Another Beige Alpha Joins the Fleet - Compaq Professional Workstation XP1000

In the middle of last year an interesting workstation computer came up for sale on Facebook Marketplace here in my area.  The Compaq Professional Workstation XP1000 is an Alpha based workstation from just after Compaq purchased Digital Equipment Corporation.  The Facebook Markeplace ad stated that it was stopping on a boot screen and that it might not be working, but the price was low enough that I thought it was worth the risk of not being able to repair it.

Once I got the system home I was able to verify that the system was in the condition described and then started to read what I could find about this computer.  I soon discovered that the motherboard had a password installed on it.  In the PC world we would call this a BIOS password, but for an Alpha machine like this, it's the SRM console password.  The SRM console uses a command line but with it locked out even the help command was generating an error "Console is secure.  Please login.".  Because PCs have a jumper to reset this I was quite hopeful that it would just be a matter of time till I figured out how to reset that password but after not finding much documentation online I decided to ask for help on the Vintage Computer Federation Forums.

As usual there were several people who were a big help there, including one gentleman that uploaded some documentation to the thread that I had not been able to find online anywhere else.  Sadly, though, we did NOT discover a backdoor designed by Compaq to reset the console password.  Although I could not find an explicit statement for this motherboard I did learn that were other machines designed by Compaq that did not contain a back door, if the password is lost, the main logic board containing the firmware must be replaced.  So I decided to put the project on hold and keep the machine.  I setup a saved search on eBay since you never know what will pop up there and didn't think much about this project in the second half of last year.

At the end of last year I gave quite a bit of thought to my Vintage Computing hobby.  I purged alot of my project machines, selling, donating to Free Geek, or recycling responsibly.  I also went through my wish lists and eBay saved searches and purged items that were no longer of interest and I discovered that I had setup the wrong search, adding an extra zero.  When I fixed the saved search I was shocked to learn that there was a logic board on eBay for sale!  I watched the item for a while and eventually made an offer that was accepted.

The board shipped from Israel so it took a while to get here but once it arrived I was able to pull my machine completely apart.  I used this as an opportunity to do some much needed dusting inside the case of this machine.  It was a huge relief when the system started back up after re-assembly and an even bigger relief when I was able to use the SRM console and issue commands to boot an Operating System off an Installation Disk!

Once I could start to explore, I learned that this was one of the newer XP1000 machines.  This machine can run the VMS operating systems and Unix like systems, but not Windows NT.  The older, slower machines could boot NT, but I already have one Alpha machine setup that way.  I know at least one DEC hardware enthusiast  who will be glad to see the machine running DEC software and not Microsoft software.

I had some old media for OpenVMS which I had burned while I was a part of the Community Licensing program, but that program has ended now.  I was able to install OpenVMS 8 on the hardware, but without licenses it's not very interesting or useful.  After searching on the Internet and reading for a bit, I learned that the archived version of Tru64 Unix on WinWorld has keys with the archive, so I gave that a try, and it worked well.

Configuring networking was a bit of a challenge, but I ended up getting that working with a Static IP and now the computer can read articles on FrogFind.com and 68k.news just fine.  I'm quite happy with how the machine turned out...

I was disappointed that I couldn't load older software on here.  I have been looking for some VAX hardware since that is what we used back in College, I remember the Motif Window Manager and that was such an interesting look and feel, but I didn't know that Motif was the precursor to the Common Desktop Environment (CDE).  Because of multiple vendors working together on this more open code base this Compaq (Digital Equipment) machine will join several others CDE machines that I have including IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, and SGI Irix.

Compaq Portable III Restoration

 One of my contacts at Free Geek recently reached out, he had a computer that had been on my wish list for a while, a Compaq Portable III.  I already have a Compaq Portable I (which also was a project computer from Free Geek) and Compaq Portable II, and I really like these early Compaq machines because of the story of the company.  If you haven't read about it, I recommend Rod Canion's book "Open".

Anyway, this repair story starts with a water damaged Compaq Portable III.  It was quite dirty and since I'd been told it was water damaged I had quite low expectations, purchasing it as a parts machine for a future repair.  When I got it home, I immediately got started with cleaning since it was so dirty I didn't even want to touch it.  Here's a picture from "Before"...

Definitely too gross to work on.  After cleaning for a while I started to take the machine apart.  I was pleasantly surprised.  The machine was very dirty and dusty inside as well, but there were no signs of water inside.

The next step was a Power On test. I could hear some clicking from the Power Supply, but no fans, no backlight from the display or any other signs of life.  Then, there was a snapping sound and smoke!  I suspected a capacitor.  Testing with the machine off, there was a short on the 5 Volt power rail, which for this era of machines often indicates a bad Tantalum capacitor.  I was able to find the blow tantalum and replace it, and as soon as that was done the machine booted.  I was glad to see that the Plasma Display appears to be intact as this is the unique new feature that really sets this machine apart from the Compaq Portable II which still had a CRT, and the next generation from Compaq which had a more normal LCD display.

The system had the following errors, Keyboard Error, Disk Controller Error, and Time of Day / Clock Error.  The keyboard error and Disk Controller Errors were easy to resolve because these peripherals were simple disconnected.  I cleaned the 1.2MB 5 1/4" Floppy disk drive with a cleaning floppy and I was able to boot the machine from a DOS disk.

I also discovered that the Hard Disk in the unit had been disconnected.  When that was reconnected, I discovered that the disk was blank with only a few DOS files left on the machine.  I tried re-installing a newer DOS, but I was not able too do so, there are write errors when formating the drive, so I'm disconnecting it and replacing it with an SD to IDE adapter solution that I've used in some other vintage machines.  Based on this other helpful bLog article, I set the system up for a Type 42 hard drive which provides just over 500 MB of disk space for this machine on a 1 GB SD card.

Fixing the clock error proved to be the most difficult part of this repair.  This is important for these early Compaq machines because they do not have the BIOS setup program in ROM, you have to boot up from the Compaq diagnostics floppy every time the computer looses power and that make the machine alot less usable.  Apparently there were two different clock circuit options for the 286 version of this machine.  One option is the Dallas Clock chip, which are still being made today, but that is not the option this machine had.  This machine has a rechargeable battery which had been removed from this computer probably due to concerns about leakage.  I tried jury rigging a battery holder for a CR2032 battery into this space where the rechargeable battery was but I made an error in connecting that and my modifications were a failure.  After doing some more research online I found this fantastic article on MinusZeroDegrees.net.  This article contains enough detail that I thought I would try to switch my board over from the unobtanium battery pack too the Dallas clock chip circuit configuration.  I was able to make those modifications, and now I have a working battery backed up clock and drive settings!

I installed MS-DOS 6.22 on this machine, and copied many of my commonly used utilities over to the machine.  That wraps up the repairs on the Compaq Portable III for now.  It needs a bit more cleaning, and perhaps some day I'll find a RAM expansion for it, but for now I'm quite happy to have one of these in the collection.

Please reach out in the comments or via email (My email address is on my profile) if you have any thoughts about the Compaq Portables.

The 286s are Coming

I've been on a bit of a tear with 286 PCs over the last couple of months.  Actually, I'd planned one of these repairs over a year ago when I got an ALR Fast 286 at an estate sale in the summer of 2022. This was a 286 machine from 1988, and I had been able to get that machine pieced back together and working but it was experiencing lock ups.  So I had been on the lookout for a nice 286 board to use as a replacement for that machine.  I'd purchased a board that needed some work, but that was yet another project that had been sitting for months waiting for time to do board level work on that.  But in the meantime, Free Geek Twin Cites came through once again with a "Project PC" 286.  It was an incomplete machine from 1990, but it had the motherboard, RAM and a functioning Floppy Disk drive, so I was happy to get it.

Shortly after that there was another 286 Project PC at Free Geek that was also incomplete, but included a nice case, Power Supply, and most of the computer.  I purchased this machine as well, thinking that I'd have enough parts already at home to build out both PCs.  One of the oddities of this era is that sometimes a 286 just isn't quite powerful enough for higher resolution VGA graphics, so I had been torn about rebuilding the 286 with VGA or CGA/EGA graphics.  But since I got the second machine, I would no longer have to make that decision.  I could configure the faster machine from 1990 as a VGA machine and the slower machine from 1988 as a CGA/EGA machine.

I did the rebuild of my existing 286 machine first with a target date of 1990.  The "new" motherboard from Free Geek has a 16MHz 286 with 4MB of RAM on it.  I was able to re-use the external battery pack I had previous built for the machine and the ATI All-In-Wonder VGA card.  There is a nice complement of ISA cards in the machine, including a FDD/HDD IDE controller card, a Serial Parallel I/O card, a more modern 3Com 3C509 Network card in it, and I added an CF to IDE card adapter instead of a hard drive.  The CF card is 256 MB and I experimented with the BIOS settings to get 200MB usable capacity from it.  The sound card is a more modern Sound Blaster Vibra 16 CT4170 which is less expensive than a period correct Sound Blaster.

I'm very happy with how the machined turned out, and it runs fast and stable...

After getting my "best" 286 running, I started on the more basic machine targeting a build date around 1988.  This PC is a 286 at 12MHz. It has 640k RAM, and I opted to stick with a CGA / EGA card.  The HDD / FDD controller and Serial Parallel I/O cards in the machine are period correct although again I did opt to install a CF adapter in order to make it easier to load software from my modern computers.  Given the low RAM configuration I won't be installing a Sound Card or other peripherals at this time, but the machine is working good and it looks really nice...

The final project for this article is another 286 PC, a Compaq Portable II.  Thanks to fellow collector Steve H. who passed this machine to me in a lot of luggable computers.  This machine was starting up but it had an error on the screen and the floppy drives were in unknown condition.  I had heard that it would have Citizen Floppy Disk Drives and that these drives were notoriously difficult to service, but when I opened the PC, the floppy drives were made by Canon.  I cleaned and lubricate the drives and after this both drives boot up and run very well, so that ended up being a non-issue.  This generation of Compaq PCs does not have the BIOS setup program in ROM.  When I was restoring my Compaq Portable I machine back in 2020, I had already downloaded and created 360K Floppy Disks for the Compaq Diagnostic and BIOS setup programs.  One of the startup error codes was related to the clock.  Thankfully, Compaq used Tadiran batteries, which I have never seen leak.  Even cooler than that, you can still purchase a replacement cell today.  Once I had installed the new Tadiran cell I was able to go into the Compaq Diagnostics and set the time, date, and machine configuration so that there would not be any error messages at start.

Since this was the lower cost Compaq II without a hard drive I knew I was going to want to install some kind of permanent storage to make the machine more useful.  Since the machine had an IDE controller built in I was able to add another CF to IDE adapter, as before with the other 286 machines.  This one is configured in the Compaq BIOS to give about 120MB of storage, which is more than this machine ever would have shipped with.

The machine boots up and runs great, I'm very happy with how it has turned out...

I think this third machine will conclude my 286 adventures for a while.  Let me know if you have any 286s, or if you have memories from that era of computing.  What games should I load on these PCs?  What programs would make them more useful in 2023?  Leave a comment below, or feel free to reach out to me via the email address in my Bio.

Compaq Deskpro XL 590 - Pentium Workhorse

I recently acquired two Compaq Deskpro XL 590 computers from Free Geek Twin Cities, the pair were labelled as a Project PC, and sold at an enticingly low price.  I was pretty excited to see this because I'd recently damaged my Epson Pentium 75 machine, which was a favorite in my Retro Computer collection, and one of the first that I'd acquired.

The Compaq PCs were in pretty rough shape, as you can see here...

This is an interesting system, it's got a processor on a slot but it's not a passive backplane computer.  There's quite a bit of logic on the mainboard, including; audio, SCSI, IDE, and Ethernet.  The CPU and RAM are on the processor slot, which is almost a full length card.  Modern Classic on YouTube recently did a series of vides on this hardware which you can find here, here, and here.  He started out with a 486 and upgraded to a Pentium 100.

My systems are a Pentium 90 with 16 MB of Built in RAM, these systems have two PCI cards slots, and the rest are EISA slots.  I've never had an EISA system before, so that was an interesting aspect of this build. My goal for this machine is to get Windows 95B running and have a boot menu configuration for DOS gaming or for starting up the Windows 95 GUI.

I had quite a few interesting challenges getting this computer going.  The first was the BIOS setup program.  The BIOS setup program for this computer shipped on Floppy Disks, and can be installed into a small partition on the hard drive, but as with most recycled computers, these machines shipped without a Hard Drive or any floppy disks or documentation.  So,  I started Googling around and used the Wayback machine to figure out what the last set of drivers for this board were.  Having this information was only the start of the struggle, since HP has turned off the FTP site where they had been hosting the old Compaq Softpaqs for many decades.  I asked for and received some good advice about locating these files on the Vintage Computer Forums.

One of my goals for the system is to use it as a Disk Imaging system with a Go-Tek floppy drive emulator with FlashFloppy firmware loaded on it.  I have a couple of these, one lives permanently in my pentium, and the other is a "floater" Go-Tek that's used for building and testing systems.  Using the Go-Tek, I was able to convert the odd Compaq Softpaq Executable files into the more useful IMG Disk Image file format.

I have collected up the drivers I needed to build a Windows 95B machine, and I will link the file here, this includes:
System Diagnostics SP16085
System Configuration Disk 1 - 4 SP6144
Firmware Update (Final 4/7/1997) SP3642
Matrox Millennium PCI Video Card Drivers for Windows95 SP2754
Onboard Ethernet Driver SP1649
Onboard SCSI Driver SP1664

Once I had the disks needed, it was time to start the build.  I wanted to use Compact Flash media for the Hard Disk Drive, but I had no end of problems with a couple of off brand devices that I tried, so for now I've defaulted back too a 6GB Quantum Fireball IDE drive that I had in the parts bin.  The System Configuration utility was able to recognize the drive and startup without error.  Once the System Configuration utility is able to start without error, if there's a blank drive it will offer to install the System Configuration into a partition on the Hard Drive, which I did for convenience.  At that point you can Fdisk the rest of the drive and setup your partition for Windows 95.  This part of the install was normal and painless.

I've moved all the goodies from my Epson computer over to this one.  I've added 128MB RAM, a 52X CD-ROM, a Go-Tek, a newer ISA SoundBlaster 16, a 3Com 3C905C Fast Ethernet card, and a Parallel port Zip drive to use for "Sneakernet".  The case cleaned up pretty good, although it did have some paint missing on the corners...

I'm quite happy with how this machine has turned out.  I still have quite a bit of tweaking left to do to get all my DOS games back up and running, but that is a big part of the fun.  It's great to have a running Pentium class machine back in the stable!

Here's the machine running Internet Explorer 4.0 and using the excellent new FrogFind.com search engine for Retro Computers from Sean at Action Retro...

Next, I need to get the Boot Configuration Menu going, I'll probably copy something from Phil's Computer Lab's MS-DOS Starter Pack.  Also, I've ordered some Industrial CF cards to try again too move the Hard Drive over to Solid State media, but in the meantime, this machine should be tons of fun.

Original Compaq Portable

It has been one of my goals in vintage computing to move “back in time” to the early days of the personal computer, I’ve been intrigued by the story behind the original IBM PC, the 5150, a fascinating story of the tension between one of the classic engineering trade offs (make vs buy), and the unforeseen consequences this can have in a product development, but I’m no longer interested in collecting IBM in particular after reading this book “IBM and the Holocaust”.  So, I’ve been on the lookout for another brand XT class machine, and I was very intrigued when a damaged Compaq Portable I popped up at my local Free Geek store.  This was one of the first IBM PC clones, but they did something really different by creating a “Portable”.  I won’t rehearse the development of the machine here as it’s been covered well elsewhere.

My Compaq is an early unit, with the plastic parts stamped 1983, and a Rev. B BIOS.  When I purchased it, there was an error code at boot, so I knew that the processor and RAM were working.  The case was in rough shape, cracked and dirty, but a carrying case was included.

Once again, the Vintage Computer Forum was one of the best sources for information.  Also, the 8-bit guy did a restoration video series  on this machine, having seen these resources gave me the confidence to give this repair a shot.  There was a long list of issues with the machine, but with knowledge of how to take the machine apart, clean and lubricate floppy drives, replace the defective foam and foil pads in the keyboard, upgrade the BIOS, install an XT-CF adapter so I could boot from Flash, and upgrade the RAM to the maximum 640K, I now have a fully functional first generation PC running at 4.7Mhz.

Not shown in the picture, I moved the CF slot up to the front of the machine in the middle of the unused floppy drive bay that was opened up by removing the non-functional drive.

Update:  March 2021

I found a Tecmar Captain card and installed that in this PC, so it has a functional Real Time Clock, a working Microsoft Serial mouse.  I've installed Windows 2.0 on this machine, and that's been alot of fun to poke around with, since that version predates my first PC ownership.

Let me know if you have any questions for me about the Compaq, or other Vintage Computing topics in the comments below.