Since the original (8086-based) M24 was our first computer at home when I was a kid, anything "M24" piques my interest. 😀

For a real nostalgia trip, maybe someone should try retrofitting a modern motherboard with an Intel Core i7-8086K ("8086 anniversary edition") CPU in that M24 P133 case, since the original M24 ran on the original Intel 8086. 🤣

digger wrote:

Since the original (8086-based) M24 was our first computer at home when I was a kid, anything "M24" piques my interest. 😀

For a real nostalgia trip, maybe someone should try retrofitting a modern motherboard with an Intel Core i7-8086K ("8086 anniversary edition") CPU in that M24 P133 case, since the original M24 ran on the original Intel 8086. 🤣

It would be kinda strange... but also nice to see 🤣

Are you italian? If I can ask, of course - here the old M24s were a legend, really loved as machine.

No, I was born and raised in the Netherlands. But Olivetti computers were fairly popular computers here as well back in the late eighties and early nineties, particularly as office PCs in the banking sector. They were reliable, well-built and highly compatible with IBM PCs, yet considerably faster.

My Dad bought an M24 back in 1987 through a government tax incentive that made it possible for people to purchase computers through their employers using their gross income. It was meant to stimulate as many people as possible to enter the digital age so to speak. The M24 was the first computer in our home. I learned a lot from that thing. Our neighbour had also purchased an M24 through her employer. Both she and my Dad worked at a bank.

Also I remember my primary school receiving a number of M24s on loan or as a gift from a university. This must have been around 1990, by which time the M24 had become outdated. My guess is that the university must have upgraded to newer machines by that point, so it probably had no more use for them. Since our primary school only had 3 Commodore 64s when they received those hand-me-down M24s, it may have been a step up in many ways, except in the graphics and sound department. 🤣

The Olivetti M24 has a special place in my heart, although I came to despise the ugly 4-color CGA graphics that it was limited to in games. I've made it my mission to upgrade my Dad's M24 to EGA-compatible graphics, using the same original monitor. It's been kind of a holy grail for me, but I've figured out that it should be possible with the right video card (which I have), ROM BIOS v1.43 chips (which I also have) and a new enough board revision (P8 or R8 or something, if I recall correctly) that allows the on-board graphics to be disabled (which my Dad's M24 happens to have). Unfortunately, the computer stopped working a while back, some time shortly before I attempted to perform the upgrade. 🙁 After measuring the voltages it would appear that the cause is a faulty power supply. Possibly the capacitors in the PSU will have to be replaced to get it working again. I have some experience with soldering, but I've never replaced a capacitor before, let alone in a PSU. In the meantime, this special decades-long obsession is put on hold for the time being. 😉

By the way, in the mid 2000s, as pretty much everyone and their dog owned a computer, that tax incentive I mentioned earlier, known as "PC-Privé", was abruptly abolished by the Dutch government. Naturally, it caught many potential PC buyers by surprise and pissed a lot of people off. I remember working part-time in a computer store at the time, and people begging or demanding from us that we change the purchase dates in their invoices to an earlier date, so they could still retroactively make use of the incentive. Effectively, they were asking us to commit fraud for them. We refused, making a lot of customers angry. But hey, it was not our fault. We didn't screw them over, the government did. That didn't make our customers any less angry, though. I remember a lot of them being seriously pissed at the time. Personally, although I completely understand that the incentive was no longer necessary and was costing the government tax revenue, I believe they should instead have announced a sunset/phaseout period. Yes, there would have been a short spike in PC sales leading up to the abolition date, but that would have stimulated PC sales and thus the economy, plus it would have given people who were already considering making use of the incentive one last chance to do so. Oh well, one of the curious historic political computer-related events in my country... 😀

Very nice save 😀
I would configure both exactly the same and play network games, only problem is I dont have anyone for the 2nd PC locally 🙁

I would install Windows 3.11 for workgroups, matches the bios screen.
I only ever load windows when I want to transfer some files over the network but just something about having something that old talking to my WinXP PC feels cool.