Sounds like you've got a lot of neat stuff. For some reason, I still don't have an original IBM PC 5150 in my collection. When I had the chance (many) to get one back in the early 1990s, I always passed them up, uninterested in PC-related stuff since it was so plentiful. Now I kinda regret it.
I should have grabbed all the original IBM-brand stuff I could find.
I have a pretty nice original AT, though. I've even got the original IBM VGA card for it, which is pretty rare. Tell me more about your decked-to-the-hilt AT. What kind of cards do you have in it?
By the time I bought an AT, I was hacking these PCs like there was no tomarrow. I was building all sorts of hardware for them to do all kinds of crazy things. My AT is one of the first units made. It has a 6MHz CPU and coprocessor. The MFM controller is actually marked "PROTO", prototype, from Western Digital. It also has the original video card in it along with the original IBM expansion board. It came with a whopping 20Meg full height drive that I still have but I later swapped it for the 30M then added a 100+ Meg drive from MicroScience before I retired it. The Quantum Q2080s were the king. Where I worked we upgraded some of the VME systems and I took the memory for the AT. I bought a EVEREX memory card and one other one that had a daughter board that would support 4Meg total. Most people back then had 640K. I also had a 20Meg IRWIN tape drive, a 1.2M and 360K floppy drives. All stuff that could be bought, so no big deal...
However, mine was a hacking machine so I built a card for it that started out being a PROM programmer but grew over time.
I could program the 2764s, 128's and 256's opf the day, but I could also program the Motorola MC68701. Ah, the good old days. Then I added a 5220 LPC encoder from TI do make the PC talk. (There were no sound cards at this time, not even the first Sound Blaster was out, which I still have). If you did want sound, you could PWM the speaker or just do a frequency change all with the timer. With PWM, we could make some sounds, but nothing like what the Sound Blaster had. As a matter of fact, I was amazed at how poor they did with the whole idea of using the PCs for games. After all, what did we have with the very first PC, Donkey! LOL. After this I added a couple of ADCs and was doing some stuff with that. Then I wrote my first BIOS hook rom, making a security system for the AT. This was just like now how you can have the PC ask for a password in the BIOS when you boot. No one thought it would be a good idea so I never did anything with it..
If you remember way back then, we were all using MFM (modified FM). I wish I had kept more of the old drives just to keep some of my equipment alive... Anyway, they later came out with RLL which was a compressor in hardware (run length limited). Then Perstor came out with a controller that would double a drive. I bought one of those and ran it for a few year. I used to use some strange software to hack the drives back then. J format was one. Pstore was another.
If all that is not enough to bore you to sleep.....
Hacking before it was hacking?
Being in engineering I was always doing something with a computer. I was always amazed at what companies were doing to try and copy protect their discs. COPYIIPC and Hardrunner was the norm. As the PC (PCPC) was getting more common, programs started to come out that actually did something other than play Donkey and Music. SPICE came out for the PC. SPICE is an engineering tool that we ran on a VAX back then. Now this was the first software I ever saw that they actually burned the floppy and you could not copy it. The software was expensive and so if you were a budding engineer wanting to play with the software at home, you had to take the master disc #1 home with you. I had reverse engineered a few programs by that time and decided to see what it would take to copy SPICE. Out came Debug, ah.. it was a packed exe file. So I looked at all of the software on the discs and read the manuals. I leanred they wrote the SPICE using Microsoft Fortran. Then I discovered that for the power users of SPICE, they had supplied the object files so you could include your own library of parts and rebuild it. It just so happened that we used Fortran, so no problem. I just rebuilt it all as an unpacked exe. Then out cam Debug a second time. A few hours later of looking at assembler code and watching two PCs single step, I had a version of the EXE that would run without the master floppy #1.
