So I did pick up the 80386 SX after all - The AST Premium

[Mad-Mike]

I guess it's official, I'm addicted to acquiring old computer equiptment. For the 5 days since I bought the Tandy, that 80386 SX sat in the back of my mind mocking me....so I gave in and got it.


http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c362/creepingnet2001/AST%20Premium%20II%20386SX/PICT0001.jpg

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c362/creepingnet2001/AST%20Premium%20II%20386SX/PICT0002.jpg

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c362/creepingnet2001/AST%20Premium%20II%20386SX/PICT0003.jpg

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c362/creepingnet2001/AST%20Premium%20II%20386SX/PICT0005.jpg

It's actually rather clean, and has a total of 10 MB of Memory (thats a lot for a 386 SX), and it has DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 installed with some odd graphical enhancements I have ot seen before, so I'm going to look into them a little more. Like there's this tornado that keeps running down the screen diagonally when I have the computer on. Has office installed as well, and a BNC/AUI equipped network card.

Interesting is that this computer uses an active backplane in which all the basic I/O stuff is attached, but the actual "computer" part of the computer is on a full length VLB card with the memory slots and CPU attached. It also has a 120 MB Maxtor 7120AT (known to me as the drive that will never die, I've never had one fail, just disappear from my collection somehow).

[Unknown_K]

Very nice system, but that processor card is not VLB nor probably a standard industrial type. You have 3 sockets for that type of card, wonder what else was available.

I have some oddball memory card that has a VLB type connection I was wondering what it went to, will go look it up in the morning.

[tezza]

Interesting looking machine Mike. What year was it made?

Tez

[Anonymous Coward]

There's this guy on ebay who has a store with all kinds of vintage AST upgrade. The store name is "lamcsales". You should go have a look, the prices aren't too bad either.

Let me re-phrase that: "This guy has AST upgrades coming out of his ass"

[Brendan]

FYI, I have an AST Premium 386/33. It was the first IBM PC compatible I could ever call my "very own". At the time 486s were out, but being in early college, there was no way I could afford them.

The case form factor and floppy drive layout matches yours exactly, and the proprietary processor card came in a number of flavors, including my 386/33 and a 486/33, IIRC. I actually purposely purchased the 386/33 with the intent of upgrading. While I did eventually upgrade, it was not via the processor card - I actually swapped out the socketed 386/33 with a Cyrix 486 and math coprocessor on the card itself.

I ended up with the original 2MB plus 2 more 4MB sticks for a grand total of 10MB. This was the 2nd machine I recall installing Linux on (following my old Zeos Pentium 60) and it was quite functional running an old version of Slackware.

[Sharkonwheels]

Waaaaay back, when PC manuals were carved in stone tablets, I had an AST Premium 286, nice machine! My fave of the old-school AT-compatibles, though, is still the Everex Step series, the one's with the scrolling LED display on the front. I had a Step 386/33 years ago - don;t even remember what happened to it.

I'd LOVE to find another one....I wonder if the LED display was used on any Everex 486 models?

T

[Terry Yager]

I've had a few of the ASTs in the past, and am p'ticularly fond of them, but I gotta agree with Sharko on this one. My all-time favorite was the Everex, just because of the lil' LED display. I was never short of company back then, as several of my friends would stop by daily just to see what kinda st00pit stuff it was displaying that day.

--T

[DoctorPepper]

My one-and-only 386 (and the only 386 I've ever owned) is the Packard Bell Legend 316SX (386-16 SX) I got from a guy I worked with. He's the only owner, and he had to get rid of it (his wife was pressuring him). Got the unit with a 60 MB drive, 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy drives, keyboard, mouse monitor and some software.

I reformatted the hard drive and installed MS-DOS 6.2 on it. It only has 2 MB of RAM, so it won't run Windows worth a toot (although he did!), but it makes a find DOS machine.

[Mad-Mike]

Very nice system, but that processor card is not VLB nor probably a standard industrial type. You have 3 sockets for that type of card, wonder what else was available.

I have some oddball memory card that has a VLB type connection I was wondering what it went to, will go look it up in the morning.

I just noticed that, I have not had a lot of time to play with this thing lately, so
I quickly took it apart, dusted it out, took pictures, and turned it on, so I did'nt really give myself enough time to notice the spacing between the brown PCI style slots and the ISA slots.

[Mad-Mike]

Interesting looking machine Mike. What year was it made?

Tez

According to the stamp on the drive cage it was built on October 22nd 1990, AST is about the only manufacturer aside from IBM I have been able to deduct the true year of the computer by the date stamps inside the case. Everything else I have to go by the oldest component in the case, unless it's a parts mutt, than the age is pretty much a rough estimate.

[Mad-Mike]

There's this guy on ebay who has a store with all kinds of vintage AST upgrade. The store name is "lamcsales". You should go have a look, the prices aren't too bad either.

Let me re-phrase that: "This guy has AST upgrades coming out of his ass"

Thanks, looking around I see a lot of 486 upgrade cards, I'm almost getting curious if this machine is capable of more than one CPU card, since it says that these cards were also used in servers. I also see several other parts I could use in even some of my other machines.

My fave of the old-school AT-compatibles, though, is still the Everex Step series, the one's with the scrolling LED display on the front.

I can think of a similar machine I had for awhile made by Amdek, the Amdek 286/a. That thing was cool, it had a near-modern indiglo LCD readout on the front that would show everything from system date, system time, disk formatting, BIOS Error codes/messages. A shame I could never find the keyboard for it though, that's why I got rid of it.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c362/creepingnet2001/pc%20hardware/case%20crap/amdek286.jpg