notANON

Digging through my files the other day I came across these little gems.  They are the sales order and build sheet for the first IBM compatible system my family ever had.  It was built by Bear Computer who is actually still in business to this day but they moved to a different location down the street.

The system we bought was configured as follows:

• 386DX/33 chip and motherboard
• 4 megs of ram
• Seagate 120 meg hard disk
• 2 the max 1mb video card
• 16-bit generic IDE/serial/parallel combo card
• 5 1/4 inch floppy drive
• 3 1/2 inch floppy drive
• 2400 baud internal modem
• 13″ Sony Trinitron SVGA 1024×768 monitor
• Keytronics 104 key keyboard
• Logitech Serial Mouse
• MS-DOS 4.01
• Windows 3.0

Price?  $3766.20 including Washington State sales tax.  That was a good chunk of money in April of 1991 but my dad felt it was necessary for his construction business to have computerized accounting and felt that it would help me take an interest and learn more about computers.  I think the computerized accounting was far more trouble than it was worth in 1991 but the second goal of peaking my interest in computers was certainly a success.

Reading this paperwork brings back memories.  Oddly, my dad purchased the computer and they handed us the sound card separately in a box.  The technicians didn’t feel comfortable installing it in the system.  I thought this was a bit odd since they felt comfortable enough to plug in 30 pin simms and a 386 chip into a non-ziff slot but couldn’t deal with a $200 sound card?  Oh well.  I’m really GLAD they did this since it gave me the opportunity to open up the system myself and jam that sound card in there.

There were several other things that happened with this system.  Somehow, we managed to fry 3 IDE controllers while it was still under warranty.  One time was CLEARLY my fault but the other two I’m not so sure about.  A Smith Corona electronic typewriter that we had featured a DB9 port on the back so I tried to plug that into the controller to see if I could interface the two.  That ended up releasing the magic smoke.  The other couple of times were random failures I think.  Back in those days, computer parts had just started being mass produced in China so there were some QC issues from time to time.

Roughly two months after my dad purchased that computer, I got a summer job working for my friend’s dad building computers at his computer store in Bellevue.  Keep in mind, I was twelve years old at this point.  As part of my working there, I managed to trade up to a 486DX/33 CPU and motherboard.  Needless to say, my dad didn’t know whether to be pleased or furious when he came home to his 2 month old computer in pieces while I was swapping in the new board.  The computer he just paid nearly $4,000 for I might add.  In the end it worked out though.  I worked off the price of the upgrade, the computer still worked after the upgrade and he didn’t have to put out a dime for it.

That wasn’t the last time I tore into the hardware or broke the software on this poor system.  I’m shocked my dad didn’t rip his hair out after the 10th time or so that I had to reinstall the operating system for one reason or another.  I did learn a lot from breaking it and fixing it however.  Those were all invaluable lessons and proof positive that the learning process includes making a few mistakes along the way.

Even the sales order itself is as archaic as the computer described on the paper.  It was printed on a dot matrix printer with tear off sides and has faded terribly over the years.  Oh the good old days…  at least I have this paperwork to remember them by.