NathanAllan
Veteran Member
Today was interesting, my neighbor gave me three computers, the most interesting was this DECstation 320sx.
It has a bad hard drive, but booted up to the bios. It's complete, has a 1.44mb drive, will very soon have a 5.25" drive, and I am seriously thinking of replacing the hdd with one of those nifty little IDE-SD adapters (the other one is still up in the air, waiting on parts still). I have a video uploading of it now, it's taki nits time to upload.
Anyway, the other two machines are a PB 386 that has already been partially stripped, and a custom built 486 with a PCChips mainboard in it. The bios is shot, it's giving garbage data in the shape of a bios setup screen. It's a pretty neat board, it has what looks like VESA slots in it with two cards in there. I might or might not mess with that machine, getting a-hold of a BIOS flash utility on a floppy disk is near impossible for me now.
The DECstation is the best of the bunch. It's got some 72-pin simm ram, with room for 30-pin simms in it, I've already set the 5.25 drive in place just haven't hooked anything up. The harddrives in the other two might help this one out, so I'll do that before I order anything else (thinking of the SD adapter).
It's a really nice machine, has some upgrade options. I'm going to see if the sound card from the other one (CT1600) can be made to work in it. There are three free ISA slots. The DECstation is what I will concentrate on. The other two are far less interesting.
/edit Just took some pictures, and I was mistaken about the memory, it's all 30-pin simms, I was thinking of one of the other machines. Pics coming!!
/editagain pics!! https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.3954736475929.2136108.1505717430&type=3
It has a bad hard drive, but booted up to the bios. It's complete, has a 1.44mb drive, will very soon have a 5.25" drive, and I am seriously thinking of replacing the hdd with one of those nifty little IDE-SD adapters (the other one is still up in the air, waiting on parts still). I have a video uploading of it now, it's taki nits time to upload.
Anyway, the other two machines are a PB 386 that has already been partially stripped, and a custom built 486 with a PCChips mainboard in it. The bios is shot, it's giving garbage data in the shape of a bios setup screen. It's a pretty neat board, it has what looks like VESA slots in it with two cards in there. I might or might not mess with that machine, getting a-hold of a BIOS flash utility on a floppy disk is near impossible for me now.
The DECstation is the best of the bunch. It's got some 72-pin simm ram, with room for 30-pin simms in it, I've already set the 5.25 drive in place just haven't hooked anything up. The harddrives in the other two might help this one out, so I'll do that before I order anything else (thinking of the SD adapter).
It's a really nice machine, has some upgrade options. I'm going to see if the sound card from the other one (CT1600) can be made to work in it. There are three free ISA slots. The DECstation is what I will concentrate on. The other two are far less interesting.
/edit Just took some pictures, and I was mistaken about the memory, it's all 30-pin simms, I was thinking of one of the other machines. Pics coming!!
/editagain pics!! https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.3954736475929.2136108.1505717430&type=3
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