Wormstation
Packard Bell Executive 486-DX2 66 MHz PC
See also:
Specifications
- SGS Thompson 486 DX-2 66 MHz CPU (originally a 486 DX 33 MHz; the new processor never made it go faster)
- AST 15″ MegaFuzzy™ monitor (1024×768, 256 colours maximum, or 800×600 at 16-bit when I was doing graphics work)
- Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, MS-DOS 6.2
- 20 MB of RAM (It was 28 but I stole 8 for my Mac LC III)
- Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 on-board video adapter with 1 MB VRAM, I think
- Seagate Medalist 1.2 GB IDE drive, with Seagate Ontrack Disk Manager to sneak the excessive size past the Phoenix BIOS
- Hopax HO-828 8× CD-ROM drive; cost me £30 but it’s crappy and discs tend to spin off the hub and bounce up and down inside, causing the drive, the IDE bus and finally the system to hang
- Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16 sound card, a replacement given to me by Pix for my injured yet beloved C-Media CMI-8330 card (which I still have but it needs surgery)
Model number remains unknown. I had it down as a 115S, but the notes I made in the manual in purple ink say 105S. The manual calls it a model 3x3.
Wormstation is my trusty old 486 PC that saw me through over seven years of computing and has been the subject of far too many blunt-knifed operations and dodgy upgrades. After becoming a Macintosh owner in about 1998, it was finally superceded by Firetrack in autumn 2000, but it’s still here and it still works. The clock battery went flat but it’s actually rechargeable and after a few hours’ use it was able to maintain the clock and BIOS settings with no power. Now, how comes when I told the BIOS that the date was 2006, it set it to 1980 instead?
Historically it never had a name, like with all my computers. I never saw any great need to endow computers with a name, but since my other two desktop machines have names, I decided that I should call this one Wormstation. Since it’s the only one capable of playing Worms and Reinforcements United and that is one of the best games ever (or was: I’ve got Worms to work in DOSBox now). Most of the best games ever (ok, in my humble opinion) are on my 486, since for me those would be Worms, Descent, Magic Carpet and X-Wing.