commodorejohn
Veteran Member
I dropped by the local computer recycler again in search of interesting things, and I came across a little 386-era minitower. (I didn't even know minitowers were a thing at this point, but then I was a Mac kid at the time.) It caught my eye for a couple reasons, aside from the fact that I was looking to grab a 386 system: it had some kind of cassette tape drive installed, a DE9-to-DB25 dongle for the serial port, and a full-length four-port Ethernet (or possibly serial-over-Ethernet?) card with a giant breakout box on the outside of the case giving four RJ45 jacks. (Crazily enough, it looks like there's space on the board for another four 16550 UARTs and associated logic! I can only imagine that somewhere out there is a breakout box even larger - and this one's already about the size of a 3.5" floppy drive, just dangling off the back of the computer...) This was very clearly not your ordinary home DOS box.
I haven't had a chance to fully investigate yet (it won't boot, as the CMOS battery is dead,) but the tape drive is hooked to an Everex controller card. According to Wikipedia Everex not only made tape-backup systems, but also file-server software and a version of Unix; given the monster network card and the serial cable (for hooking to an admin terminal?) I'm wondering if this wasn't the central server for someone's business LAN, back in the day. I was lucky in that the recycle-center folks forgot to remove the hard drive, as they customarily do, so I have the full system on hand; I'm looking forward to drive-spelunking if I can get it booting into whatever's currently installed on it.
The system itself doesn't look to be at all bad, either; it's based on this baby AT board, with a 33MHz Chips & Technologies Super 386 installed and some amount of cache (not sure what yet.) A maximum of 32MB RAM for a 386 is certainly nothing to sneeze at... It also came with this video card; a 1024x768 display in a 386-era system reinforces my theory that this is a Unix system...
So anyway, I've got a new battery on the way, and I'll post updates as I see if I can't work out what culture this artifact originated from and what significance it held there
I haven't had a chance to fully investigate yet (it won't boot, as the CMOS battery is dead,) but the tape drive is hooked to an Everex controller card. According to Wikipedia Everex not only made tape-backup systems, but also file-server software and a version of Unix; given the monster network card and the serial cable (for hooking to an admin terminal?) I'm wondering if this wasn't the central server for someone's business LAN, back in the day. I was lucky in that the recycle-center folks forgot to remove the hard drive, as they customarily do, so I have the full system on hand; I'm looking forward to drive-spelunking if I can get it booting into whatever's currently installed on it.
The system itself doesn't look to be at all bad, either; it's based on this baby AT board, with a 33MHz Chips & Technologies Super 386 installed and some amount of cache (not sure what yet.) A maximum of 32MB RAM for a 386 is certainly nothing to sneeze at... It also came with this video card; a 1024x768 display in a 386-era system reinforces my theory that this is a Unix system...
So anyway, I've got a new battery on the way, and I'll post updates as I see if I can't work out what culture this artifact originated from and what significance it held there
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