So after all that, the ugly 286 now at least has matching floppy drives, and both of them even work too! 1.2MB on the top, 360K on the bottom. Still a few things left to do on it (like figuring out how to switch turbo on/off, and making the power LED work), but this is enough for one night I think

After cleaning the worm gear a bunch and helping the heads travel the full length of the disk, the Panasonic drive is now working fine too. The ROM diagnostics in this machine were helpful in verifying that it was all working properly.

Then the 1.2MB Pansonic JU-475-3A14 I wanted to replace the old yellow drive with was misbehaving. I was sure I'd used this drive recently with a greaseweazle but now it couldn't seek properly past the middle of the disk. It would just start jumping grooves on the worm gear.

So I set out to replace it with a slightly older Chinon F-502L II. But this drive would only step the heads once during the seek test and again while booting. Couldn't read disks at all. Problem turned out to be the PCB edge connector needing a cleaning. Now it works nicely.

What started with a "lets make the floppy drives the same colour" turned out to be a bit more of an ordeal. The black 360K Chinon FZ-502 drive already in there turned out to be no good. The ribbon cable going to one of the heads seems to be slightly damaged.

So this is what the inside looks like now. The left-most slot, and the two right-most slots are only 8-bit ISA so only the SoundBlaster 2.0 or modem would fit there, but the SoundBlaster is too long for any of those slots. The SIP memory and HDD means only short cards in the three 8-bit ISA slots.

Due to the NIC failure, I had to go digging for an alternate and ended up with an 3Com EtherLink III. A little newer than I'd like, but I don't have all my ISA NICs here with me. I had to switch to a different unfortunately somewhat newer (33.6k) modem too due to space constraints.

Well, I regretted that NIC for an entirely different reason than anticipated. After the machine had been running fine for 10 minutes or so, I briefly stepped out of the room only to come back to smoke pouring out the computer. Thankfully the computer is fine, but the card is not!

I went digging and these are the parts I found. I'll probably regret the NIC choice; its supposed to be NE2000-compatbile though sounds like not perfectly. I've no idea if the RAM works, but if it does it may as well go in. And a black 1.2MB FDD to match the existing 360K drive.

One last upgrade for the Mitac: a second serial port. In part because I can't think what else I would put a one-port serial card in and I have two of them lying around. This leaves it with one 8-bit ISA slot free, maybe for a sound card someday - one of those adlib clones perhaps.

Checking the news at 2400bps! Its not fast, and RNZ is not as compatible with text-mode browsers as it perhaps could be. But it made horrible screeching noises as it connected and that's the important thing! www.youtube.com/shorts/DCfbW...

As its 2025, I guess its about time this thing finally got online. I had a dig through the big box of modems, and this one seems suitable enough! Fits right in between the NIC (a far more sensible connectivity option), and the Transteque MFM disk controller for the ST-225 20MB hard disk.

The VisionAV deals with the weird video output of the RS/6000 (refresh rates like 72.809Hz, 59.94Hz, 60.317Hz) rather well. A higher quality VGA cable might help with the occasional video noise too.

The AlphaServer and RS/6000 eventually finished their task! The AlphaServer produced the Kermit 95 3.0 beta 7 DEC Alpha binaries for NT 3.50, NT 3.51/4.0/2000, and 64bit Windows 2000ish, while the RS/6000 did the PowerPC build for NT 4.0.

Binaries for nearly all 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows in addition to 32bit OS/2 along with source (BSD license) and the full list of changes for this release can be found on Github:
github.com/davidrg/ckwi...

SSH port and X11 forwarding, a lightly updated user manual, various bug fixes and enhancements such as new commands to turn the menubar, toolbar and statusbar on/off. When the menubar is off, some important commands appear in the window menu (like PuTTY).

And the RS/6000 is joining in today too