NCR 3333

When I got this computer back in summer 2000, there was still some information to be found on the web. It's all gone now, but occasionally you stumble upon images like the one to the right. For a while after its release in 1993, the NCR 3333 was something like the archetypical server and remained a popular illustration on the websites of hosting providers for years.

The photographer did the best to give an impression of "big", but actually, the NCR 3333 lives in a slim, small case that cannot acommodate horizontal 5¼" slots. It is basically a desktop case turned upright, not a true tower case. Typically for brand name computers, it has a non-standard floppy drive, no reset button, and of course a completely non-standard mainboard. It does have a power outlet for the monitor.

The power supply is still AT, but the main board is already rather similar to ATX mainboards. It has two 15-pin serial ports, a parallel port, PS/2 connectors for keyboard and mouse, and an onboard floppy/IDE controller, which is basically just a waste of a VESA local BUS slot, since it was usually equipped with an (ISA!) adaptec 1540 or 1542 SCSI card. I have meanwhile found a local BUS version of this card and will eventually replace it. In any case it's the better idea to use SCSI, since the BIOS supports neither LBA nor an ATAPI CD-ROM drive.

There are the usual four 72-pin RAM slots, supporting up to 64MB. It seems that the machine is a bit picky about which kind of RAM it will accept. Mine has been upgraded from the original 8MB to 16MB, and I think I will leave it at that. 16MB isn't bad for a 486DX2/66.

There were two or three versions differing mainly in the equipped video card. Mine has a 512kB card which was the simplest, intended mainly for server use. I have tried to replace it with a better card (2MB local BUS cards are fairly easy to get) but didn't succeed, the other cards always printed gibberish to the screen instead of legible text.

I got it with Windows 95 installed, later equipped it with the CD drive from the IBM PS/2 9556 and a Soundblaster Gold and played some contemporary multimedia CD-ROMs on it, like Weird and Cyberdreams. Since these CD-ROMs usually run at 256 colors, the video did fine, but I found that the CPU had problems when full-motion video was involved.

Later the battery got weak and it took me quite a while to find a replacement. It has not been completely reassambled and set up yet, but since I like this computer a lot, I certainly will.

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Last modified 2004-03-23