First post, by Cyrix200+
- Rank
- Oldbie
I recently acquired a complete Tulip pc compact 2. Tulip Computers was a computer builder from The Netherlands that was popular from 1984 to halfway though the nineties.
The Tulip pc compact 2 had a NEC V20 CPU, 640kb of internal memory, two floppy disk drives (3.5" and 5.25") and a 20MB hard disk drive. My model has the EGA video optional upgrade.
I bought this system for 25 euro and it came complete with the EGA monitor, keyboard, mouse and all the original boxes, manuals and disks!
Here she is. Quite a compact model!
As you can see, the batteries have leaked a lot. Fortunately, it is a separate battery holder with standard batteries. No leakage on any critical parts. The batteries were quickly removed and the holder was cleaned.
After setting up all the parts and doing a thorough visual inspection of the whole system, I decided to switch it on.
The monitor has some cool settings for 'fake' amber and green screen.
A quick run of the included testing disk revealed something the seller already told me and I had already seen during POST, the harddisk is not working. The screen works fine though.
But not yet when testing some graphic modes. Something to look into later. Maybe just an issue with the test?
The harddisk was the well known Seagate ST-125. It was not spinning up and was not detected. But I remembered that I had another one! I had bought a large box of really old hardware a while back and there was a ST-125 included. Lucky!!! Time to hook the other disk up!
This one does spin up! Now its not working yet, but I need to do a low level format of the disk. A quick Google search helped me remember how to do that (on this controller).
Time to enter the disks parameters. Those were not printed on the disk, so where did I get them? Seagates FTP sever of course! What excellent support by Seagate!
Low Level format was successful, and the label on the disk indicated NONE on the bad sectors sticker, so time to do the partitioning and formatting with FDISK and FORMAT.
Final step for today: install DOS 3.30 with the original disks.
1982 to 2001