My company has been in business since 1999, and one of the services we used to provide was hardware compatibility testing. What hardware compatibility testing is, is seeing how a given piece of software operates on various hardware platforms – CPU, north/south bridge, video card, sound card, etc.
In 2018 we stopped offering this sort of testing; it had fallen to the wayside as hardware homologation and better driver models had appeared in more modern operating systems. But we still have a lab full of antiques from when we did this sort of thing, and I keep it around because I’m into old computers…
The above photo shows some of the test machines we used for compat testing back in the day. The age of the system increases as you go from the upper shelf (8th gen Core i7) to the lower left (Pentium II 350Mhz). In between are K6-IIs and IIIs, Pentium IIIs and Pentium 4s, Pentium Ds, Core 2 Duos and Quads, Celerons, Durons, Semprons, Athlons, Phenoms, and a few other CPU architectures of bygone days in various sockets and Slot 1 / Slot A configurations.
These machines are basically frames without side panels or, in some instances, case plastics. They were intended to be life support for a motherboard / CPU combination that various peripherals would be plugged into to fill out a compatibility test matrix.
We used a lot of drive imaging to make this go… Early on it was done with Norton “Ghost” images on CD – which is why all of the machines have a rom drive in them, but in early 2010 I switched things over to Clonezilla pushing images from a central server… Which is why all of the test boxes also have a NIC in them.
And yes, I still have all of the drive images. If you know someone who needs a period-correct Win98 install for a K6-II, I can hook you up. 🙂
You’ll probbaly notice the piles of video cards on top of the rack… Most of the compat testing we did was for video games so we always had the latest chipsets on-hand, and those cards on the top shelf are cards I pulled out of the various test systems we last used in 2018.
I also have a cabinet in that lab full of video cards ranging back to the dawn of PC gaming…
These are all numbered to correlate to a spreadsheet of make, model, chipset, and in some cases firmware versions. The cards start in the upper left with a couple of Voodoo 3 2000s, and eventually get to a GTX 1080 at the bottom.
Sadly, when taking this photo, I noticed a couple of cards with failed caps… I need to figure out if that’s something I want to fix I guess. These are cards that will probably never see electricity again – and probably not worth the effort.
My personal collection of old PC hardware contains a couple Canopus Pure 3D II cards that I used back in my EverQuest days, and a “Diamond Stealth 24” from all the way back in 1993 – which predates the collection here by a couple of years. But between this cabinet and my own collection – it’s pretty complete. 🙂
Listening to "Saved by the Bell" by Miami Nights 1984