Weird and Wonderful PCs: Your Stories Part 2

Early Overclocking Stories

From: Dean Payne

My best overclocking stories are the oldest. My boss used an IBM AT, with an overclocking device that ran it faster than the stock 6 MHz. At 9 MHz, everything he had worked fine, except for Framework, which refused to calculate. A reduction of overclock fixed it.

Editor's Note: I remember the Compaq Plus Dean talks about. I once traveled from Los Angeles to San Francisco with two of them. I remember having to carry them from the curb to the gate at LAX and from the gate to the curb in SFO; then vice versa when I returned. By the time I was finished, I swear my arms were 3" longer.

Second, I had one of those massive suitcase size Compaq Plus portables with the distinctive 9" green screen (CGA monochrome). Mine was about as far as you could get it from stock. It had an Intel Inboard 386 turbo board, a 20 MB hard drive and a half-height 720-kB floppy in addition to a half-height 360-kB floppy. I had to buy a third-party power supply to run all this.

Lots of people made 286 cards, but the Intel board had a 386/16 and 1024 kB of memory on-board. There was a special version of Windows 2.1 made for the Inboard 386, but I never bought it. Windows 3.0 wouldn't run because it required a real 386 bios. I used DOS 3.1.

I used the Compaq for programming with TeamUp, a 4GL language that never caught on. Too bad, it was good, even Y2K compatible. My brother still programs in it!