DrQue.net-- Andrew Que's corner of the net

   The Silver Dragon has a long history. The case is most likely the oldest surviving part of this system and is one of the tuffest computer cases I've ever encountered. It was bought used from a local computer store for $100 in the summer of 1994. The case cover has long sence been bent out of reconition and disguarded-- it was usualy never on the system and therefor, subjected to verious abuse as it sat around.
   The case contains 6 5 1/4" drive bays; 5 in the front and one full higth bay just over the power suply. It contains a 200 watt powersuply and may at one time have been a server case.
   This system began it's life as a 386SX-16 with 1 MB of RAM. This motherboard acualy was borrowed from a friend. It ran from 2x40 MB MFM hard drives; one of which was a full-higth drive. A Trident SVGA card with 1 MB of video DRAM provided graphics with a ability to do 16,777,216 colors which seemed magical at the time.
   In the late summer of 1994, the system upgraded to a 386SX-40 with 2 MB of RAM. A few months latter, the 40 MB drives were replaced with a 420 MB IDE drive-- which is still in the system today.

Front

   In November of 1994, the Silver Dragon became Que's Resort BBS-- a one line wonder with big dreams. Natraly, the Resort doubled as a consol computer, but the low traffic didn't make this a problem.
   Major upgrades didn't happen again until June of 1995, when the motherboard was upgraded to a 486DX4-100 with 8 MBs of RAM.
   In June of 1996, the system had a shipping accident. The 486 motherboard was praticly distroyed. Luckly, the hard drive had not been in the system when it shipped. The system had a AMD-K5 150 MHz motherboard belonging to a friend installed. A 2.1 GB hard drive and a Diamond Sealth 2001 video card with 4 MBs of DRAM were also added.
   In March of 1997, the motherboard left system to go to collage with it's owner. The Silver Dragon sat idle for a long time, running an old 486DX-33 motherboard with 16MBs of RAM. Use of the system at this time was acualy quite low, as Andrew had been working his programming job for sevral months now.
   Not until December of 1997 did the system receive an other upgrade. This time, a Cyrix P200-MMX motherboard with 512k of cache and 32 MBs of RAM. Some months after that, a 6.4 GB hard drive was added. This drive broke some months latter due to a bad motor control chip, taking with it 6.4 GBs of data.
   Over the years, the Silver Dragon has been used less and less. While working for Electro Cam Corp., Andrew was given a laptop computer to use and most work typicaly done on the Silver Dragon was done using the laptop instead.

Motherboard

   Eventualy, the Silver Dragon was acualy broght to Andrew's work place. There ware it was used to refrence old programming projects, act as a auxilary engineering server and assist in some product testing.
   In December of 1999, the White Dragon-- the sucessor of the Silver Dragon.   Due to it's powersuply and having only 5 1/4" bays, the system wasn't good for ferther upgrading. The 420 MB drive, still containing a great deal of old DOS and windows 3.1 software, suffers from physical defects. The 2.1 GB drive has a strange problem that causes the drive to reset at random-- which can cause the system to crash.
   Today the Silver Dragon serves as a memory to earlyer times. Just by looking at the system, one can tell this system has been though a lot. Drywall screws hold in a case fan; casette tape cases and duct tape form a braket system for the 3 1/2" drives that are mounted in 5 1/4" drive bays. Spliced wires with old electrical tape once feed power to drives that are no longer present. A switch was installed on the PC speaker so the system could be run without risk of waking parents.
   Although old and warn, the Silver Dragon helps me to remember the days when I learned the base of what I now know about programming. Many nights of countless hours were spent bringing my idias to reality. My computer was my life, and for this reason, the Silver Dragon will never die.