Score! I finally found my ultimate DOS box!

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Tombstone
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Score! I finally found my ultimate DOS box!

Post by Tombstone »

I was working a 3 week contract job, doing a 700 Win XP workstation roll-out, when I noticed a pile of old equipment on a palette in the back of the warehouse. Curious, I gave the pile of old junk a close examination. There she was, hiding under a busted Token Ring hub and an old line printer. A Mid Tower PC/AT with a red Dymo label on the front that said "386/40". A bright sunburst appeared over my head, and I heard the sound of angels.

The IT Department Manager let me take the machine home for only $10.00. I was told the machine had been on the palette for about 5 years, and had been brought down from an office where it had been sitting, disconnected and unused, since before anyone in the IT Department had started working there. The IT Manager had been with the company for 14 years.

Once safely home, I hooked her up to my KVM switch, and hit the button. She fired up just like brand new. I discovered she had 4 MB RAM in the form of 4 1MB 30-Pin SIMMs, so I ran to my junkpile and found four more 1MB 30-Pin SIMMs and bumped her up to 8MB.

She has one HD, a old double-height SCSI of 1GB in size, hooked up to an Always IN-2000 ISA SCSI Adapter (along with both a 3 1/2" and a 5 1/4" floppy drive). The ISA VGA card is a Western Digital WD90C11-LR (I didn't even know WD made VGA cards!) I pulled my cherished Sound Blaster CT3990 (with it's 2MB onboard DRAM) and an IBM 8x CD-ROM out of an old 486/33 machine I had been working on, and after resolving some Base I/O Resource conflicts between the SB and SCSI cards, everything works great. I had to hook the CD-ROM up to the CT3990's IDE interface, since she has no IDE I/O card.

I ordered a brand new Belkin Black Serial Mouse from HardwareCooling.com, and I'm anxiously waiting for it to arrive.

This is the exact CPU level of machine I've been searching for for several years now, and just like that, it sort of falls into my lap. Ain't life grand?
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WishboneDawn
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Post by WishboneDawn »

Congrats!

That's an awesome find! :thumbsup:
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