Super-Slasher,
I keep two other PC ATs around, and they are as original as the day they were born. One is an old 6Mhz Type 1 with the original CMI hard drive in it, still working. The other is a later 8Mhz model with just 512K on it and a Seagate 4012? (30MB) drive. Both have matching 5154s on full length EGA cards. The earlier AT has the old keyboard with just 10 function keys. The newer AT has one of the first Model Ms, which I think shipped with it. (That BIOS supports 12 function keys.)
I generally like to keep my machines original too. The AT that I upgraded was an exception. It was 1993 and I had the machine since 1990, and it was too slow to run Turbo C++ 3.0 on. I needed to learn C++ for work, so I needed the upgrade. The replacement motherboard was an AMD 386-40 based board with 128K L2 cache. Memory was 1 MB SIMMS, which cost me $47 per stick back then. With the extra hard drive, I could run Turbo C++ acceptably. And man, what a speed increase - the 386-40 with the L2 cache was nearly as fast as a 486-25 on everything except floating point.
Back then I wasn't collecting my PCs - I was using them. I retired that machine in 1994 when I bit the bullet and upgraded to a 486-66 system running OS/2. The system came out of retirement two years ago to be my diskette copy station.
As for the diskettes, I needed to copy and archive my diskettes before the bits started falling off. Some of the diskettes had gone bad after 15 years of use/disuse. So I did the following:
-Made a raw binary image using 'ditu', which does a block by block copy. This is for non-protected diskettes.
-Made a zip file of the files on each diskette.
- For copy protected diskettes I used Teledisk to make diskette images. I also used a Central Point Option Board, which is a hardware solution that is nearly infallible.
- Scanned the diskette label so that I could get version numbers, serial numbers, etc. without pulling the original diskette out.
I still have a few hundred more diskettes to go through.
Ethernet works fine on an old AT .... I use that to get the diskette images back and forth to my more capable machines. I use the MS Lan requestor for DOS running over TCP/IP. The AT/386 runs DOS 5. It can connect to file shares on a Linux machine and my Windows machines.