My new 386 PC workstation
During the last couple of years I have found out that it is getting increasingly hard to find older “noname” PC hardware such as 286, 386 and 486 systems. Even finding Pentium 1 Baby-AT systems is harder these days. It seems most owners of such systems have recycled their hardware long ago, and why would they keep old computer hardware anyways?
Occasionally I find older Compaqs (nowadays part of HP) and Goldstars (nowadays known as LG) systems but in my opinion those are ugly systems to maintain and run from a hardware point of view. Also older IBM hardware is very easy to find in Sweden since they were common in offices and sold for quite a lot of money so many employees keep their workstation thinking it is worth “something”. Though in my opinion old IBM workstation are the least worth PC systems out there just because of their horrible looking cases and nonstandard hardware. I much prefer ISA over anything else.
This is a tiny 386 motherboard I recently had the opportunity to buy, it has a AMD 386-SX CPU and is running at 33 MHz It has also got four 30-pin memory slots and is equipped with 16 MB of memory so each stick is 4 MB. There are five 16-bit ISA slots at the bottom part of the motherboard and as you can see the board lacks any connections for floppy drive or hard drive since those ports where provided on a ISA-card (which I also have somewhere in the closet).
So I have to confess I did originally buy the motherboard just for the memory, finding 30-pin memory is by no means hard. There are quite a lot of stores on the net who keep all kind of obscure old memory. But paying a premium price for 20 year old hardware does not feel right when you know you could probably find a sack full of 30-pin sticks somewhere in some offices retired parts bin.
Anyway, this is quite a nice little 386 which I am going to put together in the future when I find a suitable case for it. Until then, enjoy the pictures of the bare board!