Building my childhood dream PC
33 comments
·May 18, 2025Waterluvian
In Part 2 the photo immediately after “It seems IBM integrated it to the motherboard” completely fooled my brain into believing that I’m looking at the side wall of a garage. The garage door to the left. The opener equipment top-right.
And I’m just immediately fixated on this whole vibe of a life-sized tinkering workspace that’s the inside of a PC case.
kriro
My entry was the mentioned 486DX2-66Mhz. Double speed CD-Rom and Sound Blaster. Norton Commander was great, Doom and Pirates Gold where my games of choice.
Also started programming on this one with QBasic and then moved to Turbo Pascal 7 (because I needed a .exe file to be called from autoexec as a password protection vs. my sister which I couldn't do with QBasic :)
Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D
yazantapuz
> Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D
With a friend we destroyed the msdos 622 installation on the new 40 mb hd of my family 386 when deleting tmp files...
tos1
Love the image of the monitor showing Battle Chess! As a side note to all like-minded people that love old DOS games, check out the library of DOS games on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games
pjmlp
The best version of Battle Chess was on the Amiga, though. :)
rblank
"To my horror I found a lot more rust inside."
Not a popular opinion around here.
dt3ft
Thanks for sharing. I love the design/theme of the site. Pure bliss.
ok123456
PS/1 seems like an odd choice since it was intended for the home and small business market. It was IBM's answer to beige box clones dominating everyone who wasn't an institutional buyer and paying for the PS/2 premium.
tokai
Because of the authors childhood experience of his neighbors PS/1 being much better than his own machine.
vincent-manis
My teenage dream machine was a PDP-8 (the original) and a Teletype ASR-33. Fortunately, I never got it.
vunderba
Great article. The mention of Cyrix brought back a rush of nostalgia - one of the earlier PCs I built used a Cyrix 686 166mhz processor.
From the article:
> 8BitDo makes a fantastic modern keyboard inspired by the M looks and feel.
Hard disagree. I found most of their keyboard replicas to be rather cheap feeling. However, their controllers such as the Arcade Stick and Pro 2 are excellent.
I think the closest approximation you can get to an old school model M keyboard with buckler springs is probably from Unicomp. If you don't care about that kind of authenticity I would just stick with something like a Keychron mechanical keyboard and call it a day.
christkv
I had the same Cyrix cpu and all I remember is that FPU performance was terrible in Quake.
criddell
More than once I’ve had a TI-99/4a and fully loaded peripheral expansion box and an Atari 800XL on my eBay watch list. I’ve come so close to pulling the trigger but I know it would give me a weekend of fun and that would be about it. Back to eBay it would go for the next impulsive dinosaur.
bluedino
Reminds me a lot of the IBM 486 we had in school, it was the first Windows PC I had ever seen, most everything else was either an Apple II or an IBM running PC DOS.
It had a CD-ROM, speakers and sound and color and everything. I think it was $10,000, or that's what the computer teacher said.
ungreased0675
I love this. What a trip down memory lane.
My first x86 was acquired in 1997: a 200MHz pentium MMX with 32 MB of RAM, a 2.0 GB harddisk, a 2 MB S3 ViRGE as video card, Aztech Labs AZT-R 2316 sound card, a 33.600 bps winmodem and 28X (I think) CD-ROM. I soon wanted to install Linux on it. It ran minilinux, a small distro that could be launched directly from DOS without partitioning, relatively well. I also downloaded Debian and prepared the 10 floppies to install it but never got ahead because it didn't support my keyboard layout (ABNT2) out of the box. I eventually installed Conectiva Linux 3.0 (marumbi), a RedHat based distro, on it. It worked somewhat beautifully but had no support for the modem and soundcard.
As my relatives and siblings updated their computers, I inherited their spare parts. My machine got some very interesting upgrades. It got 2 floppy drives (very rare at the time), 2 harddisks, a cd-recorder unit, RAM was upgraded to 64 MB and the modem was replaced by a ne2k compatible network card. I also had a Linux-supported Canon BJC 4200 and a SANE-supported TCE table scanner. Still, I couldn't get the SoundBlaster that my brother had and, sadly, my machine continued without sound support on Linux.
At around 2006 I replaced it with a new self built computer which had better compatibility with Linux than with windows-xp and then this new computer became my first dedicated Linux machine. I found out that Linux eventually got support for AZT-R 2316 at around 2007, but the last time I tried my old computer, it displayed "parity error" probably from oxidation in the memory connectors. I then just gave up on it.
Later on I thought about if it would be possible to install a graphics card with OpenGL support and USB port on one of the remaining PCI ports. I certainly wouldn't be able to install a modern Linux distro on it, but certainly it would work with one of those specially crafted for old computers like TinyCore. With recent kernel changes, swapping maybe smart enough to be usable on SSD with SATA to IDE adapters even in that computer. Now, that would be a dream machine.