Absurdity, I suppose.

Tonight while jmaynard started reading 8-inch floppies I dug out an old 386 machine that I wasn't sure worked. If nothing else, at least I'd find out if the 3.5 inch floppy drive was a 720k version - something Jay says he could use for something.

The 386 was, and is, almost complete. It's a 386DX25, it has the 387 co-processor, 8 MB of RAM (in 8 30pin sticks), a 3.5 inch and a 5.25 inch floppy, and two hard drives of 170 MB and 100 MB. I must have pulled a network card from it for another machine a few years ago.

Booting it was a bit of an adventure as the CMOS battery is weak if not dead and the hard drive parameters had to be entered - fortunately I had the foresight to label the drives with that information when I assembled cobbled together the computer a few years ago. Unfortunately those drives are not in a position for the labels to be easily read. After some fiddling it booted into PC-DOS, and Windows for Workgroups was there and working (complaining about no network adapter). Also there was muLinux which I'd toyed with a bit. But muLinux is terribly outdated, as well as just plain strange. Worse, it seems to be a root-only thing. It, therefore, can go away.

I was a bit surprised to find that I'd named the machine caspian. That's the name I'd evidently re-used for Pa's old machine when it was here. I thought I'd named that one tarpan.

The 3.5 inch floppy drive is a 1.44 MB thing, so it doesn't fit Jay's plans. Meanwhile, I have a working (it runs? Okkay, it crawls..) 386. What to do with it? Besides bask in the sheer absurdity of the thing, that is.