First post, by DeafPK
- Rank
- Newbie
So this is a computer I actually bought. It came untested and the first thing I did was pulling it apart and checking out the CMOS battery and power supply. Also there was a little dust in there that was gently asked to leave the premises. I bought and replaced the lithium 3.6v battery - no leakage at all from the old one and a brand spankin' new one was in stock at the local hardware shop. So the quest began to give life back to this dude, which is older than me!
I used my "Frankenstein" Pentium MMX with 5.25" floppy drive to produce a setup disk which was found after a quick googleing. The Compaq's floppy drive would not cooperate however.
The quick solution was to just use the same Chinon drive and it is magnificent.
Good, good
The light and color of this screen is far from what the camera can percieve. It looks more like the green color of the Spotify logo. The coolest thing was when I had shut down the computer and turned off the lights in the room ... I am not kidding the picture was glowing ghostly for several minutes, text still readable... never seen anything like it before.
After saving the config, the computer booted straight off the hard drive into DOS 3.31. It complains about missing .sys files but eventually gets there. The previous user was last on this machine in 1996. Quite the time machine! Sadly the file structure is a total mess. I would need super duper EGA mode to fit the listing of dir/w ...
It also had Windows 3.0 installed. I took on the challenge of turning cats into cheese - childhood flashback right there.
The specs!
- 286 8MHz
- 4096 kB ram
- EGA video card, can possibly do CGA and other tricks
- 21 MB Winchester harddisk
- 360k floppy drive that seems faulty
- and that awesome green CRT
Furter, I took it apart more to check out the drives and I tried to clean the floppy drive's heads. Still doesn't work though.
Must be the slimmest 5,25" drive I've seen, just thinking this is 1986 is impressive. It doesn't have a belt drive, the motor is fixed under-center like on later floppy drives.
This guy has lived in this machine, possibly been hitting the road many times, and it just works.
What I want to do next:
- Try to get it to run with a 3,5" floppy drive, hopefully 1.44 MB
- Either run some deep format on the hard drive and install a fresh new DOS 3.31 or perhaps tinker and fix the existing install
- Establish some way of file sharing back and forth using a COM port or perhaps filling that last ISA slot with a NIC
- Games!!
- External monitor - I have a Commodore 1084 monitor that I believe can do EGA
- Otherwise getting to learn a lot more about the 286, EGA, EMS etc.
"an occasional fart in their general direction would provide more than enough cooling" —PCBONEZ