The VOGT Family TreeHouse

Computer #4 (Gateway 2000 Pentium Pro; 1996-2001)

Computer #4 (1996-2001) is an aging beauty (it looked a lot like the setup pictured to the right). It started out life as a Gateway 2000 200 MHz Pentium Pro (P6-200 PCI machine with Venus motherboard), with 64 MB RAM, two Quantum Fireball 3.8 GB hard drives, a Toshiba 8x CD-ROM drive, a 4MB Matrox Millennium video board driving a Vivitron 21-inch monitor (yowsa!), an Ensoniq Vivo90 full-duplex sound card with Altec Lansing subwoofer speaker system, Telepath (USR) 33.6 fax/modem with full speaker-phone capability (which I used), a 3.2 GB Iomega Ditto tape backup.

I added (and removed) a few things to the computer over the years; more hard drives (a Quantum Bigfoot 6.4 GB drive and a Maxtor 15.2 GB drive), and an internal 2x4x Sony CDR (CD-ROM writer) I bought at a computer show for $65, a D-Link 10/100 PCI network card that I added when we got Highway-1 broadband internet installed (one of the first houses in Woburn), two 64 MB SIMMs (for a total of 192 MB now), I removed the Ditto tape backup to make room for the internal CDR, and I popped the 200MHz Pentium Pro chip and replaced it with an Intel OverDrive 333MHz Pentium II processor with MMX. Not the screamer it used to be anymore, but the improvements kept it useful for a few extra years. I had visions of making it into a storage server because the tower chassis was enormous and had room for ten internal drives, but I never got around to it.