Andrew T.
Experienced Member
Although I'm partial to Apple's designs as well, my "gateway drug" into older computers back in the late 1990s was a genuine IBM Personal Computer AT. Well, sort of genuine:
By the time I got it, this AT had already turned into something of a bastard mule. The case was from 1985, but the motherboard was a small-planar 512k version from 1987. The disk controller was the only expansion card that was original: The other slots were taken up by a pair of generic serial-parallel adapters, an ATI Graphics Solution SC video card, and an AST Rampage(?) board that brought the memory to a full meg. I didn't have the keys for the case lock and didn't have the original disks or manuals; though I did have books that explained more than I wanted to know about the system and was able to alter the CMOS setup with a third-party utility.
The original gray floppy drives had been replaced by a black-panel Tandon 360k unit and a Teac 1.44MB. At first I presumed that I had a 1.2MB drive (This is an AT, after all!), and proceeded in throwing half a dozen "bad" 1.2MB floppies away since they couldn't be read by the drive. Live and learn.
My favorite part of the computer may have been the tactile sensations of working with the parts inside. The AT case was gigantic, well-finished, and heavy as a rock. Cards and drives slid into place and fit together with the ease and precision of Lego bricks, and there was lots of wiggle room left to feel around everything within. I've never experienced a case as pleasurable to work on as the genuine IBM AT either before or since.
My dream was to use the machine and push it to its limits: Get a larger hard disk, and store more programs. Better yet get a Zip drive, attach it to the second parallel port. Get an EGA video card and 5154 monitor, so I can render a GUI and play a decent library of games. Get a dot-matrix printer. Get an old copy of Quattro Pro or 1-2-3, and crunch numbers with the 80287. Get a modem, and connect to the Internet. I also wanted to replace some of the third-party parts with Big Blue IBM originals...maybe even get a copy of OS/2 1.x while I'm at it. Alas, that was not to be. Craigslist didn't exist, eBay was in its infancy, message boards were primitive affairs, and I was a penniless kid living in rural West Virginia where there was little hope of any local collaboration around. How could I find more parts? The answer to that was simple: I didn't.
Initially, I had a weathered CGA monitor attached that had originally shipped with some Zenith Data Systems clone of the same era. It had severe screen burn and displayed text messages on itself even when it was turned off. One day I was adjusting the pots in the rear, and one of them promptly disintegrated and set the hold askew. Without a working digital monitor, I wasn't able to use the system. Some months later I was able to scrounge a third-party VGA card with an onboard BIOS that allowed it to be compatible with an AT, and I was able to use it again...and promptly discovered that the battery had gone dead. Finding a replacement CMOS battery seemed to be as difficult to me at the time as finding a CGA monitor, and I eventually resorted to wires running to a six-volt flashlight lantern outside the case. And it still wasn't enough juice to keep the system time.
The story after that is somewhat brief: It was the sore subject of periodic moves, and just sat around getting rare and infrequent use until 2008. Once I replaced the motherboard with one from a generic 486...then a couple weeks later I had a change of heart and put all the "original" parts back in place. I posed it with a PS/1 monitor for the picture above, but that didn't work with the system. Finally the time came to simplify, and I gave it away.
Since my IBM exercises of the late 1990s were more or less prompted by nostalgia, it feels weird that I now feel nostalgic over that nostalgia. It also feels very weird to realize that the Pentium III box I'm typing this message on is actually older now, year for year, than that AT was then. I still have one of the ISA I/O cards from the AT working inside my PIII computer, though, so at least a little part of it lives on!
By the time I got it, this AT had already turned into something of a bastard mule. The case was from 1985, but the motherboard was a small-planar 512k version from 1987. The disk controller was the only expansion card that was original: The other slots were taken up by a pair of generic serial-parallel adapters, an ATI Graphics Solution SC video card, and an AST Rampage(?) board that brought the memory to a full meg. I didn't have the keys for the case lock and didn't have the original disks or manuals; though I did have books that explained more than I wanted to know about the system and was able to alter the CMOS setup with a third-party utility.
The original gray floppy drives had been replaced by a black-panel Tandon 360k unit and a Teac 1.44MB. At first I presumed that I had a 1.2MB drive (This is an AT, after all!), and proceeded in throwing half a dozen "bad" 1.2MB floppies away since they couldn't be read by the drive. Live and learn.
My favorite part of the computer may have been the tactile sensations of working with the parts inside. The AT case was gigantic, well-finished, and heavy as a rock. Cards and drives slid into place and fit together with the ease and precision of Lego bricks, and there was lots of wiggle room left to feel around everything within. I've never experienced a case as pleasurable to work on as the genuine IBM AT either before or since.
My dream was to use the machine and push it to its limits: Get a larger hard disk, and store more programs. Better yet get a Zip drive, attach it to the second parallel port. Get an EGA video card and 5154 monitor, so I can render a GUI and play a decent library of games. Get a dot-matrix printer. Get an old copy of Quattro Pro or 1-2-3, and crunch numbers with the 80287. Get a modem, and connect to the Internet. I also wanted to replace some of the third-party parts with Big Blue IBM originals...maybe even get a copy of OS/2 1.x while I'm at it. Alas, that was not to be. Craigslist didn't exist, eBay was in its infancy, message boards were primitive affairs, and I was a penniless kid living in rural West Virginia where there was little hope of any local collaboration around. How could I find more parts? The answer to that was simple: I didn't.
Initially, I had a weathered CGA monitor attached that had originally shipped with some Zenith Data Systems clone of the same era. It had severe screen burn and displayed text messages on itself even when it was turned off. One day I was adjusting the pots in the rear, and one of them promptly disintegrated and set the hold askew. Without a working digital monitor, I wasn't able to use the system. Some months later I was able to scrounge a third-party VGA card with an onboard BIOS that allowed it to be compatible with an AT, and I was able to use it again...and promptly discovered that the battery had gone dead. Finding a replacement CMOS battery seemed to be as difficult to me at the time as finding a CGA monitor, and I eventually resorted to wires running to a six-volt flashlight lantern outside the case. And it still wasn't enough juice to keep the system time.
The story after that is somewhat brief: It was the sore subject of periodic moves, and just sat around getting rare and infrequent use until 2008. Once I replaced the motherboard with one from a generic 486...then a couple weeks later I had a change of heart and put all the "original" parts back in place. I posed it with a PS/1 monitor for the picture above, but that didn't work with the system. Finally the time came to simplify, and I gave it away.
Since my IBM exercises of the late 1990s were more or less prompted by nostalgia, it feels weird that I now feel nostalgic over that nostalgia. It also feels very weird to realize that the Pentium III box I'm typing this message on is actually older now, year for year, than that AT was then. I still have one of the ISA I/O cards from the AT working inside my PIII computer, though, so at least a little part of it lives on!