Recall the 386SX and its features

Despite the apparent antiquity, this computer can be used, for example, to train the x86 and C assembler, as a typewriter and to run old DOS games. It works fine with the Windows 3.1 operating system in which you can quite work with the old word and exel. It also runs an early version of Delphi. One of the nice features is the ability to run MapleV, in which you can perform symbolic calculations. You can also install Windows 95, but it is quite slow.
This computer can also be used as a Web server for displaying static pages and an ftp server. The only pity is that the maximum amount of hard disk supported (information available to utilities for working with a hard disk, for example fdisk) is only 504 MB. But they can be outsmarted by formatting the disk on another computer to the maximum possible for fat16-2GB. You can also create another 3 primary partition on 2GB. Total: 8GB, the maximum available in the BIOS. Below is more detailed information. In addition, you can connect to it a CDROM, which is perfectly readable from both Dos and Windows. To do this, you must specify in BIOS that there is no slave IDE disk (disk D).
Consider this unit in more detail:

Iron review

HDD

Let's start with the hard drive. It is released by Quantum and can be tagged at 365MB or 730MB, depending on the number of cylinders, heads and sectors. At one time it was marked up at 365Mb.

Mother card

This M396F motherboard contains:

Soldered processor amd 386SX clock speed of 40 MHz. Our processor has a 16-bit external data bus. He himself is 32-bit.
Coprocessor 3C87-SX
6 ISA slots
AMI bios
4MB of memory
Does not contain CASH

Specification:

External devices

Device	Connector	Device	Connector
External battery	JP1	Turbo mode indicator	JP5
Power Indicator and Keypad Lock	JP3	Turbo switch	JP6
Speaker	JP4	Reset button	JP7

Monitor mode

Mode	Jumper	Position
Color	JP2	Is closed
Monochrome	JP2	Is open

CPU mode

Frequency	JP8	JP9	JP10
16MHz	pins 2 & 3 closed	pins 1 & 2 closed	pins 1 & 2 closed
20MHz	pins 2 & 3 closed	N / A	N / A
25MHZ	pins 2 & 3 closed	pins 1 & 2 closed	pins 2 & 3 closed
33MHz	pins 2 & 3 closed	pins 2 & 3 closed	pins 1 & 2 closed
40MHz	pins 1 & 2 closed	pins 2 & 3 closed	pins 2 & 3 closed

Multifunctional card

This F825K4PTI227W card (W83757AF, W83758P) contains the controllers: COM port, LTP port, IDE, FDD and game port.

Configuration

Unfortunately, the instruction from her was lost. I quote found with a description of the location of the jumpers. Previously, it was necessary to use handles to specify hardware interrupts and port addresses. This is not what it is now - inserted into the USB or PCI connector, installed the drive - and it’s ready (automatic selection of free ports and interrupts).

Decode:
X - Close Jumper (L)
: - Open Jumper (H)

COM-A DIS 1,2 ::
COM-A 3F8 1.2 X: = COM1
COM-A 3EF 1,2: X = COM3
COM-A 2EF 1,2 XX = COM1

COM-B DIS 3,4 ::
COM-B 2F8 3,4 X: = COM2
COM-B 2EF 3,4: X = COM4
COM-B 2EF 3,4 X: = COM2

LPT-C DIS 5.6 ::
LPT-C 378 5.6 X: = LPT1
LPT-C 278 5.6: X = LPT2

FDD-D DIS 7:
FDD-D EN 7 X

HDD-E DIS 8:
HDD-E EN 8 X

Video card

16-bit VGA Cirrus logic CL-GD5402-75QC video card with 1 MB of memory (this is the maximum for this card). Initially, it had 2 RAM chips V53C104P10L (256Kb each), then another 2 M514256A-80R (256Kb each) was added from the non-working video card.

LAN card

This COMPEX ReadyLink RL2000A card allows you to organize a network connection using twisted pair or coaxial cable. The maximum speed of work is 10 Mbps. A feature of this card is support for plug-and-play, those do not have to manually set interrupts and input / output ports with jumpers. To configure them, use a special utility that is supplied on a diskette with a card driver. The package includes a driver for Windows (9x and NT), batch for dos.

Power Supply

230-watt AT power supply.

Computer assembly

We connected all expansion cards to the motherboard, as well as the keyboard and printer. At this stage we will not connect the network card.

Printer

Epson LQ-400 dot matrix printer. The test page was printed on another computer to test its performance. Fortunately, the ribbon is almost dry.

Software

Turn on the computer and go to the BIOS. To do this, when loading, press Del.

Bios

Before us appears the main menu AMI BIOS:

I will give a brief description of each line:

Main menu line of the SETUP program	Description
STANDARD CMOS SETUP	Allows you to set all the basic configuration of the computer. This menu bar provides the ability to set the number and types of hard and magnetic drives, the current date and time, the type of video subsystem. If the computer is used as a server, this line allows you to disable keyboard and monitor checking.
ADVANCED CMOS SETUP	Designed to set additional configuration parameters specific to your motherboard and BIOS.
ADVANCED CHIPSET SETUP	Manages various parameters of the motherboard
AUTO CONFIGURATION WITH BIOS DEFAULTS	Write default values to CMOS-memory of computer
AUTO CONFIGURATION WITH POWER-ON DEFAULTS	Write default values to CMOS-memory of computer
CHANGE PASSWORD	Serves to set or change the password requested when the computer is initially booted and when trying to access the Setup program.
HARD DISK UTILITY	Serves for servicing hard disk drives. Allows you to determine the type of disk, check its performance and format it
WRITE TO CMOS AND EXIT	Allows you to record all changes in the CMOS-memory and continue booting the computer
DO NOT WRITE TO CMOS AND EXIT	Allows you to continue to boot the computer without making changes to the CMOS-memory

Go to the menu STANDARD CMOS SETUP:

Consider the parameters of the hard disk, the remaining parameters are obvious. Noteworthy is the fact that the drive supports 3.5 "at 2.88MB. To automatically determine the parameters of the hard disk, you can use the AUTO DETECT HARD DISK item of the main menu. It determines the correct configuration of disks up to 8GB (checked for interest)!

Parameter	Description
Type	The numeric designation of the type of disk is determined by its parameters. There are a number of standard disc types. The volume of disks of standard types does not exceed 160 MB. If you want to specify the parameters manually, this field must be 47.
Cylinders (Cyln.)	The number of cylinders on the disk
Heads	Number of disk heads (surfaces)
Write Precompensation (WPcom)	The physical size of the sector depends on the length of the track, and, consequently, on the track number. However, 512 bytes should be stored in each sector. Therefore, to compensate for the size of the sector, the writing and reading of inner cylinders having a smaller diameter is accelerated. This parameter determines the number of the track on which the sector size compensation mechanism is activated.
Landing Zone (L Zone)	The number of the cylinder on which the magnetic head of the disk is automatically positioned (parked) when the computer is turned off. Usually for this field indicate the number of the last track of the disc.
Sectors (Sec.)	The number of sectors on each track of the disc. For the vast majority of disks, the sector size is 512 bytes. The MS-DOS operating system cannot work with devices whose sector size is not equal to 512 bytes. For such devices, you need to install additional drivers.
Size	Disk capacity. It is derived from other disk parameters. It is calculated automatically using the following simple formula: Size = Heads * Cylinders * Sectors * 512

Let's exit their current Esc and go to the ADVANCED CMOS SETUP main menu:

Parameter	Description
Typematic rate programming	Auto-repeat mode pressed key
Typematic rate	Auto-repeat speed in characters per second
Above 1 MB Memory Test	To disable extended memory checking, select “Disabled” for this parameter. Standard memory (first MB) is checked in any case. The BIOS memory test is very simple. Many errors he leaves unnoticed. More detailed check of the RAM should be performed using a special program, for example, CheckIt.
Memory Test Tick Sound	Beep when testing memory
Memory Parity Error Check	Check parity memory. If the memory modules do not contain parity bits, then the check should be disabled.
Hit del message display	Allows you to cancel the display at the time of loading messages on the screen: Hit Del if you want to run Setup
Hard Disk Type 47 RAM Area	Usually, the description of the configuration of hard disk drives with non-standard type 47 is located in RAM at 0: 300h. If necessary, this information can be moved to another location. Can be placed in the last kilobyte standard RAM 640 KB
Wait For F1 If Any Error	Defines the reaction to error detection during the initial boot of the computer.
Fast Gate A20 Option	Manages the address line A20. This line allows you to access the RAM, located above one megabyte. In order for the computer to be fully compatible with the IBM PC / XT, the A20 line must always remain inactive and the “Fast Gate A20 Option” parameter must be set to “Disabled”. In other cases, set this parameter to “Enabled”.
Video & Adapter ROM Shadow	The BIOS chip is a permanent storage device in which various service programs are recorded. Permanent memory is much slower than RAM. To improve performance, the most frequently used programs and data located in the BIOS ROM chip are being copied into RAM when the computer is booted and then taken from it. Programs accessing addresses belonging to the BIOS will work with fast RAM. This will greatly speed up the execution of programs actively accessing the BIOS. The area of RAM, which displays the ROM area, called the shadow memory. The use of shadow memory reduces the amount of available RAM, but it significantly speeds up the functions of the computer's BIOS and video subsystem.

Press Esc and go to the HARD DISK UTILITY item of the main menu:

With the help of this utility, you can perform low-level formatting and verification of the hard disk.
We exit the BIOS without saving the parameters and restart the system:

We see information about what is loaded MS Dos.
Then run Norton Commander:

System Information and Performance Tests

Let's use the System Info program from the Norton Utilitus package.
General information:

CPU performance:

Hard Drive Speed:

The performance index of the entire system:

Programming

Let's write the simplest program in assembler, which displays only one line:

Then we will try to print the program text on our matrix printer:

Here's what we got:

Compile the program into an object file:

Run the linker to get the executable com file and run the resulting program:

Consider the then popular Borland C 3.0 integrated development environment:

Compile the program:

and run:

Word processor

Consider the well-known Lexicon:

Games

Most of all I liked the game of chess:

View DJVU files

Directly open the file format djvu can not. To open, you need to convert the page of interest to the pgm format, and then open it for viewing. Conversion time on this computer for one page is about 5 minutes.

Scrolling too slowly enough:

MAPLEV

He quickly considers simple integrals.

We park the hard drive heads and turn off the power:

Windows 3.1

Start the system with the command win:

After loading, the "desktop" appears:

Start the program manager:

Then Windows commander:

And finally - MapleV - a system of symbolic calculations:

We calculate a simple integral, taken by the method "in parts":

Now we will start the well-known Exel table processor:

Now all the above written in a more visual form:

We connect the network

We insert the network card described above into the 6th slot of the motherboard and connect the twisted pair cable to it:

We connect to the 2nd computer through a router:

We turn it on with a special utility that came with the network card and set it up for a free hardware interrupt and a port. In our case, select 0x0a interrupt and 0x280 port. We copy from diskette the packet driver of our card. Also disable the plug-and-play mode. Configure the web and ftp server configuration file that works with the card using the packet driver:

We start the packet driver of our rlpnpapd.com card and make sure that the interrupt and the port match the settings of our card. The driver will communicate with the server using software interrupt 0x60:

We start the server:

Everything, now you can connect to it using http and ftp protocols. On this server you can place a static Web site. Connect to it using a second computer:

Connect to ftp to share files:

Unfortunately, the ftp server has no permissions. But for sharing files between two computers, this is not critical. It is much more pleasant and more convenient to work through the network than to transfer data on diskettes or remove the hard drive and connect it to another computer.
Here is a short video review on the network:

Windows 95

I decided to install 95 on this computer. I took another hard drive for this, formatted it in fat16 for a maximum size of 2GB (on another computer) and ... our 386 accepted it (BIOS recognized correctly initially), despite persistent information output to all disk utilities, that the size of the disk is 504Mb. Created 3 more sections and all 8 GB became available!
I will give the process of installing Windows 95: