This evening I had a bit of a poke around with an old PC which arrived here last week. Tiny little desktop system - smaller than a whole bunch of portable machines even.
Seriously, this thing is *tiny* - here's a Spectrum for scale.
Internally it was actually surprisingly clean - and thankfully turns out to be equipped with a Dallas clock chip rather than the NiCd battery which was so commonplace in systems of this era and has killed tens of thousands of systems when they leak and start dissolving the motherboard.
This does mean that I'll need to do a little surgery to that chip to allow it to use an external CR2023 cell. That's infinitely preferable to trying to coax a motherboard which has suffered corrosion damage back into life.
The seller had tested it and rapidly switched it off when they smelled the unmistakable smell of capacitors letting the magic smoke out. So I was planning on a recapping session for the power supply.
Quite a few small form factor systems used an external power supply brick, but this one has it internal. In this tiny, very densely packed little cuboid.
Which predictably wasn't exactly the easiest thing to service, but thankfully it does "hinge" open on one side.
The majority of the caps in there are made by our old friends at Nichicon...so there's our target! Their caps probably account for about 98% of the repair work I do on equipment from the 80s and 90s.
Sure enough...
Thankfully these have only recently started to leak it looks like so there was no damage on the board (a nice change for me!). Much better.
The Rubycon ones were left alone as I've never had any issue with a single one of those unless the hardware in general has obviously been absolutely hammered.
Given how densely packed this thing is when it's folded back together I was a little apprehensive to apply power to be honest. Thankfully it didn't go bang when powered up though.
No nasty smells or anything, and even better after a few power cycles it correctly POSTed.
The hard disk is running and sounds healthy - though that doesn't necessarily mean anything yet.
Sadly this is as far as I can get now as Amstrad in their infinite wisdom have used a proprietary keyboard interface. So I'll need to see if I can find an appropriate keyboard or adapter if someone has made one.
This would actually have been a pretty punchy little machine back in 1990/91. It's running a 20MHz 80386SX, would have been nice to see a full-fat 386, but the 20MHz clock speed (I'm more used to seeing these clocked at 16MHz) should help, and they've provided 64K of cache as standard, and have provided a co-processor socket. It came with 3.5Mb of memory, an 80Mb and had an SVGA capable display card (which can also emulate CGA, EGA and Hercules modes). They have also managed to provide two half-length 16-bit ISA slots. Not a bad spec at all for the time - especially for something taking up barely a square foot of desk space. It's really a densely packed little machine, and as you would expect weighs a tonne for the size it is. Probably doesn't weigh all that much less than the Compaq desktop it's shown next to earlier.
This one came with a card in one of those slots which I'm curious to investigate once I have the system up and running.
This it turns out is an Amstrad made clone of the Ad-Lib sound card. Should be an interesting little machine once I've got it up and running. The compact form factor could be quite a bonus in terms of being something genuinely useful for playing around with older software and such.
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In Invacar news...not much to report. TPA has had her fuel pump reinstated after I'd temporarily borrowed it for the P6. Otherwise she's basically in winter hibernation, but if there's a suitable dry day she might well appear at some point before the spring. We'll see.
