Let's look inside.
A nice mammoth full length EISA SCSI controller and a row of 16 4MB memory sticks for a whopping 64MB of RAM.
Another mammoth ISA card. A dual line modem.
A sweet tasting Kingston Turbochip.
Oooo, "Full AT" bigtower... in black! With matching SCSI HDD bay and dual-floppy!
I wonder why the owner put a floppy disk label on that HDD...
EDIT: Weitek FPU (?), too... I don't want to know how expensive that entire machine was when it was brand new.
I have that tseng card, its a pretty beast. Looks like yours needs the option rom to enable cga support. I have the bios image for the rom if you want it.
Thats a scsi card? Jebus thats a big one, pics?
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
Last, but not least. I find this advanced for its time. A modular power supply in an old system like this.
That's it for now... oh wait... and I even found a gift for my wife who was a Sun Solaris admin for many years.
Two brand spanking new unused Sun three button meeses. (sic)
UPDATE: The Micropolis 1624 SCSI HDD is dead. Motor not even attempting to spin. Probably why this system was finally turned in for scrap. Also, the Micronics motherboard is an EISA motherboard which I did not notice at first.
wrote:Oooo, "Full AT" bigtower... in black! With matching SCSI HDD bay and dual-floppy!
I wonder why the owner put a floppy disk label on that HDD...
Good question. I can't see a reason. It says on that label in pencil either "Part" or "Port" Disk #1.
sellers photos.
No sir I don't like it!
Hit the BIN on a Zoom RT-323 drum machine.
I wonder if I can use its MIDI out and velocity-sensitive drum pads to trigger GM drum kits on GM modules...
Received this Gold coloured Sound Blaster 2.0 this morning. Doesn't have any Creative or Sound Blaster stamping but the FCC ID points to it being a creative card.
wrote:A huge find for me today, literally. This black tower of power has all the bells and whistles for its time. I will be cleaning t […]
A huge find for me today, literally. This black tower of power has all the bells and whistles for its time. I will be cleaning this sweetheart up over the next couple of weeks piece by piece. A physicist from a university used to own this beast, I was told, and I found it in an old hardware shop. I wont say what I paid, but it wasn't cheap nor was it too expensive either. Once I have it all cleaned up this will be my main software imaging system and software archive box.
Initial turn on reveals the A: drive (3½") pulls up just fine, but B: (5¼") doesn't seem to want to cooperate. Haven't had a chance to play around too much though.
Very nice! Is there another Harddisk in it? The 3rd from top looks like the old Seagte MFM drives?
wrote:Received this Gold coloured Sound Blaster 2.0 this morning. Doesn't have any Creative or Sound Blaster stamping but the FCC ID p […]
Received this Gold coloured Sound Blaster 2.0 this morning. Doesn't have any Creative or Sound Blaster stamping but the FCC ID points to it being a creative card.
Yep, there was more than one brand of cards of the SB 2.0 design. The most common were creative branded cards. Mine is a "sound magic" card.
Very nice big tower... what was the original cpu? Did you find any date stamp? From the chips - it is from 92.
To answer some questions for liqmat:
The drives are scsi. There are 2, one isn't happy, and isn't working. But the 2nd did and by a magic stroke of luck, seemed to have the EISA config utility on it.
Earliest date code I saw was for 51st week 1990.
Very early system.
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
The case is oem, and it was typical from 92. Same family:
They sold it in 1992, and later upgraded the cpu, hdd, etc.
wrote:Initial turn on reveals the A: drive (3½") pulls up just fine, but B: (5¼") doesn't seem to want to cooperate. Haven't had a chance to play around too much though.
Nice looking system. I have one of these dual drives as well, and I've never been able to make the 5.25" drive work. If you figure it out eventually, please let me know 😀
wrote:To answer some questions for liqmat: […]
To answer some questions for liqmat:
The drives are scsi. There are 2, one isn't happy, and isn't working. But the 2nd did and by a magic stroke of luck, seemed to have the EISA config utility on it.
Earliest date code I saw was for 51st week 1990.
Very early system.
Wow!
It has two multi I/O cards for some reason (4 serial, 2 parallel and 2 game ports). It also has a hook at the back to fasten it into some place against robbery, which probably mean it came from a shared area like a laboratory or something. That kind of a beast would be from 1992 I think. EISA, Weitek, SCSI, top of the line VGA, very uncommon PSU, and 64MB of RAM? In 1992? Who could have afforded it, if not a university or something?
And man, was "black" even a thing back in 1992?
Wow!
GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000
wrote:A nice mammoth full length EISA SCSI controller and a row of 16 4MB memory sticks for a whopping 64MB of RAM.
Looks like a DPT smart cache - I could never get the one I found working - It will supposedly emulate an adaptec 1542 if your OS of choice for this beast doesn't have DPT drivers.
Your black tower is probably a Number Smasher 486 B2T. Microway always targeted the scientific high performance market - hence the Weitek copro. Other options would have been an Intel 860 based copro card.
I found a couple of these high end 486s when I cleared some stuff from a research lab, though mine were DEC and AST - Huge full towers, SCSI drives, unheard-of-in-486 amounts of ram (well at least for us who had 8MB if we were lucky), copro cards and weird CAD video cards. Unfortunately, where these came from they were handed down to the office when the engineers moved onto something bigger and faster - so none of the software for the esoteric cards was left intact on the hard drives - all the remained was Win 3.11 and office...
wrote:sellers photos. [...] […]
sellers photos.
[...]
Are those 16MB 30p SIMMs? 😲
Received some "challanges"
486 with "Symphony" chipset - never heard of that.
ISA386U30 - looks like ASUS?
interesting 80286:
486 with VLB and PCI:
Think they will get a bath first...
wrote:Received some "challanges" […]
Received some "challanges"
486 with "Symphony" chipset - never heard of that.
ISA386U30 - looks like ASUS?
interesting 80286:
486 with VLB and PCI:
Think they will get a bath first...
That ISA386U30 is definitely Asus.
The 486 with VLB & PCI is a nice one, since it has on-board floppy & IDE and also appears to have a PS/2 header next to the keyboard connector.
Looks like you're missing a BIOS chip and some cache memory chips.
wrote:The 486 with VLB & PCI is a nice one, since it has on-board floppy & IDE and also appears to have a PS/2 header next to the keyboard connector.
Looks like you're missing a BIOS chip and some cache memory chips.
This should be solvable, but also 1 crystal missing (bright spot in the middle) and the corrosion looks rather heavy...not much hope for this one at the moment.
