My collection of Personal Computers

To date I have alot of parts and not very many functional machines. I seem to have a part for every use but everything is all strewn about. I will try to cover all the functional machines I have and then get into the parts I have.

My Daily Driver

This one is my main PC I use for Windows 95, e-mail and internet. It is a:

It is a good setup for basic internet and most pre-'95 games work fine with it. I really want something more modern but I'll take what I can afford for the time being. I put a CPU fan on the processor and it seems to make the processor run cooler than with the heat sink alone. I want to add a second hard drive but would have to sacrifice my CD-ROM drive to install it which I do not want to do. Considering it started out as a 4mb w/Win3.1, Std VGA card, 1.44mb floppy, 520mb HDD, keyb, mouse with no monitor it has come a long way from a basic machine to be a useful, albeit sometimes slow Windows 95 internet machine.

The 386

I currently have a functional Everex 386SX/20 Motherboard in a clone desktop case with a 100MB Quantum drive, 8megs of memory, 1.44mb floppy and a VGA monitor. It runs my older games just fine and works great with Windows 3.1 installed.

The 286

I also have a generic 286 motherboard running at 12mhz with 1mb of memory, a 250mb hard drive, 720kb floppy, an EGA video card and monitor. The larger drive went in this one because I use this one with text-based internet and also to just try old programs on it. The motherboard must be incredibly rugged as I found it in a box of mixed cards and bought it for $5. The whole setup is in an XT case which was a tight fit because of the drive bays and I had to cut out one of the stands from one of the bays to make it fit.

It is definitely the cheapest machine I have put together, and it has not failed me yet, except for the CMOS battery which is pretty much dead.

XT #1

This was the first machine I bought, and it cost me $32 in total for the machine, amber monochrome/cga display, and original XT keyboard. The machine was all original inside but the ST-225 drive was long dead. It has went on to become an under construction piece and now has an original Green phosphor IBM Mono monitor to go with the keyboard and machine. I am going to assemble it when I have some free time and make it a show piece since all the parts are original. If I can find a second 8-bit controller after I find one for my Olivetti Portable I will try to put a replacement ST-225 drive in and then install DOS 3.3 and make it into an identical copy of what would have been sold when it was originally bought.

Some pics of my XT

XT #2

XT#2 came with a ST-225 drive that WAS functional. I use the term WAS because it did work for about a month and then the drive crashed and took the card with it. I have since learned that ST-225 drives like to kill your controller when they die and thus leave you out of both items. I still have a functional ST-238R drive and 2 ST-225 drives that I have not yet tested. XT#2's case is now the home of my 286 machine and the motherboard is going to be a spare for my original if anything ever goes wrong with it. Both of my XT's came with 2 360k 5.25" drives each, so needless to say I have a good stock of these drives if you include the 2 from the Olivetti also.

Olivetti Portable

To read about this machine, click on this link as it tells the whole story.

IBM PS/2 Model 30 8086

This machine is all original except for the monitor, which is a monochrome monitor hooked up to a seperate card. The machine has a built in 15-pin analog plug for a MCGA monitor, but it has been disabled to run the mono monitor. The equipment, though, is complete and functional, including a 20MB hard drive and 720k 3.5" floppy. There is also a card for an external drive installed although I don't have it. The keyboard is the full-size AT type and the mouse is original with the PS/2 ports which is the machine where the term originated with.

To be honest, I do not like this machine very much. It does not like it when I try to put another video card in and internal modems won't work with it. The hard drive/floppy use a different cable and there are no power cables involved as the one cable provides it all. It is not fun for a tinkerer like me for this machine to be so un-upgradeable. I will probably trade this machine for another XT class machine to salvage that machine for it's 8-bit card and hard drive to use in my Olivetti Portable. It makes a good word processing machine for someone that does not need state of the art, though.

The cards I have

I have a bunch so I will try to cover all them here:

Links to my other computer-related pages

A page on the early IBM computers (PC/XT/AT,etc.)
Programming Page
My Olivetti Portable PC Page

...and more to come in the future as I complete them



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