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Why you don't want a vintage 286 PC -- but I like mine anyway
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ส.ค. 2024
- I really enjoy using my 1990 NCR PC286, but I go over the reasons why an 80286 may not be the ideal vintage PC for you, especially for DOS gaming. (Or if you're weird enough to try OS/2.)
Games like Lotus III and Flight Simulator 4.0 actually run surprisingly well on this 286, mostly due to the strength of its onboard Western Digital/Paradise graphics chip, but other 286 systems with plain VGA, like IBM PS/2s, would not do nearly as well. And a 386 opens the door to a whole range of games and programs which simply won't run at all on a 286.
Many thanks to LGR, RetroSpector78, The 8-Bit Guy, and mbbrutman, short clips of whose videos I have used to illustrate some of the points I make.
I was part of the OS/2 product development team at IBM in the early 90s. Can't believe we've had personal computers for over 40 years now.
please make videos talking about it
OS/2 was so good, I truly enjoyed it.
If you don't do your won TH-cam videos you should consider being a visitor on one of the channels that has talked a lot a out os2.
dam bruh u olds af
@afrose71 If you worked at IBM in Silicon Valley (I forget if it was in Mountain View or Santa Clara), I probably participated in both your in-house focus groups, as well as beta programs.
The monitor might not be "period correct", but damn, it looks "right" on that box, and it's the proper aspect ratio. Pretty!
Some of those old monitors are still excellent if you're mainly writing and want a simple setup. The current ultrawide designs may offer more real estate, but when you're focusing on a single function you want it to do that job as good as possible.
I use an old Dell monitor that I got for $5, and paired it with a Raspberry Pi 3B, to run Wordgrinder. You can't find any better solution with modern features, I feel, if you just want a machine to write on. It's silent, has a crisp matte display, and doesn't offer any bells and whistles that can act to distract you from what you're doing.
I really love the 4:3 and 1600x1200 form factor. I've had that before and enjoyed it on XP systems
@@sbrazenor2 When it comes to aspect ratio, I often WANT the outcome to be something other than "modern" ratios. I shoot (or crop) 4:3 when I need to use existing "stock" footage with the new footage. And I usually use 3:2 for stills as I want them to "match" my 35mm work. There's nothing more distracting than native 4:3 video stretched out to fit 16:9, On a vintage PC, a 16:9 monitor trying to fill the screen bugs me, Even if I'm PURELY in text mode. Mono audio and black and white video still have THEIR uses too, and for similar reasons! 😊
"This product is licensed to:
Steve Jobs
Apple Computer, Inc."
I almost spit my drink laughing at that.
@100 000 Subscribers with no videos Makes sense given both had PowerPC CPUs
I think I saw something similar on William Gates' iPad.
@100 000 Subscribers with no videos It no longer matters, Apple computers are PCs today. Regardless of what OS you like, the hardware architecture war was "won" by the PC.
Came here to say this LOL
@@kociemleko1 Yep! A key piece of hardware for the Apple 2 Wayyy back that allows the Apple 2 to run the then standard CP/M operating system was made by..... Microsoft. (Z-80 "soft" card) in 1980! Microsoft and Apple have collaborated for 40 years now.
Games like Lotus III and Flight Simulator 4.0 actually run surprisingly well on this 286, mostly due to the strength of its onboard Western Digital/Paradise graphics chip, but other 286 systems with plain VGA, like IBM PS/2s, would not do nearly as well. And a 386 opens the door to a whole range of games and programs which simply won't run at all on a 286.
I got my hands on NCR point of sales machine and they are built very well. Made a video of it, not the best, but I enjoyed that computer. Sold it last month.
Honestly, I find something really enjoyable about 286 performance though. I have a 12mhz 286 (with 287) PC myself and I'm honestly surprised how much stuff it can run playably. Especially games like Day of the Tentacle and Fate of Atlantis CD-ROMs run shockingly well. Though, I wish mine wasn't so flakey. Might be due to the Trident VGA card in it.
th-cam.com/video/Rtz0-gekfRo/w-d-xo.html
No turbo button, that's a shame
The original Sierra games should run pretty well too, with the benefit of being able to easily add a VGA card for EGA support.
I remember playing Flight Simulator 1.0 (I think) on an old unknown pc at my friends house on an amber monochrome CRT... it managed about 0.5 fps--- it took us ages to take off and we landed ONCE in the entirety of the 90s
We need a vwestlife demonstration of OS/2! Thanks for a great video as always
Okay, it's for ever and a day to load that 640x480 256 color digital photo, but in 1990, I'd have been STOKED just to be able to DO that!
James Slick I remember in the mid 90s downloading porn jpgs from underground BBSs onto my 286 with it’s 2400 baud modem and then taking that long to display. And yeah, I was totally stoked just to be able to do it.
when I was young our family had a 16mhz 286, many many games were played on it.. Crystal Caves, Duke Nukem, Halloween Harry, Commander Keen 1, 2, 3, and 4, Accolade grand prix, Trek (star trek clone) battle chess, prince of persia, xenon 1 and 2, and many many more... That machine was fantastic and gave us many hours of enjoyment :)
In all honesty, I think one of the few reasons I’d be interested in a 286 is the masochistic nostalgia of how limited it could be for playing games. I remember the rush of rifling through the games at the store and finally finding one that should have been able to work. But I also remember sitting around nervously around midday on Christmas Day, wondering if our new games were going to work.
That is one sleek 286, glad to see it again.
the 16-bit era of mid 80s to early 90s doesn't get enough retro love - thanks for showing it some
The one downvote I see must be from a grumpy spreadsheet anthusiast who still hasn't received his C80287XL math coprocessor in the mail.
*anthagonist
Nice profile image. I'm gearing up to play through Robinson's Requiem, and then Deus in a few days, on PC.
@@MikeStavola Did you do it? Playing those two games is one of my life goals, but I never find the time or energy.
That picture looks like something out of 90s Grindr
9ndr
where? spill the tea sis
OH I SEE IT
Probably circulated on Fidonet BBS relays
2MB of RAM on a 286 - that's massive for those days! My first PC came with OS/2 Warp on it! Luckily it had the option to have Windows 3.1 on it instead so I soon got rid of OS/2 Warp :) Love how long it takes to load a photo and great to see you left it in real time rather than speed the video up, it just shows you how far things have gone and how impatient we have become as if a modern photo doesnt open up instantly we get frustrated and think our devices are faulty.
IMHO, a 286 deserves at least 4MB of RAM (4x 1MB SIMMs), if possible.
That's what I had got in the mid-90s, because I wanted to run Windows 3.1
smoothly. Also, a 16-Bit soundcard comes in really handy. :)
Some of the Win16 games (-by mistake ?-) use 16-Bit Wave files,
which can't be played back on an 8-Bit sound card.
Last, but not least, let's remember that a slow HDD can also ruin the Windows 3.1
experince. Many slow 286es were slow, because they were based on XT hardware: It wasn't too uncommon to turn an XT into an AT by swapping
out the 8088 motherboard and installing a 286 motherboard while the
rest of the hardware was kept.
memory or upgrade memory was VERY expensive, even 40% of the price of the machne (around USD $2000?)
Great take on the 286. For the early DOS games, most of those computers didn't allow software to detect the display's vertical refresh, so they had a busy loop to waste CPU cycles to slow the game action down. When run on a faster computer, that busy loop (and all the rest of the code) executes much faster and the game becomes unplayable as you showed.
Most other personal computers of the era (especially those intended to hook up to TVs such as Atari and Commodore) allowed programs to detect v-blank so the games based their timing on that, running the game loop at 50 or 60 Hz. Even though faster CPU upgrades are very rare on those 8-bit machines, for those that have them (such as the SuperCPU for the C64), a surprising number of games still run at the correct speed even with a 20x faster CPU, because of this v-blank based timing.
V-blank timing isn't the only method to adjust game speed depending on hardware, and at least half of the games of that era working fine on 386/486+. Most of the time game developers just didn't care, especially when 4.77Mhz was de-facto one and only PC speed.
Alley Cat has better timing works fine be it on 4.77Mhz 8088 or even on more recent PC that can still operates real mode DOS.
I dont really do games or have desire to, but I got a 286 when the x86 something I had was a bit slow, and I used assorted spreadsheet programmes which were slow on the 8086 machine, so I sold that and got a damage ex display 286 one instead, Used if for a number of years under MS-DOS , but Win 3x was slow when I got that , eventually I acquired a 386SX in a rubbish case and just changed the mainboard over which worked fine. At the same time I switched companies and found their stock control system had been written in a datafile program (I forget which) , that used the 386 clock speed and I could not upgrade their computers to 486 as the program fell over. (with the knowledge and programs I now have I could probably hack , or get a better, inventory control programm, or an access front end to do the job). But still interesting and I have far too many machines gathering spiders in the garage now.. !
That last photo seems modern and yet not modern based on the camera, but, I guarantee that Polaroids exist from the early '50s that are remarkably similar, LOL We people don't actually change as fast as our gear does! 😊
Fact. I am so angry that a friend, bless his heart, "upgraded" my laptop to Windows 10 from XP. When it was XP everything worked and I never ever had an issue running anything on it. All my software worked and was compatible with my hardware. Whereas with Win10, immediately had troubles. Finally the whole thing crapped out. When I took it too the shop the guy said the HD had been entirely wiped out!!! How is that even possible?!
1990s shirtless selfies, 2010s clothes-less selfies, 2030s self-less selfies.
u left out the 2000s
@@MylarBalloonLover And 2020s...
Lmao!!!
@@MylarBalloonLover pantsless
@@rkan2 maskless!
Ooh la la...
That screen looked really good, especially at the end.
I wish I would find cheap old Computers like that in europe. The retro community makes everything freaking expensive over here
Expensive everywhere. Had to be a dumpster diver ten years ago to get good deals. That's when the schools were tossing them en masse.
Good deals exist here too, just don't expect to find them in public sales sites. Find a small town with a thrift shop, not a large populated city. These often have a lot more cool stuff.
I'm not that into video, but my vintage audio I usually get from a simple facebook marketplace listing asking if anyone has some of that stuff. People come to me with their 'junk', are happy to get rid of it and no one else can steal my deal!
@@Farmeraap I live in a small town and I never find any computer or audio stuff worth buying. It's just old printers and DVD players covered in cat hair. But I don't use facebook, so...
I just picked up a 486SX for 28 euro and an AMD K6 for 25 euro. Sometimes I even find stuff for free at our local recycling center, not now because it is very busy due to quarantine and people cleaning their houses. Actually market places are filled up with cheap stuff that people are trying to clear out from their attics.
In the UK you cant find an old computer or even a new one in a charity shop. They will sell the accessories, mice, joysticks, monitors etc but not the machines. I think some of the machines get wiped and sold on their ebay pages. But older machines like this probably get scrapped.
I once went into a charity shop and found a 3.5" external floppy for an apple laptop. I dont have anything apple and thought maybe it might be interesting to get it but when I asked how much it was they looked at it and said "Oh this cant be sold because of data protection". I told them that its an empty floppy drive but they had no clue, thought that there were names and addresses inside it.
All they would sell was the laptops bag.
"You're using a 286? Don't make me laugh! Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?" -Weird Al Yankovic
"You can backup your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette,
You're the biggest joke on the Internet!"
"You think your Commodore 64 is really neato,
What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito?"
In a 32-Bit world, you're a two bit user.
900 million comments
boot on Monday, start the work week on Tuesday
So true about the 286/386 clock speed. On the one hand going from a 286-16Mhz to a 386DX-16 was a let down in terms of speed, but being able to run 32bit code was incredible. No, fabulous even! No more 64kb segments!! And dos in a window!
My favourite 286 games: Wolfenstein 3D (runs very well on a 286 at 16 MHz), Sid Meier's Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Dune 2 (probably the only RTS except Planet X3 that works well on a 286), F19 Stealth Fighter and it's sequel F117A Stealth Fighter 2.0, all Commander Keen games, early Might and Magic games, Pinball Dreams I/II and Pinball Fantasies, Nomad (a very quirky but charming space exploration game), Simon The Sorcerer, Lemmings, almost all of LucasArts classic adventures... I know this because I had to use a 286 until 1996 when we finally had some cash to upgrade to a Pentium-class machine.
My first PC was actually a 486, but I definitely played Wolfenstein and later Doom, Dune 2 (first RTS), and all those Apogee shareware games like Crystal Caves, Halloween Harry, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, etc. Mortal Kombat, SimCity, Civilization, and a bunch more I'm forgetting. :)
I was literally just thinking earlier today about older computers and how if you opened a program (or later visited a website) you always had time to multitask various things because everything took forever to load.
I really enjoy your sarcastic and dry sense of humor and have been watching your channel for a long time.
The end was... unexpected :)
Ya... it caught my attention! My mind went to the window washer / kittens meme floating around.
In case you want the original file: www.amstereo.org/images/mavicaguy.jpg
Oh man, you really deserve the silver play button for your aesthetic and vintage content! Congrats on 100,000 subscribers Kevin!
Wow! I didn't know you worked out! XD
I scored a Samsung equivalent to this out of my work's scrap him a few months ago. I need to diagnose some bad memory chips, but I'm looking forward to the chance to do it
I was watching the part of the video where the image downloaded at 21:07 when my dad came into my room to let me know he was leaving.
That loading of the photo really puts things into perspective at the difference of computational speeds we have today.
I did'nt think anything could display pics slower than my 98 laptop, but yeah, wow. Well done.
This is how I learned to meditate. We'll actually waiting for ETH transactions to go thru but... Same difference. 😄
@@grizzlyaddams3606how's your eth doing
This is really bodacious! Lucky to have found this in a thrift shop! 💕
Wow. That brings me back. My first PC was a 286. I actually played Wing Commander on it. It DID work. The 286 is still in my basement.
I ran a Renegade BBS off a 286 in the early 90s. Very nostalgic times for me...
So glad to see some old x86 content by VWestlife! I've missed sthis tuff so much!
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Great to see people still using and valuing these great old machines. I still remember some graphics / programmer friends of mine saying in the mid 1980's: "all I need, all I want is a fast 286". LOL, the good old daze ... 😜 💖
Very interesting, I had considered getting a 286 to play some vintage games on, but I might look into something different, I think. Thank you!
Slimline desktop and pizzas cases are my favorite. That is a very nice 286.
I had a 286 when I was young (it was already obsolete by the time), and I remember that when you finished the solitaire game, you had this animation when all the cards were flying down. On my 286, this animation took like 2 or three minutes, the cards were dropping one by one, and I was shocked later to see for example on a 486DX2-66 that the same animation takes like 20 seconds!
the end was unexpected... But liked lol.
That reminds me of a pic of a dude with that body preparing twinkies.... Can't remember where I saw it lol
Love that case and power button. Have an AT&T branded pentium 60 with a similar look (albeit a lot bigger, but same power button)
Bill Gates' voice sounds suspiciously like Clint Basinger's
I had the exact same thought.
It was Clint's voice
The first PC that I started to use was a 286. Didn't have a hard disk and I had to boot it using a 5 1/4 inch bootable floppy disk (as against the PC in the video which has a a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive). I had only one of those 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and so I took good care of it. No windows. Only DOS. I wrote programs in GWBasic. Monochrome monitors. Was delighted when I saw the first 386 PC with windows and a color monitor. Just being able to see the colors generated from my graphics programs was a thrill. This was all between 1993-96. Saw my first multimedia PC in 95 I think.
Loving your videos! What is amazing is the memory requirement now. 2mb was ok for Win3.1 . Loaded in in a few seconds. Now we have win 10 , where you need 4gb , 2000 times more. Your video shows if you just want to word process etc, the old pc's are fine. The 2000 times more memory gets you nicer websites & multimedia. You see it when people use windows 95/8 laptops today , they look smooth & can even play DVD, but when you go on the internet they struggle to load a page. Partly due to the browser, but mostly the memory .
As a fan of your hi-fi related videos I'd absolutely love to see more classic PC stuff from you. Keep up the good work.
Amazing. Blast from the past.
It's wild that you have an old DOS computer! While I am watching TH-cam i have been playing DOS games on DosBox! You have the real thing! Very cool! Enjoy!
9:43 - hah, so when restoring my own NCR 386, I noticed the LED had two different colors. I don't have the original mobo in there, but I did wire up the LED to work like that too, except for me, regular speed is green LED, and turbo is orange (as 99% of retro PCs I had do have a yellow/amber turbo LED)
I did have an Epson Equity III+ 286 machine that had three selectable speeds (it was a 286) - red LED for 6 MHz, orange for 8 Mhz, and green for 12 Mhz.
I was transported back to when I was 18 in this video - thanks I feel old now.
Phil Swift here with Flex Disk!
Jokes aside, I like my Toshiba T3100 286, but it only has 640k and thus cannot run 3.1, so it's stuck on 3.0.
I spend much more time on my 386, and I have several partitions that I shuffle around on a 10 GB drive with OnTrack. It's even better now that I got TCP/IP set up on it. Currently, it's running Windows 95.
And I might just have to get DVPEG.
i had a similar 286 from Olivetti with a similar form factor. I got it used around '92 for cheap and ran several years as as a modem-port for my BBS.
My first PC compatible was a 286 a friend of mine cobbled together out of spare parts because he couldn’t believe I was still using a Commodore 64 in 1994. I loved that POS; ran it until 2001. I played Block Out on it constantly! On a completely different note, I scored a big case of used recorded MiniDiscs. They have the most random music on them so the last few days I have been going through them and titling the tracks. Some of the songs are out of my wheelhouse so I’ve been having to search online to figure out what they are. I just found a Westlife song which made me think of you :)
My first PC was a 286 with an SVGA monitor and 40mb hdd/1024kb RAM - it was pretty expensive. We played Prince of Persia, Lotus3, Stunts, Secret of Monkey Island, Indy500 on it, good times. I used DOS only on it the first Windows 3.1 i have seen was on a 386
I grew up with an Sanyo 12,5 MHz 80286 computer with a sound blaster 16, vga care and 256 color monitor. 40mb hard drive. And I believe it had more than 2mb of ram so I think you remember wrong. I really enjoyed that computer. And played games like civilization, port of call, 688 attack sub, Jones in the fast lane, Larry series, railroad tycoon, and the list goes on and on and on. And they all ran just fine on it. I do remember I was envy of my buddy who eventually got a 486 and could play colonization, and I was very envious. My next x86 computer was A cyrix i686 p166+ I bought when I was 12-13. Fun times. I miss those days where the only worry was If I could get away with playing another hour.
Really enjoyed the part two of your 286 adventure :)
Edit: Also when I liked the video, I was the 286th like. Hell yeah!
It seems like your system came from the same era as my Compaq Deskpro 386S (Manufacturered in December 1990 - My birth year!) which had a very choice upgrade. Someone bought the dedicated Compaq RAM upgrade card, which I found in a catalog from 1990 costing $999.95 USD which gave it an extra 4MB RAM to bring it to 6144K, insane for a 386SX at 16MHz. I gave it some love since it needed a a new Dallas RTC clock chip, which I found remanufaturered from China and bought a couple of them incase I need more. I also put in a Soundblaster 16 compatable card and a Genius 2000II networking card (since I thought playing with a DOS Webserver would be fun). It sounds almost brand new too the hardware, the original Conner 20MB hdd is silent. I've swapped it for a 40GB IDE drive (But had to get some 40 wire IDE cables, since it does not like the newer style 80 wire cables). I had to use OnTrack Disk Manager to format it as 4x2GB, and also put in a CF card reader for easy backups. Next on my list is my "New" Compaq Presario 4/100 486DX4 100MHz computer. Just after I'd upgraded the RAM from 16MB to 72MB the power supply blew up, and I replaced the resistors in it to get it working again, but haven't yet had a chance to finish restoring it. Had to desolder the battery on that board (It was a CR2032 but solded in, rediculous!). Hope you're keeping safe, stay crunchy and hope to see more of your vids soon! (sorry for long comment!)
Had an Amiga A1200HD so I didn't jump to PC till the 486 era. Looks like I didn't miss much, but still a great video.
And here I am feeling impatient when my modern cellphone takes more than a few seconds to render and display thousands of thumbnails from 12 megapixel photos
I had a 286 growing up. But I would get a 486 with a Sound Blaster Live if you are going to go vintage DOS mode.
that’s one hot selfie
Totally agreed.
I always look forward to and enjoy your Videos.
It reminds me of an old Dilbert strip. Dilbert was an engineer and needed to do some 3D design, buthe was denied a computer upgrade by Catbert and told to make do with his current 286 machine. "How many times do you need to do 3D modelling, anyway?"
Dilbert's response: "ONCE, if I hurry."
With sufficient RAM and Temp directory space, you can actually Alt-Tab between multiple MS-DOS applications on a 286 running Windows 3.x (or even on the older Windows/286 which had the nice feature of drawing the Alt-Space menu while full-screen.)
The downside is that only the active application can do any processing, so there is no concept of background processing as you’d have on a 386. You can also expect some delays in Alt-Tabbing as the application that you leave is swapped to disk. It’s far from optimal, but certainly better than nothing.
Correct, on a 286 you can only task switch between multiple DOS applications, not multitask them.
I kinda love the design of this NCR PC
9 views
9 likes
perfectly balanced
Haha those speeds and performance was my life back in 1990 to 1994 before we got a 486. Didn't know better thought it was fine back then. Brilliant review.. Everything you said is exactly as I remember... Games too fast or too slow
I would get both to have it as spare parts for the main one. It's interesting to see how common horizontal cases were common back then. And now horizontal cases are a very small niche on pc market.
I had a commodore 286 many years ago. It was a nightmare, but I still loved it.
Absolutely fascinating! I do love the monitor!
watching this on my thinkpad e545. wathcing your videos gave me the idea to upgrade my memory from 4 to 16gb and it feels like new.
This message was brought to you by the thinkpad gang
Additional RAM would allow for more programs be running under win 3.x in Standard mode but for DOS to be windowed required V86 mode and demand paging which allows capture of IO ports making this run on 286 protected mode impractical relying on the Task state switch taking too much cycles would need much faster system.
I used to work at a place where the engineers kept on using a Mavica in the 2000's even though more modern cameras using CF and SD cards became available. No need to load special software or use a special reader.
I used to drool over 286s when they were new, but never saw them as a games machine, we had Amigas for that :o)
I think Conner hard drives were used by Compaq in the Deskpro 386 line. If I remember correctly, the default was a 90MB drive. A company I worked for at the time, as a tech, had among its clients an architectural firm that was very quick to move to the 386 with 387 math coprocessor to run AutoCAD software.
The 286 was a much more useful computer in the Xenix world than it was in the Dos world. Somehow Xenix made much better use of the 286’s very limited protected mode. I remember the CarQuest auto parts chain used 286 computers running MS-Xenix for their inventory control system.
That company I worked for at that time was fortuitous in a lot of ways. In August of 1989, one of our clients ordered several 386DX/33 machines, each with 4MB RAM, 120MB hard drive and EGA graphics card. Something happened and they ended up not needing one of them. I was able to buy it at a HUGE discount. I’d already acquired one of the early Paradise VGA cards, in hopes that I was going to be able to buy a second-hand 286 from a client making an upgrade, but this opportunity came up all of the sudden and I didn’t have any kind of monitor. It took me a couple weeks to get one, but luckily in the meantime I was able to borrow a color EGA monitor from work to take home with my new computer.
One of the first things I wanted to do was connect to CompuServe, haha. And when I think about it, if I had all the money I spent on CompuServe and long-distance modem phone calls refunded back to me today, adjusted for inflation, I bet I could buy a yacht! I didn’t have to make long-distance calls to connect, but CompuServe’s fee structure made it economical to do so, because the fastest I could connect locally was 2400bps. By calling direct to Columbus, Ohio I could connect at 9600bps, and because I was only connecting with automation software known as TAPCIS, I could connect at that speed and take full advantage of it, which meant it was more economical to pay the $22 per hour connect fee for the 9600 bps speed, even with the added long-distance modem charges, than to connect locally at 2400 bps paying $12 per hour.
Imagine if you had to pay rates like that to connect to the internet today. I think the world would be quite different.
Very nice! And many new games are written for even older computers, like the VIC-64 and ZX Spectrum.
I have a Dell 486 that has a BIOS that doesn't support custom HDD geometries and you choose from a list, like this 286. The largest supported is 525 MB. Larger drives work fine if you set it to 525 MB -- you just end up limited to that amount and any more is ignored. I've successfully used far larger drives with it by using an old version of Ontrack Disk Manager. It's just a very low level TSR that loads from the boot sector before DOS loads, and in-RAM replaces the BIOS disk access routines with more capable ones. It even added CD/DVD access and even booting from them, to a system whose BIOS hadn't even heard of a CD-ROM drive.
I like my 286's machines - have about 7 of them - from IBM AT/5170 to fast 286's - like 20-16mhz. Also have a laptop "Goulipin", 286 based. I like them as from one point of view they are really oldschool PC's - 16 bit, etc, from other point of view really a lot of great games can be run on a fast 286... Also have 286's with EGA and HGA display, not only VGA based..
Now, this brings back memories... I still have my "286" (by DTK), stored away, however it will not boot (anymore). When I tried booting it up a few year ago, some error appeared on the screen (related to the hard drive, I believe). The monitor that came with it, is long gone.
It ran MS-DOS, some-version.
It had WordPerfect 5.1., and a version of "Deluxe Paint", as well as dBase III Plus(?).
As for gaming, I remember playing "Crazy Sue". :) And these games on floppy disks that my father used to buy at the local supermarket.
Those were the days!
It pains me that people see vintage computers as just a way to play old videogames, that is really not what computing was about back then. Games existed but it was obvious then how they were inferior to systems like the NES/SNES that were designed to play games; you would never buy a $2000 (in early 1990s dollars!) system to play videogames, but if you had a computer you'd put games on to entertain your kid. The reason old technology is interesting is that it constrains the programmer, it truly mattered how well you optimized your address book program or BBS program or whatever.
Great video, as always. Congratulations on 100K!
I have an IBM PS/1 (model 2011) my grandfather bought me in 1990. Unfortunately, you're right... it did not make a good games machine. However, if I still had a parallel printer floating around, it would still make an excellent productivity machine. (I suspect that's why my grandfather bought it. 😁) And, being fair, the "casual games" as we know them now ran just fine then. We never went newer than DOS 5.0 though - Dad was too cheap for Windows.
I found that exact model in a thrift store for $5, but unfortunately it didn’t have the monitor (which is needed to power it up, oddly.) Of course I wasn’t aware of this odd design at the time, so I’ve never found out yet if it actually works. I hope someday to get the required monitor.
@@DavidWonn I hope you're successful finding the monitor. It's a good machine for its time, but it was kind of a flop. Really unfortunate, as it was the first IBM PC which had a built-in GUI (literally burned into ROM-it was fast). For simple word processing and spreadsheets, it would probably still be viable. Just don't lean too heavily on creaky old Spell Check. 😁
I wonder what the selfie dude looks like now, some 25ish years later!?
Had this same PC with an original grayscale NCR screen. Bought it second hand from a bank, through a buddy that worked there. It came without the hard disk, though. Used it to program in Turbo Pascal and Assembler, and connect to BBS's. Spent many long nights on it, sure did. :-)
I'm nostalgic for the 286 since that's what I had back in ~1992. I never owned a 386, I went from a 286 to a 486 in 1994. My first PC was an IBM PS/2 with a 286 @7MHz (IIRC maybe it was 8 but I seem to remember 7!) and 2MB RAM and I think a 20MB HDD. No math co-processor. I loved it and the games it could actually play always surprised me. I got the machine used and I knew about the 486 even during the time I had the 286 but it was all my parents could afford for me and sure it wasn't as smooth but Wolf3D was playable if you knocked the screen size down a few pegs! 3D flight sims like F29 Retaliator (check that one out if you never have) were playable too! Kings Quest V, Monkey Island 2 and Day of the Tentacle all ran in their full 256 color glory. I eventually got a used Sound Blaster Pro for it and it was definitely worth it! But again many of the point and click adventure games I liked didn't need the speed but took advantage of VGA 256 color quite nicely. Monkey Island 2 was one of my favorites to play on it. Also I remember playing Tank Wars on it a lot and that was one game that never ran right on my 486 when I got it. I'm sure there are ways to slow down the 486 but I didn't know about them back then. Tank Wars gets really weird on a 486 like the interface gets messed up and you can't tell what weapon you select.
Yeah, I'm really surprised how well Day of the Tentacle runs on a 286. I guess it's a well optimized game.
All of the 286 PS/2s were 10 MHz. But the original Model 50 had wait states so in actual performance it was slower than the Model 50Z (Z for Zero wait states) even though both ran at the same CPU clock speed.
@@vwestlife I wonder if these wait states would cause any of the benchmark programs of the time to say it was 7MHz or if I'm just not remembering correctly. Either is possible knowing me. But I swear something on that PC back in the day reported 7Mhz and that's what I always thought it was because of that. I think it was a model 30 but it might have been a model 50. They both look so similar.
The 286 had it a lot better on NEC PC-9801. Japanese game devs generally targeted the PC-9801VM (1985, NEC V30 only, GRCG chipset) and PC-9801VX (1986, switchable V30 and 286, GRCG+EGC chipset) as minimum spec machines for a very long time, so there's plenty of games that run nicely on a 286, and even V30. The only 386+ games out there are mid 90s shmups that needed the new MOVZX and other instructions for optimization purposes, western game ports that relied on 32-bit DOS extenders, and the handful of 256 color games that exist.
Good ole OS/2.
My father worked at IBM during those days, and I remember them still pushing OS/2 in their work from home stations as late as 1995/1996. My father got a computer in 1995, and he set it up to dual boot so we could select between OS/2 Warp 3 (which mostly ran IBM applications like X Server and Talk Daemon) and Windows 3.1 / 95 (which ran everything else.) Side note: he actually created a third partition for Unix (just in case) and a fourth for memory swap space, because in his own words, the 1.2 gigabyte hard drive was enormous and would never run out of space.
I was 5 years old when we had this computer. The things I remember about OS/2 were that a) it didn't crash nearly as much as Windows even if the application crashed, b) it had Mahjong, c) You could actually run some Windows applications in it natively because it had some level of cross compatibility, and d) it either had some level of support for Linux style virtual workspaces, or my dad had installed an add-on which gave it that ability.
For the longest time, we actually had the installation disks for Warp 4 sitting around in their box. They never got used, and I think it got destroyed in a flood. A darn shame. I'd love to get a legacy PC and find a way to get that to run.
I’m very happy with my Commodore PC-40 286, thank you very much.
First PC I built was an AMD 286 CPU based mobo circa 1989
Prior to 1990, was better to have a 68000 based machine like Mac, Amiga or St, until the 386 came down in price, as well as Sound blasters and video that could match the sound, gfx of the St, Amiga.
Imo, the crossover point was around 92 or so when a PC of similar capabilities with the software support for Amiga, st level sound and gfx became affordable, Maybe even as late as 95.
So the Atari St I bought in 1985 had a great 7-10 year run, unheard of in Pcs from 1990-2010
Amazingly enough, Wolfenstein 3D runs ok~ish on this type of machine. That's how I played it way back when, anyway, although I was eyeing my friends' 386s with drooling envy.
18:55 my schools computer trying to open two chrome tabs at once
You think that's old school? In 1991 I was gaming on a Sinclair Spectrum. Dizzy, Saboteur, Manic Miner, Renegade, I still look back on some of those games with nostalgia. :)
Ah the memories ... although, I have to say:
"Would I recommend finding a 286 like this? Probably not."
That comment cracks me up. I just can't imagine any vintage collector in the market for a working 286 who doesn't already know what they're getting into.
There were a lot of games for 286. Saga Outrun was great for it.
However your 286 is quite advanced for having PS2 and IDE.
Most had MFM/RLL drives. standard AT keyboard, and mice needed serial.
And most didn’t have 3.5inch floppies. But 5.25.
Most didn’t take SIMs but raw RAM chips. VGA was standard however.
My first PC was 286, after having an apple II for 9 years previously, it was a huge jump.
I always wanted a sound card, but couldn’t afford then.
Wish I still had the machine.
How can we be sure that photo wasn't of you in the 90's. I'm honestly not sure I want to know lol.
LMAO 🤣🤣🤣
For the DOS gamer, a 286 is necessary for 1st quarter DOS gaming (those that may run too fast on a 386 even with turbo button). 386 is good for 2nd and 3rd quarter gaming. Pentium 120MHz through Pentium 2 is best for 4th quarter DOS games (3D ones). I used to play Spellbound (super solvers) megaman, AFT, SimCity, Hoyles, Quest for Glory (EGA), and a bunch of other games including Windows 3.0 (for corel draw) and a whole slew of other software. 286 has a niche use for sure. really miss those days.
My first portable/laptop computer was a Toshiba T1200XE, 12Mhz 80286 computer featuring a CGA monochrome LCD display. As I'd gotten it to do text via Professional Write and File, it was adequate. PC games of the time (1990?) either ran in monochrome or didn't load. If I had waited until the next year, 80386 processors and VGA color graphics displays would have been available. It was put aside for a clone 80386SX, then DX clone computer, which would run Windows 3.x. (The Toshiba laptop could run GeoWorks Ensemble 1.0/1.2, as would the photo studio's IBM XT, which I upgraded from 512K mono to 640K color to run the likes of XTree and, I think, a dBase program.) Set aside for years, it finally "went to college" with a family friend. So, I went from IBM XT to low end 80286 to 80386 and so on in a few years in the 1990's.
"(Or if you're weird enough to try OS/2.)" Hey!! A DEVOUT OS/2 guy right here!
ONLY had IBM marketed it as they SHOULD have!
Love my Tandy 1000 TL. 286 XT with Tandy graphics and sound.
17:11 hahahaha the good old German TÜV Sign :)
I got a similar 20" LCD as a student. I figured out they had a 3 year warranty and bought a partially defective one second hand. It still had factory warranty so they replaced it. As a broke student I then had the baddest biggest LCD screen of them all for 100 bucks! :-)
I disagree that 286 era games is too narrow to fully appreciate that computer. There are tons of games released between 1987-1991 that would be ideal. They are not so well known because PC market share was still pretty low, but there were many high quality titles (I know because I played them on my friends 12Mhz computer in the early 90's). Most 286's also had turbo buttons for compatibility with the older games. I will definitely agree that when 1993 rolled around the 286 was really showing its age and it was probably time to buy a bargain 386 33DX at that point.
As someone who already has a nice 386 retro computer I'd love to get my hands on a 286. Never had one, always lusted after them.
I finally got one.
I Love 286 Computers , Ah , to use Ram Doubler and Calmira 95 and Possibly Calmira XP , adding cards , Swapping Proc's Nice Box Man :) QC
I remember using a 286 in Jr. High. We had a hand-held B&W scanner with it. Use to take about the same time to process the scanner image too.