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Last night (02/23/2002) I was sitting in my basement putting together some parts for a computer. I came across a very tiny motherboard a few years ago that I put away for future work. It's really small. Barely longer than the ISA slots. It's a Toshiba Chip 2 running an AMD 386DX40. What do you think the manufacturer date was? 1993. And the BIOS date, 10/13/1993. 486's had been out in full swing for 2 years. This board was designed for the 486DLC upgrade chip. And it does have a Cyrix 387 fast math 40mhz co-processor. Even though I have an extra 486DLC I'm going to keep this a 386. There are no device controllers on board. Remember the day you had a card for the floppy and Winchester interface. And a card for the serial and parallel ports. And a card for the joystick. And you never thought a card for sound would catch on :) Digging through my parts I find a few floppy/IDE cards. But I also found a trusty Adaptec 1542CF that had the floppy connector on it. Two of the others I have had were missing it. Anyway I figure I'll go SCSI. That way I can kill the HD and CD in one aspi swoop. I find 4 matching 4 meg 30 pins. And amazingly a 1 meg video card. I throw a Quantum 850 drive on the SCSI. Find a floppy and plug it up. Stick it all on a power supply and POOF!
A working 386. Now all I need it to add one of my SoundBlaster's and I'm all set. Um. Wait. It needs a case. The whole board and cards is small. About the size of a small toaster. But the power supply and CD need some room. Anyway, why did I do this? I already have a working 386 mini sized computer that's only 4 inches high. And it has everything on the motherboard. Hmm. It doesn't have a CD though. It was a fun exercise. I wasn't aware of the Adaptec's 1542 bios boot capabilities. When I had it in my PIII I just used it for the external SCSI connection. I did replace that with a 2490 PCI Ultra SCSI though :) Keep the legacy stuff for the oldies.
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