I don't know much about older SCO UNIX releases, but I used UnixWare 7 on my Pentium 133MHz machine and it was a pretty nice system. I still miss using CDE, it was a very clean, if somewhat dated looking desktop environment.
@@RetroSpector78 Memories are awakened. Thanks for the video :) And prices are at the bottom/middle of my post... The dirt ... Siemens ... The case: It looks like a PC that was used in an industrial production environment, such as a factory hall. The SI HOST serial interface card is definitely a very strong indication that this PC was connected to a SIMATIC (PLC) controller. I was working with this stuff back then. With this, manufacturing data of a sintering plant was collected and bundled. See [1] + [2]. At that time we also had such operator / production systems (at Rheinmetall AG). All programmable logic controllers (PLC) were from Siemens, so if there is an interaction between production and this PC, then it is obvious to obtain the product from Siemens. Including the software. For example [0] indicates such an interaction software. The tape drive suggests that production data has been processed and cached for later use ... or backups. I am not sure. The lack of a network card indicates that the work was disconnected from the company network. Maybe a specially secured area? But that's just a guess. With us, the production data acquisition was by all means via network, albeit connected to a separate network-strand. If that's what I think, you're out of luck anyway. The Com-Port dongle for the Siemens software is missing, isn't it? :) In addition, the loss of the hard drive is a shame. I am so sorry for you. Possible restoration: SCO was sold to Caldera. A license costs around $ 80 (Price List - PERO Computer). We'd better be silent about the price of the Siemens software [5] :))) The LEDs are probably POST indicators for RAM, CPU, graphics and boot, etc. Thank you again for showing this off. These machines are really good and reliable workhorses. At 20:42: "I doubt that this was used for gaming". Rogue! Tetris! Pong! I would be careful with that assumption. What happens in the night shift stays in the night shift;) [0] support.industry.siemens.com/cs/document/4243694/softnet-s7-unix-sco-and-softnet-tf-unix-sco-for-sco-v5-0-4?dti=0&lc=en-WW [1] 7XV5655-0BA00 Serial Hub www.siemens.com/download?DLA08_391 [2] Only German, look for CP544 cache.industry.siemens.com/dl/files/699/109748699/att_968190/v2/109748699_S5-S7_1500_Comm_Serial_DOC_V10_de.pdf [3] About the 928B CPU internal serial ports: support.industry.siemens.com/cs/attachments/1085940/pa928ben.pdf [4] Older S5-115U Reference: cache.industry.siemens.com/dl/files/937/1085937/att_904/v1/6ES5_998-0UF23.pdf [5] Siemens Softnet TF / APRED / UNIX 2XV94501CB00 Control software Softnet € 12,598.33 ... without shipping:P P.S.: Have you ever seen the beauty of a Siemens PG 685? A 8080/Z80 CP/M machine and PLC programming device. A picture with the typical coloured Siemens keyboards of that time reminded me of it. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Siemens_Simatic_S5_PG_685.JPG + forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=106592&page=all
Back when I use to work for McDonald's the Server they called the ISP ran SCO Openserver and used a ASCII driven menu system for POS control use. At one time they had the Merge package that let you run Windows 95 on top of Openserver, kinda like a VM. By time I left McDonald's the roles of the ISP switched. Ran Windows Server 2003 and in a VM was running Openserver.
So I worked in PC world and Dixon's stores grouo in the UK in the 90s and early 00s. They had these systems in every store. They acted as the central system for all of the dumb terminals. The system was called REPOS, a menu driven system (text only). It stood for Retail Electronic Point of Sale. Not sure if that was exclusive to DSG or not. It worked like a dream. Solid as a rock and it did everything that was needed. Some suit in HQ decided that it didn't look sexy or something come the early 00s and they replaced it with a nasty Java based system called Eclipae that sat ontop of Windows (pos edition?). It hung, it crashed, probably caused DSG tens of thousands in lost sales. It eventually got better but was always very shonky IMO. Just goes to show, it may not look 'up to date', but don't fix what ain't broken!
I’ve got such a nostalgia for seeing those text mode POS systems in operation. The graphical replacements certainly caught my eye, but even in the day as a young’un I noticed it was laggier and unreliable. While the people could absolutely fly through the text mode systems by pressing the right function keys quickly. Smaller shops used them into the late ‘00s, I found they rung me up quicker, and printed easier to read receipts too (no promotions garbage to waste space). The latter might just be due to being smaller stores though.
SCO Unix and a serial card for terminals screams "point of sale" machine to me. Loads of stores had setups like this with text terminals back in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Would the box have been under the table, or rather out in the back? I had always noticed they looked like older text mode, with the buttons they press on the side of the POS being literally F-keys, as a young’un seeing them used, and was always curious at the time where the computer actually was. (And that curiosity got even stronger when they begun replacing them with touch screen units with higher resolution and graphics modes instead of text mode)
That top case design is really neat I love how it slides to the side. Very unique. Also having your outro with the grinding hard drive in the background feels like the soundtrack to our hobby.
4 года назад+2
That motherboard is a beauty! What a find! That 3:e AT connector is most likely 3.3V "optional" so if you have a PSU with that then you can connect it to. I installed a Siemens P60 motherboard in another Siemens Socket 7 chassis, not strait up fit, well motherboard fitted but its a desktop with a riser and that required an adapter. But both Siemens board, the Socket 4 and the Socket 7 had 3 AT connectors, one labeled 3.3V Optional. The Siemens Chassis had this Optional 3.3V, 3 brown and 3 black wires so when looking at the back pin 1-3 are solder together, pin 4-6 are soldered together. Now 3.3V is not a part of the AT standard so thats probably why its optional and works without it, I suspect it migh be for some PCI cards that might require it. PCI bus can have 3.3V and there is also a 3.3V AUX pin for standby, and both those motherboards had a special header for the PSU, not required for the motherboard to work but required to be connected if the Siemens PSU was suppose to be used and power on, so I guess that might be part of it to, not sure but that 3 pin connector was different and not electrically compatible between the two Siemens motherboards so I ended up making an adapter that fools it to think its connected so its basically normal AT now XD Anyways long rant but I think thats what the 3:e connector is and suspect it might give better PCI comparability, might also have something todo with standby, not sure, mostly speculation. Looking forward to part2 !
optional power for cpu upgrade? or extra power for the pci bus as first gen had 5v pci 1.1 had 3.3v as well?
4 года назад
@@daoutbox9884 Socket 4 is 5V only socket. There are no 3.3V CPU's as fare as I know and even socket 7 Pentiums require 3.52V. Overdrive pentiums have there own onboard 5V to Vcore conversion built in. There is no PCI 1.1 as fare as I know. PCI 1.0 was released in 1992 and PCI 2.0 came after that in 1993 just when the Pentium was released, so same year. In fact I have not seen a Socket 4 or Socket 3 486 system with 1.0 PCI slots, mine have 2.0 and same goes for the once I worked with before. So yea My guess is that the optional power is for PCI 2.0 since it supports 3.3V and also needs it for standby power it seems and I know Siemens did have standby support on there AT systems in some form.
I still have a 20MB ST-412 lost track 0. Found it by moving the head manually. MFM/RLL are saveable due to soft sector formatting. Buuuutttt tracks fade over time so a periodic reformat is necessary or it will fail again and a low level format is needed. This PC Is REALLY cool! This is my favorite period from 1983 to 2004 ish
Great vid! Seeing that SCO boot prompt pop up was a treat. Looks like it was running SCO 3.2v4.2, which was pretty common on early to mid 90's servers. I'm guessing the heads banged against the platters when the disk hit the ground, which would ruin a bunch of sectors, but, amazingly, it looks like the filesystem is still semi-readable. It looks like your disk set is for 3.2v4.0, which is slightly older than what was installed, but it should support the SCSI adapter, and it should be able to mount EAFS file systems. You might try installing 3.2v4.0 on another disk, putting both disks in the machine, booting to 3.2v4.0, and then mounting the root filesystem of the bad disk. You could at least poke around and see what was on there. This is all a little tricky though. IDK how familiar you are with SCO, but when you add a disk to 3.2v4.x, it isn't autodetected. You have to reconfigure and relink the kernel to support it. Also, SCO uses partitions and divisions, and a filesystem sits on a division, rather than a partition. Instead of creating partitions for swap, root, u1, etc. You typically use fdisk to create a single partition, and then use a tool called divvy to create divisions within that partition for swap, root, u1, etc. It's been forever since I did that kind of stuff, but I might be able to re-figure it out if you want to try it. You might even be able to tar up most of the old disk and finagle a way to boot from it. If you do decide to put SCO on it, I wouldn't worry about the sound card. I want to say there were Open Sound System drivers for soundblaster cards for SCO, but I think the first supported version was 3.2v5.0.2 or 5.0.4. From the late '80s through the mid 90's I worked for various folks that used Xenix and versions of 3.2v4.x and OpenServer (3.2v5.0.x) on 286 through pentium systems. They all had Computone Intelliport cards in them, but they were similar to the card you have. Basically they "ran the company" off of the one computer and used the serial port card run a bunch of terminals, scattered throughout the office. It seems crazy now, but with text-based apps, 16mb of ram was plenty. The lack of a networking card and presence of a tape drive makes me wonder if that machine was used like that. If everything was running on on machine, there'd be no need for networking, but definitely a need to back the machine up. I'd be really interested in seeing what was running on it. Good luck!
i dusted off my old 1998 athlon 550 system and re-soldered caps with your teachings and wow, i cant stop watching your videos. and btw my old system works great...just cant find a ps/2 keyboard or mouse anywhere so im at a halt.
That’s super cool .... ps/2 mouse and keyboard should be readily available for free. Pretty sure you have at least a dozen 1st level contacts that have them lying around.
Siemens PCs... a staple of the 90s! Gorgeous German industrial (in more ways than one) design inside and out. I know people who still use their Pentium III Siemens-Nixdorf desktops today... The Fujitsu-Siemens period also had some great stuff, but availability and price were never the best, even here in Europe. Protip for HDDs: to prevent them from falling, always keep them on the floor, preferably in a corner or under a desk! Minimize the hard drive's potential energy :) Learned that the hard way...
I have a PCD-4H and PCD-5T, and I can tell you, that the SCSI Controller and VGA Card are stock cards, as mine came with exactly the same cards. Thank you for finding the drivers for these machines, as I have been unable too, and couldn't really enjoy them.
@@fnglert It Gets the error message , because we don't know these LEDs states meaning when it self testing. But unfortunately, manuel doesn't show these LEDs debug feature. Maybe they're like dual 7 digit display but it's BCD or binary code.(They're 8 LEDs)
AH Siemens PC. All my work time in the 90s comes back. We used quite a lot of Siemens PC's in industrial settings, also with SCO Xenix and Unix (2 different products, be careful). The ISA card in your system is a serial port multiplexer, there should be an external box with 8 25 pin sub-D connectors or later they had 8 9pin sub-d cables. These things were generally used to connect dumb text terminals for visualization in industrial settings. While people think that dumb terminals à la DEC VT-220 went extinct in the 70s, they are completely wrong as that market still existed up to the year 2000. Mostly 2 brands remained until then Qume and Wyse. Later, with PC technology getting cheaper and smaller and LCD panels starting to gain robustness and readability in harsh environments there was no point in that kind of terminals anymore. We used SCO Unix at that time as the need for multitasking was not possible with DOS even if we had some installations which used Concurrent-DOS, there was no comparison to the clean multitasking of a proper Unix.
@HoboWild i used to run linux, but my workplace gave me software that only runs on windows, so i was forced back to windows due to the software having vm detection and other shit.
@HoboWild Nothing wrong with modern Windows? Are you kidding me? I agree that Windows 10 is probably the best Windows yet, but that's a low bar. The amount of data harvesting and spying they do on their users is disgusting. Performance is generally awful, and degrades over time in the classic Windows fashion. Linux is easier to use, faster, and more beginner-friendly than ever. There's very, very few reasons to use Windows anymore.
My computer science teacher had one of those Siemens PC's in the computer lab when I was young. It controlled a rudimentary CNC/CAD machine and also a robot arm for teaching student how to write software to interface with and control the arm. I got a memory flash back as soon as I saw yours and I swear I could smell the electronics lab.
I've started common practice when working on old machines like this is to backup or even norton ghost if you will, lol to a backup drive just so if you have to use like an SD to scsi adapter or something you can restore the OS, my kaypro was like this since each unit of those line can be slightly different, I ended up using the original boot disk and hardware with a floppy emulator to convert the original disks over to SD, I also had many years ago an IBM PS/2 tower that was all scsi and the unit even had a scsi cd rom, i believe it was clocked at either 40 or 70ish mhz
Some RUclipsr with an AceLabs kit and a clean room chamber would lend him a hand to recover the data of the disk. It wouldn't be all of it, but if this is a rare machine with rare OS install and rare app, would be worth the effort.
There’s nothing worse than accidentally ruining a piece of vintage hardware. Been there. Me: “This survived 25 years in nearly perfect condition. One week in my hands and it’s broken. I should not be allowed to touch things.”
That is a nicely built case. Looks quite high end and service friendly. Tandberg is also well known for making studio grade tape recorders. This may have been a good cad workstation back in the day, provided it had a better video card and a more common operating system. I’d suggest Installing Windows NT4 on it instead of SCO unix, so that it can run AutoCAD release 14/2000. SCO unix seems slow to boot, I do wonder how much software was actually available for it. Considering the dust, I bet it must have been used in some factory running some bespoke application.
Fantastic, I could watch your videos all day long! :-) btw it took me a while to understand that this sounds ( 6:22 ) were not coming from outside my window but from the video :D
Really cool video! Looking forward to part 2. I recently completed the rebuild of a Packard Bell Pentium 60Mhz machine. Similar to you, I had to replace the Dallas RTC chip, but in my case I was forced to re-solder a new one, although it now works great! Really fun machine to play with. Runs doom well, and even a little Quake. In the late 90's, my first Pentium was a 66Mhz machine, so these Socket 4 systems hold a special place with me.
That would fck even more the already damaged platters. Software only solutions like Spinrite are a NO-NO in cases like this. Here hardware-only analysis and solutions are your only chance to recover anything.
Nice Server. I have a Siemens Scenic 5T/90 PCI. I think this is the workstation-version of your Server. The case has many similarities, but the mainboard formfactor is completely different. It has a Sockel 7 LPX motherboard with onboard Tseng Labs ET4000/W32P and no SCSI. Love it and it received a couple of upgrades over the years: Kingston TurboChip 233MMX, Voodoo Graphics, 64MB Ram, Soundblaster 32 AWE and a NIC.
Before it was a MediaMarkt in Zwijnaarde (you know where this is) this was a Carrefour and before that GB where I did a vacation-job and there was the identical SiemensNixdorf with on top 4 modems connected for communication to the main-office in Brussels. All cash registers were also from SiemensNixdorf and connected to this system.
I remember selling these as workstations (gen 5) and servers (gen 6) in the late 90s. Really solid machines with a lot of high end features for the time. Our customers loved them.
The multi serial port card suggests it was a dumb terminal server - have you ever seen the Digital terminals? Google DEC VT320... There could have been up to eight of those around the building this was installed in, maybe a doctor's surgery, maybe an airport, anywhere staff could do their job via basic input / output on a dumb terminal like that. This was a very popular platform at the time. Also, definitely use the Quantum F... Oh, you did. Ouch, that's a nasty state of affairs. Those poor hard drives 🥺
My wife used to work for a company in Austin, TX that produced software for automotive parts stores. They used SCO Unix with SCSI drives and tape backups like this one. Also had multi-port serial cards to attach terminals to at the sales counter. Software was called Eclipse and was used in Europe as well as USA. If you would like to try the root user password that was on most of the computers they sold, let me know and I can send it to you using a secure method of your choice. Except, it appears that won't work either based upon what happened to the drive.
The extra power connector is for PCI 2.1 compatibility; I guess some higher end PCI cards required additional power to drive them, and you'd need to connect that power here. My Gateway 2000 P5-90 has one but its positioned by the PCI slots, helping me deduce what it was for, and I confirmed it in the documentation. Your motherboard runs a Socket 4 Pentium, mine is for a Socket 5. I think these disappeared when you started seeing AT layout motherboards that would accept AT both ATX power connectors as the 20-pin connector would already have all the power needed. Give that SCO UNIX distro a spin and show us some basic service configuration!
Great video and cool computer! My second PC was a Pentium 60 with the infamous floating point bug. I got lucky and the seller let me trade it in for a Pentium 100 and new motherboard. In hindsight though, it would have been a fun computer to still have. The first Pentiums are getting quite rare.
Warps me back 22 years, supporting pharmacies here in Belgium that used Fujitsu-Siemens (server) SCO 5.0.0 Openserver Unix pc's with serial MTA blocks that provided them with enough communication lines for terminals, printers & the ordinary modem to send the medical orders to the suppliers..happy days... :-)
Dude! This THING has EISA! Rare with PCI. Probably RTC. Those BIOS typically had to be manually defined in C/H/S, DMA and stuff is not out yet. And dallas RTC chips are mostly all dead by now. I have a PS/2 Model 30 286 that takes one
Looking at how dirty it is, and the no frills video card, I'm guessing it was used in a warehouse for basic tasks like email, inventory control, receiving orders to print, etc.
the drive went for a dive but couldn't survive. landing on a awkward position could crack the body and damage the heads in the proces when hitting any hard surface.
the multi serial card would be for supporting multiple RS232 terminals. I cut my teeth on Xenix, SCO Unix SysV and Openserver. We wrote communications software that hooked into MAJOR telecom switchs and PABX systems from ericcson, NEC, nortel amongst others. We generally used Compaq computers but pretty much 386 or above. we used to hang off using digiport 32 port serial cards terminals from them - amongst other RS232 hardware like message boards and so on
I'd love to find one of those! When I was toying with Concurrent DOS 386 the other day, there seemed to be support for this. Serial terminal server for the win!
@@RetroTechChris we usually used the 16 or 32 port depending on what we were doing. the downside is without the dongle with the db25s on it was nigh on useless
@@RetroTechChris yea, a good thing is that th epinout would be easy to find with a meter as it should be n times the connections depending on the amount of ports. i personally use an edgeport/4 4 port usb module for my radios and for other things like laplink :D
using a buffalo bd xl reader trough usb 2.0 see if it works around that bios or it must be lba inside bios that has to be on. this has bugged me in years after bios died.
I have a lot of Siemens Machines, but only the PCD 3/4/5 Desktop Versions. Got to say, that motherboard is quite a different beast than the Desktop ones. Despite having the same colour. I have a soft spot for Siemens Nixdorf, lots of the machines I own I used to work at when I was going through my banking apprenticeship. Many of then running OS/2 back in the time. These days I like that they are pretty standard inside, not much proprietary stuff going on and you have some nice slots for a soundcard and a Voodoo or something to go with the onboard Matrox Millennium or Tsen ET 4000 chip.They were good quality too and as a owner of way too many retro computers I like that I can stack like 8 of then on top of each other and hook them all up to a KVM switch :D
That motherboard looks really interesting, like a precursor to ATX with those back panel connectors. The difference is that ATX would sacrifice the eighth expansion slot to make room for more ports in that I/O area (and the extra built-in functionality compared to the original AT-type motharboards almost entirely made up for losing that extra expansion slot anyway). Also, ATX would introduce the 20-pin connector, which introduced standby power, so the computer no longer had to be turned off at the mains in order to be in a "shutdown" state, thus meaning it could also be turned on by things like network requests. I wonder if that extra power connector had something to do with enabling those kinds of features through some kind of custom PSU/networking solution?
I think that another good fit for this system would be an early Windows NT: 3.1 or 3.51. They're so rarely used on videos like that, it would be a nice thing to show 🙂
Nice machine!!! I have worked on a BP gas station, and there was a Siemens machine that was managing the gas pumps! I believe it was a Pentium Pro but i'm not certain... (it was over 10 Years ago)
Hi - they have 2 functions, real time clock, plus a powered storage for CMOS / BIOS information my generic pentium 100 has AMI bios, but with a dead Dallas chip you can access and change all the setting, but when you go to save , it cannot save on the dallas, well it does but due to dead battery it does not actually save. I have managed say 1 or 2 reboots very fast where the stored info has lasted long enough for the next reboot and the hard drive settings were retained and it worked but it does work as a normal pc with no saved date and time and works of the floppies OK - i do have a Gotek Eventually i purchased a working dallas battery - i tried modding 3 of the dead ones but no success, i later found out you can buy then new Regards George
Jammer Van de hardeschijf, Was zeker interessant geweest om te zien wat voor programma's er allemaal hebben opgedraaid. Ga je hem ook nog open halen en kijken wat voor schade er is?
It would be really sick if you could actually source an original PC-D, just for the value of messing around with a computer that has the IBM-incompatible 80186 processor. They actually had to patch programmes just to get them to even run on a 186, and even then they would not be fully compatible. And their 5.25" floppies were of a proprietary format that allow 720k.
What a pity for the hard drive... The presence of the multiserial interface card and the fact that this machine has Unix as its OS makes me think that it was used as a web/BBS/terminal/remote access/whatever server, with a bank of analog/ISDN modems connected to the serial interface.
I imstalled a lot of SCO unix from that version on Siemens pc’s, but we always got them delivered on QIC tape cassettes not cd or floppy, that’s why the machines have scsi tape drives. You should look for a tape tarball and not an cd image. We used them as tty machines to operate telephone exchanges, using the serial ports.
My vote for the mystery 4 pin connector next to the front panel block is probably external speaker. Second guess is external battery but not likely with a dallas clock on it.
I guess that the lock on the front would actually close the sliding door in up position, to prevent somebody else to use power button or any drives. You would just lock those doors and secured your pc. Workstation PCs like them some security ;)
@@yosuhara Yes that was probably the intent. I reckon you could still turn on the PC with the door closed by using something slim to push the button through those slots.
I'm actually a little surprised with the side panels. The system looks so beefy but those plastic clips?!?! IBM's and HP at the time you had heavy side panels held in with latching mechanisms you needed a degree in cryptography to open! Cool system though, it's a beauty!
I was surprised seeing integrated primary and secondary IDE connectors on the MB, as 430LX Mercury (the very first Intel chipset for Pentium 60/66) had no integrated IDE controllers, and there was no IDE interface card either (didn't matter as it had an Adaptec SCSI card). Then I noticed the PC Tech RZ1000 chip; it was not very popular back then, with loads of problems: www.mindprod.com/jgloss/eideflaw.html The original owner apparently chose method 5: "Buy a SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) hard disk and CD-ROM, and avoid using the EIDE ports entirely."
Nice, I worked for Siemens Nixdorf as a working Student in Augsburg, but in the early 2000, not 90s. It fused later with Fujitsu forming Fujitsu Siemens and got shut down 2 years ago. I am quite sure it is a terminal server using the 8 port serial card, as it has no network interface for other server usage and a horrible graphic card for a workstation.
I hope you are going to put the original OS back on it again. Would be a shame to convert it to yet another boring DOS/Windows box. Your most interesting videos are those where you mess with old Linux. So why not old Unix too?
Great video ! Love to see all that SCSI stuff, sory the original hD went broke that way ! Futuristic looking it deserves a better life; check the power supply as it´s used may have capiacitors on breaking point. Wonder what kind of use this machine may have ! Suse linux I had a 166 with some games like civilization, railroad tycoon 2 and some bizard platform arcade. Last tried to put Word Perfect Office for linux on it without result. Multiboot maybe nice option as you have more scsi drives one windows, one linux or retro to os/2 version 4 or a NT 4. Games usual mix of DOS and early windows based games like startrek 25 anniverary or like, anything neweer may be out of reach. Looking forward to the next video !
I also have a PCD5, my is version TG. It have 90MHz Pentium, 32mb RAM, SCSI Quantum HDD, Tandberg tape drive and Sony CD SCSI drive(Currently not functional probably dead laser :( ). Its my second Siemens in my collection, i also have a newer Scenic 600 for retro gaming(It was my first pc when i was a kid). I absolutely love this old-school Siemens ingots. Most of them still works, even they are more than 20 years old. That sound, that industrial design....absolutely awesome. Performance is not as good as the custom build computers but...it doesent really matter :)
Yeah I also have a thing for these early pentiums... it was an exciting time ... new architecture, lots of possibilities ... the migration from 486 to pentium platforms ... fun times.
I have one of those too, but with a dual processor mainboard. I have 2 Pentium 90s installed. Underneath the power supply I have an additional board with a voltage converter for the CPU. These are connected to the other port with a white cable. I have the device running on the IDE controller with Windows 2000 and an SSD 😁. There is also a DVD drive connected. And the PC has a Riva TNT2 graphics card with 32 MB, although I'm thinking about replacing it with a smaller model like a Vanta as it's just too slow to use a card like that sensibly. I just ran 3DMark99 today, 500 points with 800 x 600 in 32 bit. The sound card is also a simple SB16 Value and USB 2.0 and I also installed a 3Com network card so that data can be exchanged more easily.
If I encounter these tapes, I usually make reel-to-reels out of them. They have really good recording quality, you can record at half the speed and get the same quality and also the tape is thinner, so an 18cm reel will give you not 2 hours, but almost 9 hours of recording time per side! So that's one way of listening to music all day long and not go digital. Kinda weird... the PCD4D and PCD5D have a normal BIOS like any other machine and don't need a floppy disk for that. My neighbor had (he moved, but I know him well enough to know he almost certainly still has them) a PCD1 and a PCD2. The PCD1 uses a 80186 cpu which is kinda rare.
I had a PCD-4H long ago. Still have a PCD-4ND laptop, but ufortunately it has developed an IDE interface issue recently and the Citizen branded floppy drive is also something very interesting. It uses a belt to rotate the disk which dimininshes over time. Sadly in my case the heads don't read anything anymore.Could be an issue with the opamps of the heads. Also it has a very minimalistic BIOS setup, pretty selective taste on any IDE-SD adapters. These strongly vivid green soldermasks remind me of ordering PCBs from a company called Eurocircuits. They use something similar. It's not too glossy, but very vivid green. :)
Something like a qic-1000 or qic-525 tape. Depends on the model of the drive. But in general they use the large formfactor QIC cartridges but would be limited to maybe 2 or 3 tapes in that range. There's a large range of tape formats that could physically be inserted into the drive that would probably not work since this tape format went from 30MB or so to 1.2GB or more, depending on the drive design.
hmm before putting that tape drive to use have a close look at any parts that are rubber in there as that system is over 20 years old rubber may have gone sticky and need a refurb.
I usually just blow the dust out with the compressed air. No need to disassemble it altogether if it isn't too dirty :) Too bad the original SCSI was dropped, it happens, but if the PC wasn't disassembled it wouldn't. Otherwise, it is a nice machine, but I would much prefer a Compaq or IBM of that same era, they are better built (no finicky plastic tabs holding the case together, etc.), and the support for it can be usually much easily obtained. For instance I got a very nice Compaq Deskpro XL 486 machine, but after a week the mainboard failed. Just went on eBay and bought one for €30 including shipping. I was trying to find a replacement power supply for a Siemens PCD-5H for years but then gave up the find last year and scrapped the machine.
@@RetroSpector78 Nice! Will definitely watch the video. Also, in your PCD-5H if you have power supply made by MagneTek, please do yourself a favour and recap the low value electrolyitcs (1-22uF range). I have another one that works, but needed recap of the PSU.
18:55 All Pentium CPUs for the socket 4 had the FDIV Bug. 20:14 You're right. This card made by Specialix would connect to an adapter with 4 or 8 serial ports. So up to 8 users could connect to the server at the same time or up to 8 other serial devices or anything between. Could be used in a small POS system but could've been an comparatively cheap and slow (up to 115 kBd - RS-232 after all) way to connect 8 users to a server back then. 20:56 Back in early-mid 1994, when this PC was manufactured, PCI graphics cards weren't commen. To my knowledge there was only the Ati Mach 32 AX avalible at this point. (NEC had a 'ImageVideo' PCI card as well but you had to buy a whole NEC PC to use it.) But a bunch of PCI graphics cards were released in mid-late 1994. By 1995 basicly all new graphics cards were PCI.
Very nice motherboard :) I have seen something that looks like it, but it was not a motherboard, it was something else. So to me it feels like a motherboard that looks like something else. Kinda weird. Too bad about the hard drive. It can be so interesting to see what is stored on old hard drives.
u should use the fujitsu hard drive. In my opinion it woud make it more period-correct, considering their partnership at the time this machine was released. also i wis u had show a little bit more about the tape drive
Will do in the next one. Dunno if it still works. Might have a tape for it we’ll see. I think someone already opeend the Fujitsu drive as some of the screws got revealed ...
Pretty good sized dust bunnies there. Yuck-o. That said I have seen some as big as large house cats or small dogs. Amazingly the machine was still running even though the fans were making trails in the dust caked into the heatsinks. Scary stuff man. As for recovering the data from the old HDD, you can make a boot disk and use utilities from any OS you can get to run on something that old. I'd suggest Damn Small Linux or Crunch Bang. Any light weight version should work fine. G-Parted tends to do a decent job for partitioning and adding boot loaders. Good luck and thanks for the content.
eeek, another EISA system! I thought I was the only RUclipsr trying to get one of these going again (although in my case, it's more "got it going, wish I hadn't" sorta territory). I do have a DISKDUMP utility that can sector read a HDD from DOS, and I can probably modify it to keep retrying until it can manage it. Probably will work for recovering marginal drives. I'd love to see a SCO UNIX recovery. Drop me a line to help. EDIT: SCO UNIX *really* doesn't like to be shutdown unintentionally. I've lost filesystems that way. Need to watch this all the way through. My contact info is on my bio, and I'll drop you a line.
Ok, an 8-port serial card means this probably ran a modem farm, another possibility would be industrial application when it controlled a bunch of external devices
I have same machine with 2x s5. Good to see how to setup EISA, It posted some problem with it.
The fact that Siemens actually replied to you is amazing 👍
Indeed :) Fujitsu also :)
I can't find those comments anywhere now.
These videos are addictive ,when I see "retrospector" I just click 😂
Same. Best retro pc hardware channel on yt.
Add my vote for SCO UNIX. There's honestly enough retro Windows 95 content out there. It's far more fun watching something exotic like that old UNIX.
Will give it a try ! :)
I agree! I've never seen SCO UNIX used before, and since it came with this machine it's a perfect fit!
I don't know much about older SCO UNIX releases, but I used UnixWare 7 on my Pentium 133MHz machine and it was a pretty nice system. I still miss using CDE, it was a very clean, if somewhat dated looking desktop environment.
@@RetroSpector78 Memories are awakened. Thanks for the video :) And prices are at the bottom/middle of my post...
The dirt ... Siemens ... The case: It looks like a PC that was used in an industrial production environment, such as a factory hall. The SI HOST serial interface card is definitely a very strong indication that this PC was connected to a SIMATIC (PLC) controller. I was working with this stuff back then. With this, manufacturing data of a sintering plant was collected and bundled. See [1] + [2].
At that time we also had such operator / production systems (at Rheinmetall AG). All programmable logic controllers (PLC) were from Siemens, so if there is an interaction between production and this PC, then it is obvious to obtain the product from Siemens. Including the software. For example [0] indicates such an interaction software.
The tape drive suggests that production data has been processed and cached for later use ... or backups. I am not sure. The lack of a network card indicates that the work was disconnected from the company network. Maybe a specially secured area? But that's just a guess. With us, the production data acquisition was by all means via network, albeit connected to a separate network-strand.
If that's what I think, you're out of luck anyway. The Com-Port dongle for the Siemens software is missing, isn't it? :) In addition, the loss of the hard drive is a shame. I am so sorry for you. Possible restoration: SCO was sold to Caldera. A license costs around $ 80 (Price List - PERO Computer). We'd better be silent about the price of the Siemens software [5] :)))
The LEDs are probably POST indicators for RAM, CPU, graphics and boot, etc.
Thank you again for showing this off. These machines are really good and reliable workhorses.
At 20:42: "I doubt that this was used for gaming". Rogue! Tetris! Pong! I would be careful with that assumption. What happens in the night shift stays in the night shift;)
[0] support.industry.siemens.com/cs/document/4243694/softnet-s7-unix-sco-and-softnet-tf-unix-sco-for-sco-v5-0-4?dti=0&lc=en-WW
[1] 7XV5655-0BA00 Serial Hub www.siemens.com/download?DLA08_391
[2] Only German, look for CP544 cache.industry.siemens.com/dl/files/699/109748699/att_968190/v2/109748699_S5-S7_1500_Comm_Serial_DOC_V10_de.pdf
[3] About the 928B CPU internal serial ports: support.industry.siemens.com/cs/attachments/1085940/pa928ben.pdf
[4] Older S5-115U Reference: cache.industry.siemens.com/dl/files/937/1085937/att_904/v1/6ES5_998-0UF23.pdf
[5] Siemens Softnet TF / APRED / UNIX 2XV94501CB00 Control software Softnet € 12,598.33 ... without shipping:P
P.S.: Have you ever seen the beauty of a Siemens PG 685? A 8080/Z80 CP/M machine and PLC programming device. A picture with the typical coloured Siemens keyboards of that time reminded me of it. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Siemens_Simatic_S5_PG_685.JPG + forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=106592&page=all
Back when I use to work for McDonald's the Server they called the ISP ran SCO Openserver and used a ASCII driven menu system for POS control use. At one time they had the Merge package that let you run Windows 95 on top of Openserver, kinda like a VM. By time I left McDonald's the roles of the ISP switched. Ran Windows Server 2003 and in a VM was running Openserver.
So I worked in PC world and Dixon's stores grouo in the UK in the 90s and early 00s. They had these systems in every store. They acted as the central system for all of the dumb terminals. The system was called REPOS, a menu driven system (text only). It stood for Retail Electronic Point of Sale. Not sure if that was exclusive to DSG or not. It worked like a dream. Solid as a rock and it did everything that was needed. Some suit in HQ decided that it didn't look sexy or something come the early 00s and they replaced it with a nasty Java based system called Eclipae that sat ontop of Windows (pos edition?). It hung, it crashed, probably caused DSG tens of thousands in lost sales. It eventually got better but was always very shonky IMO. Just goes to show, it may not look 'up to date', but don't fix what ain't broken!
I’ve got such a nostalgia for seeing those text mode POS systems in operation. The graphical replacements certainly caught my eye, but even in the day as a young’un I noticed it was laggier and unreliable. While the people could absolutely fly through the text mode systems by pressing the right function keys quickly. Smaller shops used them into the late ‘00s, I found they rung me up quicker, and printed easier to read receipts too (no promotions garbage to waste space). The latter might just be due to being smaller stores though.
SCO Unix and a serial card for terminals screams "point of sale" machine to me. Loads of stores had setups like this with text terminals back in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Yep, McDonald's did this and I think Autozone as well had a similar setup.
Would the box have been under the table, or rather out in the back? I had always noticed they looked like older text mode, with the buttons they press on the side of the POS being literally F-keys, as a young’un seeing them used, and was always curious at the time where the computer actually was. (And that curiosity got even stronger when they begun replacing them with touch screen units with higher resolution and graphics modes instead of text mode)
That top case design is really neat I love how it slides to the side. Very unique. Also having your outro with the grinding hard drive in the background feels like the soundtrack to our hobby.
That motherboard is a beauty! What a find!
That 3:e AT connector is most likely 3.3V "optional" so if you have a PSU with that then you can connect it to.
I installed a Siemens P60 motherboard in another Siemens Socket 7 chassis, not strait up fit, well motherboard fitted but its a desktop with a riser and that required an adapter. But both Siemens board, the Socket 4 and the Socket 7 had 3 AT connectors, one labeled 3.3V Optional. The Siemens Chassis had this Optional 3.3V, 3 brown and 3 black wires so when looking at the back pin 1-3 are solder together, pin 4-6 are soldered together.
Now 3.3V is not a part of the AT standard so thats probably why its optional and works without it, I suspect it migh be for some PCI cards that might require it. PCI bus can have 3.3V and there is also a 3.3V AUX pin for standby, and both those motherboards had a special header for the PSU, not required for the motherboard to work but required to be connected if the Siemens PSU was suppose to be used and power on, so I guess that might be part of it to, not sure but that 3 pin connector was different and not electrically compatible between the two Siemens motherboards so I ended up making an adapter that fools it to think its connected so its basically normal AT now XD
Anyways long rant but I think thats what the 3:e connector is and suspect it might give better PCI comparability, might also have something todo with standby, not sure, mostly speculation.
Looking forward to part2 !
optional power for cpu upgrade? or extra power for the pci bus as first gen had 5v pci 1.1 had 3.3v as well?
@@daoutbox9884 Socket 4 is 5V only socket. There are no 3.3V CPU's as fare as I know and even socket 7 Pentiums require 3.52V. Overdrive pentiums have there own onboard 5V to Vcore conversion built in.
There is no PCI 1.1 as fare as I know.
PCI 1.0 was released in 1992 and PCI 2.0 came after that in 1993 just when the Pentium was released, so same year.
In fact I have not seen a Socket 4 or Socket 3 486 system with 1.0 PCI slots, mine have 2.0 and same goes for the once I worked with before.
So yea My guess is that the optional power is for PCI 2.0 since it supports 3.3V and also needs it for standby power it seems and I know Siemens did have standby support on there AT systems in some form.
Sorry to hear about the hard drive. Looks like a really neat system.
I still have a 20MB ST-412 lost track 0. Found it by moving the head manually. MFM/RLL are saveable due to soft sector formatting.
Buuuutttt tracks fade over time so a periodic reformat is necessary or it will fail again and a low level format is needed.
This PC
Is REALLY cool! This is my favorite period from 1983 to 2004 ish
Great vid! Seeing that SCO boot prompt pop up was a treat.
Looks like it was running SCO 3.2v4.2, which was pretty common on early to mid 90's servers. I'm guessing the heads banged against the platters when the disk hit the ground, which would ruin a bunch of sectors, but, amazingly, it looks like the filesystem is still semi-readable. It looks like your disk set is for 3.2v4.0, which is slightly older than what was installed, but it should support the SCSI adapter, and it should be able to mount EAFS file systems. You might try installing 3.2v4.0 on another disk, putting both disks in the machine, booting to 3.2v4.0, and then mounting the root filesystem of the bad disk. You could at least poke around and see what was on there. This is all a little tricky though. IDK how familiar you are with SCO, but when you add a disk to 3.2v4.x, it isn't autodetected. You have to reconfigure and relink the kernel to support it. Also, SCO uses partitions and divisions, and a filesystem sits on a division, rather than a partition. Instead of creating partitions for swap, root, u1, etc. You typically use fdisk to create a single partition, and then use a tool called divvy to create divisions within that partition for swap, root, u1, etc. It's been forever since I did that kind of stuff, but I might be able to re-figure it out if you want to try it. You might even be able to tar up most of the old disk and finagle a way to boot from it.
If you do decide to put SCO on it, I wouldn't worry about the sound card. I want to say there were Open Sound System drivers for soundblaster cards for SCO, but I think the first supported version was 3.2v5.0.2 or 5.0.4.
From the late '80s through the mid 90's I worked for various folks that used Xenix and versions of 3.2v4.x and OpenServer (3.2v5.0.x) on 286 through pentium systems. They all had Computone Intelliport cards in them, but they were similar to the card you have. Basically they "ran the company" off of the one computer and used the serial port card run a bunch of terminals, scattered throughout the office. It seems crazy now, but with text-based apps, 16mb of ram was plenty. The lack of a networking card and presence of a tape drive makes me wonder if that machine was used like that. If everything was running on on machine, there'd be no need for networking, but definitely a need to back the machine up. I'd be really interested in seeing what was running on it.
Good luck!
Thx a lot for the detailed write up ! I will give SCO a try I think. Did some retro linux video’s in the past. Might make for some cool content.
i dusted off my old 1998 athlon 550 system and re-soldered caps with your teachings and wow, i cant stop watching your videos. and btw my old system works great...just cant find a ps/2 keyboard or mouse anywhere so im at a halt.
That’s super cool .... ps/2 mouse and keyboard should be readily available for free. Pretty sure you have at least a dozen 1st level contacts that have them lying around.
Siemens PCs... a staple of the 90s! Gorgeous German industrial (in more ways than one) design inside and out. I know people who still use their Pentium III Siemens-Nixdorf desktops today... The Fujitsu-Siemens period also had some great stuff, but availability and price were never the best, even here in Europe.
Protip for HDDs: to prevent them from falling, always keep them on the floor, preferably in a corner or under a desk! Minimize the hard drive's potential energy :) Learned that the hard way...
I have a PCD-4H and PCD-5T, and I can tell you, that the SCSI Controller and VGA Card are stock cards, as mine came with exactly the same cards. Thank you for finding the drivers for these machines, as I have been unable too, and couldn't really enjoy them.
Glad to be of service. Enjoy the machines...
Pretty interesting how that motherboard has so many tantalum capacitors. Guess ‘production class’ hardware (floppy aside) gets the good stuff 😊
17:21 These LEDs are usually for hardware debugs. It needs to check the motherboard manual !😀
It checks the motherboard manual or it gets the error message again?
@@fnglert It Gets the error message , because we don't know these LEDs states meaning when it self testing.
But unfortunately, manuel doesn't show these LEDs debug feature. Maybe they're like dual 7 digit display but it's BCD or binary code.(They're 8 LEDs)
@@crazyfurnaceguy1229 I made a movie reference with my comment, a modified quote from Silence of the Lambs :) Am sorry you missed that.
@@fnglert That's OK .('・ω・')
AH Siemens PC. All my work time in the 90s comes back. We used quite a lot of Siemens PC's in industrial settings, also with SCO Xenix and Unix (2 different products, be careful). The ISA card in your system is a serial port multiplexer, there should be an external box with 8 25 pin sub-D connectors or later they had 8 9pin sub-d cables. These things were generally used to connect dumb text terminals for visualization in industrial settings. While people think that dumb terminals à la DEC VT-220 went extinct in the 70s, they are completely wrong as that market still existed up to the year 2000. Mostly 2 brands remained until then Qume and Wyse. Later, with PC technology getting cheaper and smaller and LCD panels starting to gain robustness and readability in harsh environments there was no point in that kind of terminals anymore.
We used SCO Unix at that time as the need for multitasking was not possible with DOS even if we had some installations which used Concurrent-DOS, there was no comparison to the clean multitasking of a proper Unix.
Cool story ... thx for the write-up. Will definitely give SCO a try and see if I can create some interesting content on it.
The motherboard LEDs are POST status codes.Very fancy.
You really should try to install SCO Unix on this machine. It could be interesting
I would prefer slackware96 aka slackware 3.0
@HoboWild i used to run linux, but my workplace gave me software that only runs on windows, so i was forced back to windows due to the software having vm detection and other shit.
@HoboWild Nothing wrong with modern Windows? Are you kidding me? I agree that Windows 10 is probably the best Windows yet, but that's a low bar. The amount of data harvesting and spying they do on their users is disgusting. Performance is generally awful, and degrades over time in the classic Windows fashion. Linux is easier to use, faster, and more beginner-friendly than ever. There's very, very few reasons to use Windows anymore.
@@AureliusR 👍
My computer science teacher had one of those Siemens PC's in the computer lab when I was young. It controlled a rudimentary CNC/CAD machine and also a robot arm for teaching student how to write software to interface with and control the arm. I got a memory flash back as soon as I saw yours and I swear I could smell the electronics lab.
Pretty unique motherboard! I wonder if the DIP switch for the password enable/disable would disable the password for the EISA setup utility?
I've started common practice when working on old machines like this is to backup or even norton ghost if you will, lol to a backup drive just so if you have to use like an SD to scsi adapter or something you can restore the OS, my kaypro was like this since each unit of those line can be slightly different, I ended up using the original boot disk and hardware with a floppy emulator to convert the original disks over to SD, I also had many years ago an IBM PS/2 tower that was all scsi and the unit even had a scsi cd rom, i believe it was clocked at either 40 or 70ish mhz
F for the HDD. Rest in peace old friend.
Some RUclipsr with an AceLabs kit and a clean room chamber would lend him a hand to recover the data of the disk. It wouldn't be all of it, but if this is a rare machine with rare OS install and rare app, would be worth the effort.
RIP in peace, poor hard drive :(
There’s nothing worse than accidentally ruining a piece of vintage hardware. Been there.
Me: “This survived 25 years in nearly perfect condition. One week in my hands and it’s broken. I should not be allowed to touch things.”
That is a nicely built case. Looks quite high end and service friendly. Tandberg is also well known for making studio grade tape recorders. This may have been a good cad workstation back in the day, provided it had a better video card and a more common operating system. I’d suggest Installing Windows NT4 on it instead of SCO unix, so that it can run AutoCAD release 14/2000. SCO unix seems slow to boot, I do wonder how much software was actually available for it. Considering the dust, I bet it must have been used in some factory running some bespoke application.
Fantastic, I could watch your videos all day long! :-)
btw it took me a while to understand that this sounds ( 6:22 ) were not coming from outside my window but from the video :D
Really cool video! Looking forward to part 2. I recently completed the rebuild of a Packard Bell Pentium 60Mhz machine. Similar to you, I had to replace the Dallas RTC chip, but in my case I was forced to re-solder a new one, although it now works great! Really fun machine to play with. Runs doom well, and even a little Quake. In the late 90's, my first Pentium was a 66Mhz machine, so these Socket 4 systems hold a special place with me.
You could try running Steve Gibson's Spinrite on the disk, as long as you can make the disk visable to DOS.
That would fck even more the already damaged platters. Software only solutions like Spinrite are a NO-NO in cases like this. Here hardware-only analysis and solutions are your only chance to recover anything.
When you showed inside and mentioned the special shade of green - this board looks like those early 3D renders of PC parts images.
Nice Server.
I have a Siemens Scenic 5T/90 PCI. I think this is the workstation-version of your Server. The case has many similarities, but the mainboard formfactor is completely different. It has a Sockel 7 LPX motherboard with onboard Tseng Labs ET4000/W32P and no SCSI.
Love it and it received a couple of upgrades over the years: Kingston TurboChip 233MMX, Voodoo Graphics, 64MB Ram, Soundblaster 32 AWE and a NIC.
Before it was a MediaMarkt in Zwijnaarde (you know where this is) this was a Carrefour and before that GB where I did a vacation-job and there was the identical SiemensNixdorf with on top 4 modems connected for communication to the main-office in Brussels. All cash registers were also from SiemensNixdorf and connected to this system.
I remember selling these as workstations (gen 5) and servers (gen 6) in the late 90s. Really solid machines with a lot of high end features for the time. Our customers loved them.
The multi serial port card suggests it was a dumb terminal server - have you ever seen the Digital terminals? Google DEC VT320... There could have been up to eight of those around the building this was installed in, maybe a doctor's surgery, maybe an airport, anywhere staff could do their job via basic input / output on a dumb terminal like that.
This was a very popular platform at the time.
Also, definitely use the Quantum F... Oh, you did. Ouch, that's a nasty state of affairs. Those poor hard drives 🥺
My wife used to work for a company in Austin, TX that produced software for automotive parts stores. They used SCO Unix with SCSI drives and tape backups like this one. Also had multi-port serial cards to attach terminals to at the sales counter. Software was called Eclipse and was used in Europe as well as USA. If you would like to try the root user password that was on most of the computers they sold, let me know and I can send it to you using a secure method of your choice. Except, it appears that won't work either based upon what happened to the drive.
The LED's on the Mainbord are for the Bios PostCodes
The extra power connector is for PCI 2.1 compatibility; I guess some higher end PCI cards required additional power to drive them, and you'd need to connect that power here. My Gateway 2000 P5-90 has one but its positioned by the PCI slots, helping me deduce what it was for, and I confirmed it in the documentation. Your motherboard runs a Socket 4 Pentium, mine is for a Socket 5. I think these disappeared when you started seeing AT layout motherboards that would accept AT both ATX power connectors as the 20-pin connector would already have all the power needed.
Give that SCO UNIX distro a spin and show us some basic service configuration!
Thanks for solving that mystery!!
The bios chip seems also to be socketed - very cool
I wonder what the third AT power connector is for? never seen that.
Put the Fujitsu in, keeping with the brand.
My thoughts as well!
I was thinking the same thing!
17:25 You don't know what kind of codes do those less display? Sounds strange that was not specified on the manual.
Great video and cool computer! My second PC was a Pentium 60 with the infamous floating point bug. I got lucky and the seller let me trade it in for a Pentium 100 and new motherboard. In hindsight though, it would have been a fun computer to still have. The first Pentiums are getting quite rare.
Warps me back 22 years, supporting pharmacies here in Belgium that used Fujitsu-Siemens (server) SCO 5.0.0 Openserver Unix pc's with serial MTA blocks that provided them with enough communication lines for terminals, printers & the ordinary modem to send the medical orders to the suppliers..happy days... :-)
I always love to see old Unix/Linux stuff. Would be cool if you could get it installed again.
Dude! This THING has EISA! Rare with PCI. Probably RTC. Those BIOS typically had to be manually defined in C/H/S, DMA and stuff is not out yet.
And dallas RTC chips are mostly all dead by now. I have a PS/2 Model 30 286 that takes one
Same! Replaced mine with a GlitchWorks RTC chip!
Looking at how dirty it is, and the no frills video card, I'm guessing it was used in a warehouse for basic tasks like email, inventory control, receiving orders to print, etc.
Have you tried putting a hard drive in the freezer and tried reading it again .it worked a few time for myself to get just the data off
the drive went for a dive but couldn't survive. landing on a awkward position could crack the body and damage the heads in the proces when hitting any hard surface.
wow that's a really nice looking motherboard
the multi serial card would be for supporting multiple RS232 terminals. I cut my teeth on Xenix, SCO Unix SysV and Openserver. We wrote communications software that hooked into MAJOR telecom switchs and PABX systems from ericcson, NEC, nortel amongst others. We generally used Compaq computers but pretty much 386 or above. we used to hang off using digiport 32 port serial cards terminals from them - amongst other RS232 hardware like message boards and so on
I'd love to find one of those! When I was toying with Concurrent DOS 386 the other day, there seemed to be support for this. Serial terminal server for the win!
@@RetroTechChris we usually used the 16 or 32 port depending on what we were doing. the downside is without the dongle with the db25s on it was nigh on useless
@@WX4CB ya.. I was afraid of that!!! A few (or perhaps several) cards had survived, but the dongles are probably long gone :(
@@RetroTechChris yea, a good thing is that th epinout would be easy to find with a meter as it should be n times the connections depending on the amount of ports. i personally use an edgeport/4 4 port usb module for my radios and for other things like laplink :D
That might be the most unique-looking Pentium motherboard I've ever seen!
using a buffalo bd xl reader trough usb 2.0 see if it works around that bios or it must be lba inside bios that has to be on. this has bugged me in years after bios died.
Nice to see an old system running SCO Unix. SCO was originally right in my town 😃
That logo, used to see it all the time on tills in shops.
I have a lot of Siemens Machines, but only the PCD 3/4/5 Desktop Versions. Got to say, that motherboard is quite a different beast than the Desktop ones. Despite having the same colour. I have a soft spot for Siemens Nixdorf, lots of the machines I own I used to work at when I was going through my banking apprenticeship. Many of then running OS/2 back in the time.
These days I like that they are pretty standard inside, not much proprietary stuff going on and you have some nice slots for a soundcard and a Voodoo or something to go with the onboard Matrox Millennium or Tsen ET 4000 chip.They were good quality too and as a owner of way too many retro computers I like that I can stack like 8 of then on top of each other and hook them all up to a KVM switch :D
Haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do with this one... also have the PCD-5H (desktop). Need to check that one out also.
I think I'm in love with the case.
(Haha, just saw my face in the tweeter posts :))
That motherboard looks really interesting, like a precursor to ATX with those back panel connectors. The difference is that ATX would sacrifice the eighth expansion slot to make room for more ports in that I/O area (and the extra built-in functionality compared to the original AT-type motharboards almost entirely made up for losing that extra expansion slot anyway). Also, ATX would introduce the 20-pin connector, which introduced standby power, so the computer no longer had to be turned off at the mains in order to be in a "shutdown" state, thus meaning it could also be turned on by things like network requests. I wonder if that extra power connector had something to do with enabling those kinds of features through some kind of custom PSU/networking solution?
I see a Siemens, I click like.
Also click subscribe, and the bell ! :)
I think that another good fit for this system would be an early Windows NT: 3.1 or 3.51. They're so rarely used on videos like that, it would be a nice thing to show 🙂
Got a boxed copy of NT 3.51 :) good idea :)
Excellent video. Go SCO!!
Nice machine!!! I have worked on a BP gas station, and there was a Siemens machine that was managing the gas pumps! I believe it was a Pentium Pro but i'm not certain... (it was over 10 Years ago)
Yeah .. already heard lots of use-cases for these ... doctors office, pick and place machines. Pos systems, .....
Never seen a system where the Dallas clock chip also powers the CMOS chip and keeps settings stored.
Hi - they have 2 functions, real time clock, plus a powered storage for CMOS / BIOS information
my generic pentium 100 has AMI bios, but with a dead Dallas chip you can access and change all the setting, but when you go to save , it cannot save on the dallas, well it does but due to dead battery it does not actually save.
I have managed say 1 or 2 reboots very fast where the stored info has lasted long enough for the next reboot and the hard drive settings were retained and it worked but it does work as a normal pc with no saved date and time and works of the floppies OK - i do have a Gotek
Eventually i purchased a working dallas battery - i tried modding 3 of the dead ones but no success, i later found out you can buy then new
Regards
George
@@georgemaragos2378 I love my GlitchWorks RTC chip! I think that Monotech sells them too if I recall
Jammer Van de hardeschijf, Was zeker interessant geweest om te zien wat voor programma's er allemaal hebben opgedraaid. Ga je hem ook nog open halen en kijken wat voor schade er is?
It would be really sick if you could actually source an original PC-D, just for the value of messing around with a computer that has the IBM-incompatible 80186 processor. They actually had to patch programmes just to get them to even run on a 186, and even then they would not be fully compatible. And their 5.25" floppies were of a proprietary format that allow 720k.
What a pity for the hard drive...
The presence of the multiserial interface card and the fact that this machine has Unix as its OS makes me think that it was used as a web/BBS/terminal/remote access/whatever server, with a bank of analog/ISDN modems connected to the serial interface.
that board looks amazing clean , almost no caps jungle like on other boards .
I imstalled a lot of SCO unix from that version on Siemens pc’s, but we always got them delivered on QIC tape cassettes not cd or floppy, that’s why the machines have scsi tape drives. You should look for a tape tarball and not an cd image.
We used them as tty machines to operate telephone exchanges, using the serial ports.
My vote for the mystery 4 pin connector next to the front panel block is probably external speaker. Second guess is external battery but not likely with a dallas clock on it.
Can you state the keyboard-combination here?
CTRL-ALT-INSERT
@@RetroSpector78 I’ve heard of that combo on some PCs, along with other obscure ones like Control-Alt-Esc. It’s good to know what it was!
I did try CTRL-ALT-ESC :) But wasn't aware of CTRL-ALT-INSERT till I read the docs :)
Hope you get that unix going. I have a softspot for Unix stuff.
I know linux a little bit, but would need to find some practical applications and cool things to show. Otherwise would be pretty dull ...
Lots of "enterprise" stuff ran on SCO Unix, including loads of bespoke software. Maybe try setting up a database and web server on it?
That brand new dallas chip is 3 years old. How long would you say they last when just left in storage?
Silly how the sliding door covers the power button.
I guess that the lock on the front would actually close the sliding door in up position, to prevent somebody else to use power button or any drives. You would just lock those doors and secured your pc. Workstation PCs like them some security ;)
@@yosuhara Yes that was probably the intent. I reckon you could still turn on the PC with the door closed by using something slim to push the button through those slots.
I'm actually a little surprised with the side panels. The system looks so beefy but those plastic clips?!?! IBM's and HP at the time you had heavy side panels held in with latching mechanisms you needed a degree in cryptography to open! Cool system though, it's a beauty!
I was surprised seeing integrated primary and secondary IDE connectors on the MB, as 430LX Mercury (the very first Intel chipset for Pentium 60/66) had no integrated IDE controllers, and there was no IDE interface card either (didn't matter as it had an Adaptec SCSI card). Then I noticed the PC Tech RZ1000 chip; it was not very popular back then, with loads of problems: www.mindprod.com/jgloss/eideflaw.html
The original owner apparently chose method 5: "Buy a SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) hard disk and CD-ROM, and avoid using the EIDE ports entirely."
I'd guess that the kind of person who bought a name brand Pentium in 94 was going to use SCSI no matter what IDE controller the computer had.
Nice, I worked for Siemens Nixdorf as a working Student in Augsburg, but in the early 2000, not 90s. It fused later with Fujitsu forming Fujitsu Siemens and got shut down 2 years ago.
I am quite sure it is a terminal server using the 8 port serial card, as it has no network interface for other server usage and a horrible graphic card for a workstation.
Indeed ... will see if I can still get something off the hard drive
I'd install either that SCO Unix or Windows NT on that PC. Or, why not? NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP!
Think I’ll try SCO.
I've also from experience, had alot of quantums die on me, specifically the bigfoot drives
Board looks very clean and professional... I am 1000% sure that Siemens did not ship it with a buggy CPU...no way!
I hope you are going to put the original OS back on it again. Would be a shame to convert it to yet another boring DOS/Windows box.
Your most interesting videos are those where you mess with old Linux. So why not old Unix too?
You might be on to something here ... SCO
It shall be ...
I'd hate to see the CD eject when the drive bay cover is raised.
Stay tuned :)
Great video ! Love to see all that SCSI stuff, sory the original hD went broke that way ! Futuristic looking it deserves a better life; check the power supply as it´s used may have capiacitors on breaking point. Wonder what kind of use this machine may have ! Suse linux I had a 166 with some games like civilization, railroad tycoon 2 and some bizard platform arcade. Last tried to put Word Perfect Office for linux on it without result. Multiboot maybe nice option as you have more scsi drives one windows, one linux or retro to os/2 version 4 or a NT 4. Games usual mix of DOS and early windows based games like startrek 25 anniverary or like, anything neweer may be out of reach. Looking forward to the next video !
The mysterius connector Is another SCSI conector. Look the SCSI connector tablet. Greetings from Argentina 🇦🇷🇧🇪
It seems to be a multi-serial card (8 serial ports) on a single connector
@@RetroSpector78 Yes, it is a multi serial card. This is a SCO Unix system and the serial ports are used to connect dumb terminals...
@@RetroSpector78 As a kid I remember seeing a machine identical to this in our library powering the dumb terminals to do book searches..
I also have a PCD5, my is version TG. It have 90MHz Pentium, 32mb RAM, SCSI Quantum HDD, Tandberg tape drive and Sony CD SCSI drive(Currently not functional probably dead laser :( ). Its my second Siemens in my collection, i also have a newer Scenic 600 for retro gaming(It was my first pc when i was a kid).
I absolutely love this old-school Siemens ingots. Most of them still works, even they are more than 20 years old. That sound, that industrial design....absolutely awesome. Performance is not as good as the custom build computers but...it doesent really matter :)
nice tower ! I recently bought IBM desktop, too with Pentium1/60Mhz. It runs Hexen and Duke3d ok, but Descent a bit slowly ...
Yeah I also have a thing for these early pentiums... it was an exciting time ... new architecture, lots of possibilities ... the migration from 486 to pentium platforms ... fun times.
I have one of those too, but with a dual processor mainboard. I have 2 Pentium 90s installed. Underneath the power supply I have an additional board with a voltage converter for the CPU. These are connected to the other port with a white cable. I have the device running on the IDE controller with Windows 2000 and an SSD 😁. There is also a DVD drive connected. And the PC has a Riva TNT2 graphics card with 32 MB, although I'm thinking about replacing it with a smaller model like a Vanta as it's just too slow to use a card like that sensibly. I just ran 3DMark99 today, 500 points with 800 x 600 in 32 bit. The sound card is also a simple SB16 Value and USB 2.0 and I also installed a 3Com network card so that data can be exchanged more easily.
If I encounter these tapes, I usually make reel-to-reels out of them. They have really good recording quality, you can record at half the speed and get the same quality and also the tape is thinner, so an 18cm reel will give you not 2 hours, but almost 9 hours of recording time per side! So that's one way of listening to music all day long and not go digital.
Kinda weird... the PCD4D and PCD5D have a normal BIOS like any other machine and don't need a floppy disk for that.
My neighbor had (he moved, but I know him well enough to know he almost certainly still has them) a PCD1 and a PCD2. The PCD1 uses a 80186 cpu which is kinda rare.
I had a PCD-4H long ago. Still have a PCD-4ND laptop, but ufortunately it has developed an IDE interface issue recently and the Citizen branded floppy drive is also something very interesting. It uses a belt to rotate the disk which dimininshes over time. Sadly in my case the heads don't read anything anymore.Could be an issue with the opamps of the heads. Also it has a very minimalistic BIOS setup, pretty selective taste on any IDE-SD adapters. These strongly vivid green soldermasks remind me of ordering PCBs from a company called Eurocircuits. They use something similar. It's not too glossy, but very vivid green. :)
I have the exact same tape drive, I wonder what tapes it takes
Something like a qic-1000 or qic-525 tape. Depends on the model of the drive. But in general they use the large formfactor QIC cartridges but would be limited to maybe 2 or 3 tapes in that range. There's a large range of tape formats that could physically be inserted into the drive that would probably not work since this tape format went from 30MB or so to 1.2GB or more, depending on the drive design.
@@stonent Thanks !
hmm before putting that tape drive to use have a close look at any parts that are rubber in there as that system is over 20 years old rubber may have gone sticky and need a refurb.
I have seen such a serial card in a terminal setup. Having UNIX on the machine makes this quite likely.
What LCD do you use?
P.S. Cool video
First Siemens Pentium PC?
I usually just blow the dust out with the compressed air. No need to disassemble it altogether if it isn't too dirty :) Too bad the original SCSI was dropped, it happens, but if the PC wasn't disassembled it wouldn't. Otherwise, it is a nice machine, but I would much prefer a Compaq or IBM of that same era, they are better built (no finicky plastic tabs holding the case together, etc.), and the support for it can be usually much easily obtained. For instance I got a very nice Compaq Deskpro XL 486 machine, but after a week the mainboard failed. Just went on eBay and bought one for €30 including shipping. I was trying to find a replacement power supply for a Siemens PCD-5H for years but then gave up the find last year and scrapped the machine.
Also have a PCD-5H. Will probably also showcase it a bit in the next video
@@RetroSpector78 Nice! Will definitely watch the video. Also, in your PCD-5H if you have power supply made by MagneTek, please do yourself a favour and recap the low value electrolyitcs (1-22uF range). I have another one that works, but needed recap of the PSU.
18:55 All Pentium CPUs for the socket 4 had the FDIV Bug.
20:14 You're right. This card made by Specialix would connect to an adapter with 4 or 8 serial ports. So up to 8 users could connect to the server at the same time or up to 8 other serial devices or anything between. Could be used in a small POS system but could've been an comparatively cheap and slow (up to 115 kBd - RS-232 after all) way to connect 8 users to a server back then.
20:56 Back in early-mid 1994, when this PC was manufactured, PCI graphics cards weren't commen. To my knowledge there was only the Ati Mach 32 AX avalible at this point. (NEC had a 'ImageVideo' PCI card as well but you had to buy a whole NEC PC to use it.) But a bunch of PCI graphics cards were released in mid-late 1994. By 1995 basicly all new graphics cards were PCI.
Very nice motherboard :) I have seen something that looks like it, but it was not a motherboard, it was something else. So to me it feels like a motherboard that looks like something else. Kinda weird. Too bad about the hard drive. It can be so interesting to see what is stored on old hard drives.
u should use the fujitsu hard drive. In my opinion it woud make it more period-correct, considering their partnership at the time this machine was released.
also i wis u had show a little bit more about the tape drive
Will do in the next one. Dunno if it still works. Might have a tape for it we’ll see. I think someone already opeend the Fujitsu drive as some of the screws got revealed ...
@@RetroSpector78 Did you take a look inside the Fujitsu drive?
R.I.P. Connor
Beautiful machine. Bummer on HD. I would attempt installing OS/2 Warp 3 on it. Probably lose a little hair in the process.
Pretty good sized dust bunnies there. Yuck-o. That said I have seen some as big as large house cats or small dogs. Amazingly the machine was still running even though the fans were making trails in the dust caked into the heatsinks. Scary stuff man.
As for recovering the data from the old HDD, you can make a boot disk and use utilities from any OS you can get to run on something that old. I'd suggest Damn Small Linux or Crunch Bang. Any light weight version should work fine. G-Parted tends to do a decent job for partitioning and adding boot loaders. Good luck and thanks for the content.
Go for SCO!
eeek, another EISA system! I thought I was the only RUclipsr trying to get one of these going again (although in my case, it's more "got it going, wish I hadn't" sorta territory). I do have a DISKDUMP utility that can sector read a HDD from DOS, and I can probably modify it to keep retrying until it can manage it. Probably will work for recovering marginal drives. I'd love to see a SCO UNIX recovery. Drop me a line to help.
EDIT: SCO UNIX *really* doesn't like to be shutdown unintentionally. I've lost filesystems that way. Need to watch this all the way through. My contact info is on my bio, and I'll drop you a line.
Thx for getting in touch ... love the channel by the way ... will check it out tonight....
Ive mostly seen those in hospitals and clinics here in Spain...
It would benefit the channel views if you put the link to Part 2 in the video description.
I love those old Siemens machines...it’s a shame that they got out of the personal computer biz long ago.
Ok, an 8-port serial card means this probably ran a modem farm, another possibility would be industrial application when it controlled a bunch of external devices