Knights Hall(ME) is classified as a personal computer. This is the FIRST and the OLDEST
computer in the house. Knights Hall is now my son's computer. At one time, however, it was my main system.
It was then, my one and only system. It also did not have a network name.
Knights_Hall hails from October of 1992 when it was a ZEOS 386SX with a whooping 2MB of FP 30-PIN RAM
and a 107MB hard drive! Original operating system was DOS 5.0 and a Windows 3.1 GUI. Since that time
Knights_Hall as seen many changes, many upgrades. The first upgrade was to boost the memory to 4MB,
a sound card was added, and a 2X Mitsumi CDROM installed.
The next upgrade was in June of 1994 when the 386 mainboard was replaced with a 486DX2 mainboard,
16MB of FP 72-pin SIMMs, DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11(for workgroups). Credit will be given to where credit
is due and I thank my Uncle Gene, who sold computers as a side job. He is the individual responsible
for teaching how to change out the mainboard of the system. Without that knowledge, indeed it is very
probable that none of these computers on the Stin_Net Home Network would be in existence today.
The next credit is my former neighbor and friend, Duane Lentz. With the knowledge I had gained from
Gene, I help build his first machine. However, Duane is not an idle person and within two months he
built a second system for his son. In the process, he also added network cards to these machines.
The result was that now the thought of networking computers had arrived.
As stated above, while I helped my neighbor build his system, I was building my own. To differentiate
the two computers, I gave them names. The new computers, a Pentium 90, would be called Possessed and this
computer, now called Knights_Hall, would have the original name of On_Faith. Upon building his second
computer, m neighbor show me how to network two computers together, and my first home network was born.
My First Early Home Network.
With the building of Possessed(95), Knights_Hall, then called On_Faith, became The Second computer,
being manned by my kids and acting as a backup machine. Another added feature was the fact that the
kids and I could also play games against each other on the network. Just as with buying my first computer,
things started out small and blossomed from there. Sure I could play games. But I quickly learned that I
can move large files alot faster and safer than copying them a disk, and carrying them to the another machine.
Network techs refer to this as "sneaker net". At this point, it became a practice to move important files
to the other system, before doing system work
In Feb/Mar of 1999, On_Faith under went another upgrade and had its 486 mainboard romoved, and in
its place, a Tyan Trinity 100 was installed. By then, Stin_Net was in existance and the network name of
Knights Hall. The system board was also given 256MBytes of SDRAM to improve performance. In fact, the
whole system was given a fac lift. The old hard drives were removed and replaced with a single 20GB drive,
and the 4X CDROM was removed and replaced with a 40X CDROM.
Until January of 2002, the problem with Stin_Net at the time, was that Knights_Hall and Archers_Hall
were both in remote parts of the house. That meant that these two were networked only to each other.
Several events working in conjunction, would change this. The first was that Stin_Net was a live-and-well
server-based network downstairs. The next event was December 3,rd, 2001 when DSL entered to pictured.
The final technoolgy that brought everything together was wireless. 802.11b 11Mbits wireless LAN cards to
be exact. In January of 2002, wireless network cards were installed in both Knights_Hall and Archers_Hall.
With an addition of a Linksys 802.11b Wireless Access Point (wap) to the network downstairs, every computer
in the house was now directly connected to Stin_Net. Early February, ALL of the HALL computers were
reconfigured to be clients to server. Now every computer in the house was part of Stin_Net.
Latest Upgrade on April 3, 2003.
What could be possible the last upgrade to this system, the Tyan Trinity 100 AT was removed and
replaced with a Tyan Tsunami AT mainboard. The need for the upgrade became apparently clear when Mom
decided to buy game software for Darwin's birthday. This software was bought as budget-ware (i.e.
red-tag sale). Its minimum requirements were a Pentium III 500 or better. Mind you that this was
red-tag software, so there is no telling how long this will last.
Specifications:
Motherboard: Tyan Tsunami AT mainboard from ebay
(On the board)
CPU(s): Single Pentium III 500MHz 100FSB Slot 1 from ebay
Memory: 256Mbytes 7.5ns SDRAM from Crucial
(Two 128Mbytes DIMMS)
AGP Graphics: GeForce 256 NVida 32 MB DDR
Network: D-LINK DWL-520 802.11b Wireless network card
Sound: Soundblaster 128
(Drives)
System Hard Drive: 20GB Maxtor ATA66
DVD/CDROM Drive: 16x/48x
CDROM/RW Drive: 12x8x40
Advanced Floppy: LS-120 (Used to be Sneaker_Net)
(Peripherals:)
Monitor: 17" Standard Monitor
Keyboard: Standard PS2
(Software)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows ME
Netscape: 4.79 & 7.0 locally and server
Internet Explorer 6.0
Various Applications: My Son adds games and internet applications constantly.
> > > See Archers_Hall
