I have always held an odd fascination for the Model 25. The same day I bought my Compaq 386s, I also happened upon a Model 25. I found it fascinating, as it was a PC that looked much like an early Macintosh. I had never seen a 25 before, and soon after began searching for one of my own. I have bid on several of them on eBay, but have always lost the bidding war. One day I spied one up for auction that was missing a few parts, but was otherwise salvagable. I won the auction for $9.00 plus shipping, and was soon happily beginning the search for repair parts. The day the Model 25 arrived I was not home. The UPS driver took it back to the his depot, and promptly lost it, so for the next week I was on the phone almost every day with the UPS depot supervisor. Finally, I got it back, but by this time it had gone from Oklahoma to Ohio to Oklahoma to Ohio again, and it was completely crushed. I sadly stripped it for what few parts were left undamaged, and tossed it in the trash.

The next day I was telling a co-worker about my woes, and he said that he knew where there were at least three of them he could get for free. Within four days I was the proud owner of three nearly perfect color Model 25’s. One I cleaned up to keep, the second I gave to a friend, and God knows what I will do with the third.

The Model 25 was introduced to the public in 1987. It features an Intel 8086 processor, 512K of memory, a 720K floppy drive, and most of them have no hard drive. Luckily, I managed to download the Starter Diskette off the internet, and I did get a low density disk with DOS 3.3 on it with the smashed 25. As it is, this computer doesn’t do a whole lot, so I am hoping to find a 20MB hard drive with the proper interface for it soon. I just inherited a full version of DOS 3.3 and a copy of the original Windows, and I’m planning to install them on the 25.

This little computer was a great “find”. I was out visiting my favorite local used computer store when I found a big pile of junk in front of the door. Closer inspection revealed that the pile was actually seven or eight Packard Bell 286’s that the store personnel had stripped of their video cards, and of their 3.5″ floppy and hard drives. They were destined, as it turns out, for the trash. However, much to my joy, they all still had their motherboards, processors, 30 pin memory, 5.25″ drives, power supplies, cases, cables, and screws galore. After getting the store’s permission, I loaded as many into my car as I could fit, then took them all to work with me.

When I arrived at work, I promptly set about stripping the majority of them for parts. What a goldmine! I have plenty of spare case screws now! I did, however, save the computer with the best case for a rebuild. I cleaned up the parts, and installed a spare 3.5″ floppy and 40meg hard drive. The last thing I dug up for it was an old full-length CGA card. I hooked it up to a keyboard and one of my 5151 MDA monitors, slipped in a boot disk from my 386s, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t fire right up.

It currently is running PCDOS 7.0 from IBM. This is my first experience with PCDOS, and so far I really like it. The little Force 1 is a great machine to test things like this on. I have to admit, when I first rebuilt this computer, I was just going to mess around with it before scrapping it for more parts, but it’s grown on me, and I decided to go ahead and immortalize it here.