As I've continued to learn about Minnesota's computer history and the history of the PC compatibles, I've learned that Minnesota seems to have had more than our fair share of successful PC clone builders. Perhaps this was a lingering effect of Minnesota's strength in the early days of computing with Remington Rand and several of the the mainframe companies located in Minnesota (IBM and the Seven Dwarves). I know of at least one individual who left an engineering job at a mainframe company in order to run a business building PC clones.
Many of these companies didn't have the market size to design their own boards, and so they would purchase and build systems using boards from many different vendors in Taiwan, but there were a few companies that either started early enough or had a large enough market share to do their own motherboard designs. There were a couple of local companies that Minnesotans might recognize, ZEOS and Northgate Computer Systems. Both advertised nationwide, and so had some broader recognition. It seems that both struggled with financial trouble in the mid 90s, Northgate going through a bankruptcy and Zeos a buyout.
I've been interested in Northgate since I've had one of their keyboards for a while. I was recently offered one by a collector in St. Paul who is looking to downsize. The machine was untested, but I was able to look inside and ensure that there wasn't battery damage.
When I got the machine home I unplugged the mainboard and checked the Power Supply voltages. Everything checked out, so I plugged it back in and it booted. Of course the clock battery was dead, but I was able to set the BIOS parameters and boot off a floppy. I was not able to figure out how to set the BIOS to recognize the hard drive but after some time I realized that the Specifications sticker on the back of the machine listed the Hard Drive's BIOS type on it. When I entered that data in the BIOS the drive was recognized right away and the machine booted to DOS 6.22. There was a Drive Overlay installed on the HDD to get it to recognize the additional space on the drive, it has a 450 MB drive that appears to be working just fine.
One of the next challenges with this machine was determining which Northgate system it was. There is not a ton of information available online about these systems, but I found this list on Vogons. By googling images, I was able to determine that this was a Northgate Slimline 320 (A 386 @ 20 MHz with a date of 1991 on it). Knowing the model I was able to find these jumper settings and specifications. It turns out that this unit has already been maxed out at 8MB RAM.
After this, I needed to decide what to do with the machine. It has a total of 3 16 Bit ISA expansion slots, and two 8 Bit slots on the back. It had a modem which I removed, and replaced that with a generic sound card. I have a not quite period correct, but significantly cheaper Sound Blaster Vibra 16 on order for this machine. I also used the slightly newer 3COM 3C509B 10MB Ethernet card.
For storage, I tried directly connecting a Compact Flash card to the IDE Bus on this machine, but I was not able to get the BIOS to recognize the newer cards that I had (2GB and 4GB Sandisk and 1 other brand). I wouldn't have minded if I could only get those cards working with 250 or 500 MB partition, but nothing was working so I installed a Lo-Tech XT-IDE card that I already had on hand from another build that I changed. This boots the machine just fine.
Once I got DOS and some of my standard Games and Utilities moved over to the Compact Flash drive, I tried to install Windows 3.1 on this machine. The machine has Integrated Graphics, and when that is enabled, a boot message indicates that the video card has 256K RAM onboard, which is enough RAM for 640x480 with 8 bit color. However, I could not get this to work with Windows 3.1, either on the original Hard Drive or on the CF based storage. Windows 3.1 locks up after the splash screen. This makes me wonder if the reason this machine was taken out of service back in the day was because of a failing video controller on the motherboard. Anyway using the board Jumpers I was able to disable the onboard VGA, and test several other 16-bit ISA Video Cards that I have. I decided to use the most "period correct" VGA card I had. This came from another 386 parts machine, and it also has only 256K RAM on it. This works great in Windows 3.1, but of course has no acceleration, which is just fine for this machine.
So that about wraps it up for this machine. I'm really happy to have a nice clean Northgate Computer in the collection that pairs nicely with the Northgate Keyboard that I've previously blogged about.
Please let me know if you have any memories of using Northgate Systems back in the day, or any tips about where to find additional technical information about the Slimline systems online?
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