My skip rescue! Compaq 386/20e
 

Hi All,

I'm new to the forum - have always had an interest in vintage technology and dabbled in amateur radio as a teenager.

Anyhow - I rescued this from a wheely bin (with permission) a few years ago, subsequently popped it in the back of a cupbaord for rainy day and stumbled accross recently and decided to have a go at some light restoration with the end-game of reliving my late 80s/early 90s DOS gaming experience.

4MB on-board RAM, working DD 3.5" and 5.25" drives and a 110MB hard disk runinng MSDOS 6.2 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

The CRT is in good condition with no screen burn and just a few small scuffs on the very discoloured casing, I understand these are pretty rare these days. Retr0brite on order.

It was in use at London Underground as a drilling rig controller until the early 2000s.

I plan to install the obligatory SB card and as an ambitious project am planning on trying to get it on my home network for filesharing (the same wheelybin produced a NE2000 compatible ISA Network card.

I'm sure I'm going to need some help and advice with all of this sop watch this space.

Karlos1979

Re: My skip rescue! Compaq 386/20e
 

You should be able to use it on your LAN and even on the internet if you install the WfWG TCP/IP protocol stack (it may already be installed). Using any sort of GUI browser is likely to be hard work though.

To install the NE2000 card you will need to set and remember the IRQ number and I/O address. It was standard practice to use 5 and 0x300 for these. You configure the early cards with jumpers, and the later ones with a DOS setup program.