The system's configured to drop to the boot menu at power-on, allowing the user to boot from disk, tape, or across the network (it's possible to auto-boot from the first device found according to one of the switches on the back of the machine though)

The disk contains a partition which holds a diagnostic shell, and contains enough logic and knowledge of the filesystem to allow the user to boot different kernels if they want. It was only this behaviour that allowed me to upgrade the disk, as without this partition (which I kept in the same location on the replacement drive), I'd have no way of copying files from the old drive to the new drive (as the kernel would change location during the copy)

DiNEX-2 does some logic tests to make sure the system's OK, then loads the kernel. The machine grumbles about the date held in NVRAM - it's confused because the NVRAM code isn't Y2k-compliant, even though the OS *is* happy to have a date past the year 2000.

Eventually the system fires up X Windows and displays a login prompt. Not a particularly pretty one, but it works.

X-Fractint works, although it took a bit of hacking to the source code to get it to compile. The system only has X11R3 on it, which is getting a little long in the tooth now - as well as being short of a few common include files and functions, so I keep having to work around things.

Povray also built without *too* much trouble. One hour fifteen minutes to render the skyvase image, which isn't half bad for a 16 year old piece of hardware I suppose. Probably equivalent to the sort of 486 PC that wasn't around for another 5 years or so.