Hello Sayaka, I know you said you didn't want to disassemble everything ... But in the last computer (so the one without a graphics card), you have found that it was a PcPartner motherboard on TheRetroWeb. As you probably saw, we don't have a picture of this board yet. Could you please make a picture of this motherboard for us ? You will be credited of course🙂
I remember the time when pentium 4 came out. Most of my group of friends were dreaming of having one with the famous “Hyper threading” logo on it. It was also the point where single core were reaching their physical limitations and as you said, the core series had to be introduced. Cool video!!
I was a young teen in this timeframe, and was always interested in computers. I got my A+ a few years later in high school, and man, this video brings back feelings and memories I didn't even know I had!
Thank you so much for your donation, I'm glad you enjoyed the video! These computers were indeed cutting-edge in their time. It's amazing to look back and see how much progress has been made
When I started my profession IT career, it was using PCs and such from this era. Although I have a larger soft-spot for older home computers (C64s, Timex Sinclair, TIs, Mac Classics, TRS-80 Cocos), I still miss the days of MS-DOS and pre-Win95. Loved the video. Great work!
Thank you so much for your kind words! It's wonderful to hear from someone who shares a passion for vintage computers. I may be young, but I have a deep appreciation for the history and nostalgia of computing before my time :)
And Amiga of course. How can you forget Amiga. I own an IBM 5150 PC with the original super-clicky mechanical keyboard and the original green screen mono monitor. It's a beauty and comes with DOS 1.0! Crazy that IBM just open sourced the whole design from scratch.
@@peterwilson7532 Oh no. Yes, can't forget the Amiga (which I guess I did...haha). And all those MSX computers, that didn't get as much of spread outside of Asia as they should have.
Hey Sayaka. This episode is very nostalgic. Some of the antique PCs presented by you, were very expensive at time when i was a student and I can recall working on them. Patience, loading, error, patience, repeat process, turn it, leave it, STOP, format it! sending HP-Love 💚
Old computers were built to last with heavy construction and lots of room. I hope you find a video card for the last one, it looked pretty clean. The first computer I owned was a Compaq 486 66 running Windows 3.11. Those were the days.
@@MM2isBest What changed was thousand pin CPUs, heavy CPU coolers which warp the mainboard, and saggy heavy GPUs which break the socket they're in or break their own components, just an intersection of legacy standards and new avoidably bad designs leading to something that is just hanging on barely alive with no margin of reliability. The electronics is denser, consumes a lot of power across a small area at peak load, has more stringent operating requirements, and is more fragile. Of course it's also a lot more affordable today for what you get, back in the 90s, a PC would cost thousands with just the basic features and was obsoleted really quickly, within just a couple years the next generation of software will find it insufficient. Today you can run the hardware a lot longer if it survives at all.
Before applying power always open the cover, blow out the dust outside and reseat cards. Might save you from frying something or bringing critters into the house.
On the contrary, you should boot it once first to ensure it works, that way if it doesn't you know you didn't break it yourself and won't void any returns policies.
@@IlBiggo don't think opening a case is the issue. But their point regarding reseatng cards is valid. I see both of your points though. Cards can come loose over time but a visual inspection can usually identify this. A baseline of power on before doing anything does have it's benefits.
@@Sayakas_Digital_Attic It sounds nostalgic when you put it like that. I guess it was fun. Mostly it was just a bunch of dudes, about a dozen of us, building and repairing pc's and crt's, and sometimes printers. I do have a lot of stories from that time. We were one of the very few and the biggest hardware shops in DFW at the time. I started after my 18th birthday on April Fool's Day 1990. That was the day Congress increased the minimum wage from $2 to $4.25. So I was making banking. I had a weird assortment of customers. NASA came in once and asked for some old DIP chips for their space shuttle program. We all thought that was hilarious. Some of the guys went on to start their own companies. This was before the Internet took hold, that happened around 1994 when Compuserve and some local ISP's started offering direct access to the Internet. But before that a few of us ran BBS's. I had a two line system running RBBS. We wrote our own tooling using FIDONET for propagation. Anyway, I guess it is nostalgic when I think about it. These days everything is cloud based but I still have some servers at home. Probably nothing like your setup. I'll have to check out more of your videos and see what you've got going on. Good times!
Yep. Also with MFM hard drives. Run DEBUG then issue that command for a low level format. Oh and don’t forget to park the hard drive heads before shutdown.
Nice. One tip. Before power on, I recommend you to open the case and if possible test only the power supply and do a visual inspection. This will prevent to fry computers with leak components or a bad psu.
Glad to see those beauties receiving a second chance. Back in the day, I used to repair my school mates pc's, and those were the days, when I downloaded a full iso 4.7 Gb filled with thousands of drivers. LAN and video were the most tricky, and the full joyness of watching everything running smoothly. Outstanding channel! Greetings from México 🇲🇽 ✨
Hello Sayaka. I enjoyed your video!! Please keep us up to date about the last machine if you have the time! The Retro community is very supportive of others (mostly), and by keeping these wonderful vintage machines alive we have access to times past (very important ). Keep up the great work! Thanks.
Good to see you working on non-8-bit hardware. Makes a nice change of pace from Commodore and other 8-bit stuff, and gets you into a more marketable skill set for the modern era. That third machine looks like one of the very early Dell Optiplex desktop machines. They were built primarily as office machines. They were generally rugged and reliable, but the power supplies are a bit dodgy after about ten years (at least in my experience). The Acer Aspire is also an early example of that product line, and was generally reliable, too. That "white box" clone with the Pentium is so typical of what was being built everywhere in the 1990s, and is a great find. With a nice Diamond or Cirrus Logic video card, it should do well. All of these should serve well for retro-gaming and light work like word processing and spreadsheets , but I don't know that I'd put them on the network with their present operating systems - they are all too out of date and vulnerable for that. Even installing Linux on these old 32-bit machines will be a bit of a risk security-wise. Enjoy them, learn more about them, and have lots of fun.
Oooh, have you tested the CRT monitor? Hopefully it works too, that would be awesome to use with those machines! Impressing to see almost all PCs working almost right out of the box. My first ever PC was a 486 DX2 66MHz back in the late 90s. It was a computer my dad brought home to do some work on, and I got to use it a bit too. It's still here and working fine, even the hard drive is still good. It's a Seagate ST3250A with it's whopping 213.9MB haha, very solid hardware! I was expecting to see MSDOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 on your 486, like what I had back in the days, but you got Win95 instead. :) I didn't have any games on the 486 back then. But later I picked up my cousin's PC when he finally upgraded, I remember it was either a Pentium II or a Celeron (Slot 1 type), with onboard ATI Rage graphics. A Compaq Presario, alongside its CRT with two big speakers attached on the side. I finally enjoyed some PC games with Unreal Tournament GOTY, Battlezone II, Worms Armageddon and some others! I love retro hardware of that era! And the 98-05 PC games are absolutely awesome and iconic to me!
What a great selection of computers to receive, congratulations! I also really like your bench setup, it's very neat and spacious. Looking forward to more videos.
Good thing to clean up contacts on RAM sticks and expension cards, a pencil eraser. My father gave me that trick ... holy f... 30 years ago... works wonders to this day :) Nice spread of CPU generations there !
I'd probably use brasso, followed up with a light scrub with IPA and an old toothbrush. it works really well and really quickly. I tend to manhandle things when scrubbing them, so a pencil eraser seems a bit more likely to result in disaster for me personally. But you probably already have a lot of them, so the eraser has that going for it!
I once got a PC for free that looked just like that Dell. I really liked that case since it was so easy to open. You could also take out a tray with all the expansion cards as one piece, since they were sitting on a separate PCB, that was slotted into the motherboard. It had a Pentium I, but could really easily be overclocked to 200 Mhz or so just by setting some jumpers. It also had a huge passive heatsink, which I found rather unusual. Fun times.
Nice to see you again ☺️, definitely replace the batteries I think they could eventually leak on the motherboard. Not properly seated RAM I was have that one on my own computer, LOL.
I love how simple and genuine your video is. It really feels more personal that way. It was fun all issues where ram not being connected fully except the last one.
I love your work. I can see you really love computers. There's not much people who dares to bring back to life old and antique computers. That's a why I'm in love with your channel.
That first computer looks like a Siemens (Nixdorf) 486 PC. These were mostly geared to the corporate market. I was sysadmin in an office with 100 of those in 1997
I love you and of course what you do there. I am extremely enthusiastic about your "love" for technology. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that you can continue this story for a long time to come. Much, much, most of all in success! 😊❤
First time using computer was in 1988 (18 yo teen) windows not yet exist (at least in my country), we use dos based application like wordstars, Lotus 123 and Formtools. Still using PC/laptop for private work and entertainment. Nice video. Thanks
what memories!! The dell gx1 was my first pc, the last upgrade I did was to put 3 256 mb dimm modules in it and install win xp and i played age of empires II and starcraft on it , excellent video, thanks for sharing
Hello, Sayaka! Congratulations on that good start-up of those old computers! Watched also this video which you had told in Italian. I am surprised that despite they are old, those computer did not greeted you with boom on their ancient power supply due to age. Also, pretty interesting, to be honest, some of computers especially with LED Digits (telling the speed of the CPU), reminds me of some computers that had existed in most computer laboratories here in Philippines for children to get trained on how to operate computer, like for example, to run Word document for typing practice. But few people who bought such computers here at the time for personal use, they were released here (they were too expensive), they tried to play them with Doom or other games at those time, even good old solitaire. This was also the age where many kids chose more to watch cartoons or animes on televisions as renting was way expensive to afford, and those were the times when we though such computers were just made mainly for businesses, until early 2000's came and Pentium 4 redefined computing industry and even included Excel in computer classes. Pretty miss those days. I thank destiny for making such computers being part of my life in being computer literate. Hope that one computer with missing video card will find the best video card for completion of operation. I forgot. Try to clean also the PCI socket, maybe that they oxidized due to age, and maybe one of the reason why the system won't recognize PCI-based video cards. All the best in your videos and looking forward for your next videos!
You'll find that capacitors in units made back in the late 80s and 90s were of much higher quality than those made today. I'm not sure why this is so, but this means the power supplies and filtration and decoupling caps could last a good bit longer before failing. Your note about cleaning the PCI slots is a good call. I'd use something similar to CRC QD Electronics Cleaner, or maybe one of the less aggressive formulations of DeOxit and a lint-free swab (such as those made by Chemtronics CC50 or CFP50 "foamtips" which don't leave cotton fibers behind).
Hello! Thank you so much for your kind words and for sharing your memories and insights. It's fascinating to hear about your experiences with computers and how they were used in computer laboratories in the Philippines. I appreciate your suggestion about cleaning the PCI!
I remember my father (and therefore I) went from AMD 386DX/40 to 486DX4/100, and w95 was very slow. It takes some courage to install and use W95 on DX2/66. On FOUR MB of ram!
2:50 i486DX2 66Mhz ... That is the same CPU of my first computer. I would have never imagined to see it running again. Memory was 4MB , HDD was around 300MB. Few years before that my father was using company's computer at home which was thick, heavy & small screen had i386 33Hhz CPU in it and costed 500,000 yen which was equivalent of 5,000 USD back then which was pretty crazy price. Good work Sayaka-san ;)
The Siemens Nixdorf 486 PC brings back Memories, i lived in the City who this computer was Manufactured. Still today in Paderborn is the Heinz Nixdorf Museum. Thank you for that Video.
Hi, nice video . I used to worked and maintain those computers when they where new . I still maintain them, and many other brand , systems . You seem to have more than the basics in home computers . But let me give you 3 advises : -1 - on old computers always open them to see if anything have moved during transport . -2- Always check the power supply before trying to power them . -3- if you have to work on computer between 1988 and 1993 always check the battery , it can be a barrel one that can leek , in this case it as to be remove asap . (especially PC, Mac, Amiga) Maybe You know all that things, do as you wish and have fun . Thank You .
Thanks for sharing this video. Nice to hear the history of Cpu from you. I started my journey with the 486DX2 processor. At that moment the Pentium processors were also available. But after the Pentium 2 came out, things changed very quickly. In the meantime AMD was also concurring at the market. Especially when they came with the AMD Athlon Cpu the Cpu war was began. I see so that the case of these PC' are white. This was at that moment the standard. Nowadays we have de black colored cases, which is much better.
Felicitaciones, trato de hacer andar las computadoras que otros tiran, creo que las tecnologias pueden ser usadas por mucho mas tiempo que el establecido. Muy viejas las computadoras que mostraste. tu video es simple concreto y por sobre todo bien didactico. Desde San Rafael al sur de Mendoza Argentina
You can use ISA VGA/SVGA cards in a PCI computer no problem, a Trident or something, they were made by billions. But unfortunately an ISA card slows the whole computer down a fair bit. The era appropriate card is of course S3Trio PCI or Tseng ET6000, or Matrox or ATI of the era, but if you find a Virge instead or something else, no reason not to use that.
Another great video Eleonora. Wow you've got more PC's than Microsoft lol. Nice to see you covering a large variety of computers. Keep up the great work.
Your videos are so relaxing and fun! I like to open up a computer before powering on because parts can come loose during shipment. It might be good to figure out a way of testing a power supply while it is unplugged from the computer parts, though that might be a little difficult.
When I was at university in the mid 1990s, and again when I started work, the computers I used had cases of the last design - they were sold by Dan Technology. Hope you manage to revive yours.
I donated all my old PCs, monitors, etc. to a computer shop when I upgraded mine. I kept my Voodoo 3Dfx GPU though for memories~ ..that thing rips through OG WoW during those times~ Ahh~ Nostalgia! 😌
Maybe I'm much more thorough (or I'm a huge nerd), but once I get into Windows I always run benchmarks and do stress tests. I have a boot disk specifically designed with Windows 9x and DOS in mind. 😊 Anyway, great video! Keep up the amazing work! 😊❤
I used to build computers back in the day, during the late 90´s or so, I mostly used AMD K6-2 processors because I thought those CPU´s was better than intel. I started working on computer at a very young age of 13-14 around the year 1990 or so, mostly Amiga 500 computers at that time. My most recent build was back in 2017 when I built my (at the time) monster Hackintosh, very powerful, sadly it does not work anymore due to software issues, to install MacOS on it today I need to change the GPU, CPU and motherboard, an investment I am not willing to do at this time due to the simple fact that its possible to get a Mac mini M1 for the same price. I still have some very old PC´s from the late 90´s and 7-8 different PC Laptops from the 90´s and early 2000´s as well, in working condition. Thanks for the video..
Es muy curioso ver a gente que no vivió esa época interesada en estos aparatos. Yo los disfruté en casa de mi primo y un amigo. Mi primer ordenador fue muy posterior, fue un pentium 2 350 mhz. Aún recuerdo la ilusión que me provocó su compra y todos los recuerdos y vivencias con el. Saludos desde España.
@SayakasDigitalAttic Nicely done work. All of them need some cleaning and the last one just needs a PCI video card, but otherwise that is quite a haul!
another fun video i really enjoyed. i use to cannibalize these computers as a young fella and build my own pc with all the best parts i found! for gaming (:
All those computers were brand new when I was working as a repairman!! Most of the times the problem was a drained battery, a cable not connected correctly or the worst of all, a bad PSU! You also had the occasional damaged HDD
Small piece of advice, always do a visual inspection before powering on an unknown computer. This way you can potentially avoid loose/improperly seated components shorting out otherwise good hardware.
Nice old pc's. I've got one from 2001, but it has 600 Mhz Intel Celeron processor, a HP Brio BA410. Bought it new at the time, still came with Windows 98SE. Original Bios battery lasted over 20 years, then started giving that checksum error and loaded default values at the startup when the battery died. I did replace the battery and now it works fine again. Cleaned the dust from inside the minitower case once, after it was over 17 years old. Hasn't gotten much dust inside after that, as I rarely use it anymore. Recently though fixed a broken hinge from the keyboard case lifting mechanism, the one that raises the rear edge of the keyboard for more ergonomic position. Made new part using plastic modelcar modelkit parts tree for missing hinge plastic tab, glued it in place using superglue, and installed the repaired part back to the keyboard.
It's impressive that you were able to fix the broken hinge on the keyboard case using plastic model car parts. Your resourcefulness is truly inspiring! It's amazing to see how these machines can still be maintained and repaired with a little creativity.
My first PC build was a 486 in 1995. We already had a Pentium 90 but this one was just for me. I got a late production intel MB and a Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM 4MB. It was one of the first boards to support BIOS overclocking. Initially, I raised the multiplier to 2.5 and the FSB to 40MHz and later raised the multiplier to 3 and had it running at nearly double the nominal clockspeed. It ran Quake fairly well which is something usually not said about any 486. It beat a Pentium 60 in floating point performance and general compute was like a P75. Even at only 100MHz, it blew the official 100MHz 486 chips out of the water because of the 21% higher FSB speed which was easy to achieve because I only had 1 ISA card and one PCI card. It was also an early example of an integrated I/O MB. Fun times. When someone starts talking about their 14900KS, I just start yawning. I just want to scream, 'Modern intel is a joke!'. Wouldn't have touched an AMD CPU with a ten foot pole back then and now that's all I will buy. I have an Am486 DX4-120 and VLB MB just waiting for me to build it. These days, I have a ton of old video cards and sound cards. Since it will just be for DOS games, and I have the majority of them archived, I'll probably just download the ones I don't have and put them all on a big SD card (with like 100 partitions) and write a launcher app to run them. Something like Steam OS for DOS, lol. I've been contemplating using a SBC as a drive controller to see if I can use a modern high capacity SSD with DOS without having to deal with a million partitions. I think something that is conceptually similar to the way those old PCs were able to use extended memory would work. I want to use original hardware but make it as convenient as using DOSBox. I am also contemplating building a streaming DOS/Win 95 game server with a Sun Ultra 60 I have. It has a Pentium MMX PC card. It can run a modern-ish Linux distro and that opens up a lot of possibilities.
Woah, your experience with your first PC build sounds absolutely fascinating! It's amazing how you were able to push the limits of technology back then, especially with the overclocking and achieving such impressive performance gains. And the idea of a streaming DOS/Win 95 game server with a Sun Ultra 60 is just mind-blowing! It sounds like you have some incredible projects in the works.
With that last computer you should be able to use any ISA or PCI VGA card. Look for Trident, Cirrus Logic, Diamond VGA cards, always good to have one around. As for the slots marked C1 and C2 at 10:52, those are COM ports, someone looks like they used a permanent marker to identify which one is COM1 and which one is COM2. There is an LPT port beside it. Since its got a sound card in it, I would guess someone probably labeled the ports because they might have been using an external modem rather than an industrial application. I used to run an old FidoNet BBS system off old 386 and 486 PCs back in the 90s...
I live in Brazil and the release on the Pentium allowed me to buy a 486 DX-100 in 1995, prices went down. I had tons of fun with that computer, but the difference I observed in Pentium computers was absurd. So many games that wouldn't run on my 486 but ran smoothly in the Pentium. Myst, Full Throttle, to mention a few. Good times.
It would be fun to have a PC from that era to fix up and play games like Starcraft and Diablo... but I've still got too much Commodore stuff on my bench to fix up!
Unfortunately the community hasn't quite advanced to open videcards for classic computers yet. I do think it's the next frontier to make a Voodoo 3 PCI compatible card. Even just an ISA VGA card would be quite a challenge if it has to have in depth compatibility, but also there isn't a strong case to put in the effort given the abundance of simple and reliable Tridents. Fortunately simple single chip PCI and ISA cards were made by the billions and are abundant enough. Much cheaper and easier. You can even get a Rage XL for only a couple dollars shipped from China, it's fully functional, difficult to compete with.
At 90's, there were brands which were bulletproof and others like to fail&dead just itself without any reason. (edit) But think, these machines are decades old and running well!
It might be interesting to try some lightweight Linux on these PCs and see if anything could be done with them today. Maybe Loc-OS Linux, Debian Lxde or another distros on 32 bits. Good video, and best wishes.
I used to repair vintage computers back when they weren’t vintage 😂
Did you make components level repairs?
The rattle of the hdd🔥
So... what you're saying is... you're now also vintage?
@@WesleyJohnson1981 pretty much so😉
@@WesleyJohnson1981 Hahah, oh I am definitely vintage.
Hello Sayaka, I know you said you didn't want to disassemble everything ... But in the last computer (so the one without a graphics card), you have found that it was a PcPartner motherboard on TheRetroWeb. As you probably saw, we don't have a picture of this board yet.
Could you please make a picture of this motherboard for us ?
You will be credited of course🙂
I remember the time when pentium 4 came out. Most of my group of friends were dreaming of having one with the famous “Hyper threading” logo on it.
It was also the point where single core were reaching their physical limitations and as you said, the core series had to be introduced.
Cool video!!
Ah opening up these old computers brings back memories. Good old times.
oh yes
I was a young teen in this timeframe, and was always interested in computers. I got my A+ a few years later in high school, and man, this video brings back feelings and memories I didn't even know I had!
Even though I didn't experience those times firsthand, I'm glad my videos can still bring back those memories for you :)
@@tucsonsduke and headaches lol
@@Sayakas_Digital_Atticdon't think English is your first language
One of the few channels I thumbs-up before I've even watched the video. I know it's going to earn it. Thanks for posting!
Thank you for watching my videos!
@@Sayakas_Digital_AtticI sttill have 3 of my original childhood pcs and i had some macs growing up to
@R.Daneel Did you automatically blow your load? ....damn she's talking about floppies!
Thanks for posting
I've seen people say it's more helpful to the algorithm to click like at the end of the video.
@@MM2isBestyou just wasted more time commenting on it. 😋
I show this channel to my daughter every new video! Very cool! Keep posting!
I remember when these computers were cutting edge!!
Thank you so much for your donation, I'm glad you enjoyed the video! These computers were indeed cutting-edge in their time. It's amazing to look back and see how much progress has been made
@@Sayakas_Digital_Atticbut also some regress, I doubt current generations will still work after such a long time without almost any issues...
I've started my computer experience with the Commodore 64 in 1983/84. Good old memories...
When I started my profession IT career, it was using PCs and such from this era.
Although I have a larger soft-spot for older home computers (C64s, Timex Sinclair, TIs, Mac Classics, TRS-80 Cocos), I still miss the days of MS-DOS and pre-Win95.
Loved the video. Great work!
Thank you so much for your kind words! It's wonderful to hear from someone who shares a passion for vintage computers. I may be young, but I have a deep appreciation for the history and nostalgia of computing before my time :)
And Amiga of course. How can you forget Amiga. I own an IBM 5150 PC with the original super-clicky mechanical keyboard and the original green screen mono monitor. It's a beauty and comes with DOS 1.0! Crazy that IBM just open sourced the whole design from scratch.
@@peterwilson7532 Oh no. Yes, can't forget the Amiga (which I guess I did...haha). And all those MSX computers, that didn't get as much of spread outside of Asia as they should have.
Hey Sayaka. This episode is very nostalgic. Some of the antique PCs presented by you, were very expensive at time when i was a student and I can recall working on them.
Patience, loading, error, patience, repeat process, turn it, leave it, STOP, format it!
sending HP-Love 💚
It is so heartwarming watching young people appreciate and repair old computers and systems. Thanks!
Specially attractive young women.
Old computers were built to last with heavy construction and lots of room. I hope you find a video card for the last one, it looked pretty clean. The first computer I owned was a Compaq 486 66 running Windows 3.11. Those were the days.
@@MM2isBest What changed was thousand pin CPUs, heavy CPU coolers which warp the mainboard, and saggy heavy GPUs which break the socket they're in or break their own components, just an intersection of legacy standards and new avoidably bad designs leading to something that is just hanging on barely alive with no margin of reliability. The electronics is denser, consumes a lot of power across a small area at peak load, has more stringent operating requirements, and is more fragile. Of course it's also a lot more affordable today for what you get, back in the 90s, a PC would cost thousands with just the basic features and was obsoleted really quickly, within just a couple years the next generation of software will find it insufficient. Today you can run the hardware a lot longer if it survives at all.
When you repair old computers, they remind me of mine childhood. Thank you for bringing back good memories! 😍
Before applying power always open the cover, blow out the dust outside and reseat cards. Might save you from frying something or bringing critters into the house.
On the contrary, you should boot it once first to ensure it works, that way if it doesn't you know you didn't break it yourself and won't void any returns policies.
If cards & stuff look loose, of course they would be worth inserted in the system. . .
@@BlueEyedVibeChecker Anybody able to break a computer by opening the case should keep some distance from any electrical appliance.
@@IlBiggo don't think opening a case is the issue. But their point regarding reseatng cards is valid. I see both of your points though. Cards can come loose over time but a visual inspection can usually identify this. A baseline of power on before doing anything does have it's benefits.
This brings back lots of, uh, memories!
I used to work in a computer shop in the early 90's. This gives me flashbacks to formatting RLL hard drives. I still remember the command "g=c800:5"
Wow, what memories! It must have been amazing working in a computer shop in the early '90s
@@Sayakas_Digital_Attic It sounds nostalgic when you put it like that. I guess it was fun. Mostly it was just a bunch of dudes, about a dozen of us, building and repairing pc's and crt's, and sometimes printers. I do have a lot of stories from that time. We were one of the very few and the biggest hardware shops in DFW at the time.
I started after my 18th birthday on April Fool's Day 1990. That was the day Congress increased the minimum wage from $2 to $4.25. So I was making banking. I had a weird assortment of customers. NASA came in once and asked for some old DIP chips for their space shuttle program. We all thought that was hilarious. Some of the guys went on to start their own companies.
This was before the Internet took hold, that happened around 1994 when Compuserve and some local ISP's started offering direct access to the Internet. But before that a few of us ran BBS's. I had a two line system running RBBS. We wrote our own tooling using FIDONET for propagation.
Anyway, I guess it is nostalgic when I think about it. These days everything is cloud based but I still have some servers at home. Probably nothing like your setup. I'll have to check out more of your videos and see what you've got going on. Good times!
@@Sayakas_Digital_Attic I wish I lived in Italy lol
Yep. Also with MFM hard drives. Run DEBUG then issue that command for a low level format. Oh and don’t forget to park the hard drive heads before shutdown.
Old machines are cool. I would probably try to install Xubuntu 😀
Nice.
One tip. Before power on, I recommend you to open the case and if possible test only the power supply and do a visual inspection. This will prevent to fry computers with leak components or a bad psu.
Glad to see those beauties receiving a second chance. Back in the day, I used to repair my school mates pc's, and those were the days, when I downloaded a full iso 4.7 Gb filled with thousands of drivers. LAN and video were the most tricky, and the full joyness of watching everything running smoothly. Outstanding channel! Greetings from México 🇲🇽 ✨
Hello Sayaka. I enjoyed your video!! Please keep us up to date about the last machine if you have the time! The Retro community is very supportive of others (mostly), and by keeping these wonderful vintage machines alive we have access to times past (very important ). Keep up the great work! Thanks.
WOW!!!.... Flashback to my childhood. I remember playing Doom on those old PC's.
Something about old computers that I love.
Nostalgia.look it up society virus
Good to see you working on non-8-bit hardware. Makes a nice change of pace from Commodore and other 8-bit stuff, and gets you into a more marketable skill set for the modern era.
That third machine looks like one of the very early Dell Optiplex desktop machines. They were built primarily as office machines. They were generally rugged and reliable, but the power supplies are a bit dodgy after about ten years (at least in my experience). The Acer Aspire is also an early example of that product line, and was generally reliable, too.
That "white box" clone with the Pentium is so typical of what was being built everywhere in the 1990s, and is a great find. With a nice Diamond or Cirrus Logic video card, it should do well. All of these should serve well for retro-gaming and light work like word processing and spreadsheets , but I don't know that I'd put them on the network with their present operating systems - they are all too out of date and vulnerable for that. Even installing Linux on these old 32-bit machines will be a bit of a risk security-wise. Enjoy them, learn more about them, and have lots of fun.
Brought back so many happy memories of building my own
Oooh, have you tested the CRT monitor? Hopefully it works too, that would be awesome to use with those machines! Impressing to see almost all PCs working almost right out of the box.
My first ever PC was a 486 DX2 66MHz back in the late 90s. It was a computer my dad brought home to do some work on, and I got to use it a bit too. It's still here and working fine, even the hard drive is still good. It's a Seagate ST3250A with it's whopping 213.9MB haha, very solid hardware!
I was expecting to see MSDOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 on your 486, like what I had back in the days, but you got Win95 instead. :)
I didn't have any games on the 486 back then. But later I picked up my cousin's PC when he finally upgraded, I remember it was either a Pentium II or a Celeron (Slot 1 type), with onboard ATI Rage graphics. A Compaq Presario, alongside its CRT with two big speakers attached on the side. I finally enjoyed some PC games with Unreal Tournament GOTY, Battlezone II, Worms Armageddon and some others!
I love retro hardware of that era! And the 98-05 PC games are absolutely awesome and iconic to me!
What a great selection of computers to receive, congratulations! I also really like your bench setup, it's very neat and spacious. Looking forward to more videos.
I've been thinking about picking one of these old computers up. Great video, keep it up.
Good thing to clean up contacts on RAM sticks and expension cards, a pencil eraser.
My father gave me that trick ... holy f... 30 years ago... works wonders to this day :)
Nice spread of CPU generations there !
I'd probably use brasso, followed up with a light scrub with IPA and an old toothbrush. it works really well and really quickly.
I tend to manhandle things when scrubbing them, so a pencil eraser seems a bit more likely to result in disaster for me personally.
But you probably already have a lot of them, so the eraser has that going for it!
Me to. I have a pencil case with normal pencils and an eraser in my tool kit.
Try a magic eraser. Even better.
I use an eraser for the contacts on my game console buttons and cartridges! Works like a dream
"Deoxit" contact cleaner, both cleans and protects
I once got a PC for free that looked just like that Dell. I really liked that case since it was so easy to open. You could also take out a tray with all the expansion cards as one piece, since they were sitting on a separate PCB, that was slotted into the motherboard. It had a Pentium I, but could really easily be overclocked to 200 Mhz or so just by setting some jumpers. It also had a huge passive heatsink, which I found rather unusual. Fun times.
Nice to see you again ☺️, definitely replace the batteries I think they could eventually leak on the motherboard. Not properly seated RAM I was have that one on my own computer, LOL.
Love it! I used to repair Vintage Computers myself, it's a great hobby 🙂 Have fun, your videos rock! Best greetings from Scotland
I love how simple and genuine your video is. It really feels more personal that way. It was fun all issues where ram not being connected fully except the last one.
I love your work. I can see you really love computers. There's not much people who dares to bring back to life old and antique computers. That's a why I'm in love with your channel.
Thank you!
Super channel with great content. Thankx for sharing. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands
I wish the channel success, even though I don't have patience, it's really cool
That first computer looks like a Siemens (Nixdorf) 486 PC. These were mostly geared to the corporate market. I was sysadmin in an office with 100 of those in 1997
I love you and of course what you do there. I am extremely enthusiastic about your "love" for technology. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that you can continue this story for a long time to come. Much, much, most of all in success! 😊❤
Makes me want to pick up a first generation Pentium pc with Win98 just to run the After Dark screensavers. Love your videos.
Not just a repair video, but also an informative one, well done!! 👏🏼👏🏼
First time using computer was in 1988 (18 yo teen) windows not yet exist (at least in my country), we use dos based application like wordstars, Lotus 123 and Formtools. Still using PC/laptop for private work and entertainment. Nice video. Thanks
I'm using my P1 MMX to develop my own Quake-style game engine like it's 1995 and I have the same case as one of those. Nice video.
This is so cool. You are awesome for taking the challenge on!
Thanks for this channel it is very interesting to see all of these old computers! 😊
Thank you so much for your support, it means a lot to me and I'm happy to know that you like my videos😃
what memories!! The dell gx1 was my first pc, the last upgrade I did was to put 3 256 mb dimm modules in it and install win xp and i played age of empires II and starcraft on it , excellent video, thanks for sharing
Cool computers, I've got a Dell Gx1 just like yours, Love that thing. Nice presentation, enjoyed that.
Hello, Sayaka! Congratulations on that good start-up of those old computers! Watched also this video which you had told in Italian. I am surprised that despite they are old, those computer did not greeted you with boom on their ancient power supply due to age. Also, pretty interesting, to be honest, some of computers especially with LED Digits (telling the speed of the CPU), reminds me of some computers that had existed in most computer laboratories here in Philippines for children to get trained on how to operate computer, like for example, to run Word document for typing practice. But few people who bought such computers here at the time for personal use, they were released here (they were too expensive), they tried to play them with Doom or other games at those time, even good old solitaire. This was also the age where many kids chose more to watch cartoons or animes on televisions as renting was way expensive to afford, and those were the times when we though such computers were just made mainly for businesses, until early 2000's came and Pentium 4 redefined computing industry and even included Excel in computer classes. Pretty miss those days. I thank destiny for making such computers being part of my life in being computer literate. Hope that one computer with missing video card will find the best video card for completion of operation. I forgot. Try to clean also the PCI socket, maybe that they oxidized due to age, and maybe one of the reason why the system won't recognize PCI-based video cards. All the best in your videos and looking forward for your next videos!
You'll find that capacitors in units made back in the late 80s and 90s were of much higher quality than those made today. I'm not sure why this is so, but this means the power supplies and filtration and decoupling caps could last a good bit longer before failing. Your note about cleaning the PCI slots is a good call. I'd use something similar to CRC QD Electronics Cleaner, or maybe one of the less aggressive formulations of DeOxit and a lint-free swab (such as those made by Chemtronics CC50 or CFP50 "foamtips" which don't leave cotton fibers behind).
Hello! Thank you so much for your kind words and for sharing your memories and insights. It's fascinating to hear about your experiences with computers and how they were used in computer laboratories in the Philippines. I appreciate your suggestion about cleaning the PCI!
Nice to see a younger pc enthusiast taking an interest in older and vintage hardware.
I remember my father (and therefore I) went from AMD 386DX/40 to 486DX4/100, and w95 was very slow. It takes some courage to install and use W95 on DX2/66. On FOUR MB of ram!
You're a positive person, please never stop, never change anything about yourself. you're gonna go far
You're gonna fly...we're gonna like you.
2:50 i486DX2 66Mhz ... That is the same CPU of my first computer. I would have never imagined to see it running again. Memory was 4MB , HDD was around 300MB. Few years before that my father was using company's computer at home which was thick, heavy & small screen had i386 33Hhz CPU in it and costed 500,000 yen which was equivalent of 5,000 USD back then which was pretty crazy price. Good work Sayaka-san ;)
I'm glad you enjoyed seeing the i486DX2 CPU in action again! Your support means a lot to me, thank you! 😊
Love your accent do not get better its so cute punctuation & your tone 🥰it
I randomly found this video and I love it! Brings back some memories!
Great Love this old stuff
The Siemens Nixdorf 486 PC brings back Memories, i lived in the City who this computer was Manufactured. Still today in Paderborn is the Heinz Nixdorf Museum.
Thank you for that Video.
Hi, nice video .
I used to worked and maintain those computers when they where new .
I still maintain them, and many other brand , systems .
You seem to have more than the basics in home computers .
But let me give you 3 advises :
-1 - on old computers always open them to see if anything have moved during transport .
-2- Always check the power supply before trying to power them .
-3- if you have to work on computer between 1988 and 1993 always check the battery , it can be a barrel one that can leek , in this case it as to be remove asap . (especially PC, Mac, Amiga)
Maybe You know all that things, do as you wish and have fun .
Thank You .
Thanks for sharing this video.
Nice to hear the history of Cpu from you. I started my journey with the 486DX2 processor. At that moment the Pentium processors were also available. But after the Pentium 2 came out, things changed very quickly. In the meantime AMD was also concurring at the market. Especially when they came with the AMD Athlon Cpu the Cpu war was began.
I see so that the case of these PC' are white. This was at that moment the standard. Nowadays we have de black colored cases, which is much better.
Un abbraccio dal Brasile
Realizza altri video per PC retrò
Felicitaciones, trato de hacer andar las computadoras que otros tiran, creo que las tecnologias pueden ser usadas por mucho mas tiempo que el establecido. Muy viejas las computadoras que mostraste. tu video es simple concreto y por sobre todo bien didactico. Desde San Rafael al sur de Mendoza Argentina
Im saving this one for later. Im falling asleep atm, subbed btw.
You can use ISA VGA/SVGA cards in a PCI computer no problem, a Trident or something, they were made by billions. But unfortunately an ISA card slows the whole computer down a fair bit.
The era appropriate card is of course S3Trio PCI or Tseng ET6000, or Matrox or ATI of the era, but if you find a Virge instead or something else, no reason not to use that.
Thank you very much for your valuable advice, I'll definitely try to find one of these.
just found your channel first vid watch and it was a joy. now subscribed and off to watch more. Please keep up the good work!!
Another great video Eleonora. Wow you've got more PC's than Microsoft lol.
Nice to see you covering a large variety of computers. Keep up the great work.
I love your energy! Your awesome! Keep up the good work’
Your videos are so relaxing and fun! I like to open up a computer before powering on because parts can come loose during shipment. It might be good to figure out a way of testing a power supply while it is unplugged from the computer parts, though that might be a little difficult.
When I was at university in the mid 1990s, and again when I started work, the computers I used had cases of the last design - they were sold by Dan Technology. Hope you manage to revive yours.
I donated all my old PCs, monitors, etc. to a computer shop when I upgraded mine. I kept my Voodoo 3Dfx GPU though for memories~ ..that thing rips through OG WoW during those times~ Ahh~ Nostalgia! 😌
Maybe I'm much more thorough (or I'm a huge nerd), but once I get into Windows I always run benchmarks and do stress tests. I have a boot disk specifically designed with Windows 9x and DOS in mind. 😊
Anyway, great video! Keep up the amazing work! 😊❤
You are a boss, always love watching your content and continued success
That's a nice Acer Aspire there, especially with the monitor.👍
I used to build computers back in the day, during the late 90´s or so, I mostly used AMD K6-2 processors because I thought those CPU´s was better than intel. I started working on computer at a very young age of 13-14 around the year 1990 or so, mostly Amiga 500 computers at that time. My most recent build was back in 2017 when I built my (at the time) monster Hackintosh, very powerful, sadly it does not work anymore due to software issues, to install MacOS on it today I need to change the GPU, CPU and motherboard, an investment I am not willing to do at this time due to the simple fact that its possible to get a Mac mini M1 for the same price. I still have some very old PC´s from the late 90´s and 7-8 different PC Laptops from the 90´s and early 2000´s as well, in working condition. Thanks for the video..
Es muy curioso ver a gente que no vivió esa época interesada en estos aparatos. Yo los disfruté en casa de mi primo y un amigo. Mi primer ordenador fue muy posterior, fue un pentium 2 350 mhz. Aún recuerdo la ilusión que me provocó su compra y todos los recuerdos y vivencias con el. Saludos desde España.
love your videos i am getting back into this stuff again i used to repair old game consoles and the odd computer.
@SayakasDigitalAttic
Nicely done work. All of them need some cleaning and the last one just needs a PCI video card, but otherwise that is quite a haul!
Cool t-shirt!!! My first pc was a pentium. since them i love tinkering with old tech. keep up the good work !
Love this girl she`s amasing.
another fun video i really enjoyed. i use to cannibalize these computers as a young fella and build my own pc with all the best parts i found! for gaming (:
All those computers were brand new when I was working as a repairman!! Most of the times the problem was a drained battery, a cable not connected correctly or the worst of all, a bad PSU! You also had the occasional damaged HDD
Small piece of advice, always do a visual inspection before powering on an unknown computer.
This way you can potentially avoid loose/improperly seated components shorting out otherwise good hardware.
Nice old pc's. I've got one from 2001, but it has 600 Mhz Intel Celeron processor, a HP Brio BA410. Bought it new at the time, still came with Windows 98SE.
Original Bios battery lasted over 20 years, then started giving that checksum error and loaded default values at the startup when the battery died. I did replace the battery and now it works fine again.
Cleaned the dust from inside the minitower case once, after it was over 17 years old. Hasn't gotten much dust inside after that, as I rarely use it anymore.
Recently though fixed a broken hinge from the keyboard case lifting mechanism, the one that raises the rear edge of the keyboard for more ergonomic position. Made new part using plastic modelcar modelkit parts tree for missing hinge plastic tab, glued it in place using superglue, and installed the repaired part back to the keyboard.
It's impressive that you were able to fix the broken hinge on the keyboard case using plastic model car parts. Your resourcefulness is truly inspiring! It's amazing to see how these machines can still be maintained and repaired with a little creativity.
My first PC build was a 486 in 1995. We already had a Pentium 90 but this one was just for me. I got a late production intel MB and a Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM 4MB. It was one of the first boards to support BIOS overclocking. Initially, I raised the multiplier to 2.5 and the FSB to 40MHz and later raised the multiplier to 3 and had it running at nearly double the nominal clockspeed. It ran Quake fairly well which is something usually not said about any 486. It beat a Pentium 60 in floating point performance and general compute was like a P75. Even at only 100MHz, it blew the official 100MHz 486 chips out of the water because of the 21% higher FSB speed which was easy to achieve because I only had 1 ISA card and one PCI card. It was also an early example of an integrated I/O MB. Fun times. When someone starts talking about their 14900KS, I just start yawning. I just want to scream, 'Modern intel is a joke!'. Wouldn't have touched an AMD CPU with a ten foot pole back then and now that's all I will buy.
I have an Am486 DX4-120 and VLB MB just waiting for me to build it. These days, I have a ton of old video cards and sound cards. Since it will just be for DOS games, and I have the majority of them archived, I'll probably just download the ones I don't have and put them all on a big SD card (with like 100 partitions) and write a launcher app to run them. Something like Steam OS for DOS, lol. I've been contemplating using a SBC as a drive controller to see if I can use a modern high capacity SSD with DOS without having to deal with a million partitions. I think something that is conceptually similar to the way those old PCs were able to use extended memory would work. I want to use original hardware but make it as convenient as using DOSBox. I am also contemplating building a streaming DOS/Win 95 game server with a Sun Ultra 60 I have. It has a Pentium MMX PC card. It can run a modern-ish Linux distro and that opens up a lot of possibilities.
Woah, your experience with your first PC build sounds absolutely fascinating! It's amazing how you were able to push the limits of technology back then, especially with the overclocking and achieving such impressive performance gains. And the idea of a streaming DOS/Win 95 game server with a Sun Ultra 60 is just mind-blowing! It sounds like you have some incredible projects in the works.
With that last computer you should be able to use any ISA or PCI VGA card. Look for Trident, Cirrus Logic, Diamond VGA cards, always good to have one around. As for the slots marked C1 and C2 at 10:52, those are COM ports, someone looks like they used a permanent marker to identify which one is COM1 and which one is COM2. There is an LPT port beside it. Since its got a sound card in it, I would guess someone probably labeled the ports because they might have been using an external modem rather than an industrial application. I used to run an old FidoNet BBS system off old 386 and 486 PCs back in the 90s...
Necroware offers replacements for those old clock chips used in computers like the 486 :)
Great restoration :)
Having a small business like this is a dream
You videos make me so happy despite reminding me how old I am.
Cool video, well done!
Hi, Sayaka. I loved this video. Thanky for making it.
I live in Brazil and the release on the Pentium allowed me to buy a 486 DX-100 in 1995, prices went down. I had tons of fun with that computer, but the difference I observed in Pentium computers was absurd. So many games that wouldn't run on my 486 but ran smoothly in the Pentium. Myst, Full Throttle, to mention a few. Good times.
Between 1995 and 1999 I worked as a computer technician building these machines and earlier ones.
It would be fun to have a PC from that era to fix up and play games like Starcraft and Diablo... but I've still got too much Commodore stuff on my bench to fix up!
My first computer was a Pentium 133, it cost $800 complete in 1999.
You might check into some of the open source projects that relate to video cards. It may be possible to build one that would work.
Unfortunately the community hasn't quite advanced to open videcards for classic computers yet. I do think it's the next frontier to make a Voodoo 3 PCI compatible card. Even just an ISA VGA card would be quite a challenge if it has to have in depth compatibility, but also there isn't a strong case to put in the effort given the abundance of simple and reliable Tridents.
Fortunately simple single chip PCI and ISA cards were made by the billions and are abundant enough. Much cheaper and easier. You can even get a Rage XL for only a couple dollars shipped from China, it's fully functional, difficult to compete with.
My more modern computer stopped coming on and makes beeps. You have given me an idea. I thought it might be the hard drive but maybe not. Thanks.
I used to have one of those Scenic PCs, it was my first "real" Windows PC. Mine was much faster though with a Pentium 200 and 64MB of RAM.
Very good video, nice job seeing Windows 95 and Windows 98 was fun.
At 90's, there were brands which were bulletproof and others like to fail&dead just itself without any reason. (edit) But think, these machines are decades old and running well!
Nice repairing work!
the last one looked like it had a PCI video card in it and someone took it out.
It might be interesting to try some lightweight Linux on these PCs and see if anything could be done with them today. Maybe Loc-OS Linux, Debian Lxde or another distros on 32 bits.
Good video, and best wishes.
Great video - I had a real Pentium 166 and Intel CPUs before that - but made the leap to a K6 and AMD moving forward - cheaper and I was poor lol
OMG i love old computer... my first computer who i buy be in 2006 and i remember how i spend too much houers learning how its work and play game : D