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.
By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I had four or five computers around a U-shaped desk in the basement, and I wanted some music to listen to while I used them. This was the early 1990s, and I was mostly running Minix. Playing music while doing something else on the machine wasn’t particularly convenient, since the Sound Blaster could only be used by one program at a time. There was an old stereo receiver down there too, the sort you would connect a record player to, but its radio only received AM. I wanted FM.
Somehow I came across an old car radio with a bunch of wires sticking out of the back. It already had the tuner and controls I wanted, and it needed twelve volts to run. The computer had twelve volts available inside it, and was already open. I’d been taking computers apart and putting them back together for years, and I was changing things in this one often enough that I had given up putting the top back on. I think it was a 486 using an old IBM XT power supply, though I remember the lower half of the XT case more clearly than what was in it.
To get the radio going, I needed to work out which pins on the Molex drive power connector carried the twelve volts. Once I had that sorted out, I folded up the radio’s wires and shoved them into the connector. That was the extent of the power wiring.
While fitting this together, I discovered that the radio would actually fit into the floppy drive opening. Now that I was borrowing the power supply, this was a fairly convenient place to put the rest of it. The controls stuck out of the front where I could reach them, and the wires stayed inside with all the other wiring. I had gone looking for a way to power the radio and ended up with somewhere to put it as well.
I wired the audio through the old AM and record-player receiver to the speakers. The FM stations were now coming through the stereo I’d already had, with the tuning controls sticking out of the computer. I could listen while I worked in Minix, and the Sound Blaster was available for something else.
It stayed like that for a year or two, playing music while I used the computers. Eventually I had a PowerPC Mac and was changing the setup again, so I took the radio back out.