My Older Pc's

[rowdy235]

New here and thought I'd share some of my computers.
My first has been a project of mine which you can see here:
http://www.shareaproject.com/pages/projectTut,p,221,00.html
Its a commodore C386SX-LT with a bigger hard drive and windows 95
http://www.shareaproject.com/slideImages/7663.jpg

Next is my work in progress, no picture yet but its a custom AMD k6 system with 2 cd drives, 3.5" floppy, 5.25" floppy, and a hard drive. I'm planning to attempt to run XP.

Let me know what you think.

PS Sorry if they're not old enough. :(

[JDT]

Welcome! Glad to have you here. Enjoy your stay.

As for your two machines... the K6 is way too "new" and the 386 is IMO old enough but that point may get argued ;) I myself am looking to build a 386 box, looking for a 40mhz board & chip.

[Micom 2000]

I thought you had got that. I do have a new 386/33 with cache. I'll go to the wanted section and carry on from there.

Lawrence

[NathanAllan]

I'm pretty sure that the Commodore and Atari x86's can get a pass from the normal vintage rule, imho. It's not like they're littering the compu-scape like other x86 clones.

Very nice, rowdy, and it looks like it's in real good shape, too! Get a picture of the boot screen of the C64 and you'll be all set!

Nathan

[tezza]

the 386 is IMO old enough...

I reckon so too. :)

Wecome!

Tez

[Burnout_Ftw]

I have the same commodore, and i was wondering. A c386sx-lt.
My computer goes to a white screen when i flick on the power switch, and nothing else happens.
Any clues on how to fix?

[rowdy235]

chances are the display settings are out, fiddle with the two knobs on the right side front and see what you can get to come up.

[Druid6900]

Actually, with older "dumb" displays, an all white screen is indicative of the screen getting power to it, but no signal.

If you are getting nothing else happening (no drive activity, no activity on the LED bar) then you have serious problems such as no power is getting to the mother board (the monitor is sometimes powered separately), the CPU is shot, something is badly shorted or other such catastrophic failures.

[Mike Chambers]

anything with a protected mode is too new to be fun. :p

nah j/k, i have a couple 386's sitting here next to me too. it's fun to put windows 95 on them and watch the motherboard melt.

computers too old to even consider running windows (in any useful fashion) is where the real fun is, like when i put windows 3.0 on my XT clone w/ 640 KB of RAM. it could load and run notepad... maybe the clock if i didn't load too big of a text file in notepad.

[Micom 2000]

I had one of these Commodore LTs. But with no power supply. They have a dual power supply on the 5-pin plug and were difficult to duplicate even tho the sparse info on them did include a pinout on a german site. Sanyo and Everex had the same PSU IIRC. I hung on to it for the longest time but over the years with no compatible PSU coming up I sold it on EBay as-is. Made in Germany during the failing days of Commodore. A very cool design and I envy and applaud how you've upgraded it.

Lawrence

[Micom 2000]

I have an IBM PC with the Intel Inboard 386 which could run windows on a VGA color monitor. But of course that is cheating. I also have a NEC Prospeed LT, an AT with 2megs of memory which ran Win 3.1 and could use MSWorks very productively. Ditto with a Grid 1520 and using the VGA pod could drive an external color monitor. As far as Win95 goes it was more a problem of available ram and the sloppy programming which has become acceptible.

Can you imagine setting some of the modern-day micro-coders down in the face of a 64K 8-bit processor and asking them to do anything meaningfull with it. They've been trained to more or less ignore CPU speed, ROM and RAM size (the engineers will take care of it or we'll make a patch) and the result is like an untrained artist with too much paint and a self-inflated imagination and ego, typical of these times. The essence of the proto-typical genius character described in "The Soul of a New Machine" is displayed only in forums such as this, the industry itself is run by marketers, and engineers who attempt to satisfy their market-driven masters.

Now and then in this present age some new innovations do come to the fore, but only because they've somehow escaped the scrutiny of the accountants and marketeers.

Perhaps I'm being a bit hard on the do-it cast of modern-day engineering, whose job is so closely entwined with management and the bean-counters but the image of the greatest "engineer" in history, TESLA, confounds the mind in comparison.

Lawrence

anything with a protected mode is too new to be fun. :p

nah j/k, i have a couple 386's sitting here next to me too. it's fun to put windows 95 on them and watch the motherboard melt.

computers too old to even consider running windows (in any useful fashion) is where the real fun is, like when i put windows 3.0 on my XT clone w/ 640 KB of RAM. it could load and run notepad... maybe the clock if i didn't load too big of a text file in notepad.

[tezza]

And to think, Tandy once sold a stock control package for their new (non-kit) TRS-80 Model 1 which was 4k in size.

4K !!!!.

I actually didn't believe it until someone in the tandy mailing group I'm a member of showed me the advertisement.

Coding those old 8 bit machines required programmers to be inventive and cunning. Not one byte could be wasted.

Tez

[rachael24]

Nice images...I had one just like that back in the day LOL

[Burnout_Ftw]

Actually, with older "dumb" displays, an all white screen is indicative of the screen getting power to it, but no signal.

If you are getting nothing else happening (no drive activity, no activity on the LED bar) then you have serious problems such as no power is getting to the mother board (the monitor is sometimes powered separately), the CPU is shot, something is badly shorted or other such catastrophic failures.

Actually, the keyboard works. it still makes beeps when i press f11 twice.
And i'll try "fiddling with the two knobs on the right side front"