Very nice! 😀

This has to be one of the most awesome restoration projects I've seen. Big kudos to you!

Did the NEC V30 come standard in those models, or were they pin-compatible drop-ins?

The only time I've ever used a PS/2 8525 was in middle school, and we were forbidden from opening it up to see what the innards were like.

Our Computer class teacher was awesome, in contrast. He let us teardown, and rebuild the Apple IIs in the computer lab, to learn more about how the computer hardware worked.

Thanks for all the new comments!

I still haven't figured out if the floppy issue is drive or controller related, and looking at the pictures now I believe the casing has yellowed a bit 😢 (even though it has spent 99% of the time in a dark storage room). I thought 'IBM plastic' didn't discolor but it seems I was wrong. On the plus side the hard drive still works.

Here's a high-res picture of the motherboard I shot on request to help a fellow Vogons member:

PcBytes wrote:

I noticed a Pentium 3 motherboard in the pics.Seeing that the Pentium 3 motherboard is PCChips (I know how their boards look)what did you do with it?

It's been a while, but most likely I cleaned it up, tested it, and if it worked, put it in an anti-static bag and became part of my motherboard stash. 😉

ElectricMonk wrote:

The only time I've ever used a PS/2 8525 was in middle school, and we were forbidden from opening it up to see what the innards were like.

That's too bad. I remember that one of the things that really got me into computers as a liitle kid was having one of my dad's co-workers open up one of these and showing me the innards. I was fascinated by how easy it was to get access to the inside and by all those chips and ribbon cables going everywhere. Such a seemingly mundane experience was life-changing to my younger self.

133MHz wrote:

That's too bad. I remember that one of the things that really got me into computers as a liitle kid was having one of my dad's co-workers open up one of these and showing me the innards. I was fascinated by how easy it was to get access to the inside and by all those chips and ribbon cables going everywhere. Such a seemingly mundane experience was life-changing to my younger self.

Not to worry, we got that teacher back. One of us smuggled in a floppy disk with the Three Stooges game on it. It was insanely loud, and there was no way to turn it off, short of unplugging the computer. 😜