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3.25 floppy – Janeil Harricharan

3.25 floppy

Here’s a quick shot of the “experimental” and original machine that’s supposed to span two eras in computing; the Millenium project.

 

A ghost of a husk of the old family computer, I was never able to get this computer to work for various reasons. First I got a hard drive in 2002 but I had no OS to make it work; then in 2006 I was given an official opinion that the motherboard was broken on it. It was a custom build, with no brand name or manufacturer that had a birth in 1999.

 

I have cannibalized and gotten a lot of parts, including buying a duplication Biostar motherboard to bring it to life again. It now thankfully powers on again, but I have to get it to work with the hard drive installed, which is hard since I have no OS.

 

But I have dry-tested startup on some additional parts; two CD-ROM drives (one being the fabled Creative 52X drive), a tape drive from a 386 that broke down, and dual 3.25″ floppy disk drives. I can’t get the digital display to work on the front, but everything seems to fire up right.

 

And while I don’t have a picture on the back, I have a SoundBlaster32 for internals (kicking out the ES1868 AudioDrive), an IDE expander and gotten connectors to have some additional serial and parallel ports on the back.

 

As for now, it’s a half-baked PC with no heart or brain, but a working body. Sitting in the corner like some neglected test aircraft down at Northdrop with a bunch of tarps draped over it. When I can get enough cash to get an OS for it, I’ll hopefully bring this system to the life it deserves. It’s a matter of when, as the frame has sentimental value to me.

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**Backdated for historical purposes**

 

Remember that spiffy game called Descent? With the ship flying around in the cavern shooting robots? I got a whiff of it and thought it was intoxicating. While I couldn’t play it at home, the memory stuck with me long after. And while I had barely been drawing things in MSPaint, one night I did drum this up on my parent’s IBM 65sx PS/2 system, and had forgotten about it till a diskette dump I did in 2014; a BMP fanart of Descent.

 

I had seen the game briefly in action at a relative’s house in Charlotte. And while I would die within ten minutes of starting Level 1, those gray hallways and that Spider Bot in the menu always stuck to me. While I’m pretty sure I might’ve drawn something on paper, I apparently did this in MSPaint as well. Why, I don’t know; but I did, and I did write and save it to a floppy disk to uncover all these years later.

 

As you can see, the imagination of a kid holds a lot of potential. They can remember certain things very well and vividly in those times. The cockpit may be well off, but I certainly remembered that double ring HUD. And I even got the ship design right in the shield window to some degree. Looking back at it decades later, I can’t believe it myself that I did ‘fanart’.

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