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First clone you built from scratch?

I did buy my first PC on the 14. april 1987.
At a price of 1265$ , it contained :
8Mhz 8088 motherboard, one floppy drive, 640Kb RAM, cga card, multifrunction card, keyboard and ERZO dos 3.20..
But NO crt and no HD ! ;)
/cimonvg
 
Define "ground up"...

I essentially rebuilt a PC XT in 1987-89 timeframe, full set of upgrades, everything but the chassis, power supply, and motherboard. (Had a 286 upgrade in there.)

Same with a nominally-store-bought 486 from 1990 - completely unrecognizable other than chassis by 1993.

1994 would likely have been my very first "from scratch" build - Cyrix 6x86 CPU, 16 MB RAM (upgraded to 48 MB the next year - I've always had WAY more than the standard for the era,) generic Tseng ET4000/W32, Sound Blaster AWE32 with RAM upgrade.

Is it bad that I can name every part of every computer I've considered my primary computer since 1985? Same with all of my cars.
 
It was around 1989, I used an old clone XT case with 386 XT sized MB, 766 MB FH SCSI, 1.2 MB FDD, Viper Tape drive, Paradise SVGA card, and SVGA monitor. Most of the parts were transferred from my IBM 5150 which had the Intel Inboard 386 card, but not enough slots and would not run Windows 3.0, not even in real mode.
 
Nothing to spectacular. Went from a store bought 8088 Laser XT clone to a Intel 386 DX 33, Tyan motherboard I think, mini tower case with MHz indicator and one of those cheesy fake 3 1/2" floppy drive bay covers. 16 MB RAM, some type of Trident VGA card, 104 MB Western Digital HD and a 15" Packard Bell CRT.

Later I upgraded with an Evergreen Rev to 486 processor, added the Microsoft Windows Sound System, a Revel FM radio card, external modem and a 2X Sony CD ROM drive.
 
Built my first in 1986. It was a "Turbo" 8Mhz XT clone with 640K, CGA video, 360K floppy and a 20M HD. Had a really cool Taiwanese case with a hinged top. Press buttons on either side of the case and the top opened like the hood of a car. I went to a computer show and bought all the parts in one fell swoop. It had an ERSO BIOS in it originally but I later copied the ROM chips from an IBM XT so my clone had an IBM BIOS complete with ROM BASIC.
 
Lets see...I don't think I've ever built one completely of new parts.

The 1st system I did build was a HP Vectra VE that I got in parts after a computer class (we all did). They were originally 400 MHz Pentium II, 64 MB ram, 20 gig hard drive, CD-ROM and whatever random video card was in it (some ATI Rage 128, some Trident cards, some old nVidia cards, ya never knew).

I had built mine but it felt somewhat sluggish, so I threw a Powerleap IP3/T adapter in it with a 1 GHz Pentium III, put 512 MB ram in it (finding a 256 MB+2x128 MB ram modules is easy for PC100\133 ram) and a 24x CD burner. Felt so much faster than those 400 MHz Pentium IIs.

As for one that isn't entirely OEM with an OEM case...I think that would be a...it's either a Dual AMD Athlon MP 3200+ system in a Gateway P5-100 case (kinda killed that board after a while using the stock Gateway PSU and a +12v 4-pin CPU power adapter and no 2nd motherboard power connector) or a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 HT desktop in a card board box :p.

The 1st "old" computer I built was a Shuttle HOT-433 motherboard, 66 MHz 486 DX2 with 16 MB ram, 1 gig HDD, 1.44 MB floppy and a S3 Trio 64V+ video card. Never did anything with that as I didn't have a keyboard or keyboard adapter for it. It's now been upgraded and is currently a 66 MHz 486 DX2-66 (looking at getting a DX4-100), 32 MB ram, 2.1 GB IBM SCSI HDD, 12X SCSI CD-RW drive, Tekram DC-390U SCSI controller, 1.44 MB floppy, 360K floppy, 3Com 10/100 PCI network adapter that likes to run at 10 Mb/s (even though it's using CAT6 cable to a 100 Mb/s switch) and still has the Trio 64V+, as not much is needed for text-only.
 
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my first new purchase build was a 486slc40 with 387sx mathco processor and 16mb of 30 pin simms... think the memory cost right at $600 in 1994...
 
mcsew2k said:
It was around 1989, I used an old clone XT case with 386 XT sized MB, 766 MB FH SCSI, 1.2 MB FDD, Viper Tape drive, Paradise SVGA card, and SVGA monitor. Most of the parts were transferred from my IBM 5150 which had the Intel Inboard 386 card, but not enough slots and would not run Windows 3.0, not even in real mode.
Click to expand...

I still have the 5150 and Inboard386 card. I have restored the 5150 to all OEM IBM parts and I put the Inboard386 in an XT 5160 I recently purchased.

I just looked in the rafters in my garage and found this very same clone XT case. I since then transferred the above parts into a tower case, then eventually sold the unit.
 
From scratch--as in starting off with bare PCB, a bucket of components and a soldering iron? There were a few PC kits--and lots of 8-bit kits (the MITS Altair was one such--I recall it took an entire weekend and a lot of coffee to get it built).

Or are you talking about taking someone's already-built board and sticking it into someone else's ready-built case?
 
Chuck(G) said:
From scratch--as in starting off with bare PCB, a bucket of components and a soldering iron? There were a few PC kits--and lots of 8-bit kits (the MITS Altair was one such--I recall it took an entire weekend and a lot of coffee to get it built).

Or are you talking about taking someone's already-built board and sticking it into someone else's ready-built case?
Click to expand...

The first PC I've built from already built board / case / etc. was back in 1991 and it was a Soviet ES1841. The company I worked for as a student bought few tens of these machines new in boxes, but many of them were DoA, mostly due to low quality connectors and probably rough transportation/handling. So I spent some time switching around components to get more working computers. For historical record, while ES1841 was very compatible with IBM PC/XT it had some major differences (so IMHO it can't be called a PC clone). It used KR1810VM86 or Intel 8086 CPUs (interestingly enough some machines had original Intel CPU and some had soviet counterpart, 8086 looked funny in metric sockets). It didn't have a motherboard or ISA connectors, instead it used a backplane and CPU board, a couple of memory (512 KiB and 128 KiB if I remember correctly) boards, hard drive controller board, CGA-compatible display controller board (with user loadable fonts). All these boards had similar size.

In 1992 I built my first "real" PC clone - AMD 386DX-40 based machine, as far as I remember with 2 MiB of RAM (8 x 256 SIMMs) and a 108 MB HDD.

In 2011 I build a 8088 PC really from scratch - from designing schematics and PCB to soldering components on a board... Well I used some 3rd party components - VGA and sound card, disk controller, floppy drives, power supply, etc.
 
If Heathkits count I built an ET-3400 trainer. Used a 6800 CPU and had a whopping 256 Bytes! Not KB or MB but bytes of RAM. All programming done through a hex keyboard. Took me 2 days to complete it. That was back in 1977! Had a blast with it and still had it until I recently sold it to a member here.
 
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