Powerexec 4/25 SL Mono Vintage

Sometimes at work I’ll stumble over some old, unknown hardware just lying around on the floor in the basement. Sometimes it looks shiny, and I want to have it. Today I found a PowerExec 4/25SL from AST Research Inc. The ari-service.com website has a lot of great information about these ancient systems, that were made to compete with IBM’s machinery in the early 90s, and whose demise was caused by relying wholly upon self-manufactured components instead of following the OEM standardization we came to know as the PC.

AST Research PowerExec 4/25SL
Added picture to the post @ 04.02.09

Here’s a tell-tale illustration of the chassis. It’s fitted with a Norwegian/Arabic keyboard combo and a 2.5 Inch IDE Hard Drive at a full 200 MB diskspace so you can see why I’m so excited (it doesn’t have LBA so you can forget about replacing it). Is it Y2K compliant? "Enter the date at the DOS prompt and then reboot the computer." Apparently this little baby was assembled in Mexico, and sports a whopping 4MB of RAM. I’m gonna fit it with Damn Small Linux and pitch it up against the old IBM laptop from 93 that I’ve got as a dust-collector in the back of my office. I’m not gonna do any other distros, unless they come in a friendly amount of floppies..

6 thoughts on “Powerexec 4/25 SL Mono Vintage

  1. I’ve got two of these sitting around… hoping to find a way to get the data off of the drives — other than that I’d be happy to let you have them as spares. Let me know if you are interested / can give me a hint about what type these drives are at my email above.

    Hogan

  2. Hahaha, thanks, man! But I’m really drowning in obsolete hw atm, so my GF is pushing me to get rid of most of it.

    I just feel someone (a museum, or school) should take care of these for posterity. Thanks for sharing, though!

  3. Hogan, I’ve been looking for one of these to repair mine for ages, would you consider sending one or both of your machines my way? I can certainly get any data you need off of the disks in exchange, as well as pay for postage.

    1. Munchausen, Hogan left his e-mail in the original comment. I’ll contact him and ask if he can help you out.

      Unfortunately, I left the featured machine at work when I left. But I remember running DSL on it:)

      1. Sigg3, thanks a lot! You should also have my email. Hopefully he’ll get in touch. These are really nicely built machines so would be cool to get mine working properly again.

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