The EXPERT 286: An 80s IBM PC/AT 5170 lookalike with a very special CPU board

What's this? This machine looks like a shrinked down version of the IBM PC/AT 5170. That's too obscure retro tech to just let it go!

The EXPERT 286 is a real mid-1980s IBM PC/AT 5170 lookalike, that has been modified to include a CUBIX BC 4030 CPU card featuring a later-years i486.
This osbscure combo smells like an industrial computer, but with the original CPU gone for good, I can only dive into the CUBIX single-board computer, that plugs directly into a passive ISA backplane, as found on this very machine.

00:00 Intro
00:32 The impossible IBM AT lookalike
01:53 The CUBIX BC 4030 486 SBC board
03:28 Little Detour: Another 486 SBC board
04:38 The Thing about the stuck Drive Rails
05:45 Cleaning, lots of cleaning
06:27 New Studs for the Backplane
07:42 Hardware Upgrades
09:35 New Internal Wiring
10:40 The Thing about the Drive Rails (again)
12:31 Conclusion
13:24 Credits

Links:

CUBIX Corporation (today):

CUBIX Corporation (archive, ca. 1997):

Tech Info on the BC 4030 (archived, ca. 1997):

CUBIX ERS, feat. the BC 4030:

Copyright @ 2023 THE PHINTAGE COLLECTOR, Gianpaolo Del Matto. All rights reserved.

Theme Music composed by Abdallah El-Ghannam.

[airfixer]

Great restore..congrats with that... :-) I love to see some NT4 on it

[davidbeszeda]

I would like to see running a Novel Netware 4.x on this machine and also pushing it's limits when it comes to a collaboration/working environment like using chat (mhs), file sharing, printing service, xntpd, even voice (with knoppix), network gateway, local web services, database, console access, basic network management, making a network diagram etc. (if you just pick two or three of these and present them, that would be splendid). It is very time consuming, I know :)
I know there wasn't much security and most people used non-secure way of accessing information back in those days, but let's say having a user/pass for authentication is acceptable for these machines.
So briefly it would be nice to see interconnected old computers that can prove that they are still usable for standard tasks today.

[heilong]

looks like you might be using arctic silver MX-5? that stuff was recalled for oil separation (which is why it spreads so poorly)

[lemagreengreen]

That seems like a very high quality miniaturised clone case like so many early IBM PC clones, it seems like the Taiwanese manufacturers actually cared about quality of materials etc a little more than you'd expect and certainly more than they eventually did.

[MotownBatman]

I Want One!
the Perfect lil 286 that could!

[cocoe]

I have same symbol of same manufacturer in an ISA MDA card of muy first 286 PC computer bought un 1989, same M that belongs to a taiwanese brand called Minwa.

[kemi]

I think MS-DOS 6.22 or maybe Windows 95 is the way to go. A 486 DX66 is more than enough to run Doom, and I just love using devices for their unintended purpose, like LGR played games on an industrial network analyzer.