The car radio in the floppy drive bay
An old car radio, the computer's twelve-volt supply and a basement stereo gave me FM music while I worked at the computer.
In the early 1990s I wanted FM radio in the basement room where I kept my computers. I had an old stereo and record-player receiver, but it only received AM. Playing music on the computer while doing other things wasn’t particularly convenient either. I was mostly running Minix, and the Sound Blaster could only be used by one program at a time, which left me looking for another way to have some music while I was down there.
Somehow I came across an old car radio, with a bunch of wires sticking out of the back. It needed twelve volts. There was already a twelve-volt supply inside the computer, which I remember as a 486 using an old XT power supply and the lower half of an XT case. I had the top off because I was changing things often enough that leaving it open was easier. While working out how to power the radio, I discovered it would also fit into the floppy drive opening, with its controls sticking out of the front of the computer.
I was about thirteen or fourteen and had already been taking computers apart and putting them together for years. By then there were four or five machines around a U-shaped desk. I had some idea of how the parts would work together, and the radio was another thing to try with the equipment I had around me.
The part I needed to sort out was the connection to the power supply. The drive power connector had the twelve-volt rail available on it. I worked out which pins to use, folded up the radio’s wires and pushed them into the Molex connector, so the wiring could stay inside the open case while the controls were accessible from the front.
For the audio, I used the old AM and record-player receiver and its speakers. It could still do that part of the job even though it couldn’t receive the FM stations I wanted. The car radio provided the tuner, the computer provided the power and somewhere to put it, and the receiver let me hear it. Nothing about listening to it needed Minix or the sound card, so I could carry on using the computer while the radio played.
It was a fairly silly arrangement. There may have been easier ways to get FM music into the room, but I was curious whether it would work and it was fun to put together. I learned a little more about the power connector along the way. It stayed there for a year or two, playing music while I used the computers. Eventually I had a PowerPC Mac and was changing the setup, so the radio came back out of the computer.