Good haul of old PC stuff

[Teo Zenios]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott Stevens" <chenmel at earthlink.net>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2005 8:36 PM
Subject: Good haul of old PC stuff


> Today at work I was given another haul of old stuff retired from
> the lab.  I got a whole pile of 8088 IBM machines.  Actually,
> there were some XT clones as well, which I didn't keep as units,
> but did salvage the cards and drives out of.
>
> >From one of the XT clones I got something I have heard of but
> never seen before: an 8-bit controller card for IDE drives.  It
> has a BIOS extension on it and some other chips, I haven't studied
> it thorougly yet.
>
> I kept intact the IBM machines, two complete PC-XT systems and two
> PCs.  I believe both XTs have the 64-256 motherboard.  Most of the
> boards in these systems are IBM originals, they all have 'AST
> Six-Pack' style (not sure of the brand) memory and I/O expansion.
> If I ever get the time (hmmm..) I may build a cassette drive cable
> and explore cassette basic on one of the PCs (stripped down, of
> course, to remove the 'optional' floppy controller.)
>
> I am now the sole person in the lab still using the last two
> PC-XTs (and a Commodore SX64) for actual data acquisition and test
> purposes.  I was able to grab and consolidate ALL the good parts,
> so the machine in the lab I primarily use now has a special drive
> controller (with BIOS extension) in it, so that the B: drive is a
> 1.44M 3-1/2" drive.
>
> I also got an IBM CGA monitor in the haul today, and a number of
> real IBM PC keyboards.  There are also some 'third party'
> switchable XT-AT keyboards.  If anybody on the list needs a 'third
> party' XT keyboard for the cost of shipping, drop me a note, I
> will give away up to three of the ones I got today (and they
> continue to grow harder to find) to the first three people
> interested.

A place I worked at untill the 1999 used an old XT to run software to check
the serial ports of temperature controllers. Generally if the device does
not change, companies tend to use the same old equipment for QC.