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got a new complete 8088 system

M

Mike Chambers

Veteran Member
Joined
Sep 2, 2006
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hi all! i got a new vintage machine today, woo hoo! for free, too.

i met an older guy who had a problem. at his church, they had an old 8088 system with their 5000+ membership registry that has been building up since the mid 80's on that thing. apparently the lady who operated the machine just died about a month ago, and nobody at the church has any idea how to get the database off of that old thing.

i told him i'd do it cheap and if i get to keep the machine, which he obviously didnt have any use for. he was delighted, so i got the machine and so now it is here. it looks like all the data on it is stored using DBASE3... i think i can manage to get the data out into text files but if anybody has some good info on how to best do this, let me know!

anyway, i have the monitor, keyboard, dot matrix printer (lol), and a whole bunch of random disks with it. it's a neat machine, i'll post some pics up later. looks like an IBM clone from a company called "BMI" and even the BMI logo is made to look like the old IBM logo.

EDIT: pics on page 2

-mike
 
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the graphics card, btw, is an IBM monochrome graphics adapter(integrated parallel port) with a 9-pin video out!
 
Congrats dude, I've been feeling sort of the same way since my 640K upgrade for my Half/Clone IBM XT came in this week. I thought it was gonna be hard, but it turned out to be really easy, plus I think now I understand how memory is divvied up on those old "9 individual chips per bank" machines.

And it's nice to be able to use Windows 1.0 for once again too.
 
awesome, what was in there before? 256 or 512 KB? what makes you call it a "half/clone" btw??

oh and i've never actually used windows 1.0!! it looks pretty useless in the screen shots haha. i did install windows 3.0 on my other 8088 once. it worked but with 640 KB of RAM you can't do much other than run calculator or notepad lol. running write instead of notepad will push it to it's limits!!
 
Mike Chambers said:
awesome, what was in there before? 256 or 512 KB? what makes you call it a "half/clone" btw??

oh and i've never actually used windows 1.0!! it looks pretty useless in the screen shots haha. i did install windows 3.0 on my other 8088 once. it worked but with 640 KB of RAM you can't do much other than run calculator or notepad lol. running write instead of notepad will push it to it's limits!!
Click to expand...

It's called a half clone because it's a modified IBM PC XT 5160 1st edition motherboard in a 1984 SongCheer XT Clone chassis with a 150 Watt generic PSU. I bought the case New Old Stock off of E-bay a few years ago for a "Pentium in XT case" project, and ran out of purpose for the Pentium.

I wanted to try out Windows 1.01 because it was pretty interesting, I might make a video of it for Youtube showing off how silly it actually is. I'm toying with putting 3.0 on this thing as well.

Tonight I'm going to see if I can put it on leetirc using an EXP16 ethernet card I need to test out (it has an 8-bit mode), so far it gets a good thing, but I need to setup the ROM in the card.
 
Here's a picture of this thing, just to show what I've done with it....it's the one on the right...

286andXTtogether.jpg
 
Mad-Mike said:
It's called a half clone because it's a modified IBM PC XT 5160 1st edition motherboard in a 1984 SongCheer XT Clone chassis with a 150 Watt generic PSU. I bought the case New Old Stock off of E-bay a few years ago for a "Pentium in XT case" project, and ran out of purpose for the Pentium.

I wanted to try out Windows 1.01 because it was pretty interesting, I might make a video of it for Youtube showing off how silly it actually is. I'm toying with putting 3.0 on this thing as well.

Tonight I'm going to see if I can put it on leetirc using an EXP16 ethernet card I need to test out (it has an 8-bit mode), so far it gets a good thing, but I need to setup the ROM in the card.
Click to expand...

let me know if you make a youtube video of that! i've actually got every version of windows from 1.01 to 3.11 for workgroups on an "all windows" 2-disc DVD set :cool: if you need some hard to find specific version let me know!

let me know how leetirc runs! a lot of people seem to be using my program. woot! and thats the fun of programming, knowing people are getting use out of your work. :D

time to gets me some sleep for now, i have to work in the morning! night.
 
Nice find Mike, we'll be waiting for some pictures and more info :p

I already have a video of Windows 1.04 on YouTube... although at that time I didn't have a mouse attached. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItuymzxNUYM

I have another one I've been meaning to upload for ages (needs editing), of Windows 1.04 in colour on my EGA Amstrad 8086.

I also put it on my 5150 (with Hercules mono graphics) yesterday!

Windows 1 is completely useless. :D
 
Hey! Looks like I'm not going to bother with Win 1.04. Even worse than 2.x, as expected. 2.x is about useless too. You could do more with pctools at the time.
 
Did you figure out how to deal with dBase III? I have a running copy of dBase4 that I can probably read the data with.
 
If dBase III is installed on the machine, just use it to create a text file.

If you can't navigate through the help menus (type ASSIST at the dot prompt to get to the menus) let me know and I can tell you exactly what command to use at the dot prompt to create a comma-separated, tab delimited or fixed length text file. It's just the export command, I think, but there are a lot of options. I still use the dBase languages, and III+ is the version I have on my XT, so I'll just look it up for you if the menu system doesn't provide you with the appropriate options.

It should be noted, however, that the dBase file format was such a standard that most modern applications will read those files directly. For example, Excel will import these files directly, then you can use a sort to index them.
 
Mike Chambers said:
let me know how leetirc runs!
Click to expand...

Leetirc ran pretty well until it actually came to connecting to the server, it would get most of the way, then the graphics would go black and white, and the computer would hang saying.......

OUT OF MEMORY Cannot Load COMMAND.COM System Halted

So apparently, I'm running out of RAM.

I have some new fish to fry though, right now I'm trying to get either a Sharp JY-750 Magneto-Optical Drive or an Iomega SCSI ZIP Drive to work on the computer, but to no avail. There's a thread about it in the PC section. I'm still learning how to work with a SCSI drive setup.
 
FWIW, I have a complete copy of dBase III+, for postage cost, if ya want it.

I agree, if all else fails, try 'comma-delimited' format, it was pretty standard in the day, and is still supported by many newer database progs.

--T
 
dongfeng wrote:

Windows 1 is completely useless. :D

Yeah GEM is heaps better on an 8088, mainly because it was written on one for that purpose.

Did anybody else use to joke about how "Alley Cat" was Windows v1?! ;-) Only thing there is "Alley Cat" is IBM, though Microsoft like to buy things out.
 
i took some photos of it, guys. sorry about the quality. my digital camera was $18 at walmart :eek: (my good camera broke)

i have the case off atm, i guess thats good anyway so i could take some pics of the innards. i'm visiting my dad tomorrow, i'm sure he'll let me borrow his camera for some better pics.

i know some more details about the computer now. 8088 @ 4.77 Mhz, 640 KB RAM, and the motherboard is labeled "PC II SYSTEM BOARD" mfg in 1986.

Photo002.jpg


Photo003.jpg

^ the big card furthest from the camera is a monochrome graphics/printer adapter... you'll also notice just one 360 KB floppy disk. there were two, but i took one out and put it in my amd64 so i can transfer files to this thing easily. the card second furthest from the camera is a 3Com 3C503 ethernet adapter i stuck in there :)

Photo004.jpg

^ MiniScribe hard drive manufactured jan. 2, 1986

Photo006.jpg

^ original amber phosphor monitor and the original keyboard
 
oh and thanks for the good info on dbase3 guys!! yeah i opened up OpenOffice Base and it does indeed support .DBF files!!!! :D
 
here it is with the case on... notice the "BMI" logo in the second pic. uber blatent rip off of the "IBM" logo!

case001.jpg


bmi001.jpg
 
My ol' friend 'Time-Release Bill' used to run a BMI system. It was a flip-top case, which I always envied, but I haven't seen another one till now. Is yours for sale?

--T
 
Terry Yager said:
My ol' friend 'Time-Release Bill' used to run a BMI system. It was a flip-top case, which I always envied, but I haven't seen another one till now. Is yours for sale?

--T
Click to expand...

i'd rather not sell it. at least not now. it's a fun toy! sorry. maybe in the future, you never know. i promise it'll be taken good care of in case i ever do decide to sell it, though!

i just ran a full hard disk scan on it and every single block on the disk in error-free still!
 
Ok, but, I've got a nice lil' Kaypro 10 sitting here with your name on it, should you change your mind. (Hell, I'd swap it for just the badge, if you could remove it without damaging it).

--T
 
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