Jeremy dishes the dirt thus:

"We just got rid of our old point-of-sale system at work. The four POS terminals ran the following: a 12MHz 386 soldered to a baby AT mobo, 2MB RAM, 120MB or 256MB Western Digital, Maxtor or Conner hard drive. Three of them had a 1.44MB 3.5-in floppy. [The systems ran] EGA graphics with amber- or green-on-black monochrome monitors, DOS 6.2 [and the network was] Lantastic 5. The server featured a 25MHz 486, Socket 3 baby AT mobo with 4MB RAM, 640MB Western Digital hard drive, 1.44MB floppy drive, EGA graphics, monochrome monitor and Lantastic Server 5."

But as usual, the boss gets the fast car and keys to the executive lavatory.

"The manager's workstation was the screamer of the lot: 233MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, 6x CD-ROM drive, 1.44MB floppy drive, 3GB Quantum Bigfoot hard drive, VGA monitor, Lantastic 8 (I upgraded!), DR-DOS 8 (I upgraded, again!), Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, Microsoft Office 5 and Zoom 56kbit/s modem."

"We used a bus mouse because the machines had serial cash draws that used all the COM ports [and there was] a really old 9-pin OKI printer that was upgraded to colour with parts scavenged from eBay. The thing about these systems was that they ran without fail. The only problem we had was with the hard drives. They died of old age because the system was on 24/7 for 12-14 years."

Surely it can't get worse though.

"Our other two stores were worse."

Oh, OK then.

"They had an 8088- based point-of-sale system. These suckers were about 25-27 years old, and were there when I started in 1983. They communicated with a weird proprietary parallel communication protocol that used a 35-pin Centronics cable."

Surely it was 36-pin? But go on…

"The printers were standard parallel printers but the parallel port had to be soldered in the main board about 15 years ago when the manufacturer couldn't get parts to replace the old internal printers. There was a built-in UPS that was based on four beer-can sized capacitors. I believe that the main program was stored on a pair of 10- or 12-pin, 256k EEPROMs. In all, they were about 35 pounds each and about the size of a small cube refrigerator."

Aye, I can smell ‘em now.

Neil calls in with (yet another) stirring story of days of yore.

"I work in the digital libraries field and preservation is an interest but here's the most antique stuff I have working. An IBM PC portable rescued from our scrap pile last year -- dead posh with a 20MB half-height hard disk drive and two low-density floppy drives. It fired up just fine after I reformatted the drive (worryingly, I could remember how to invoke the BIOS routine via debug) and I found a shrink-wrapped copy of PC-DOS 3.3 to go with it. Just for kicks we tried embedded Linux on it. It boots fine off floppy but there are no drivers for the HDD controller - can't think why. Wordstar 3.3, WordPerfect 5.2, Lotus Freelance 2.0, Lotus Magellan and Borland Sidekick 1.5 to follow after a quick dig in the loft. And Turbo Pascal 3.3 of course, with the Graphix Toolbox."

And Neil had a classic subnotebook design even we'd forgotten about.

"HP Omnibook 300 -- 386SX-16, 2MB RAM, DOS 5.0, Windows 3.1, Word and Excel in ROM, mono VGA screen - weighing three pounds and offering eight hours computing from a set of AA batteries. HP did great stuff once and if you're writing on the road this is still the master. 2400 modem built in. Still looking for a 1.01 BIOS card and a network card with drivers for this one."

Yes, and didn't it have a small pop-out mouse tethered with a short cable? We just looked it up -- yes, it did. At the time we thought it would be a big seller. Clearly it wasn't.

Finally, Mat asks an aggressive, futuristic question ill-befitting this offbeat ramble down memory lane noting points of interest as we go.

"Are these people crazy? I mean, honestly, those systems have to be rotting from years of decay... What's the point in hanging on to the oldest point-of-sale hardware? To say, ‘hey I have this crap still running'? These guys must be the true definition of nerds... Chuck the crap and get a new cheap Dell, HP, even an eMachine and be gone with that 9-inch monitor of doom."

Yes indeed Mat, but how would we have ever filled two huge INQUIRER slots with ancient tales of the land computing forgot?

That's enough old-skool IT -- we've taken this as far as we can and there can't be any better tales of the PC from BC. Unless, as Cyril Fletcher used to say to Esther Rantzen, you know different… µ

See Also
How old skool is your IT?
Readers fess up to old-skool IT