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Your "Must-have" computers

I agree with VampireSlog. I pretty well have most of the REALLY want items, but there's always a few items I'd like to add.

Blue NEC PC-8201 (sold only in Japan and more than half mythical!)
TI 99/2
TI 99/8
Neither of the above are a burning desire, but if I can find them at a decent price...
Original silver case hexbus peripherals. Oh, and that clear case prototype wafertape!
Anything and everything I can get my hands wrapped around pertaining to the CC-70.
 
Right now my most wanted computer of vintage age would be an IBM 5170, preferable complete in decent shape.
 
I don't have any Must Have's, I've already had a Compq Deskpro 286, Compaq Deskpro 386, many PS/2s, a holy mountain of old 286, 386, and 486 Laptops, and piles and piles of whitebox stuff from 8088-Pentium D.

As far as Branded equiptment goes that I'd love to have (but don't have the room for), IBM, GEM Computer Products, and 1989 and older Compaq tops my list, in particular, XT and AT style machines. However, IBM PS/2's no longer have a good source for reference disks, GEM's old desktops are very hard to get (as they are a local store to Georgia), and Compaq stuff tends to be missing keyboards, and the DSM monochrome monitors and EGA displays for them are hard to get. If I got any one of those three, I'd love the original hardware that went with it just to have a fully vintage accurate machine.

I also dig Tandy's 1000 and professional lines from the mid-late 80's, and have a Tandy 1000 myself that's souped up.

My Must-Keeps of the vintage stuff I have now....

- My Hot-Rodded 486 Setup - This thing is years and years of experience in dealing with 486/Windows 3.1x level computing put together the best I know how, and is configured as close to modern as possible....it even has a CD burner in it. But it does all of it's "modern" work under DOS and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Has a SoundBlaster AWE32, a 2MB S3 Graphics Card I'm trying to replace with a Mediavision ProGraphics 1280 that I'm having a b**** of a time finding the drivers for, Iomega ZIP. I'm toying with putting the Hard Disk caddie in it so I can make use of all my old sub-540MB HDD in it by making different machine configurations based upon year. If not I may take one of my old ATA hard disks of 40GB or so and multi-boot it to multiple O/S that will run on 486 hardware.

- The GEM 286 - This thing is a beast of a 286 both by size and power, I need to look into finding a 286 compatible bootloader and putting a Protected Mode based O/S on it like Xenix or early OS/2 to make full use of the massive 6144KB of RAM it has. It even has the 287 in it (an ITT 80c287), is overclocked to 12MHz from having that installed, has graphical internet, has file shares on my LAN, and just in general is a neat piece of equiptment. Plus it's full size AT which is my favorite style of case for old stuff. Also has a SoundBlaster 16, Zip Drive, SVGA 1MB Graphics Card, and I'm still, after 6 years of ownership, am trying to fill the massive 540MB hard disk with 286 era software till it can't hold no more (LOL)!

- The Franken-Business-Machines industrial Anti-Portable PC (aka, IBM Industrial/Portable PC in a Clone Chassis) - A Terry Yager provided true blue IBM system board, mounted in a SongCheer XT chassis with a 150 Watt PSU, various mods made to the board with a soldering iron (Reset, Power LED), XT-IDE controller with 2 IDE HDD's on it (and maybe later take one out and add an SDCARD Reader), 9-pin and 15-pin graphics via a 1MB ATI All-In-Wonder card with proprietary Microsoft Mouse port. I'm still thinking of robbing one of the 360K drives out of the Tandy and putting that in it instead of the 1.44M floppies, and then putting my SCSI MO-Drive beneath the floppy (giving me a spot to put the 500MB SCSI HDD in the Tandy).
 
Oh sweet. I've thought about trying to find something for 286 protected mode myself, I've got a pretty solid Packard-Bell (yes, there was a time when that wasn't an oxymoron) that I'm not going to be using for DOS now I've got a 486 box.
 
Mad-Mike said:
I don't have any Must Have's, I've already had a Compq Deskpro 286, Compaq Deskpro 386, many PS/2s, a holy mountain of old 286, 386, and 486 Laptops, and piles and piles of whitebox stuff from 8088-Pentium D.

As far as Branded equiptment goes that I'd love to have (but don't have the room for), IBM, GEM Computer Products, and 1989 and older Compaq tops my list, in particular, XT and AT style machines. However, IBM PS/2's no longer have a good source for reference disks, GEM's old desktops are very hard to get (as they are a local store to Georgia), and Compaq stuff tends to be missing keyboards, and the DSM monochrome monitors and EGA displays for them are hard to get. If I got any one of those three, I'd love the original hardware that went with it just to have a fully vintage accurate machine.

I also dig Tandy's 1000 and professional lines from the mid-late 80's, and have a Tandy 1000 myself that's souped up.

My Must-Keeps of the vintage stuff I have now....

- My Hot-Rodded 486 Setup - This thing is years and years of experience in dealing with 486/Windows 3.1x level computing put together the best I know how, and is configured as close to modern as possible....it even has a CD burner in it. But it does all of it's "modern" work under DOS and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Has a SoundBlaster AWE32, a 2MB S3 Graphics Card I'm trying to replace with a Mediavision ProGraphics 1280 that I'm having a b**** of a time finding the drivers for, Iomega ZIP. I'm toying with putting the Hard Disk caddie in it so I can make use of all my old sub-540MB HDD in it by making different machine configurations based upon year. If not I may take one of my old ATA hard disks of 40GB or so and multi-boot it to multiple O/S that will run on 486 hardware.

- The GEM 286 - This thing is a beast of a 286 both by size and power, I need to look into finding a 286 compatible bootloader and putting a Protected Mode based O/S on it like Xenix or early OS/2 to make full use of the massive 6144KB of RAM it has. It even has the 287 in it (an ITT 80c287), is overclocked to 12MHz from having that installed, has graphical internet, has file shares on my LAN, and just in general is a neat piece of equiptment. Plus it's full size AT which is my favorite style of case for old stuff. Also has a SoundBlaster 16, Zip Drive, SVGA 1MB Graphics Card, and I'm still, after 6 years of ownership, am trying to fill the massive 540MB hard disk with 286 era software till it can't hold no more (LOL)!

- The Franken-Business-Machines industrial Anti-Portable PC (aka, IBM Industrial/Portable PC in a Clone Chassis) - A Terry Yager provided true blue IBM system board, mounted in a SongCheer XT chassis with a 150 Watt PSU, various mods made to the board with a soldering iron (Reset, Power LED), XT-IDE controller with 2 IDE HDD's on it (and maybe later take one out and add an SDCARD Reader), 9-pin and 15-pin graphics via a 1MB ATI All-In-Wonder card with proprietary Microsoft Mouse port. I'm still thinking of robbing one of the 360K drives out of the Tandy and putting that in it instead of the 1.44M floppies, and then putting my SCSI MO-Drive beneath the floppy (giving me a spot to put the 500MB SCSI HDD in the Tandy).
Click to expand...

. . . about your 'hot-rodded' 486 - have you ever attempted WIN98/2000/Xp? Just curious.
 
Agent Orange said:
. . . about your 'hot-rodded' 486 - have you ever attempted WIN98/2000/Xp? Just curious.
Click to expand...

Oh I've done all kinds of nutty stuff with a 486 based computer regarding O/S

I've run 2000 Pro SP2 on one years ago by just putting in the hard disk drive from a Pentium system that had that O/S on it in there. I could try the same thing using Windows XP possibly.

I've been using 98SE on 486 based machines for as long as I can remember. At one time there was a program one could download online called 98 Lite that would allow one to scrape a few more years out of a (low-resource) 486 by installing 98 SE on it and then replacing parts of the Explorer Shell (or maybe it was the whole shell) with the one from Windows 95. It also allowed 98 to be installed on something as old as a 386 (and I have found a 386 or two at thrift stores that ran 98....scary and slow stuff).

Had an IBM PC-330 100DX4 that I could change the hard disk boot order in the BIOS to where I could boot off the D drive (!!!), this was before there was a patch to make Windows 3.1x run properly on a FAT-32 filesystem, so I had the D drive in FAT-16, and the C drive FAT-32. It'd boot to the FAT-32 drive for Windows 98 SE, and I'd boot to the FAT-16 drive for MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows For Workgroups 3.11.
 
I don't remember the exact model number, but my "must have" computer is the 80286 Emerson computer from back in the early nineties. It was ugly as hell with a 5 1/4 floppy drive and a whopping 640 on board ram. My grandma bought it from Walmart back in 1990. About 5 years later, when she upgraded, she made the mistake and gave it to my brother while I was off in the military. When I was discharged, I discovered that he tossed it out. I am still depressed to this day.
 
Doubt I'll ever find mine, a NeXT Cube.

Another is an old IBM system that is running the fire alarm system at the local veterans home, not sure what model it is but it looks bullet proof, has a 5 1/4" floppy, a 3.5" floppy, one of those hard drives you can hear a mile away and it runs OS/2 2.1.

Although now that I think of it there was an old AT system I seen once that was another one of those loud hard drive systems that was running a medical transcription office that looked as if you could set off a bomb and it would be the last thing around. It was complete with a locked front bezel and an old 12" CRT monitor.
 
To me there is "must have" and also "can't have". The first machine I became comfortable with is a must have, and recently I've added an interest in a Cardinal computer because of their rarity. However, there is an area of computers which I know I will never get. Not just because they are a bit on the expensive side, but because I know that I will never spend the time to learn how to operate them. The most noteworthy in that category would be a PDP-11. I think that is probably the most desirable machine to collect, but that's just a dream.
 
As long as were talking fantasies, my absolute must-have machine would undoubtedly be a Xerox Alto in functional condition. Nothing beats it.

A close second might be an Amiga 4000T or perhaps a Sun1
 
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