Milton, my new retroworkstation for the office \ VOGONS

Milton, my new retroworkstation for the office

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First post, by DaveJustDave

Posted on 2019-02-08, 21:05

DaveJustDave Offline

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I picked up a couple of these lovely Wugo PCIIs lately. One is trashed, but the other was mint - except the motherboard is dead.
I love how they look, and wanted to justify space for it, except there is none to be had at home. So I thought perhaps i can bring one to work with me.

So while it's innards are in my to-fix pile, i swapped in some _slightly_ more modern and usable bits to get it up and running

the specs are a bit vanilla and inconsequential, in fact so much so that i didn't bother figuring out who made any of the parts

-generic mini AT 386SX-25 board i had sitting around with 4MB RAM
-generic 16bit ISA VGA card
-generic 16bit ISA I/O IDE controller
-quantum 4.3gb IDE drive - the machine can only address 512mb, but this was the smallest drive i had in stock
-a pair of lovely Teac 1.2/1.44's i had in black . was saving these for another build but since it's a visible part of the machine i decided to borrow them for Milton. I've always been a bit partial to Teacs
-CT2940, my least favorite sound card
-dell bigfoot keyboard with alps switches
-Rasterops Superscan MC17 CRT that i've been meaning to free up from storage. i believe it's made by Hitachi

as intended it's become quite the conversation piece at work. Some millenials tried using it and couldn't figure it out. I'm not sure what I plan to do with it, and i'm not positive this thing can even handle the cryptographic demands to use as an SSH terminal - perhaps if I route it through my main PC. Just running DOS 6.22 at the moment.

I have no clue what I'm doing! If you want to watch me fumble through all my retro projects, you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/user/MrDavejustdave

Reply 1 of 6, by digger

Posted on 2019-02-08, 21:39

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It's truly heartwarming to see you run Quest for Glory I on that thing. I have quite a fondness for that game. 😀

It's also hillarious how that "PC II" logo is such an obvious IBM ripoff. 🤣

A nice looking machine, and decent specs for some nice DOS retro gaming. Congrats!

And brilliant how you simply brought that thing to to work and put it on your office desk. You'll bring some culture to those young millennial noobs yet!

( And who knows, maybe having that machine as your daily driver at work will end up making you more productive as well. 😉 )

Reply 2 of 6, by gerwin

Posted on 2019-02-09, 02:54

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DaveJustDave wrote:
as intended it's become quite the conversation piece at work. Some millenials tried using it and couldn't figure it out. I'm not sure what I plan to do with it, and i'm not positive this thing can even handle the cryptographic demands to use as an SSH terminal - perhaps if I route it through my main PC. Just running DOS 6.22 at the moment.

Fully approve of mixing old computer hobbies with the office. Especailly in the way you just did. 😀

Last week I wanted to test two P4 Prescott Engineering Sample CPUs, but did not have the proper motherboards at home. Fortunately two suitable motherboards were still stored in the Server room at work. That was fun. I am considering permanent retro setup in the server room now.
If someone asks I will say it is necessary in case we need to access PLC data on old floppy disks. That actually happened, once.

Maybe Milton can run at least one applicable office program, as an excuse?

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 3 of 6, by DaveJustDave

Posted on 2019-02-09, 03:19

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I was thinking of running this

http://sshdos.sourceforge.net

I have no clue what I'm doing! If you want to watch me fumble through all my retro projects, you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/user/MrDavejustdave

Reply 4 of 6, by gerwin

Posted on 2019-02-09, 15:14

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SSHDOS, looks complicated, so that should do just fine.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 5 of 6, by keenmaster486

Posted on 2019-02-09, 17:08

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You could run MS Word 5.5 or Word Perfect 6 on there (WP6 has a DOS WYSIWYG interface) and get yourself some usable word processing - using RTF for compatibility.

Does the office store files on a central server? As a followup, can you get to that server via FTP or SFTP? What a dream that would be. The IT guy sends everyone an email wondering what the "unknown OS" is that's connecting to the server. "Is anyone running an experimental OS?"

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 6 of 6, by DaveJustDave

Posted on 2019-02-09, 18:56

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I thought about it but I do zero word-processing. For most of my work I just need to be able to SSH to Azure and AWS assets. None of the IDEs I use have legacy versions for dos either 🙁

There was one guy who was so sure he could run vi, emacs or do a simple "LS" ..hahaha I should bring my Osborne in as my new "laptop" and have people play with CP/M

I have no clue what I'm doing! If you want to watch me fumble through all my retro projects, you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/user/MrDavejustdave

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