Don't underestimate the keyboard!!! Many people still think IBM model Ms were the best, and they were bundled with Personal System/2. $400 and up for them now, which in most cases now is much more than the rest of the PC.
@@squirlmy Model Ms routinely sell for $50. There was a time not long ago where they were all $150+ though. There are millions of them out there, and a lot of people don't particularly like them (they have their diehard fans). Even the superior Model F can still be had for less than $400. These Leading Edge boards are worth good money for their switches alone. The DC-2014 keyboard in this video is guaranteed to have SKCM blue Alps switches, which are probably hunted by enthusiasts second only to IBM's beamsprings. I rarely see them sell for less than $200-300 anymore.
Adrian, the leading edge model D was revolutionary for its time. I still remember my father’s friend who got one. These were affordably priced quality PCXT clones. They had a smaller case than the IBM PC, they had front mounted power/reset buttons and keyboard connector, a real first for it’s time. They sold thousands if not millions of these things during the mid 80s. Leading Edge even sold their own branded word processor as well.
The LEWP--Leading Edge Word Processor. I had to support students using it in our library's computer lab (20 Model D's) as part of my campus job in 1987. I preferred Wordperfect.
@@markuslvic A relative of mine had a Leading Edge Model D, with LEWP. It also came bundled with a Lotus 123 look-alike, which as far as I could tell was an exact copy of 123, except for its brand name. Which appropriately enough, was... "Twin". :-D
They were much less integrated then. The Model D was more tightly integrated than the XT class machines before it, that allowed them to undercut many others in price. Of course by modern standards, it's still a ton of chips.
All of the discreet logic was eventually reduced into the north / south bridge chips we have in todays modern chipsets. Much easier to diagnose and repair with distinct chips if nothing else. :)
When I was a kid, my parents delayed buying a (much needed) new car to buy a home computer. They bought a Leading Edge Model D. Paid something like $500 extra to get the full 640k of RAM. Our was dual 360kB floppies. Later my dad brought home an IBM PC-XT from work to be his "work from home" computer (MDA video card, 20 MB hard drive plus dual 360kB floppies,) so the Leading Edge got to come to my bedroom instead of the basement/family room. I bought a Hard Card (20 MB hard drive on an ISA card) and a modem for it, and BBSed the nights away! We even had two phone lines - the second one so my dad could dial in to work (yes, in the late '80s!) I got caught BBSing in the middle of the night on the main phone line, so I ended up illicitly running a phone cable from the basement to the upstairs to my bedroom through a furnace duct/vent so I could BBS on the second phone line. Between then and high school in the '90s, my parents brought home from their work a Compaq Portable II (to keep, it was being replaced by an early laptop) a PS/2 Model 50 (replacing the XT as my dad's work-from-home computer,) and a PS/2 Model P70 (the "luggable" model with the large red-gas-plasma screen - also to keep as it was replaced by a laptop) which replaced the Leading Edge in my room (plugged in to a VGA monitor I bought myself so I could have color.) In high school, the "family PC" got upgraded to a later Leading Edge 486. (My dad's work PS/2 got moved to another desk.) The 486 wasn't very impressive. (Although I did end up upgrading the RAM, hard drive, modem, and video card myself.) Leading Edge had been bought by that point, and was just yet another generic PC maker by that point. (They were one of the earliest "low cost PC clone" makers back when we got our first one.)
HAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So I actually did but there was nothing interesting in them at all just a small snippet of a basic computer program ..... and then I try to keep the channel "G" rated for the kids, etc.
@@adriansdigitalbasement It's always interesting because there's a story behind every computer and what someone did with it long ago. Finding an old hard drive is like finding an old ship's log and learning about its voyages. Obviously even with 30+ year old computers the original owners might still be alive and it's good form not to dox them if there's extremely personal information (i.e. finding a diary instead of a ship's log), but I hope old hard drives do get preserved well enough that 50+ year old ones can tell stories from the dead in the same way we learn about the lives of our ancestors from old books.
Adrian, I’m so happy you came across the model D! This was the first PC I ever used at school and learned how to type on. This brings back a lot of memories for me.
I really enjoyed this one, and would love to see you poke around the other 486. The twist ending where you finally get the XTIDE to work was very satisfying.
My family had a Leading Edge XT 640k just like that in 1988. Our second machine after the C64. I somehow expected it to come up here sooner or later :D Thanks for the memories!
One of my first memories is my dad buying a Leading Edge 286 sometime in the late 80's. He ended up returning it because of some incompatibility (likely Lotus 1-2-3) and swapped it for a NEC 286. For some strange reason that distinctive Leading Edge logo stuck in my head, and I was able to figure out what brand it was as an adult. Strange what memories stick in your head from early childhood.
Well, this takes me back. WARNING: LONG-WINDED MIDDLE-AGED REMINISCENCES AHEAD I worked in Leading Edge's warranty hardware support department in the mid-'90s, at the tail end of the Daewoo era. The Model D was long out of warranty by then, but it was still legendary within the company (albeit not quite as legendary as the Model M, which was downright mythical). Unfortunately, by the time I came along, manufacturing quality had taken a pretty substantial dip, so my colleagues and I were pretty busy. Just as one example, at the time LE sold a computer called the WInPro 486, which was notable for a) not shipping with enough RAM to run Windows, b) not being professional-grade in any way, and c) not really having a 486 in it (it was one of those stupid Cyrix processors that was really a 386SX with the 486 instruction set). Things picked up somewhat quality-wise toward the end of my time there, circa the summer of 1995--the last generation of Leading Edge PCs were pretty good--but the writing was on the wall by then. Leading Edge was getting its lunch eaten by other manufacturers, mostly with "Packard" in their names, and the product improvements came too late. I got out when Daewoo extended a hiring freeze to include not making up for attrition, causing the support department workload to spiral out of control. I remember one day we in Hardware Support all went to a big meeting with a Daewoo bigwig who'd come over to HQ in Westborough, and one of my coworkers asked if we could please at least hire to replace people who left, because we were really getting hammered. He stared at us while his young flunky translated, then scowled, pointed at us, and said without going through the flunky: "The rest... you work harder." FYI, since you note at the beginning that you didn't know whether Leading Edge ever made 486es: they did! And not just the Cyrix faux 486es, they had proper Intel ones in the last few generations (including a minitower very similar to the generic one you have there). In fact, when I bailed, the company had just started shipping its first (and probably last) Pentium model. That's another horror story, in fact; the computer itself was fine, but the Corporate Masters had decided to revamp the company's image, so they abandoned the triangle logo for something painfully generic and branded the Pentium line "Fortiva". This was at around the same time that IBM launched their "Aptiva" product line, and a brand of yogurt called "Activia" appeared on the market. So that went about as well as you would expect. By then I was on my way to the exciting world of supporting ISP infrastructure equipment instead of PCs, anyway. Finally, a fun fact: the last generation of Leading Edge laptops were made by Lenovo! That was before they bought the ThinkPad brand from IBM and started selling laptops themselves instead of being an anonymous OEM for other manufacturers. So they were actually quite good... not that that helped them sell very well.
"...at the time LE sold a computer called the WInPro 486, which was notable for a) not shipping with enough RAM to run Windows..." I'm getting flashbacks to the first year after Vista launched.
@@MyNameIsBucket Not much, unfortunately. I worked for Leading Edge 30 years ago, and like I say, the Model D was long out of production even then. Anything with a processor earlier than a 386 was before my time.
I'm pretty sure I saw one of these at a yearly city recycling event. The line of cars was long, so I didn't want to hold up the whole line trying to ask them if I could buy it and/or try to root around for the DC-2014 keyboard that was probably tossed along with it. I already have two of those boards anyway though.
I'm glad you got that one figured out and I'd definitely like to see what's inside the mini-tower as well. Sometimes seeing some of those old setups is amazing. Looks like that hard drive was well used by the folks that owned that computer!
This was my family’s first computer. Ours came bundled with a tiny amber monitor but my Dad got a CGA monitor later. Kicked off my fascination with computers and gave me a computer literacy that has served me well my whole life. Computers like the Model D were not easy to use. They were cryptic and difficult to understand, so you really had put time and effort into getting anything out of them
My very first family computer was a CGA model D with two LD 5.25’s and an 8088. Never thought I would see this thing on your channel, awesome! Very special. Thanks for all the great content, Adrian.
I was the Director of Purchasing for a company that was the largest distributor of Leading Edge computers back in the late 80's. We actually "owned" Leading Edge briefly, when they filed for bankruptcy around 1989, although later the bankruptcy court took the name away from us. Originally, Leading Edge sourced the products from Mitsubishi (hence the names Model M and MH) and then later, to lower costs (plus Mitsubishi tired of Michael Shane's tendency to pay late) and for better credit terms they sourced from Daewoo (hence the Model D, D2, etc.). Quite popular at the time, maybe even more popular than any one of the models was the Leading Edge Word Processor, which came bundled with each computer and was also sold separately. Daewoo sold us the remaining Leading Edge computers directly but wanted to market directly in the US under their own name after that, so we turned to Mitac computers (AKA American Mitac) as the 3rd suppliers for Leading Edge branded computers. But that sort of quantity and branding took time, and several months later the bankruptcy court took the LE name away so we rebadged them under our own name, and while they were actually quite nice, we never sold them in the numbers we sold Leading Edge computers under, since the dealer network had either collapsed or moved on to a more stable supplier. We survived, as it was just one piece of our business, but a lot of smaller dealers went under as Michael Shane (the original owner of Leading Edge) would often extract full payment or large deposits before shipping computers to dealers (often late). Shane's dicey business practice is kind of how we became such a large distributor - we didn't demand those terms and reliably shipped on time and still gave dealers 35% off retail in large quantities - and when Shane was up against the wall, he'd sell us huge quantities of machines for 50% off if we paid COD, which we could. Shane was almost operating a Ponzi scheme at some point, in my estimation.
This was my family's first computer. My mother ran a typing business, and part of her selection criteria was the quality of the keyboard! She started with LEWP, but moved to Wordperfect within a few months. Our system originally had dual 360k floppies, but later had a 5.25" 30MB hard drive installed. Interesting bit about the dual CGA and MDA ports: you could hook up two monitors to the system and switch between them with the DOS mode command. I had a CGA monitor for my games, and my mother kept the monochrome monitor for her word processing.
I worked for Leading Edge and my first project was the the Model D from prototype stage. It was one of the most popular computers in the US esp. after Consumer Reports endorsed the PC. The computer had 640k, 4.77/7.16, CGA/Hercules all one big motherboard (even before the IBM PS/30). The designer was Steven Khang who went on to found power computing, a Macintosh computer mfg.
" The computer had 640k," - You sure about that one? All (3) Model D's I knew of personally, one that was mine, two belonging to friends, required an expansion card to get 640k, it wasn't all on the motherboard.
This was my first computer as a kid. Ours only had two 5.25" floppy drives (we later added a 3.5"). When we added that drive, we accidentally broke one of the pins on the integrated floppy controller and had to buy one of the slot-based floppy controllers as a replacement. We also upgraded the RAM from 512K to 640K. Great machine for the time! This is the first time I've seen one since we got rid of ours. Thanks for doing this.
Oh god... Its the Leading Edge PC!! That was my first PC that I ever owned from the late 1980s running on an 8086 CPU. I remembered that computer and had fond memories. I remember being able to put MSDOS, and all my utilities into one 360K boot up disk before I got the 1.44M floppy drive. Who would ever forget the Leading Edge Word Processor program? The glow of that green CRT monitor still brings back memories. I remember trying to code color ANSI screens for a BBS. It looked okay on a green monitor, but when I first saw it on an EGA monitor, boy, those ANSI screens were ugly! Even though I had a C64, that IBM PC was used a lot more due to BBSes in that era. Those were the good old days.
I have a couple of these things. I bought one from a company in Tampa. that one came without a keyboard, but it has a VGA card and a hard drive. I later bought one from a guy in Boston. It was in the original box with the keyboard and an amber monochrome display. I've only ever powered on the Tampa machine with the KB from the Boston machine. I didn't know they had batteries inside, so now I have a project to get them out. I bought them out of curiosity. I have an older brother that had a Leading Edge clone that he used to do his doctoral thesis. Also, I went to a Leading Edge dealer with my dad in the mid 1980s where we looked at these machines. I was just a teenager with an Atari 800 at the time, so I don't think I understood what I was looking at. Thanks for the teardown!
Videos of this type for dinosaurs computers are always appreciated for those of us who don't get rid of old machines just pack them away. Please keep them coming. Thanks
That's awesome! I actually have the Leading Edge PC (retroactively called the Model M) which was the first computer sold by Leading Edge and was made to directly compete with the IBM PC.
It's always nice to see a "HardCard". In aroundabout 1984, The first IT job I had was working for a small company in the UK "XTec UK" that used to buy in hard disks and controllers, re-programed the on card BIOS and mounted both on the hardware bracket, hard formated, softformeded repacked and sent out. The hardcard we called the "Insider". Some times we used OMPI and sometimes WD controllers.
Great Video. I demoed Minix 1.5 on my Leading Edge Model D 2011 at VCF Pacific NW 2019. Back in the day, not every PC/XT clone was 100% IBM compatible. When I was researching Minix, I found an old Info Sheet that mentioned the Model D worked well with Minix. Great System - I swapped out the onboard UART with a 16550A and put in the XT-IDE Card. If you google, there is an 8088 BIOS called Super XT. I run that now and it works great. Only downside is that the built in Video doesn't work.
I bought one of these in 1988 for about $1200, a lot of money at the time. I couldn't afford a hard drive so initially I worked with two floppies. I also had a 1200 baud modem. I did my MS and my Ph.D on one of these and used it for my first 3-4 years as a professor. At one point I installed a hard drive, a whopping 20 Megabytes. The 1200 bad modem worked well enough to run SAS statistical processing over a phone line to the campus mainframe on campus. I also later added a 3.5" floppy drive so I could take my WordPerfect files to from home to use on my Mac office computer and print it out on the department laser printer. I really regret replacing it. Mechanical keyboard, light weight compared to the IBM keyboards. WP gave you a plain uncluttered screen that showed your text and some page and line numbers on an amber monochrome that was easy on the eyes. It would be worth having today because it was the best writing tool I ever had.
Would love to see a video on the other machine. I would watch pretty much anything you do! Keep up the excellent videos and thanks for for taking the time to make them.
Oh, my goodness---_the D did color!_ The Leading Edge Model D 8088 was my dad's first computer. As I recall, Dad bought the D in 1986, surely based at least partly on Consumer Reports' enthusiastic recommendation. His configuration included one 5.25" floppy drive, and he also purchased an optional 20 MB hard drive. (Unfortunately, the hard drive never worked reliably.) I'm reasonably sure the keyboard was identical to the one you've got here. Dad also got a monitor that could display every color . . . as long as it was green. Indeed, until now, I had no idea the Model D offered any color capability whatsoever. Now I can rest easy!
I absolutely love watching these kinds of videos. I could easily watch this all day long! It's also the exact thing that gets me in the mood to get elbow deep inside my own computer projects. Sometimes I'll queue up your videos and proceed to spend ours debugging the most silliest of problems on an old computer, and have the best time doing it 😁
I feel like I need to call attention to just how beautiful the layout of the motherboard is for the Leading Edge machine. As someone who dabbles in PCB layout, this is a beautiful example of how to use all the available space.
Back around 1988, I had to dissolve my small legal partnership for several reasons, one being my partner''s unwillingness to invest in hardware and employee training to adopt a (then) modern PC computer installation in the office. What was odd then was that my firm had been one of the leading firms to adopt in-house computer services (CPM) in our city, one of the medium large cities in our state starting in 1979. After our split, I bought my secretary and myself computer systems and lessons on use of WordPerfect. I bought myself a Leading Edge XT, and it was a lesser, middle of the road computer, but fine for word processing. I taught myself WordPerfect 5.0 one weekend; and never got out of my bathrobe and never looked back. My secretary got an AST 286, the "Cadillac" of office computers of the day. The XT, 286, two pin printers, monitors, etc, plus some software, set me back $4,500 in 1988.. Later, another $1100 bought me the first Panasonic laser printer, which must have weighed 75 lb. If that seems like a lot of money, consider that the CPM system we (firm) bought in 1979, based on a 3 disk drives (5" disks) with a top of the line pin printer, cost us $15,000 with basic office software developed by the local vendor. We had to hire a dedicated system operator to do all operations. She later quit when I wouldn't pay $10,000 for the new "Wincheter" drive, first hard drive, with a mind-boggling one megabit of capacity. Later, my Leading Edge was stolen, and I replaced it with a generic 386DX; I remember thinking what a bargain I got finding expansion memory for a but less than $100/meg. Good times.
I love the format. Continue the archives. As soon as you said the XTide Bios was not compatible. I immediately thought "Change the board bios" and that was your fix later in the video. I guess I'm learning. Thanks for the videos. It has fueled my computer collecting and has helped my repair skills with my Arcade Machine collection. Thanks.
The very first PC I built, from scratch, was an XT. It was 10Mhz, turbo, and had 8, 1Mb RAM chips. Everything was on cards, except the keyboard. I had an MFM HDD controller, which I had to, not only set jumpers, but also boot into the card's firmware to low-level format the 20MB Seagate hard drive. I once got a hold of an RLL controller and could format the same drive to 30MB, but it wasn't stable. My friend would visit his dad, who I assume worked at UNR (University of Nevada, Reno). He would always come back with loads of disks with games and "laughy" text files, with deadly dad jokes. That's how I got a hold of Thexdir, a fun game that worked on any display, including cloned Hercules.
Picked up a slightly newer version of this pc (has the mhz switch). I had no idea it was the machine from this video, and I immediately remembered all of the shenanigans you had to deal with when it was first published. The info here is a treasure trove for restoring these important machines.
I used a Leading Edge Model M up until 1990. the Leading Edge Word Processor helped me write a lot of school work. I remember playing Pool of Radiance on it. it was so over the specs for the machine i'd start loading it when i got home from school and go watch half an hour of cartoons. Great memories of that machine, I should poke around I may have some of the software yet.
I worked for a local computer store that sold Leading Edge Products... solidly built machines, but not people's first choice when going to buy a computer. I had the 286 model of that machine. I worked there in the early 90s.
I actually had one of these. Well not that one, but a Leading Edge 286 that came to me with a bad motherboard, so my Dad and I swapped it out for a 386 DX25, that I kept until I was out of high school. When you discovered how the case opened forward, it brought back all kinds of memories. I even put my 486 DX4 120 in there, and stood it up like a tower as the cool kids did! :) Thanks for the nostalgia!
Ooh, that's the version of Tetris we had on our school RM Nimbus machines in the early 90s! I'm glad to see it, I had forgotten the exact version it was - thanks for showing it!
Great video. I remember the trials and tribulations of manually setting jumpers and dipswitches on cards! I love the idea of touring random old PC clones, there's a lot of variation and interesting things for sure.
I had a Leading Edge as a hand me down in the 90s. The printer that came with it was basically a typewriter(minus the keys) with a parallel port. It had a green phosphor monitor. Wish I still had it. It was mostly used to play shareware games such as Funnels and Buckets.
This is the first PC I ever used! I played Basstour and LEWP (Leading Edge Word Processor) and Nutshell (database I think) on my grandfather’s Model D! I had no idea it would support a 3.5 floppy drive, we were told since it was a clone it wouldn’t support one, but we did put a 80MB SCSI drive in it Thanks for the trip down memory lane! Love your videos
Ah, Nutshell. When I worked at LE in the mid-'90s, we were still using Nutshell internally to look up part numbers, figure out which models came with which options, and the like.
My grandfather worked for a chemical company, and in the 80s they introduced payment plans to buy computers to increase computer literacy for their employees, my grandfather bought a Leading Edge Model D and a NEC Multispeed which I used for years, unfortunately I had a mishap with the NEC and some ROM chips and never got that machine working again, and the Leading Edge was donated, but the old machines just had a certain charm to them
Our home PC when I was a kid was a PCjr, but my dad, being an architect, borrowed a friend's PC for a while to take a look at the early versions of AUTOCAD. It was a Leading Edge machine complete with one of those early optical mice that needed a metal pad with a dotted tracking surface. Needless to say, I wasn't allowed anywhere near it.
I had a Leading Edge 386 years back, with matching monitor and keyboard. It had a rather interesting 1/4 height 5.25" drive. Basically, a 1.2 MB drive, as you'd expect, except the height of a normal 3.5" floppy drive. Yet one more in a collection of things I wish I hadn't thrown away.
This was the first computer I ever used and cracked open. It was my dad's that he had stored away in the closet for a few years until I started messing with it around 1990 (I was 10). Had no HDD or modem, and had 2 5.25" drives. The country I was in didn't have any software for the thing I could buy to learn (all I had was the DOS disks and learned some .BAT scripting). That little 8088 still taught me a lot.
My first taste of DOS machines, helping out on the school computer lab. Configuring cylinders and heads to get the HD to work and adjusting dip switches to get a sound card to not conflict with something else. This really brought back memories of those days. Very enjoyable and I'm even more curious about that second "multimedia" age PC since it is possibly right around the age of computer where I had to fight to get ethernet cards to work in an already crowded computer with very little resources remaining. A time when plug and play, was more plug and pray.
Just stumbled on this video. I remember these computers. When I was looking for my first IBM type computer, the actual IBM computer was extremely expensive. I seem to remember prices like $3300 ish. There were a LOT of IBM XT clones out there at the time. The Leading Edge Model D was one of the more expensive clones. It sat at a price range around midway ($2000ish) between the actual IBM XT and the clones, which I think cost around $1200 at the time. Much cheaper than IBM boxes, yet not as cheaply made as the clones. The Leading Edge Model D was a computer we drooled over at the time, but was typically as out of price range as the IBM XT itself was.
I had a Model D and loved it. And what a great keyboard it had. There was just the perfect amount of tactile feedback in the "clicks". My current keyboard doesn't really come close in that respect but has other neat features, have been using it for some 20 years now, and it is still going strong. Every few years I disassemble it, clean the interior, wash all the keys. The PS/2 port connection kind of sucks for today's standards, but ...yeah.
My Dad had one of these around 1985-6. I only really remember it had the triangular logo and so that's how I know it was a leading edge. Looking online, it doesn't seem they came in too many case styles, so this was probably similar to the one he had. I also remember before buying it, he had brought home a work computer, a luggable suitcase-style PC to play with. I believe the system that replaced the Leading Edge was a Gateway 2000.
I wrote a previous comment that the new BIOS would disable the 16 color mode, but to my utter astonishment, it still seems to be working even with the new bios that you swapped in. I have no explanation for this, but I'm glad everything's all working for you!
OMG - This was my first computer. The Leading Edge Model D - It came with the clone of the Lotus 123 spreadsheet and more. it did have a 30 MB HD, so I was big man on campus, when I had it. I never had to use a computer with just floppy drives. Running MS-DOS by Van Wolverton (both books) were the beginning of me ending up with a career as a Cisco Network Engineer. Mine was an 8088 xt version that I bought in 1986.
I love these troubleshooting vids, going through the process of working out what's wrong, frustration, trying a new idea (repeat x times until working).
A friend of mine had one very similar, possibly this exact model when I was a kid. We discovered flipping the COLOR/MONO switch to MONO and back to COLOR would make it switch CGA palettes in some games - to the red and green palette instead of cyan and magenta. Theirs had a black hard disk where the 3 1/2" is on this particular model. That 5 1/4" also spits the disk out when you open the door and had kinda nice action. I remember the door lock too. Also SO MANY CHIPS!! we had an original Tandy 1000 at the time which has probably less than half the chips. I remember them getting a joystick card for Christmas one year too, just like this one. We played lots of Test Drive on it.
This was my first computer I bought in 1985. Mine had 2 floppies and a 1200 Baud modem. Loved the keyboard. I paid around $1200 for it. I was so excited. Glad I bought this instead of a Kaypro.
After an insane amount of fiddling, I was able to get my model D connected to a very early version of AOL back in 1995. I remember it having an EGA monitor and I think I installed a 14.4 modem. Could get it on the main AOL screen but functionality was all but non-existent. Don’t think I was able to access web pages. Frustrated, I built a Cyrix 166 white box, 16MB RAM, and a 1.7GB Seagate HDD, win 95 and that was my first internet machine. Thanks for rekindling this memory!
This is an awesome little XT clone, but that keyboard is the real prize. Alps SKCM Blue switches, one of the best clicky switches and as Chyros would call it, the Beethoven of Alps clicky switches
This was great. Definitely do a video on the other PC as well. The most interesting part to me was the motherboard BIOS issue. The fact that you were able to utilize another BIOS from a completely different machine is just fascinating. Those old PCs were so similar to each other. You could never do that today with a modern PC.
Hi Adrian, have just been clearing out my garage and found an old "Sunshine" Eprom programmer which uses an XT style card, looks like it programs the old 25/21 volt Eproms, comes with the original 5.25 floppy and instructions, yours if you are interested. I'll throw in any other XT stuff too just to fill up the box. And many thanks for the years of helpful info on how to keep these old machines running.
I really appreciate that you document all the fails and foulups as well as the successes. It makes us mere mortals with lesser technical aptitude feel just a tad less inferior, knowing that anybody can make mistakes. That said, your fix of the ROM issue was borderline witchcraft! Well done all around.
The Leading Edge Model D was my first computer in 1985. I used it until about 1992 and it was in storage until my parents moved in 2003. Looked just like this one. I even added the 3.5 drive.
This was my first Intel PC, purchased in 1983. I think I paid $1,200 for PC, the 20MB hard drive on a card was an additional $800. CGA color, Hercules compatible monochrome 2 monitor was nice. Word processing on CGA was really hard on the eyes so you used monochrome when needed. Bumped to 768kb RAM, rplaced CPU with V20 8Mhz, 20Mhz crystal over clocked that to 10Mhz, moded the RAM wait states and for an XT it was "fast". These machines were great.
Leading Edge model D! I learned how to use PCs on this computer at my first job. I remember playing Spectrum Holobyte Fighting Falcon on it after work. Such fun and a great keyboard.
Very much enjoyed this!! I grew up with DOS and ran a Bulletin Board on a DOS machine for many years. Started with DOS on a Heathkit H-89. Those were the years. Learn to write assembly DOS drivers too I’d love to see you keep on with this series. It’s great!!
Hi Adrian. Great video. A little note on your software exploratory around 41:00. I noticed the machine also has a copy of dBASE III. Sidekick and dBase III were a very common combination back then, since dBASE was programmed with .PRG text files that were interpreted, not compiled. The dBase text editor was utterly appalling so everybody used Sidekick instead. When writing and debugging their program files, they would quickly pop up the Sidekick Notepad TSR, already loaded with a with a copy of the .PRG, edit it, dismiss Sidekick and immediately re-run the freshly-edited program in dBase. It was such a productivity boost. What was extra-cool was that the Sidekick editor used WordStar keystrokes (Ctrl-K C for Copy etc.). The maximum size of a Sidekick text file was 64K so, if your program exceeded that, you could then fire up the exact same .PRG in WordStar and continue editing using the keystrokes that were already burned into your muscle memory.
we had a leading edge xt as our first PC in our house. had the dual video outputs. we had a mono monitor sitting on top and a Sony trinitron with RGB input that doubled as the tv we would use in the kitchen while eating dinner. we would wheel it out to the living room and hook it up to the computer and could get CGA for color games. 10mb hard disk using stacker to get it up to 20mb ish.
Adrian, I know PC's aren't necessarily your favorite type of retro computers, but this is some serious quality PC retro content; it makes me go "oooh" at every revelation about a computer of which the basic specs have been known for 35 years.
I know this type of video isn't your cup of tea, but I absolutely loved it. This is the era of equipment I learned to disassemble PCs as a young child when this hardware was very old (1995ish). Have you ever heard of a WANG PC? I haven't come across one since. Thanks for the time you have put into this! Will we get to see the other mini tower as well? The first PC that I refurbished and sold for a small profit was a Leaning Edge 386 that ran Windows 3.1 in 1996/1997ish. I always thought leading edge was a local outfit building clones. Very cool to see this!
I remember having a hardcard like that. It was a Miniscribe 20MB hard drive. Used it in my IBM PS/2 30 that I bought without a hard drive (back in 1993).
Great video! My first PC was a leading Edge 486 SX25, now long gone. After getting into the retro computer kick a few years ago I surfed eBay for a bit and was able to find two of them, as well as a 386, and Leading edge keyboard, VGA monitor, and mouse. One of these days I'll get around to cleaning them up...
A friend and I got about a dozen of these Leading Edge machines in the mid-90s. The local community college had just replaced their workstations and auctioned off the old ones. We paid a dollar for a dozen. Thankfully that included keyboards and monitors. I think we got about six of them to work by cannibalizing parts from the others. We gave them away to our friends. The biggest problem we had was the hard drives releasing their blue smoke. Our units only had 5.25" drives with the hard drive taking the second bay. So, the only cards we had were the hard drive controllers. So many games were played on those machines. Sadly, I'm sure they were all trashed a few years later when we started getting jobs and could afford something a bit more modern.
Shoutout to Ron and Heidi! :p I love videos like this, I once bought an Atari 800 from a guy on craigslist, the disks that it had with it included a guy's diary from 1984, I was able to track him down on Facebook and I sent him the contents of it by printing it to my AtariMax virtual printer. Apparently he got a new computer in the late 80s and left the Atari with his college roommate...
Wow, Adrian. You're like the guy I called back in the day when I needed help with a DOSenstein beast that was missing its "Abby Normal" chip. Meanwhile, I've never been to an Electronics Recycling center but am now inspired to. I googled and to my surprise found 3 listed as close to me. I've always dropped off stuff, like at the town transfer station but I've never gone to such a place to pick up stuff...Let's see what's to be found.
Well, the 3 purported--by a certain web search engine--closest electronics recycling centers were a bust. Two only receive equipment and one isn't a recycle center of anything but hey, it was "near me" so what's to complain about (doh). I may have better luck asking people instead of the internet.
I'm sure everyone and their grandmother told you by now but that keyboard in that condition is worth a pretty penny and has one of the best keyboard switches of all time. It's also easily convertible to newer PCs.
I grew up with an XT-class machine that dad had from/for his job working for a gift and party supply company, and I remember playing with Banner Mania on there as a kid. Pretty nostalgic seeing it again.
"The Computer Chronicles is made possible by Leading Edge"
Leading the way to the Information Age!
@@bhickenbottom Same!
I see comments on these with how much of a headache these machines were
@@rartolak Yes, as I recall, the hard disk on my dad's system didn't work reliably.
And BYTE magazine!
I could watch Adrian open random old computers all day long. This is top tier stuff!
Yes!
Yup
You need to get a life.
"Why is this Leading Edge PC so good?" "Well, the keyboard is a big plus."
It must have been designed in Sweden.
That's certainly a key element of its success.
Don't underestimate the keyboard!!! Many people still think IBM model Ms were the best, and they were bundled with Personal System/2. $400 and up for them now, which in most cases now is much more than the rest of the PC.
@@squirlmy Model Ms routinely sell for $50. There was a time not long ago where they were all $150+ though. There are millions of them out there, and a lot of people don't particularly like them (they have their diehard fans). Even the superior Model F can still be had for less than $400. These Leading Edge boards are worth good money for their switches alone. The DC-2014 keyboard in this video is guaranteed to have SKCM blue Alps switches, which are probably hunted by enthusiasts second only to IBM's beamsprings. I rarely see them sell for less than $200-300 anymore.
I loved this video. Have a look at the other machine. Please.
Yes, we would likely more.
Yes please!
Yes, please do! 👍
Ditto ⬆️
Please, sir. I want some more.
Adrian, the leading edge model D was revolutionary for its time. I still remember my father’s friend who got one. These were affordably priced quality PCXT clones. They had a smaller case than the IBM PC, they had front mounted power/reset buttons and keyboard connector, a real first for it’s time. They sold thousands if not millions of these things during the mid 80s. Leading Edge even sold their own branded word processor as well.
The LEWP--Leading Edge Word Processor. I had to support students using it in our library's computer lab (20 Model D's) as part of my campus job in 1987. I preferred Wordperfect.
I remember LEWP... It sucked.
@@markuslvic Or Wordstar before that.
Anything but Edlin!
@@wishusknight3009 Was the best WP for it's day... and only one that supported long-file names in DOS
@@markuslvic A relative of mine had a Leading Edge Model D, with LEWP. It also came bundled with a Lotus 123 look-alike, which as far as I could tell was an exact copy of 123, except for its brand name. Which appropriately enough, was... "Twin". :-D
It is always amazing to me seeing how many chips are on these old motherboards.
They were much less integrated then. The Model D was more tightly integrated than the XT class machines before it, that allowed them to undercut many others in price. Of course by modern standards, it's still a ton of chips.
It's also interesting how straight forward the design is. Well within one's ability to understand.
All of the discreet logic was eventually reduced into the north / south bridge chips we have in todays modern chipsets. Much easier to diagnose and repair with distinct chips if nothing else. :)
Makes me think of the Micro8088 project and how few chips it uses...
When I was a kid, my parents delayed buying a (much needed) new car to buy a home computer. They bought a Leading Edge Model D. Paid something like $500 extra to get the full 640k of RAM. Our was dual 360kB floppies. Later my dad brought home an IBM PC-XT from work to be his "work from home" computer (MDA video card, 20 MB hard drive plus dual 360kB floppies,) so the Leading Edge got to come to my bedroom instead of the basement/family room. I bought a Hard Card (20 MB hard drive on an ISA card) and a modem for it, and BBSed the nights away!
We even had two phone lines - the second one so my dad could dial in to work (yes, in the late '80s!) I got caught BBSing in the middle of the night on the main phone line, so I ended up illicitly running a phone cable from the basement to the upstairs to my bedroom through a furnace duct/vent so I could BBS on the second phone line.
Between then and high school in the '90s, my parents brought home from their work a Compaq Portable II (to keep, it was being replaced by an early laptop) a PS/2 Model 50 (replacing the XT as my dad's work-from-home computer,) and a PS/2 Model P70 (the "luggable" model with the large red-gas-plasma screen - also to keep as it was replaced by a laptop) which replaced the Leading Edge in my room (plugged in to a VGA monitor I bought myself so I could have color.) In high school, the "family PC" got upgraded to a later Leading Edge 486. (My dad's work PS/2 got moved to another desk.)
The 486 wasn't very impressive. (Although I did end up upgrading the RAM, hard drive, modem, and video card myself.) Leading Edge had been bought by that point, and was just yet another generic PC maker by that point. (They were one of the earliest "low cost PC clone" makers back when we got our first one.)
I'm so disappointed that you didn't look at the files named "SHIT" and "JUNK". Those are the ones I would've immediately gravitated to. xD
HAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So I actually did but there was nothing interesting in them at all just a small snippet of a basic computer program ..... and then I try to keep the channel "G" rated for the kids, etc.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that!
@@performa9523 There was also SHIT2 LOL
@@adriansdigitalbasement It's always interesting because there's a story behind every computer and what someone did with it long ago. Finding an old hard drive is like finding an old ship's log and learning about its voyages.
Obviously even with 30+ year old computers the original owners might still be alive and it's good form not to dox them if there's extremely personal information (i.e. finding a diary instead of a ship's log), but I hope old hard drives do get preserved well enough that 50+ year old ones can tell stories from the dead in the same way we learn about the lives of our ancestors from old books.
@@NozomuYume as a man who just finished imaging an mfm bbs server I encountered in scrap, I concur :)
More archeology please!
"Oh, let's look what kind of switches the keyboard has."
Just the most sought after Alps switches, very expensive. :))
Yeah, not bad for his first clicky Alps board. The DC-2014 was also my own first Alps board.
P.S. Do more PC archeology! We like the deep dive into mystery! :D
Adrian, I’m so happy you came across the model D! This was the first PC I ever used at school and learned how to type on. This brings back a lot of memories for me.
I really enjoyed this one, and would love to see you poke around the other 486. The twist ending where you finally get the XTIDE to work was very satisfying.
My family had a Leading Edge XT 640k just like that in 1988. Our second machine after the C64. I somehow expected it to come up here sooner or later :D
Thanks for the memories!
That's a downgrade.
One of my first memories is my dad buying a Leading Edge 286 sometime in the late 80's. He ended up returning it because of some incompatibility (likely Lotus 1-2-3) and swapped it for a NEC 286. For some strange reason that distinctive Leading Edge logo stuck in my head, and I was able to figure out what brand it was as an adult. Strange what memories stick in your head from early
childhood.
I remember commodore 286 systems, the horror... especially if you have none of the system floppies
Well, this takes me back. WARNING: LONG-WINDED MIDDLE-AGED REMINISCENCES AHEAD
I worked in Leading Edge's warranty hardware support department in the mid-'90s, at the tail end of the Daewoo era. The Model D was long out of warranty by then, but it was still legendary within the company (albeit not quite as legendary as the Model M, which was downright mythical). Unfortunately, by the time I came along, manufacturing quality had taken a pretty substantial dip, so my colleagues and I were pretty busy. Just as one example, at the time LE sold a computer called the WInPro 486, which was notable for a) not shipping with enough RAM to run Windows, b) not being professional-grade in any way, and c) not really having a 486 in it (it was one of those stupid Cyrix processors that was really a 386SX with the 486 instruction set).
Things picked up somewhat quality-wise toward the end of my time there, circa the summer of 1995--the last generation of Leading Edge PCs were pretty good--but the writing was on the wall by then. Leading Edge was getting its lunch eaten by other manufacturers, mostly with "Packard" in their names, and the product improvements came too late. I got out when Daewoo extended a hiring freeze to include not making up for attrition, causing the support department workload to spiral out of control. I remember one day we in Hardware Support all went to a big meeting with a Daewoo bigwig who'd come over to HQ in Westborough, and one of my coworkers asked if we could please at least hire to replace people who left, because we were really getting hammered. He stared at us while his young flunky translated, then scowled, pointed at us, and said without going through the flunky: "The rest... you work harder."
FYI, since you note at the beginning that you didn't know whether Leading Edge ever made 486es: they did! And not just the Cyrix faux 486es, they had proper Intel ones in the last few generations (including a minitower very similar to the generic one you have there). In fact, when I bailed, the company had just started shipping its first (and probably last) Pentium model. That's another horror story, in fact; the computer itself was fine, but the Corporate Masters had decided to revamp the company's image, so they abandoned the triangle logo for something painfully generic and branded the Pentium line "Fortiva". This was at around the same time that IBM launched their "Aptiva" product line, and a brand of yogurt called "Activia" appeared on the market. So that went about as well as you would expect. By then I was on my way to the exciting world of supporting ISP infrastructure equipment instead of PCs, anyway.
Finally, a fun fact: the last generation of Leading Edge laptops were made by Lenovo! That was before they bought the ThinkPad brand from IBM and started selling laptops themselves instead of being an anonymous OEM for other manufacturers. So they were actually quite good... not that that helped them sell very well.
"...at the time LE sold a computer called the WInPro 486, which was notable for a) not shipping with enough RAM to run Windows..." I'm getting flashbacks to the first year after Vista launched.
this is a longshot but i've found a desktop for sale. the model is dc-2012 which isn't actually documented anywhere. know anything about it?
@@MyNameIsBucket Not much, unfortunately. I worked for Leading Edge 30 years ago, and like I say, the Model D was long out of production even then. Anything with a processor earlier than a 386 was before my time.
Crazy: A PC XT clone in such a good condition at a recycle center !!
Even crazier is that they didn't wipe the corporate files from the hard drive.
I asked my local recycling centre, but they won't let me in the back to look at the computers.
Looks like it spent 30 years in storage. Probably got replaced after the harddrive failed?
I'm pretty sure I saw one of these at a yearly city recycling event. The line of cars was long, so I didn't want to hold up the whole line trying to ask them if I could buy it and/or try to root around for the DC-2014 keyboard that was probably tossed along with it. I already have two of those boards anyway though.
Great video, early PC stuff is absolutely my jam, so PLEASE do the other one, and many more. :)
Those Leading Edge computers were pretty popular when I was in college, lo these many years ago... A pretty solid business computer for the time.
I actually find this older one way more interesting then the more generic tower PC, really nice repair process!
Oh god I am crossing all my fingers and toes for you to find the BIOS for that precious Floppy controller.
Yeah that is just heart breaking... Crossing them here too!
Yeah, that was really cringy!
Yes, uncharacteristically careless of Mr Black. Must have been distracted 😢
I'm glad you got that one figured out and I'd definitely like to see what's inside the mini-tower as well. Sometimes seeing some of those old setups is amazing. Looks like that hard drive was well used by the folks that owned that computer!
This was my family’s first computer. Ours came bundled with a tiny amber monitor but my Dad got a CGA monitor later. Kicked off my fascination with computers and gave me a computer literacy that has served me well my whole life. Computers like the Model D were not easy to use. They were cryptic and difficult to understand, so you really had put time and effort into getting anything out of them
My very first family computer was a CGA model D with two LD 5.25’s and an 8088. Never thought I would see this thing on your channel, awesome! Very special. Thanks for all the great content, Adrian.
I was the Director of Purchasing for a company that was the largest distributor of Leading Edge computers back in the late 80's. We actually "owned" Leading Edge briefly, when they filed for bankruptcy around 1989, although later the bankruptcy court took the name away from us. Originally, Leading Edge sourced the products from Mitsubishi (hence the names Model M and MH) and then later, to lower costs (plus Mitsubishi tired of Michael Shane's tendency to pay late) and for better credit terms they sourced from Daewoo (hence the Model D, D2, etc.). Quite popular at the time, maybe even more popular than any one of the models was the Leading Edge Word Processor, which came bundled with each computer and was also sold separately. Daewoo sold us the remaining Leading Edge computers directly but wanted to market directly in the US under their own name after that, so we turned to Mitac computers (AKA American Mitac) as the 3rd suppliers for Leading Edge branded computers. But that sort of quantity and branding took time, and several months later the bankruptcy court took the LE name away so we rebadged them under our own name, and while they were actually quite nice, we never sold them in the numbers we sold Leading Edge computers under, since the dealer network had either collapsed or moved on to a more stable supplier. We survived, as it was just one piece of our business, but a lot of smaller dealers went under as Michael Shane (the original owner of Leading Edge) would often extract full payment or large deposits before shipping computers to dealers (often late). Shane's dicey business practice is kind of how we became such a large distributor - we didn't demand those terms and reliably shipped on time and still gave dealers 35% off retail in large quantities - and when Shane was up against the wall, he'd sell us huge quantities of machines for 50% off if we paid COD, which we could. Shane was almost operating a Ponzi scheme at some point, in my estimation.
This was my family's first computer. My mother ran a typing business, and part of her selection criteria was the quality of the keyboard! She started with LEWP, but moved to Wordperfect within a few months. Our system originally had dual 360k floppies, but later had a 5.25" 30MB hard drive installed. Interesting bit about the dual CGA and MDA ports: you could hook up two monitors to the system and switch between them with the DOS mode command. I had a CGA monitor for my games, and my mother kept the monochrome monitor for her word processing.
I worked for Leading Edge and my first project was the the Model D from prototype stage. It was one of the most popular computers in the US esp. after Consumer Reports endorsed the PC. The computer had 640k, 4.77/7.16, CGA/Hercules all one big motherboard (even before the IBM PS/30). The designer was Steven Khang who went on to found power computing, a Macintosh computer mfg.
" The computer had 640k," - You sure about that one?
All (3) Model D's I knew of personally, one that was mine, two belonging to friends, required an expansion card to get 640k, it wasn't all on the motherboard.
Love this PC archeology format. Clearly a lot of work went into this one.
This was my first computer as a kid. Ours only had two 5.25" floppy drives (we later added a 3.5"). When we added that drive, we accidentally broke one of the pins on the integrated floppy controller and had to buy one of the slot-based floppy controllers as a replacement. We also upgraded the RAM from 512K to 640K. Great machine for the time! This is the first time I've seen one since we got rid of ours. Thanks for doing this.
Oh god... Its the Leading Edge PC!! That was my first PC that I ever owned from the late 1980s running on an 8086 CPU. I remembered that computer and had fond memories. I remember being able to put MSDOS, and all my utilities into one 360K boot up disk before I got the 1.44M floppy drive. Who would ever forget the Leading Edge Word Processor program? The glow of that green CRT monitor still brings back memories. I remember trying to code color ANSI screens for a BBS. It looked okay on a green monitor, but when I first saw it on an EGA monitor, boy, those ANSI screens were ugly! Even though I had a C64, that IBM PC was used a lot more due to BBSes in that era.
Those were the good old days.
I have a couple of these things. I bought one from a company in Tampa. that one came without a keyboard, but it has a VGA card and a hard drive. I later bought one from a guy in Boston. It was in the original box with the keyboard and an amber monochrome display. I've only ever powered on the Tampa machine with the KB from the Boston machine. I didn't know they had batteries inside, so now I have a project to get them out. I bought them out of curiosity. I have an older brother that had a Leading Edge clone that he used to do his doctoral thesis. Also, I went to a Leading Edge dealer with my dad in the mid 1980s where we looked at these machines. I was just a teenager with an Atari 800 at the time, so I don't think I understood what I was looking at. Thanks for the teardown!
Videos of this type for dinosaurs computers are always appreciated for those of us who don't get rid of old machines just pack them away. Please keep them coming. Thanks
That's awesome! I actually have the Leading Edge PC (retroactively called the Model M) which was the first computer sold by Leading Edge and was made to directly compete with the IBM PC.
Yes. Work on the next one. I love videos about these older computers!
It's always nice to see a "HardCard". In aroundabout 1984, The first IT job I had was working for a small company in the UK "XTec UK" that used to buy in hard disks and controllers, re-programed the on card BIOS and mounted both on the hardware bracket, hard formated, softformeded repacked and sent out. The hardcard we called the "Insider". Some times we used OMPI and sometimes WD controllers.
There's something very comforting about the old beige box.
Great Video. I demoed Minix 1.5 on my Leading Edge Model D 2011 at VCF Pacific NW 2019. Back in the day, not every PC/XT clone was 100% IBM compatible. When I was researching Minix, I found an old Info Sheet that mentioned the Model D worked well with Minix. Great System - I swapped out the onboard UART with a 16550A and put in the XT-IDE Card. If you google, there is an 8088 BIOS called Super XT. I run that now and it works great. Only downside is that the built in Video doesn't work.
I bought one of these in 1988 for about $1200, a lot of money at the time. I couldn't afford a hard drive so initially I worked with two floppies. I also had a 1200 baud modem. I did my MS and my Ph.D on one of these and used it for my first 3-4 years as a professor. At one point I installed a hard drive, a whopping 20 Megabytes. The 1200 bad modem worked well enough to run SAS statistical processing over a phone line to the campus mainframe on campus. I also later added a 3.5" floppy drive so I could take my WordPerfect files to from home to use on my Mac office computer and print it out on the department laser printer.
I really regret replacing it. Mechanical keyboard, light weight compared to the IBM keyboards. WP gave you a plain uncluttered screen that showed your text and some page and line numbers on an amber monochrome that was easy on the eyes. It would be worth having today because it was the best writing tool I ever had.
Please sir, may I have some more.
Would love to see a video on the other machine. I would watch pretty much anything you do! Keep up the excellent videos and thanks for for taking the time to make them.
Oh, my goodness---_the D did color!_
The Leading Edge Model D 8088 was my dad's first computer. As I recall, Dad bought the D in 1986, surely based at least partly on Consumer Reports' enthusiastic recommendation. His configuration included one 5.25" floppy drive, and he also purchased an optional 20 MB hard drive. (Unfortunately, the hard drive never worked reliably.) I'm reasonably sure the keyboard was identical to the one you've got here.
Dad also got a monitor that could display every color . . . as long as it was green. Indeed, until now, I had no idea the Model D offered any color capability whatsoever. Now I can rest easy!
I absolutely love watching these kinds of videos. I could easily watch this all day long!
It's also the exact thing that gets me in the mood to get elbow deep inside my own computer projects.
Sometimes I'll queue up your videos and proceed to spend ours debugging the most silliest of problems on an old computer, and have the best time doing it 😁
I feel like I need to call attention to just how beautiful the layout of the motherboard is for the Leading Edge machine. As someone who dabbles in PCB layout, this is a beautiful example of how to use all the available space.
Back around 1988, I had to dissolve my small legal partnership for several reasons, one being my partner''s unwillingness to invest in hardware and employee training to adopt a (then) modern PC computer installation in the office. What was odd then was that my firm had been one of the leading firms to adopt in-house computer services (CPM) in our city, one of the medium large cities in our state starting in 1979. After our split, I bought my secretary and myself computer systems and lessons on use of WordPerfect. I bought myself a Leading Edge XT, and it was a lesser, middle of the road computer, but fine for word processing. I taught myself WordPerfect 5.0 one weekend; and never got out of my bathrobe and never looked back. My secretary got an AST 286, the "Cadillac" of office computers of the day. The XT, 286, two pin printers, monitors, etc, plus some software, set me back $4,500 in 1988.. Later, another $1100 bought me the first Panasonic laser printer, which must have weighed 75 lb. If that seems like a lot of money, consider that the CPM system we (firm) bought in 1979, based on a 3 disk drives (5" disks) with a top of the line pin printer, cost us $15,000 with basic office software developed by the local vendor. We had to hire a dedicated system operator to do all operations. She later quit when I wouldn't pay $10,000 for the new "Wincheter" drive, first hard drive, with a mind-boggling one megabit of capacity. Later, my Leading Edge was stolen, and I replaced it with a generic 386DX; I remember thinking what a bargain I got finding expansion memory for a but less than $100/meg. Good times.
That was a real #doscember video :D Very nice!
Thank you for beeing here. Regards from Poland.
That Leading Edge was my first PC! Fond memories of playing Jill of the Jungle and War in Middle Earth on it.
I love the format. Continue the archives. As soon as you said the XTide Bios was not compatible. I immediately thought "Change the board bios" and that was your fix later in the video. I guess I'm learning. Thanks for the videos. It has fueled my computer collecting and has helped my repair skills with my Arcade Machine collection. Thanks.
The very first PC I built, from scratch, was an XT. It was 10Mhz, turbo, and had 8, 1Mb RAM chips. Everything was on cards, except the keyboard. I had an MFM HDD controller, which I had to, not only set jumpers, but also boot into the card's firmware to low-level format the 20MB Seagate hard drive. I once got a hold of an RLL controller and could format the same drive to 30MB, but it wasn't stable. My friend would visit his dad, who I assume worked at UNR (University of Nevada, Reno). He would always come back with loads of disks with games and "laughy" text files, with deadly dad jokes. That's how I got a hold of Thexdir, a fun game that worked on any display, including cloned Hercules.
One of the best recent videos, please keep'em coming :)
Picked up a slightly newer version of this pc (has the mhz switch). I had no idea it was the machine from this video, and I immediately remembered all of the shenanigans you had to deal with when it was first published. The info here is a treasure trove for restoring these important machines.
My very first computer was a Leading Edge Model D. That keyboard really brings me back.
I used a Leading Edge Model M up until 1990. the Leading Edge Word Processor helped me write a lot of school work. I remember playing Pool of Radiance on it. it was so over the specs for the machine i'd start loading it when i got home from school and go watch half an hour of cartoons. Great memories of that machine, I should poke around I may have some of the software yet.
I worked for a local computer store that sold Leading Edge Products... solidly built machines, but not people's first choice when going to buy a computer. I had the 286 model of that machine. I worked there in the early 90s.
Remember any of them having Western Electric memory chips in them? Those are the ones labeled "WE".
I actually had one of these. Well not that one, but a Leading Edge 286 that came to me with a bad motherboard, so my Dad and I swapped it out for a 386 DX25, that I kept until I was out of high school. When you discovered how the case opened forward, it brought back all kinds of memories. I even put my 486 DX4 120 in there, and stood it up like a tower as the cool kids did! :) Thanks for the nostalgia!
Ooh, that's the version of Tetris we had on our school RM Nimbus machines in the early 90s! I'm glad to see it, I had forgotten the exact version it was - thanks for showing it!
Great video. I remember the trials and tribulations of manually setting jumpers and dipswitches on cards! I love the idea of touring random old PC clones, there's a lot of variation and interesting things for sure.
I had a Leading Edge as a hand me down in the 90s. The printer that came with it was basically a typewriter(minus the keys) with a parallel port. It had a green phosphor monitor. Wish I still had it. It was mostly used to play shareware games such as Funnels and Buckets.
This is the first PC I ever used! I played Basstour and LEWP (Leading Edge Word Processor) and Nutshell (database I think) on my grandfather’s Model D! I had no idea it would support a 3.5 floppy drive, we were told since it was a clone it wouldn’t support one, but we did put a 80MB SCSI drive in it
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! Love your videos
Ah, Nutshell. When I worked at LE in the mid-'90s, we were still using Nutshell internally to look up part numbers, figure out which models came with which options, and the like.
My grandfather worked for a chemical company, and in the 80s they introduced payment plans to buy computers to increase computer literacy for their employees, my grandfather bought a Leading Edge Model D and a NEC Multispeed which I used for years, unfortunately I had a mishap with the NEC and some ROM chips and never got that machine working again, and the Leading Edge was donated, but the old machines just had a certain charm to them
I don’t know why exactly, but I’ve come back to these two computers when I’m relaxing far more often than any of your other backlog.
Our home PC when I was a kid was a PCjr, but my dad, being an architect, borrowed a friend's PC for a while to take a look at the early versions of AUTOCAD. It was a Leading Edge machine complete with one of those early optical mice that needed a metal pad with a dotted tracking surface. Needless to say, I wasn't allowed anywhere near it.
Glad you saved this PC! I love recycling, but not for old PCs. It breaks my heart thinking people will just leave stuff like this for scrap.
I had a Leading Edge 386 years back, with matching monitor and keyboard. It had a rather interesting 1/4 height 5.25" drive. Basically, a 1.2 MB drive, as you'd expect, except the height of a normal 3.5" floppy drive. Yet one more in a collection of things I wish I hadn't thrown away.
@53:37 glad to see the art of file naming hasn't changed much since 1997.
This was the first computer I ever used and cracked open. It was my dad's that he had stored away in the closet for a few years until I started messing with it around 1990 (I was 10). Had no HDD or modem, and had 2 5.25" drives. The country I was in didn't have any software for the thing I could buy to learn (all I had was the DOS disks and learned some .BAT scripting). That little 8088 still taught me a lot.
My first taste of DOS machines, helping out on the school computer lab. Configuring cylinders and heads to get the HD to work and adjusting dip switches to get a sound card to not conflict with something else. This really brought back memories of those days. Very enjoyable and I'm even more curious about that second "multimedia" age PC since it is possibly right around the age of computer where I had to fight to get ethernet cards to work in an already crowded computer with very little resources remaining. A time when plug and play, was more plug and pray.
Just stumbled on this video. I remember these computers. When I was looking for my first IBM type computer, the actual IBM computer was extremely expensive. I seem to remember prices like $3300 ish. There were a LOT of IBM XT clones out there at the time. The Leading Edge Model D was one of the more expensive clones. It sat at a price range around midway ($2000ish) between the actual IBM XT and the clones, which I think cost around $1200 at the time. Much cheaper than IBM boxes, yet not as cheaply made as the clones. The Leading Edge Model D was a computer we drooled over at the time, but was typically as out of price range as the IBM XT itself was.
I had a Model D and loved it. And what a great keyboard it had. There was just the perfect amount of tactile feedback in the "clicks". My current keyboard doesn't really come close in that respect but has other neat features, have been using it for some 20 years now, and it is still going strong. Every few years I disassemble it, clean the interior, wash all the keys.
The PS/2 port connection kind of sucks for today's standards, but ...yeah.
At 12:25, that battery stores HD settings and RTC. At 33:50, check for INT number via jumper.
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Put a battery in!!!
Well, I would certainly enjoy seeing a full video on that other computer. I enjoyed this one. I love seeing old PCs that are built like battleships.
My Dad had one of these around 1985-6. I only really remember it had the triangular logo and so that's how I know it was a leading edge. Looking online, it doesn't seem they came in too many case styles, so this was probably similar to the one he had. I also remember before buying it, he had brought home a work computer, a luggable suitcase-style PC to play with. I believe the system that replaced the Leading Edge was a Gateway 2000.
I wrote a previous comment that the new BIOS would disable the 16 color mode, but to my utter astonishment, it still seems to be working even with the new bios that you swapped in. I have no explanation for this, but I'm glad everything's all working for you!
OMG - This was my first computer. The Leading Edge Model D - It came with the clone of the Lotus 123 spreadsheet and more. it did have a 30 MB HD, so I was big man on campus, when I had it. I never had to use a computer with just floppy drives. Running MS-DOS by Van Wolverton (both books) were the beginning of me ending up with a career as a Cisco Network Engineer. Mine was an 8088 xt version that I bought in 1986.
I love these troubleshooting vids, going through the process of working out what's wrong, frustration, trying a new idea (repeat x times until working).
A friend of mine had one very similar, possibly this exact model when I was a kid. We discovered flipping the COLOR/MONO switch to MONO and back to COLOR would make it switch CGA palettes in some games - to the red and green palette instead of cyan and magenta. Theirs had a black hard disk where the 3 1/2" is on this particular model. That 5 1/4" also spits the disk out when you open the door and had kinda nice action. I remember the door lock too.
Also SO MANY CHIPS!! we had an original Tandy 1000 at the time which has probably less than half the chips.
I remember them getting a joystick card for Christmas one year too, just like this one. We played lots of Test Drive on it.
This was my first computer I bought in 1985. Mine had 2 floppies and a 1200 Baud modem. Loved the keyboard. I paid around $1200 for it. I was so excited. Glad I bought this instead of a Kaypro.
After an insane amount of fiddling, I was able to get my model D connected to a very early version of AOL back in 1995. I remember it having an EGA monitor and I think I installed a 14.4 modem. Could get it on the main AOL screen but functionality was all but non-existent. Don’t think I was able to access web pages. Frustrated, I built a Cyrix 166 white box, 16MB RAM, and a 1.7GB Seagate HDD, win 95 and that was my first internet machine. Thanks for rekindling this memory!
This is an awesome little XT clone, but that keyboard is the real prize. Alps SKCM Blue switches, one of the best clicky switches and as Chyros would call it, the Beethoven of Alps clicky switches
The cut from the LCD to that 1084 was immensely satisfying. How all pre 21st century PC's should be displayed: on a good old CRT
This was great. Definitely do a video on the other PC as well. The most interesting part to me was the motherboard BIOS issue. The fact that you were able to utilize another BIOS from a completely different machine is just fascinating. Those old PCs were so similar to each other. You could never do that today with a modern PC.
Hi Adrian, have just been clearing out my garage and found an old "Sunshine" Eprom programmer which uses an XT style card, looks like it programs the old 25/21 volt Eproms, comes with the original 5.25 floppy and instructions, yours if you are interested. I'll throw in any other XT stuff too just to fill up the box. And many thanks for the years of helpful info on how to keep these old machines running.
I really appreciate that you document all the fails and foulups as well as the successes. It makes us mere mortals with lesser technical aptitude feel just a tad less inferior, knowing that anybody can make mistakes. That said, your fix of the ROM issue was borderline witchcraft! Well done all around.
The Leading Edge Model D was my first computer in 1985. I used it until about 1992 and it was in storage until my parents moved in 2003. Looked just like this one. I even added the 3.5 drive.
This was my first Intel PC, purchased in 1983. I think I paid $1,200 for PC, the 20MB hard drive on a card was an additional $800. CGA color, Hercules compatible monochrome 2 monitor was nice. Word processing on CGA was really hard on the eyes so you used monochrome when needed. Bumped to 768kb RAM, rplaced CPU with V20 8Mhz, 20Mhz crystal over clocked that to 10Mhz, moded the RAM wait states and for an XT it was "fast". These machines were great.
This was such a nice way to spend a winter afternoon, please keep making them
Leading Edge model D! I learned how to use PCs on this computer at my first job. I remember playing Spectrum Holobyte Fighting Falcon on it after work. Such fun and a great keyboard.
Very much enjoyed this!! I grew up with DOS and ran a Bulletin Board on a DOS machine for many years. Started with DOS on a Heathkit H-89. Those were the years. Learn to write assembly DOS drivers too
I’d love to see you keep on with this series. It’s great!!
Hi Adrian. Great video. A little note on your software exploratory around 41:00. I noticed the machine also has a copy of dBASE III. Sidekick and dBase III were a very common combination back then, since dBASE was programmed with .PRG text files that were interpreted, not compiled. The dBase text editor was utterly appalling so everybody used Sidekick instead. When writing and debugging their program files, they would quickly pop up the Sidekick Notepad TSR, already loaded with a with a copy of the .PRG, edit it, dismiss Sidekick and immediately re-run the freshly-edited program in dBase. It was such a productivity boost. What was extra-cool was that the Sidekick editor used WordStar keystrokes (Ctrl-K C for Copy etc.). The maximum size of a Sidekick text file was 64K so, if your program exceeded that, you could then fire up the exact same .PRG in WordStar and continue editing using the keystrokes that were already burned into your muscle memory.
we had a leading edge xt as our first PC in our house. had the dual video outputs. we had a mono monitor sitting on top and a Sony trinitron with RGB input that doubled as the tv we would use in the kitchen while eating dinner. we would wheel it out to the living room and hook it up to the computer and could get CGA for color games. 10mb hard disk using stacker to get it up to 20mb ish.
Adrian, I know PC's aren't necessarily your favorite type of retro computers, but this is some serious quality PC retro content; it makes me go "oooh" at every revelation about a computer of which the basic specs have been known for 35 years.
I loved this archaeology video! I have done it myself on vintage computers and would love to see the other one in a video!
I know this type of video isn't your cup of tea, but I absolutely loved it. This is the era of equipment I learned to disassemble PCs as a young child when this hardware was very old (1995ish). Have you ever heard of a WANG PC? I haven't come across one since. Thanks for the time you have put into this! Will we get to see the other mini tower as well?
The first PC that I refurbished and sold for a small profit was a Leaning Edge 386 that ran Windows 3.1 in 1996/1997ish. I always thought leading edge was a local outfit building clones. Very cool to see this!
I remember having a hardcard like that. It was a Miniscribe 20MB hard drive. Used it in my IBM PS/2 30 that I bought without a hard drive (back in 1993).
This is the first computer I owned model D brings back a lot of memories thanks
Great video! My first PC was a leading Edge 486 SX25, now long gone. After getting into the retro computer kick a few years ago I surfed eBay for a bit and was able to find two of them, as well as a 386, and Leading edge keyboard, VGA monitor, and mouse. One of these days I'll get around to cleaning them up...
A friend and I got about a dozen of these Leading Edge machines in the mid-90s. The local community college had just replaced their workstations and auctioned off the old ones. We paid a dollar for a dozen. Thankfully that included keyboards and monitors. I think we got about six of them to work by cannibalizing parts from the others. We gave them away to our friends. The biggest problem we had was the hard drives releasing their blue smoke. Our units only had 5.25" drives with the hard drive taking the second bay. So, the only cards we had were the hard drive controllers. So many games were played on those machines. Sadly, I'm sure they were all trashed a few years later when we started getting jobs and could afford something a bit more modern.
Shoutout to Ron and Heidi! :p I love videos like this, I once bought an Atari 800 from a guy on craigslist, the disks that it had with it included a guy's diary from 1984, I was able to track him down on Facebook and I sent him the contents of it by printing it to my AtariMax virtual printer. Apparently he got a new computer in the late 80s and left the Atari with his college roommate...
Wow, Adrian. You're like the guy I called back in the day when I needed help with a DOSenstein beast that was missing its "Abby Normal" chip. Meanwhile, I've never been to an Electronics Recycling center but am now inspired to. I googled and to my surprise found 3 listed as close to me. I've always dropped off stuff, like at the town transfer station but I've never gone to such a place to pick up stuff...Let's see what's to be found.
Well, the 3 purported--by a certain web search engine--closest electronics recycling centers were a bust. Two only receive equipment and one isn't a recycle center of anything but hey, it was "near me" so what's to complain about (doh). I may have better luck asking people instead of the internet.
I'm sure everyone and their grandmother told you by now but that keyboard in that condition is worth a pretty penny and has one of the best keyboard switches of all time. It's also easily convertible to newer PCs.
How many hours did you spend on this? Pretty neat to dig into the past like this.
I grew up with an XT-class machine that dad had from/for his job working for a gift and party supply company, and I remember playing with Banner Mania on there as a kid. Pretty nostalgic seeing it again.