Vintage PC Builds - Think 486 Era

Soldato
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2 Jan 2005
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NOPE.

Blody hell never again. I often look back upon those days with rose tinted goggles, until the reality of hardware conflicts, jumpers, crap / nonexistent drivers, constant failing kit and those goddamn mouse balls hit me. Never again.

this really - pc's were such a pain in the arse back then.
 
Soldato
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17 May 2004
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Pentium Pro is where it's at!

My first PC was a 286, then we bought a 486 DX2/66 (Cyrix ftw!), which I managed to overclock to a DX2/80. I remember having to source FPM memory to upgrade from 4MB to 16MB just to be able to play some newer games. My 486 couldn't even run Winamp though! Fiddling around with config.sys, autoexec.bat, having to assign addresses, IRQs and DMAs when playing games, having to ensure these were correct in the autoexec.bat file as well. I too remember doing things like loading simpler mouse drivers just to get a little extra memory for the PC. At one point out of a possible 640k RAM I was running at 622k and had access to everything. That took me quite a while to achieve, on my own, as in those days there wasn't really much of an internet to refer to (at least not for me, I didn't get a 33.6 modem until a year after owning the 486!). I copied the mouse driver onto a floppy from our school network!

I always wanted a Pentium Pro though. I knew a guy at school, his father was loaded and he bought him a Pentium Pro 200Mhz and he was the envy of everyone! Ah those were the days!
 
Soldato
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2 Aug 2012
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this really - pc's were such a pain in the arse back then.

And yet....

Back in the dark ages, every program was just a program.

Even the operating system was just another program sitting in its own directory just waiting to be run.

Backups were easy. Just copy the relevant directory and job done.

How do you back up a "single" program (App, for the Children, :p ) today??

Not sure it is that easy really :/

There may well be a way of doing so, but I do not know what it is.....

If anybody knows, please tell me.
 
Soldato
Joined
11 Apr 2004
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19,807
Anyone remember 80186 chips :)

Minolta used them in their PC based wordprocessor units. A right oddity.

I have a Tandy 1000SX which was handed down to me by my Dad. 8086/8088 CPU, 640K of RAM, dual 5 1/4" floppy drives, 16 colour graphics chip. Quite a lot of games from that era had graphics options for CGA, EGA or Tandy 16 colour.

It was that machine that got me into PCs, as I replaced one of the floppy drives with a 3.5" drive when I was about 8. It could only format disks up to 720K though which wasn't quite enough for Windows 3.1 (I tried!). It did run Dos 6.22 however.
 
Associate
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27 Jun 2008
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Hipsters watching Youtubers like LGR have driven up the prices of anything older than a Pentium as there seems to be a "Vintage PC" resurgence going on. eBay sellers are sticking "Vintage" or "Rare" onto listings to cash in on it. Wonder if things like CRT monitors might become worth something again in many years time as more of them are being destroyed/recycled becoming harder to obtain.
 
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