One weekend I was home, visiting my parents. My dad mentioned that they were throwing out a couple old computers at his workplace, but couldn’t tell me what they were. We hopped into his car and went to his office to see. One was a Dell 486 that was so uninteresting even I wasn’t enthused. The other was this little gem, which I promptly grabbed up and brought home.

This 286LTE has a 12mhz processor, 4.6mb of RAM (the max it can handle), a 9″ CGA LCD screen, and a 40mb hard drive. It also has a monsterous external power suppy, and it all packs together in a nylon case. With case and all, I would estimate it weighs around 15 pounds.

Despite the fact that Compaq made a lot of these in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I think they’re interesting enough that they might become collectable some day. I needed a computer in the summer of 1995, didn’t really know anything about them, and so purchased this 386s for way too much money. It has a 386-16mhz processor, 40 meg hard drive, 2 megs of memory, DOS and Windows 3.1, and that’s about it. It did come with a decent SVGA monitor, but despite this, I soon outgrew this little computer. The problem here is that the Compaq 386s was an extremely proprietary design, meaning that if one wanted to upgrade, one had to purchase expensive parts from Compaq or one of it’s licensees. The DOS was specially made by Microsoft for Compaq. Extra memory is contained on 1 or 4 meg boards that plug into a daughter card on the motherboard. The hard drive was also specially made for Compaq (IDE will not work here). Even the connectors from the power supply are not standard! I did manage to find a 4 meg memory board on eBay (see link page) for next to nothing, so now it has 6 megs of memory instead of 2 (oooh, it’s dangerous now).

Despite all the aggravation this machine has caused me over the years, I still like it.