Saturday, June 21st, 2020

Quest for the Holy Grail
========================

There are  for sure many  computers, that I'd  like to sit  behind and
work with  them. There are even  many computers, that I'd  like to add
permanently to my collection - Sinclair QL, PowerMac 6100, NeXTStation
- just  to name few. But  there is only  one computer, that I  need to
have no matter what and I won't stop  with trying to get it even if it
should take the rest of my life. And  as  a matter  of fact  it's just 
a generic, boring, ordinary, uninteresting PC: the Asus P/I-P65UP5.

I bought this motherboard in 2003, when I was going to college, moving
to dorm  and our  only family  PC has  to stay  at parent's  house. It
didn't cost more than 10-15 USD and I've got a complete unused Amstrad
CPC 6128 set with  it as well. Both machines were  seen as an obsolete
crap by  the hardware shop  owner and he  was actually happy,  that he
could sell them to some poor student.

First couple of weeks I had just  one 200MHz Pentium MMX in the board,
so I sticked with  Windows 98. As I always hated  the system, I've got
another CPU and then installed Debian Linux. I was fiddling with Linux
since the  release of  RedHat 6.1  in 1999,  but never  used it  as my
primary operating system. This machine changed that.

This was the machine, on which I configured and built the Linux kernel
from  sources for  the first  time to  get SMP  support. This  was the
machine, on which I abandoned the obvious newbie choice of KDE for the
first time and started to use the more lightweight WindowMaker.

Then I bought newer computer for my dorm at some point around 2004 and
this  one  was moved  to my parent's  house.  At that  time there  was 
a little WiFi revolution going on  here in Czech Republic: small local
companies and nonprofit organisations were providing low-cost wireless
internet  connection  as an alternative to the dial-up and ISDN, which
were  quite  expensive  even after demonopolisation.  Our monthly bill 
decreased from more than a 100 USD for dial-up to about 20 USD for the
WiFi  connection and as a bonus we've got public static IPv4 address.

So this was the machine, on which I learnt how to make  the WiFi work,
how  to configure firewall (IPtables),  WWW server  (Apache)  as  well
as  FTP  and  SSH  servers.  Several  of my friends  had  SSH accounts
there and were logged in almost 24/7 as did I. And  when  the  duo  of
mighty  Pentium MMX  cores  had nothing  better  to  do,  it  crunched
SETI@home with  the blazing speed of 143.12 MIPS and 86.91 MFLOPS.

The  machine went  permanently offline  in 2007,  when the  local WiFi
provider  went  bankrupt and  parents  started  to use  ASDL  internet
connection. When  I tried to  power it on  after five years  (2012) it
bursted in flames. As I had no experience with soldering and repairing
back then, I  simply put the motherboard in electronic  waste and kept
just the dual-CPU module. I was  probably a mistake, just simple recap
would make the motherboard work again, but I will never know.

Since then I'm  trying to get the board again.  I spent countless days
on Google, trying  to find someone selling it. I'm  going through eBay
and local  auction portals  on regular  basis in  hope it  will appear
there one  day. I  sent dozens  of e-mails  to anyone  I found  in old
discussion forum  threads, mailing  lists, etc. And  then last  week I
found it. Someone was  selling an old server and just  one look on the
photos was enough to  recognise the board. I was bidding  on it to the
last second and even with my 300USD maximum I failed to win. In fact I
even wasn't second after the winner. But  I will never give up. I just
have to have it  - so as I stated before - the  rest of my life starts
right now.