Post by Rick on Mar 15, 2024 17:15:54 GMT -6
Back in early 1993, I really did not know what I was buying for a computer. I had some software passed on to me by our local circuit board manufacturing house and I needed a PC to run it. After spending a couple of near frustrating evenings at my friend's house using the software trying to design a real simple interface board, this ended up being the reason why I went out to buy a computer for myself.
As you can see by the pictures, the specs were:
486SX25 Processor
4MB RAM
No Secondary Cache
130 MB Hard Drive
512 KB Video Card (Oak OTI-087)
Mini tower with 1.44MB Floppy Drive, 14" Monitor, Mouse, and Keyboard.
All running on MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1
The price tag was about $1,700.00.
I brought it home, plugged it in, turned it on, and lo and behold, it booted up directly into Windows. I played with it moving the mouse around on the screen and eventually found the little built-in tutorial under help on how to use Windows. That was my start to personal computing. In the first year of owning the system, I was on that very steep learning curve on how to use and maintain my system, learning how to re-install DOS and Windows when I screwed up doing something that I wasn't supposed to be doing. Learn I did, and I became very good at it, with a lot of help from my friends and neighbors along with the "Computer Doctor," who was the guy I went to for upgrades and maintenance on my system.
My first upgrade to the systen were a HP Laserjet 4L printer. Then it was a Sound Blaster Pro Sound card interfaced with a Sony CDU-31A Dual Speed CD-ROM. I later added in a 270 MB hard drive, a 5.25' floppy drive, and an internal FAX/Modem card. Eventually, I went out and spent yet another $1000.00 and bought 16-MB RAM to add into the system thus bringing the system RAM up to 20-MB. I wasn't done yet as I was looking to upgrade to an overdrive processor that my system was supposed to be capable of doing. I was at about a year and a half into owning my computer at this point when the "Computer Doctor" said I would be better off to upgrade my motherboard and adapter cards to a Vesa Local Bus system along with a brand new DX2-66 processor.
I transferred what I could onto the new motherboard and sold off my old motherboard along with the appropriate adapter cards to a friend of mine who was in need of a secondary system at the time.
A few years later, my old motherboard and the adapter cards came back to being in my possession again, tough by this time, I did not really have a need for them, so the parts basically went into storage up until this past year.
I still have the original tower case, which has survived several upgrades over the years, only having to replace the power supply fan once. Being my main system, I used to leave the system on 24/7. It has done very well up until I retired the system a number of years back, only to fire it up occasionally time to time to see if it still worked.
More Recently, I thought it would be nice to re-assemble everything back to the configuration I had in 1993/94.
First order of business was to fix the Dallas Real Time Clock dead battery problem. I got out the old Dremel tool and ground out the side of the chip to access the internal battery connections so that I could solder in a replacement battery. The procedure to do this can be found here: www.mcamafia.de/mcapage0/dsrework.htm
Next, was to remove the upgrade parts from the old tower and re-install the old parts I had from that time period. That was pretty straight forward as I have done this many times just doing upgrades on the system over the years. Though I still have the original 130MB and 270MB hard drives from that time period, I thought I would just go with a single 420MB unit. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my old motherboard could actually support drives upto 8-GB's when I was experimenting with other drives in the system. Of all the other aging cards and peripherals in the system, it was only the old Sony CDU-31A CD-ROM drive that gave up the ghost. The capacitors inside decided to leak out corroding the circuit boards inside. This was most likely due to the fact that I traded out the sound card and drive many upgrades ago and had them sitting in storage too. In keeping with the vintage of the machine, I did find in my collection an old Sony quad speed IDE CD-ROM to put in as a replacement along a simple stand IDE card for this purpose. Putting the drive onto the main IDE controller caused some problems when I was trying out the 32-bit disk and file accessing mode in Windows for Workgroups.
As my system stands now, the specs are:
486SX25 Processor
20MB RAM
128KB Secondary Cache
420 MB Hard Drive
1024 KB Video Card (Oak OTI-087)
Mini tower with 1.44MB and 1.2MB Floppy Drives, Sound Blaster Pro audio card, Sony CDU-77 CR-ROM Drive,
Monitor, Mouse, Keyboard - Not original as these wore out quite some time ago.
The software installed is running on the original MS DOS-5 and Windows 3.1 I had at the time. I've upgraded the DOS to 6,22. I've installed pretty much everything I had for software at the time plus additional stuff I've acquired and/or purchased over the years that can still run under Windows 3.1. Though the software is coming off my aged floppy disk collection, I've only had three disks that have failed from the years of storage. Fortunately, I had backups for some of the disks and the web to go find others. One such good web site for getting old disk images is: winworldpc.com/library/operating-systems
Unfortunately, I do have one disk in my OS/2 Warp 3 installation disks that has also gone bad, so I was not able to install this earlier version of OS/2 Warp onto my system. I do have a latter version of OS/2 Warp Connect, which installed onto the system with little problem.
All-in-all, I am very pleased how well this system is performing after all these years. CorelDraw! 5 is about the only program that is showing some performance issues, though it did come out later time period than what my old system did. I know that particular program actually worked very well when it was on my 486-DX2-66 system back in the day which in itself, served me very well up into the Windows 95 era and beyond, at which point it was eventually upgraded a 486-DX4-100, Pentium 133, then a Pentium 233-MMX system. These upgrades mostly came about because of upgrading my secondary system that I used to use for gaming and to test other operating systems on.