Forgive me for being stupid here, however I have come across and have in my possession now about 50 pieces of an old token ring router.
I opened them up just to see what was inside, turns out it's a 386 motherboard with the 386DX Intel chip and apparently has it's own bios in order to be able to run the token ring router functions. The keyboard port is blocked off from the outside, and there is no video card installed, so apparently the bios, when booted up, would run a program that would that would serve the token ring router functions.
The motherboard is a peak/DM board with about six or seven ISA slots. The units have 4 30 pin memory boards.
They look similar to this ebay item:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/141666616765
So I am wanting to find the correct bios to run these as regular computers.
I have not hooked one up yet because I will have to find an ISA video board.
But I would be interested in your thoughts, if these have any value, and if the bios could be purchased online already programmed into the bios chip so that I could just plug it into the board (after removing the old bios of course)
I am not under delusions of grandeur thinking that these units are a gold mine, I just simply want to find a way to convert them to standard 386 computers and sell them off to others who could find good uses for them.
The existing cases do not support bays for hard drives, floppies, and as stated, even the keyboard hole is missing.
I opened them up just to see what was inside, turns out it's a 386 motherboard with the 386DX Intel chip and apparently has it's own bios in order to be able to run the token ring router functions. The keyboard port is blocked off from the outside, and there is no video card installed, so apparently the bios, when booted up, would run a program that would that would serve the token ring router functions.
The motherboard is a peak/DM board with about six or seven ISA slots. The units have 4 30 pin memory boards.
They look similar to this ebay item:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/141666616765
So I am wanting to find the correct bios to run these as regular computers.
I have not hooked one up yet because I will have to find an ISA video board.
But I would be interested in your thoughts, if these have any value, and if the bios could be purchased online already programmed into the bios chip so that I could just plug it into the board (after removing the old bios of course)
I am not under delusions of grandeur thinking that these units are a gold mine, I just simply want to find a way to convert them to standard 386 computers and sell them off to others who could find good uses for them.
The existing cases do not support bays for hard drives, floppies, and as stated, even the keyboard hole is missing.