Love your video. Back in 1998 I was Network Administrator for a State Government organisation. NT was our server OS of choice and Windows 95\98 the Client. Mail server was Exchange. Boy the memories came flooding back. I remember our system availability was 99.99% which was far better than other networks at that time. The server room was a glassed goldfish bowl and I was often swimming around performing various maintenance tasks, waving at staff as they passed by. Best job I ever had, and they paid me for it. Survived Y2K bug no problem 😉 thanks for your video. 😍🥰
@@judenihal It was the best time for me. I started as a Systems Analyst on mainframe systems, with a clerical background. It was so frustrating to have small projects let go because of costs. Then I was assigned to look at a CP/M computer with SuperCalc and WordStar. WOW! Then IBM dropped the PC and suddenly my mainframe buddies were interested - but not convinced. The PC made an ideal mainframe terminal. But after the PC XT and AT were launched, things got really interesting. All Government agencies had Managers who wanted Word Processing and Accountants who wanted Lotus 123. And my career boomed!. I ended up in an agency that was moving to new premises, and we had the chance to install office-wide Cat2 cabling for our network. So the IT Manager and I jumped in and built our systems from scratch using the most modern hardware and software. But when Microsoft launched Windows NT we jumped from Unix SvR4 and adopted Windows 3.11 and the rest is history. Great times and immensely rewarding, and they paid me quite well. 🙂
@@6Diego1Diego9 I’m retired. I keep a menagerie of older PCs, laptops, retro computers and Raspberry Pi’s. But I’m not obsessed 🤩 I can stop any time, just as long as cheap computers stop being produced. 😆 it’s a hobby! Really! No, really! Help! 🥰😛
@@6Diego1Diego9 I’m retired now. Enjoying the lazy life with my wife, son, couple of dogs, and quite a few computers. I’m really loving the reproduced RetroGames THEC64 mini & maxi and THEA500 mini. Also have a bunch of Raspberry Pi’s - I say it’s a hobby, Mrs says it’s obsessive- she may be right 😁
Tell me about it... My favourite from the time "There is not enough disk space to delete these files. Please delete some files from this drive and try again"
@@RetroSpector78 So the net can talk to these old machines? make sure you have them up-to-date if you can find all their official and unofficial updates
@@basvanharen2904 Just need to setup a newer postfix server with spam control and setup a mail gateway? Even maybe something like untangle. Something to stop all the garbage except for e-mail flowing in.
When I moved to my first dorm room late 90's I was the only one in the building with a 1 mbit internet connection. I provided internet services for around 10 people using a bnc network that I cabled myself and 2 servers (pentium 200 if I recall correctly) that I setup in my closet aka server room and provided a mailbox with it hosted by an exchange server The other server ran ISA server as a router / firewall. A real trip down memory lane for me.
I LOVE how you show and explain this kind of stuff, so this way of doing things is not forgotten forever. It's sad when people retire, a lot of knowledge disappears and the new generations aren't respecting that because it's "old culture". Thank you for showing us how stuff was done in the past, this is better than a museum.
Brings back memories of one of my first Sys Admin gigs. Every change always required a reboot. Every reboot was long as it had to check all the server hardware. There was no snappy internet to look up any questions. A lot of hours spent sitting in the server room ripping away at items trying to get the PDC/BDCs and Exchange server talking and then routing mail.
You made it look too easy :D Back in those days it was really hard to configure these things, mostly because computers (and servers) were real slow... Make a mistake, or try with incorrect DNS, and you go home hours later... Thanks for a look back at the old days :D
Well you clearly were not sitting next to me the days leading up to this 20min video :) It was pretty confusing when I started looking into this. Forgot a lot of stuff, and came to the realization that I never really knew the entire backstory of Microsoft Mail / Inbox / Exchange / Outlook (Express) ..... When we started Email it was all pop3 stuff using Eudora, and then we switched to Outlook Express due to the sheer dominance of Microsoft.
@@RetroSpector78 Aah, that sounds more like it 😂 I did MCSE for NT4, including Exchange back in the day. Things were never easy, not that it's any easier today 😁 Thanks for your hard work preparing for this video, I thoroughly enjoyed it 😁
Exchange setup and configuration is still very complex today. MS on one time considered switching its backend storage engine to SQL Server but finally did not realize that.
Thanks for taking us with you on this trip through email memory lane. It’s amazing that Exchange Server 5.5 was released almost 25 years ago. I have installed and supported a lot of those environments for our customers back in the days, including connecting many of those to the Internet for the very first time. With Office 365, a lot has changed over the time…
Wow, you can feel the engineers mind developing those products. It’s simple to use and works well, even if it was a pain to install. I must admit, seeing this outlook web interface got me very impressed. They were really at the forefront of what we use everyday today.
I was a support tech at Microsoft PSS nordic 1995-99. I started out with NT/Win3.11/95 then moved on to the Exchange team in -96, supporting 4, 5 and 5.5 (and even occasional MS-Mail on which I also was certified). I remember all the connectors, MTA:s, isintegs, ds/is consistency checks, eseutil etc. And most of all I remember what it was like when Bedlam DL 3 happened, which gave Exchange a really hard time with the reply all storm. But it never crashed completely. Good old memories, thank you for reviving some of them!
The Bedlam DL3 list had about 13000 recipients. I was on it too, and when the reply all storm started, we in the exchange team quickly did some custom rules to filter out the noise. And informed everyone at the local swedish MS sub on what to do (and NOT to reply all like so many did). The mails did not reach everyone at MS wroldwide at the time, but it slowed down the exchange org a whole lot due to the exponentially increased mail traffic. Not long after that, I seem to recall that the devs added an admin option to deny mails to or reply all for all but a select few to big distribution lists. It might be tricky to replicate the bedlam, as MS was a huge org by that time, thus users in different time zones, mail transfer delays, directory replication and so on all played a part in duration of the event. But it would be interesting to see a replay.
This video hits my early career nostalgia. Working with Windows NT and Exchange and luckily Terminal Server/Citrix - I would sit amongst the servers knowing there were around 500 odd folk up and down the country hooked up to this doing their job and it felt incredibly powerful!
Thanks man ... I know not everything is going to be everyones cup of tea ... just stick with me, and let me know what you like. Just more stuff to come on the channel
Thank you for this video. People have an appetite for old tech. Things were over-built, understated, and free from politics. I have an IBM 5155 and a Kaypro 16/2. Your videos have been invaluable to not only getting them working, but upgraded and doing things beyond their intended purpose.
The virtualization route was smart. I did an Exchange 5.5 install on Compaq Armada 7700DMT systems. It was just for recreation. Between the domain controller, Exchange server and client install it took hours. The video was a mess.
Thanks for creating. I think the first version I installed in a corp environment was 5.0 around 1998 or so. So much more simpler back then, kind of. From 5.0 to 5.5 then to other versions. Great job.
Oh my god, what a blast from the past, I had to administer a regional hub in the UK, connected to US and DE servers, what a nightmare when things went wrong. Then we upgraded to Exch2000, that added at least 1 or 2 grey hairs :) Thanks for the Vid!!
I enjoyed the vid, I liked how you made the Exchange deployment look smooth and easy, I played with Exchange 5.5 myself and gosh it was real pain to deploy. I'm curious to know if do you encountered the NT Option Pack SMTP / Exchange IMS conflict, that had me confused and caused a lot of frustration until realised smtp from opt pack was not needed.
thanks for the video....as many fellas around here, in those days i also did a lot of Exchange server's troubleshooting...many long nights and weekends praying for a clean output from isinteg command....😄😄😄
Every second of this video rang a bell. I really appreciate it. I can imagine this setup for fun in a virtual environment at home for fun. I hardly ever install real hardware machines since VMs are easier to use for reinstalls/fallbacks.
Pretty comprehensive history and I love the demos - Microsoft also released a free upgrade to Microsoft Outlook 97 with Outlook 98 before releasing the full MS Office 2000 package a few years later - more features included within. Great retro software tech showcase. :)
This was pretty much setting the stage for Active Directory services. I managed a large 5.5 system and migrated it into an AD forest and Exchange 2003. Somehow I survived lol. But it was fun and beat digging ditches for a living. TIP-Run the Enterprise version if you really intend to run this. Standard has a store limit of 16gb and Enterprise raises it to 1tb.
not a big deal in 2022, but you'd probably want to go for SP6a which fixes some bugs introduced by SP6. I have vivid memories of certain 3Com NIC drivers killing your install on 'vanilla' SP6
First native Microsoft TCP/IP network I ever connected to was in late 1999. Before that each site I worked at was using Novell and IPX. Some of the Novell sites ran IPX and TCP/IP, however early on when I first ran into TCP/IP the sites I worked at didn't run DHCP. Any time we set up or relocated a pc, we'd have to look up available IP addresses in a spreadsheet, ping to verify they are inactive, then add them as a fixed IP. That was a pain when people moved from one building to another. This would involve going into multiple spreadsheets (not sure iif tabs existed back then) and making changes. Mail was either cc:mail or Groupwise. Groupwise and Outlook were very similar in use.
from 1998 to date i'm still installing exchange servers 🙃, but that's the worst email server when comes to setup , maintain and recovery . Microsoft should make it easier to use with less dependencies . MDaemon is doing a Grete job.Nice Video. 👍
wow this bring backs old memories when I was little kid and introduced to Pentium 3 in year 2000 playing GTA 1 😊😊 network neighborhood, internet explorer, dial up connection can't forget today's generation missed that era
My god. Is that heaven? Paradise? Its beautiful, all those childhood computers buzzing away. Now we just need a few mac's on the other wall. Yes. This is my dream.
Woooow! Brings back memories. Been in the industry for 24 years now. Used to compete installing NT4 server the fastest 😁. Exchange Server 5.5 was the first version I got certified on and started my career upgrading a version 5 server to 5.5 at my first employer in the industry. Exchange client was simple. No calendar or contacts. Just email. A far cry from outlook today.
Haha, me too. Started as IT admin back in '97 and one of the things I started with was Windows NT 4.0 and MS SQL server. Later on (I believe it was in 2000) I got trained for MS Exchange 5.5... a typical Microsoft product, looks very simple when you install it, but indeed it wasn't that simple to manage, especially if you had an organisation with multiple exchange servers and interconnection between them. Along with all this pdc/bdc/wins/netbios/trust etc. stuff - glad that I survived it and evolved towards Linux and network management.
@@adrock0801 I’m now still working with collaboration but now I’m Microsoft 365 with cloud migrations, Teams, Endpoint manager and the rest of the MS cloud offerings, including exchange online 😁. We also host both Linux and windows servers for clients.
Oh man you bring memories to late 90s when networks and IT is for remarkable people only but now within 6 months some people will call themselves network engineering
aaah exchange 5.5! i did work experience for a public sector organisation in the uk back in 2002 and they were using exchange 5.5 on nt4 for their email. the server used to crash and lock up solid pretty much every day, so they'd send someone down to the server room to hit the reset button. wonder if they ever did fix it or just put up with it? different times back then, IT was still a nice-to-have unlike now.
I was one of the original Beta customers of 4.0. As part of doing this I ran an Exchange server at home, and its still running to this day, though not on 4.0 now Exchange 2019. Back well before Skype, Zoom or Teams teleconferences with 100+ folks and it seemed to work. Still have fond memories of the X.400 transport, 5.5 was the last of this line, Windows 2000 changed it all moving the directory into what became Active Directory and the primary transport became SMTP. Talk about a walk down memory lane.
20:17 “Thanks to the IMAP protocol which basically downloads these messages for me.” Maybe you meant this, but IMAP retains the messages on the server unless the user deletes them. The client may cache them locally, though, for quicker access, so will download them in that case, yes, but not remove them from the server. POP would fetch and remove them from the server, so usually when people talked about downloading the messages they meant POP for that reason, as on IMAP only the message listing and metadata would be automatically downloaded. A specific message cinten would be downloaded on a request to read it.
I was working in a bank in 2007 and they still have MANY Windows NT4 servers (and workstations) around. We deployed VMware and it make it extremely easy to spin up new NT4 servers whenever we need. Installing Windows NT4 on physical hardware was really a pain. We used to have a cabinet with folders containing all the floppy disks, CD drivers, boot disks, etc from each physical server. And whenever we needed to reinstall a NT4 server, none of the media used to work... So we needed to download all software over and over again, prepare new media, and one year later, it didn't work anymore. I really hated Windows NT4 with all my heart, lol
What do you recommend for virtualising Windows 9x and 3.x? Recent versions of VM software like Virtualbox do not give any driver support. Only found that a Windows 7 Machine with Virtual PC can install drivers.
PCem is the... was??? :-))) the best for Win95 and 3.11. Depending on your hardware it might reach up to 80-100% of Pentium 166MMX performance. At least 4 haswell cores do the job and the newer the CPU the better. I don't remember, but people wrote that 4GHz is needed for 200MMX. Anyway even emulated 166MMX with 512MB of RAM is fine to run post 1999 Linuxes, they (linuxes) were really fat&slow thus NT4 felt like a super fast interstellar rocket!!!
I was you dude. Now I'm glad to be in a different stage of life, but in 1998 it was grand. So, that's fine I guess. I was satisfied then and satisfied now.
on the 1:38, what is that 486 machine? I had desktop with that specific power button - exactly the same minus the color (but Mine was pink) with custom dos menu. I wonder of more systems using that button (mainly because I search for that one specific unit)
What a blast form the past... but I can't help but think about ALL the security vulnerabilities present in all those software packages, it's in just about installed. Lanman, SQL, IIS, ASP, OWA, etc, etc. LOL
Nice looks just like some of the small server rooms I worked in in the late 90s and early 2000s. I built quite a few Exchange 5.5 servers using SMTP and X400 and built quite a few places first email systems.
Nice trip down the memory lane. By the way there was an Exchange Client 5.0 (not 5.5), that had a cooler splash screen than the 4.0 one 😀 Oh and IIS3 would have been technically enough so it is strange that as it is installed by NT4 SP3 if IIS is installed at that time. Maybe ASP would have to be activated, too long ago to know that from my memories :)...
I've been working as a systems administrator for the last 5 years, I just missed the on-prem exchange era by a few years and I'm glad I did after watching this video lol. This looks so tedious and with a million things that can go wrong. It's not perfect but the 0365 architecture is a godsend compared to processes like this.
This was my first server install almost exactly, not sure if I did any 95 clients but the rest is completely the same. Just need a Frontpage website and it would be perfect.
There were optical PS/2 mice, not very common, but they're a thing. Might wanna look into replacing "ballers" with the optical PS/2 mice. There are also converters to connect a PS/2 mice into a COM port. On the OS side, it would be completely transparent.
God I miss those naming conventions... maybe it's just because of nostalgic reasons... but I loved my saying my PC had a 486 DX 2 66.... upgrading to the DX 4 100 wasn't as big of a leap as it was jumping to the Pentium 100... .wow, that was life changing. Software 3D Quake... drool.
Holy flashback, Batman!! *POW* I remember Microsoft IT guys running around losing all of their customer data on NT server and Exchange 5. Meanwhile, I was installing Novell Groupwise everywhere and spending the days browsing MySpace. lol "High speed" internet was a ISDN BRI (256k for the gen z and millennials), but at least it wasn't dial-up.
I use Exchange 5.5 at home on my network, it's hosted on my Windows 2000 Server but I connect to it with various clients including my Toshiba Satellite Pro 430CDT with Windows 3.1 I found it to be nice and fast, but all my machines run at at least 100mbs
It feels like I was a kid when I use to work on NT, oh those days before PNP when you had to set IRQ's etc. Then 2000 came out and change everything, the first thing I remember is OMG GroupPol is gone (or whatever the hell it was called), how do you lock things down, and then we found Group Policy and GPO's, it was a wow moment. Those were the days when everyone used IPX/SPX to connect pc's for gaming and how MS created Novell gateway services which killed Novels license model. Man the 80's and 90s were cool for computing. Now it all sucks.
Love your video. Back in 1998 I was Network Administrator for a State Government organisation. NT was our server OS of choice and Windows 95\98 the Client. Mail server was Exchange. Boy the memories came flooding back. I remember our system availability was 99.99% which was far better than other networks at that time. The server room was a glassed goldfish bowl and I was often swimming around performing various maintenance tasks, waving at staff as they passed by. Best job I ever had, and they paid me for it. Survived Y2K bug no problem 😉 thanks for your video. 😍🥰
I would have loved to work in an environment like this
@@judenihal It was the best time for me. I started as a Systems Analyst on mainframe systems, with a clerical background. It was so frustrating to have small projects let go because of costs. Then I was assigned to look at a CP/M computer with SuperCalc and WordStar. WOW! Then IBM dropped the PC and suddenly my mainframe buddies were interested - but not convinced. The PC made an ideal mainframe terminal. But after the PC XT and AT were launched, things got really interesting. All Government agencies had Managers who wanted Word Processing and Accountants who wanted Lotus 123. And my career boomed!. I ended up in an agency that was moving to new premises, and we had the chance to install office-wide Cat2 cabling for our network. So the IT Manager and I jumped in and built our systems from scratch using the most modern hardware and software. But when Microsoft launched Windows NT we jumped from Unix SvR4 and adopted Windows 3.11 and the rest is history. Great times and immensely rewarding, and they paid me quite well. 🙂
what do you do now?
@@6Diego1Diego9 I’m retired. I keep a menagerie of older PCs, laptops, retro computers and Raspberry Pi’s. But I’m not obsessed 🤩 I can stop any time, just as long as cheap computers stop being produced. 😆 it’s a hobby! Really! No, really! Help! 🥰😛
@@6Diego1Diego9 I’m retired now. Enjoying the lazy life with my wife, son, couple of dogs, and quite a few computers. I’m really loving the reproduced RetroGames THEC64 mini & maxi and THEA500 mini. Also have a bunch of Raspberry Pi’s - I say it’s a hobby, Mrs says it’s obsessive- she may be right 😁
Those pre 2000 MS products aged me considerably. Even the sight of it gave me chills...
Tell me about it...
My favourite from the time
"There is not enough disk space to delete these files. Please delete some files from this drive and try again"
Oh man, same! Haha
This brings back memories! Spent the first 6 years of the 2000’s as a system and exchange admin… (and also from Belgium and from ‘78 😊)
Hehe … cool ! Would like to see if I can somehow hook it up to the internet via DNS for a certain domain name.
Ik ene van 73 😁
@@RetroSpector78 So the net can talk to these old machines? make sure you have them up-to-date if you can find all their official and unofficial updates
@@rawr51919 I dont think with all the available updates you can consider the systems safe😅
@@basvanharen2904 Just need to setup a newer postfix server with spam control and setup a mail gateway? Even maybe something like untangle. Something to stop all the garbage except for e-mail flowing in.
When I moved to my first dorm room late 90's I was the only one in the building with a 1 mbit internet connection. I provided internet services for around 10 people using a bnc network that I cabled myself and 2 servers (pentium 200 if I recall correctly) that I setup in my closet aka server room and provided a mailbox with it hosted by an exchange server The other server ran ISA server as a router / firewall. A real trip down memory lane for me.
I LOVE how you show and explain this kind of stuff, so this way of doing things is not forgotten forever. It's sad when people retire, a lot of knowledge disappears and the new generations aren't respecting that because it's "old culture". Thank you for showing us how stuff was done in the past, this is better than a museum.
hehe ... Thanks a lot ... had no idea 102K people would like this video to be honest ! A bit of a surprise to me. Glad you enjoyed it.
Brings back memories of one of my first Sys Admin gigs. Every change always required a reboot. Every reboot was long as it had to check all the server hardware. There was no snappy internet to look up any questions. A lot of hours spent sitting in the server room ripping away at items trying to get the PDC/BDCs and Exchange server talking and then routing mail.
This is more fascinating than I imagined
I also have a strange fascination for all these NT4 based services.
You made it look too easy :D
Back in those days it was really hard to configure these things, mostly because computers (and servers) were real slow... Make a mistake, or try with incorrect DNS, and you go home hours later...
Thanks for a look back at the old days :D
Well you clearly were not sitting next to me the days leading up to this 20min video :) It was pretty confusing when I started looking into this. Forgot a lot of stuff, and came to the realization that I never really knew the entire backstory of Microsoft Mail / Inbox / Exchange / Outlook (Express) ..... When we started Email it was all pop3 stuff using Eudora, and then we switched to Outlook Express due to the sheer dominance of Microsoft.
@@RetroSpector78 Aah, that sounds more like it 😂
I did MCSE for NT4, including Exchange back in the day.
Things were never easy, not that it's any easier today 😁
Thanks for your hard work preparing for this video, I thoroughly enjoyed it 😁
Exchange setup and configuration is still very complex today. MS on one time considered switching its backend storage engine to SQL Server but finally did not realize that.
Thanks for taking us with you on this trip through email memory lane. It’s amazing that Exchange Server 5.5 was released almost 25 years ago. I have installed and supported a lot of those environments for our customers back in the days, including connecting many of those to the Internet for the very first time. With Office 365, a lot has changed over the time…
I don’t know why youtube recommended your video…but this bring back nostalgia back in the 90’s when i first started my career as IT support in nyc!
I am glad youtube did. They should do it more to many other people :)
Wow, you can feel the engineers mind developing those products. It’s simple to use and works well, even if it was a pain to install. I must admit, seeing this outlook web interface got me very impressed. They were really at the forefront of what we use everyday today.
I was a support tech at Microsoft PSS nordic 1995-99. I started out with NT/Win3.11/95 then moved on to the Exchange team in -96, supporting 4, 5 and 5.5 (and even occasional MS-Mail on which I also was certified). I remember all the connectors, MTA:s, isintegs, ds/is consistency checks, eseutil etc. And most of all I remember what it was like when Bedlam DL 3 happened, which gave Exchange a really hard time with the reply all storm. But it never crashed completely. Good old memories, thank you for reviving some of them!
Would be great to replay the Bedlam dl3 storm and see how she holds up. Need to check how many employees MS had in 1997 :)
The Bedlam DL3 list had about 13000 recipients. I was on it too, and when the reply all storm started, we in the exchange team quickly did some custom rules to filter out the noise. And informed everyone at the local swedish MS sub on what to do (and NOT to reply all like so many did). The mails did not reach everyone at MS wroldwide at the time, but it slowed down the exchange org a whole lot due to the exponentially increased mail traffic. Not long after that, I seem to recall that the devs added an admin option to deny mails to or reply all for all but a select few to big distribution lists.
It might be tricky to replicate the bedlam, as MS was a huge org by that time, thus users in different time zones, mail transfer delays, directory replication and so on all played a part in duration of the event. But it would be interesting to see a replay.
You're getting some guys excited with all that Exchange talk 😂
This video hits my early career nostalgia. Working with Windows NT and Exchange and luckily Terminal Server/Citrix - I would sit amongst the servers knowing there were around 500 odd folk up and down the country hooked up to this doing their job and it felt incredibly powerful!
Always love watching your retro systems, retro softwares. Thanks a lot for such a great channel!
Appreciate it ! Thx a lot.
computing/server work in early 00's and late 90s was something else.
so personal and perfect
Nice to see you posting. This particular video was not my favourite subject, but still you are a brilliant narrator and generally nice productuction.
Thanks man ... I know not everything is going to be everyones cup of tea ... just stick with me, and let me know what you like. Just more stuff to come on the channel
Thank you for this video. People have an appetite for old tech. Things were over-built, understated, and free from politics. I have an IBM 5155 and a Kaypro 16/2. Your videos have been invaluable to not only getting them working, but upgraded and doing things beyond their intended purpose.
The virtualization route was smart. I did an Exchange 5.5 install on Compaq Armada 7700DMT systems. It was just for recreation. Between the domain controller, Exchange server and client install it took hours. The video was a mess.
I remember commenting on that video a while back ! Getting all of this prepped on actual hardware is indeed very time consuming.
Thanks for creating. I think the first version I installed in a corp environment was 5.0 around 1998 or so. So much more simpler back then, kind of. From 5.0 to 5.5 then to other versions. Great job.
Awesome video, great setup explanation...brings back happy memories 😍 Looking forward to the next one !
My goodness this brings back memories.
That's the idea ! :) Hope you enjoyed it.
When I saw 5.5 I got chills! NT4 and Exchange 5.5 was a techs email server! Kids these days with their Cloud and Facepages!
Oh my god, what a blast from the past, I had to administer a regional hub in the UK, connected to US and DE servers, what a nightmare when things went wrong. Then we upgraded to Exch2000, that added at least 1 or 2 grey hairs :) Thanks for the Vid!!
I enjoyed the vid, I liked how you made the Exchange deployment look smooth and easy, I played with Exchange 5.5 myself and gosh it was real pain to deploy. I'm curious to know if do you encountered the NT Option Pack SMTP / Exchange IMS conflict, that had me confused and caused a lot of frustration until realised smtp from opt pack was not needed.
thanks for the video....as many fellas around here, in those days i also did a lot of Exchange server's troubleshooting...many long nights and weekends praying for a clean output from isinteg command....😄😄😄
Every second of this video rang a bell. I really appreciate it. I can imagine this setup for fun in a virtual environment at home for fun.
I hardly ever install real hardware machines since VMs are easier to use for reinstalls/fallbacks.
once you get going on actual hardware, then you need a solaris box and get outlook express for unix running and send messages back and forth
I was certified in 5.5. It was not too bad to manage. I loved it. 😍
Then all the spam hit
perhaps you might be able to help me out with DirSync between Exchange and my MSMail for PC Networks 3.5 setup :)
Pretty comprehensive history and I love the demos - Microsoft also released a free upgrade to Microsoft Outlook 97 with Outlook 98 before releasing the full MS Office 2000 package a few years later - more features included within. Great retro software tech showcase. :)
Thanks for the info! And really happy you enjoyed the video.
This setup will be part of my retirement plan. The icons, the look, and the feel are very relatable to going to a museum, just with UX.
what you want to do is, do a windows 95 deployment using window NT4 server, using a network boot disk that you create with the server.
Just make sure your clients date/time are sync'd or you'll have a bad day 😂
This was pretty much setting the stage for Active Directory services. I managed a large 5.5 system and migrated it into an AD forest and Exchange 2003. Somehow I survived lol. But it was fun and beat digging ditches for a living. TIP-Run the Enterprise version if you really intend to run this. Standard has a store limit of 16gb and Enterprise raises it to 1tb.
not a big deal in 2022, but you'd probably want to go for SP6a which fixes some bugs introduced by SP6. I have vivid memories of certain 3Com NIC drivers killing your install on 'vanilla' SP6
First native Microsoft TCP/IP network I ever connected to was in late 1999. Before that each site I worked at was using Novell and IPX. Some of the Novell sites ran IPX and TCP/IP, however early on when I first ran into TCP/IP the sites I worked at didn't run DHCP. Any time we set up or relocated a pc, we'd have to look up available IP addresses in a spreadsheet, ping to verify they are inactive, then add them as a fixed IP. That was a pain when people moved from one building to another. This would involve going into multiple spreadsheets (not sure iif tabs existed back then) and making changes.
Mail was either cc:mail or Groupwise. Groupwise and Outlook were very similar in use.
from 1998 to date i'm still installing exchange servers 🙃, but that's the worst email server when comes to setup , maintain and recovery . Microsoft should make it easier to use with less dependencies . MDaemon is doing a Grete job.Nice Video.
👍
wow this bring backs old memories when I was little kid and introduced to Pentium 3 in year 2000 playing GTA 1 😊😊
network neighborhood, internet explorer, dial up connection can't forget
today's generation missed that era
My god. Is that heaven? Paradise? Its beautiful, all those childhood computers buzzing away. Now we just need a few mac's on the other wall. Yes. This is my dream.
Woooow! Brings back memories. Been in the industry for 24 years now. Used to compete installing NT4 server the fastest 😁. Exchange Server 5.5 was the first version I got certified on and started my career upgrading a version 5 server to 5.5 at my first employer in the industry. Exchange client was simple. No calendar or contacts. Just email. A far cry from outlook today.
Haha, me too. Started as IT admin back in '97 and one of the things I started with was Windows NT 4.0 and MS SQL server. Later on (I believe it was in 2000) I got trained for MS Exchange 5.5... a typical Microsoft product, looks very simple when you install it, but indeed it wasn't that simple to manage, especially if you had an organisation with multiple exchange servers and interconnection between them. Along with all this pdc/bdc/wins/netbios/trust etc. stuff - glad that I survived it and evolved towards Linux and network management.
@@adrock0801 I’m now still working with collaboration but now I’m Microsoft 365 with cloud migrations, Teams, Endpoint manager and the rest of the MS cloud offerings, including exchange online 😁. We also host both Linux and windows servers for clients.
This video brought back a LOT of memories!
The hours..... the hours that i spend back in the days with this version..... :D REALY NICE VIDEO. thanks.
That webmail client took me back to college. Maybe it was a version later, but the webmail we had in college in 2004 was pretty close.
Legendary stuff as usual! 👍
Oh man you bring memories to late 90s when networks and IT is for remarkable people only but now within 6 months some people will call themselves network engineering
trip down memory lane, back when you didn't have to worry about ransomware...... nice video!
That’s nifty! I use exchange 2003 and this is a neat look back.
Amazing video on how it works... I have nightmares of exchange 2010 still
I stopped using Exchange (or being aware of it) after this 5.5 version :)
Oh I ran an exchange 5.5 server in 2000 for a small isp. And their iis server. What a flashback 🤩
I did setup Windows NT Server with Exchange 5.5 in my virtual lab, It was fun to explore these things
no
This is something I dont miss dealing with anymore
The Old Internet Explorer icon in the top right is awesome.
Always nice to see these old inbox / internet explorer / msn icons back again. How far we have evolved.
OMG, you're sending so much Fart emails back to the future 🤣🤣🤣
Groeten, weer een goeie retro video!
Altijd een plezier om naar te kijken.
aaah exchange 5.5! i did work experience for a public sector organisation in the uk back in 2002 and they were using exchange 5.5 on nt4 for their email. the server used to crash and lock up solid pretty much every day, so they'd send someone down to the server room to hit the reset button. wonder if they ever did fix it or just put up with it? different times back then, IT was still a nice-to-have unlike now.
I was one of the original Beta customers of 4.0. As part of doing this I ran an Exchange server at home, and its still running to this day, though not on 4.0 now Exchange 2019. Back well before Skype, Zoom or Teams teleconferences with 100+ folks and it seemed to work. Still have fond memories of the X.400 transport, 5.5 was the last of this line, Windows 2000 changed it all moving the directory into what became Active Directory and the primary transport became SMTP. Talk about a walk down memory lane.
do you have proof of this? 🤨
Vmware guest driver for WindowsNT4 supports FullHD and works well. Probably VB does the same.
Indeed. Works for NT but doesn’t for Win95/98. But there are other solutions on VirtualBox for that.
20:17 “Thanks to the IMAP protocol which basically downloads these messages for me.” Maybe you meant this, but IMAP retains the messages on the server unless the user deletes them. The client may cache them locally, though, for quicker access, so will download them in that case, yes, but not remove them from the server. POP would fetch and remove them from the server, so usually when people talked about downloading the messages they meant POP for that reason, as on IMAP only the message listing and metadata would be automatically downloaded. A specific message cinten would be downloaded on a request to read it.
I was working in a bank in 2007 and they still have MANY Windows NT4 servers (and workstations) around. We deployed VMware and it make it extremely easy to spin up new NT4 servers whenever we need. Installing Windows NT4 on physical hardware was really a pain.
We used to have a cabinet with folders containing all the floppy disks, CD drivers, boot disks, etc from each physical server. And whenever we needed to reinstall a NT4 server, none of the media used to work... So we needed to download all software over and over again, prepare new media, and one year later, it didn't work anymore.
I really hated Windows NT4 with all my heart, lol
For sure this was cutting edge email tech at the time!
While we at it, maybe throw in a Novell server?
Been there done that :)
@@RetroSpector78 Groupwise?
And if you’re really feeling adventurous, Novell border manager?
Lotus Notes, when? ;)
This ripped open old wounds 😂 My twitch has came back. Thanks 😂
Makes me feel old, i did practices and exams on setting up NT4 when i studied as an it supporter here in denmark
Back in the day when Windows use to feel snappy and fast......
Brings back many memories as well :)
Snappy and fast - when sped up 8 times.
Oh Clippy. I miss you. Hehehe...
What do you recommend for virtualising Windows 9x and 3.x? Recent versions of VM software like Virtualbox do not give any driver support. Only found that a Windows 7 Machine with Virtual PC can install drivers.
I use virtualbox. Works well for 3.11 / 95 / 98 / nt 4.0 / xp. If guest additions don’t work I use SciTech Display Doctor
86box? a tad slow, but at least no memory problems.
PCem is the... was??? :-))) the best for Win95 and 3.11. Depending on your hardware it might reach up to 80-100% of Pentium 166MMX performance. At least 4 haswell cores do the job and the newer the CPU the better. I don't remember, but people wrote that 4GHz is needed for 200MMX. Anyway even emulated 166MMX with 512MB of RAM is fine to run post 1999 Linuxes, they (linuxes) were really fat&slow thus NT4 felt like a super fast interstellar rocket!!!
Is it bad that watching this instantly took me back to my early 20s?
I have the same Trust Speakers sitting at my home right now :) I can't believe someone else also possesses another pair :)
Esta buenisimoooo!!!!! Saludos desde buenos aires
I love that the Windows NT server box has a 90s tribal tattoo on it.
Excelente!!! Gracias por los recuerdos! 😊
I was you dude. Now I'm glad to be in a different stage of life, but in 1998 it was grand. So, that's fine I guess. I was satisfied then and satisfied now.
wow 5.5 - been some 20 years since I've touched it I barely recognize it anymore. can't remember how it even works before AD
that room is a throwback
Duygulandım... eski günler aklıma geldi.
I had to learn this shyte.. Never implemented it. Went straight to Linux solutions.
I have Windows server 2022 and Windows server 2003 for legacy hardware. 👌
I’m going to try the exchange server from your video..
Ahh.. the wonderful days of single instance storage
I ran Exchange 5.5 for several years in a corporate environment.
on the 1:38, what is that 486 machine? I had desktop with that specific power button - exactly the same minus the color (but Mine was pink) with custom dos menu.
I wonder of more systems using that button (mainly because I search for that one specific unit)
Great video, though I wished you uploaded it with 60 FPS
Amazing brother, I wish I could be there.
What a blast form the past... but I can't help but think about ALL the security vulnerabilities present in all those software packages, it's in just about installed. Lanman, SQL, IIS, ASP, OWA, etc, etc. LOL
Also had the feeling that installing Service Pack 6 wouldn't be sufficient to make everything air tight :)
I see you sent a FART right at the end, LGR would be proud!
Nice looks just like some of the small server rooms I worked in in the late 90s and early 2000s. I built quite a few Exchange 5.5 servers using SMTP and X400 and built quite a few places first email systems.
Nice trip down the memory lane. By the way there was an Exchange Client 5.0 (not 5.5), that had a cooler splash screen than the 4.0 one 😀
Oh and IIS3 would have been technically enough so it is strange that as it is installed by NT4 SP3 if IIS is installed at that time. Maybe ASP would have to be activated, too long ago to know that from my memories :)...
Please no! I've never used Exchange for regular cases, but I tested a lot of...stuff, for some project. I hate it! Thank you for the video :)
I've been working as a systems administrator for the last 5 years, I just missed the on-prem exchange era by a few years and I'm glad I did after watching this video lol. This looks so tedious and with a million things that can go wrong. It's not perfect but the 0365 architecture is a godsend compared to processes like this.
This was my first server install almost exactly, not sure if I did any 95 clients but the rest is completely the same. Just need a Frontpage website and it would be perfect.
There were optical PS/2 mice, not very common, but they're a thing. Might wanna look into replacing "ballers" with the optical PS/2 mice. There are also converters to connect a PS/2 mice into a COM port. On the OS side, it would be completely transparent.
I dont miss these days...
I was playing with groupwise and domino at those golden days.
Was running Exchange Server on a domain controller officially supported back then or did it just not give you the warning like it does today?
would have wanted a tutorial like that 20 years ago.
God I miss those naming conventions... maybe it's just because of nostalgic reasons... but I loved my saying my PC had a 486 DX 2 66.... upgrading to the DX 4 100 wasn't as big of a leap as it was jumping to the Pentium 100... .wow, that was life changing. Software 3D Quake... drool.
hell plug it up to the internet and open port 25 from your router and see what happens... jking cool video of these old machines!
Holy flashback, Batman!! *POW* I remember Microsoft IT guys running around losing all of their customer data on NT server and Exchange 5. Meanwhile, I was installing Novell Groupwise everywhere and spending the days browsing MySpace. lol "High speed" internet was a ISDN BRI (256k for the gen z and millennials), but at least it wasn't dial-up.
Unbelievable!!! I finally found a slower pc than my laptip😅
I recently came across my Server 2003 discs... I'm sure I have older stuff somewhere.
How do you do that to connect both the Domain Controller VM to a client VM on VirtualBox, I want to try this someday. :)
The geeky stuff we love to see for vintage machines but hate in our modern offices :,D
I wonder if you transfer the VMs to your actual machines tho :o
I use Exchange 5.5 at home on my network, it's hosted on my Windows 2000 Server but I connect to it with various clients including my Toshiba Satellite Pro 430CDT with Windows 3.1
I found it to be nice and fast, but all my machines run at at least 100mbs
It feels like I was a kid when I use to work on NT, oh those days before PNP when you had to set IRQ's etc. Then 2000 came out and change everything, the first thing I remember is OMG GroupPol is gone (or whatever the hell it was called), how do you lock things down, and then we found Group Policy and GPO's, it was a wow moment. Those were the days when everyone used IPX/SPX to connect pc's for gaming and how MS created Novell gateway services which killed Novels license model. Man the 80's and 90s were cool for computing. Now it all sucks.