@@GigantTech people were asking me that when I had 500 subs, 1k subs , 10k subs. luckily I still have a day job :) That being said, feel free to put in a good word for me with Suzan W :)
the 90s was the last decade when IT industry was still fun and conferences were super fun to attend - after 90s things just got more and more dull and big tech companies got more and more overtly evil
And also as fast Internet connections came onboard more attacks on browsers and spyware and the never ending battle to secure shit, that sucked the fun out of it for sure. But yeah the 90s were definitely filled with promise. That’s what vaporwave is all about!
A lot of things changed for the worse. Smaller companies went bust (including a lot of locally owned PC builders) and many larger companies started caring more about shareholders over their customers, and as a result, they didn't cater to their users anymore. So things kinda got homogenized and it only got worse as time went on. They called it the 'market of diminishing returns' and it's still a problem today. Doubtful things will ever improved since many folks keep buying instead of voting with their wallets.
@@NickDalzell and those, in addition to nostalgia, of course, are all why retro computing is so popular a scene these days (getting ready to go mess with my recently arrived TheC64 Maxi - going to connect a USB external 3 1/2 floppy disk drive to it and try to load some games from that, like Attack of the PESCII Robots and SEGA Sonic The Hedgehog - a whirling floppy disk will be more like old times than a silent USB stick)
13:52 is part of the reason why whenever I get an old computer that still has the previous owner's OS installation on it, I always wipe it and reinstall everything myself. It's pretty much guaranteed to make the computer run far better.
It's always nice to experience that clean install and the speed associated with it. It is however a challenge to keep it lean like that. The slowness tends to creep in over time.
That trayless drive, the original 1x speed no multisession Mitsumi - the drive kind of slides out and then the top hinges open - an absolute classic. And the Hercules card, from what I can find, a S3 savage 3D
That mini-tower with the “Impact” badge was my first 486 computer case back in 1993. It probably costs about $40 back in 1993 in Silicon Valley. It was a very popular case. Hard to find today as it is still very popular with the retro community.
I built so many clones of all these systems. I recognise pretty much every case and component. It's slightly freaky, as if you got a load of my old PC builds lol. Blast to the past :) Oh, by the way, fans stopping and spinning up only when needed was fairly common back in those days; CPU's didn't get nearly as hot as they do today, a heat sink did the job in many cases. Great Video!
Yea the older opti cards with dedicated opl3 chips were pretty great even the 931 itself had decent opl3 emulation. These in the video however have a pretty horrible (unique?) synthesizer wavetable with missing and wrong instruments, and the sound quality was pretty bad too. I do not recommend them for retro gaming unless its your last option.
What a relaxing watch. It's incredible how despite lots of damage and mistreatment by time, these machines continue to power on today. Goes to show how back then stuff was made to last for a lifetime. Finally, that cute case at 20:49 I also got recently, brand new and for next to nothing! And it came in a box that was covered in lots of vintage stamps. Thank you for this superb video!
Things were made to be repaired and user-servicable. we didn't need laws for right to repair in the 1990s. Technically we shouldn't need them today if people would simply stop buying from companies who produce crap.
That tower with the black corner has its buttons arranged like the old Acer logo. Amazing video as always! I really enjoy looking at old PCs and investigating them
Great video. It looks like there could be a few more exciting retro videos to come with this bunch of computers. Looking forward to seeing how you clean up the Varta battery mess.
With that last PC, I think the FD failure might be because it was set as a 1.2 MB 5.25" drive rather than a 1.44 MB 3.5" drive. I've had that error for the same reason on one of my PCs.
Yeah I was getting tired at that point I guess :) goal was not to do advanced diagnostics. But some of the computers will get their own video for sure.
That "Impact" minitower is a same one, which I used to have as my first PC. I still have the guts, but the tower is a history since many years :( I got one recently which is similar, but still not the same though....
A very good collection. Those barrel batteries have a lot to answer for. I was expecting a lot of fireworks on start ups but was surprised by the amount of successful boots.
Some similarities between some of these machines. 3Com networks cards, Pentium class, sometimes 2 hard drives. Makes me think this was a lot of PCs from an old business. They look fairly clean, so maybe office machines?
Awesome video! That final desktop, Tori, has a battery holder for 4 x AA batteries stuck on the power supply. What's that about? You see it at 26:42 . The motherboard also has that green barrel battery that leaked..
A lot of people had AA instead of the varta, or got it sent out and that was the common replacement. People still do it today that don't want to use Vartas or coin cells.
Great video, I used to have 2 of the old XT style desktops both were 286 boards with 640k ram. Picked up cheap from a computer fair in the UK as they were not working. Fixed both and built my confidence messing with hardware in the process. Sadly I no longer have them but seeing this video brought back so many fun memories.
Nice collection of computers. The first computer with the leaking varta battery sounded like it popped a few times as though a capacitor had blown which is a shame.
I had the case with the very orange 3.5-inch floppy bay, second tower from lower right. I think the brand was InWin. I worked for a company where we built a bunch of systems around those cases in the late '90s, mainly because they were inexpensive and we could get them shipped next day from California via UPS ground. Weird seeing this UV-damaged version of it.
Yeah these were very popular cases. Have seen them pass by here in all kinds of different colora, from pearly white to the most extreme yellow / orange.
29:00 nice IBM 8513 monitor I see on the shelf :). Great video, hopefully those 486 boards with the Varta battery leakage will scrub up OK. At least with the last one you checked you still had a working keyboard interface.
I LOVE that "unboxing" of newly acquired old computers and going on the discovery tour on their inside. Could do that all day long. sadly my storage space ran full, eheh. Curious when it will happen to you :P
That's a nice stack of 90's tech! Bit surprised to see a Dallas chip on a Pentium era motherboard, I thought they'd all gone over to coin cells by then. The case you show at 20:45, I have one that's pretty much identical, just with a round power switch (same type though) if I remember correctly. Acquired it about 20 years or so ago, and back then I built a Pentium 100 into it for my niece's birthday. Eventually it ended up back in my hands and I still have it now!
I still have my *A-Open* Server floor standing case (3ft x 2ft).. It could handle up to six Hard Drives! Had a slide out motherboard tray. I customized it with 4 fans, two 120mm Aluminum Sanyo's from an IMB server (That still work in 2021) & Two 80mm in the rear in back of the Hard drive tray on the top!
Suspicious lack of 5.25" floppies. Could it be they sell for $200+ these days? I love that mini-tower on the bottom 3rd from the right. They were ubiquitous where I live and had more than one myself back in the day. Brings back memories so sharp I can smell my basement lab back then!
Lol how that power button popped out at 17:00! I have one of these ancient Mitsumi CDROM drives. You just push the entire thing into the computer and it snaps out a little. Now you can pull it out and open the tray upwards. Single speed, but it would read even my most scratched up CD with barely a problem - no other drive could read that CD until I got a 40x burner. Win98 with 32MB RAM is no fun... talking from experience. With 40MB it starts being fun. And with 64MB it runs great. These Cirrus Logic video cards are pretty fast and really capable... and really poorly soldered. I have some issues with mine, bending them makes them work, so it's pretty certainly dry solder joints.
It's pretty likely that the 486 board isn't what was originally in the 286 clone-looking desktop. I built my brother a K6-233 machine to replace his older Prolinea 4/25s into a very similar case (after junking the zero wait state turbo 286 clone board and MFM drive... cringe) for his sophomore year of college in late 1997. He wanted a desktop case instead of a mini-tower and they were getting harder to find even then. The old 286 I got for $10 at a Thrift store. It had a 250 watt power supply and was fully up to snuff. We figured it would be a kind of "sleeper" to keep his dorm mates from "borrowing" what looked like a then 10 year old PC. Apparently he got so much harassment about his "old" computer he made me put it in a standard beige mini-tower case. I don't know what happened to the 286 case, it was mint.
hehe ... short and sweet. Have fun with it. It is a nice PC and pretty fast. Installed Windows 95 on a good old Western Digital Caviar and it ran pretty well.
If a network card is installed in windows 95/98 and an automatic IP address from dhcp is configured and the LAN cable is not connected during startup, the system still waits for an IP address from the DHCP server, which takes a very long time. Such a strange microsoft error.
The K6-2 533 is meant to be run at 5.5*97 MHz. Many mainboards don't support 97MHz FSB, but they do support 95MHz. 5.5*95MHz is 522.5MHz. That's why the 533MHz processor posts at 523MHz instead.
One system that I really regret disposing of was a super socket 7 system. I don't remember the model number but was an Asus board that would take 512MB ram, I had that and an AMD K6 550, I don't remember much about the other components, except 2 of the largest hard drives it would take and a DVD rom and CD-RW drive. I ran that thing until like 2005 or 2006
Thanks for this video. Nice to be able to boot most of them. Really like the XT style case, the diamond buttons and the clicky style button. It's the first time I see XT style for 486 and modern machines. I hope you will able to fix issues.
They indeed HAD... I had one of them with 4 Megs of RAM in an Intel Pentium MMX 233 machine with Win98 and 16 Megs of ram on a 1 Gb (Yes, Gigabyte, NOT Terabyte) PATA133 (IDE) Harddrive. Unreal and Quake could not work properly, so I ordered 2 3DFX Voodoo2 cards and put them in SLI. MUCH beter :-D
I love the Baby AT case form factor, as well as the micro/mini tower, which is basically a Baby AT desktop case in vertical position. I still have a few '90's cases as well, including slimlines & also 1980's big XT & AT cases etc etc. I only have one full tower.
There should be a button on the "top" of the case to push to turn it off. It is a 2 stage power button on the globalyst. I've got two of those bad boys. A pentium 90 and a dx2 66
The Hercules Terminator Beast is a very nice find. It's featuring the S3 Savage chipset with S3TC. Even if it's weaker in performance I would prefer it over every generic TNT card.
Nice video as always! I think you forgot to cover the mini-tower with the Creative CD-ROM drive. Would have been curious to know what the sound card it held ;)
What a find, and from my favorite era of computing. Those k6-2 machines could be set up for some fine old-school gaming, especially if paired with graphics accelerators.
The power button in that globalyst has a feature that can lock the power button in the on position. It appears to have been optional in some models. That smaller orange button along the side should release it.
Had a globalyst 515 back in the day and I’ll definitely hold on to one if I ever come across another one. Great style and the red power button just makes everything more exciting.
That's why I bought it immediately when I saw it up for sale. This thing has 3 PCI slots, 6 ISA slots, can hold 2 hard drives and 2 CD drives & has loads of space inside. If the compatibility on this thing is as good as on my other IBM PCs, I'll make this one my standard DOS driver.
I was working for IBM when the original PC was introduced. It is so annoying that they did not create a passive backplane as a standard. It would have been easy to upgrade millions of computers multiple times just by swapping cards.
That CPU fan turning itself off reminds me of the anxiety I got when I first ran my PC in a new case where I could see the GPU fans and they stopped spinning lol
Regarding the last PC, is there any identifier on the 5.25" to 3.5" hard disk drive bay adapter? I am looking for something like that for a very long time but it is hard to find it without a part number. Very nice video, indeed!
Strange how that PCI graphics card at @17:25 (Fastware vc963c?) turned into an AGP card moments later? :) Awesome systems anyways! So much retro goodness
I can say that the last system you had there likely has a good controller card, but the slot it was in has been corroded a bit by the leaking battery, you could see the green on the pins of the slot when you were taking the card out, you had said you were tired, so you might have missed it. I'm sure cleaning the board should get it booting again.
Very nice collection! I was hoping to see more 486 and 386 systems, but still a great find nonetheless. Speaking of running Windows 95 on 486-class hardware like the DX2-66 in the video, I found running Windows 95 on my DX4-100 practically unbearable and ended up reverting back to DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. At the time I just thought 486s were underpowered for Win95, but after becoming a collector myself, I have an AMD DX4-100 and Cyrix 5x86 100 that run Win95 just on the side of tolerable. My 486 back in the day had 18MB of RAM, but it is the older 30pin type that I think runs at something like 120ns which I think has a major impact on performance. The latter 486s I mentioned have 72pin SIMMs at 70 or 80ns and using local bus for hard drive accesses too. So I guess if you have a late-gen 486 Win95 runs ok, but if you have an early gen it just doesn't do so well.
@@RetroSpector78 I have just unearthed a Plantron 386, with Plantron labelled MFM controller, HDD and other Plantron labelled stuff. But the board has been replaced by a 486. I also might downgrade it to a 386 again.
I have that exact Impact tower with the green led and the 2 white buttons. I am not too sure what O/S it's running because upon boot up it tells me the checksum failure and that the keyboard is locked and I can't get any further into it. I also don't have a keyboard or mouse that is compatible with that computer. I do like the look of that tower though.
Nobody born after 1990 will ever understand why are we all watching a guy rummaging through old office equipment in a dusty storeroom, and why are we smiling with joy when he says the part numbers.
Necroware has restored an AT&T Globalyst 515 and in that system you have to push a little orange button just on the side of the power button in order to disengage it. I think it was a safety measure not to power off by mistake.
Gary Kildall used to talk about how AT&T was going to dominate the computer industry when they threw their hat in the ring. He suggested that no predictions should be made until we saw what AT&T would do. But AT&T did nothing. At first they were Olivetti, then NCR/IBM, but they never made a serious effort to design their own stuff. All in all I have always been dissapointed with little orginality and flavor in the AT&T machines.
Whoa, those beige boxes, almost the same, bland and boring (except the Compaq ones, LOL). Remembers me of when I was doing Computer classes to learn how to use Windows, MS Office and the Internet. They are kinda ugly now, but at that time they were the most beautiful things. And there were the happiest hours of my life, every week!
@@RetroSpector78 They're sure a piece of history in your hands right now. This kind of PC (with generic cases, apart from AT&T) was the most common in houses around my country (Brazil) in those days. Just a few people had branded computers (IBM, Compaq, Acer...). Awesome video!
Wow that was a big flashback for me I think I owned a few of these systems back in the day, even the Dutch windows versions so iconic lol yes I’m Dutch, just hated giving support to systems running Dutch then and still I set my OS to English. Started with the c64 and an x86 ibm pc1 in ‘83 and owned all the systems up to my current zen3/intel I7 still remember when I got my first soundblaster 20mb hdd and Hercules 3dfx gpu. Btw the little brown slot behind the pci witch you didn’t recognize was EISA I think a standard for servers that didn’t really succeed because pci came just a behind it, remember having them in my 486dx4 server tower.
The one with the impact logo was my first pc at home, it had a 386 sx with 100 mb harddisk and 2 mb ram, that we upgraded to 4 mb ram to run Windows 3.11... wooohooo! We later had a Cyrix 6x86mx in it, with 2 gb disk I think.
Dang, i wish i could get things like this easily (and cheaply!) but alas i'm usually stuck inside.. Give them to meeeeee lol.. Also, have you noticed how similar each Windows install is set up? And how clean they are inside.. Plus identical network cards or at least the same brand. Makes me think whoever had them at some point repaired/cleaned them all then they got stored and never sold? That K6-2 533 really isn't common either! Seems someone re-used that last system's case, as that was definitely more like a 286/386 system. Someone slapped a new machine in there!
That's a pretty cool haul. The machines are somewhat generic, but it's cool that they all still work after 15 years of garage duty. Are you re-selling them after you've fixed them up or give them away to friends? Would be fun to have a video where we'll see these PC's find a new home (as if they are adopted from a shelter, lol).
Such Awesome finds and the fact you said you paid next to nothing for them you are extremely lucky. I would like to buy a AT case(in great shape) and not have to give a kidney in price(that also includes shopping) for it. It crazy difficult to find this stuff(granted I know there's eBay but that's where the sellers are stealing from you in your wallet especially in shipping cost) for a fair price and its awesome you found them.
I used to sell all that stuff new and used. You should find an old ISA POST probe if you're doing a lot with those old motherboards we used to use them all the time to find out what was stopping them booting.
@Rita 25 y.o - check my vidéó I remember seeing those in a library in about 1990, they were upgrading all the microfilm records to CD and it was to be the format future generations would use the access the archives.
I love that tower with the black corner and diamond-shaped buttons. Really unique for its day!
Yep, also love the led segment display. Didn’t notice it at first. Will definitely need some TLC to get it up and running again.
@@RetroSpector78 how do you only have around 28k subs
@@GigantTech people were asking me that when I had 500 subs, 1k subs , 10k subs. luckily I still have a day job :) That being said, feel free to put in a good word for me with Suzan W :)
@@RetroSpector78 i was there when you had around like 10 - 15k
Yes, that rather unusual one. I never seen any other one like this.
Tell the 90s I miss them.
Will do !
the 90s was the last decade when IT industry was still fun and conferences were super fun to attend - after 90s things just got more and more dull and big tech companies got more and more overtly evil
And also as fast Internet connections came onboard more attacks on browsers and spyware and the never ending battle to secure shit, that sucked the fun out of it for sure. But yeah the 90s were definitely filled with promise. That’s what vaporwave is all about!
It died in late 1997, with Quake, Red Alert, MMX and most importantly, Internet for the masses.
You create your own reality!!
A lot of things changed for the worse. Smaller companies went bust (including a lot of locally owned PC builders) and many larger companies started caring more about shareholders over their customers, and as a result, they didn't cater to their users anymore. So things kinda got homogenized and it only got worse as time went on. They called it the 'market of diminishing returns' and it's still a problem today. Doubtful things will ever improved since many folks keep buying instead of voting with their wallets.
@@NickDalzell and those, in addition to nostalgia, of course, are all why retro computing is so popular a scene these days (getting ready to go mess with my recently arrived TheC64 Maxi - going to connect a USB external 3 1/2 floppy disk drive to it and try to load some games from that, like Attack of the PESCII Robots and SEGA Sonic The Hedgehog - a whirling floppy disk will be more like old times than a silent USB stick)
13:52 is part of the reason why whenever I get an old computer that still has the previous owner's OS installation on it, I always wipe it and reinstall everything myself. It's pretty much guaranteed to make the computer run far better.
It's always nice to experience that clean install and the speed associated with it. It is however a challenge to keep it lean like that. The slowness tends to creep in over time.
That trayless drive, the original 1x speed no multisession Mitsumi - the drive kind of slides out and then the top hinges open - an absolute classic.
And the Hercules card, from what I can find, a S3 savage 3D
I converted many of those into ashtrays for LAN parties back in the day!
That mini-tower with the “Impact” badge was my first 486 computer case back in 1993. It probably costs about $40 back in 1993 in Silicon Valley. It was a very popular case. Hard to find today as it is still very popular with the retro community.
Can I sell cases on facebook do you think ?
@@highpath4776 Same!
I built so many clones of all these systems. I recognise pretty much every case and component. It's slightly freaky, as if you got a load of my old PC builds lol. Blast to the past :) Oh, by the way, fans stopping and spinning up only when needed was fairly common back in those days; CPU's didn't get nearly as hot as they do today, a heat sink did the job in many cases. Great Video!
awesome stuff! looking forward to see the video about the Terminator BEAST and the K6-2/533!
Whoever owned that one put some love into it. Over 200 megs of RAM, and a fan that senses temp, that was rare in 98.
Those Opti soundcards are amazing! I don't care, how cheap they are. They have true OPL3 (maybe illegaly copied) and superb compatibility.
Also, most you can find are supported by Unisound!
Yea the older opti cards with dedicated opl3 chips were pretty great even the 931 itself had decent opl3 emulation. These in the video however have a pretty horrible (unique?) synthesizer wavetable with missing and wrong instruments, and the sound quality was pretty bad too. I do not recommend them for retro gaming unless its your last option.
Aztech, ESS, Crystal (not the 4235), Creative Labs, and Yamaha are all good options for retro gaming
What a relaxing watch.
It's incredible how despite lots of damage and mistreatment by time, these machines continue to power on today. Goes to show how back then stuff was made to last for a lifetime.
Finally, that cute case at 20:49 I also got recently, brand new and for next to nothing! And it came in a box that was covered in lots of vintage stamps.
Thank you for this superb video!
Thx. Glad you enjoyed it. It is an iconic case. Also have the maxi tower version :)
Things were made to be repaired and user-servicable. we didn't need laws for right to repair in the 1990s. Technically we shouldn't need them today if people would simply stop buying from companies who produce crap.
That tower with the black corner has its buttons arranged like the old Acer logo. Amazing video as always! I really enjoy looking at old PCs and investigating them
Glad you liked it !
30min video about nineties ❤️ oh man, how i miss the 90s.. Thanks for the video, stay safe 🇧🇷
Glad you enjoyed! You to !
They call it yellow mellow, I hated the way the plastic turned yellow after a few years lol
I love how all the retro PC youtubers comment on each other's videos.
Just love the videos that you do. I look forward to future videos on these old PCs.
Great video. It looks like there could be a few more exciting retro videos to come with this bunch of computers. Looking forward to seeing how you clean up the Varta battery mess.
With that last PC, I think the FD failure might be because it was set as a 1.2 MB 5.25" drive rather than a 1.44 MB 3.5" drive. I've had that error for the same reason on one of my PCs.
Yeah I was getting tired at that point I guess :) goal was not to do advanced diagnostics. But some of the computers will get their own video for sure.
That "Impact" minitower is a same one, which I used to have as my first PC. I still have the guts, but the tower is a history since many years :( I got one recently which is similar, but still not the same though....
You may try to offer few of your new RTC replacements and trade it for the case. Might work. I'm sure they'd be very handy here :D
I had the full size version with the pedestal. that case was a beast. I miss that thing.
A very good collection. Those barrel batteries have a lot to answer for. I was expecting a lot of fireworks on start ups but was surprised by the amount of successful boots.
Indeed. only one that turned out dead but perhaps still salvageable.
that Soyo SY-025P2 got wrecked by that timebomb battery.
Some similarities between some of these machines. 3Com networks cards, Pentium class, sometimes 2 hard drives. Makes me think this was a lot of PCs from an old business. They look fairly clean, so maybe office machines?
The underwater theme popular on these, both on the desktop and some of the cases I think! Looking forward to seeing some of them get fixed up :)
Nice to see those vintage computers.
haven't saw that coral wallpaper for like twenty years! damn, I need one retro Win98 PC asap!
Awesome video! That final desktop, Tori, has a battery holder for 4 x AA batteries stuck on the power supply.
What's that about? You see it at 26:42 .
The motherboard also has that green barrel battery that leaked..
Might be a remnant from the past. Think this one was upgraded from perhaps a 286 (or even xt perhaps)
A lot of people had AA instead of the varta, or got it sent out and that was the common replacement. People still do it today that don't want to use Vartas or coin cells.
I love playing "Guess the CPU" by seeing the drives, ports, and motherboard connectors in these videos before it gets revealed.
16:53 - This machine's power switch gets 'released' once the fan has reached full speed! :)
Great video, I used to have 2 of the old XT style desktops both were 286 boards with 640k ram. Picked up cheap from a computer fair in the UK as they were not working. Fixed both and built my confidence messing with hardware in the process. Sadly I no longer have them but seeing this video brought back so many fun memories.
Interesting how all of the mini towers had dual hard drives.
Nice collection of computers. The first computer with the leaking varta battery sounded like it popped a few times as though a capacitor had blown which is a shame.
I had the case with the very orange 3.5-inch floppy bay, second tower from lower right. I think the brand was InWin. I worked for a company where we built a bunch of systems around those cases in the late '90s, mainly because they were inexpensive and we could get them shipped next day from California via UPS ground. Weird seeing this UV-damaged version of it.
Yeah these were very popular cases. Have seen them pass by here in all kinds of different colora, from pearly white to the most extreme yellow / orange.
Blood, sweat, and tears literally were required to work on these cases. They were very sharp inside.
29:00 nice IBM 8513 monitor I see on the shelf :). Great video, hopefully those 486 boards with the Varta battery leakage will scrub up OK. At least with the last one you checked you still had a working keyboard interface.
I LOVE that "unboxing" of newly acquired old computers and going on the discovery tour on their inside. Could do that all day long. sadly my storage space ran full, eheh. Curious when it will happen to you :P
That's a nice stack of 90's tech! Bit surprised to see a Dallas chip on a Pentium era motherboard, I thought they'd all gone over to coin cells by then. The case you show at 20:45, I have one that's pretty much identical, just with a round power switch (same type though) if I remember correctly. Acquired it about 20 years or so ago, and back then I built a Pentium 100 into it for my niece's birthday. Eventually it ended up back in my hands and I still have it now!
I still have my *A-Open* Server floor standing case (3ft x 2ft).. It could handle up to six Hard Drives! Had a slide out motherboard tray. I customized it with 4 fans, two 120mm Aluminum Sanyo's from an IMB server (That still work in 2021) & Two 80mm in the rear in back of the Hard drive tray on the top!
Suspicious lack of 5.25" floppies. Could it be they sell for $200+ these days?
I love that mini-tower on the bottom 3rd from the right. They were ubiquitous where I live and had more than one myself back in the day. Brings back memories so sharp I can smell my basement lab back then!
Lol how that power button popped out at 17:00!
I have one of these ancient Mitsumi CDROM drives. You just push the entire thing into the computer and it snaps out a little. Now you can pull it out and open the tray upwards. Single speed, but it would read even my most scratched up CD with barely a problem - no other drive could read that CD until I got a 40x burner.
Win98 with 32MB RAM is no fun... talking from experience. With 40MB it starts being fun. And with 64MB it runs great.
These Cirrus Logic video cards are pretty fast and really capable... and really poorly soldered. I have some issues with mine, bending them makes them work, so it's pretty certainly dry solder joints.
Haha … didn’t even notice that while filming / editing :)
This video is a delight for anyone who loves those old boot sounds, like buckets filled with rust swirling into life 😊
Nice haul, you are lucky to find them, here in NZ I've been after a DX2-66 or DX4-100 for ages, can't find one anywhere.
It's pretty likely that the 486 board isn't what was originally in the 286 clone-looking desktop. I built my brother a K6-233 machine to replace his older Prolinea 4/25s into a very similar case (after junking the zero wait state turbo 286 clone board and MFM drive... cringe) for his sophomore year of college in late 1997. He wanted a desktop case instead of a mini-tower and they were getting harder to find even then. The old 286 I got for $10 at a Thrift store. It had a 250 watt power supply and was fully up to snuff. We figured it would be a kind of "sleeper" to keep his dorm mates from "borrowing" what looked like a then 10 year old PC. Apparently he got so much harassment about his "old" computer he made me put it in a standard beige mini-tower case. I don't know what happened to the 286 case, it was mint.
Ahah it seems I get to see the AT&T in one of your videos after all ;). I'll have some fun exploring it this weekend.
hehe ... short and sweet. Have fun with it. It is a nice PC and pretty fast. Installed Windows 95 on a good old Western Digital Caviar and it ran pretty well.
If a network card is installed in windows 95/98 and an automatic IP address from dhcp is configured and the LAN cable is not connected during startup, the system still waits for an IP address from the DHCP server, which takes a very long time. Such a strange microsoft error.
The K6-2 533 is meant to be run at 5.5*97 MHz. Many mainboards don't support 97MHz FSB, but they do support 95MHz. 5.5*95MHz is 522.5MHz. That's why the 533MHz processor posts at 523MHz instead.
One system that I really regret disposing of was a super socket 7 system. I don't remember the model number but was an Asus board that would take 512MB ram, I had that and an AMD K6 550, I don't remember much about the other components, except 2 of the largest hard drives it would take and a DVD rom and CD-RW drive. I ran that thing until like 2005 or 2006
Yeah these had a really long lifespan. Like the platform a lot
Thanks for this video. Nice to be able to boot most of them. Really like the XT style case, the diamond buttons and the clicky style button. It's the first time I see XT style for 486 and modern machines. I hope you will able to fix issues.
"The Hercules Terminator Beast... I think this one has a louder bark than its bite."
Beautifully stated. That gave me a chuckle.
They indeed HAD... I had one of them with 4 Megs of RAM in an Intel Pentium MMX 233 machine with Win98 and 16 Megs of ram on a 1 Gb (Yes, Gigabyte, NOT Terabyte) PATA133 (IDE) Harddrive.
Unreal and Quake could not work properly, so I ordered 2 3DFX Voodoo2 cards and put them in SLI. MUCH beter :-D
@@Neovo.Geesink You are a man of culture! ;-)
I love the Baby AT case form factor, as well as the micro/mini tower, which is basically a Baby AT desktop case in vertical position. I still have a few '90's cases as well, including slimlines & also 1980's big XT & AT cases etc etc. I only have one full tower.
There should be a button on the "top" of the case to push to turn it off. It is a 2 stage power button on the globalyst. I've got two of those bad boys. A pentium 90 and a dx2 66
That one was the best! Now I know what that mysterious AT&T Riser card, that I have is there for! :D
have to say.. when that system froze you were really in 90s mode and moving the mouse and pressing the keys hard hahaha
The Hercules Terminator Beast is a very nice find. It's featuring the S3 Savage chipset with S3TC. Even if it's weaker in performance I would prefer it over every generic TNT card.
Might give it its own little video. Will see if I can do some shorter more off the cuff style videos.
I miss when PCs looked like this. Beige should never have gone out of style.
fun video. wonder if in 40 years well see someone say things like standard 3080ti with a ryzen processor, very standard..
Nice video as always!
I think you forgot to cover the mini-tower with the Creative CD-ROM drive. Would have been curious to know what the sound card it held ;)
Surprised the drives ain't wiped.
What a find, and from my favorite era of computing. Those k6-2 machines could be set up for some fine old-school gaming, especially if paired with graphics accelerators.
I could cry. I miss this era ❤️
very nice haul you got there i have some of those old ones to
The power button in that globalyst has a feature that can lock the power button in the on position. It appears to have been optional in some models. That smaller orange button along the side should release it.
Had a globalyst 515 back in the day and I’ll definitely hold on to one if I ever come across another one. Great style and the red power button just makes everything more exciting.
That's why I bought it immediately when I saw it up for sale. This thing has 3 PCI slots, 6 ISA slots, can hold 2 hard drives and 2 CD drives & has loads of space inside. If the compatibility on this thing is as good as on my other IBM PCs, I'll make this one my standard DOS driver.
That AT&T case would be a great base for a modern sleeper build. Need some tinkering though.
When I saw the thumbnail I thought you had picked what I threw out recently!
I was working for IBM when the original PC was introduced. It is so annoying that they did not create a passive backplane as a standard. It would have been easy to upgrade millions of computers multiple times just by swapping cards.
When I feel nostalgic for 90s computing I come here or to my basement. :-)
That CPU fan turning itself off reminds me of the anxiety I got when I first ran my PC in a new case where I could see the GPU fans and they stopped spinning lol
Yeah also threw me off. I know they can run slower / faster based on temp. Did not know they could halt completely :)
that AT&T Globalist is amazing looking. i love how the air intake grill just goes right to the edge of the case.
Looking at retro PC prices where I live, even if all of them were completely empty cases you would still be looking at $1500-2000 total.
Regarding the last PC, is there any identifier on the 5.25" to 3.5" hard disk drive bay adapter? I am looking for something like that for a very long time but it is hard to find it without a part number.
Very nice video, indeed!
That "yellow" color is color is called "nicotine yellow"!
Strange how that PCI graphics card at @17:25 (Fastware vc963c?) turned into an AGP card moments later? :) Awesome systems anyways! So much retro goodness
Yea i saw that too, wonder what that was about.
God I wish I could randomly stumble upon somebody's old PCs in a garage lol
Could you do some mini series on some of these systems. Doing some repairs and upgrades and gaming.
I can say that the last system you had there likely has a good controller card, but the slot it was in has been corroded a bit by the leaking battery, you could see the green on the pins of the slot when you were taking the card out, you had said you were tired, so you might have missed it. I'm sure cleaning the board should get it booting again.
Very nice collection! I was hoping to see more 486 and 386 systems, but still a great find nonetheless.
Speaking of running Windows 95 on 486-class hardware like the DX2-66 in the video, I found running Windows 95 on my DX4-100 practically unbearable and ended up reverting back to DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. At the time I just thought 486s were underpowered for Win95, but after becoming a collector myself, I have an AMD DX4-100 and Cyrix 5x86 100 that run Win95 just on the side of tolerable. My 486 back in the day had 18MB of RAM, but it is the older 30pin type that I think runs at something like 120ns which I think has a major impact on performance. The latter 486s I mentioned have 72pin SIMMs at 70 or 80ns and using local bus for hard drive accesses too. So I guess if you have a late-gen 486 Win95 runs ok, but if you have an early gen it just doesn't do so well.
I recall moving up from a 486DX33 to a DX66 cpu. Night and day difference with some games.
And that quickshot joystick with transparent case. Whare are that times? Nowhere turned to dust.
I used to have 2 of those lower-left cases. I think they had 286 or 386sx in them. Might still have one!
Think the bottom left one might deserve a downgrade to a 386 or 286
@@RetroSpector78 I have just unearthed a Plantron 386, with Plantron labelled MFM controller, HDD and other Plantron labelled stuff. But the board has been replaced by a 486. I also might downgrade it to a 386 again.
I have that exact Impact tower with the green led and the 2 white buttons. I am not too sure what O/S it's running because upon boot up it tells me the checksum failure and that the keyboard is locked and I can't get any further into it. I also don't have a keyboard or mouse that is compatible with that computer. I do like the look of that tower though.
Nice presentation sir
Nobody born after 1990 will ever understand why are we all watching a guy rummaging through old office equipment in a dusty storeroom, and why are we smiling with joy when he says the part numbers.
I dig the mini tower AT's, have a couple of them myself. Noticing a trend of dual hard drive setups & Windows 98! ;-)
7:18 so familiar case! Got my Cyrix PR200 with Voodoo 2 rig inside it :)
i hope you make a video on trying to repair bad sector/damaged hard drives :)
Necroware has restored an AT&T Globalyst 515 and in that system you have to push a little orange button just on the side of the power button in order to disengage it.
I think it was a safety measure not to power off by mistake.
Yeah I figured that out yesterday when I took off the front panel. It's an interesting design - I thought the button was to slide the top off.
Nice to see that even leaked motherboards are still alive!
I like the ATT one and the 533 AMD, despite the 533 is having a 10mhz identity problem
Yeah. Motherboard doesn’t have the weird 97.5mhz fsb setting (only 95 and 100)
Gary Kildall used to talk about how AT&T was going to dominate the computer industry when they threw their hat in the ring. He suggested that no predictions should be made until we saw what AT&T would do. But AT&T did nothing. At first they were Olivetti, then NCR/IBM, but they never made a serious effort to design their own stuff. All in all I have always been dissapointed with little orginality and flavor in the AT&T machines.
Whoa, those beige boxes, almost the same, bland and boring (except the Compaq ones, LOL). Remembers me of when I was doing Computer classes to learn how to use Windows, MS Office and the Internet. They are kinda ugly now, but at that time they were the most beautiful things. And there were the happiest hours of my life, every week!
Idk if I'd call them hideous.
They just need a little bit of TLC and all will be fine :)
@@thepirategamerboy12 Yeah, maybe I was too harsh on them. I've changed that to "ugly". :D
@@RetroSpector78 They're sure a piece of history in your hands right now. This kind of PC (with generic cases, apart from AT&T) was the most common in houses around my country (Brazil) in those days. Just a few people had branded computers (IBM, Compaq, Acer...). Awesome video!
I am looking forward to 20 years in the future when people look at those "hideous watercooled RGB disco boxes" that we have now :P
Wow that was a big flashback for me I think I owned a few of these systems back in the day, even the Dutch windows versions so iconic lol yes I’m Dutch, just hated giving support to systems running Dutch then and still I set my OS to English.
Started with the c64 and an x86 ibm pc1 in ‘83 and owned all the systems up to my current zen3/intel I7 still remember when I got my first soundblaster 20mb hdd and Hercules 3dfx gpu.
Btw the little brown slot behind the pci witch you didn’t recognize was EISA I think a standard for servers that didn’t really succeed because pci came just a behind it, remember having them in my 486dx4 server tower.
Those 486DX2 systems may have been 386 systems that had a motherboard upgrade due to the lack of VL-Bus video and I/O.
The one with the impact logo was my first pc at home, it had a 386 sx with 100 mb harddisk and 2 mb ram, that we upgraded to 4 mb ram to run Windows 3.11... wooohooo! We later had a Cyrix 6x86mx in it, with 2 gb disk I think.
Dang, i wish i could get things like this easily (and cheaply!) but alas i'm usually stuck inside.. Give them to meeeeee lol.. Also, have you noticed how similar each Windows install is set up? And how clean they are inside.. Plus identical network cards or at least the same brand. Makes me think whoever had them at some point repaired/cleaned them all then they got stored and never sold? That K6-2 533 really isn't common either! Seems someone re-used that last system's case, as that was definitely more like a 286/386 system. Someone slapped a new machine in there!
the old boxes have more charm than the new ones and they are more resistant!
In the early 90s my first PC was a 486 SX25 in the same case as the "Impact" PC
That's a pretty cool haul. The machines are somewhat generic, but it's cool that they all still work after 15 years of garage duty. Are you re-selling them after you've fixed them up or give them away to friends? Would be fun to have a video where we'll see these PC's find a new home (as if they are adopted from a shelter, lol).
ME: looking @ my PC
We have gone a long way.
I have had neglected systems boot slow from the hard drive mechanics got sluggish and the data needed refreshing. After that they booted just fine.
Such Awesome finds and the fact you said you paid next to nothing for them you are extremely lucky. I would like to buy a AT case(in great shape) and not have to give a kidney in price(that also includes shopping) for it. It crazy difficult to find this stuff(granted I know there's eBay but that's where the sellers are stealing from you in your wallet especially in shipping cost) for a fair price and its awesome you found them.
I used to sell all that stuff new and used. You should find an old ISA POST probe if you're doing a lot with those old motherboards we used to use them all the time to find out what was stopping them booting.
@Rita 25 y.o - check my vidéó I remember seeing those in a library in about 1990, they were upgrading all the microfilm records to CD and it was to be the format future generations would use the access the archives.
God, those were the days! I just wish the chassis were still available, but in a ATX format. those things were build to last!
Windows 98 was great! I am still using it on an older computer with a dot matrix printer and an old flatbed scanner.