This feels every little bit like a family's computer that was later handed over to the family's kid once they got a new one. It's strangely nostalgic since that was also my situation.
Yeah either this or/and just a faulty HDD. That's why IBM Via Voice started multiple times and the PC froze at one position. Weak blocks make it slow, which later transform into bad blocks. HDTune can show you the slow-downs in benchmark and also show bad blocks, but standard scan speed is missing some blocks. You can make it read all blocks, but it's super slow ofc. HDTune will not show you weak blocks I think. HDAT2 and HDD Regenerator can show you both weak and bad blocks, which you can try to sort out w/o deleting data. It also works with any known and unknown, even unformatted partitions, because it's using direct hardware access. If there's not many bad blocks in a row, the chance is pretty high that you can recover the HDD and use it again. I think when the PC froze, there's too many bad blocks, which you may not be able to recover with said two tools. But there's two ways to circumvent it: - make an empty position around those bad blocks. - write a big file you don't use around those bad blocks and hope there's no more bad blocks.
8:27 My suspicion from the start was that this PC Case WAS from the 80s and thee whole PC was upgraded from the motherboard up using the case as a donor. They carried over the hard drive, upgraded it to 95 at some point and then maybe when upgrading to 98 they did a hard drive upgrade at the same time.
90s case all the way dude, 80s was often desktop format IBM and clones from Compaq and such. Unless the 386 had a Turbo button i'm fairly sure that was a 90s thing!
My 90s PC was made just like that... It started as 386SX, low-cost machine with 40MB hard drive in the (very) early 90s or even late 80s. It also had some kind of "bad" monitor that couldn't display VGA properly! It was bought by my father second-hand and we replaced our Amiga 600 with it around ~94 (and yeah - it was such a disappointment in terms of games and music!) But then we slowly upgraded it: replaced monitor, added sound card (Gravis UltraSound!), new hard drive, moved to 486DX4 in ~96, added more RAM and new SVGA graphics so it became quite a nice mid-90s low-end machine. Great for DOS & early Windows games. And it was still in the same case. Somewhere before 2000 we upgraded again: with K6-2 450Mhz and... S3 VIRGE (yeah, we were tricked into that one!) with ~64MB or RAM I think. It was a great performance boost in terms of CPU performance (I could listen to .mp3 AND doing something else at the same time!). Very soon we upgraded GPU to GeForce 2MX and more RAM (I think 192MB at this point?) - but then CPU suddenly became a limitation! And the case? Yep, still the same old AT case. Our motherboard back then was a hybrid AT/ATX one... It was ~2002 when finally discarded the old case and moved to Athlon XP!
Speaking as someone who remembers that style case looks early 90's to me as it's a mini tower, most PC's were sold as desktops as the norm in the 80's. My friend had a nearly identical case which he had an AMD 386DX 40 Mhz with 4MB ram & a 200MB hdd, i was insanely jealous as in 1993 we had a 286 16MHz. It was down to seeing this system my dad got sick of the 286 & went and brought a 486DX2/66 8MB (upgraded to 16), 500MB hdd & it was multimedia PC, 4 months later he brought a Hayes modem & flatbed scanner (I'll never know to this day what lit a fire up his ass to buy all that lol). That was the only reason I got to play Doom lol
Who is MJD? A humble and lovely guy that clearly respects his viewers. I love the candid nature of admitting to missing the gpu issue and giving credit to the viewers. What a guy! Subbed brother.
That letter to santa is the most wholesome thing I've watch on a retro pc video. It brings me meories of when me and my family used to share a single pc. It was a Pentium 4 with Windows XP, and lasted until it just stooped to turn on kinda before the end of Windows XP lifetime
It's so good that you're so respectful of the personal data on this computer. I *would* like to see some of the more time-capsule-ish letters and whatnot rescued, with the personally identifying info redacted, just for the sake of history. But that would be very time consuming probably. Maybe you could keep an encrypted record of it on a pw-protected disc somewhere? That would be such a hard decision for me, because I think history is very important, but so is personal privacy. I feel bad erasing evidence of people from the face of the earth, but also want to respect their data.
@@davinp Pretty sure he said in another comment reply that the data did not belong to the person who gave him the computer. Perhaps that person did know the original owners and could ask them, but that would be the best he could hope for.
i used to fix computers for family and family friends, i always made it a point to never look at the data on the drives, its just how i am i would even blur and squint my vision when i HAD to actually look into a directory, never ever tried to see any personal data, unless it was a wallpaper, then, rip their privacy if it was bad, but that was, in fact, their bad
@@DeIeted Yeah, I did something similar when I worked in a computer repair shop--*if* my only job was to fix or upgrade the computer. However, we also did some basic backup and data recovery services, and sometimes the customer would request that I locate and save specific documents or groups of documents, even videos (and yes, sometimes they'd sheepishly--or blithely--ask me to find and save their home-made smut/porn, so that was fun). If they didn't remember the name or specific file type, I'd end up having to at least briefly scan my eyes over the file contents so I could determine if it was what they were looking for. In the process I often found other important stuff they might've forgotten about, like family photos, tax/mortgage documents, work or school projects. I wouldn't stare at them and to this day can't remember anyone's name or the details of those files, but I'd always save them too and they were always happy I did. If someone "donated" their PC full-stop, we usually did zero out the drives without looking at them at all, but we'd only do so after we'd held onto the computer for at least 1 month, just in case the customer came back after remembering they'd left something important behind they wanted to retrieve before it was destroyed. A lot of people did just that. Just because of that experience, I tend to pause for a bit before completely obliterating anyone's stuff. You never know if you're erasing something important. Privacy takes precedence, of course, though, so *unless* the information can be redacted of anything identifying (which is time-consuming), erring on the side of clearing it all out is probably the better option.
The digital hoarder in me is kinda crying when you say you're going to wipe it, but I totally understand it's personal data that nobody should see. It's the right thing to do. But man, still, I have a thing for files from the 90's. I love to look at a word file and see what a person was thinking at that very moment, sometimes even before I was born. Kinda feels weird to delete something that existed for more than 20 years. But at the end of the day I'm glad this PC ended up in your hands because we were able to catch a glimpse of the past while remaining respectful to the personal data stored there.
This probably isn't a good idea, but I think that it would be cool to try contact the original owner/s of this computer and try to learn the history of it.
Ehhh that's a good place to start but I have a feeling the two are not one and the same. Little things here and there tell me that the person who last used this machine wasn't the most computer literate person on the planet. And computers back then we're waaay more complex.
the amount of wholesomeness, happiness, and nostalgia this brings me is immense. especially those christmas files, the 90s to me felt like on big christmas season
@@dnsoulx The 98 machine is in the boiler cupboard and hasn't been switched on in about 20 years. The Dell Dimension 450 I think it is sits in My front room, I was using it as a video player for DVD rips.
The voice software reminded me of a story about a company exec thought he'd get around doing the recordings by having two of the IT guys do the voice training for him. One was from the mountains of Tennessee and the other was on an H1B visa from India. Both had unique speech patterns which totally confused the system.
In the interest of saving rare software, please consider checking the Temporary Internet Files folder for Java (JAR/CLASS,) Director (DIR/DXR/DCR) and Flash (SWF) files. Internet content from this time period is extremely difficult to find. Always do this when you are in this situation: there are many applications that have been recovered this way.
When looking at the dates or the documents. One of them was the day before 9/11, which really surprised me and I thought I might share that in case no one else noticed. Also very cool video! It's cool to see what kind of old data was placed on an old computer that hasn't been used in years! I can only imagine that family watching this video and realizing that it was their PC with old data on it
The comic sans comes from the travel desktop theme that's applied here. They just applied the travel theme then changed the main background to that earth background. I used to like the travel background for the "BEEP BEEP" sound used for the default/change volume sound. But my favorite theme used to be "Inside Your Computer".
I think that there was an old game called Wolf back in the day where you live the simulated life of a wolf. Maybe it was once on the PC? I actually still have that old game buried somewhere in my home as I remember playing it. There is also Lion too, I think.
It always cracks me up seeing the random customization things people put on their computers :) Like I've got just one thing changed on mine and it's that Recycle Bin is just called "me"
That is why I turn on the "Boot up Floppy Seek" test on the BIOS. If the cable is plugged in the wrong way the POST will show an error it would also show if the floppy drive is the wrong type in or wrong drive letter plug on the ribbon cable. Some of those floppy cables have no keys on the connectors and no 1 pin colour code on the ribbon cable.
This was such a cool look into the life cycle of this computer and it’s hard drive between what seems like terry and his family. The fact that it’s pretty obvious it got handed down to his kids and possibly another user and then you. Thank you for this great video
These switches are great! Two of my machines have them, and they give a satisfying "clunk" from them. To me it looks like there was basically ONE company making these flick switches...
That speech program engine is written by a belgium company called Lernhout and Hauspie, a weird name, but those 2 dudes were one of the biggest players in the early 90 to the early 2000's, but they commited a lot of fraud and they got sued eventually! Crazy to see how far their software has reached without a big online presents! Insane honestly that IBM picked it up, those dudes could've made so much money! My dad was dislectic so he almost couldn't use a regular keyboard, so he used this speech recognition software to help him write letters which was quite nifty way back in those days.
I had Lernout and Hauspie speech recognition in the late 90s and I remember having to read it a full chapter of a book for the speech training which took about 30 minutes. Then you just had to let it sit there for 2 hours to process the recording.
MP3 ripping and encoding, five to ten minutes for a three minute song, then a day arrived when a 200 MHz or something CPU could do it in real time, then faster than the recording time length. Today mere seconds.
Omg, this brings back so many memories. Those wallpapers made in paint look like something that I would have done back in the day. Lol. I used to have a very similar machine to this in the early to mid 2000's with a Cyrix 6X86 CPU , Award BIOS and Windows 98 ,but it probably had a better graphics card, I don't really know as I was way too young back then, I just remeber that it was capable of running 3D games in hardware mode and it supported fairly high display resolutions. The only things that I have left from that machine are the speakers and the AT keyboard.
I agree dude pretty cool that Michael is doing these kinds of videos I REALLY LIKED seein the WINDOWS UPGRADE video he did from 1.0 TO WINDOWS 7 that was cool and insane (in a good way tho) XD
I also love going through old windows installations. One time one of the hdd i bought from scrap gave me a bit of a shock. It was full of inappropriate images. Haha
Crazy how similar a computer made in 1996 still has the same basic capabilities as a computer made today. You got Quickbooks, Microsoft Word, Internet, games, and still has a hard drive, keyboard and mouse.
Seems like it contracted a computer virus at some point. Unpleasant but luckily probably not a huge concern for archiving since most ancient viruses are no-longer effective on modern PC's. Just be careful if your antivirus or Windows Defender flags them because it'll try to delete everything.
"probably not a huge concern for archiving since most ancient viruses are no-longer effective on modern PC's." Actually... You would be surprised. I saw a video from Nostalgia Nerd (ruclips.net/video/kLan-BOybbk/видео.html) where many old-ass viruses did indeed still work on Windows 10.
Yeah, that might explain why performance is so awful (it shouldn't be cranking the HD constantly, even with its measley 16MB RAM) and so much stuff behaves erratically. I'd certainly not let it communicate with any network.
Na, the speed and thrashing is likely because it only has 16MB RAM in it which is far too low for such a loaded up Windows 98 install like that one. The 'not responding' is oftentimes not actual lock ups but because the system is literally too busy to report that it's working on something. He could alleviate a lot of it by bumping the RAM to 48MB or 64MB (64MB cache-able limit on 430VX boards). Windows 9x era viruses often caused actual blue screens and much more crashing than that. It's a pretty stable system aside from the RAM.
@@arnox4554 The caveat on Nostalgia Nerd's video was he used a 32-bit install of Windows 10. 64-bit Windows won't run 16-bit DOS and Windows programs. Though I do wonder what would happen if you ran old DOS viruses in DOSBox...
Have to tried to find and contact the original owner ? Those files would be really emotional for them, specially the letter to santa etc. This remembers me of our first computer, kinda similar and had 2.1 GB HDD and Win95 initially (Pentium-MMX). I still got some of the weird MS-Paint drawings from that.
Nice to see a tape drive from Colorado Memory Systems! I remember when Colorado Memory Systems sold to HP because at one point in time they were both in Loveland, Colorado. I went to middle school with Colorado Memory Systems' former owner's daughter.
p.s: IBM ViaVoice is an early voice recognition program for windows 95 and 98. it cannot tap into word or notepad or any ol program, you have to use its own text editing tool called speakpad. vargskeletor joel used it in his win95 destruction video
Ferreting out info on digital timecapsules like this is one of my favorite things to do to. love the way you put it as a 'digital timecapsule' btw. too true!
I had flashbacks to playing with voice recognition, I remember being a kid with a cheap microphone and went through all that for nothing and it was so frustrating.
I would back everything up onto a flash drive on this, encrypt it so that there's no risk of their data being stolen, then if they ever reach out you could give them the flash drive and password to decrypt it
please could you do the gaming community a huge favour and look for old Runescape cache files when you boot up a pc from the mid 90s to early 00s. The community will be ever grateful if you ever find something. Theres quite sopme things that could be hidden in there we really want to find.
I'm getting some flashbacks here, though they aren't wholesome. A friend's grandma donated an old computer their granddad had been using when they were kids that had been mothballed up in the attic for 20 years, and I was brought in to get it working again. Let's just say we discovered a few things about his granddad that should've probably been buried with him. I feel so bad because that discovery virtually tore that family apart.
That is the exact kind of situation that makes me wary of acquiring old computers that still have their hard drives. I’m sorry you had to come across that.
That thing with the empty wolf 3d folder was probably that whatever kid had this computer installed wolf 3d (probably the shareware version) on it and then his mom/dad (his because terry) discovered that he was playing it and then deleted it because they are the type of people that think kids can't have fun
A peice of history of this person, in this computer. Imagine how many school friends and stuff this guy had on AOL. My guess is that hes probably 40 now. Wherever you are Terry, we have your old computer!
Dude you gotta save an image of the drive. Then send a hand written letter to memaw and popop's old address explaining all this. See what happens. I've done something similar a few times in 3 decades and received a couple responses and it was always cool.
Aww, I kinda hoped you’d imaged that drive, even if a lot of those documents are bland or nonsense, a few of them seem like treasured memories. Not imaging it to share anywhere, because of privacy, but keeping it in your stash for preservation. In another 50-100 years everyone who did it would be dead and it might have historic value or be interesting to their grandkids or something. But that’s just me. From the frequency of the documents going down, to the weird custom wallpapers and renamed things, and the Comic Sans text, I get the feeling this was given to a kid when the dad upgraded and the kid chose Comic Sans and a bunch of the other theming. Which is wholesome.
@@JohnZombi88 I never proposed it was earth shattering - quite the opposite. A lot of valuable historical research has come from old forgotten letters buried in a shoebox, and this is the digital equivalent. Sure, plenty of those shoeboxes were thrown in the fireplace. But unless you similarly condemn eg war researchers looking through letters from 1910-1920, I’m frankly confused by the reaction.
@@JohnZombi88 Did you miss the “in 50 to 100 years” part from my first comment? All history starts as recent history. Almost all documents are assumed, wrongly, to be worthless at first. Lost film and TV histories from the 1930s and 1960s respectively nevertheless didn’t prevent people throwing away video game history in the 1980s&90s.
Quaint old homebrew computer. i used to build my own back in time and they looked as good(?) as this one. Please do the NT4 install. I always loved the look and feel of that OS.
Windows 95/98 was built on windows 3.1.1. Alot of windows 3.1.1 remained and didn't get removed from the windows world until Windows ME so it makes sense to have alot of windows 3.1 programs still there. If windows explorer crashed you could fix it by editing the config.sys to boot to Progman (Windows 3.1) instead of Explorer. And they didn't have many 2GB hard drives until 1995/1996. So the drive would not have been moved from a windows 3.1 machine to this. It was uncommon but still in used to have AT form factors in budget computers. The Cyrix processor was also used mostly in budget computers, so that makes sense.
Oh for the days when everything moved to ICQ. loved that program. Also using mIRC programs to chat in different rooms on servers, much like Discord does today. In fact I think discord is based on mIRC.
Michael thanks for the great and engrossing content! I love watching your videos and hearing the story behind these things. Already LGR level IMO :) Also this reallyy gives me nostalgia of my first computer haha.
I have a love/hate relationship with NT 4. It's very quirky and not, shall we say, the most stable. Yet, I can't stay away from it, and I find it very fascinating to use and to watch other people use. Bottom line, yes, I'd love to see a video of this computer running NT 4.
Hmm. Reminds me of an old 2gb hdd I got with a pentium 66 machine. Had a lot of random html stuff and I couldn’t figure out why. Although that one has a really weird issue with the vga card as it’s a Dr. Berghaus VAMP550(if anyone can tell me how the jumpers should be configured, I’d be very appreciative). Half the colors don’t appear at all. Windows 95 runs pretty well tho.
This PC looks almost like my first x86 PC I got when I was still very young. A 486DX2 with 2x speed CD-ROM drive, 3.5 and 5.41" floppy drive and 200 or so MB harddrive running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Given this machine has been constantly upgraded, this could very well be from the same factory line.
IBM Via Voice and Dragon Naturally Speaking was the two best voice recognition packages of the time. I got hold of a trial copy of Via Voice and can remember having so much fun with with since it reminded me so much of Star Trek. You could actually navigate the computer with it.
I worked on PC Computers XT model and AT model computers back in starting from 80's and a majority of those if they're transported there supposed to be a guard retention above attached to the cover w/ bolts or screws down inside the case if that's not there A lot of times those cards will come out partially or all the way depending on if there were handled roughly?
I'm guessing 16 mb RAM is a bit too little for some of the software, on top of Win 98 moreover? There is crazy swap file hard disk activity going on. The Cyrix isn't a beast either.
Yeah, that combined with the amount of stuff running in the background for most of the video made it run rather slow. I'll have to see if I have some more RAM to put in it.
@@MichaelMJD check your swap file, and defrag. Might help with the speed some. That HD is slower than dirt by todays standard so if it is writing to the swap file it will take a while.
@@ikbintom More Ram does always help. Just remember that Windows 95/98 cannot access more than 68 MB or ram. It will see it, just not use it. Going to 128MB is a waste. The motherboard may not be able to use Dimms either. Might have to find some old Simms.
@@butchjohnson3159 windows 9x can actually see up to 512 mb and remain stable, and can use up to about 160 mb effectively (without slowing down because of it). But you're right that some motherboards might not support large amounts of ram. I still have an old laptop from 1997 lying around that has a limit of 96 mb
It's cool to see all the period-correct software still there. I've bought a Celeron 433-based PC to install MSDOS 6.22 on it and guess what I've found on the HDD? Windows freaking XP! The poor computer barely struggled to run this monster of an OS. People just don't get that old computers are better left off for old games and software, not to try and do real work on them.
I remember this IBM via voice that came in a CD pack in my computer. I never made it work properly, it was really frustrating, so you reproduced the real experience.
Most of those wallpapers are Win 3.1 wallpapers. When I saw those I immediatly thought 'old pc, upgraded from 3.1 to 98' . Loving these videos.
yep alot of them where the tiled type from 3.1 which look really weird stretched lol
those wallpapers were included in windows 95 also.
Yep, I was going to comment the same. Castle, Cars, Chitz, Leaves and all the like are from 3.1 most certainly.
Thats specific but cool
A man of culture and edacuation I see
This feels every little bit like a family's computer that was later handed over to the family's kid once they got a new one. It's strangely nostalgic since that was also my situation.
Also my situation, except my dad moved the HDDs to their new PC and bought me a new one 😅
Same! Started with the either the 98 or 2000 and I moved to the XP and then I think finally 7
Yep
Yeah either this or/and just a faulty HDD. That's why IBM Via Voice started multiple times and the PC froze at one position.
Weak blocks make it slow, which later transform into bad blocks. HDTune can show you the slow-downs in benchmark and also show bad blocks, but standard scan speed is missing some blocks. You can make it read all blocks, but it's super slow ofc. HDTune will not show you weak blocks I think.
HDAT2 and HDD Regenerator can show you both weak and bad blocks, which you can try to sort out w/o deleting data. It also works with any known and unknown, even unformatted partitions, because it's using direct hardware access. If there's not many bad blocks in a row, the chance is pretty high that you can recover the HDD and use it again.
I think when the PC froze, there's too many bad blocks, which you may not be able to recover with said two tools.
But there's two ways to circumvent it:
- make an empty position around those bad blocks.
- write a big file you don't use around those bad blocks and hope there's no more bad blocks.
school laptops suck
8:27 My suspicion from the start was that this PC Case WAS from the 80s and thee whole PC was upgraded from the motherboard up using the case as a donor. They carried over the hard drive, upgraded it to 95 at some point and then maybe when upgrading to 98 they did a hard drive upgrade at the same time.
It feels like that to me too. There's Windows 3.1 stuff on there!
J
90s case all the way dude, 80s was often desktop format IBM and clones from Compaq and such. Unless the 386 had a Turbo button i'm fairly sure that was a 90s thing!
My 90s PC was made just like that... It started as 386SX, low-cost machine with 40MB hard drive in the (very) early 90s or even late 80s. It also had some kind of "bad" monitor that couldn't display VGA properly! It was bought by my father second-hand and we replaced our Amiga 600 with it around ~94 (and yeah - it was such a disappointment in terms of games and music!)
But then we slowly upgraded it: replaced monitor, added sound card (Gravis UltraSound!), new hard drive, moved to 486DX4 in ~96, added more RAM and new SVGA graphics so it became quite a nice mid-90s low-end machine. Great for DOS & early Windows games. And it was still in the same case.
Somewhere before 2000 we upgraded again: with K6-2 450Mhz and... S3 VIRGE (yeah, we were tricked into that one!) with ~64MB or RAM I think. It was a great performance boost in terms of CPU performance (I could listen to .mp3 AND doing something else at the same time!). Very soon we upgraded GPU to GeForce 2MX and more RAM (I think 192MB at this point?) - but then CPU suddenly became a limitation! And the case? Yep, still the same old AT case. Our motherboard back then was a hybrid AT/ATX one...
It was ~2002 when finally discarded the old case and moved to Athlon XP!
Speaking as someone who remembers that style case looks early 90's to me as it's a mini tower, most PC's were sold as desktops as the norm in the 80's. My friend had a nearly identical case which he had an AMD 386DX 40 Mhz with 4MB ram & a 200MB hdd, i was insanely jealous as in 1993 we had a 286 16MHz. It was down to seeing this system my dad got sick of the 286 & went and brought a 486DX2/66 8MB (upgraded to 16), 500MB hdd & it was multimedia PC, 4 months later he brought a Hayes modem & flatbed scanner (I'll never know to this day what lit a fire up his ass to buy all that lol). That was the only reason I got to play Doom lol
Who is MJD? A humble and lovely guy that clearly respects his viewers. I love the candid nature of admitting to missing the gpu issue and giving credit to the viewers. What a guy! Subbed brother.
That letter to santa is the most wholesome thing I've watch on a retro pc video. It brings me meories of when me and my family used to share a single pc. It was a Pentium 4 with Windows XP, and lasted until it just stooped to turn on kinda before the end of Windows XP lifetime
Dell Optiplex?
Seeing ViaVoice installed on this pc brings back fond memories of a certain Swedish streamer destroying a copy of Windows 98
i was scrolling so long for a comment referencing this..knew I wouldn't be the only one HAHA
@@meganisdumb bro same lol
Luigi is drunk again
HRÁT
TORNADO
It's so good that you're so respectful of the personal data on this computer. I *would* like to see some of the more time-capsule-ish letters and whatnot rescued, with the personally identifying info redacted, just for the sake of history. But that would be very time consuming probably. Maybe you could keep an encrypted record of it on a pw-protected disc somewhere? That would be such a hard decision for me, because I think history is very important, but so is personal privacy. I feel bad erasing evidence of people from the face of the earth, but also want to respect their data.
or Michael could ask the person he got the PC from if they wanted that data
@@davinp Pretty sure he said in another comment reply that the data did not belong to the person who gave him the computer. Perhaps that person did know the original owners and could ask them, but that would be the best he could hope for.
i used to fix computers for family and family friends, i always made it a point to never look at the data on the drives, its just how i am
i would even blur and squint my vision when i HAD to actually look into a directory, never ever tried to see any personal data, unless it was a wallpaper, then, rip their privacy if it was bad, but that was, in fact, their bad
@@DeIeted Yeah, I did something similar when I worked in a computer repair shop--*if* my only job was to fix or upgrade the computer. However, we also did some basic backup and data recovery services, and sometimes the customer would request that I locate and save specific documents or groups of documents, even videos (and yes, sometimes they'd sheepishly--or blithely--ask me to find and save their home-made smut/porn, so that was fun). If they didn't remember the name or specific file type, I'd end up having to at least briefly scan my eyes over the file contents so I could determine if it was what they were looking for. In the process I often found other important stuff they might've forgotten about, like family photos, tax/mortgage documents, work or school projects. I wouldn't stare at them and to this day can't remember anyone's name or the details of those files, but I'd always save them too and they were always happy I did. If someone "donated" their PC full-stop, we usually did zero out the drives without looking at them at all, but we'd only do so after we'd held onto the computer for at least 1 month, just in case the customer came back after remembering they'd left something important behind they wanted to retrieve before it was destroyed. A lot of people did just that. Just because of that experience, I tend to pause for a bit before completely obliterating anyone's stuff. You never know if you're erasing something important. Privacy takes precedence, of course, though, so *unless* the information can be redacted of anything identifying (which is time-consuming), erring on the side of clearing it all out is probably the better option.
Isn't that was history is revealing a person in tge past private info
i love how respectful you are with the peoples belongings, making sure that you arent exposing anyones information
The Santa letter is too precious.
The digital hoarder in me is kinda crying when you say you're going to wipe it, but I totally understand it's personal data that nobody should see. It's the right thing to do. But man, still, I have a thing for files from the 90's. I love to look at a word file and see what a person was thinking at that very moment, sometimes even before I was born. Kinda feels weird to delete something that existed for more than 20 years. But at the end of the day I'm glad this PC ended up in your hands because we were able to catch a glimpse of the past while remaining respectful to the personal data stored there.
20:06 Please make this the windows startup sound now. 😂
This probably isn't a good idea, but I think that it would be cool to try contact the original owner/s of this computer and try to learn the history of it.
That'd be virtually impossible to verify unless they have the original receipts.
What about the adress on the recovered word document?
Ehhh that's a good place to start but I have a feeling the two are not one and the same. Little things here and there tell me that the person who last used this machine wasn't the most computer literate person on the planet. And computers back then we're waaay more complex.
Maybe email addresses associated with the buddy lists or something if they are connected idk
@@Slurpee_Burger if Michael real want to, I surely bet he can manage to contact the person or the kids.
the "J" background just instantly reminds me of the "B" flash movie/meme that blew up on newgrounds way back in the day.
the amount of wholesomeness, happiness, and nostalgia this brings me is immense. especially those christmas files, the 90s to me felt like on big christmas season
Makes Me want to dig out My windows 98 PC and fire it up but got to sort out the 15 year old Dell first as that things got some use.
@@HOLLASOUNDS sadly when we moved we didn't bring the 98 Gateway :(, good luck with fixing that XP Dell tho lol
@@dnsoulx The 98 machine is in the boiler cupboard and hasn't been switched on in about 20 years. The Dell Dimension 450 I think it is sits in My front room, I was using it as a video player for DVD rips.
The voice software reminded me of a story about a company exec thought he'd get around doing the recordings by having two of the IT guys do the voice training for him. One was from the mountains of Tennessee and the other was on an H1B visa from India. Both had unique speech patterns which totally confused the system.
😆
And now I'm imagining if he'd had a Jamaican and a Scot in the mix too...
I find these computer time capsules to be super fascinating
That jingle you came up with at 20:06... that's going to be my new startup sound.
Thanks!
In the interest of saving rare software, please consider checking the Temporary Internet Files folder for Java (JAR/CLASS,) Director (DIR/DXR/DCR) and Flash (SWF) files. Internet content from this time period is extremely difficult to find. Always do this when you are in this situation: there are many applications that have been recovered this way.
When looking at the dates or the documents. One of them was the day before 9/11, which really surprised me and I thought I might share that in case no one else noticed. Also very cool video! It's cool to see what kind of old data was placed on an old computer that hasn't been used in years! I can only imagine that family watching this video and realizing that it was their PC with old data on it
The comic sans comes from the travel desktop theme that's applied here. They just applied the travel theme then changed the main background to that earth background. I used to like the travel background for the "BEEP BEEP" sound used for the default/change volume sound. But my favorite theme used to be "Inside Your Computer".
My personal favorite built-in theme is the Dangerous Creatures theme on Windows 98.
So glad to see a follow-up video for this PC!
I agree WOULD like to see the WINDOWS NT on this donated PC ^_^
@@x1o1Adamx2015 That would be cool to see, as I have never heard of NT before
I FEEL the outrage at the wolf3d folder NOT having wolfenstein 3d in it. I mean c'mon.... don't do that to someone.
I think that there was an old game called Wolf back in the day where you live the simulated life of a wolf. Maybe it was once on the PC? I actually still have that old game buried somewhere in my home as I remember playing it. There is also Lion too, I think.
Oh wow, that looks just like one I built way back in the day
J background, J name, 👀
@@goldenblood9316 We might be onto something here....
You wouldn’t happen to know a Terry would you?
Hmm
It always cracks me up seeing the random customization things people put on their computers :)
Like I've got just one thing changed on mine and it's that Recycle Bin is just called "me"
Man, browsing an old computer's drive can be an interesting digital time capsule.
It’s really cool how you found people’s memories on this computer
OHHHH MY HEART WITH THE SANTA LETTER god im in actual tears god damn
The FDD ribbon cable is plugged in backwards. That's why the light on the drive comes on as soon as you power the pc on and won't turn off.
That is why I turn on the "Boot up Floppy Seek" test on the BIOS. If the cable is plugged in the wrong way the POST will show an error it would also show if the floppy drive is the wrong type in or wrong drive letter plug on the ribbon cable.
Some of those floppy cables have no keys on the connectors and no 1 pin colour code on the ribbon cable.
OMG! I've completely forgotten about Lotus 1-2-3. I learned computer applications (in DOS) back in the day and that was the spreadsheet we used :)
This was such a cool look into the life cycle of this computer and it’s hard drive between what seems like terry and his family. The fact that it’s pretty obvious it got handed down to his kids and possibly another user and then you. Thank you for this great video
toooooowaards...
Glad I found this channel... Great to find treasures like this.
A part of me really wants a PC case like that to put a newer system into, I love the look and sound of that massive power switch lmao
These switches are great! Two of my machines have them, and they give a satisfying "clunk" from them. To me it looks like there was basically ONE company making these flick switches...
@@bad.sector Are they really expensive to get?
The cooling is pretty ttash
That speech program engine is written by a belgium company called Lernhout and Hauspie, a weird name, but those 2 dudes were one of the biggest players in the early 90 to the early 2000's, but they commited a lot of fraud and they got sued eventually! Crazy to see how far their software has reached without a big online presents! Insane honestly that IBM picked it up, those dudes could've made so much money! My dad was dislectic so he almost couldn't use a regular keyboard, so he used this speech recognition software to help him write letters which was quite nifty way back in those days.
being sued and committing lots of fraud explains their only legacy as being remembered through bonzi buddy
I've seen two of Lernout and Hauspie's TTS voices in the Speech control panel of Windows XP.
I had Lernout and Hauspie speech recognition in the late 90s and I remember having to read it a full chapter of a book for the speech training which took about 30 minutes. Then you just had to let it sit there for 2 hours to process the recording.
MP3 ripping and encoding, five to ten minutes for a three minute song, then a day arrived when a 200 MHz or something CPU could do it in real time, then faster than the recording time length.
Today mere seconds.
8:31 That date saying 12-17-96 was just a day after my oldest brother was born!
Omg, this brings back so many memories. Those wallpapers made in paint look like something that I would have done back in the day. Lol. I used to have a very similar machine to this in the early to mid 2000's with a Cyrix 6X86 CPU , Award BIOS and Windows 98 ,but it probably had a better graphics card, I don't really know as I was way too young back then, I just remeber that it was capable of running 3D games in hardware mode and it supported fairly high display resolutions. The only things that I have left from that machine are the speakers and the AT keyboard.
This is my type of channel and it has really good content. I'm glad that I came across it. Keep up the good work Michael!
I agree dude pretty cool that Michael is doing these kinds of videos I REALLY LIKED seein the WINDOWS UPGRADE video he did from 1.0 TO WINDOWS 7 that was cool and insane (in a good way tho) XD
Since it was used until possibly 2002, I wonder if there are any lost Flash games on there.
That’s actually a really good point
if there were they're gone now
I don't know why, but some of the edits are hilarious.
I would honestly love to do something like this. It just seems so fun to boot up a PC that old and find all those files.
On 13:48 I NEVER laughed so hard at a beefy mic before... 🤣🤣🤣
I also love going through old windows installations. One time one of the hdd i bought from scrap gave me a bit of a shock. It was full of inappropriate images. Haha
Lucky bastard.
Crazy how similar a computer made in 1996 still has the same basic capabilities as a computer made today. You got Quickbooks, Microsoft Word, Internet, games, and still has a hard drive, keyboard and mouse.
Seems like it contracted a computer virus at some point. Unpleasant but luckily probably not a huge concern for archiving since most ancient viruses are no-longer effective on modern PC's. Just be careful if your antivirus or Windows Defender flags them because it'll try to delete everything.
"probably not a huge concern for archiving since most ancient viruses are no-longer effective on modern PC's."
Actually... You would be surprised. I saw a video from Nostalgia Nerd (ruclips.net/video/kLan-BOybbk/видео.html) where many old-ass viruses did indeed still work on Windows 10.
Yeah, that might explain why performance is so awful (it shouldn't be cranking the HD constantly, even with its measley 16MB RAM) and so much stuff behaves erratically. I'd certainly not let it communicate with any network.
Na, the speed and thrashing is likely because it only has 16MB RAM in it which is far too low for such a loaded up Windows 98 install like that one. The 'not responding' is oftentimes not actual lock ups but because the system is literally too busy to report that it's working on something. He could alleviate a lot of it by bumping the RAM to 48MB or 64MB (64MB cache-able limit on 430VX boards).
Windows 9x era viruses often caused actual blue screens and much more crashing than that. It's a pretty stable system aside from the RAM.
@@arnox4554 The caveat on Nostalgia Nerd's video was he used a 32-bit install of Windows 10. 64-bit Windows won't run 16-bit DOS and Windows programs.
Though I do wonder what would happen if you ran old DOS viruses in DOSBox...
@@AaronOfMpls It would wreck the DOXBox environment, but that's probably it.
Terry called.. He wants his folder back.
Have to tried to find and contact the original owner ? Those files would be really emotional for them, specially the letter to santa etc. This remembers me of our first computer, kinda similar and had 2.1 GB HDD and Win95 initially (Pentium-MMX). I still got some of the weird MS-Paint drawings from that.
Nice to see a tape drive from Colorado Memory Systems! I remember when Colorado Memory Systems sold to HP because at one point in time they were both in Loveland, Colorado. I went to middle school with Colorado Memory Systems' former owner's daughter.
p.s: IBM ViaVoice is an early voice recognition program for windows 95 and 98. it cannot tap into word or notepad or any ol program, you have to use its own text editing tool called speakpad. vargskeletor joel used it in his win95 destruction video
Ferreting out info on digital timecapsules like this is one of my favorite things to do to. love the way you put it as a 'digital timecapsule' btw. too true!
I had flashbacks to playing with voice recognition, I remember being a kid with a cheap microphone and went through all that for nothing and it was so frustrating.
Reminds me of how I explored my dad‘s old computer. Let’s just say there were… questionable stuff on there!
QUESTIONABLE STUFF :-O :-O
What type of questionable stuff? 😳
What type of questionable stuff did your dad look at? 😳
Just one photo. And uh....yeah that says it all.@@Windows2000Professional.s
When you were flipping past the DOS folder you found, I saw a folder named GAMES. Maybe it has some interesting old games in it? 🤔
A new generation start with this machine,
New adds?, new software?, magic?, installing windows out of limits?
I would back everything up onto a flash drive on this, encrypt it so that there's no risk of their data being stolen, then if they ever reach out you could give them the flash drive and password to decrypt it
please could you do the gaming community a huge favour and look for old Runescape cache files when you boot up a pc from the mid 90s to early 00s. The community will be ever grateful if you ever find something. Theres quite sopme things that could be hidden in there we really want to find.
...what, like deleted content or something?
I'm getting some flashbacks here, though they aren't wholesome.
A friend's grandma donated an old computer their granddad had been using when they were kids that had been mothballed up in the attic for 20 years, and I was brought in to get it working again.
Let's just say we discovered a few things about his granddad that should've probably been buried with him.
I feel so bad because that discovery virtually tore that family apart.
That is the exact kind of situation that makes me wary of acquiring old computers that still have their hard drives. I’m sorry you had to come across that.
That thing with the empty wolf 3d folder was probably that whatever kid had this computer installed wolf 3d (probably the shareware version) on it and then his mom/dad (his because terry) discovered that he was playing it and then deleted it because they are the type of people that think kids can't have fun
Give the case a repaint. The system works fine.
Great video.
I would love to see those wallpapers uploaded somewhere, especially J
With the personal information removed of course
J
7:52 I saw IBM Via Voice
I remember Joel messing around with that on stream
What if you SCREAM into it?
That Netscape Navigator icon.. remembers me when I was at school..
I simply love that small little michael mjd guy lmao
That looks like one I built in 1995 with the same Cyrix processor. Windows 3.11 for a while. I actually have a box of those keyboards somewhere
Nice clip, I dig these nostalgic mid-90's installs. As for NT 4.0, go for it!
"🎵Microsoft Windows 98🎶"
That caught me offguard 😂
A peice of history of this person, in this computer. Imagine how many school friends and stuff this guy had on AOL. My guess is that hes probably 40 now. Wherever you are Terry, we have your old computer!
The letter to Santa is actually pretty cute
Not sure why I laughed so much at 13:02 with the camera shake...xD
Dude you gotta save an image of the drive. Then send a hand written letter to memaw and popop's old address explaining all this. See what happens. I've done something similar a few times in 3 decades and received a couple responses and it was always cool.
"Hey, what should we do with that PC that has all the personal data, accounting, addresses and so on?"
"Yyyy... give it away? Or dumpster?"
The fact that the hard drive predates Windows 3.1 and is still working properly is insane
his hand's voice is so calming
And yeah, do the NT 4 install video! I know you could need that sometime.
This... is why I love MJD!
I would like to see the old documents for documenting this PC because you plan to delete the HDD. Obviously personal data like addresses blurred.
Yay more retro tech! ❤️ you know what would be super baller making a sleeper pc out of that case!
Yep, I definitely want to see the NT4 install on this
Aww, I kinda hoped you’d imaged that drive, even if a lot of those documents are bland or nonsense, a few of them seem like treasured memories. Not imaging it to share anywhere, because of privacy, but keeping it in your stash for preservation. In another 50-100 years everyone who did it would be dead and it might have historic value or be interesting to their grandkids or something. But that’s just me.
From the frequency of the documents going down, to the weird custom wallpapers and renamed things, and the Comic Sans text, I get the feeling this was given to a kid when the dad upgraded and the kid chose Comic Sans and a bunch of the other theming. Which is wholesome.
@@JohnZombi88 I never proposed it was earth shattering - quite the opposite. A lot of valuable historical research has come from old forgotten letters buried in a shoebox, and this is the digital equivalent. Sure, plenty of those shoeboxes were thrown in the fireplace. But unless you similarly condemn eg war researchers looking through letters from 1910-1920, I’m frankly confused by the reaction.
@@JohnZombi88
Did you miss the “in 50 to 100 years” part from my first comment?
All history starts as recent history. Almost all documents are assumed, wrongly, to be worthless at first. Lost film and TV histories from the 1930s and 1960s respectively nevertheless didn’t prevent people throwing away video game history in the 1980s&90s.
Quaint old homebrew computer. i used to build my own back in time and they looked as good(?) as this one. Please do the NT4 install. I always loved the look and feel of that OS.
Windows 95/98 was built on windows 3.1.1. Alot of windows 3.1.1 remained and didn't get removed from the windows world until Windows ME so it makes sense to have alot of windows 3.1 programs still there. If windows explorer crashed you could fix it by editing the config.sys to boot to Progman (Windows 3.1) instead of Explorer. And they didn't have many 2GB hard drives until 1995/1996. So the drive would not have been moved from a windows 3.1 machine to this. It was uncommon but still in used to have AT form factors in budget computers. The Cyrix processor was also used mostly in budget computers, so that makes sense.
I'm having a nostalgia overload right now. :)
Oh for the days when everything moved to ICQ. loved that program. Also using mIRC programs to chat in different rooms on servers, much like Discord does today. In fact I think discord is based on mIRC.
Michael thanks for the great and engrossing content! I love watching your videos and hearing the story behind these things. Already LGR level IMO :)
Also this reallyy gives me nostalgia of my first computer haha.
Seeing that old interface, I was expecting you to stumble across Bonzai Buddy....yeesh. I feel old.
I got a power macintosh that came from a collage and they left there stuff on it its kind of neat.
I have a love/hate relationship with NT 4. It's very quirky and not, shall we say, the most stable. Yet, I can't stay away from it, and I find it very fascinating to use and to watch other people use. Bottom line, yes, I'd love to see a video of this computer running NT 4.
NT4 can be very very stable, I've had machines with uptime of several years.
Hmm. Reminds me of an old 2gb hdd I got with a pentium 66 machine. Had a lot of random html stuff and I couldn’t figure out why. Although that one has a really weird issue with the vga card as it’s a Dr. Berghaus VAMP550(if anyone can tell me how the jumpers should be configured, I’d be very appreciative). Half the colors don’t appear at all. Windows 95 runs pretty well tho.
Your channel is so nostalgic.
That machine looks eerily similar to one I got rid of many years ago, however if it is one I had, it didn't have a HDD when I got rid of it
2:38 I'm using one of those keyboards on my current machine. They're immortal.
This PC looks almost like my first x86 PC I got when I was still very young.
A 486DX2 with 2x speed CD-ROM drive, 3.5 and 5.41" floppy drive and 200 or so MB harddrive running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups.
Given this machine has been constantly upgraded, this could very well be from the same factory line.
IBM Via Voice and Dragon Naturally Speaking was the two best voice recognition packages of the time. I got hold of a trial copy of Via Voice and can remember having so much fun with with since it reminded me so much of Star Trek. You could actually navigate the computer with it.
I couldn't get my copy working I just end up shouting at it.
I worked on PC Computers XT model and AT model computers back in starting from 80's and a majority of those if they're transported there supposed to be a guard retention above attached to the cover w/ bolts or screws down inside the case if that's not there A lot of times those cards will come out partially or all the way depending on if there were handled roughly?
I'm guessing 16 mb RAM is a bit too little for some of the software, on top of Win 98 moreover? There is crazy swap file hard disk activity going on. The Cyrix isn't a beast either.
Yeah, that combined with the amount of stuff running in the background for most of the video made it run rather slow. I'll have to see if I have some more RAM to put in it.
@@MichaelMJD check your swap file, and defrag. Might help with the speed some. That HD is slower than dirt by todays standard so if it is writing to the swap file it will take a while.
@@butchjohnson3159with the huge bottlenech that is having 16mb of ram, defragging is probably not worthwhile
@@ikbintom More Ram does always help. Just remember that Windows 95/98 cannot access more than 68 MB or ram. It will see it, just not use it. Going to 128MB is a waste. The motherboard may not be able to use Dimms either. Might have to find some old Simms.
@@butchjohnson3159 windows 9x can actually see up to 512 mb and remain stable, and can use up to about 160 mb effectively (without slowing down because of it). But you're right that some motherboards might not support large amounts of ram. I still have an old laptop from 1997 lying around that has a limit of 96 mb
I was 1 month old in December 1996. This is so cool.
dont wipe it but rather backtrack this Terry person and give/send the hdd to him
It's cool to see all the period-correct software still there. I've bought a Celeron 433-based PC to install MSDOS 6.22 on it and guess what I've found on the HDD? Windows freaking XP! The poor computer barely struggled to run this monster of an OS. People just don't get that old computers are better left off for old games and software, not to try and do real work on them.
I remember this IBM via voice that came in a CD pack in my computer. I never made it work properly, it was really frustrating, so you reproduced the real experience.
This was an awesome video! I love seeing people touch on retro tech! Keep up the great work!!