My Computational System (2003)


The hardware

The computers

discovery - This is my main personal computer: an AthlonXP 1700+ (1466 MHz) cpu, Soyo K7V Dragon Plus! motherboard, 512 MiB of DDR133 RAM, an old (an quite slow) 15 GB Quantum Fireball lct15 hard disk, a 8x4x32 cd-rw driver (LG 8080, firmware 1.07) and a DVD-ROM drive, also LG, 1608 (16x). And that's not everything, it also has an internal zip drive (Nec, 100 MB), a 1,44 floppy disk drive (argh), a network interface card (IBM EtherJET 100, actually an Intel 85578), a video capture/tv interface card (Pixelview Pro, chipset bt878) and a video acelerator (Riva NVanta, 32 MiB RAM). Besides that, there are some extras that came with the motherboard: some extras USB ports, a SmartCard reader, a good onboard sound card.

Conected to the computer I used to have an Epson Stylus Color 600. Unfortunatly, it broked and now I hava an Genius ColorPaga-View (300x600 dpi) connected at the parallel port (and it works fine!), a Creative Labs Webcam 3, a half-working handcam (I used it as a high resolution webcam, linking it to the video capture card), a Samsung SyncMaster 15 GLi monitor, a serial Palm IIIe caddle and lots of others cables: microphone, stereo, earphone.

columbia - It's an AMD K6-2 400 (actually 380 MHz, 95 MHz frontside bus due to the motherboard, a PCCHIPS 598) with 128 MiB RAM (SDRAM PC100), a 20 GB Quantum Fireball lct20, an ALS 4000 sound card. As discovery, it has a no-break (600 kVa, unknown autonomy), a Genius VividPro-II scanner (600x600 dpi), a Canon BJC-2000 monochrone inkjet printed and a 15' Daewoo monitor.

vls - Yes, Veiculo Lançador de Satélite. No, just a joke, I really hope brazilian VLS suceddes as well as this computer. It's a Pentium-pro 200 MHz, 64 MiB of EDO RAM, Creative Labs Awe 64 Value sound card, Diamond Stealth 64 4 MB VRAM video card, a Lucent modem and 3Com 905 Network card interface. Till 2002, it had a 2,1 GB NEC hard disk. But that one died. Now, vls just has a Quantum de 6,4 GB (vls always had these two hds, but the former was fixed, the other was kept in the removable hd drawer. As I bought a dvd player for discovery, replacing the cd-rom reader, this one was installed in vls. And it's working fine, thanks!

velho - My first real computer: an Intel 486 DX-2 66 MHz, 8 MB FPM RAM (30 pins), ISA network interface card (NE2000 compatible), a Vesa Local Bus IDE and Trident 9400Cxi video card.

The Network

There are two phisical networks. One, 10 MB/s Ethernet, linking all the computers that needs to access Internet through the ADSL Router. The other net is 100 MB/s, ethernet, crossover between columbia and discovery. This is my network version 2. Before it was an Ethernet 10T2 (cabo coaxial). The figure below is my network:

The network model