Broken to BBS: A Dell 286 Restoration [video]

That speech card seems to be the most unusual thing about the machine, maybe assistive technology for blind users? Impressive that it survived the capacitor exploding.

I wonder if there was some DOS driver already installed on the hard drive that allows "echo"ing text to a character device to make it say something - like he does at the end of this video, but unfortunately without an explanation of what the interface for that is.

edit: the longer video has a short bit at the very end where you can see some kind of menu system is launched from AUTOEXEC.BAT, with speech output. But it just cuts off after that - I'm a bit disappointed, since everything else is pretty much standard hardware for the time, while this card and the software supporting it is certainly rare, maybe even unique!

I had a 286 with a case just like that one. I don't miss the 286, but I wish I had kept the case.

I watched the video and just seeing a machine that old just plugged in without checking the board was triggering then the explosion of a cap for the views was obvious. Nice restoration overall but plugging it in to film a cap exploding is bad taste I think.

the music is so nice in this video... god i miss the days of old computers. ran my first BBS on my 486DX2