First post, by OSkar000
Some of you might have seen a glimpse of this little 286 in my thread about software, utilities and games to enjoy on this machine. This thread will be more focused on the hardware side of it since I got a lot of great ideas for what to do with it there.
First, some history.
I never had a 286 when I grew up. The first computer we had was a home built clone of a ABC 800 / Facit DTC. A Zilog Z80 based system that my father built more or less from scratch, including making some of the PCBs, building a case for it and adopting a display to make it work with it. The machine is still working but not used very much any more. This was around 1985...
Our first PC came into the family maybe 5 years later. A XT-clone made by Trident. I'm not sure about how it was configured when we got it but it was not new and looked a bit tired. I still have the harddrives from it, a 40mb and a 30mb MFM drive. The case and a 386 motherboard that was put into it a few years later was unfortunately badly damaged in storage so it was scrapped the last time I moved.
Fast forward to 1991 or 1992 and the first "real" PC was purchased. Some years later I took over it and used it until the end of 1998. It was a Facit S333, a 386 based system with pretty nice performance for being a 386. 33MHz CPU, a 387 was added to it and in the end it ha a 528mb harddrive, 20mb ram and a SB32AWE (CT3670). Running Windows 95 on it was a bit slow but it worked most of the time. I have spent lots of time with this computer. My first LAN-party experiences was with that computer, playing Doom2 at quite bad framerates and probably only with the keyboard. But we had lots of fun and learnt a lot from it. 3com509 and coaxial cables where used in most of the computers me and my friends had at that time. This machine was scrapped due to a mother board failure, I should have fixed it...
Picture of it from 2007, probably the last time it was more or less working.
So.. I might be a bit obsessed with Facit computers because of that. I'm not sure but I believe that Mitac made all of their PCs and it was limited to 286-486 based computers, at least I haven't seen anything else so far. Common for them is quite nice boxy design and a light grey color combined with slightly darker grey drives that made them stand out a little from all the beige boxes that was standard for PCs at the time they were produced.
A few months ago I found my latest retro purchase that I couldn't resist. I got it for a decent amount of money and it was in working condition when I got it. More or less original except from the floppy drive that had been replaced with a beige/white 1,44mb drive.
Front side when I got it. Not much room for expansion! The case is just 9cm high, 37cm width and 40cm deep so it fits great under almost any display.
Rear view. Two full length 16-bit ISA slots is hiding under the blank cover plates. Both empty.
Since I had a almost dead 3,5" floppy in the right color I had to do some work to get a working floppy drive in the right color in the computer. Looking thru my stack of floppy drives quickly revealed a matching drive that could be used with the face plate from the dead floppy. That one also needed some work... but I eventually got a working 3,5" floppy drive with the right color and a red LED.
Next up, memory upgrade and a look at the inside 😀
