I've been giving Win 11 a good testing and think I needed to get away from the 21st century so I pulled an NEC386 out of my attic. It's been up there 20 years and doggone it...Put it on my bench and it booted right up.
It has one of those box type cmos batteries that was not completely dead...2v and the clock had only lost 15 years :)
I actually had a spare battery for it, quite old but 3v. I think a new one would be 4.5v
Anyway it had Word Perfect on it and I finally figured out how to exit. F7
It has 2 megs of RAM, a 16mhz cpu and a 40 meg MFM drive.
I sent a message to NEC and they actually replied withinthe hour. They were glad I liked the 386 and that the company is now only in Japan.
I've been giving Win 11 a good testing and think I needed to get away
from the 21st century so I pulled an NEC386 out of my attic. It's been
up there 20 years and doggone it...Put it on my bench and it booted
right up.
It has one of those box type cmos batteries that was not completely
dead...2v and the clock had only lost 15 years :)
I actually had a spare battery for it, quite old but 3v. I think a new
one would be 4.5v
Anyway it had Word Perfect on it and I finally figured out how to exit. F7 >It has 2 megs of RAM, a 16mhz cpu and a 40 meg MFM drive.
I sent a message to NEC and they actually replied withinthe hour. They
were glad I liked the 386 and that the company is now only in Japan.
On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 05:47:44 -0500, philo <philo@privacy.net> wrote:
I've been giving Win 11 a good testing and think I needed to get away
from the 21st century so I pulled an NEC386 out of my attic. It's been
up there 20 years and doggone it...Put it on my bench and it booted
right up.
It has one of those box type cmos batteries that was not completely
dead...2v and the clock had only lost 15 years :)
I actually had a spare battery for it, quite old but 3v. I think a new
one would be 4.5v
Anyway it had Word Perfect on it and I finally figured out how to exit. F7 >> It has 2 megs of RAM, a 16mhz cpu and a 40 meg MFM drive.
I sent a message to NEC and they actually replied withinthe hour. They
were glad I liked the 386 and that the company is now only in Japan.
Ahhh the memories .. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#/media/File:Tandy_1000_rl_1.jpg
My first computer was the sleek little Tandy 1000 RSX < AMD 386 >.
which cost me $ 700. < on sale > included keyboard, mouse, and
a 13 inch rgb monitor. < ~ 1 mb ram 60 mb HD ? >
I remember saving-up $ and nervously installing the math
co-processor and extra RAM. < another ~ $ 200. >
Tandy's DeskMate " op sys " was interesting.
I think it was Win 3.1 otherwise.
John T.
On 10/4/2021 6:47 AM, philo wrote:
I've been giving Win 11 a good testing and think I needed to get away
from the 21st century so I pulled an NEC386 out of my attic. It's been
up there 20 years and doggone it...Put it on my bench and it booted
right up.
It has one of those box type cmos batteries that was not completely
dead...2v and the clock had only lost 15 years :)
I actually had a spare battery for it, quite old but 3v. I think a new
one would be 4.5v
Anyway it had Word Perfect on it and I finally figured out how to
exit. F7
It has 2 megs of RAM, a 16mhz cpu and a 40 meg MFM drive.
I sent a message to NEC and they actually replied withinthe hour.
They were glad I liked the 386 and that the company is now only in Japan.
I hope the disk drive made authentic sound effects.
You should bench it now with HDTune :-)
Paul
I've been giving Win 11 a good testing and think I needed to get away
from the 21st century so I pulled an NEC386 out of my attic. It's been
up there 20 years and doggone it...Put it on my bench and it booted
right up.
philo <philo@privacy.net> wrote on Mon, 4 Oct 2021:
I've been giving Win 11 a good testing and think I needed to get away
from the 21st century so I pulled an NEC386 out of my attic. It's been
up there 20 years and doggone it...Put it on my bench and it booted
right up.
Damn, where is my Intel 8088 MS-DOS system with 640 KB RAM, Hercules screen and
two floppy drives and without modem and hard drive?
Richard
On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 05:47:44 -0500, philo <philo@privacy.net> wrote:
I've been giving Win 11 a good testing and think I needed to get away
from the 21st century so I pulled an NEC386 out of my attic. It's been
up there 20 years and doggone it...Put it on my bench and it booted
right up.
It has one of those box type cmos batteries that was not completely
dead...2v and the clock had only lost 15 years :)
I actually had a spare battery for it, quite old but 3v. I think a new
one would be 4.5v
Anyway it had Word Perfect on it and I finally figured out how to exit. F7 >> It has 2 megs of RAM, a 16mhz cpu and a 40 meg MFM drive.
I sent a message to NEC and they actually replied withinthe hour. They
were glad I liked the 386 and that the company is now only in Japan.
Ahhh the memories .. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#/media/File:Tandy_1000_rl_1.jpg
My first computer was the sleek little Tandy 1000 RSX < AMD 386 >.
which cost me $ 700. < on sale > included keyboard, mouse, and
a 13 inch rgb monitor. < ~ 1 mb ram 60 mb HD ? >
I remember saving-up $ and nervously installing the math
co-processor and extra RAM. < another ~ $ 200. >
Tandy's DeskMate " op sys " was interesting.
I think it was Win 3.1 otherwise.
John T.
On 10/4/21 7:14 AM, hubops@ccanoemail.ca wrote:
On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 05:47:44 -0500, philo <philo@privacy.net> wrote:
I've been giving Win 11 a good testing and think I needed to get away >>>from the 21st century so I pulled an NEC386 out of my attic. It's been
up there 20 years and doggone it...Put it on my bench and it booted
right up.
It has one of those box type cmos batteries that was not completely
dead...2v and the clock had only lost 15 years :)
I actually had a spare battery for it, quite old but 3v. I think a new
one would be 4.5v
Anyway it had Word Perfect on it and I finally figured out how to exit. F7
It has 2 megs of RAM, a 16mhz cpu and a 40 meg MFM drive.
I sent a message to NEC and they actually replied withinthe hour. They
were glad I liked the 386 and that the company is now only in Japan.
Ahhh the memories .. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#/media/File:Tandy_1000_rl_1.jpg
My first computer was the sleek little Tandy 1000 RSX < AMD 386 >.
which cost me $ 700. < on sale > included keyboard, mouse, and
a 13 inch rgb monitor. < ~ 1 mb ram 60 mb HD ? >
I remember saving-up $ and nervously installing the math
co-processor and extra RAM. < another ~ $ 200. >
Tandy's DeskMate " op sys " was interesting.
I think it was Win 3.1 otherwise.
John T.
$700 was cheap even for what you got.
On 10/4/21 11:57 AM, Richard wrote:
philo <philo@privacy.net> wrote on Mon, 4 Oct 2021:
I've been giving Win 11 a good testing and think I needed to get
away from the 21st century so I pulled an NEC386 out of my attic.
It's been up there 20 years and doggone it...Put it on my bench and
it booted right up.
Damn, where is my Intel 8088 MS-DOS system with 640 KB RAM, Hercules
screen and two floppy drives and without modem and hard drive?
Richard
I am having fun diffing through my attic.
I do have an IBM 8088 up there.
Right now I'm working on a ps-1 486
Damn cmos battery kept the right date!
It had 2 megs of RAM that I now took up to 64 megs
Label on the case says expandable to 64 megs and Pentium technology.
486 is soldered in, upgrading to Pentium a bit difficult.
philo wrote:
On 10/4/21 11:57 AM, Richard wrote:
philo <philo@privacy.net> wrote on Mon, 4 Oct 2021:
I've been giving Win 11 a good testing and think I needed to get
away from the 21st century so I pulled an NEC386 out of my attic.
It's been up there 20 years and doggone it...Put it on my bench and
it booted right up.
Damn, where is my Intel 8088 MS-DOS system with 640 KB RAM, Hercules
screen and two floppy drives and without modem and hard drive?
Richard
I am having fun diffing through my attic.
I do have an IBM 8088 up there.
Right now I'm working on a ps-1 486
Damn cmos battery kept the right date!
It had 2 megs of RAM that I now took up to 64 megs
Label on the case says expandable to 64 megs and Pentium technology.
486 is soldered in, upgrading to Pentium a bit difficult.
Somewhere I have stored a Tandy 1200A with 10 Meg harddrive. My next computer was a 486 25Mhz Dx with a 100 Meg harddrive. I remember trying to figure out how I would ever use 100 Megs of storage space. When you figure in inflation these computers would probably cost at least $6,000 to $8,000
in todays money. I believe the first IBM PC was about $3,100 in 1981 which would probably be about $12,000 in todays money.
On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 14:22:17 -0500, philo <philo@privacy.net> wrote:
On 10/4/21 7:14 AM, hubops@ccanoemail.ca wrote:
On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 05:47:44 -0500, philo <philo@privacy.net> wrote:
I've been giving Win 11 a good testing and think I needed to get away
from the 21st century so I pulled an NEC386 out of my attic. It's been >>>> up there 20 years and doggone it...Put it on my bench and it booted
right up.
It has one of those box type cmos batteries that was not completely
dead...2v and the clock had only lost 15 years :)
I actually had a spare battery for it, quite old but 3v. I think a new >>>> one would be 4.5v
Anyway it had Word Perfect on it and I finally figured out how to exit. F7
It has 2 megs of RAM, a 16mhz cpu and a 40 meg MFM drive.
I sent a message to NEC and they actually replied withinthe hour. They >>>> were glad I liked the 386 and that the company is now only in Japan.
Ahhh the memories .. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#/media/File:Tandy_1000_rl_1.jpg >>>
My first computer was the sleek little Tandy 1000 RSX < AMD 386 >.
which cost me $ 700. < on sale > included keyboard, mouse, and
a 13 inch rgb monitor. < ~ 1 mb ram 60 mb HD ? >
I remember saving-up $ and nervously installing the math
co-processor and extra RAM. < another ~ $ 200. >
Tandy's DeskMate " op sys " was interesting.
I think it was Win 3.1 otherwise.
John T.
$700 was cheap even for what you got.
I forget the exact year, but 486's were coming on - becoming
almost affordable & getting cheaper by-the-month it seemed -
and I was intent on staying well under $ 1. grand.
John T.
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