My small collection of
odd computers and video game consoles.
This is one of my favorite machines. Hot Rod has probably had more
work done to him than deserved. Hot Rod was spending his years in
the basement of Derek Castor's Family's house, wasting away... waiting
for someone to do something with him. Derek's father found it, I'm
not sure how, but at the time was unable to get a hold of a working battery
for it. He decided the heck with it, and hardwired the power supply
to the mother board, bypassing the battery equipment (See "power hack"
above to see a photo of the hole cut for the cable in). After getting
Hot Rod working, he really had no good use for it. And so he decided
to give it to me. Hot Rod ended up for a while being used as a Dice
Roller for late night sessions of Vampire: The Masquerade while I was in
High School. Eventually he became the test machine for InputGUIDO,
and has since taken up residence as part of a poorly constructed end table
(see photo above). He seems happy, if you can call an inanimate object
happy.
Running an 8 Megahertz 8088 processor, with 640k RAM, Hot Rod proves
just how slow things can get. He has a 20 megabyte hard drive, a
single density 3.5 inch floppy, and a CGA video card with limited color
LCD display. I also have an external monitor I occasionally hook
up to him. I've added mouse support through the serial port, and
have an Alpha build of InputGUIDO running over DOS 3.0. I still use
Hot Rod as the test machine for InputGUIDO, but other than that - he's
getting most of his use holding the current mail and as a place to put
my drink. I have no idea what he cost on release, or what the actual
date was. |
