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

[Fred Cisin]

>>>> No CD.
>> Why no CD-ROM?  2/3G storage; SCSI or proprietary interfaces, even parallel
>> port adapters.
> Oh, that was someone else. I'll put in a SCSI CDROM, probably a Plextor or
> Pioneer.
>> CD-ROM was less work for installing Windoze 3.10/3.11 than a couple
>> dozen floppies.
> Or installing SLS or Slackware with 40 floppies. :-)

It wasn't very hard using parallel port, to implement SCSI (Trantor 
Mini-SCSI and the like), including Floptical, and 2.8M (MicroSolutions 
"Backpack")
On machines without SCSI or CD-ROM, I would temporarily bring up CD-ROM 
off of parallel port when I had Windoze installations or the like to deal 
with.

I never realized that floptical or 2.8M drives were scarce or rare, 
although blank media started to be harder to come by.
One of the machines that I used quite a bit in my office (<2000) had a 
360K 5.25", a 720K 5.25", a switch between an extrnal box with 1.2M 5.25" 
and 8" and the other position of the switch was 3" and 3.25", with 
a floptical/1.4M on a SCSI card, and a 2.8M/1.4M on a parallel port. 
(Did I mention that I was working with floppy disk formats?)


--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com