2nd Tandy 1000SX

I picked up a 2nd Tandy 1000SX on eBay last week for about what I paid for shipping on the first one, but with free shipping, and it should be delivered tomorrow. This one also has a modem of some sort and a dual serial card, and I'll investigate those once it gets here. But it also has 3.5" 720K as the second floppy drive. I'll probably move that floppy to my other 1000SX and will make sure it also has the faster modem (if they are both functional). I'll also be looking to see what UARTs are on the serial card and may swap those as well. But I'll leave the 8088 in this one instead of swapping in a NEC V20. I'm debating on doing the other upgrades to this one (XT-IDE and network card) or on just making sure the current one had all the hardware I want in it, and using this one as a backup should the first one fail. Alternatively, I could wait until I pick up a cheap Tandy 1000 keyboard (which are usually only available cheaply if I'm no longer looking for one) and doing some upgrades and selling it back off to fund more projects ;)

Also, a few weeks ago, I picked up a bunch of gear from an old co-worker and good friend of mine. Part of the haul included a DEC Alphastation 500, which I've been drooling over since they came out. I'm flip-flopping on whether or not to install Gentoo Linux or OpenVMS on. I have very limited VMS experience from high school, so that could be interesting. I was also given a couple of 80x86-compatible servers, so I can put Linux on those ;)

There was also an old Compaq DeskPro 386/25 in that haul. There is no network card, modem, or sound card in that machine, and it's a 386SX, not DX (the difference being that the SX had a 16-bit data bus) with the memory maxed out at 16MB. I may take one of the modems and put in it, pick up another Intel EtherExpress, and maybe an early Sound Blaster 16. I'm not a fan of how Compaq put these machines together with special rails for the drives (the CD-ROM drive doesn't have the rails, so just sorta sits and "floats" in its bay) and things like that, but the DeskPro line were solid performers back in the day. I'm happy to have this system as part of my collection, and I'm actually considering loading DESQview onto it and moving the BBS over to it. That could be interesting, especially if I create a dial-up node and use a telnet <-> RS-232 gateway for additional nodes.