Thinking "out of the box" when building a PC

Mxsmanic wrote:

David Maynard writes:


It 'works', though, and you can tell that an incredible amount of
engineering and design effort went into the thing. It's just that a plain
metal box would have been infintely superior from just about any standpoint.


The accountants probably told the engineers that a plastic case was
mandatory for cost reasons, and then ignored the engineers when they
explained all the additional work that would be required to make the
case compliant.

Well, accountants do some strange things from time to time but specifying
hardware design isn't usually one of them. Their approach is generally much
simpler, such as explaining you have a 1 lb budget for a 10 lb box and the
rest is your problem.

Manufacturing then tells you they ain't got tools to make 10 lb boxes, R&D
tells you it's not technologically possible to make 10 lb boxes, marketing
says 10 lbs ain't big enough because the competition has 12 lb boxes, with
bells, the buyer says lead time for the one indispensable part with no
substitute is 200 years but contract admin has forbidden purchasing from
them anyway, Q&A suddenly announces a new standard requiring 10 lb boxes
survive a nuclear blast with the mega-tonnage TBD, which generally means
some time significantly after your scheduled delivery, and the board
doesn't know what a 'lb' is but wants the arbitrary schedule you couldn't
make to begin with cut in half.

None of which you can find in the conceptual drawings, statement of work,
or specifications for the 5 lb box you were asked to design.

Other than that it's a piece of cake

They were very easy systems to assemble, because the case was big and
open. IIRC, the motherboard in the 486 based system used a UMC chipset,
and a separate card for the SuperIO functions (serial/parallel/game
port).

There have been instances of all of those types of PCs. They fail
because while everyone says how great they would be, no one wants to
pay a big premium. Adding interconnect cables, separate power supplies,
etc, adds cost. I.e., you used to be able to buy a PC with the CD-ROM
and floppy drives in a separate desktop cabinet, since there was no
need for the whole PC to be easily accessible. But this involved two
cases, two power supplies, a host of cables, etc.

The trend now is to not have a gazillion pieces strewn around the room,
connected by cables. So stuff like integral media readers, removable
drive bays, etc., are becoming more common.

One way to achieve what you want is to set up a client-server
environment, with a separate server. But thin clients have
traditionally been rather low performance, and not cheap because they
require specialized thermal solutions, and low power processors (10
watts or so) to be able to be silent and to fit into small cases.

I worked on one high performance thin client at my last job, and the
demand was very high (we could not manufacture components fast enough
for the customer). When I go to my local library, and use their
extremely slow thin clients, it makes me wish that they would buy the
higher performance machines, but they were very expensive (as well as
being fanless).

On Sat, 23 Jul 2005 11:18:07 -0500, Bob Adkins
wrote:

On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 20:43:49 -0500, David Maynard
wrote:


Yes. I've got an old 486 system made by Compudyne, I think it is, and it's
a plastic case with metal sheets all over the place inside for EMI shielding.

Did you ever see an old Kaypro "portable" case? Now THAT was some
"engineering"!

It was an ancient precursor to the laptop. It was huge, with built-in ~9"
CRT, all made from heavy gage aluminum, all aircraft-looking rivnuts and
fasteners. Weighed about 30 pounds. Just the case must have cost more than a
modern computer. I tore one down and salvaged the aluminum sheet metal,
brackets, heavy fiberglass braces, rivnuts, and high quality SS fasteners. I
still use the aluminum for building home made brackets and trays.

Found a nice picture of it he http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html

Even the keyboard was mounted in a heavy gage aluminum tray, which I use for
a shelf in my shop.


Wasn't it working? That might've been worth some $$$$ to a
collector, certainly more than the cost of that much sheet
metal if you merely needed materials.

Bob Adkins writes:

Did you ever see an old Kaypro "portable" case? Now THAT was some
"engineering"!

It was an ancient precursor to the laptop. It was huge, with built-in ~9"
CRT, all made from heavy gage aluminum, all aircraft-looking rivnuts and
fasteners. Weighed about 30 pounds. Just the case must have cost more than a
modern computer. I tore one down and salvaged the aluminum sheet metal,
brackets, heavy fiberglass braces, rivnuts, and high quality SS fasteners. I
still use the aluminum for building home made brackets and trays.

Found a nice picture of it he http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html

Even the keyboard was mounted in a heavy gage aluminum tray, which I use for
a shelf in my shop.

It's interesting to note that the main reason these first portable
computers were so bulky and heavy was that they had to contain large
diskette drives and a CRT. Remove the floppies and the CRT and they'd
nearly fit into a modern laptop. The development of inexpensive,
high-quality, reliable hard disk drives and flat-panel screens is what
made laptops really practical; unfortunately, that didn't happen until
many years after the PC itself was invented.

I remember seeing people lugging those large Osbornes and what-not
around occasionally and thinking that they didn't seem very practical.
However, I did like the old IBM 5100 from a style standpoint, although
it was twice as heavy as the Osbornes and had less horsepower. It had
a nice cartridge tape drive, which I found superior to floppy disks,
and the fit and finish were excellent.

Bob Adkins wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 20:43:49 -0500, David Maynard
wrote:



Yes. I've got an old 486 system made by Compudyne, I think it is, and it's
a plastic case with metal sheets all over the place inside for EMI shielding.


Did you ever see an old Kaypro "portable" case? Now THAT was some
"engineering"!

Sure, I remember them. And the Osborne. And, of course, making 'portables'
is how Compaq got started.

It's certainly engineered but not in the same way as the Compudyne case I
was talking about. The Kaypro is primarily bend sheet metal, a simpler and
less costly solution than making molds with the attached shielding bits.


It was an ancient precursor to the laptop. It was huge, with built-in ~9"
CRT, all made from heavy gage aluminum, all aircraft-looking rivnuts and
fasteners. Weighed about 30 pounds. Just the case must have cost more than a
modern computer. I tore one down and salvaged the aluminum sheet metal,
brackets, heavy fiberglass braces, rivnuts, and high quality SS fasteners. I
still use the aluminum for building home made brackets and trays.

Found a nice picture of it he http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html

Even the keyboard was mounted in a heavy gage aluminum tray, which I use for
a shelf in my shop.

Bob Adkins writes:

I was in awe of the HDD. It was a 5mb unit, and was very large and heavy. I
should have kept it.

I recall a $3000 Corvus drive in a blue plastic case that held about 3
megabytes. Even at the time, they were gouging customers on price;
the drives didn't cost _that_ much to make. When one looks at the
prices of things back in those days, one must remember that a lot of
hardware had very generous margins built into the sale price.

Mxsmanic wrote:
Bob Adkins writes:


I was in awe of the HDD. It was a 5mb unit, and was very large and heavy. I
should have kept it.


I recall a $3000 Corvus drive in a blue plastic case that held about 3
megabytes. Even at the time, they were gouging customers on price;
the drives didn't cost _that_ much to make. When one looks at the
prices of things back in those days, one must remember that a lot of
hardware had very generous margins built into the sale price.

Which, no doubt, explains why so many of them are no longer in the business.

David Maynard writes:

Which, no doubt, explains why so many of them are no longer in the business.

No doubt ... although Apple is still in business.