im more offended that you called a pbx a little guy, that board is nearly full atx sized, i got some single board pci computers that would qualify better as little guys :P ironically also from a pbx as a remote access/watchdog solution
I'm wholeheartedly amused with the concept of you not actually doing an os/2 video, but managing to do 20 minutes of one every year and sneaking it into a different video each time.
But it _does_ have a sound card (of sorts), which it uses to talk to the CPC. It just isn't useful for playing DOS games. But now I _really_ want to see this thing running Jazz Jackrabbit in DosBox, while smashing the game audio out of a speakerphone. Please, Gravis; for science?
If I'd guess, it was an installed in a hotel. Utility rooms can be anywhere, and I've definitely been in one that literally was ventilated from the kitchen, that held their cable and VOD system. Everything was grimey.
That feels like too few phonelines for a hotel, unless it was exclusively for the hotels own phones and they didn't have any room phones Unless it's a pretty small hotel, but then i wonder if they would have a kitchen, and not arrangements with the local choice of food vendors
Me too, as one who worked for a phone provider. The amount of times I went on trouble calls and had to show a customer the phone service works fine, the phone system you installed on the house is the problem. Bye.
Your gnarly black grease reminds me of something I encountered back when I did electronics recycling. We got stuff that had come out of a Harley Davidson plant. Hundreds and hundreds of 700MHz Compaq Deskpro desktops. HUNDREDS! And then later, hundreds and hundreds of Compaq Evo desktops that replaced them. The deal was we refurbished the ones that were salvageable, donated those to charity, and used the proceeds from scrapping the rest to fund it. Anyway, some of those PCs lived in very harsh environments - some in particular were coated inside and out in a horrible black greasy tar that was some kind of freak abomination of condensed motorcycle exhaust and aerosolized lubricants. ... And then there were the weld shop and paint shop machines.
I used to do some electronics repair and hearing "weld shop paint shop machines" triggered a fight or flight response. I remember seeing the aftermath of somebody dumping a shitload of current through a steel PC case. Sheet steel can't handle that much current.
Every CNC machine from the 90's I've worked on is covered with the mystery black gunk (pretty sure it's mostly cutting coolant, and other oils), but most of them have seals on the electronics cabinet, with a heat exchanger, so no air is actually moving from outside to inside of the cabinet - on some machines that haven't had many issues, and the door was kept closed, the inside of the cabinet is virtually pristine. And on the ones that had issues, and the doors were open a lot, they're pretty coated. You can wash it off with simple green and a plastic brush, and rinse with hot water. They come out basically brand new. PCBs are washed when they're manufactured, so it's not a big deal to wash them again later. Just be careful of water in connectors, transformer coils, and under chips, or in speakers, buzzers, etc etc. Compressed air usually does a good job of getting rid of 95% of the water.
I used to install and service the Axxess. The fun part about upgrading the software for VM card was that it had to be done with a series of floppies. As you can obviously see is that there is no floppy drive but there is a floppy header. Whenever I did upgrades I had dangle a floppy drive out of the chassis while it was powered up and go through the upgrade process with a monitor and keyboard attached. To explain why audio goes over the PCM port and not the backplane is that the original voicemail system for the Axxess was a full external PC with an ISA card with the PCM connector and DSP bits. Control of the voicemail system was done with a serial port. The EVMC is all that put on a card that is powered by the backplane and communicating the same way.
Heh. Just like some airplanes. (yes, some of them STILL load updates from 5.25" floppies.) I guess it could be worse... upgrading Big Boy(tm) phone switches from TAPE.
Work still has one in production use, with the outboard voicemail PC and all. The PC software uses a DLL to cause Windows Explorer to interact with a Microsoft Access database. It only works on a few versions of Windows NT, ours runs NT 4. People jump up and down screaming at me about how dangerous and irresponsible and insecure this is because they cannot understand that there is no network hardware and no USB ports and no WiFi capability, the machine physically cannot be connected to any kind of network. The hardware is not there. They just keep asing "But what if someone just plugs it in? What if it gets accidentally connected? What if someone sneaks in..." If someone is able to get through all of the locked doors into the phone equipment room and install hardware undetected, I have much bigger problems than the Intertel software being unsupported. They could just wreck everything in the room with a hammer and do a lot more damage.
@@SuzuranMajere Yeah. Some people just cannot wrap their noodle around a computer *NOT* being connected to the internet. The only way to potentially interact with it is through the "modem" (fax) interface. Some of them (VM cards) have a means of "DISA" - Direct Inward System Access - for remote management, but the interface is uselessly slow (9600bps)
Until 2009 I worked for an MSP, and one of our clients was a church that had an A N C I E N T PBX that evidently still had a developer around, because every six months or so we'd receive a 3-1/2" floppy with updated code for their long distance auditing software. So between that and MS server OSs that *still* needed floppies for stuff like SCSI/RAID cards, the Old Skool DOS-era skills came in handy on a fairly frequent basis.
I worked at a NASA contractor a few years ago and we sent PC/104 computers to the ISS to control and caprure data from various components and sensors of science experiments. Cameras, thermostats, servos, ignitors, heaters, pressure sensors, valves, etc. They are still very useful and you can get tons of add-on boards for them for connecting all kinds of specialized equipment.
Hey Thank you for the OS/2 and ATA (VOIP) modem stuff on your website! The OS/2 images were a serious nostalgia trip for me; I used 2.0 and 2.1 daily as a personal workstation in 1993-1994, and then years later for work had to upgrade a pair of OS/2 2.1 servers to Warp 4 for Y2K as no one else had OS/2 experience. OS/2 2.x had super fast disk routines and was WAY more responsive on a 486 than any version of Windows at the time. Multitasking with a modem was reliable unlike Windows 3.x. I missed out on Warp 3 because of a life event that occured right before it was released, but it looks like that would have been a great upgrade. Keep up the awesome site and work CRD!
As microelectronics engineer, i have a deep love/hate relationship with OS/2. It's super finnicky to set up and to navigate, but once it is ready for it's purpose, it runs very stable. OS/2 is still used in some industrial or commercial legacy systems. But most of it runs on Windows NT or UNIX. I work mostly for smaller production facilities and they often buy older second hand machinery. I have never used it as a desktop system, but after all what i have seen, i came to the conclusion that desktop UI's before Win95 are super unintuitive, at least in my eyes. Win311, Amiga WB, UNIX, etc, they haven't quite figured it out yet. I'm born 1992, so i missed that time period. My parents were engineers too and had some older 3D/CAD systems at home. Amiga 2000 & 4000 based ones and dual Pentium Pro Siemens Nixdorf systems with NT4. There is a modern OS, which claims to be compatible with OS/2 applications called ArcaOS, but i have not tried it out yet. It looks very close to a Linux DE from what i have seen.
@@hyperturbotechnomike The problem with ArcaOS is that it's still a closed source system and if there's one thing that companies like to do it would be to squeeze pennies until they melt into copper. That also nixes the hobbyists out too.
the image of a computer switched off being powered only by the sheer willpower of the PSU caps is going to live rent free in my mind for ever... i watch these videos to sleep, but today, I'll stay awake thinking about freaking caps so much suffering, stress and lost deadlines would have been inexistent in so many people's lifes only if every desktop computer PSU had caps like these
@@XanthinZarda i truly wonder if there's such a thing nowadays, having some juice for a second would be tremendously useful for fast oscillations in the power line hopefully today's PSUs are a solved problem, only problem being most manufacturers wanting to save cost on a/bunch part/s that really shouldn't be downgraded
i literally laughed out loud when he did that, 'cause like, it makes sense, but it's still weird to see a computer stay on after the power's been cut off
my uncles ran a bus company for a while and they had one of these PBX boxes in the back electrical closet and the thing i found neat was someone had attached a radio-stereo system to it, so radio played over the PA system in the warehouse and repair bays, and it all looked so duct-taped together.
shit, someone did the same thing in the tax office I worked at in college. Our PA system was literally wired into the output from a regular old boombox with its speakers ripped out so the wires could attach to the PA system controller, which was in turn run by the poor little overheated office computer pretending to be a server.
Oh man, I used to admin an Intertel Axxess (and before that, its little brother, the Intertel Axxent). I had the very configuration software you're missing, sadly, lost to time. And yes, with that system and an ISDN PRI line, you could make all sorts of telephone magic happen. (A call from Zimbabwe, you say?) Our system must have had the network card, because I could reach into it from my desktop system. (This would have been a circa 2002 system.) Those little DSPs were a much-touted voice-processing feature that did some echo-cancellation for speaker calls, among other things. It was really a nice little beast. Oh, and here's a fun "little guy" moment: The kid-brother to this system, the Intertel Axxent, actually used an ATX mini-tower as its enclosure, but not in the way you'd imagine. It had some kind of passive backplane, analogous to the Axxess, but it was in an ISA/PCI card slot form-factor. Similarly, the voicemail card was a single-board computer that plugged into that backplane, but a completely different shape. (It was probably running the exact same voicemail software.) It was a PC in a PC case, but not like you'd expect!
High an old CallWare CNTE here (Certified Network Telephony Engineer). The 15 pin connector is for out-of-band signaling to the voicemail card. Calls are routed to voice mail and become analog pots calls that get converted by the 8 channel card on the board. The 15 pin connection tells it what the call is that is coming in. For instance on port 2 is extension 103 doing a voicemail retrieve, on port 4 is a call no answer for extension 105, and on port 3 is a transfer to voicemail for an outside call to extension 106, port 101 is an Auto Attendant, etc. Many voicemails did in-band signaling where it winks, sends DTMF digit to say what the call is, then winks again and the call is put through, but they were a little slower and if you had one bad line, it was REALLY hard to trouble shoot. Some of the early systems (Like Panasonic KXPs) had to do supervised transfers, those were messy. We also had TSAPI, an out of band signaling protocol running over SPX, that one had some problems at first! Most of those systems we just had to change over to in band.
We had lifestyle programs (home improvements, cooking, etc) where you could 'request an info sheet via fax'. You rang the number, went thru the prompts, and the remote end would actually start sending the fax to you immediately, without ending the call and needing to call you back. You would just hit "start" on your fax machine and hang up the handset. I don't know if that "receive fax on current call" functionality was an uncommon capability. I thought that was a pretty cool use of the technology, especially since the remote end didn't need to pay for an extra phone call.
How was OS/2 a trainwreck? In the late 1980s to early 1990s, it was the undisputed "best" OS. Its object oriented Workplace Shell GUI was far ahead of its time and had features we _still_ don't have in modern Windows. It's reliability was far above anything else [that a normal PC owner could use]. Maybe you meant IBM's promotion of OS/2 - yea, they f'ed that up bad.
@@TonyPombo Between development, marketing, the entire agreement with MS thing going tits-up, Warp 3 and 4 were indeed a trainwreck overall, even if the actual end product was fantastic. And they were, that was *the* multinode BBS grail at the time.
@@brocka.6479 Ya, I agree it was a political trainwreck. I don't think OS/2 v3 was bad. A v3.1 could have been killer, but IBM was circling the drain on PCs at the time and personally, I don't think IBM really wanted to "work hard enough" to make OS/2 win the OS war for a market they were planning to leave.
My dad worked at IBM in the 90s, we had to have OS/2 installed on our home computer for when he worked from home, and I can't tell you how much mileage I forced out of that Mahjong Solitare as a kid. Did you know that there was a custom board editor so you could make your own Mahjong templates? That's right! What 6 year old needs more than that?
@@DerekLippold It was such a fancy pants setup for 1995. IBM gave him a stipend for a *second phone line* so we could be on the phone and the internet at the same time! He could get on the Web Explorer to check daily Dilberts and press the forbidden-to-me red 'X' icon talk to Daemons (pretty sure that was his job) while mom was upstairs chatting with her sister about the latest QVC special or whatever. At the same time! Such a privileged existence.
@@CathodeRayDude He had all kinds of weird stuff installed on that machine. Like way too much to list out in a youtube comment and expect anyone reasonable to read it. I wish I could resurrect that beast, but hard drive go clickclick and I can't find the backup tapes.
MCF5272VF66 "SOC" is a ColdFire V2 SOC running at 66MHz, my best guess is that it's comparable to a 66-100MHz 486 (depending on what it does). ColdFire isn't "a 68000 processor", the instruction set is derived from 68k but is missing some instructions and addressing modes, the FPU internal precision is 64-bit instead of 80-bit and the actual instruction encoding is simplified. You can run 68000 assembly through a translator to generate ColdFire assembly and then assemble that, and for simple programs it might work as is but it's really intended as a starting point for porting rather than being used directly. This seems similar to how the Intel 8086/8088 came with a translator that took 8080 ássembler and generated 8086 assembly - again it might work out of the box for very simple programs but it was really inteded as a starting point for porting all those old CP/M programs.
I forget how they marketed the thing. I had several dev boards, and I think the palm pilot used them. They were roughly based on a 68030, but designed for low power use. I don't know anyone that wrote assembly for them (that could avoid it :-)), everyone wrote things in C. (with minimal tweaking, C compiles anywhere.) It's hard to compare it to a "PC" as it's not anything like it. For example, SSH is insanely slow on a CF processor, so much so a 12MHz 386 can run circles around it.
I had a portable music player back in the 2000s that had a Coldfire CPU (Motorola had spun off their semiconductor division as Freescale so that's how it was branded). I installed a hacked firmware called Rockbox and even created a basic 3d game for it, and I wrote the core of the rendering loop in Coldfire assembly. It was pretty fun getting it all to work.
I know that the older Crestron Building Automation systems used a Coldfire C based compiler for their programming software. But it was all proprietary at that level and heavily guarded from non-licensed programmers
@@PinkPandaKatiewow, Rockbox rocked! I installed it on the iPod Classic, the last gen before they all turned into b-stock iPhones with no cellular connection. Was your game by chance the Doom port?
@@Dong_Harvey No, nothing that fancy. It was actually inspired by Ken's Labyrinth, and I called it "RocKen" as a pun on "Walken", the early prototype of Ken's Lab. I never finished it, though, and my iRiver H120 broke a long time ago so I have no way to actually play it now other than a standalone test version I created.
Wow, this brings back memories. I administered one of these for about probably close to a decade before we replaced in with an in-house built FreePBX based system. The entire cost of the server hardware with 3 T1 cards and around 75 Aastra 57i IP phones was barely more than 1 year of the lease for the Inter-tel system.
We didn't have the Voicemail PC card though. I can't remember if it had it's own dedicated PC or if we just had the Inter-tel software installed on one of our other servers.
I have a friend who works in telecoms as an engineer so hearing you break the whole business down for me in gory detail so I can properly understand the shop talk would actually be very very nice
Wow, you have outdone yourself, this is by far the most interesting and informative video from you. Really interesting learning about all of the technologies you touched on in this video.
Not Windows, though! Even in Windows 11, there's still not a sensible way to create an icon, nor can you just set a PNG as one. What a good operating system.
As for OS/2 interface and lack of exit button - the "double click on system menu" is not only something that existed in Windows at least since 3.0, it works to this day in modern Windows versions xD
Double-clicking to close windows was mandatory in its contemporaries too; there was no other "window manager" button to do it. That is why OS/2 does it that way - IBM was just copying what the norm was. It's not a mark against OS/2. Except Macs. Macintosh OS, at the time, had a box in the upper left of the window that would close it. It looked like a checkbox, but would quit the app when you tried to "check the box" to see what it did. Also, on OS/2 it was common for apps to *not* have a File -> Exit/Quit menu option. Many did, but not all. Maybe that's what CRD meant by "mandatory".
Annoyingly enough, it doesn't for anything made with WinUI, like Explorer. Either that or the custom framing they had to implement to make tabs work in Explorer just lacks support for handling it, because oh how I sorely miss it.
FYI, 1.) there are new Open Source Hardware projects making things like Sound Blaster and Adlib clones for PC104 boards. They're really popular for compact DOS gaming rigs. Some of the projects require out of production components, (but not all of them). 2.) ALSO, ALSO!! Someone made a PC104 to ISA card adapter, where it has like 3 or 4 ISA card slots that you could (optionally) install into an AT motherboard case (if you wanted to). But it gives you the ability to run stock video cards, harddrive cards, and/or sound cards. Makes it easier to start out slowly with PC104, build a working system with off the shelf parts, and slowly work your way up to a full system.
If I remember right I also saw things like storage, CPUs multiples of, and like you said VGA etc for the PC 104 and 104b etc class cards. Probably the big reason they're still available insanely expensive is compatibility between cards because of the pc104 interface. But also because there's something called a numa case that you can put them into which is also what they use for things like very embedded industrial and aviation uses. Things like specialized aviation approved equipment.
Paging terminals (computers really) were another interesting voice storage application. You only had one frequency that hundreds or thousands of pagers were tuned to so what do you do if two people dial two pagers at the same time? Originally one person would get a busy signal which was annoying but eventually they began recording the message and transmitting it to the pager later. The paging terminal that my dad owned around 1980 had several Z80 based boards that could store eight second voice messages in 64K of RAM _digitally_ so the message would be sent to the pager once the transmitter was available. The idea that audio could be stored in a bunch of bytes in memory completely blew my mind at the time.
The pin you blew up, btw, is a ground pin on the hard drive and the melted socket on the motherboard is the +5V (motor) pin. Since there are multiple adjacent ground pins elsewhere on the connector, ground was still properly connected when the pins were offset and you shorted the main 5V supply into one of those ground pins (which promptly melted). The reason the drive and board still work is firstly because those other ground pins on the drive are fine, and secondly because either your 5V motor supply socket on the motherboard is still ok despite the melting or because there's an adjacent 5V logic supply and they're bussed together on one or both ends.
My first post-college job was using an intertel system. They were very license heavy for every little feature. In fact, if you wanted to add a phone, you had to get your contract/license modified and that endpoint number could never go down. We dropped them as soon as we could.
Fun Fact: That's still how it's done by *so many* vendors now, particularly for cloud PBX. It's miserable and stifling and drove so many people to Asterisk despite its myriad problems.
Your standard for unplayable duke3d is pretty amusing. :p That ran better than i expected honestly especailly given it was high detail mode and fullscreen.
I am Italian, so I apologize for my poor English. I just wanted to tell you that I am fascinated by every one of your videos. You manage to go into detail about anything and make everything interesting. I can't watch videos on RUclips that are longer than 10 minutes, but you manage to make me spend 90 minutes in the most pleasant and interesting way possible. Thank you so much for the effort you put into it.
Yay, industrial PC104! :) Amusing to see a Lucent module in this. When AT&T were forced to split up, Lucent was one of the spin offs. They later split themselves into Avaya and the rest bought by Alcatel, and at some point got absorbed into Nokia. Lucent also sold its consumer products division to VTech. It's such a weird lineage, and a testament to how huge they were even after splitting away from AT&T if you find their modules in a competitor's product.
Yes exactly this - my dad was at AT&T and then Lucent after the split- writing code to make phones work. We had “take your kids to work” days a couple years so we got to hang out in his office and such.
@@DerekLippold To be honest that sounds pretty awesome to me - the whole lineage of companies born from Bell Labs were utterly fascinating to me. Out of interest how did your father feel about the split?
"Computers should get bigger when you add more functionality to them" well yeah, it only really makes sense for that happening, the more specialized units you add- "Because it's extremely funny" Oh, well, that too.
@@markjames8664 not sure how but the phone company my grandparents used got their old att rotary dial phone from the 50s hooked up to their digital phone service they have now and it works perfectly fine. I remember being so confused as a kid that the one phone, yes the only phone, we had in the house in the kitchen had a switch labeled touch tone and pulse and never could figure out what it did until I got older.
I had so much fun working south the old access system back in the day. We got the first VOIP card available for it, and the fun really started. I lived in an area at the time that didn't have broadband yet. My boss made a call the I could work remotely some days if I could get a voip phone working at home. He didn't think I would be able to with a 56k connection. I tweaked the packet settings and size on a voip phone and got it working over a 56k connection to the internet... I couldn't do anything else on the internet when on the phone, but I got it working great and call Qual was tinny but it worked. Boss couldn't believe it. Loved how easy it was to work on that old system.. great memories! Cheers!
This rack style is used in a lot of other applications. In my building, several machines have this same backplane system with x86 CPUs to control some high-end machinery.
It has a lot of similarities with Ferranti's Eurobus backplane which still appears all over the place in industrial applications, but I suspect it's proprietary in this case.
we also had these little voicemails that had a 486 embedded and booted dos from a flashcard. you could load windows 98 on a flashcard and hyperterminal right into the serial port and see it boot.
oh my glob! I remember working on these things as well. I think the largest PBX I ever worked on was a 32 line setup. I don't think it was this particular manufacture. It's been years! Very well done short and concise explanation. It was nice "relearning" ;) Funny, the training I had was this short. I figured the rest out on my own. Horrifying and pleasant walk down memory lane.
I've got a three 386SL based PC104 computers made in the '90s by a company named Megatel in Ontario that no longer exists. I have collected some documentation about them. They're real interesting, with a sort of early flash-based filesystem, VGA, floppy and IDE controllers on board and one of them even has ethernet. I have a breakout board of sorts since they use a one of those DIN 32-pin connectors in lieu of separate connectors for each peripheral. I intended to make a PC out of them, but it's been years and I'm sure you'd do more good with them than I.
Long story short: we used fax capable voicemail boxes to store 1000s of incoming faxes to send to a Faxpress, which output to a HP LJ6000 in a remote office.
As a kid who grew up on a C64 and was blown away when 95 came out it is cathartic to hear the beeps and boops as you mess round in the bios and booting. Was also nice to see ports that most "tech support" would have no idea about. Love my modern toys, but boy so I miss those days when it came to repair. Computer won't boot, may take 5 hours but you can fix it usually with stuff you have on hand. So many pcb I have repaired with bread ties and magnet wires. Now I can't even tell which trace I want without a microscope and schematics that look like M.C.Escher was the circuit designer. Thank you Gravis, always appreciate your videos. Also, I will be waiting for that PBX video/s. Will take me back to playing with them and sip to get free cell service over my city free WIFI. Missed the first wave but that felt like Phreaking 2.0
I love this series! The embedded/industrial side of computing is so interesting. Love seeing PC guts adapted and modified for these niche applications and I like how it's all designed for reliably and maintenance. I have a hunch voicemail modules end up being pc-like hardware because it's a perfect match for general purpose computing. Recording, playback, file management, phone trees, networking, voicemail-to-email. Why come up with a bespoke special purpose computer when off the shelf standard PC hardware and software already exists? You can implement whatever you can dream up if you can pay a programmer to write software for it.
The PSU has a high grade supply filtering to meet the regulations for connection to the PSTN as well as heavy current draw. Nipon Chemicon is really top end kit !
1:03:15 - Windows 3.1 didn't have a shut down button, but there was a button to exit Windows if I remember correctly and it would exit into MS Dos. After which the user would shut down the PC manually.
The house I grew up in had a Vodavi StarPlus DHS with two trimline AT&T phone 6 executive stations with caller ID (odd feature but all it said was the phone number from what i remember) one Panasonic cordless phone a viking intercom. All connected to 4 lines. One for fax, one for business, one for home, and one alarm line. It never dropped out and I think it had the call waiting module as I remember music all hooked up through an unlabeled punch block. All services were provided by MCI and then Verizon. Despite thr digital upgrade in 2006 we still used the traditional pbx as we wanted our money's worth.
Compaq was using their own color code for keyboard Orange, mouse Green, monitor Blue, speaker red, mic again blue but they also tend to put the microphone in the monitor and had some sort of attachable speakers. And this was done before the color standard went in to Standard. It was one of the nice things they were doing that simplified set up that I think other manufacturers didn't go along with until it became a standard and surprisingly the colors are fairly similar.
The PC-99 standard might have made it an industry standard, however, Packard Bell had been using that same color spec on its ports much earlier than that. This unlocked a memory of first seeing this around 1993. Through the mid-90s (and other manufacturers started having some uptake a little earlier than PC-99, I can't recall ever seeing a Socket 7 motherboard that had USB and *didn't* have colored ports), it was a dead giveaway if something came from a Packard Bell because the cable connectors would be molded in the same colors as the sockets in an era when cable connectors were typically beige, black or maybe chrome if it was some kind of parallel port sound device.
My Gateway PC (Pentium 166) has USB ports and non-standard colors. I think some ports are normal-colored but the keyboard is orange and the mouse is purple.
yeah, PC/104 stuff is horrifically expensive because it's still used VERY widely in industry, so aside from "hobbyists" the only market is large companies. The CPC is running VxWorks, the POSIX main bit is a dead giveaway. You're also correct about the accounting stuff, it's called CDR "Call Data Recording", I used to provide support for a phone billing system which we sold into hotels, it was based on a custom ISA card which was basically a full 8086 system with a pair of hardware buffered serial interfaces, which you'd plug into a PC running DOS (originally designed for PCs which were about as powerful as the card but with less RAM ;) ), it'd take the CDR feed from the PBX, process it through various billing tables then spit out a custom record over a different serial port which was plugged into your FOH billing system (and frequently an Epson dot matrix printer for backup).
11:50 - A couple of the most fascinating devices I ever had to work on where the Toshiba voice mail systems for their PBX systems. They had one family of them that were basically the same device, just one was internal to the cabinet, and the other was an external device. It ran DOS! You could connect a serial terminal to it, and watch it boot, and interact with it like a little DOS machine. The other one came later, and was more like the one you show here, and it ran a version of Windows NT (4 I think). You had to connect to it using an ancient version of MS NetMeeting, and if the old spinning hard drive on it died, you were absolutely screwed. I don't miss working on that stuff.
My first job was managing the FaxBack PC at a local computer store in 1995. We didn’t let you enter your own fax number, we just sent the fax back on the call that was already up. You called up, heard the fax tone, and pressed start on your own fax machine. That means you were billed for the call and not the computer shop, and that matters because UK phone calls back then cost like 5p or 10p a minute and we didn’t distinguish between local and long-distance like the US did.
Use to spend hours messing with the Intertel phone system we had at the office back in the day. Use to page all of ENG department with Johnny Cash Ring of Fire after outages from random locations and never caught.
Actually, Ctrl+Alt+Delete is a low level key combo. It gets caught by the BIOS and passed to the OS if it's running in real mode, as opposed to standard mode. This is why you have to hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete in Windows to get your login window, because it's an actual hardware interrupt that has to be handled by the firmware or the kernel. CTRL+ALT+DEL is actually a very special key combo on PCs.
There is a tremendous amount of misinformation about this as far as I can tell. It's very common for people to claim CAD generates an NMI, and in fact I made that statement in the video as originally shot, and some people called me on it so I looked into it. I can find no indication that CAD generates any special signal; it's not mentioned in any MS documentation, nor in the original PC technical manual. As far as I understand, it's simply a sequence that the default bios keyboard handler looks for to trigger a reboot, and when you boot an OS like Windows it replaces that vector with its own code which also listens for that combo. It has special significance only because the kernel keyboard handler will not send that key combo to anything except the login process.
I believe the Ctrl+Alt+Del (which started with NT) was supposed to be a security feature-this was the only place you would enter your password so the users were supposed to know that any other login window was fake (this was before the ability to do admin tasks by entering the admin password etc).
@@markjames8664 It didn't start with NT, it started with the PC, in the BIOS as CRD said. (OK, TBH, I have no idea if it was significant on CPM machines before that. But it definitely existed on the IBM PC and has been around ever since.) Also as CRD said, it was used by NT as the login attention sequence because no other program was allowed to trap that combo, to prevent things like a key logger that might capture logins and passwords. In between, 16-bit Windows trapped the keyboard interrupt, circumventing the PC BIOS, and responded to that sequence to show the Task Manager (or to reboot in an emergency, if you kept at it.)
it was likely using tones to digital commands to talk over the modem for phone over ip and multiple choice menus, 3 way calls and long distance calls. otherwise youd be doing it manually with one of those handset bases for a 3way call or any tone tone /pulse to digital. 🤔
Ever since I found out that my modem could send faxes in middle school, I've been fascinated by the prospect of interacting with phone lines using a computer (well, besides the obvious use of connecting to the internet). Unfortunately, with extremely limited internet access and my extremely limited command of English language at the time, I couldn't do much about it. Got to use that knowledge exactly once, by sending out a hundred or so custom faxes overnight for my father's business. Everyone thought that I was a wizard for a brief moment, until they realized that these faxes were probably going straight into the trash bin. Something like this would have blown my entire mind at the time. Thanks for the video, this is a cool piece of hardware!
In the mid 90's we created a music on hold system out of an early pentium PC (even possibly a 486), a soundblaster and winamp. The sales people created short 'advertisements', we cut pieces of easy listening music and put together a giant playlist of random music and ads.
For as long as I have worked in IT I have loved how phone cards look. If it's on a little "small office / branch" system like this one or a massive PBX for a hospital... The cards are always amazing and visually pleasing to me.
this is one of your most banging videos in a while and your knowledge of the subject shines brighter than usual here. i want to see the 40 minute tirade on PBXs
I used to help admin crusty old Avaya PBXs. We’d buy whole PRI trunks or just a handful of channels, then configure a complex web of rollovers and trees. Using the software was insanely confusing and awful. It barely worked. When the guy who ran them all quit, I was put in charge of all telco. I immediately went around ripping them out and replacing them. I still hear the default ringtone and wince a little.
Sounds like a PBX to me. Awful interface with settings written in an indecipherable foreign language. Terrible software. Insanely expensive. And, if you can get it to run at all, it will run for the rest of time.
Dude I can't express how much these videos interest me. Keep up the good work..I will be contributing via patreon very soon as I have pulled the plug on a few that were going nowhere! Love this stuff :)))
I appreciate your enthusiasm for these small, almost forgotten devices! Thank you for doing this series. I look forward to seeing what you put out next.
@0:30 I never understood the phone addiction some people seem to have, I wonder if it's the IT version of train people - and I mean this in the kindest possible sense. I hated calling or being called. Now I've come to appreciate how quickly you can get things done compared to email and text.
I was into phones for years and I think it's a fascinating hobby, I just ran out of things to learn about them that intrigued me. It's neat technology.
I'm a typical tech geek introvert, but I'm fascinated by all the behind-the-scenes comms stuff. I love the idea of running a small telco, cable co, dialup and DSL ISP, TV station, radio station... I don't want to be called or see my face on the TV, but working on the stuff that would provide that infrastructure? Neat.
@@nickwallette6201yep exactly. I hate talking on the phone….or in person….or at all but yes, I love this technology though (especially since it’s all mostly outdated)
The Winbond chip is probably the standard super IO chip with dual serial, parallel, mouse, keyboard and floppy controller There is a PC/104 USB controller that works with 8bit ISA, its the same as the little ISA USB controller with the CH375 chip that only does sub storage under DOS
your takes on OS/2 were the voice of reason the OS wars of the 1990ies would have needed. your picks on the config.sys are 100% correct. it was a bit like NixOS today. you could do a lot, but it was very easy to break.
There's a lovely hobbyist project called the weeCee based on PC-104. The main part of the project is basically a PCB design for a Crystal CS4237 based sound card, designed to be paired with a Vortex86 module. So the most accessible PC-104 sound card is probably that.
Well this was a blast from the past. I was a Unix system admin at Inter-Tel in the late '90s and early 2000s. There were a lot of exciting things going on with IP Telephony and, what at the time was called, Visual Voicemail.
That's the exact model PBX we installed in the law Firm I worked for in the 90s. It was quite expensive but worked flawlessly. As for the LAN port, it was for maintenance (and in my case to grab the call log so I could hash it over to Timeslips for billing). And for the record, Inter-Tel had the most foul attitude of any vender I ever worked with, even worse than the Xerox people, who were dicks, or the SW Bell people who seemed to hate everyone. To every Inter-Tel rep who ever spoke to me, I hope you now live in the sewers under Vegas.
I remember reading that Duke nukem forever was designed with the 486 as they're absolute basic minimum. There were some features in the very first level which they had to remove because it hung 486 computers. I think it's included in the developer commentary on one of the later re-releases.
@@pazsion gaming on the minimum specs is never very common. Metal gear solid the phantom pain had some minimum spec of a 2012 i3, but I very much doubt anyone was playing that game on their office computer.
Great content. Looking forward to the PBX/TDM transport (pre-IP) deep dive. Private vendors are the only people still working on these. "The Telephone Company" no longer wants to support PBX's. Regulated "POTS" service is to the NID. Worked for baby bells 20 some years.
On PC104, I have a pair of Advantech PCM-9388 SBCs that I'm using for a retro PC arcade cab, they're a P4 based Celeron M 600MHz... I salvaged them out of a McDonald's order confirmation kiosk, they used to run XP Embedded. Sadly only one has the original LCD display and power supply setup, the other one is just the SBC. They're pretty useful, has onboard HDA sound (which works perfectly with SBEMU), but has a PC104 interface, so it *could* get a genuine Sound Blaster.
The reason for the dual UART chip on the EVMC is due to voltages. FPGAs like 3.3v, at most you can get some 5v i/o these days. RS232 can be upwards of +/- 15v, especially in telcom in those days. Since plumbing 15v into an FPGA would require a level shifter chip, and FPGA blocks are expensive, it makes more sense to spec a cheaper FPGA and UART chip instead.
to do multiple calls, sound or modem requests you need more than one uart controller... or more modems and sound cards. or just one not in use simply to switch and not drop the task at hand. hand offs for a bbs for example so simultaneous call ins dont get dropped, it can be on hold. kind of.
![Little Guys: Episode 1 [Logic AU912]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GQmj1P-DSoY/mqdefault.jpg)
Sorry for the dirty keyboard. I have like 6 identical HP keyboards and didn't notice this was the one with... something on the keys.
Halfway through this video blissfully unaware, until I glanced at this comment 🤣
im more offended that you called a pbx a little guy, that board is nearly full atx sized, i got some single board pci computers that would qualify better as little guys :P ironically also from a pbx as a remote access/watchdog solution
It might be time to get a bit ...Phreaky... with the next PBX you bring out.....
I'll see myself out....
@@frogz you didn't watch the last video!! little is about mentality, not size!!!
sometimes a dirty keyboard is what the audience wants to see! Bringus' dirty cherry keyboard is practically a character.
I'm wholeheartedly amused with the concept of you not actually doing an os/2 video, but managing to do 20 minutes of one every year and sneaking it into a different video each time.
underrated comment
Adhd unite!
The paradox of having a little guy with no sound card while being a server for dozen of sound cards (phones)
But it _does_ have a sound card (of sorts), which it uses to talk to the CPC. It just isn't useful for playing DOS games.
But now I _really_ want to see this thing running Jazz Jackrabbit in DosBox, while smashing the game audio out of a speakerphone. Please, Gravis; for science?
If I'd guess, it was an installed in a hotel. Utility rooms can be anywhere, and I've definitely been in one that literally was ventilated from the kitchen, that held their cable and VOD system. Everything was grimey.
Well they probably looked on the bright side it was waterproof
Every time I see a comm room at a hotel, it's also doubles as the laundry room. ;-)
That feels like too few phonelines for a hotel, unless it was exclusively for the hotels own phones and they didn't have any room phones
Unless it's a pretty small hotel, but then i wonder if they would have a kitchen, and not arrangements with the local choice of food vendors
> 40 minutes of CRD rambling about PBXs
Don't threaten me with a good time!
Perhaps he could upload those to patreon... That would get me to sign up!
Portlands?
@@JunafaniFIN or 2nd channel, im not proposing, im waiting
Yeah, I’d love to see that as well!
PBX* (private branch exchange)
As someone who works in the telco industry i‘d love to hear you talk about PBXs and telephones for as long as you like.
Yeah - I’d like those 40min please! And maybe some more!
Me too, as one who worked for a phone provider. The amount of times I went on trouble calls and had to show a customer the phone service works fine, the phone system you installed on the house is the problem. Bye.
Same.
Same here
Yes please
Your gnarly black grease reminds me of something I encountered back when I did electronics recycling.
We got stuff that had come out of a Harley Davidson plant. Hundreds and hundreds of 700MHz Compaq Deskpro desktops. HUNDREDS! And then later, hundreds and hundreds of Compaq Evo desktops that replaced them. The deal was we refurbished the ones that were salvageable, donated those to charity, and used the proceeds from scrapping the rest to fund it. Anyway, some of those PCs lived in very harsh environments - some in particular were coated inside and out in a horrible black greasy tar that was some kind of freak abomination of condensed motorcycle exhaust and aerosolized lubricants.
... And then there were the weld shop and paint shop machines.
And to think, the same stuff is coating the workers lungs
I used to do some electronics repair and hearing "weld shop paint shop machines" triggered a fight or flight response. I remember seeing the aftermath of somebody dumping a shitload of current through a steel PC case. Sheet steel can't handle that much current.
A few of my customers are machine and mechanic stops. That black grime is on everything even with me cleaning them every 6 months.
Every CNC machine from the 90's I've worked on is covered with the mystery black gunk (pretty sure it's mostly cutting coolant, and other oils), but most of them have seals on the electronics cabinet, with a heat exchanger, so no air is actually moving from outside to inside of the cabinet - on some machines that haven't had many issues, and the door was kept closed, the inside of the cabinet is virtually pristine. And on the ones that had issues, and the doors were open a lot, they're pretty coated. You can wash it off with simple green and a plastic brush, and rinse with hot water. They come out basically brand new. PCBs are washed when they're manufactured, so it's not a big deal to wash them again later. Just be careful of water in connectors, transformer coils, and under chips, or in speakers, buzzers, etc etc. Compressed air usually does a good job of getting rid of 95% of the water.
I got a 486 machine from an old print shop that got used well into the 2010's. The board and cards were jet black from ink powder and dust.
School IT Tech here, our Voicemail System was just a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7 tucked at the bottom of our server rack.
I used to install and service the Axxess. The fun part about upgrading the software for VM card was that it had to be done with a series of floppies. As you can obviously see is that there is no floppy drive but there is a floppy header. Whenever I did upgrades I had dangle a floppy drive out of the chassis while it was powered up and go through the upgrade process with a monitor and keyboard attached.
To explain why audio goes over the PCM port and not the backplane is that the original voicemail system for the Axxess was a full external PC with an ISA card with the PCM connector and DSP bits. Control of the voicemail system was done with a serial port. The EVMC is all that put on a card that is powered by the backplane and communicating the same way.
Heh. Just like some airplanes. (yes, some of them STILL load updates from 5.25" floppies.) I guess it could be worse... upgrading Big Boy(tm) phone switches from TAPE.
we had a zip drive kit...
Work still has one in production use, with the outboard voicemail PC and all. The PC software uses a DLL to cause Windows Explorer to interact with a Microsoft Access database. It only works on a few versions of Windows NT, ours runs NT 4. People jump up and down screaming at me about how dangerous and irresponsible and insecure this is because they cannot understand that there is no network hardware and no USB ports and no WiFi capability, the machine physically cannot be connected to any kind of network. The hardware is not there. They just keep asing "But what if someone just plugs it in? What if it gets accidentally connected? What if someone sneaks in..."
If someone is able to get through all of the locked doors into the phone equipment room and install hardware undetected, I have much bigger problems than the Intertel software being unsupported. They could just wreck everything in the room with a hammer and do a lot more damage.
@@SuzuranMajere Yeah. Some people just cannot wrap their noodle around a computer *NOT* being connected to the internet. The only way to potentially interact with it is through the "modem" (fax) interface. Some of them (VM cards) have a means of "DISA" - Direct Inward System Access - for remote management, but the interface is uselessly slow (9600bps)
Neat!
Until 2009 I worked for an MSP, and one of our clients was a church that had an A N C I E N T PBX that evidently still had a developer around, because every six months or so we'd receive a 3-1/2" floppy with updated code for their long distance auditing software. So between that and MS server OSs that *still* needed floppies for stuff like SCSI/RAID cards, the Old Skool DOS-era skills came in handy on a fairly frequent basis.
Oh my god that's even wilder than anything I dealt with and I dealt with some wild situations
'Why is voicemail down?'
'Dave is playing Wolfenstein 3D on the PBX again.'
I worked at a NASA contractor a few years ago and we sent PC/104 computers to the ISS to control and caprure data from various components and sensors of science experiments. Cameras, thermostats, servos, ignitors, heaters, pressure sensors, valves, etc. They are still very useful and you can get tons of add-on boards for them for connecting all kinds of specialized equipment.
I love when this man apologizes for sections of the video he thinks are dry. While I'm sitting here fully engaged the whole time.
Hey Thank you for the OS/2 and ATA (VOIP) modem stuff on your website! The OS/2 images were a serious nostalgia trip for me; I used 2.0 and 2.1 daily as a personal workstation in 1993-1994, and then years later for work had to upgrade a pair of OS/2 2.1 servers to Warp 4 for Y2K as no one else had OS/2 experience. OS/2 2.x had super fast disk routines and was WAY more responsive on a 486 than any version of Windows at the time. Multitasking with a modem was reliable unlike Windows 3.x. I missed out on Warp 3 because of a life event that occured right before it was released, but it looks like that would have been a great upgrade. Keep up the awesome site and work CRD!
In the early 1990s, OS/2 was the hands-down _best_ OS for personal computers. I still miss some of the awesomeness of the Workplace Shell.
As microelectronics engineer, i have a deep love/hate relationship with OS/2. It's super finnicky to set up and to navigate, but once it is ready for it's purpose, it runs very stable. OS/2 is still used in some industrial or commercial legacy systems. But most of it runs on Windows NT or UNIX. I work mostly for smaller production facilities and they often buy older second hand machinery.
I have never used it as a desktop system, but after all what i have seen, i came to the conclusion that desktop UI's before Win95 are super unintuitive, at least in my eyes. Win311, Amiga WB, UNIX, etc, they haven't quite figured it out yet. I'm born 1992, so i missed that time period. My parents were engineers too and had some older 3D/CAD systems at home. Amiga 2000 & 4000 based ones and dual Pentium Pro Siemens Nixdorf systems with NT4.
There is a modern OS, which claims to be compatible with OS/2 applications called ArcaOS, but i have not tried it out yet. It looks very close to a Linux DE from what i have seen.
@@hyperturbotechnomike The problem with ArcaOS is that it's still a closed source system and if there's one thing that companies like to do it would be to squeeze pennies until they melt into copper. That also nixes the hobbyists out too.
OH MY GOD MORE LITTLE GUYS
Thank you Papa Gravis
i was like "oh what a pleasant suprise, technology connections uploaded", then i was like "THEY BOTH UPLOADED ?!?!?!"
SAME! SAME!
Re: telephone systems in general: "once you know one, you kinda know most of them" has been the basis of my career.
That's what I used to say about Unix and now Linux. They all have their own personalities (or accents?), so you gotta be flexible.
the image of a computer switched off being powered only by the sheer willpower of the PSU caps is going to live rent free in my mind for ever...
i watch these videos to sleep, but today, I'll stay awake thinking about freaking caps
so much suffering, stress and lost deadlines would have been inexistent in so many people's lifes only if every desktop computer PSU had caps like these
Well, there are the Uninterruptible power supply series of devices which were popular during the 90s, but...they were often freaky and no-worky.
@@XanthinZarda i truly wonder if there's such a thing nowadays, having some juice for a second would be tremendously useful for fast oscillations in the power line
hopefully today's PSUs are a solved problem, only problem being most manufacturers wanting to save cost on a/bunch part/s that really shouldn't be downgraded
i literally laughed out loud when he did that, 'cause like, it makes sense, but it's still weird to see a computer stay on after the power's been cut off
my uncles ran a bus company for a while and they had one of these PBX boxes in the back electrical closet and the thing i found neat was someone had attached a radio-stereo system to it, so radio played over the PA system in the warehouse and repair bays, and it all looked so duct-taped together.
shit, someone did the same thing in the tax office I worked at in college. Our PA system was literally wired into the output from a regular old boombox with its speakers ripped out so the wires could attach to the PA system controller, which was in turn run by the poor little overheated office computer pretending to be a server.
Oh man, I used to admin an Intertel Axxess (and before that, its little brother, the Intertel Axxent). I had the very configuration software you're missing, sadly, lost to time. And yes, with that system and an ISDN PRI line, you could make all sorts of telephone magic happen. (A call from Zimbabwe, you say?) Our system must have had the network card, because I could reach into it from my desktop system. (This would have been a circa 2002 system.) Those little DSPs were a much-touted voice-processing feature that did some echo-cancellation for speaker calls, among other things. It was really a nice little beast.
Oh, and here's a fun "little guy" moment: The kid-brother to this system, the Intertel Axxent, actually used an ATX mini-tower as its enclosure, but not in the way you'd imagine. It had some kind of passive backplane, analogous to the Axxess, but it was in an ISA/PCI card slot form-factor. Similarly, the voicemail card was a single-board computer that plugged into that backplane, but a completely different shape. (It was probably running the exact same voicemail software.) It was a PC in a PC case, but not like you'd expect!
High an old CallWare CNTE here (Certified Network Telephony Engineer). The 15 pin connector is for out-of-band signaling to the voicemail card. Calls are routed to voice mail and become analog pots calls that get converted by the 8 channel card on the board. The 15 pin connection tells it what the call is that is coming in. For instance on port 2 is extension 103 doing a voicemail retrieve, on port 4 is a call no answer for extension 105, and on port 3 is a transfer to voicemail for an outside call to extension 106, port 101 is an Auto Attendant, etc. Many voicemails did in-band signaling where it winks, sends DTMF digit to say what the call is, then winks again and the call is put through, but they were a little slower and if you had one bad line, it was REALLY hard to trouble shoot. Some of the early systems (Like Panasonic KXPs) had to do supervised transfers, those were messy. We also had TSAPI, an out of band signaling protocol running over SPX, that one had some problems at first! Most of those systems we just had to change over to in band.
We had lifestyle programs (home improvements, cooking, etc) where you could 'request an info sheet via fax'. You rang the number, went thru the prompts, and the remote end would actually start sending the fax to you immediately, without ending the call and needing to call you back. You would just hit "start" on your fax machine and hang up the handset. I don't know if that "receive fax on current call" functionality was an uncommon capability. I thought that was a pretty cool use of the technology, especially since the remote end didn't need to pay for an extra phone call.
Still hoping one day that an actual OS/2 video will happen because OS/2 is such a trainwreck.
man installing it in virtualbox was an adventure
But damn it's a beautiful trainwreck.
How was OS/2 a trainwreck? In the late 1980s to early 1990s, it was the undisputed "best" OS. Its object oriented Workplace Shell GUI was far ahead of its time and had features we _still_ don't have in modern Windows. It's reliability was far above anything else [that a normal PC owner could use].
Maybe you meant IBM's promotion of OS/2 - yea, they f'ed that up bad.
@@TonyPombo Between development, marketing, the entire agreement with MS thing going tits-up, Warp 3 and 4 were indeed a trainwreck overall, even if the actual end product was fantastic. And they were, that was *the* multinode BBS grail at the time.
@@brocka.6479 Ya, I agree it was a political trainwreck. I don't think OS/2 v3 was bad. A v3.1 could have been killer, but IBM was circling the drain on PCs at the time and personally, I don't think IBM really wanted to "work hard enough" to make OS/2 win the OS war for a market they were planning to leave.
My dad worked at IBM in the 90s, we had to have OS/2 installed on our home computer for when he worked from home, and I can't tell you how much mileage I forced out of that Mahjong Solitare as a kid.
Did you know that there was a custom board editor so you could make your own Mahjong templates? That's right! What 6 year old needs more than that?
oh my god that's so spicy i love it
Lucky! My dad’s home computer to call in to work didn’t do much of anything
@@DerekLippold It was such a fancy pants setup for 1995. IBM gave him a stipend for a *second phone line* so we could be on the phone and the internet at the same time!
He could get on the Web Explorer to check daily Dilberts and press the forbidden-to-me red 'X' icon talk to Daemons (pretty sure that was his job) while mom was upstairs chatting with her sister about the latest QVC special or whatever. At the same time! Such a privileged existence.
@@CathodeRayDude He had all kinds of weird stuff installed on that machine. Like way too much to list out in a youtube comment and expect anyone reasonable to read it.
I wish I could resurrect that beast, but hard drive go clickclick and I can't find the backup tapes.
MCF5272VF66 "SOC" is a ColdFire V2 SOC running at 66MHz, my best guess is that it's comparable to a 66-100MHz 486 (depending on what it does).
ColdFire isn't "a 68000 processor", the instruction set is derived from 68k but is missing some instructions and addressing modes, the FPU internal precision is 64-bit instead of 80-bit and the actual instruction encoding is simplified. You can run 68000 assembly through a translator to generate ColdFire assembly and then assemble that, and for simple programs it might work as is but it's really intended as a starting point for porting rather than being used directly. This seems similar to how the Intel 8086/8088 came with a translator that took 8080 ássembler and generated 8086 assembly - again it might work out of the box for very simple programs but it was really inteded as a starting point for porting all those old CP/M programs.
I forget how they marketed the thing. I had several dev boards, and I think the palm pilot used them. They were roughly based on a 68030, but designed for low power use. I don't know anyone that wrote assembly for them (that could avoid it :-)), everyone wrote things in C. (with minimal tweaking, C compiles anywhere.) It's hard to compare it to a "PC" as it's not anything like it. For example, SSH is insanely slow on a CF processor, so much so a 12MHz 386 can run circles around it.
I had a portable music player back in the 2000s that had a Coldfire CPU (Motorola had spun off their semiconductor division as Freescale so that's how it was branded). I installed a hacked firmware called Rockbox and even created a basic 3d game for it, and I wrote the core of the rendering loop in Coldfire assembly. It was pretty fun getting it all to work.
I know that the older Crestron Building Automation systems used a Coldfire C based compiler for their programming software. But it was all proprietary at that level and heavily guarded from non-licensed programmers
@@PinkPandaKatiewow, Rockbox rocked! I installed it on the iPod Classic, the last gen before they all turned into b-stock iPhones with no cellular connection.
Was your game by chance the Doom port?
@@Dong_Harvey No, nothing that fancy. It was actually inspired by Ken's Labyrinth, and I called it "RocKen" as a pun on "Walken", the early prototype of Ken's Lab. I never finished it, though, and my iRiver H120 broke a long time ago so I have no way to actually play it now other than a standalone test version I created.
Wow, this brings back memories. I administered one of these for about probably close to a decade before we replaced in with an in-house built FreePBX based system. The entire cost of the server hardware with 3 T1 cards and around 75 Aastra 57i IP phones was barely more than 1 year of the lease for the Inter-tel system.
We didn't have the Voicemail PC card though. I can't remember if it had it's own dedicated PC or if we just had the Inter-tel software installed on one of our other servers.
I have a friend who works in telecoms as an engineer so hearing you break the whole business down for me in gory detail so I can properly understand the shop talk would actually be very very nice
Wow, you have outdone yourself, this is by far the most interesting and informative video from you. Really interesting learning about all of the technologies you touched on in this video.
Graphical operating systems of the 80s and 90s just loved to come bundled with an icon editor.
Not Windows, though! Even in Windows 11, there's still not a sensible way to create an icon, nor can you just set a PNG as one. What a good operating system.
This was not at all dry! Absolutely love PCs in weird places, this was a very fun watch.
As for OS/2 interface and lack of exit button - the "double click on system menu" is not only something that existed in Windows at least since 3.0, it works to this day in modern Windows versions xD
Right, but at that time it was mandatory.
Double-clicking to close windows was mandatory in its contemporaries too; there was no other "window manager" button to do it. That is why OS/2 does it that way - IBM was just copying what the norm was. It's not a mark against OS/2.
Except Macs. Macintosh OS, at the time, had a box in the upper left of the window that would close it. It looked like a checkbox, but would quit the app when you tried to "check the box" to see what it did.
Also, on OS/2 it was common for apps to *not* have a File -> Exit/Quit menu option. Many did, but not all. Maybe that's what CRD meant by "mandatory".
Annoyingly enough, it doesn't for anything made with WinUI, like Explorer. Either that or the custom framing they had to implement to make tabs work in Explorer just lacks support for handling it, because oh how I sorely miss it.
FYI, 1.) there are new Open Source Hardware projects making things like Sound Blaster and Adlib clones for PC104 boards. They're really popular for compact DOS gaming rigs. Some of the projects require out of production components, (but not all of them).
2.) ALSO, ALSO!! Someone made a PC104 to ISA card adapter, where it has like 3 or 4 ISA card slots that you could (optionally) install into an AT motherboard case (if you wanted to). But it gives you the ability to run stock video cards, harddrive cards, and/or sound cards.
Makes it easier to start out slowly with PC104, build a working system with off the shelf parts, and slowly work your way up to a full system.
Yep. There's been a lot of those coming out recently.
If I remember right I also saw things like storage, CPUs multiples of, and like you said VGA etc for the PC 104 and 104b etc class cards.
Probably the big reason they're still available insanely expensive is compatibility between cards because of the pc104 interface. But also because there's something called a numa case that you can put them into which is also what they use for things like very embedded industrial and aviation uses. Things like specialized aviation approved equipment.
Paging terminals (computers really) were another interesting voice storage application. You only had one frequency that hundreds or thousands of pagers were tuned to so what do you do if two people dial two pagers at the same time? Originally one person would get a busy signal which was annoying but eventually they began recording the message and transmitting it to the pager later. The paging terminal that my dad owned around 1980 had several Z80 based boards that could store eight second voice messages in 64K of RAM _digitally_ so the message would be sent to the pager once the transmitter was available. The idea that audio could be stored in a bunch of bytes in memory completely blew my mind at the time.
The pin you blew up, btw, is a ground pin on the hard drive and the melted socket on the motherboard is the +5V (motor) pin. Since there are multiple adjacent ground pins elsewhere on the connector, ground was still properly connected when the pins were offset and you shorted the main 5V supply into one of those ground pins (which promptly melted).
The reason the drive and board still work is firstly because those other ground pins on the drive are fine, and secondly because either your 5V motor supply socket on the motherboard is still ok despite the melting or because there's an adjacent 5V logic supply and they're bussed together on one or both ends.
My first post-college job was using an intertel system. They were very license heavy for every little feature. In fact, if you wanted to add a phone, you had to get your contract/license modified and that endpoint number could never go down. We dropped them as soon as we could.
Fun Fact: That's still how it's done by *so many* vendors now, particularly for cloud PBX. It's miserable and stifling and drove so many people to Asterisk despite its myriad problems.
@@CathodeRayDude that's not a very fun fact. At all.
Freeswitch is a great PBX too
I work for one of those providers in NL. Licencing is based on user / seat count. Can be changed every month
Your standard for unplayable duke3d is pretty amusing. :p That ran better than i expected honestly especailly given it was high detail mode and fullscreen.
I am Italian, so I apologize for my poor English. I just wanted to tell you that I am fascinated by every one of your videos. You manage to go into detail about anything and make everything interesting. I can't watch videos on RUclips that are longer than 10 minutes, but you manage to make me spend 90 minutes in the most pleasant and interesting way possible. Thank you so much for the effort you put into it.
os/2 in the thumbnail... oh dear god this video shall be fun
Yay, industrial PC104! :)
Amusing to see a Lucent module in this. When AT&T were forced to split up, Lucent was one of the spin offs. They later split themselves into Avaya and the rest bought by Alcatel, and at some point got absorbed into Nokia. Lucent also sold its consumer products division to VTech. It's such a weird lineage, and a testament to how huge they were even after splitting away from AT&T if you find their modules in a competitor's product.
Yes exactly this - my dad was at AT&T and then Lucent after the split- writing code to make phones work. We had “take your kids to work” days a couple years so we got to hang out in his office and such.
@@DerekLippold To be honest that sounds pretty awesome to me - the whole lineage of companies born from Bell Labs were utterly fascinating to me. Out of interest how did your father feel about the split?
"Computers should get bigger when you add more functionality to them"
well yeah, it only really makes sense for that happening, the more specialized units you add-
"Because it's extremely funny"
Oh, well, that too.
6:08 That has to be the best impersination of pulse dialing I've ever heard anyone make.
That actually was pretty impressive. My brain and mouth would've given up halfway through the second "click" and would've turned into a babbling mess.
@@TheClumsyFairy is there still support for pulse dialing in any modern systems? I know it was around for quite a while.
@@markjames8664 I know my local exchange still supports it, but most PBXs these days don't have any support for it at all.
@@markjames8664 not sure how but the phone company my grandparents used got their old att rotary dial phone from the 50s hooked up to their digital phone service they have now and it works perfectly fine. I remember being so confused as a kid that the one phone, yes the only phone, we had in the house in the kitchen had a switch labeled touch tone and pulse and never could figure out what it did until I got older.
He's like a Captain Crunch, but for electromechanical switches.
I had so much fun working south the old access system back in the day. We got the first VOIP card available for it, and the fun really started. I lived in an area at the time that didn't have broadband yet. My boss made a call the I could work remotely some days if I could get a voip phone working at home. He didn't think I would be able to with a 56k connection. I tweaked the packet settings and size on a voip phone and got it working over a 56k connection to the internet... I couldn't do anything else on the internet when on the phone, but I got it working great and call Qual was tinny but it worked. Boss couldn't believe it.
Loved how easy it was to work on that old system.. great memories! Cheers!
This rack style is used in a lot of other applications. In my building, several machines have this same backplane system with x86 CPUs to control some high-end machinery.
It has a lot of similarities with Ferranti's Eurobus backplane which still appears all over the place in industrial applications, but I suspect it's proprietary in this case.
we also had these little voicemails that had a 486 embedded and booted dos from a flashcard. you could load windows 98 on a flashcard and hyperterminal right into the serial port and see it boot.
As someone who works with PWM from time to time I'm definitely going to steal the term "voltage wobbles"!
oh my glob! I remember working on these things as well. I think the largest PBX I ever worked on was a 32 line setup. I don't think it was this particular manufacture. It's been years! Very well done short and concise explanation. It was nice "relearning" ;) Funny, the training I had was this short. I figured the rest out on my own. Horrifying and pleasant walk down memory lane.
I've got a three 386SL based PC104 computers made in the '90s by a company named Megatel in Ontario that no longer exists. I have collected some documentation about them. They're real interesting, with a sort of early flash-based filesystem, VGA, floppy and IDE controllers on board and one of them even has ethernet. I have a breakout board of sorts since they use a one of those DIN 32-pin connectors in lieu of separate connectors for each peripheral. I intended to make a PC out of them, but it's been years and I'm sure you'd do more good with them than I.
Long story short: we used fax capable voicemail boxes to store 1000s of incoming faxes to send to a Faxpress, which output to a HP LJ6000 in a remote office.
As a kid who grew up on a C64 and was blown away when 95 came out it is cathartic to hear the beeps and boops as you mess round in the bios and booting. Was also nice to see ports that most "tech support" would have no idea about.
Love my modern toys, but boy so I miss those days when it came to repair. Computer won't boot, may take 5 hours but you can fix it usually with stuff you have on hand. So many pcb I have repaired with bread ties and magnet wires.
Now I can't even tell which trace I want without a microscope and schematics that look like M.C.Escher was the circuit designer.
Thank you Gravis, always appreciate your videos.
Also, I will be waiting for that PBX video/s. Will take me back to playing with them and sip to get free cell service over my city free WIFI. Missed the first wave but that felt like Phreaking 2.0
I love these videos so much. You might be my favorite youtube channel. Thanks so much for the effort you put into these and great script writing
I love this series! The embedded/industrial side of computing is so interesting. Love seeing PC guts adapted and modified for these niche applications and I like how it's all designed for reliably and maintenance.
I have a hunch voicemail modules end up being pc-like hardware because it's a perfect match for general purpose computing. Recording, playback, file management, phone trees, networking, voicemail-to-email. Why come up with a bespoke special purpose computer when off the shelf standard PC hardware and software already exists? You can implement whatever you can dream up if you can pay a programmer to write software for it.
The PSU has a high grade supply filtering to meet the regulations for connection to the PSTN as well as heavy current draw. Nipon Chemicon is really top end kit !
1:03:15 - Windows 3.1 didn't have a shut down button, but there was a button to exit Windows if I remember correctly and it would exit into MS Dos. After which the user would shut down the PC manually.
The house I grew up in had a Vodavi StarPlus DHS with two trimline AT&T phone 6 executive stations with caller ID (odd feature but all it said was the phone number from what i remember) one Panasonic cordless phone a viking intercom.
All connected to 4 lines.
One for fax, one for business, one for home, and one alarm line.
It never dropped out and I think it had the call waiting module as I remember music all hooked up through an unlabeled punch block.
All services were provided by MCI and then Verizon. Despite thr digital upgrade in 2006 we still used the traditional pbx as we wanted our money's worth.
I was rummaging around in the comments, and when I heard the dark spirit theme I instantly threw the wheel back to the top.
Compaq was using their own color code for keyboard Orange, mouse Green, monitor Blue, speaker red, mic again blue but they also tend to put the microphone in the monitor and had some sort of attachable speakers. And this was done before the color standard went in to Standard. It was one of the nice things they were doing that simplified set up that I think other manufacturers didn't go along with until it became a standard and surprisingly the colors are fairly similar.
The PC-99 standard might have made it an industry standard, however, Packard Bell had been using that same color spec on its ports much earlier than that. This unlocked a memory of first seeing this around 1993. Through the mid-90s (and other manufacturers started having some uptake a little earlier than PC-99, I can't recall ever seeing a Socket 7 motherboard that had USB and *didn't* have colored ports), it was a dead giveaway if something came from a Packard Bell because the cable connectors would be molded in the same colors as the sockets in an era when cable connectors were typically beige, black or maybe chrome if it was some kind of parallel port sound device.
My Gateway PC (Pentium 166) has USB ports and non-standard colors. I think some ports are normal-colored but the keyboard is orange and the mouse is purple.
yeah, PC/104 stuff is horrifically expensive because it's still used VERY widely in industry, so aside from "hobbyists" the only market is large companies.
The CPC is running VxWorks, the POSIX main bit is a dead giveaway.
You're also correct about the accounting stuff, it's called CDR "Call Data Recording", I used to provide support for a phone billing system which we sold into hotels, it was based on a custom ISA card which was basically a full 8086 system with a pair of hardware buffered serial interfaces, which you'd plug into a PC running DOS (originally designed for PCs which were about as powerful as the card but with less RAM ;) ), it'd take the CDR feed from the PBX, process it through various billing tables then spit out a custom record over a different serial port which was plugged into your FOH billing system (and frequently an Epson dot matrix printer for backup).
11:50 - A couple of the most fascinating devices I ever had to work on where the Toshiba voice mail systems for their PBX systems. They had one family of them that were basically the same device, just one was internal to the cabinet, and the other was an external device. It ran DOS! You could connect a serial terminal to it, and watch it boot, and interact with it like a little DOS machine.
The other one came later, and was more like the one you show here, and it ran a version of Windows NT (4 I think). You had to connect to it using an ancient version of MS NetMeeting, and if the old spinning hard drive on it died, you were absolutely screwed. I don't miss working on that stuff.
My first job was managing the FaxBack PC at a local computer store in 1995. We didn’t let you enter your own fax number, we just sent the fax back on the call that was already up. You called up, heard the fax tone, and pressed start on your own fax machine. That means you were billed for the call and not the computer shop, and that matters because UK phone calls back then cost like 5p or 10p a minute and we didn’t distinguish between local and long-distance like the US did.
Use to spend hours messing with the Intertel phone system we had at the office back in the day. Use to page all of ENG department with Johnny Cash Ring of Fire after outages from random locations and never caught.
please do pbx videos, about obsolete ones of the last 30 years. it would float my boat.
Agreed 😊
Ctrl+C being the shortcut for "cheat" is straight up killing me man xD
Actually, Ctrl+Alt+Delete is a low level key combo. It gets caught by the BIOS and passed to the OS if it's running in real mode, as opposed to standard mode. This is why you have to hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete in Windows to get your login window, because it's an actual hardware interrupt that has to be handled by the firmware or the kernel. CTRL+ALT+DEL is actually a very special key combo on PCs.
There is a tremendous amount of misinformation about this as far as I can tell. It's very common for people to claim CAD generates an NMI, and in fact I made that statement in the video as originally shot, and some people called me on it so I looked into it. I can find no indication that CAD generates any special signal; it's not mentioned in any MS documentation, nor in the original PC technical manual. As far as I understand, it's simply a sequence that the default bios keyboard handler looks for to trigger a reboot, and when you boot an OS like Windows it replaces that vector with its own code which also listens for that combo. It has special significance only because the kernel keyboard handler will not send that key combo to anything except the login process.
I believe the Ctrl+Alt+Del (which started with NT) was supposed to be a security feature-this was the only place you would enter your password so the users were supposed to know that any other login window was fake (this was before the ability to do admin tasks by entering the admin password etc).
@@markjames8664 It didn't start with NT, it started with the PC, in the BIOS as CRD said. (OK, TBH, I have no idea if it was significant on CPM machines before that. But it definitely existed on the IBM PC and has been around ever since.)
Also as CRD said, it was used by NT as the login attention sequence because no other program was allowed to trap that combo, to prevent things like a key logger that might capture logins and passwords.
In between, 16-bit Windows trapped the keyboard interrupt, circumventing the PC BIOS, and responded to that sequence to show the Task Manager (or to reboot in an emergency, if you kept at it.)
@@nickwallette6201 I really meant its use in logon.
@@markjames8664 Ah, well, in that case. Carry on! "Well actually" withdrawn.
25:00 Game ports are MIDI
Hence the audio and data capabilities above the gaming use!
it was likely using tones to digital commands to talk over the modem for phone over ip and multiple choice menus, 3 way calls and long distance calls. otherwise youd be doing it manually with one of those handset bases for a 3way call or any tone tone /pulse to digital.
🤔
Ever since I found out that my modem could send faxes in middle school, I've been fascinated by the prospect of interacting with phone lines using a computer (well, besides the obvious use of connecting to the internet). Unfortunately, with extremely limited internet access and my extremely limited command of English language at the time, I couldn't do much about it.
Got to use that knowledge exactly once, by sending out a hundred or so custom faxes overnight for my father's business. Everyone thought that I was a wizard for a brief moment, until they realized that these faxes were probably going straight into the trash bin.
Something like this would have blown my entire mind at the time. Thanks for the video, this is a cool piece of hardware!
I'm in joy just seeing your upload title. CRD, you're great, thanks for your work!
I'm a little sad RC2 of this video didn't add the Boy Howdy counter. Great video as always!
Check around 27:00 (“PC 104”)
In the mid 90's we created a music on hold system out of an early pentium PC (even possibly a 486), a soundblaster and winamp. The sales people created short 'advertisements', we cut pieces of easy listening music and put together a giant playlist of random music and ads.
For as long as I have worked in IT I have loved how phone cards look. If it's on a little "small office / branch" system like this one or a massive PBX for a hospital... The cards are always amazing and visually pleasing to me.
this is one of your most banging videos in a while and your knowledge of the subject shines brighter than usual here. i want to see the 40 minute tirade on PBXs
I used to help admin crusty old Avaya PBXs. We’d buy whole PRI trunks or just a handful of channels, then configure a complex web of rollovers and trees. Using the software was insanely confusing and awful. It barely worked.
When the guy who ran them all quit, I was put in charge of all telco. I immediately went around ripping them out and replacing them. I still hear the default ringtone and wince a little.
Sounds like a PBX to me. Awful interface with settings written in an indecipherable foreign language. Terrible software. Insanely expensive. And, if you can get it to run at all, it will run for the rest of time.
Dude I can't express how much these videos interest me. Keep up the good work..I will be contributing via patreon very soon as I have pulled the plug on a few that were going nowhere! Love this stuff :)))
Really been loving the Little Guys series. Can't wait for the next Little Guy!
I appreciate your enthusiasm for these small, almost forgotten devices! Thank you for doing this series. I look forward to seeing what you put out next.
id watch the hell out of a feature-length video on PBX systems
thx for digging into old games. so awesome. i got those feelings.
@0:30 I never understood the phone addiction some people seem to have, I wonder if it's the IT version of train people - and I mean this in the kindest possible sense. I hated calling or being called. Now I've come to appreciate how quickly you can get things done compared to email and text.
I was into phones for years and I think it's a fascinating hobby, I just ran out of things to learn about them that intrigued me. It's neat technology.
I'm a typical tech geek introvert, but I'm fascinated by all the behind-the-scenes comms stuff. I love the idea of running a small telco, cable co, dialup and DSL ISP, TV station, radio station...
I don't want to be called or see my face on the TV, but working on the stuff that would provide that infrastructure? Neat.
@@nickwallette6201yep exactly. I hate talking on the phone….or in person….or at all but yes, I love this technology though (especially since it’s all mostly outdated)
@@CathodeRayDude did you have a few copies of 2600 magazine laying around?
@@nickwallette6201 Im very interested of cable headend stuff i always try to find as much info about them as possible since its hard lol
The Winbond chip is probably the standard super IO chip with dual serial, parallel, mouse, keyboard and floppy controller
There is a PC/104 USB controller that works with 8bit ISA, its the same as the little ISA USB controller with the CH375 chip that only does sub storage under DOS
your takes on OS/2 were the voice of reason the OS wars of the 1990ies would have needed. your picks on the config.sys are 100% correct. it was a bit like NixOS today. you could do a lot, but it was very easy to break.
There's a lovely hobbyist project called the weeCee based on PC-104. The main part of the project is basically a PCB design for a Crystal CS4237 based sound card, designed to be paired with a Vortex86 module. So the most accessible PC-104 sound card is probably that.
An excellent video to watch with one eye, while working on a soldering project. Perfect background chatter. Much appreciated!
“Yes?”
“I'm doing a survey. Do you believe the Condor's really an endangered species?”
as lomg as you can program in additional hardware itll never be gone lol
Well this was a blast from the past. I was a Unix system admin at Inter-Tel in the late '90s and early 2000s. There were a lot of exciting things going on with IP Telephony and, what at the time was called, Visual Voicemail.
That's the exact model PBX we installed in the law Firm I worked for in the 90s. It was quite expensive but worked flawlessly. As for the LAN port, it was for maintenance (and in my case to grab the call log so I could hash it over to Timeslips for billing). And for the record, Inter-Tel had the most foul attitude of any vender I ever worked with, even worse than the Xerox people, who were dicks, or the SW Bell people who seemed to hate everyone. To every Inter-Tel rep who ever spoke to me, I hope you now live in the sewers under Vegas.
I remember reading that Duke nukem forever was designed with the 486 as they're absolute basic minimum. There were some features in the very first level which they had to remove because it hung 486 computers. I think it's included in the developer commentary on one of the later re-releases.
yet i dont recall anyone playing these games on a 486? im surprised tomb raider runs at all on a 486?
@@pazsion gaming on the minimum specs is never very common. Metal gear solid the phantom pain had some minimum spec of a 2012 i3, but I very much doubt anyone was playing that game on their office computer.
😂 This is a Macintosh that routes your phone calls okay😂 👍
Great content. Looking forward to the PBX/TDM transport (pre-IP) deep dive. Private vendors are the only people still working on these. "The Telephone Company" no longer wants to support PBX's. Regulated "POTS" service is to the NID. Worked for baby bells 20 some years.
It's so weird when something suffers what seems like catastrophic damage, but still works just fine.
Your channel is my favorite of all the tech-related channels I regularly watch. Always educational and entertaining.📺
The top with all the grills looks really cool :D
I'm glad you're mostly recovered from being into phones. It's been two years since I've looked at an asterisk log.
ive always wondered wth a pbx was, something we should of had instead of what we got.
love this.
Oh goody! A parallel port! So I can print out my voicemails!
The real way the age of this thing is demonstrated is by the fact that 300 W was considered a lot of power for a PC
On PC104, I have a pair of Advantech PCM-9388 SBCs that I'm using for a retro PC arcade cab, they're a P4 based Celeron M 600MHz... I salvaged them out of a McDonald's order confirmation kiosk, they used to run XP Embedded.
Sadly only one has the original LCD display and power supply setup, the other one is just the SBC.
They're pretty useful, has onboard HDA sound (which works perfectly with SBEMU), but has a PC104 interface, so it *could* get a genuine Sound Blaster.
The reason for the dual UART chip on the EVMC is due to voltages. FPGAs like 3.3v, at most you can get some 5v i/o these days. RS232 can be upwards of +/- 15v, especially in telcom in those days. Since plumbing 15v into an FPGA would require a level shifter chip, and FPGA blocks are expensive, it makes more sense to spec a cheaper FPGA and UART chip instead.
ah, duh! you could have a level shifter but at that point why not just get the whole UART and be done with it. makes sense, ty!
to do multiple calls, sound or modem requests you need more than one uart controller... or more modems and sound cards.
or just one not in use simply to switch and not drop the task at hand.
hand offs for a bbs for example so simultaneous call ins dont get dropped, it can be on hold. kind of.
Your keyboard looked very familiar and I realised mine is exactly the same.
Except yours is clean. Well done.
Behind the scenes objects and spaces are always interesting, change my mind