ZXnet

PC "Tasman"

Named "Tasman" for the text engraved on the top of its plastic front and coloured in with black vivid, I have no idea how long I've had this machine or where it came from.

Specifications

These are the specifications of the machine. As far as I remember I've not changed anything, but its possible I may have installed the VGA card (it's not original to this machine - it came from a Total Peripherals PC). Despite its relatively poor cosmetic condition, it has quite decent specs and everything except perhaps the 360K floppy drive works well. While it has an RLL hard disk installed, the disk controller is only MFM so the drive is formatted as type 2 (20MB) rather than the 33MB it supports.

This machine was pulled from storage in April 2024, fully dismantled, all components cleaned and tested, then reassembled and inventoried as COMP-0002. Some minor battery corrosion on the motherboard was cleaned and two bad capacitors in the PSU replaced at this time, while the floppy drives were cleaned and lubricated. The hard disk passed all tests with zero bad sectors. It was given a clean install of MS-DOS 6.22 and returned to storage.

In February 2025 it was pulled from storage again for upgrades. At this time it was given an American Research PCN006 NIC (which caught fire), followed by a 3Com EtherLink III NIC (which did not catch fire), a Creative SoundBlaster 2.0 sound card, and a Speedcom VDI33SP Modem. The Chinon FZ-502 360K 5.25" floppy drive was tested and found faulty (ribbon cable for one of the heads appears damaged) so was replaced with a Chinon F-502LII. At the same time, the formerly beige (now yellow) Mitsubishi MF504C-310M 1.2M 5.25" drive (which works fine) was replaced with a black Panasonic JU-475-3A14 to better match the 360K drive. I also tried to add another 2MB of RAM, but the additional RAM wasn't detected (bad RAM? Bad SIP memory slot) so it still only has 2MB in it.

The computer now lives in my office as my 286 PC. I don't have the desk space to have it set up permanently, so it's just on a shelf when not in use.

Current Issues

None aside from its cosmetic condition. It would be nice to find a 16bit ISA RLL disk controller for it sometime though.

Inventory Data

This is a subset of the hardware inventory record for this computer. It may be more up-to-date than the rest of this page.

2024-04-04: Dismantled with motherboard, cards, and HDD tested
2024-04-14: PSU repaired 2024-4-14. Clean install of MS-DOS 6.22 on HDD.
2025-02-09: Retrieved from storage for upgrades.