Exploring a dual Pentium Pro board, and getting it booting

Earlier this year I bought this stunning TYAN Titan Pro AT motherboard, on which one of Clara’s stickers is perched: This board appealed to me for a few reasons: It was in immaculate condition. It wasn’t sold as “new old stock”, but I expect it was never used. TYAN boards are some of my favourites from the time. They’re always clearly labelled labelled, logically designed, and included above-average documentation. This was workstation-grade kit. It came bundled with a 200 MHz 256 KiB Pentium Pro, complete with its original heatsink. Maybe one day I’ll upgrade this beast to 512 KiB versions, when money starts growing on trees. But best of all, this is a dual-socket board! The Pentium Pro wasn’t the first x86 architecture to support multiple CPUs, but it was arguably the one that made it popular. I’ve always wanted to try how well SMP worked on earlier 32-bit hardware, given my first experience was on 64-bit PowerPC and AMD64. The Pentium Pro also holds special significance for me. I…

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