I’ve picked up a rather substantial Wyse 2112-40 286 computer from eBay, and it’s certainly an interesting machine. Imagine a tower case that’s been pushed over onto its side and you get some idea of the size. It’s enormous!

Inside we’ve got a 12.5 MHz 80286, eight expansion slots and a rather impressive collection of cards. The keyboard uses an RJ-style connector, and the keys are fairly squishy. Certainly no IBM Model M, but it’ll do.

The machine also arrived with a Seagate ST-251 hard drive, an EGA video card and two floppy drives. One is a 1.2 MB drive, while the other is a 720 KB drive fitted into an adapter. Quite a collection of bits and pieces! The Seagate is a lovely big drive that doesn’t appear to have been opened, although it’s not much use to me at the moment.

Unfortunately, the Wyse wasn’t booting properly when I received it. I’ve replaced the EGA card with an Oak VGA card, partly because I don’t have an EGA monitor sitting around. The replacement also has some controller hardware on it, so that could make things interesting.

And then there’s the power supply. I thought the one in my IBM PS/2 Model 30 was enormous, but this thing makes it look positively tiny! Wyse certainly wasn’t trying to save space.

The front panel is rather nice, with a little LCD display that can tell you what the system is doing. There’s also a memory expansion card that appears to bring the machine up from 640 KB to around 1.6 MB. The motherboard itself is mostly an arrangement of expansion slots, with the processor sitting on one of the cards.

There’s an external-drive connection at the back that can also supply power, and the internal cables are nicely labelled. Even the power connectors are ordinary Molex connectors, which is a relief given some of the other unusual hardware in here. The cards themselves look rather non-standard, though. I’m not particularly keen to find out what happens if I stick one into another machine. I’d imagine it might catch fire, and I’m trying to keep down the number of fires this week!

I tried powering the machine up, but it didn’t get particularly far. The display reported a boot failure, which seems fair enough considering the state of things. I also ran out of camera battery while filming, so that’s about all we’re getting from this particular demonstration!

It’s a fascinating old system, though, and I’d much rather see whether I can get it running than strip the whole thing for parts. We’ll see what a little tinkering can achieve.

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