This little computer was a great “find”. I was out visiting my favorite local used computer store when I found a big pile of junk in front of the door. Closer inspection revealed that the pile was actually seven or eight Packard Bell 286’s that the store personnel had stripped of their video cards, and of their 3.5″ floppy and hard drives. They were destined, as it turns out, for the trash. However, much to my joy, they all still had their motherboards, processors, 30 pin memory, 5.25″ drives, power supplies, cases, cables, and screws galore. After getting the store’s permission, I loaded as many into my car as I could fit, then took them all to work with me.
When I arrived at work, I promptly set about stripping the majority of them for parts. What a goldmine! I have plenty of spare case screws now! I did, however, save the computer with the best case for a rebuild. I cleaned up the parts, and installed a spare 3.5″ floppy and 40meg hard drive. The last thing I dug up for it was an old full-length CGA card. I hooked it up to a keyboard and one of my 5151 MDA monitors, slipped in a boot disk from my 386s, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t fire right up.
It currently is running PCDOS 7.0 from IBM. This is my first experience with PCDOS, and so far I really like it. The little Force 1 is a great machine to test things like this on. I have to admit, when I first rebuilt this computer, I was just going to mess around with it before scrapping it for more parts, but it’s grown on me, and I decided to go ahead and immortalize it here.
