Righting a Wrong
My company was cleaning out an old telecom closet when they decided to get rid of the "door stop" they had been using to prop open the door when working in the tight space. It was a Dell System 310, or so it seemed. The IT guys knew of my interest in old computers, and I was delighted when one day I walked into my office and found it sitting on my desk.My excitement held until I got it home and discovered that its motherboard had been replaced. The original 1989 Dell motherboard with its 386DX was gone, replaced by an Amptron PM-8600 with a 233MHz AMD K6. I should have known something was up when I saw a 36x CD-ROM had replaced the original 5.25 floppy.
I thought about making it into a sleeper system, but instead I set out to find the original motherboard. A year later, I was blessed with a fruitful eBay alert, and the original board was mine.
Now, I'm going to restore the computer to its proper configuration. The original motherboard looks good, though with plenty of tantalum caps waiting to pop. Its RAM is missing, but it should use standard 30-pin SIMMs — a real plus, considering many systems of this era used custom memory cards (it also has a custom memory expansion connector). One wrinkle is that the system lacks an onboard keyboard jack. The jack is supposed to be mounted in the case above the motherboard and connected using a 4-pin header. I'll have to figure that out.
This will be my first 386DX system. I longed for a 386DX system back in the day, but I could only swing an SX. And thus far, all the 386s in my collection are of the SX variety.
I've been looking forward to working on this one for a while.
