arjan

I install & sell climate control systems in greenhouses, and use PC's for monitoring and changing setpoints in the climate control system.
The older versions used dos software, and didn't require much cpu power.

Last week a customer phones me that his PC got stolen from the greenhouse. We are talking a 286 or early 386. Sort of tells you a stupid thiefs are. I costs more on fuel to transport the thing than it's worth.

The customer then hands me a machine someone gave to him. I didn't pay too much attention, but noticed the 5 1/4 floppy....
I didn't have the required software with me, so I told him that I'll take the machine with me and drop it off when I put the software on it.
When I tried to plug in the monitor I found that it still has monochrome video. The plug looks like vga but has only nine pins like a serial port.
I decided to pop the lid and yess.., a 8bit mfm controller with boatanchor (harddrive). It is actually an XT, likely 9.54Mhz and 640K ram. The ram chips were actually soldered on the motherboard those days.

Not an overly intersting story, but some of you might remember fighting Irqs and dma channels on those things. No plug and pray back then.

I guess it's almost a collectors item and maybe I should ebay it such.