

How do you use a computer that's 30 years old, has no monitor, and no keyboard? - sbierwagen
http://www.reenigne.org/blog/i-bought-an-xt/

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steve8918
Ahhhh, memories!

The first computer I had was an 8088 XT clone with a turbo setting that went
from 4.77 MHz to 8 MHz! It was blazing fast!

I remember the very first thing I did when we brought the computer home from
the computer store was I went through the hard drive and saw this file that I
couldn't possibly use, and deleted it. Why? Who knows, I was a dumb kid.

Yes, you guessed it. COMMAND.COM.

When I rebooted my computer, I got the "COULD NOT LOAD COMMAND.COM" error and
I freaked out because I f'ed up my computer on the very first day I had it and
my parents would kill me. I knew I could boot from my DOS 3.2.1 diskettes, but
not from my hard drive, so after straining, I somehow managed to figure out
how to copy the command.com from my diskette onto my hard drive and it worked.

And thus started my illustrious career in debugging computer problems and IT
support, which continues to this day.

~~~
Luyt
On a slow day, you could TYPE C:/COMMAND.COM and watch all the gibberish fly
by, with the occasional beep due to the BELL character.

~~~
ajenner
Heh, I used to do that with all the binaries I could find in an attempt to
learn their secrets (before I discovered I could do it with DEBUG.COM). I
found that doing "copy command.com /b con" would show me more since it would
stop on EOF characters.

------
ajenner
A little update - I've now replaced the power supply's circuit board with one
from a modern (and working) ATX PSU, the graphics card with a CGA card (which
works with the TV with the BIOS timings) and booted into ROM BASIC using a
little Windows program to turn keystrokes into scancodes sent over the serial
port.

The hard drive doesn't appear to be bootable and I don't have any floppy disks
for it yet so I need to write some more code to see if the hard disk is broken
or just doesn't have a boot sector, and to determine which RAM chip is faulty
(it's only detecting 192Kb of the 256Kb onboard RAM).

~~~
smoyer
Would you like an XT keyboard ... I found a box of them in my basement
recently.

~~~
ajenner
That would be great! My email address is andrew@reenigne.org.

~~~
smoyer
Check your inbox ... as far as monitors go, my first one was a NEC Multi-Sync
EGA monitor that had the pin-out you need. It was top-of-the-line but cost
$650 for a 640x350 16-color display. And it was _heavy_! I believe I sent it
to our local recycler last year, but I wanted to point out that there are VGA-
EGA adapters packaged much like RS-232 (serial) gender changers ... if I can
find the appropriate one, I'll send it along with your keyboard.

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shabble
Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful hack. The keyboard-interface as I/O
reminds me a lot of the similarly awesome ipod firmware dump via piezo
speaker:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070613032334/http://ipodlinux.o...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070613032334/http://ipodlinux.org/stories/piezo/)

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ck2
You can still get the large 5pin din connecting keyboards on ebay. Search for
"G83-6414" for example.

But I think the 5pin to ps/2 connector may just be a straight wire through to
the smaller connector, so you can reverse that?

Threw out turbo-xt motherboards well over a decade ago.

Still have a couple 16mhz 386sx motherboards somewhere that I cannot seem to
make myself throw out because they worked fine, just (very, very) outdated.
They are so tiny (1/3 board size) that they don't take any space to keep
around.

Also have some isa vga cards somewhere - could send you one if you really
needed. But the original XT also had an optional color card with composite out
that could still be easily used today.

~~~
ajross
My memory is that the AT (and PS/2) keyboards shared the same signaling, but
had different scan codes. So it wouldn't work to plug a PS/2 keyboard in via a
DIY adapter.

~~~
ajenner
Different scancodes and different protocol - there's plans for a
microcontroller-based adapter at [http://www.vintage-
computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?15907...](http://www.vintage-
computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?15907-AT-to-XT-Keyboard-Converter) .

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DanBC
I love to see this level of investigation. It's a great shame that there's not
really any programme of funding or support to encourage hacking like this.
Hopefully people will dig around in cupboards / attics / basements to find
more hardware.

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hackermom
By serial terminal, was my first thought.

~~~
ajenner
That was my first thought too, and I made up serial and parallel cables. But
without a keyboard or disk drives, there's no way to bootstrap it into running
some software that will talk to the serial or parallel port.

~~~
Roboprog
Ah, but there is. As one of the commenters on the site noted, you make a
floppy with the redirection command in "autoexec.bat". Of course, I only have
a 3.5 inch USB floppy drive, but not a way to work on 5.25 inch floppies (no
sure if spare drive in garage still plugs into anything in newer mobos)

