
Ow….. forgot to mention something.
On using old motherboards one thing you have to worry about is bit rot in the EPROMs
The ones in the older MBs are reaching their retention lifetimes. I have several old MBs that are not useable because of the EPROM bit rot. If you have a MB that worked perfectly when you stopped using it, and it won’t work no more, then that is one of the probable causes. If you have a MB that uses straight ROMs then you won’t have to worry about that causing the death of the MB.
If you do have an old 8086/286 board that is still usable and it has an EPROM, I would highly suggest you pull it and make a backup. And then reburn the data back to the EPROM to refresh it. That will guaranty many more years of usable service.
People that collect old video game cartridges have the same problem with bit rot on the old cartridges.
The other thing that kills old MB is the CMOS backup battery. That dies and leaks corrosive liquid across the MB. When you see one that has went bad, the you will understand why it kills a MB. It just eats the traces away. If you are going to set an old MB back for long term storage, ALWAYS remove the backup battery. Just take a pair of clippers and cut the leads to remove it. That way, when you pull it back out years from now, you will have something that hasn’t been eat up to the point that it’s almost unrecognizable.
Other problems I have noted on mixing old and new equipment is using older MFM/RLL hard drives with newer motherboards.(P3/P4) If you have a newer MB with an ISA slot, you can put a MFM hard drive controller in it, and it will be able to use a hard drive that has already been low level formatted by the controller on an older MB. ..
BUT you will NOT be able to LL format the hard drive while it’s connected to the newer MB. The reason why is the program for LL formatting the hard drive is located in the BIOS. In newer MBs they left that program out of the BIOS because it was no longer used for IDE drives. Sometimes you can access the ROM on the MFM controller card with debug to LL format the drive using the program built into the MFM controller. Some controllers do not have that feature. Even if the controller does, it still leaves many HF LL formatting utilities dysfunctional because almost all of them rely on the program in BIOS to carry out the LL formatting.
Hmmm. That is a new one I have not previously heard of. I knew of data degradation due to random UV in ambient or artificial lighting causing problems, but since most of the EPROMs and EEPROMs had at least an adhesive label pasted over them I thought that the particular problem you mentioned was alleviated in that regard. Plus, all the boards I have stored away are in nonstatic sleeves, in foam-padded containers that have not seen any light whatsoever for many years, so is that still a concern? Bit rot from simple age?
Thanks for the tip. I do indeed have some old MFM and RLL drives that I was looking at recently, although it was for parts reclamation truth be told. Still have the controller cards (SCSI, too -and drives!) and the info you mentioned was indeed not something I had come across earlier, so thanks again since you most probably have saved several days of frustration on this end without that knowledge.
I think I will make a definite foray into the storage area and begin making backups ASAP. Last time I did I was pleasantly surprised to find not only brand-new (well, newly purchased at the time and never installed) 5-1/4in floppy drives and media, as well as some old C-programming and Assembly progs on that media that I had completely forgotten about. I may just pull one of the older EISA 386 with Math Co-Processor boards out and see if I can get one working just to have a look at the data still on the disks... Never know what you may find!