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

On Thu, 2 Jun 2016, william degnan wrote: I've had a few OptiPlex machines as workstations given to me by my corporate masters. They were decent machines. I'm a little put off on Dell for servers after working in a shop where we got both Dell and HP (or Compaq) DL series systems. When I worked at Oracle from 2003 to 2007, we'd often get both (Dells for the hosted data centers and HP DL series for lots of lab environments). The failure rate for the Dell systems was much higher out of the box, and slightly higher in production as well. That was just my anecdotal experience. I'll probably put in a SCSI ZIP drive and a combo 3.5" / 5 1/4" drive if I go with a big honkin' case. If not, I'll just do a 3.5" floppy if I gotta choose. I wonder if any of those "big floppy" style drives supported standard 3.5" floppies, too? Didn't the old LS120 and Sony HiFD do backwards support of older 1.44MB floppies, too? I remember those days. You have to understand that, even though I was a pre-teen / kid, I considered myself a hardcore DOS user when Windows came onto the scene. I liked a lot of things about DOS (hated some others). Once 3.1 was released, I realized how serious Microsoft was about Windows. I just couldn't stand it. Nothing was going in a direction I liked. I felt a kind of despair that I wasn't going to be a "computer guy" like I planned because if I had to work with Windows for my whole career I'd rather just dig ditches. That was about the time I got introduced to Unix (around 1992). That "saved" me. I went coocoo for coco puffs and I never looked back. So, I've never really used Windows that much. I've played some games on it, off and on. At my jobs (systems programmer, sysadmin, etc..), I always use a Unix variant. If they trick me or change the desktop OS policy, I laugh in their face until I turn purple and quit the gig using my middle finger. Bottom line, Windows isn't a consideration for me. No offense meant. It's just my background. Cool. Reading that for fun. Heh, right on. You are having fun with it, I don't begrudge anyone that! Heh, maybe pick you up one of those 2007FP that are going cheap lately. That's the one folks recently piped up on the thread about 4:3 and square LCDs. That is a real steal nowadays and I'd agree it's a hella-nice bit of kit. -Swift