Old PC hardware questions

[markusman64ds]

I am recently getting into old computers again. I have a nice setup so far.



However, there are some ports on the inside of the PC and I cannot figure out what they are.



Not sure what this one is. It's under the hard drive and behind the floppies.



One is a RAM slot and the other is the one I'm not sure about.



There's something that appears to be a floppy/hard drive cable slot even though it is on the opposite side of the other drives. The redish one is a fan slot, but I think it might be missing a pin.



Soundblaster. One looks like another drive port, and the one on the right looks like it would fit some kind of chip.

So if anyone could help me figure out what these ports do, I would be very thankful. Also, there is one ISA card slot left. What should I put in it?

[Tokimemofan]

Probably a proprietary drive bay, I see them all the time on servers.


Very often in the old days expansion cards had expansion options, video cards would have extra slots for more VRAM, network cards would have a PXE rom, they sometimes were available separately but good luck ever finding one.

[FABombjoy]

VRAM I believe since it's between the S3 graphics controller, the built-on VRAM and the RAMDAC. The blue is marked AUI which is a type of ethernet connector.

VESA feature connector?

The missing chip would be the ASP/CSP. Not worth tracking down, not much used it and they didn't generally come installed.

[Jorpho]

One is a RAM slot and the other is the one I'm not sure about.

You mean the blue one? The letters "AUI" suggest that one would have connected one of these there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_Unit_Interface

[markusman64ds]

Here's the Brother MFC-970MC. It's a printer/scanner/fax machine that connects to the computer via a device called the Missing Link.

It connects to said device via a PC I/F cable. Problem is, I can't find one. Are these compatible with Ethernet?

[Jorpho]

What did you search for? There are plenty of interesting hits for <brother "pc i/f">, like this one.

[Anderson]

There's no value of your old PC because the technology have been introduce many new items and these are faster and every latest features so the old PC hardware have no value in this modern age but mya be you old pc have some value for those persosn who have also an old pc and need for some hardware for chanige in their old pc fro mour pc..

[Neb6]

The second one appears to be a 96-pin SCSI connector. There are plenty of ways to adapt SCSI cables over so there's a chance you might be able to use this port if you really want to.

For the Sound Blaster card, the socket is a PLCC for a programmable Digital Signal Processor that Creative Labs dubbed the "Creative Signal Processor". This was later blown out of the water when Creative purchase EMU and Ensoniq and got them to build the Sound Blaster Live!/Audigy/Extigy series of sound cards. The connector might be for the optional Wave Blaster daughter board.