Computers For Sale
Here is a selection of computers that we are offering for sale (not)...
Wow! What a selection, heh?
Dual-Core Linux Special
CPU: AMD Athlon x2 4200+ Brisbane 65W (2.1GHz)
Motherboard: AsRock ALiveNF6P-VSTA (NVIDIA nForce 430 Chipset)
RAM: 2GB OCZ Performance "SLI Certified" dual-channel DDR2-6400 (4GB max.)
Video: Onboard GeForce 6150SE Integrated Video (PCIe x16 slot open)
HDD: 250GB 7200rpm SATA
Power Supply: Antec Basiq 350W ATX12V (FSP-made)
Case: Athenatech Black/Silver Mid-Tower ATX
OS: Your Choice Of: Ubuntu 8.10, Arch Linux or Sidux
$349.99
My Collection
Here are the more interesting specimens in my collection.
Tandy 1000 TL/2
Powered by the venerable 80286 processor running at a blistering 8 MHz, this beastie can play MODs through its nifty onboard parallel-port DAC and run old DOS games.
It's got 640KB of memory, a 512KB VGA card, an 80MB Quantum SCSI hard disk (connected to a hacked-up Seagate SCSI controller card) and a floggable character.
Only trouble is, it is an XT-class machine so it cannot use extended memory.
Commodore PC-20 II
This is one of the more interesting XT's I've come across.
Aside from the Commodore name and its, ahem, "unique" case design (both ugly and handsome at the same time), it's not much different from your typical XT-clone from the era. It uses an 8088 clocked at 7.16MHz (thanks to a turbo circuit that came wired onto the board from the factory), 640KB of memory, two 360KB 5.25" diskette drives and onboard CGA/Hercules video.
It also had a Seagate 30MB hard drive, but it experienced horrible stiction when I tried to power it up, so essentially it has NO hard drive.
IBM PS/2 Model 80 386
This gigantic, heavy beast I picked up from a computer-recycling business operating out of a warehouse. They had removed the hard drive and cable when I bought it, so I had to order a compatible cable off eBay. :S
Anyway, this behemoth has a 20Mhz 386DX, 4MB of RAM, onboard XGA video and a microchannel SCSI controller card. It also has a slightly sticky Quantum 80MB SCSI drive I pulled from a decommissioned Mac LC that popped its SMT capacitors.
I briefly tried the machine out with one of those weird little Cyrix 486DLC processors, which offered only a marginal speedup along with tons of hassle trying to get the thing to run stable (seems the early PS/2 Model 80's aren't overly fond of the Cyrix 486DLC processors.) I eventually gave up and stuck the old 386DX back in. Also, the floppy drive is kind of marginal; it has to be constantly cleaned and romanced in order to read disks.
Machines I Used to Own
I've long since junked these machines or traded them off, but I can claim (confess?) that I owned them at one point in my life.
Tandy 1000 HX
Ah, the old HX. This was my family's first ever IBM-compatible computer. It was, and still is, one of the most reliable, dependable and just plain un-killable computers ever made.
This was the culprit responsible for consuming the better part of my childhood, playing classic games such as Star Wars (the arcade vector graphics game), Piperun, Fleet Sweep, Beast, Alleycat, and a slew of others.
I also remember listening to the lovely "3-voice" squarewave music that the bundled GUI, DeskMate, played through its Music program. Another thing I remember vividly from this machine, was how you could actually hear the computer "thinking" over the built-in speaker! Due to noisy analog circuits, the machine would squeak, squawk and buzz through the onboard speaker, depending on what the anemic 7.16MHz 8088 processor was working on. I also remeber the distinct, soft purr the built-in Sony 720KB floppy drive emitted when it was active, a noise once heard, never forgotten.
We used this machine all the way up into the early 486 days, when the 384KB of RAM and lack of hard drive simply became too constrictive.
Tandy 1000 SL
This was our second IBM compatible computer. It was actually a fair step up from the HX, with an 8 MHz 8086 (the fully 16-bit cousin of the 8088), 640KB of RAM, low-density 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives, and a 20MB Miniscribe 8425 (one of the coolest sounding hard drives I've ever heard: it emitted a distinctly futuristic "sweep" noise whenever it was acccessing, a sound never forgotten once heard, and one that would not have been out of place in the movie Blade Runner.)
The previous owner of our particular machine, To us, it was pretty fast for its time... until the old Jeru.1808/Payday virus (the scourge of the mid 80's networks) kicked in, and brought the machine to a snail-on-Valium kind of crawl.
It finally met its untimely demise when we tried unsuccessfully to fix its viral problems: at the time we didn't know much about computers, so we actually tried messing with the electricals in an attempt to fix the massive viral damage! So we ditched it in favor of a much more modern machine, an AGI 386SX...
AGI 386SX
The picture to the left isn't of the actual machine; rather, it's from a somewhat similar-looking machine taken from the 'net. This was the machine I actually started honing my budding hardware tech skills on, for better or for worse.
We picked up this machine from someone who claimed to build computers from old, retired machines obtained from Boeing Surplus. We paid way too much for the danged thing ($200), considering what it was: it had a sluggish Intel 386SX running at 16MHz, 4 megs of RAM, a very nice Orchid ProDesigner II 1MB Super VGA video card (based on the excellent Tseng ET4000AX video chip), and the noisy, fragile Priam 40MB ID45H MFM hard drive.
It was also our first exposure to Windows 3.1. When we initially got it, the person loaded the wrong video driver onto the machine, so when we went to fire it up, it booted into black and white Windows! So we took it back, and had them install the correct VGA driver, which fixed the lack of color. Shortly afterward, the hard drive went out in a blaze of glory.
We took it to someone else who was tech-savvy, who transformed it into our 386DX tower. After that it became a 486SLC2/66, and then a 486DX2/66, and then a 5x86/133, and went through a few more upgrades until ultimately being junked.
