On Fri, 18 Jan 2002, -P.Chase wrote:

> A friend of mine gave me a computer to look at for them to see what
> I could do with it. It's a DECpc 420SX. I looked on the web for info
> concerning this model but found little. I haven't opened it up yet
> to see how much memory it has. It has windows 3.1 for workgroups. I
> wasn't able to find out what the system configuration is though,
> anyone know how to do this in win 3.1? Also the BIOS seems to go
> directly to MS-DOS, i have to check the version and revision but
> anyone know how to get the menu? thanx

DEC (now Compaq) used to have utility disk available for download. I
seem to remember that the disk didn't do much, though; just let you
set the drive sleep time, nothing you'd really need.

The boxes we had had an AHC-1540 scsi card (no utility on the card,
put I'm pretty sure you can still download that), a 5-1/4in 40 or 80mb
scsi drive, and a daughtercard with 4 1mb simms. They were all
purchased circa 1988. Once they were declared obsolete, I tricked one
out with a daughtercard salvaged from a twin, and loaded NetBSD-1.3.2
with X! Later took it to 1.3.3. It was a bear, so I finally gave it
another job running some touchscreen controllers. The thing the
touchscreen's controlled is gone since last year, but it's probably
still heating up the room. What a trooper! <sniff>

Frederick