At home I use as my main system a Pentium II - 233 with 192meg RAM and a
8.4 gig HD, with Win 95.

Also around the house are other systems that stuck around after I
'upgraded' ... they include

a Pentium 1 - 60 with 16M ram and a 1.2 gig and 540 meg HD running '95

2 NEC 486sx-25's with 4 or 12 meg RAM
I these a few months ago for $29 each from an electronics surplus house on
the web.  I thought
that I would use these on the work bench, to upgrade the old XT there now..
for use when I get time to dive into 'pic' ing

1 gateway 2k laptop 486dx2-50 with 20meg RAM and 330meg HD, Win 95
Used for data collection from the chronograph  and exterior ballistics
calculations when I am over at the rifle range.

a 386dx-40 with 4 meg RAM and 420meg HD, running win 3.11- for weather sat
image reception

and a 10mhz v-20 based XT system with a 30meg HD in it.  it runs dos 3.31.
It is on the work bench in the basement,
until I  get time to take one of the NEC's down there and get it set up for
the work bench.
Maybe a computer collector would be interested in it... ha!


At work, ( I don't work with PIC's, sad to say)   I have 4 of HP Pentium II
- 200's and a AMD486-100
in my "main" area on the plant floor.  We use w 3.11 on the AMD system and
w95 on 2 of the maintenance
computer systems. One of the units runs NT4.0.   I use these to maintain
and program Allen Bradley PLC-5's, SLC-500's, micrologics-5550 and
Modicon 984's and 484 PLC systems.  Most of these systems have several  (up
to 8) servo drives that are also
intelligent  "box's"  that need programming and tweaking from time to time.

There are also a couple of Pentium II -350 systems that run NT-4.0 that are
used as hosts for a Cognix Checkpoint vision processor
that is used for 100% inspection and orientation of input parts to a couple
of the production machines.

We have a bunch of 80196 based 'in house' developed control systems.
I hope that after I get 'my feet wet' with PIC's I'll be able to use some
of these for embedded systems in the plant.
I have several projects that I would like to use PIC's in  at work.. I just
need to get time to learn more about them..

This is why I have been 'lurking' on this list, trying to decide what to do
for software and programming hardware...
When things slow down here in a month or so (couple of big projects going
on at work)  I'll be able to get started...
For the mean time I am 'lurking and learning'  on the LIST.

Have a good day!        AG





- Arnie Grubbs - KA0NCR
-agrubs@teknetwork.com