My first build

[strollin]

I thought I would tell the story of my first build, it's kind of long but I hope you guys find it interesting. Building a computer was different then.

I built my first machine in late 1984 or early 1985. I had a background as an Electronics Technician but I was new to PCs. I bought the parts at a Computer Show, a case with a hinged top, 150W power supply, "Turbo" 8Mhz XT motherboard, NEC V20 CPU (a clone of the Intel 8088 but about 5-10% faster), 640K of RAM, an MFC (Multi-Function Card) and a 20M Seagate ST-225 HDD with controller.

An MFC was a card that had an on-board clock with battery as well as 2 serial ports and 1 parallel port. The battery backed clock was needed because these computers didn't have CMOS or a battery on the motherboard so it was necessary to enter the date and time every time you booted the computer unless you had a card with a clock on it. MBs didn't have any on-board ports then, everything was discrete cards.

I don't recall the total cost of the build but I remember that the 20M HDD cost $500. I think the total cost was around $1800. I used a 360K floppy drive and controller, CGA (Color Graphics Adapter) video card as well as keyboard and monitor from my old PC.

I assembled the components in the case which wasn't very difficult. The hard part was the setup. As I mentioned earlier, the MB didn't have CMOS to store settings so there were several sets of switches on the MB that needed to be set correctly to tell the system how much RAM was installed, how many floppy drives (0, 1 or 2), whether a math co-processor was installed and whether you had a mono or color video card. It took awhile to figure out the right combination of switches which required studying the MB manual.

Most users opted for mono in those days because mono was much cheaper. Unfortunately, mono back then also meant text only, no graphics, which is why I opted for color. Since I had a color video card, I set the switch on the MB to color.

When I powered it up the first time, the PS fan came on but there was no output on the display which should have been showing the memory countup in the upper left-hand corner. After a minute or so, there was a beep to indicate it had completed POST then the floppy drive started seeking and appeared to be booting the OS but still there was nothing on the display. I checked that everything was plugged in correctly and checked and triple checked that I had the switches set correctly on the MB.

I removed the MB and took it to the shop I had bought it from and explained the problem. The owner told me that I probably didn't know what I was doing and didn't have the MB switches set correctly. I assured him I had the switches set correctly. He hooked up the MB on his bench, installed a mono video card, set the MB switch to mono and powered it up. The mono display showed the memory being counted up as it should. Since it was working the guy was pretty smug and reiterated that I must have had the switches set wrong. I pointed out to him that I had a color card and wanted him to show me that it worked with a color card. He kept telling me it wouldn't make any difference but I insisted so he finally gave in and tried it with a color card. Guess what? No output on the display!

After trying a few things that convinced him I was right, he called someone on the phone and started jabbering away in Chinese. When he got off the phone he told me to go away and come back in 1 hour. I went and got some lunch and when I returned, he had my MB working with a color card. Apparently, the issue was in the BIOS. In that hour, they had determined the bug in the BIOS, fixed it, burned a new BIOS chip and installed it on my MB. I guess I was the first to ever attempt a build using a color video card with that MB/BIOS combo.

After I got the MB back in my machine, I could boot from a floppy but still needed to setup the HDD. HDDs and controllers had to be matched up back then because the MB BIOS didn't know about HDDs, the HDD controller had it's own BIOS and that BIOS only worked with the handful of HDDs it knew about.

In order to setup the HDD I had to boot DOS and invoke Debug, then from Debug I needed to invoke the low-level format routine that was contained in the controller's BIOS. The command was something like "g=C800:5". Once the LL format completed I then partitioned and formatted the C: drive to make it bootable.

I've built many more since then but I'll never forget my first time.

What was your first build like?

[David M]

Nice story. You never forget your first girl.

[Nuclear Krusader]

Unfortunately.