Mothercard

[computers]

This is from the cool-but-useless department. Can you guess what it is? I acquired it a few months ago when my employer was getting rid of some old hardware, in exchange for donations that would go to a local public school.

It's a PC. Really. The only things it's missing are a hard drive to boot from, and a power supply to feed it. And this particular one, as you can see on the top right, doesn't have any memory in it at the moment. But otherwise it's a full computer packed onto a card. A mothercard, if you will.

Turn it on its edge and you'll see sound input/output, a VGA port, USB port, a serial port, and a parallel port. Cool, eh? But useless. Because there's one more thing missing: a Sun SPARC computer. The card looks sneakily like PCI, but it's not; there's an extra notch. This card allows Sun users to run Windows without having to get a second box. It's just slightly crazy, if you ask me.

Actually, I'm not sure how this card accesses its hard drive. Probably, you plug one into that giant white plug on the upper left. Or it might piggy back on the Sun's hard drive controller -- in which case, I imagine the Sun machine would need some kind of extra software to drive this card.

So the only reasonable possibility I can see for me to use this card is if it is serendipitously PCI-compatible (meaning I can plug it into another PC), and the great big white plug is an optional feature (meaning it uses the hard drive controller on the motherboard), and I can find the required software, free on the internet. I have Solaris 7 for x86, so if the software is out there, I might actually be able to run it.

But I'm not holding my breath.