The Quarky Engineer

Hard drive formatted and installed in 1988, still works great. Lotus 123 and Word Perfect , and turbo pascal included. And the miniscribe isn’t making funny noises Clay Cowgill, Christopher Neil Bradley!

I decided I needed something interesting to decorate my office with. The 5150 is the perfect choice for the discerning engineer.

This is a mid 1984 production IBM PC, the PC that started it all. It originally came with either one or two full height floppy drives, and those look to have been replaced with the half height ones to make room for a hard disk.

The motherboard looks to be in good shape, and it is the 64-256K variety ( 1984 production ). The add on AST SixPackPlus card it typical of the era, giving you extra serial and parallel ports as well as additional memory up to 640K.

The async card (serial) appears to be original IBM 5150 vintage. The display adapter is a Paradise Systems MultiDisplay card which was a nifty adapter back in 1984 as it had both MDA and CGA outputs ( although you could only use one at a time).

I took a close look at the motherboard and it doesn’t appear that the tantalum caps have been changed.. so I’ll do that as the old ones tend to explode.

The power supply is not the original 5150 as that original power supply was only 63 watts, so not enough for a hard drive. This looks to be a Power Tronic 150W power supply used in the XT as well as the PC when upgrading to a hard disk.

The hard drive is a Microscribe 3425, 20MB ST506 interface MFM drive (similar to the classic ST225). 625 KB/sec transfer rate.

I think Clay might have a few of these buried in his lab somewhere.. and perhaps even some memory for it!

I’m really liking this car washing station at home.

Thanks Clay for the air sensor. I’ll be interested to see how these sensors compare to the one I have been using. This module does PM2.5, plus Temp, Humidity, CO2, CH2O, TVOC, O3, CO, and NO2.

Sometimes, random shuffle gets it just right..

For reasons that are ‘it would be interesting’.. I replaced the radios for the wireless link to the gate. I have conduit and am pulling fiber to the gate, so the wireless link was just something temporary (and I suppose it could be a backup). I was using an older pair of Ubiquity Nanostation Ms running at 5Ghz. I decided to try out an update Ubiquity Nanostation AC. For $80 they work pretty well.

The distance is 984ft, but there is a relatively thick forest of trees between the two. The red circle in the first pic is about the right direction.

In testing it does get about 240-250mb/sec over that link, which isn’t bad given the trees in the way.

Update – A little time getting the aim better – now 550 mb/sec.

New House Construction

I tried taking a few pictures in the dark. It was easy with the camera… but the drone didn’t work great. At long exposures the wind moves it around too much.

I ended up replacing 2 cars in the fleet this week. I got a new 2021 Suburban Z71 to replace my Yukon Denali XL, and Kristin got a new 2021 X5 45e plug in hybrid to replace her 2016 Volvo XC90.

The Z71 was a replacement for my Yukon which I use for the typical people and stuff transport as well as to tow both of my trailers. I really like to idea of a diesel suburban so I’l probably trade this one once they new 3.0 diesel version is out and working well. I really really like Suburbans and have had one in my fleet for over 20 years.

Kristin’s car was a choice between this X5 45e and all of the other electric cars we could find. The 45e is an interesting car.. it has a 3.0L turbo inline six (289hp), plus a 111hp electric motor combined with a 24kWh battery. That gives is a range of 35-40 miles on all electric.

So far we have driven 216 of the 230 miles on all electric, and most of that gas driving was me being a jackass in Sport mode. 😉 It has been actually quite usable in all electric mode, especially for the use cases Kristin sees most. (small trips that are 10-30 miles in total distance). I suspect she will go months without using gasoline. Everything else is typical BMW – Good drive feel, excellent interior materials, typical German over engineering..

Kristin did consider the Tesla Model Y, but the ride quality just isn’t there compared to the BMW… and that follows with pretty much all of the interior features. ( remember I also have a Model 3 Performance ). We also looked at the Jag, the Merc, and Audi eTron, and the Volvo.

Certainly I’ll have more to report as we accumulate some experience.

I put the second set of cheap Xeon 2690v2s in my desktop.
20 cores, 40 Hyperthreads, 3.3 Ghz. I think the openCL score was just a tad higher than the i7-10700.