thinking of the "ultimate" retro x86 PCs - what bits to seek/keep ?

On Thu, 2 Jun 2016, TeoZ wrote: Yes, I would agree on that. However, since I'm mostly interested in running older Unix variants and DOS, games aren't at the top of my value system. Don't get me wrong, I love games, and I'd surely have a few loaded with DOS. However, I'm looking for something special. I have this foggy memory of a small, white, NEC (or maybe it was NCR, or or or... crap. I just can't remember) slimline desktop machine that was a 486 and had a SCSI2 interface right on the mobo and had an external SCSI2 header, too. I know it had two or three expansion slots, but I didn't get to pop open the box to look at what kind of slots they were. I've been google image searching for a while trying to find it again. I saw them while doing some contract job back in the 90's. The green LED on a SCSI terminator caught my eye (as well as the fact that I liked the case design). I have an Orchid VL-bus card I plan to use. I think I'll probably go with the 3c509 for ethernet, or a 3C905 if the machine comes with PCI (doubtful). I'm not a huge PS/2 fan, but some of them were still interesting to me. I just looked those up. That model 95 is a beast. 8 32-bit MCA slots. Geeze. However, I'm afraid a lot of those MCA adapters won't be supported under something like BSDi or Solaris x86. I totally understand. That's why I put big quotes around "ultimate". Everyone has their own idea of that. I'm really just hoping that if someone sees me saying "I think this bit was really nice" about something they had a bad experience with, then they'd speak up. Some folks have already, and I appreciate that. Plus, I've learned a ton about floppy drives with the discussion about 2.88M floppies. :-) -Swift