I remember PC/104. Arduino and Raspberry Pi weren't the first, but they were the first affordable ones. PC/104 was sold at industrial prices, that's for sure.
Hi Dave, CubeSats actually do not use the full PC/104 spec. I build CubeSats and CubesSat systems, and I have to always explain to customers it is NOT PC/104. Only the mechanical mounting holes and the connector location of the PCI variant PCI-104 is used. The electrical specs are usually violated. So CubeSat boards generally do not stack into PCI-104 stacks. they do not have the ISA bus side at all. Most bigger CubeSat vendors like us are now using other connectors to save space or improve signal integrity.
@@kasa6468 I've been directly involved in 12, of which 5 are still active and the rest retired after a successful mission. I've worked on at least a dozen more. the notification of your reply only came today, 2 years late. yay RUclips
@oH well,lord! most CubeSats use various buses like I2C and SPI, UARTS and CAN. but physically it's indeed close to the PCI variant, albeit with another pin count
@@davestephens3246 It makes them less reliable. It's like telling your grandmother what you do at work and then listening to her bragging to her friends about your work and not recognizing what is she talking about.
I've written a lot of software for PC104 systems, they were very reliable and not cheap. They would be manufactured to IPC class 3 standards with most companies doing everything in house to control quality. These boards would go in mission critical equipment. I probably have bunch setting around that were blown up during EMI testing that were considered "unrepairable."
Dave, this video is amazing. I highly recommend more content like this.. These vintage machines are incredibly cool. Thank you so much for posting this!
I use these in my lab with real-time Linux for controlling robots! Very expensive but amazing performance compared to things like the Raspberry Pi! This is mainly because SBCs like the Raspberry Pi do not have their PCI / ISA buses broken out. You get them with high performance CPUs like the Intel Atom.
to be fair, it would need to be more of a comparison with 50-150$ pico itx/thin mini itx intel atom SBCs than with 5-15$ Pis. But those don't often use standard GPIO connectors, so it's a trade off, still, if you are willing to do the trade off it may be cheaper. Another consideration you could have is Pci express Fpgas, which you can plug into any motherboard with a pcie slot.
Pretty happy to have the massive Arduino community, access to my fav $3 Nanos and the option to go to a full Linux system for under $10. Good times these days. Cheers.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I haven't thought about PC/104 for many a year. I didn't ever work with these devices but I remember reading about them a lot back when I used to read BYTE magazine. Back in the day the size of the boards was made to fit on the back of 5 1/4" floppy disk drives.
Reliability vrsus price and convenience. Most people now are trained to accept poor reliability over convenience, programmers included. I used to work on multi-user single processor databases that were designed to recover properly from any shutdown. That is, get 16 people to sit doing invoicing and throw the power switch of any any point and they would recover, without grabbing backups, OS included. Fully journaled datapaths, including journal recovery. You get what you pay for. I know it is not databasing, but you don't get that in a PI project with lots of module code written by "whoever". "Try version 1.1" or "Go back to version 0.87" type statements about fixing problems with addons or the kernel, makes me worry when people put them into machines that can hurt someone when they go wrong.
This video was really fun to watch! Thank you so much for taking the time. Ah the simple DOS days. Eh, kinda simple. Remember autoexec.bat? Having to tweak it? My first computer was an IBM PC Jr. It could do color and sound. My Dad and I would spend hours typing in programs from old computer magazines. I learned so much. Now I'm a successful senior software engineer. That pcjr was the start of it all. Good stuff! Thanks again!
I just wanted to say the following: You've really sparked my interest in electronics repair/hobby! I've gotten a $40 O-scope (GOS-622G) that had a sticker which showed it was used in a University's electronics program! (hopefully the calibrations kept it in good shape, haha). I've accrued an almost entire electronics laboratory and have been repairing loads of stuff! I actually repaired a Wacom tablet that had been overvolted (faulty USB port), they had a previous repairman take a look at it and he completely ripped out the fuse solder pads! I made them promise to test their USB ports they would be using this device on and bypassed the fuse circuitry (they're a student so they couldn't well afford a new one!) I adore your videos and greetings from Arkansas!
maddog187killa weirdly I was never taught this during my course on microcontrollers. What do libraries and languages are generally used to program these kinds of boards?
Dave, I don't know if the title of this episode was a bow to Bob Pease, but thanks for reminding me of him and his words of wisdom. He is missed by those of us who are old enough to remember TVs that had both tubes and transistors in the signal chain.
Absolutely amazing! I didn't know that these things still being used. My first computer was a 286. That was a very reliable technology and really makes me happy to know it stills alive. Thanks for your video!
A Sayler A lot of us suffer from that same disorder, drives my family crazy that I still have so much gear, and tons of floppies, from the early 89s through today,
Not only menus, whole system has been way more efficient. My first PC was 80286 with 1mHz processor, and 1MB of RAM. Now, I have 3.8gHz CPU and 24 GB RAM, at least 3000 times faster and more resourseful. But don't get efficiency x3000 compare to 80286, nowhere near thanks to software bloat... Agreed..
This was so exciting to watch with the sting in the tail taken out. As you in the background did all the running around to get this bad boy to work! Thank you!
The last time I saw one of these it was running windows 95 and part of an animated waterfall. It controlled all the relay outputs for doing the images as the water fell. I think I still have 3 or so running around here still.
I remember seeing a PC/104 setup at our local science museum about 20 years ago. IIRC, it was part of an exhibit about satellites. I remember being blown away by the idea that you could have a full (if modest) PC in such a tiny form factor, and the idea of stackable modules was just amazing. Kind of reminds me of S-100 bus machines back even further.
I have actually got something a little bigger with the same isa 16 bit header, a 10Mbit lan controller module. It is a CSI Netplus Series 2000 Router with a I386. It was pulled out of an I/NET door controller system.
Thanks Dave! I will use this as a reference if a customer ever complains about the hours I charge for repairing their ancient PC-104 machines. Especially the second channel video tells it very well! But I have a strange love/hate relationship to it so it's all ok ;)
8:24 i did ask my boss about using or creating our own rpi DIN mounted plugin. He said well it's not that bad of an idea, but there isn't the support of our beckhoff ethercat modules.
Thanks for your effort to bring this puppy to live. I'm very happy how you solve the problems with your well taught knowledge. definitely you are the smart one.
And I thew my Ampro little board out ..... I orginally bought it to make a dial up BBS system, however that never eventuated, then the rail inverter for the -12V to run the RS232 interface died, so I scraped the whole thing. As for PC/104, years ago when working for Telstra we were repairing these video scramblers (Pay TV) that had Ampro PC/104 boads in them. When they eventually got scrapped I made sure I scored the Ampro's out of them. These were pre the 'Disk on Chip' you have in your's, they contain one large eprom (apart fro the bios eprom) to boot from. I desected one and found apart from a header, they were basically a disk image. So I made some test boot disks on an old laptop, on 720k floppies. This was imaged, then written to the eprom - success! Later I looked at the PC104 pinouts and noted they looked identical to a PC ISA bus, so I grafted an old CGA graphics card on, and, again my luck persisted. I never did connect a keyboard as you did, I just made up self booting images/ eproms. Pity there is no picture insert button on these comments... it's all at arm's reach. I was going to make one into a bedside clock, at the time I thought it would be good bragging rights to say my clock run's on Dos, and is written in Turbo Pascal.
I used to look at those old microcrontrollers in trade mags when I was a kid. 20-25 years ago. I drooled over them although I didn't know exactly what I could use them for.
I had a socket 7 (Pentium) one. But I blew it up with a dicky power supply. Was a sad day, but pushed me to upgrade from a P100 to a Via Epia. I was only using it for a music player so didn't need the industrial interface.
Wow. Just wow. Brings back memories . . . I started my career with DOS 3.11/Windows 2.0. Trying to add things like a NIC, extra serial or printer ports, memory, was a major project. Then you had EMS and Extended memory managers to contend with . . . . Kids today don't realize how good they got it! We didn't have any of this fancy schamcy Plug-and-Play stuff - *everything* was manually configured!
The PC/104s are indeed great pieces of hardware. Glad they got here a well deserved tribute. They sit inside a number of industrial grade machinery and all sorts of instruments that run non-stop 24/7, with no trouble whatsoever. Most run MS-DOS derivatives, with all their limitations for threading and resources management but others run industrial versions of UNIX, which overcomes said limitations and allows to exploit fully the processor power. Real men (or women!) stuff, not for the amateur ;-)
Absolutely loved this video. I picked a couple out of the trash at work when some equipment we fix was upgraded. I was wondering how to hook them up and then what to run on them after I get it up. Thanks for the great video Dave. Best Wishes & Blessings. Keith Noneya
The typical TMJ or "Ten Minute Job" Dave? It all started somewhere. Thanks for the glimpse into what was going on when we who were doing other things at the time these boards were made. There has to be a level somewhere, other than the "bigger, faster" viewpoint.
I've toured a real, industrial factory where the equipment is run by a whole lot of Arduinos. I don't think I should give much more info about what they do but I can tell you they have big customers, big corporations and governments. Their product is something where quality counts and it is not obscure, It's stuff we all have seen.
Thanks for reminding me how old I am:) I can vaguely recall when lots of systems running DOS 2.0 were frequently just as difficult as this example. I liked CPM !!!
In 1993-4 I talked with the founder of Ampro right after he got out of it. He mentioned that it was great for 4MHz stuff like old x86. My job is now to replace all that stuff with shit that actually works. An example - we had one client using a Celeron-based 104+, and the EMI interaction between it, the other I/O cards and the SMPS that was also on the stack was so hideous that it was pretty much useless. BTW - PC104 Plus is the PCI version of it. pc104.org/hardware-specifications/pc104-plus/ It added a PCI bus that was a nightmare as far as PCI bus mastering - most had a shitty rotary switch that would set the slot position (see the PCI spec). PC104 Express is with PCIx... So the PC104 is poo, and if you want to see real poo take a look at PICMG - wow... silly Or how about ETX or EBX? Or the other zillion formats that places like Advantech and others sold. Here's the deal - Intel used to have an "embedded" goup - unlike most Intel processors that have a max. 6 month roadmap, Intel was at one time supporting a sub-set of processors and chipsets for 5 years... Well - no more of that. So PC104 lost a lot of support for x86 parts... Stand off is 600mil... totally non- standard spacing. Oh yea - go get some of those I/O, serial cards. You can even get "bean rails" to mount in rugged stuff. www.curtisswrightds.com/products/electronic-systems/enclosures/shock-rocks.html Work? - Uh sort of... what a mess.... Uh - unleaded? - Naw most of the dinosaurs that still use these are using it for mil applications - no RoHS there: www.army.mil/-news/2010/06/11/40712-army-works-to-decrease-lead-free-electronic-components/ Sooo... uh... yea... right on... Your phone has more proc power... Speaking of all the ARM based stuff. Here's the next furball. So for the last few years, Freescale/NXP (now Qualcomm), TI, Atme (now Microchip), ST, Broadcom (now Avago) and others have been introducing a ton of M and A series (M's are self contained - like whats in you washer/dryer; A series is what's in your phone - MMU fo SDRAM). So to spin up a chip fab, it takes between $20 and $600 mil. So you better have some customers. A lot. And once you get a thousand processes in the fab line working right - you better keep it going. One gas changes slightly in process 1215, and you just turned 300mm drink coasters. So all these guys wanted to get the "big design win" - some high volume consumer product. Well, Allwinner - a fabless place in CN that DID get the big wins - follows a similar biz model as Intel. 6 month product lifecycle. Then on to the next hotness. Well where does that leave all these standalone uC guys? Fucked... bigtime. Yea - I know Raspberry Poo may sell 20 million units. May. And that's across variant in the Broadcom portfolio. Do the math. At a half a billion bucks to fab these, do you think that paltry amount will suffice a stockholder or board member? Whats the ROI on that? Poo... And once the car mfg's (about the only industry still supporting standalone uC's) realize they too can do what Aplle and the others do and fab their own Allwinner thing - that'll dry up about the only mass market left for those uC companies. And Broadcom refuses to release a full datasheet for what's on those PeePoos. take a look at what Olimex is doing: www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXino-LIME/open-source-hardware Yep - over fab of the Allwiner A 20. And they actually released the full datasheet... why? Cause they're on to the next thing.... that they'll actually make money on. So, we'll go back to the way it was back when these PC10foo things came around - for actual embedded stuff (things with out external SDRAM and low proc requiments) they'll be some ARM M thing that somehow got into a vending machine. Fun times.... NOT. And as to even using a rasp. PI for most "Maker BS, - this is the same thing with PC104. Ya need to turn on a relay. So Get out your OS, compiler, IDE and have the Pi or 104 run a zillion clock cycles to eventually map something to go "ON" Talk about a misapplication of technology - That'd be like hiring me and a bunch of my old friends to shoot a porn flick. All the Viagra, oxygen, EMT's with defibs, etc... and then ya got to pay us enough to pay for wives/support, kid's college. Too much overhead. Better off going to some bar and getting 20 somethings... Funny - the porn industry is smarter than all these STEM/Maker guys...
Thunderbyte antivirus. Good times. This brought back a lot of good memories, tinkering with old pc's up in the attic. I remember my parents buying me an awe 64 for christmas once. I was the happiest kid in town.
i worked on Postal mail sorting machines that used the PC104's about 20 years ago. One thing I learned about them is if the 5v rail ever dipped below 4.7v the system became unstable. It did not help that the 5v supply was about 6 feet away and they did not bother to use remote sensing so if the supply was putting out 5.00v you got 4.76v at the stack. To make it more interesting the placed the supply in a very difficult to reach area so you had to rremove the supply to adjust the output. Other than that little feature they did their job well.
I have a bunch of PC/104 compatible systems. They plug into a PCI/ISA backplane and the single board computer cards have PC/104 slots on the side. Pretty cool. One of them I salvaged from a system that was "broken" and had been left out in the rain. Took it home, powered it up and found it was running Windows NT 4.0. The BBC used to use it in R&D according to the files on it. It was used for analysing the DVB-T network. The analyser cards were from Wavetek Wandel Goltermann. The other system I salvaged was used in the automotive industry hooked up through a TAXI interface to a Brüel & Kjær data acquisition box. Sadly I couldn't find the box that it goes with for a reasonable price. Had a beautiful modular ISA card inside though with six huge Texas Instruments DSPs on it, a 5w4 connector on the end and a shielded ribbon cable that ran to another ISA card in the box. Both systems were Dolch MegaPACs. I'm currently in the process of modifying one of them to take ATX boards. Already got it a 1080p LCD to replace the 800x600 one on the front.
Wow. Amazing how you can miss what you've been looking for. Here I was thinking latte panda was the ducks guts. I thought embedded boards were designed and manufactured individually on a per device basis. Now the world makes sense. Thanks Dave.
I believe that VGA header was a commonly used arrangement back in the day. I remember working on motherboards with integrated video that used a header like that to connect to the HDDB-15 socket on a slot plate or back panel knock out.
Very interesting boards, like to have one. Like the formfactor. My first a self-build 386SX (an AMD) at 33 Mhz with a Connor 40MB drive. At school they had a 386DX, a 386 with co-processor.
I just did something similar, I got my hands on a PC104 board from an IPG fiber laser oscillator. It came with windows CE and it took me quite a while to get XP installed on it.
Wow ... what a trip back to the past ... I really enjoyed the video ... What a triumph when we get the "C:\ " prompt and the flashing cursor! ... Yes I did lots of hacks on the ISA bus back then.
They use a similar standard for one of the boards used in Dixtal 2010 ECG monitors. I believe it's the power management board (I don't quite remember off the top of my head), which connects to the motherboard via the pins on the bottom of the board.
My first PC was an 80286 with 640K of RAM. I upgraded it to 1MB of RAM and installed Windows 3.0 on it (40MB HDD). Some of my classmates at school had PCs running MFM and/or RLL hard disk drives (which I got to see the innards of). I think mine was running the newfangled IDE interface on the HDD. Remember SIPP RAM modules? My introduction (as far as I can remember) was via DOS v.3.1 or thereabouts. I worked my way up through DOS 3.3, 4.x, 5.x, up to 6.22, Windows 95, 95a, 95b, the rare 95c, 98, 98SE, NT4.5, 2000, Major Error (a.k.a.: Millennium Edition), XP, and so forth, up to 10 and Server 2016. Never saw a PC/104 system (also never heard of it before). Seeing the floppy, IDE, and DIN connectors, as well as the BIOS, POST, and DOS boot screens brings back memories...
Dave, could you make a video (if you haven't already) about the kind of filter that we can see attached to the end of the cable at 16:00? I've always been curious about them, have seen them on many cables but I was never quite sure what they were and how they worked.
I do wonder if these are the boards used in the plastic injection molding machines I work with? The oldest models use CRTs while some have LCD screens with floppy disks and the latest use touchscreen LCDs with compact flash drives.
I still have PTSD from working with cubesats that had many PC104 stacked boards. Reliability in extreme environments drops exponentially as you stack more boards.
16:00 In my school they had the audio cable for the loudspeaker running along an unshielded VGA cable, you could hear a very annoying buzzing sound and the sound changed depending on the image on the screen.
What Arduino and Raspberry Pi pioneered was microcontroller development boards and SBCs on a hobbyist friendly budget respectively. I remember browsing old, far far out of date PC/104 boards on Ebay, thinking of all the amazing things I could do with such small sized and power sipping boards. I never actually hit the bid button though because they were too expensive! Oh.. and yes, Basic Stamps were sort of marketing towards hobbyists but apparently ones with lots of money to throw around!
If you ever find yourself in need of DOS again, I would like to mention www.freedos.org/ -- it's a modernized, F/OSS DOS-implementation and comes with a bunch of improvements over the old DOS 6.22 and the likes. Also, as it's so freely available, you won't have to hunt for old floppies with DOS on them or whatever :)
Nita Vesa But he still needs good quality blank floppies for the initial install. Too sad Sony cornered the blank floppy aftermarket with crap quality blanks, then stopped production completely. Still fondly remember using genuine Nashua blanks in the 1980s, but there were other well established quality brands that could have supplied the long tail aftermatket at $10 or more per disc instead of those crap ones.
Nita Vesa But he still needs good quality blank floppies for the initial install. Too sad Sony cornered the blank floppy aftermarket with crap quality blanks, then stopped production completely. Still fondly remember using genuine Nashua blanks in the 1980s, but there were other well established quality brands that could have supplied the long tail aftermatket at $10 or more per disc instead of those crap ones.
Doesn't look like it's DOS-compatible. I mean, sure, if one doesn't need DOS then by all means and there are plenty of other choices too, but I specifically was saying that if one needs DOS.
There are still PC/104 format SBCs being made, some of them with newer architecture like the Intel Atom and others. They can fit a lot more on those boards with newer tech.
can't believe I had never heard of this before....but sure was a very entertaining video to watch and got to learn something new! Wouldn't mind seeing more videos about this embedded platform. If possible, get some more add-on boards and let's see what it's capable of doing :)
I still have an Ampro Little Board. Your video is making me want to resurrect it. I still have the floppy drives, etc. I programmed for a number of years on CP/M systems (Kaypro and Xerox) for embedded Z80 based medical equipment. Brings back great memories. Thanks for your videos.
You find a lot of these guys driving machinery in industrial places. I'm my case, in my work we use equipment by quipp and it uses a different form factor based on an ISA backplate with push-in cards. To me, as a computer geek, it was amazing to discover that work machinery were really computer parts on custom boards
This is an invaluable discovery for me. The very module that you have demonstrated is ideal for a current project. When I search, I only find newer faster (unnecessary) items. Any advice on tracking down these older versions?
Do get a GOTEK. Their pretty cool. Bit of troubleshooting advice - always make USB drive "A" on the cable if you want to have a physical floppy drive too.
Love to see some examples of interfacing external electronics components with boards/PC's like this. I'm familiar with Serial over USB; but would like to see some of the older, more reliable methods used.
"It always looked better than that..." welcome to the warped world of nostalgia Dave :-) Great video, I have a couple of PC/104 boards somewhere that I bought because I wanted something low power to make a home automation system, but I wanted something I could run Windows on to make it easier to program so that's why I went with these over other solutions (as my skill set is Windows programming). Rasberry Pie wasn't even a thing then. The PC/104's are still in their boxes, never used, never tested! Oh well. Home automation isn't something I am too fussed with now anyway.
You said it yourself Dave, these guys geared themselves towards industrial applications. It's no different than IBM thinking there was no home computer market. You can always tell when someone is getting old because they're a sucker for nostalgia.
I once bought PC 104 computer kit from ebay out of curiosity. It was a fully functional small form factor PC. Has USB ports, CF card slot, built-in ethernet. I installed Damn Small Linux on it and it works great. I plan to build expansion card for it with 8255 PPI chip.
I remember PC/104. Arduino and Raspberry Pi weren't the first, but they were the first affordable ones. PC/104 was sold at industrial prices, that's for sure.
So that's what the random PCB sitting on my desk for the past 2 years is...
+ANTALIFE LOL
Hi Dave,
CubeSats actually do not use the full PC/104 spec. I build CubeSats and CubesSat systems, and I have to always explain to customers it is NOT PC/104. Only the mechanical mounting holes and the connector location of the PCI variant PCI-104 is used. The electrical specs are usually violated. So CubeSat boards generally do not stack into PCI-104 stacks. they do not have the ISA bus side at all. Most bigger CubeSat vendors like us are now using other connectors to save space or improve signal integrity.
@@kasa6468 I've been directly involved in 12, of which 5 are still active and the rest retired after a successful mission. I've worked on at least a dozen more. the notification of your reply only came today, 2 years late. yay RUclips
@oH well,lord! most CubeSats use various buses like I2C and SPI, UARTS and CAN. but physically it's indeed close to the PCI variant, albeit with another pin count
5:34 - Never trusted specs from a company that uses "Mhz" instead of "MHz"...
ElmerFuddGun Agree 100%! It’s a good indicator that the spec sheet was written by the marketing department instead of the engineering department.
@@davestephens3246 It makes them less reliable. It's like telling your grandmother what you do at work and then listening to her bragging to her friends about your work and not recognizing what is she talking about.
I've written a lot of software for PC104 systems, they were very reliable and not cheap. They would be manufactured to IPC class 3 standards with most companies doing everything in house to control quality. These boards would go in mission critical equipment. I probably have bunch setting around that were blown up during EMI testing that were considered "unrepairable."
I bet the unrepairable ones could be sold on ebay for a few bucks.
Or I might send them to Dave.
Would make for an interesting video. Dave's a wizard, he could likely breathe some life into them.
He's a wizard who values his time though, lol.
Dave, this video is amazing. I highly recommend more content like this.. These vintage machines are incredibly cool. Thank you so much for posting this!
I use these in my lab with real-time Linux for controlling robots! Very expensive but amazing performance compared to things like the Raspberry Pi! This is mainly because SBCs like the Raspberry Pi do not have their PCI / ISA buses broken out. You get them with high performance CPUs like the Intel Atom.
to be fair, it would need to be more of a comparison with 50-150$ pico itx/thin mini itx intel atom SBCs than with 5-15$ Pis. But those don't often use standard GPIO connectors, so it's a trade off, still, if you are willing to do the trade off it may be cheaper.
Another consideration you could have is Pci express Fpgas, which you can plug into any motherboard with a pcie slot.
Pretty happy to have the massive Arduino community, access to my fav $3 Nanos and the option to go to a full Linux system for under $10. Good times these days. Cheers.
Yes, Arduino was a mentality change in the world of hobbyist electronics, like the china manufactoring was the change for professionals.
and china arduinos... :D
try doing that without china. arduino wasnt the cause of cheapness
what are the options under 10$ ?
TheKetsa search for Arduino Uno or mega or whatever you want on Aliexpress. You'll get a lot of options
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I haven't thought about PC/104 for many a year. I didn't ever work with these devices but I remember reading about them a lot back when I used to read BYTE magazine. Back in the day the size of the boards was made to fit on the back of 5 1/4" floppy disk drives.
I love how the battery holder sits halfway over the chip ^^
Also next year there will be the question why the new µCurrent uses PS/2 connectors...
Reliability vrsus price and convenience. Most people now are trained to accept poor reliability over convenience, programmers included. I used to work on multi-user single processor databases that were designed to recover properly from any shutdown. That is, get 16 people to sit doing invoicing and throw the power switch of any any point and they would recover, without grabbing backups, OS included. Fully journaled datapaths, including journal recovery. You get what you pay for. I know it is not databasing, but you don't get that in a PI project with lots of module code written by "whoever". "Try version 1.1" or "Go back to version 0.87" type statements about fixing problems with addons or the kernel, makes me worry when people put them into machines that can hurt someone when they go wrong.
This video was really fun to watch! Thank you so much for taking the time. Ah the simple DOS days. Eh, kinda simple. Remember autoexec.bat? Having to tweak it?
My first computer was an IBM PC Jr. It could do color and sound. My Dad and I would spend hours typing in programs from old computer magazines. I learned so much.
Now I'm a successful senior software engineer. That pcjr was the start of it all.
Good stuff!
Thanks again!
I just wanted to say the following:
You've really sparked my interest in electronics repair/hobby!
I've gotten a $40 O-scope (GOS-622G) that had a sticker which showed it was used in a University's electronics program! (hopefully the calibrations kept it in good shape, haha). I've accrued an almost entire electronics laboratory and have been repairing loads of stuff!
I actually repaired a Wacom tablet that had been overvolted (faulty USB port), they had a previous repairman take a look at it and he completely ripped out the fuse solder pads! I made them promise to test their USB ports they would be using this device on and bypassed the fuse circuitry (they're a student so they couldn't well afford a new one!)
I adore your videos and greetings from Arkansas!
Cheers mate
Oh man, I remember seeing those PC/104s in the computer arcades here. Totally forgot about those things until now.
We use PC/104 at work. Got tons of them.
Also have a box of them that were used in a proprietary imaging system.
We use them at work as IOC (In/Out Controllers) for PLC's (Programmable Logic Controllers) in our controls system.
Which one do you use, the ISA, PCI, or PCI-Express one?
We use PCI. We use model MZ104-EV.
maddog187killa weirdly I was never taught this during my course on microcontrollers. What do libraries and languages are generally used to program these kinds of boards?
Great video. I'm a Software Engineer. First time hearing of this stack-able system type.
Dave,
I don't know if the title of this episode was a bow to Bob Pease, but thanks for reminding me of him and his words of wisdom. He is missed by those of us who are old enough to remember TVs that had both tubes and transistors in the signal chain.
Absolutely amazing! I didn't know that these things still being used. My first computer was a 286. That was a very reliable technology and really makes me happy to know it stills alive. Thanks for your video!
Gee, Dave. Thanks for reinforcing my inclination to never discard anything, for one can never tell when it might be useful.
A Sayler A lot of us suffer from that same disorder, drives my family crazy that I still have so much gear, and tons of floppies, from the early 89s through today,
bootdisk.com has everything you need for making 3.5" floppy bootdisks... :)
Nice.
Wow. This was actually heart-warming. I did my thesis project on a PCI-104 board. That was fun...
@dave: this is yet another video of yours that makes me feel old and nostalgic.
Done this thousands of times. Still have OEM 6.22 in shrink wrap.
Great job Dave, this video was a blast. Forgot all about the SYS command, but I'm a bit rusty on my DOS commands after 20 years.
As far as interface speed goes, this thing is faster at loading menus than a modern computer is. Software is such bloat nowadays
Not only menus, whole system has been way more efficient. My first PC was 80286 with 1mHz processor, and 1MB of RAM. Now, I have 3.8gHz CPU and 24 GB RAM, at least 3000 times faster and more resourseful. But don't get efficiency x3000 compare to 80286, nowhere near thanks to software bloat... Agreed..
This was so exciting to watch with the sting in the tail taken out. As you in the background did all the running around to get this bad boy to work! Thank you!
The last time I saw one of these it was running windows 95 and part of an animated waterfall. It controlled all the relay outputs for doing the images as the water fell. I think I still have 3 or so running around here still.
When I saw the title of this video I came to think of "The Bob Pease show" RIP Bob Pease ("Analog by design show" was the original title if I recall)
I remember seeing a PC/104 setup at our local science museum about 20 years ago. IIRC, it was part of an exhibit about satellites. I remember being blown away by the idea that you could have a full (if modest) PC in such a tiny form factor, and the idea of stackable modules was just amazing. Kind of reminds me of S-100 bus machines back even further.
Oh, man. The feeling when you got that floppy to boot was awesome. I know the feeling of fighting boot disks well.
PC104 (and others) embedded guy here. I always chuckle a bit when people excitedly tell me what they've discovered with their Arduino etc boards.
I have an XPS420 I use as a linux server still. Was funny seeing you still have one.
"I remember this looking better"
every gamer reaction when they play their old favorite game.
I have actually got something a little bigger with the same isa 16 bit header, a 10Mbit lan controller module. It is a CSI Netplus Series 2000 Router with a I386. It was pulled out of an I/NET door controller system.
Thanks Dave! I will use this as a reference if a customer ever complains about the hours I charge for repairing their ancient PC-104 machines.
Especially the second channel video tells it very well!
But I have a strange love/hate relationship to it so it's all ok ;)
Brings a tear to my eye to old days of PC's and DOS ...
8:24 i did ask my boss about using or creating our own rpi DIN mounted plugin. He said well it's not that bad of an idea, but there isn't the support of our beckhoff ethercat modules.
Thanks for your effort to bring this puppy to live. I'm very happy how you solve the problems with your well taught knowledge. definitely you are the smart one.
PC104 works really well for small defence applications. I've seen it used in some industrial-type applications, but not many.
And I thew my Ampro little board out .....
I orginally bought it to make a dial up BBS system, however that never eventuated, then the rail inverter for the -12V to run the RS232 interface died, so I scraped the whole thing.
As for PC/104, years ago when working for Telstra we were repairing these video scramblers (Pay TV) that had Ampro PC/104 boads in them. When they eventually got scrapped I made sure I scored the Ampro's out of them. These were pre the 'Disk on Chip' you have in your's, they contain one large eprom (apart fro the bios eprom) to boot from. I desected one and found apart from a header, they were basically a disk image. So I made some test boot disks on an old laptop, on 720k floppies. This was imaged, then written to the eprom - success!
Later I looked at the PC104 pinouts and noted they looked identical to a PC ISA bus, so I grafted an old CGA graphics card on, and, again my luck persisted.
I never did connect a keyboard as you did, I just made up self booting images/ eproms.
Pity there is no picture insert button on these comments... it's all at arm's reach.
I was going to make one into a bedside clock, at the time I thought it would be good bragging rights to say my clock run's on Dos, and is written in Turbo Pascal.
You Could always post links from Google drive or something to the images then add a reply or edit the comment.
I used to look at those old microcrontrollers in trade mags when I was a kid. 20-25 years ago. I drooled over them although I didn't know exactly what I could use them for.
16:00 "...you really needed a high quality cable for it" The audiophiles go wild.
Too bad it doesn't have a 486, you could have played DOOM on it.
It can run Wolfenstein at least!
He could play Ultima VI on it; that would be cool.
I had a socket 7 (Pentium) one. But I blew it up with a dicky power supply. Was a sad day, but pushed me to upgrade from a P100 to a Via Epia. I was only using it for a music player so didn't need the industrial interface.
Duke Nukem 3D is so much better gamer
@basshead
Duke3d came a couple of years later. You can't compare them. If you want to compare Duke3d, then compare it to Quake.
Always good to see an old computer finally booting! Even if it is just basic MSDOS with no programs. Love it
Doesn't the lovely sound of the floppy drive head scanning bring back memories.
wow nostalgia played a lot around in this kind of bios setups in the past tuning computers back in the day :)
Really coooool video, last time I was thinking about what existed before Arduino & Rasberry Pi. Cool to know that
Wow. Just wow. Brings back memories . . . I started my career with DOS 3.11/Windows 2.0. Trying to add things like a NIC, extra serial or printer ports, memory, was a major project. Then you had EMS and Extended memory managers to contend with . . . . Kids today don't realize how good they got it! We didn't have any of this fancy schamcy Plug-and-Play stuff - *everything* was manually configured!
The PC/104s are indeed great pieces of hardware. Glad they got here a well deserved tribute. They sit inside a number of industrial grade machinery and all sorts of instruments that run non-stop 24/7, with no trouble whatsoever. Most run MS-DOS derivatives, with all their limitations for threading and resources management but others run industrial versions of UNIX, which overcomes said limitations and allows to exploit fully the processor power.
Real men (or women!) stuff, not for the amateur ;-)
16:50 love the engineering on that strain relief
Arduino is already 12 years old and still going strong and growing, another 18 years to go. :D
Electrodude what happens after 18 years ??
Absolutely loved this video. I picked a couple out of the trash at work when some equipment we fix was upgraded. I was wondering how to hook them up and then what to run on them after I get it up. Thanks for the great video Dave. Best Wishes & Blessings. Keith Noneya
The typical TMJ or "Ten Minute Job" Dave? It all started somewhere. Thanks for the glimpse into what was going on when we who were doing other things at the time these boards were made. There has to be a level somewhere, other than the "bigger, faster" viewpoint.
Had no idea about pc/104
I've toured a real, industrial factory where the equipment is run by a whole lot of Arduinos. I don't think I should give much more info about what they do but I can tell you they have big customers, big corporations and governments. Their product is something where quality counts and it is not obscure, It's stuff we all have seen.
Thanks for reminding me how old I am:) I can vaguely recall when lots of systems running DOS 2.0 were frequently just as difficult as this example. I liked CPM !!!
In 1993-4 I talked with the founder of Ampro right after he got out of it. He mentioned that it was great for 4MHz stuff like old x86. My job is now to replace all that stuff with shit that actually works. An example - we had one client using a Celeron-based 104+, and the EMI interaction between it, the other I/O cards and the SMPS that was also on the stack was so hideous that it was pretty much useless.
BTW - PC104 Plus is the PCI version of it. pc104.org/hardware-specifications/pc104-plus/
It added a PCI bus that was a nightmare as far as PCI bus mastering - most had a shitty rotary switch that would set the slot position (see the PCI spec).
PC104 Express is with PCIx...
So the PC104 is poo, and if you want to see real poo take a look at PICMG - wow... silly
Or how about ETX or EBX?
Or the other zillion formats that places like Advantech and others sold. Here's the deal - Intel used to have an "embedded" goup - unlike most Intel processors that have a max. 6 month roadmap, Intel was at one time supporting a sub-set of processors and chipsets for 5 years...
Well - no more of that. So PC104 lost a lot of support for x86 parts...
Stand off is 600mil... totally non- standard spacing.
Oh yea - go get some of those I/O, serial cards. You can even get "bean rails" to mount in rugged stuff. www.curtisswrightds.com/products/electronic-systems/enclosures/shock-rocks.html
Work? - Uh sort of... what a mess....
Uh - unleaded? - Naw most of the dinosaurs that still use these are using it for mil applications - no RoHS there:
www.army.mil/-news/2010/06/11/40712-army-works-to-decrease-lead-free-electronic-components/
Sooo... uh... yea... right on... Your phone has more proc power...
Speaking of all the ARM based stuff. Here's the next furball.
So for the last few years, Freescale/NXP (now Qualcomm), TI, Atme (now Microchip), ST, Broadcom (now Avago) and others have been introducing a ton of M and A series (M's are self contained - like whats in you washer/dryer; A series is what's in your phone - MMU fo SDRAM).
So to spin up a chip fab, it takes between $20 and $600 mil. So you better have some customers. A lot. And once you get a thousand processes in the fab line working right - you better keep it going. One gas changes slightly in process 1215, and you just turned 300mm drink coasters.
So all these guys wanted to get the "big design win" - some high volume consumer product.
Well, Allwinner - a fabless place in CN that DID get the big wins - follows a similar biz model as Intel. 6 month product lifecycle. Then on to the next hotness.
Well where does that leave all these standalone uC guys?
Fucked... bigtime.
Yea - I know Raspberry Poo may sell 20 million units. May. And that's across variant in the Broadcom portfolio.
Do the math. At a half a billion bucks to fab these, do you think that paltry amount will suffice a stockholder or board member? Whats the ROI on that?
Poo... And once the car mfg's (about the only industry still supporting standalone uC's) realize they too can do what Aplle and the others do and fab their own Allwinner thing - that'll dry up about the only mass market left for those uC companies.
And Broadcom refuses to release a full datasheet for what's on those PeePoos. take a look at what Olimex is doing:
www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXino-LIME/open-source-hardware
Yep - over fab of the Allwiner A 20. And they actually released the full datasheet... why?
Cause they're on to the next thing.... that they'll actually make money on.
So, we'll go back to the way it was back when these PC10foo things came around - for actual embedded stuff (things with out external SDRAM and low proc requiments) they'll be some ARM M thing that somehow got into a vending machine.
Fun times.... NOT.
And as to even using a rasp. PI for most "Maker BS, - this is the same thing with PC104.
Ya need to turn on a relay. So Get out your OS, compiler, IDE and have the Pi or 104 run a zillion clock cycles to eventually map something to go "ON"
Talk about a misapplication of technology - That'd be like hiring me and a bunch of my old friends to shoot a porn flick. All the Viagra, oxygen, EMT's with defibs, etc... and then ya got to pay us enough to pay for wives/support, kid's college.
Too much overhead. Better off going to some bar and getting 20 somethings...
Funny - the porn industry is smarter than all these STEM/Maker guys...
Thunderbyte antivirus. Good times. This brought back a lot of good memories, tinkering with old pc's up in the attic.
I remember my parents buying me an awe 64 for christmas once. I was the happiest kid in town.
i worked on Postal mail sorting machines that used the PC104's about 20 years ago. One thing I learned about them is if the 5v rail ever dipped below 4.7v the system became unstable. It did not help that the 5v supply was about 6 feet away and they did not bother to use remote sensing so if the supply was putting out 5.00v you got 4.76v at the stack. To make it more interesting the placed the supply in a very difficult to reach area so you had to rremove the supply to adjust the output.
Other than that little feature they did their job well.
27:25 This is pretty much Audiosurf
I have a bunch of PC/104 compatible systems. They plug into a PCI/ISA backplane and the single board computer cards have PC/104 slots on the side. Pretty cool. One of them I salvaged from a system that was "broken" and had been left out in the rain. Took it home, powered it up and found it was running Windows NT 4.0. The BBC used to use it in R&D according to the files on it. It was used for analysing the DVB-T network. The analyser cards were from Wavetek Wandel Goltermann.
The other system I salvaged was used in the automotive industry hooked up through a TAXI interface to a Brüel & Kjær data acquisition box. Sadly I couldn't find the box that it goes with for a reasonable price. Had a beautiful modular ISA card inside though with six huge Texas Instruments DSPs on it, a 5w4 connector on the end and a shielded ribbon cable that ran to another ISA card in the box.
Both systems were Dolch MegaPACs. I'm currently in the process of modifying one of them to take ATX boards. Already got it a 1080p LCD to replace the 800x600 one on the front.
Love the old PC technologies that are still hanging on today! Very cool.
Wow. Amazing how you can miss what you've been looking for. Here I was thinking latte panda was the ducks guts. I thought embedded boards were designed and manufactured individually on a per device basis. Now the world makes sense. Thanks Dave.
I believe that VGA header was a commonly used arrangement back in the day. I remember working on motherboards with integrated video that used a header like that to connect to the HDDB-15 socket on a slot plate or back panel knock out.
Very interesting boards, like to have one. Like the formfactor. My first a self-build 386SX (an AMD) at 33 Mhz with a Connor 40MB drive. At school they had a 386DX, a 386 with co-processor.
I just did something similar, I got my hands on a PC104 board from an IPG fiber laser oscillator. It came with windows CE and it took me quite a while to get XP installed on it.
Wow ... what a trip back to the past ... I really enjoyed the video ... What a triumph when we get the "C:\ " prompt and the flashing cursor! ... Yes I did lots of hacks on the ISA bus back then.
They use a similar standard for one of the boards used in Dixtal 2010 ECG monitors. I believe it's the power management board (I don't quite remember off the top of my head), which connects to the motherboard via the pins on the bottom of the board.
My first PC was an 80286 with 640K of RAM. I upgraded it to 1MB of RAM and installed Windows 3.0 on it (40MB HDD). Some of my classmates at school had PCs running MFM and/or RLL hard disk drives (which I got to see the innards of). I think mine was running the newfangled IDE interface on the HDD. Remember SIPP RAM modules?
My introduction (as far as I can remember) was via DOS v.3.1 or thereabouts. I worked my way up through DOS 3.3, 4.x, 5.x, up to 6.22, Windows 95, 95a, 95b, the rare 95c, 98, 98SE, NT4.5, 2000, Major Error (a.k.a.: Millennium Edition), XP, and so forth, up to 10 and Server 2016.
Never saw a PC/104 system (also never heard of it before). Seeing the floppy, IDE, and DIN connectors, as well as the BIOS, POST, and DOS boot screens brings back memories...
Dave, could you make a video (if you haven't already) about the kind of filter that we can see attached to the end of the cable at 16:00? I've always been curious about them, have seen them on many cables but I was never quite sure what they were and how they worked.
I do wonder if these are the boards used in the plastic injection molding machines I work with? The oldest models use CRTs while some have LCD screens with floppy disks and the latest use touchscreen LCDs with compact flash drives.
There are also some PC104/PCI104 Arm, MIPS, PPC based CPU boards out there for other niche applications.
I still have PTSD from working with cubesats that had many PC104 stacked boards. Reliability in extreme environments drops exponentially as you stack more boards.
16:00 In my school they had the audio cable for the loudspeaker running along an unshielded VGA cable, you could hear a very annoying buzzing sound and the sound changed depending on the image on the screen.
As some one who collects and restores old computers. You are right it can be hard.
What Arduino and Raspberry Pi pioneered was microcontroller development boards and SBCs on a hobbyist friendly budget respectively. I remember browsing old, far far out of date PC/104 boards on Ebay, thinking of all the amazing things I could do with such small sized and power sipping boards. I never actually hit the bid button though because they were too expensive! Oh.. and yes, Basic Stamps were sort of marketing towards hobbyists but apparently ones with lots of money to throw around!
Thanks for that Dave!!!!! That was fun!!! Blast from the past!!!!
Nice trip down memory lane ... thanks!
If you ever find yourself in need of DOS again, I would like to mention www.freedos.org/ -- it's a modernized, F/OSS DOS-implementation and comes with a bunch of improvements over the old DOS 6.22 and the likes. Also, as it's so freely available, you won't have to hunt for old floppies with DOS on them or whatever :)
Nita Vesa But he still needs good quality blank floppies for the initial install. Too sad Sony cornered the blank floppy aftermarket with crap quality blanks, then stopped production completely. Still fondly remember using genuine Nashua blanks in the 1980s, but there were other well established quality brands that could have supplied the long tail aftermatket at $10 or more per disc instead of those crap ones.
Nita Vesa But he still needs good quality blank floppies for the initial install. Too sad Sony cornered the blank floppy aftermarket with crap quality blanks, then stopped production completely. Still fondly remember using genuine Nashua blanks in the 1980s, but there were other well established quality brands that could have supplied the long tail aftermatket at $10 or more per disc instead of those crap ones.
Doesn't look like it's DOS-compatible. I mean, sure, if one doesn't need DOS then by all means and there are plenty of other choices too, but I specifically was saying that if one needs DOS.
@baggacfreaks
You don't want to run dosbox on such an old and slow 386 machine.
I've contemplated asking you to make a video on this more than anything else. Thanks mate!!
Awesome video, aaah the frustration of getting old systems up and running.. so many wasted nights..
There are still PC/104 format SBCs being made, some of them with newer architecture like the Intel Atom and others. They can fit a lot more on those boards with newer tech.
can't believe I had never heard of this before....but sure was a very entertaining video to watch and got to learn something new! Wouldn't mind seeing more videos about this embedded platform. If possible, get some more add-on boards and let's see what it's capable of doing :)
I still have an Ampro Little Board. Your video is making me want to resurrect it. I still have the floppy drives, etc. I programmed for a number of years on CP/M systems (Kaypro and Xerox) for embedded Z80 based medical equipment. Brings back great memories. Thanks for your videos.
Sweet. Probably worth pretty penny on ebay
PC104 is adorable! I want the 386!
You find a lot of these guys driving machinery in industrial places. I'm my case, in my work we use equipment by quipp and it uses a different form factor based on an ISA backplate with push-in cards. To me, as a computer geek, it was amazing to discover that work machinery were really computer parts on custom boards
This is an invaluable discovery for me. The very module that you have demonstrated is ideal for a current project. When I search, I only find newer faster (unnecessary) items. Any advice on tracking down these older versions?
I was cheering for the A prompt as well :)
Awesome! Thanks Dave for the Effort and the obsession !👍👍👍✔
I was just wondering if the RGB wiring would be staggered because of an IDC connection when you said it.
Do get a GOTEK. Their pretty cool. Bit of troubleshooting advice - always make USB drive "A" on the cable if you want to have a physical floppy drive too.
Love to see some examples of interfacing external electronics components with boards/PC's like this. I'm familiar with Serial over USB; but would like to see some of the older, more reliable methods used.
"It always looked better than that..." welcome to the warped world of nostalgia Dave :-)
Great video, I have a couple of PC/104 boards somewhere that I bought because I wanted something low power to make a home automation system, but I wanted something I could run Windows on to make it easier to program so that's why I went with these over other solutions (as my skill set is Windows programming).
Rasberry Pie wasn't even a thing then. The PC/104's are still in their boxes, never used, never tested! Oh well. Home automation isn't something I am too fussed with now anyway.
Than you, sir. I love learning about systems other than arduino and others.
You said it yourself Dave, these guys geared themselves towards industrial applications. It's no different than IBM thinking there was no home computer market. You can always tell when someone is getting old because they're a sucker for nostalgia.
+Steven and the problem with creating a specialised industrial embedded computer standard?
lol... "three finger salute" .. haven't used that term in many years!
that "frustration" is par for the course on trying to setup a vintage computer from scratch these days.
I once bought PC 104 computer kit from ebay out of curiosity. It was a fully functional small form factor PC. Has USB ports, CF card slot, built-in ethernet. I installed Damn Small Linux on it and it works great. I plan to build expansion card for it with 8255 PPI chip.
I wasn't aware if this. Thanks for the video!
The big difference is price.
PC104 was never available for the hobbyist.