cybersextant
New Member
Old computers? Come on! You just pull out your credit card and log on to Dell's website and order something with a processor speed measured in GHz, a 120-gig hard drive, and at least 512 Megs of RAM, right? Well, yeah, I've done that, too, but I've also spent a fair amount of time doing curbside recycling: grabbing hardware I see by the side of the road and refurbishing it. Most of my finds lately are of too recent vintage even to be of interest here (it's surprising what people throw away), but I have an original IBM PC, several ATs, and quite a few early PS-2s in my basement, all of which were removed from the dumpsters at the World Trade Center when I worked there as a paramedic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What led me to this site was that I had recently found this eTower 400ix that I loaded Windows 98 on and had an urge to pop a 5.25-inch floppy drive into, especially given that I recently had a need to access some data on old 5.25-inch floppies. I had a NEC 1.2-Meg drive sitting in a drawer, but despite lots of trial and error with the jumpers, and even a Google search that yielded some recommendations, I was unable to get the thing running properly. Windows 98 recognized it and the motor ran, but it kept yielding a drive not ready message. So I pulled a 5.25-inch drive from one of the ATs in the basement. Since I already had SETUP on the machine designating B: as a 1.2-Meg 5.25-inch floppy, I needed to know whether to change that to 360K for the baby I'd pulled out of the AT. Using Google I found this site and its excellent histories of various early machines, and quckly learned that the 1.2-Meg 5.25-inch floppy was actually introduced on the AT in 1984. To make a long story short, it was essentially plug-and-play when I pulled out the NEC drive and inserted the IBM. I didn't even look for any jumper switches. So a 20-year-old piece of "obsolete" hardware is now once again functioning productively. (I hope I haven't offended any purists by cannibalizing one of my old ATs!)
