The "Windows XP Box" (2003)

The "Windows XP Box" (2003)mini-itx.com

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226 points•doubletwoyou•9 days ago•53 comments•

53 comments

This was my favorite build from that site: https://www.mini-itx.com/projects/psu-pc/

Back then this was quite a bit of effort and engineering (especially the bootloader auto detection) to achieve and probably got a lot of wowed faces. Today nobody would bat an eye, you can cram anywhere a tiny PC or even stick PC, and maybe have a single USB-C cable sticking out.

projektfu6 days ago

Now you could maybe cram the guts of a DGX Spark in there and have an incredible sleeper machine.

tosti7 days ago

Back then, a computer case like that often came pre-equipped with a PSU. To save a little money around the turn of the milennium I'd buy the cheapest case they had (IIRC CoolerMaster was very affordable) and just use the PSU it shipped with.

So it really does look exactly like a spare case and no actual computer present.

lproven6 days ago

That is amazing. I love the glitterball, emphasizing all that lovely empty space. Fantastic.

dspillett7 days ago

I remember being very impressed by the combined daftness and ingenuity in this and similar builds, to the point that I'm disappointed by the 3D printing community for its lack of imagination in computer cases: there are a great many options for mini-ITX boards, RPi's and their ilk, but for the most part that are just cases, or mini-racks, or open test rigs, with little or none of the imagination that brought us things like this and the infamous PHKL (https://web.archive.org/web/20011212120420/http://www.exonom...).

naggie7 days ago

Wow I remember this being covered in Custom PC, a magazine in the UK.

I emailed the author to get the modified bootloader source code that he mentions at the end to allow the dual boot between XP and red-hat via a hardware switch. It was magic to me at the time as a 13 year old! I probably still have the code somewhere.

There was something special about Mini-ITX machines at the time, nothing was that small.

hypercube337 days ago

I miss the scene and custom cases. MN PCTech still exists and I love reading their builds. It was more of an art to craft custom cases but the payoff was showing up to a lan party with a custom case no one else has.

bayindirh7 days ago

Also, it was the last serious push of VIA as a processor vendor.

I genuinely miss that era of computing. Simpler, more fun, and with way more but not as crippling problems (except Linux support and WinModem. I'm glad that we're past that).

ValdikSS6 days ago

>but not as crippling problems

I was reusing about 40 kg of Via Eden Esther 3 years ago, and they hang under certain conditions when the software uses SSE2 instructions.

Had to rebuild the kernel and all the software in 'pentium4' mode, to make it work without SSE2.

I had this issue on my VIA Nano U2250 server in online.net as well back in 2013 :)

wowczarek7 days ago

That era was great - think PC Engines, Soekris, early Mikrotik RouterBoard, etc. Felt proper elite at the time.

I still have one of those C3 embedded aluminium boxes with a pass-through Ethernet bypass port pair. I ran it as a transparent bridging FW, when power went, it turned into a coupler. This is what got me using pfSense.

Another thing VIA C3 had was the integrated Padlock crypto engine, and this was way before AES-NI, supported on both Linux and BSDs. I remember benchmarking SSL against contemporary Xeons at the time and it wasn't even apples and oranges, it was more like tar and fibre optics. Cisco's AIM module throughput at the time felt laughable in comparison.

Atom was OK, but today Intel's N-series are proving great and we are completely spoilt for choice in terms of good, cheap platforms available.

kjs36 days ago

PC/104 SBCs were smaller (X-Y dimensions, not so much Z as they stacked expansion cards) with similar CPUs. We built some really tiny customs using them back in those days. They were, however, pretty expensive, being targeted at the embedded/industrial market.

lproven6 days ago

> Wow I remember this being covered in Custom PC, a magazine in the UK.

For which I wrote the Linux column for the mag's first year. :-)

1010087 days ago

Sounds like a fun project and very cool for the nostalgic people (like me).

A bit off topic, but I also loved the fact that the website remains like an antique website from that era (I know the article is from 2003 but the design is clearly not "modern"). I am going to say something probably stupid, but I feel there is a correlation between old/vintage design = good content.

denissem7 days ago

I agree. Specially text-based websites. The content is very rich, full of details, sometimes technical details, useful links, etc.

Terr_7 days ago

The final embellishment of making it automatically "dual boot" between XP and Red Hat Linux is a very nice touch.

vintagedave7 days ago

Yes, especially the concern they could accidentally boot XP from their Linux box, and vice versa - I laughed. But also the technical solution, placing it one way up and then another with a tilt sensor, is really advanced.

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