Just some pictures of a dusty old generic Comtex box. :) (18 images, 2.8MB total)

[MacJunky]

Figured I might go about bringing to the surface some old memories within some of you oldies hanging around here.
Yes, it does work and I have the key.
No, I am not going to clutter up the main rigpics thread.
Every image is no more and no less than 1280 pixels wide.
Yes, I am aware that you will have to do lots of scrolling on a netbook, I have one.

[Jake_HT]

How much horsepower she got?

[Caldezar]

Ah... the 'game port' for joysticks on the printer card... the memories come flooding back. I should add some photos of my old Tandy 1000. I think I've got it in a box somewhere...

[fefox]

Wow that brings back memories, I must have built 1000 machines just like that...

so it looks like a 286 machine with a pirated award bios, 360k floppy drive, Seagate 40meg hard drive with a western digital MFM controller, looks like 640k of ram, 2 banks of 256 and 2 banks of 64 all at 120ns, im sure glad ram still isn't inserted chip by chip anymore, one pin bent under ment pulling them all out one by one trying to find the bad one... The I/O card was the standard, 2 serial ports, a game port and printer port. this machine probably didn't do any serious MODEM action as the UARTS on the board were never upgraded to the 16550 chips that would allow faster thruput for modems over 2400 baud and/or a multitasking OS. and a EGA card, :) probably a game machine! that's high end graphics!
The numbers written on top the hard drive are for when you had to LOW-LEVEL format the drive, you would use DEBUG from DOS prompt and use the command G=c800:5 to start the low level format and you would need the Cylinder / Heads / Sectors per track, this drive could have been pushed to 65 meg with a RLL controller it would have made its data transfer rate go up as well if you got the interleaving correct on the low level format. it probably had a 28ms access time and a transfer rate of 5Mbit/sec the ST-251 was a real junker im surprised it still works. don't worry about that clunking sound when you power it up its totally normal...

Hhahaha upgrading your UARTS on the I/O card I think was like $15 a chip, and throwing in of a RLL drive controller was the Overclocking of yesteryear :)

oh it looks like its 25Mhz and check out the size of the heatsink! ;)

can't think of anything else at the moment,, very cool too see one of those again

[MacJunky]

Actually, unless my memory is failing me the HDD powers up not too loudly. It is shutting down where it really makes noise.
I should dig out and setup a tripod and record it booting then shutting down. :P

[fefox]

it should make a really odd hollow clunk sound when it starts up, I think it happens when the drive comes up to speed.. like a marble dropped inside and bounced a bit.. I dunno..
my memory of the sound has faded but id recognize it right away if I heard it again

[MacJunky]

100_0302.MP4 - DivShare
I know for sure that I have heard the sort of clunk that you describe in other HDDs though. I am pretty sure I have one around here. I shall try to find it. :P
/me digs up his 50pin SCSI and ancient IDE drives.

Sorry for the quality of the video, it was the camera's highest setting. :<

[fefox]

im sure it was that Seagate that made a clunking sound... maybe im mixing it up with something else

Nice video, it does the trick... its great to see a old machine like that still alive and kicking...

for some reason I have no PC parts from that era of machine, ive got loads of stuff from the early 80's and then nothing til like mid-late 90's going forward.. been cleaning out my computer room and all the PARTS I had packed away in boxes, its insane how much crap I have... power supplies alone I must have over 10, sounds card, keyboards, CD drives LOL, CPUs.. oh and RAM! I have about 20 lbs of ram chips!
I even found a sparcstation IPX that I thought I had given away 10 years ago

is there some type of mental illness that results in the hoarding computer parts?
cause im pretty sure I have it. :help:

[MacJunky]

Hehehe. I think I got a bit carried away.
SCSI_HDD_Fever.mp4 - DivShare Watch out low bandwidth users, 110MB. It is even a smaller res than the last one but still the camera's so called "high quality" mode for that res.
This vid contains a few HDD clips one after another(please excuse the noises in the first part, I forgot to mute my aspire one).
The first HDD is a Seagate ST15150N, the second is branded MicroNet/Connor CFP2105S(it gives me a fuzzy warm feeling remembering using it), the third drive is an IBM DSAS-3720, fourth is a LaCie branded Quantum ProDrive 1050S. The final drive is the one I use to boot my MacPlus w/ 4MB RAM. A Seagate ST-125N. :)

Oh, and I have more SCSI drives too!
ST-125N:

I probably need a girlfriend. <_< >_>

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by fefox

Snip
The numbers written on top the hard drive are for when you had to LOW-LEVEL format the drive, you would use DEBUG from DOS prompt and use the command G=c800:5 to start the low level format and you would need the Cylinder / Heads / Sectors per track, this drive could have been pushed to 65 meg with a RLL controller it would have made its data transfer rate go up as well if you got the interleaving correct on the low level format. it probably had a 28ms access time and a transfer rate of 5Mbit/sec the ST-251 was a real junker im surprised it still works. don't worry about that clunking sound when you power it up its totally normal...

Snip

Had a 10 meg MFM done up like that. Pretty sure it got me somewhere around 13.5M, but it had to be scandisked every week to make up for overtaxing the media. Took 12+ hours, and back then Norton was your friend. (Norton Utilities FTW!!!).

Only thing that stands out for me is that I don't believe I've ever seen a toggle turbo switch... it was always a 2 position push switch on any computer I used.