Custom PC - Project Jenny

Coming soon
Where my personal PC journey began.

NZ used to have a thriving PC manufacturing industry, with firms like PC Company, PC Direct, PC General and Arche all fighting for a piece of the action. It was an era where they didn't just sell upgrades, they expected to sell you upgrades, so machines were readily accessible and built with a modicum of love.

Enter my claptrap. Originally shipped from PC General as a 386 for a typing class, it was barebones as they come - soldered CPU, no FPU, 1MB RAM, Trident 8900C 512K, no sound, not even a mouse.

It only marginally resembles this now.

Specifications

AMD Am386 DX 40MHz CPU

ULSI US38C87 40MHz FPU

8MB 30-pin RAM

dtk PEM-4030Y mainboard

327MB ATA hard disk

Diamond Speedstar Tseng ET4000AX 1MB video card

Creative Sound Blaster Pro2 sound card

Creative CR563B 2x CDROM drive

D-Link DE220P network card

MS-DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1

Unique features

The slinky dtk motherboard is a real peach with plenty of cache upgrade options and no stinking NiCd battery to leak! It did have an ST clock module but unlike the Dallas, it couldn't be peeled for repair so has been replaced with the venerable Necroware nwx287 to great effect.

It even has an integrated... wait, what? Calculator and hard disk park utility in BIOS?!

Personal history

Picture this: it's the late 90s. A young Carcenomy is forever getting told to get off the family Compaq so Dad can do some invoicing. The family is tired of this nonsense. Then the local high school decide they're replacing all their old computers in one go, so they're selling off complete desktop PCs or complete Macs to whoever will take them...

Logically this meant one turned up for me - my first truly personal computer. A beat up PC General desktop with a flippy top chassis, a 386 and 1MB RAM, packed with DOS, WordPerfect 5.1, DirectAccess menu and... wait, a hidden copy of Windows 3.1 and a bunch of shareware DOS games?! That made no sense for a typing room, who did this so I can thank you?

Unfortunately, younger me was either a jerk or a kindly individual, however you want to look at it - after upgrading to a 486, I donated the original motherboard to a family friend to allow them an upgrade from the 8088 they were still running. It's taken many moons after realizing my folly to find an appropriate replacement motherboard!

Upcoming repairs and upgrades

Several in fact!

IO subsystem. A cached hard disk controller isn't out of the question.
Keyboard controller. Something's up and the keyboard registers weirdly and doesn't play well with the KVM. We need to get to the bottom of that before...
Mouse support. Apparently the keyboard controller DTK used likely has a damn PS/2 mouse controller built in but not exposed. If it does, we're gonna expose it - even if just so it's easier to connect Jenny to the KVM.