The crazy process of resurrecting a beige box from the 80s/90s.
–PC Pitstop.
Building a Retro PC
by Marc Thomas for Daves Computer Tips
Retro is The New Black
Have you ever wondered what happens to all those beige boxes you remember from the 80’s and 90’s? Well some of them end up in flea markets, car boot sales and Ebay, if they haven’t already been crushed or thrown in some inner city canal along with all those supermarket trolleys. But many of them and their components, sit next to their modern rival offspring in dens, lofts, basements and studies from here to Chipping Norton.
The fact is, people love to restore things, whether they be cars, boats, fabulous oil paintings or computers. There’s something intrinsically rewarding on coming across a seemingly useless piece of junk and breathing new life into it, almost as if you were the very person it was waiting for all those years.
Which brings me to when I recently took a trip back down memory lane with a customer who asked me to take a look at his Polaroid Sprint Scan 35+, which he brought over to me with a box of SCSI cards and cables, together with a very down and out looking PC, with which he had been working, but rather slowly.
The end result of this exchange being a happier customer going home with a functioning 1997 model scanner and a replacement PC running Windows 98.
This brought forth an itch I needed to scratch and since it was still raining outside, what better time to dust off the old Pentium II? This particular beast has seen many incarnations, initially as a 486DX running Windows 3.1, until, over the years, the innards gradually became separated from the case, leaving it rather forlorn and empty looking in the corner of the garage, whilst real life wreaked its havoc outside.
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These excerpts are shared with permission from davescomputertips.com.
