resman
Veteran Member
First off, I'm not a fan of the 80286; not a particularly compelling CPU architecture to me. However, I bought this Deskpro 286 many years ago as a non-functional machine to use for parts for my other DeskPros. I tried to revive it some time ago - a shorted cap on the power rail kept the power supply crowbarring. Snipped the cap and the power supply didn't crowbar, but something smoked, so I put it back on the shelf. Until yesterday. I pulled out out, found another cap shorted on the powere rail and snipped it, too. This time the damn thing booted.
What to do with a DeskPro 286? It's not as retro cool as the DeskPro 8086 or groundbreaking like the DeskPro 386, so I first needed to learn more about the DeskPro 286 features.
It turns out the computer I have is actually a version 2 of the DeskPro 286 that came out in 1987, a 12 MHz system rather than the 8 MHz of version 1. It was horribly expensive at over 7 grand for a fully loaded 2.1 MB (all on the motherboard) and 40 MB hard drive. This one even had a 70 MB drive, but try as I might, it failed to work. I could see where it had been opened up in the past. It sounded like grinding bearing death. Mind you, this computer was built after the DeskPro 386 was released and is much slower, but only a little cheaper. Other 286 machines on the market during this time were almost as fast (the AST was actually faster) and all were much less expensive. So who was buying this thing?
I decided to set it up as an uber-DOS machine with Windows 3.0 to show off the extended memory of the 286. Without running OS/2 or Xenix, it isn't clear the best way to take advantage of this memory. But it needed a hard drive. It has a multi-function card with ATA interface, but the old, hard-coded drive types wouldn't match anything I had in the pile of misfit drives. Attached to my XT-IDE in one of my DeskPro 8086s is a 20 GB drive (8 GB useable) that I decided to re-purpose to the DeskPro 286. I didn't want to use the XT-IDE interface card as the AT controller card is faster. However, I found the drive overlay manager programs choked on the large drive size. Since I was putting a network card in the machine, I went with the Universal BIOS programmed onto an EEPROM installed on the network card to provide the large disk support and matching the capabilities of the XT-IDE. Hard drive I/O is very fast with this setup.
There is more tweaking to do to maximize free conventional memory, but it's working nicely right now. I now have the clean sweep of the original DeskPro form factor: DeskPro 8086, Deskpro 286/12 and DeskPro 386/25. Obligatory glamour shot:
What to do with a DeskPro 286? It's not as retro cool as the DeskPro 8086 or groundbreaking like the DeskPro 386, so I first needed to learn more about the DeskPro 286 features.
It turns out the computer I have is actually a version 2 of the DeskPro 286 that came out in 1987, a 12 MHz system rather than the 8 MHz of version 1. It was horribly expensive at over 7 grand for a fully loaded 2.1 MB (all on the motherboard) and 40 MB hard drive. This one even had a 70 MB drive, but try as I might, it failed to work. I could see where it had been opened up in the past. It sounded like grinding bearing death. Mind you, this computer was built after the DeskPro 386 was released and is much slower, but only a little cheaper. Other 286 machines on the market during this time were almost as fast (the AST was actually faster) and all were much less expensive. So who was buying this thing?
I decided to set it up as an uber-DOS machine with Windows 3.0 to show off the extended memory of the 286. Without running OS/2 or Xenix, it isn't clear the best way to take advantage of this memory. But it needed a hard drive. It has a multi-function card with ATA interface, but the old, hard-coded drive types wouldn't match anything I had in the pile of misfit drives. Attached to my XT-IDE in one of my DeskPro 8086s is a 20 GB drive (8 GB useable) that I decided to re-purpose to the DeskPro 286. I didn't want to use the XT-IDE interface card as the AT controller card is faster. However, I found the drive overlay manager programs choked on the large drive size. Since I was putting a network card in the machine, I went with the Universal BIOS programmed onto an EEPROM installed on the network card to provide the large disk support and matching the capabilities of the XT-IDE. Hard drive I/O is very fast with this setup.
There is more tweaking to do to maximize free conventional memory, but it's working nicely right now. I now have the clean sweep of the original DeskPro form factor: DeskPro 8086, Deskpro 286/12 and DeskPro 386/25. Obligatory glamour shot: