lolo799 wrote:

bjt wrote:

Bootable CD is your friend 😀

It can only boot from the Floppy drive (internal or external) or HDD.

Yeah I've got no floppy either. Had to remove the HD, copy the Windows installer files, reinstall the HD and then install the OS. What a faff. I should just get a floppy drive really.

Hmm, funny, mine boots from the CD just fine - although maybe that's just a feature of the Satellite Pro series and not Tecra.

Although my CD drive doesn't work near the outside of the disk, so I had to do the same thing: copy the installation files on a different computer and go from there! 🤣

My 410CDT does not boot from CD-ROMs. Luckily I have a floppy drive for it, something I use heavily as I used floppies to store backups of my book partly because I wrote parts of it when I wasn't even at home.

I didn't use it to set windows up though and actually used the "copy the files to the hard drive in another machine" approach.

i bought one 3com - 3cr990-tx-m Etherlink for my pentium build.

Gotta love having a system perfectly up and running... only for a ZIF clip to fall off and render it completely unusable, after trying to replace a hard drive that decided to die. 😠 😠 😠

Picked up this kit of ram for my new Compaq http://www.ebay.com/itm/291748223798 should be about as fast as it gets for this system 😀

So, my local old-school computer shop supplied me with some really nice old IBM keyboards today. They appear to be basically brand new. They had a little bit of what I'd call "storage residue" on them, but they are free of the usual grime that a used keyboard has. No Dorito crumbs in between the keys or grungy looking key caps.

The one with the box (the larger one) is an IBM 6323 from 1996, which is apparently a rubber dome style keyboard but is one of the better ones out there. I guess its the same as a Chicony 6323, which I've read is a very good keyboard. After a little bit of cleaning, it looks nearly perfect with only a little bit of discoloration along the bottom edge.

The other is an IBM\Lexmark Model M2 from 1993, which had a little bit of gunk on it but looks to have never actually been used. After cleaning it up, its pristine! The legs had actually never even been propped up (the plastic had no grooves in it and it was super tight). And it has that oh-so-glorious super loud springy click that I was hoping for. Its basically the perfect retro keyboard for me because its so compact.

I paid $20 each for them, which isn't an amazing amazing deal (when he told me about them, I thought maybe he had some original Model Ms for the same price) but is good none the less, since I can use them. My Keytronic AT\XT switchable keyboard can now be switched back to XT and used exclusively with my upgraded 5150.

Those are nice keyboards! The layout is perfect--identical to my Dell QuietKey. I love the '\' placement for navigating DOS. On modern keyboards it's tucked out of the way and hard to use (usually displaced by the big L shaped Enter key). Congrats, I would've paid $20 for the 1993 one myself.

lolo799 wrote:

An old Linux distro and a Toshiba Tecra 500CDT, not very clean but it works, with a few broken plastic latches, and the eject drive lever was out all the time and now dead stuck in it's place...
Boasting a Pentium 120MHz, slow enough that using my ZV cards on it will have a noticeable impact on MPEG1 and MPEG2 decoding.

You could pull the HDD and copy an install across. Generic 32 bit Linux kernels, even of that era, are good at auto detecting the core hardware elements. Stuff like ISA cards can then be configured with the drive in the laptop. Also, you have the option of using something like Puppy and LoadLin on top of DOS.

clueless1 wrote:

Those are nice keyboards! The layout is perfect--identical to my Dell QuietKey. I love the '\' placement for navigating DOS. On modern keyboards it's tucked out of the way and hard to use (usually displaced by the big L shaped Enter key). Congrats, I would've paid $20 for the 1993 one myself.

Yeah, I refuse to use a keyboard with an L shaped enter key. I've never used one on a machine I owned. I think my brother's first Packard Bell from ~1995 had a keyboard like that, but my Gateway from 1999 and all subsequent keyboards I've owned since have all had the standard placement for Enter, Shift and \.

Any time I had to use one it bothered me. Those enter keys just feel WRONG. 🤣

Saved this little guy from the dumpster. It works! Pentium II machine with onboard ATI Rage Pro, ESS audio, also an ISA slot. Should make a nice little DOS/Win95 machine.

I got an orchid wavebooster 4fx.

Marmes wrote:

I got an orchid wavebooster 4fx.

Nice, these are hard to find. Sounds good too!

Got this in the mail last week.

Nice find!

Won an auction for a LAPC-I, CM-32L and MPU-IPC-T. Not bad to get all 3 for the price of a LAPC-I. 😈

PeterLI wrote:

Won an auction for a LAPC-I, CM-32L and MPU-IPC-T. Not bad to get all 3 for the price of a LAPC-I. 😈

nice, was watching that! That was one of two cm32 auctions the last couple of days. too rich for my blood, surprised the one without the lapc1 went as low as it did. I got suspicious of the lapc one since it had previously sold and was relisted..

hopefully the seller comes through and you get it 😀

zerker wrote:

Picked up the retro version of my current favourite trackball: […]
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Picked up the retro version of my current favourite trackball:

So this makes 5 Logitech Marble Mice/Trackman Marbles I have now 😀

I own the same model, great trackball (and pricey, I've seen - mine is a gift, fortunately)

Something 'exotic', bought the other day: a SIP Videotel TTM90 terminal, complete with manuals. The Videotel is the Italian equivalent of the French Minitel service, without ever having had the same success. DIN connector in the back of the terminal is an atypical serial port, that I'm exploiting to connect via modded serial cable and USB-RS232 adapter this little machine to my Raspberry Pi, currently hosting my BBS, turning it into a cool CRT thin client:

He already shipped it. eBay / PayPal and AMEX buyer protection so should be fine.

Roland prices have been very erratic this year.