Old 386/486 hardware

J

jaco1982

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Hi guys,

For various reasons (including educational purposes), we are looking for some old computer hardware at work. Specifically, we are looking for the following:

  • 386/486 motherboards, with processors and RAM
  • IDE Hard drives, up to about 1-2GB
  • 3.5" Floppy drives (5.25" would be nice but not required)
  • ISA VGA Display adapter
  • ISA Sound card (Sound blaster 2, etc)
  • AT chassis
  • AT-style serial keyboard
  • Serial mouse
  • Support Hardware (Controllers, etc)
  • 2x IDE CD-ROM

I have invested new hardware, but current industrial 386 SBC hardware will not be suitable for our purposes.

In terms of quantities, we need enough to build up two fully working computers. Does anyone know where we can look to source this kind of hardware?
 
It's going to be super expensive. These sorts of machines are becoming collectors items now.

Have you considered emulating them using a Pi? You'd get away with hiding the Pi in an old ATX case, along with USB-IDE connectors for the cd-rom/floppy drives.

As long as you dont poke about inside, you can get it to work pretty much identically
 
agentrfr said:
It's going to be super expensive. These sorts of machines are becoming collectors items now.

Have you considered emulating them using a Pi? You'd get away with hiding the Pi in an old ATX case, along with USB-IDE connectors for the cd-rom/floppy drives.

As long as you dont poke about inside, you can get it to work pretty much identically
Click to expand...

We've considered this. We're currently emulating the software in DOSBox, but would like to add the hardware experience to it as well.
 
Why not do it using a pi and emulate a whole machine as a VM? Like actually run windows 3.1. You can then add things like a virtual SoundBlaster card or Voodoo GFX etc. And pipe the output direct to the HDMI out?
 
You could try some under priviledged schools. They might still be using this hardware with Windows 95 for word processing etc.
 
I might have a 286 with 16k RAM somewhere in my dad's garage...used the 40meg IDE HDD as a door stop many years ago though so probably cant find that
 
agentrfr said:
Why not do it using a pi and emulate a whole machine as a VM? Like actually run windows 3.1. You can then add things like a virtual SoundBlaster card or Voodoo GFX etc. And pipe the output direct to the HDMI out?
Click to expand...

VM/DosBox is not always the solution, I have some old eeprom programmers that will only work on the real thing, and I know there are some other types of industrial hardware that is the same especially when they require dedicated ISA cards.

Some of my old hardware ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy-sZVADXDI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDW3ReUPua0
 
Where are you based? I have an old box lying at home gathering dust. It is in now way functional, but you might be able to source some parts from it.
 
Thanks for the responses so far guys. I'm afraid I can't say too much as to exactly why we need the hardware, because there are several colleagues on the forums, and the exact purposes are quite hush-hush at the moment. All I can say at the moment, is that for these purposes, we need the hardware itself, as the "training" involves the hardware more than the software.
I'll say this though... there are lots of young engineers at our company who do not know and/or have no appreciation for the history of especially personal computing hardware...

@Drifter - I'm based in Cape Town.
 
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