It arrived!

It arrived! My 2nd Tandy 1000SX got here today, but the sound I heard when I took delivery was a bit ominous. It sounded like something rattling around inside. So I got it unpacked and opened it up. First, the case is a bit worse for wear. There is considerable rust on the chassis, and the plastic is a bit scuffed and has a couple of small cracks. Also, two of the slots don't have covers, but there is clearly a modem in the eBay picks. So once the case is open, I discover the Tandy 1200bps modem lying inside, but also some sort of hard card lying loose as well. The hard drive is likely dead after banging around, but it was completely unexpected. Also, one of the ROM chips is a lot higher off the motherboard than in my other 1000SX, so it's likely there is a smartclock in this one, so there's that. Once everything was back together, I hooked up my monitor and keyboard and... 640K appears on screen, the 5.25" floppy seeks, the 3.5" floppy seeks, and "Non system disk or disk error" eventually appears. I put in my Tandy DOS disk and press ENTER, and it seeks the 5.25" drive again, but fails to boot. I am uncertain whether it is the drive or the disk (I suspect the drive, as I believe I previously tested the disk in the other Tandy) but my troubleshooting stopped there, for now.

Some thoughts on this system: despite not getting a DOS prompt yet (and even if I don't), I'm happy with this purchase. It works well enough to make a good backup to the other one, and the RTC and 3.5" floppy can be moved straight over to it for immediate use. It would be awesome if I could get the hard card going, but it's no loss if I can't. If I can get to a DOS prompt, then I'll likely restore this one too, but if not, the parts I'm definitely using are more than worth what I paid. :)

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.

Guest Posts

I have added the ability to submit guest posts to the blog. The post will by placed into a moderation queue until I review it. This will be especially helpful for people wishing to submit "Ghosts of Ohio" stories :)

Yet another site redesign?

I'm not happy with the current (free) hosting provider, and am considering yet another site redesign. I also find myself not posting very often. And I am also neglecting my telnetable BBS and related website (http://bbs.nitemarecafe.com), which I'm not even certain is accessible from outside my own network anymore due to DNS issues.

I'm considering pointing www and bbs to the same content on a machine at home. Look and feel would likely remain the same, but content could be driven by the actual BBS. Not all of the BBS content would be put on the site, but the ANSI screens, maybe the g-files section, some specific files from that section, and a web-based telnet client to the BBS could be made available, along with the "From the Sysop" section, so people could get BBS-related news without actually logging on, and would allow potential users to get programs to allow them to log on without using the web-based client.

I've also discovered that analog modems work fine at 2400bps over digital home phone, and I suspect 9600 would mostly work and reliability would go down from there as speeds increased. So I'm considering using my unused line to provide a dial-up line to the BBS as well. It'll still sit mostly unused, but unused with a purpose ;) I have a working 2400bps modem, and can't imagine a 9600 would be too difficult, or expensive, to source used.

It may encourage me to actually take care of the BBS and use it more often myself.

Intel EtherExpress 8/16

Back when 16-bit ISA slots were all the rage, a few companies decided to release 8/16 ISA cards. Many of these were video cards, with a few exceptions. One was Intel's EtherExpress 8/16 network adapter. This card also had a standard RJ-45 Jack on it, so when I went looking for a network card for my Tandy 1000SX, my choices were either one of 3-Com's 8-bit cards, or this particular Intel card (or something less well known, but without easily sourced drivers). I decided on the Intel because grabbing one on eBay is a fraction of the cost of a 3-Com. I won one last night, and within a week or so, I'll have my Tandy 1000 on the Internet.

Disabled Cloudflare

Due to the way my DNS and site are currently hosted, I've currently disabled Cloudlare because it was not properly propagating my MX records, breaking my domain email. So, no more https for now...

CF Reader

I picked up a cheap USB CF Reader off of Amazon to transfer files for to the Tandy 1000SX, and, aside from PKZIP and PKUNZIP, the first thing I threw on it was Telix. The good news, the 2400bps modem works fine, even over crappy Digital Home Phone from Spectrum. I found a dial-up BBS number, and it connected fine. I did get booted a couple of times, but I suspect this is because I forgot to disable call waiting first, so I've disabled it completely for my service rather than use *70, on each call, as I don't use that line for anything else.

The bad news, did we really do any work this slowly? It took about 2 hours to install Telix. I guess multitasking back then meant starting your install and then doing the dishes and laundry while you waited ;)