Original IBM PC, and other old computers

[theMan]

They were throwing out a room full of old computers at my university, and well... I just had to take a bunch of them. I'm sitting here right now with a few original IBM 5150 PC's from 1981 (the original version), and a few HP Vectra A's from 1986. They're all in perfect working condition, and I have keyboards, monitors, and printers for all of them.

I've already dusted off my old box of 5.25" floppies, and I've been playing Lode Runner and Zork all day. I've also typed a paper in Word 5.0 and printed it on the dot matrix printer. Lol.

Next step is to network so I can play some games against some of my friends. But how? Any ideas how i could possibly set up some sort of network with these HP's? This stuff is a bit before my time, I'm only 20 years old..... I never had to do networking until the age of broadband.

 

[PottedMeat]

Lol network? If you can find some 8-bit ISA coax cards maybe. I think you'll need some coax cable and T-connectors too.

 

[acheron]

I'm a little jealous.

I used to have some ISA network cards, I finally got rid of them though a couple years ago. They were 16-bit though (I used them for a 386), so even those wouldn't have worked on an 8088.

 

[pukemon]

Simple networking between two PC/XT/AT machines was often done with a null modem cable (that came in either 9 or 25 pin variety that you plugged into your serial port) or via a Laplink cable using your parallel port. You'd use some DOS command to copy files from one machine to another. It wasn't any faster than just copying onto a floppy disk and sneakernetting to the other machine.

Multiple computer networks was done using Thicknet (10Base-2) using coaxial cable, or IBM Token Ring - try to find some old IBM PS/2s with Microchannel Token Ring cards, that's a blast from the past right there.