Look At This Weird Industrial Computer!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.ย. 2024
- Thanks PCBWay.com - I found a totally normal 90's computer. It's very normal, and not strange at all.
══════════════════════════
💾 For more vintage Apple stuff, please subscribe: www.youtube.co...
💾 Support these retro computing shenanigans on Patreon! / actionretro
══════════════════════════
Check out my Amazon page with links to my tools, adapters, soldering equipment, camera gear and more: www.amazon.com...
══════════════════════════
💬 Come talk about old computers on the BitBang Social Mastodon! bitbang.social
══════════════════════════
#Pentium #Normal #DOScember
![🎤 ไปกันต่อออ! จับฉลากร้องเพลง x P’ #XXSIVK [EP.2] (1/2) เพลงของใครจึ้งสุดน้าา 💓🎤 #MXFRUIT](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/mLI_K0sAS4o/mqdefault.jpg)
Former CNC maintenance mechanic here. Mostly worked on Fanuc and Haas controls, but some Allen Bradley stuff as well. Machines can be extremely finicky about the generation, size, and type of media you use with them. Standard procedure for any compact flash or USB was to format them first on the machine you intend to use it with. Anything over 4gb was a big no-no, even though the hardware and file system should support it, it just wouldn't. Even if it was SMALL enough, sometimes it wasn't OLD enough, as newer CF cards would often have a different "generation" or "Version" or whatever.
It was getting increasingly hard to find flash cards that were small enough and old enough to work with some of our machines. It surprises me not at all that no combination of flash/adapter works for you. Rockwell Automation (nee Allen Bradley) has a great knowledge base online, but you do have to register and some of which is not free. Surprisingly enough, a number of NC's run on modified x86 hardware and some even run on Windows, such as Mazak. I found that anything running on Windows worked as well as you might expect, especially compared to purpose-built embedded hardware like FANUC. Even if it is x86 hardware, you can't know what the NC builder changed firmware-wise, or has custom built onto the board.
What i though will be :)
didn't Rockwell also make the Turbo Encabulator?
@@loganmacgyver2625 Yes they did - the hydrocoptic marzelvanes effectively prevented side fumbling. However it's now been superseded by the Hyper Encabulator.
a few years ago, the company i worked for had a mass production CNC lathe line, These Muratec 120 (i think was the model) lathes had an auto gauge for measuring a cone angle after cutting. This was controlled by a panel mounted windows xp PC similar to the one in this video! Just a bit newer. It had a resistive touch screen and a few hard controls for power, zero'ing, e-stop, etc.
Got the feeling this is just for running FactoryView on, as it's just a generic panel without any specialized keys (unlike any of the CNC controller). Nowadays this kind of machine would be much smaller and with touch screen, but this is some old stuff.
Looks like an HMI (Human Machine Interface). I've not worked on any that old, but I used to do PLC and industrial process control and it's cool to see some of this older equipment.
I've also only used more modern variants. Much smaller and sleek but probably work just the same.
Yes, it is. It is an Allen-Bradley HMI PC.
Definitely looks bucket sized. Gonna guess this was mounted in an MCC to operate the PLC.
I’ve worked on much older ones on automotive production systems from the mid 80s to late 90s. Mostly they were used to control the PLC on production lines with robots etc.
I’ve also used very old ones on old CNC milling machines.
The variety of machines controlled with a IBM compatible PC architecture is endless. I’ve never seen an Apple based machine for whatever reasons
As someone working for a System Manufactering also making Industrial Computers: You would not believe the amount of hacks and trickery we get up to. From needing to repin a Backlight connector to fit a different manufactures standard over cascading adapters to cutting and resoldering power cables
9:14 The DC-DC converter and the big gap in the ground plane of the PCB (visible as a lighter green line) mean it’s not an ordinary serial card, but one that’s galvanically isolated. The chips bridging the gap are optocouplers. The chip (or chips) directly connected to the pins of the connector are the serial transceiver(s) or line driver(s). Those are what determine whether it’s RS-232, RS-422, and/or RS-485 serial. (They come in varying levels of integration.)
This is all super fresh in my mind because I just recently designed and built a device with a galvanically isolated RS-485 interface. Just delivered it to the customer last week and ran the cabling to the top of the cryogenic vessel it’ll sit atop. :)
> Just delivered it to the customer last week and ran the cabling to the top of the cryogenic vessel it’ll sit atop. :)
Oh, so it is for standard applications?
;-)
its a profibus card. if you look closely you can see the profibus controller (aspc2)
All three are possible options.
AllenBradley do make extensive use of the DH-485 protocol however.
Profibus is electrically RS-485.
I thought that's what it might be; some kind of RS-485 or RS-232 comm-trunk (field-level-network or "FLN"). The machine might've been the management point for a network of secondary controllers. That, or it might've been part of a facility-wide FLN used to coordinate the actions of a host of controllers just like it from a central controller.
@@allangibson8494 It’s kinda neat how many different control systems use an RS-485 physical layer. Profibus, DMX, and studio digital audio, for example.
there was an attempt to "Upgrade" the machine over it's life. the original fan probably died and was replaced, along with the hard drive. obviously the filter was just thrown out at some point. pretty neat construction though. I love the fact that the backlight was accessible.
I had the pleasure of working on an industrial plasma cutter computer from 1991. It had just been shipped back from their official repair company in Georgia, but apparently the shipping company dropped the system which bent the back of the case in, caused all the card slots to break, every expansion board in it completely shorting out the ISA bus, and the power supply fried. ☹️
Well, I managed to bend the casing back, I swapped the expansion cards over to other slots that weren't damaged, and of course I replaced the PSU. Then the system managed to POST but it wouldn't boot up their custom operating system.
Not sure how else to proceed from there, we contacted the company it belonged to and informed them it runs again, but I had to go to their job site to finish troubleshooting it to get it booting again.
And so I did, and it kept booting to like an immediate Kernel Panic error. I found myself looking at the rather ancient BIOS settings, not sure how it was all originally set. Then the company informed me they had another identical system up and running if I needed to check it's configuration. Awesome!
So that's exactly what I did, and I found a major difference between the two machines. The one they had there already running had a 320MB hard drive, manually configured with the ancient CHS (Cylinders, Heads, Sectors) values.
The system I was troubleshooting had a 4GB hard drive though. But they're supposed to be identical systems right? That's what the company told me anyways. So what's with the different hard drives here? 🤔
Well, I took a wild guess that the official repair company in Georgia could no longer find a suitable working 320MB drive and just used the next best thing they could find, and installed the manufacturer's original disk image onto that instead.
So taking that wild guess, I copied the CHS values directly from the working 320MB system over to the one I was troubleshooting with the 4GB system.
Success! It booted up just fine into their ancient CAD/plasma cutter software!
Long story short, they apparently used a much larger drive than the original, I assume because they simply couldn't find any ancient 320MB drives working anymore.
But hey, whatever works right?
Good old method from the 1980s! If your ancient BIOS didn't have a "custom" hard drive type you just picked the nearest one to the correct capacity of your new-fangled IDE drive and formatted it like that. And you'd better remember the type you used instead because that hard drive wouldn't boot with any other settings. I read up all that stuff when I started messing with obsolete PCs in the second half of the 90s, our neighbour gave me a huge pile of DOS magazines from the late 80s through early 90s that had a wealth of information, including a giant table of CHS values for pretty much all known MFM/RLL hard drives known at that time.
I put that knowledge to work when asked to get a late-80s CNC mill back up and running in 2006. The computer was an oddball Mitsubishi 286 and its main fault was a flat CMOS battery. Unfortunately the setup wasn't built into the ROM but was supplied on a long-lost floppy disk. The computer itself wasn't too valuable but the software on the drive was. Based on the cables and age of the machine I guessed MFM and connected the drive to the controller in two of my 286s, no dice. Then I tried the drive and controller in my machine, nothing, would hang before I could even enter setup. I spent three days scouring the internet trying to find a setup and finally succeeded. Downloaded it from the internet, probably on my iBook, probably copied it onto a 3.5" floppy somehow, put that into a Pentium running Windows 98, created a bootable 5 1/4" floppy with the setup on it and used that on the Mitsubishi. Now all I had to do was try each and every hard disk type and reboot after every try to see if the machine would recognise the HDD. Fortunately it only took two attempts.
That left me with the task of extracting the DOS software from the ancient drive and moving it onto something slightly more modern. Copying straight onto an IDE drive in the original machine was out of question because MFM/RLL and IDE can't co-exist in one machine to my knowledge, they're too similar. So I grabbed an ISA SCSI card and SCSI hard drive and xcopied the old drive's contents to my SCSI disk. Then I moved the SCSI disk to a Pentium 90 with a fresh DOS 6.22 install, copied the folder for the CNC to the new drive and that was it!
Funny to think that Pentium is now older than the 286 was when I did that, if it still exists! It was probably close to 10 years old back then and that was 16 years ago. The 286 had a 1987 date on the board, so probably somewhere between that and 1989 or 1990.
I recently replaced the hard disk in an HP optical spectrum analyzer. I was able to use whatever drive I felt like using because I used a forensic disk interface system which allowed me to clone the original drive onto an SSD, bit for bit. The system didn't know the difference.
@@moconnell663 Okay, cool cool. But how truly compatible is that? Does it support both MFM and RLL formats? Does it support manual CHS configuration, or does it strictly rely on the BIOS to autodetect the drive?
In my experience, those sort of adapter mechanisms are only compatible within a particular range of drive technologies. And I've never once seen such an adapter work with legacy MFM drives which need manual configuration.
The thing is, even with an exact bit for bit clone, legacy systems still need manual configuration to know how to actually align the data into a coherent data stream.
Does your 'forensic storage' device setup support manual CHS configuration? Cuz if not it probably won't do well with such ancient proprietary systems.
@@southernflatland I haven't worked with anything from the MFM era, so I have no insight to offer on that. All i know is that I used a Tableau forensic bridge to mount the drive (and IBM Travelstar 2.5" IDE disk) to a pc which prevented windows from doing anything that might alter the file system, and directly cloning the source drive to a "industrial" compact flash card. I might have had better luck with this method because the OSA already had a SCSI to IDE bridge adapter installed since god knows when. That might have taken up some of the compatibility errors. Apparently HP were the only ones who ever used 2.5" SCSI drives and someone had worked on it before me.
I remember seeing that type of computer doing water jet cutting - You may have to install the OS through the computer as some of the drives for that type of system were using some proprietary encrypted boot not compatible with fat32 (a floppy drive, Disk with DOS, and FDisk maybe your friend to get it to boot). Also I remember the thing running Windows NT
Reason why those things are so expensive is because they're used in automation for large companies. If they have machines that haven't been adapted to newer modern controller systems, they have to rely on finding 1-1 replacements when their machines go down and they don't make them anymore so resellers get away with a high markup.
Tell me about it.
The manual for this unit is available on the Allen-Bradley (Rockwell Automation) website. Looks like it came with Win95/98 ot NT installed as its operating system. KIC card is the Keypad interface card that is overriden if a keyboard is plugged into the PS2 port according to the manual.
While I don't have any experience with this specific model, I have had to work with similar, albeit slightly smaller, models that were used to control an Hegla crane. This was not all that long ago, so it's a bit of a surprise to see their design language was so consistent for so long.
Given the age of that computer, it may have the LBA limit where you cannot surpass 4g in drive size. You’d have to load up the compatibility program by the vendor to override. But if you have an old CF card, format a 2g volume.
There was a limit before that at 540mb but that was pre-486 era so doubt that is at play here but similar fix.
I think the limit on these was even lower than 4g. I think there were bios bugs that prevented it addressing anything bigger than 400 megs.
Those sorts of limits are _fun_ I've found
The kic card came in all of the ab computers of that vintage. That serial card is probably for rs-485 or rs-422. Its a base model. There's a couple of different comm cards you could get for it (controlnet or data highway plus/remote io)
Here’s the documentation for the KIC utility in the strange case that someone wants to read it lol: literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literature/documents/in/6180-in010_-en-p.pdf
I find that those straight CF to IDE thingies tend to not work really well, because they rely entirely on the CF card being 100% IDE spec which they very often are not. the SD to IDE adapters work much better because there's a chip in that that translates the communication, and they really don't cost all that much.
It's a brave man who shows his thermal pasting technique on camera
Only a fool is worried about other peoples opinions beyond considering them when warranted
At first glance I noticed the name Rittal on the front. Its a Swedish manufacturer of industrial enclosures and racks. So to me it looks like it was ment for rackmount and that perhaps the entire case was a standard product from Rittal back in the day. The Rittal company is still around and I pass by their facilities on a regular basis.
Merry Christmas from Sweden.
No wonder about the HDD. Deskstars were notoriously known for their "click of death"
Deathstars. It's been 20 years and I still remember the click click click screech.
when he pulled the drive out and I saw IBM my first thought was no wonder it won't boot anymore, then he stated it was a 40GB model and i knew what was coming when he was plugging it in. They were called deathstars for a reason, I bought 3 at once back when they first launched the 20, 30 and 40 Gb models, 2 failed in under a month and the third died 6 months in.
I had one of these too in the early 2000's (and it died too). This PC was probably still used until the early 2000's until they decided to fully replace it (after the HDD had crashed?)
I have only worked rides with newer AB PC based control interfaces. The newer gen ones are basically Tablet PC's . the Amusement Park I worked for had ones running XP Embedded. The one linked to the log flume was basically just a normal weather proof PC running monetering software for the block sensors.
That's 100% an HMI. We still have some of these where I work. I had to even revive a 486 to get our PLCs to function again
i wasn't going to comment, but the company logos seemed familiar and piqued my curiosity.
02:56
Rittal is still in business, perhaps they can help identify this.
per wikipedia
Rittal is a German company headquartered in Herborn. The company manufactures electrical enclosures for use in industrial settings. Founded in 1961, Rittal is a subsidiary of the Friedhelm Loh Group.
Allen-Bradley is also still in business;
Allen-Bradley is the brand-name of a line of factory automation equipment, today owned by Rockwell Automation. The company manufactures programmable logic controllers (PLC), human-machine interfaces, sensors, safety components and systems, software, drives and drive systems, contactors, motor control centers, and systems of such products.
very interesting gizmo, merry christmas.
I sit in front of a 72" by 36" by 72" Rittal cabinet at work
It could be the size limit thing at play here. P1 and older system tend not to work with drives larger than 7.8 gigs without major trickery to the partition table.
Basically: Configure it as a much smaller drive by manual config in the bios, install a loader that overrides the internal bios routines in charge of hdd access and then install an os on top of that. Took me days to do it to my old p1 but it's now happily running w98 on a 200 gig drive
Disk type 17 was the normal option I seam to remember with something like ezdrive installed.
Rittal makes industrial enclosures and cabinets for electrics and all sorts of stuff, so my guess would be that this thing was some sort of interface for a machine that was contained (partly) within one of those cabinets.
Yes it's very obvious that it's "cabinet pc". Most likely it has resided on PLC cabinet and allowed programmers to more easily do changes to their factory programs.
It was likely an HMI for a CNC mill or tooling center.
@@kurtpena5462 I was about to mention the same, but interface is missing Jog-dial which has been on all CNC machines I've seen in addition to few other g-code related buttons.
CNC router interface controller for running CNC jobs. Used to work with these, probably running Windows 3.1, DOS or Linux. Had one so old at one point that ran a very old version of Linux with Bubble RAM. The interface to CNC was usually Serial RS-232. There was not enough bubble RAM for more than a few lines of CNC gcode that it had to drip feed it.
That wouldn’t have been Linux - which didn’t come along until late in 1991; and was originally written for a 386. It may have been an early UNIX or some other OS running on a minicomputer and drip-feeding to a NC motion controller. I have in my garage a Shizuoka AN-S knee mill that originally came with a 8080-based CNC, with only a punched-paper-tape reader and a hacked-in serial interface for feeding it G-code from an external PC. I believe that the control in that was based on a S-100 based computer system; but I’m not 100% sure (I sold all the electronics to the other guy who was bidding on the machine - turns out he had an AN-S with the same control and needed the electronics for spare parts; and I just wanted the mill itself to do a conversion to a modern control, which is a project still in progress).
@@darkwinter6028 yes would have been UNIX.
@@AmySteve2008 Nope, I was using System V UNIX in 1991 and (1) you would not spend $5000 on an operating system and install it on low performance hardware, (2) UNIX was not used for HMIs, and (3) AB HMIs ran DOS or Windows. I'm commissioning a rather large plant right now and we're using L7 and L8 generation AB PLCs with Rockwell software driven Windows HMIs. Windoze is still a nightmare and to call HMI response sluggish would be disrespectful.... to slugs.
It might have been running a realtime unix-like OS like QNX?
@@dbranconnier1977 AB runs windows.... even today in almost 2023 they are still 100% windows. This box is an HMI or Human-Machine-Interface, and it's just the dashboard the PLC uses to communicate with people. The actual real-time control is done by another computer called a PLC or Programmable Logic Controller.
Industrial machines are usually well designed and fairly easy to service. Though, from my days buying used industrial stuff, nothing that comes out of these places is even moderately clean.
fun fact! that old server fan can be used to make an air purifier/fume hood using a box, a 12v wall wart, and either paper towel or cheap air purifier filters! extremely useful for containing dust and paint overspray when restoring old computers like these. i have two of them myself that i use for preventing and treating asthma attacks, along with preventing dust and fumes from being spread while soldering & cleaning out my pc
I appreciate that you dig into equipment sight unseen so we can enjoy figuring it out alongside you.
id say that unit is more a 2004 vintage, its in a ATX format case and is using a ATX powersupply, remember that industrial computers are normally a decade or so behind in technology as they normally just control simple PLC's, also thanks for having Skit Sean today, missed him,
It would also make sense for the 40 gig hdd. It seemed rather large to me for a 90s system.
It's like when we first got the HMCs (hardware management console) in for our pSeries Regatta machines, and I saw they had 40G drives (late 2001). I wondered why they had such large drives for a hardware controller, until I saw it would contain firmware updates as well as configuration backups.
16:46 The BIOS is from 1992
@@derek20la Still not unsurprising to see new old stock built into industrial machines that is years of not decades older than the built date of the machine.
Also looked like the fan had four wires for power, tacho and PWM, which I heavily doubt is P1-era old
Im pretty sure that's HMI for industrial equipment and made to fit to a door of a control cabinet. We have something similar at my workplace but with modern internals and toutch screen to have commandline access to the PLC's
Allen Bradley sounds like the names of Scrooge's slient business partners in the 1840s England haha
Alan Bradley was one of Flynn's buddies. He is the programmer of Tron.
Sounds like a knockoff board game
Allen Bradley made the controls for Rockwell Automation's retro encabulator.
Good old IBM Deathstar.
The Dells at the place I worked at shipped with them. If any of them didn't die or get replaced, it was a miracle.
@@timmooney7528 IBM Deathstars inside of **Dell** machines? You were cursed twice over there, weren't you.
@@SenileOtaku Optiplex GX110
I'm almost certain reprogramming that CF card would get it working properly, as I found out and made a video showing recently: th-cam.com/video/Oybjii2qnxM/w-d-xo.html
That particular SanDisk one that you're using most likely has an SM2236 controller, so will work with the tools described.
13:55 quite possible the first time we've seen an uncensored thermal compound application.
Seriously. I mean applying it in an "X" shape? Everyone knows it should be applied in the shape of a Hiragana "Ki"...
We need a part two for this. What a strange machine, I dig it.
Seen a few of these in Mills and one plant that literally made rust (extracted it from steel cleaning acids) for floppy disks and tape and what not... was the 90s and that stuff got into everything. Add humidity the computers would literally rot from the inside out once a filter failed. Worked on a mill here not long ago that was running off a P100 tower with 6 com ports shoved in it that talked with all the sensors.
“And today, we’re going to dive DEEP into just what the heck is wrong with me.“ …I was expecting a much longer video! 🤣
This looks a lot like the control for one of the Large Paper Cutters we use at our print factory.
Allen-Bradley is the brand-name of a line of factory automation equipment. They are owned by Rockwell Automation. They manufacture a lot of Automation Equipment. That is a HMI Human Machine Interface Terminal system. It's a panel mounted system. That's why you don't see a back casing like other consumer computers. It's intended to sit in some kind of panel rack, kind of like a server rack but a little different. A Human Machine Interface, or HMI for short, is a device that allows a human to give directions and receive feedback from the PLC that is controlling the manufacturing process. In other words, it is a means to input commands into your machines and earn feedback about their status. Also the HMI software those run is Allen Bradley FactoryTalk View Suite. So to clear things up of what that is, and what Allen-Bradley is. That's basically what it is in a nutshell.
I just found your channel. INSTANTLY subbed. There are not enough people like you exploring, remembering, and restoring older interesting tech. Keep up the great work! It's very much appreciated.
@ActionRetro That crunch could the M and Z membranes on the keyboard moving. They are on correct place at the start of the video but shifted a bit after reassembly.
Control unit for an old CNC milling machine.
As far as the HDD, did you plug the parameters into the BIOS under type 47 for the CF Card?
I found a bunch of busted computers in the scrap metal bin where I work. I took them
to my shop and got out any ssds I found. Got 2 samsung 850 evo 250 GB a WD 500 GB
green drive and an Adata 250 GB ssd I had never heard of before I gave that plus
the ram and cpus to a friend of mine. The drives were all fine looked brand new. The
ram sticks were 4 GB PC3L and the cpus were I5s.
This model IBM Deskstar (along with the 60GB version) was known as the notorious Deathstar drives, that would die with the click of death well before they should have (within 1-2 years).
I had a pair of 15 gig Deathstar drives. One just up and died. The other one would pass every test I threw at it 100%. I could install Windows and it would go through that without any problems. But try to *boot and use* Windows from it, it would crash in 2 to 5 minutes unless I had a fan blowing air over the drive.
How it could pass an intense, hard driving test suite perfectly yet die merely booting up Windows, which should not have stressed it as much as the testing - which is designed to bring out all kinds of fails, including ones caused by heat, I have no idea.
I gave the drive away, making sure to inform the new owner about its issues, and to not put any irreplaceable data on it.
So... Whoever decided that it's a good idea to put that in a industrial machine and, judging from its size, use it to do data collection, is a real genius? /s
Used to work in a chemical plant that used these. It was often simpler than dealing with Allen-Bradley's "data highway" interface cards and having to find places to put PCs where they weren't in the way or their cables weren't at risk of damage. And yes, you'd mount it inside a industrial controls cabinet. Similar in concept to a server rack, but far more durable and protective. It provided you controls for working with PLC systems but also could talk to your PC network to send reports, alarms, and even allow remote control from other PCs. This way, a manager could babysit idle systems without getting their hands dirty. Or security guards could monitor safety stats during the night.
It's the control panel for a Turbo-Encabulator.
The case is made from malleable prefamulated amulite.
16:10 looks like it has ATA security turned on, if that is the case it will only recognise harddrives with the same key in the hdd firmware and the superIO chip, and likewise for the hdd itself, there are tools to help with that but nearly all AV companies like to pad their numbers of hits by deleting such tools when found, so make sure to prepare it on a computer without any AV at all, including microsoft defender that normally cannot be turned off.
Oh, that's an interesting point!
That machine looks to be mounted in a cabinet door made by Rittal (a nice German company). There may be a clue somewhere as to what the original enclosure looked like. What a find for 50 bucks! (You are probably going to want to boot to one or another version of MS-DOS or PC-DOS, or, maybe, Windows NT 3.51 or 4.0, or Windows 2000 Pro, depending on what model this machine is.)
That "oddball" card may be a Sutherland-Schultz communication card for supporting Data Highway + (DH+) communication (an A-B proprietary comms standard).
Reminds me of the computer in the laundry room at my last job. We added a outside filter over the fan - in addition to the filter it came with-to catch all the air crud. Made me wonder what the people who worked there were breathing in.
I love this massive monster! I really hope you're able to get it up and running! Then maybe we'll be able to answer the age old question "Can it run DOOM ?".
It's a Pentium 100 with maybe at least 16 megs of RAM, so it should run Quake, too. Will it work with that custom video board? That's another question...
Of course,but the problem I think is the motherboard can accept diferent GPUs,for me the best solution is use another Socket 7 motherboard or upgrade to a newer platform like s370 or Super 7
i used to work in a factory that had these, one controlled a round table with bars straight up, u load parts on it like large rings to get coated. the guy took 30 minutes to program it by hand, entering decimals, for the turn table, robotic arms that moved up and down, for some black coating that req heat to dry quickly.
Ah, you got bitten by the famous IBM "deathstar" hard disk. Those things were notorious for that in the day, so I'm surprised to see one in an industrial machine.
Never seen this exact model of computer, but at my last job (I am an engineer) the shop had dozens of lathes and endmills, a lot of older ones that would have similar interface computers like this. they were all in ones just like this with a built in screen, keypad (some membrane ones like that and others with real keys) and many would have there own inputs for controlling the machine itself. They all had a lot of similar features to this one (such as the shock absorbers on the HDD).
Old as hell but they still work great and were still used daily for making parts in the shop. They were still the main work-horses of the shop for most parts XD
Used to use interfaces like this every day. It's just a computer. But oriented toward interfacing with PLC. All the control logic, I/O hardware, and A/D stuff is in the cabinets scattered about the industrial plant. This computer would've just had the pictographic software a to monitor processes and control things manually. The system can work without this thing as in the case where it conks out and gets swapped out. With the right software, you could make a killer, industrial-strength home automation interface. Our place used Wonderware for the interfaces.
the fact it has an ABC built in keyboard tells you a lot about the kind person it was made for.
It's an industrial HMI, you rarely type anything on it, so what else would it have? (Basically those letters are more of just for shortcut keys.)
How big were the hard drives that you were trying to use? I have a motherboard that won't accept anything larger than 16 GB. It's possible someone threw that 41 GB drive in there trying to fix it and ran into the same issue you did. Maybe try an 8 GB SD card?
I was going to say the same thing, I bet that deskstar is jumpered for 2 or 8GB operation as the PIIX 3 southbridge on a 430HX can't handle anything bigger.
He said fat formatted so i assume he meant fat 16, which would be 4 gb max
@@bunter6 Oooo good point about the jumper. I had forgotten that used to be a thing. That and I found that the SD to IDE converters tend to be more compatible than the compact flash to IDE converters. You'd think mapping the IDE pins directly to an IDE device would be the most compatible but I've had all kinds of incompatibilities. Now I almost exclusively use SD to IDE converters.
@@JaredConnell formatting is one thing but there are some BIOSs from this era they won't recognize drives larger than a certain capacity. I have a board with an SIS chipset that exhibits the same behavior of not recognizing the drive on boot. It only works when I use a smaller SD card.
@@megan_alnico yeah I have a Compaq Deskpro 590 which uses Compaq's own triflex chipset and it refuses to work with my SD to IDE boards. I use an Adaptec 1200a PCI card for it instead.
Removable CFL backlight? That's begging for an easy LED backlight retrofit! If that's not cursed enough, you could even use RGBW LED strips to make the screen go funky colours as well as normal white...
holy crap that's genius
@@ActionRetro YES; DO IT!
My brother (Canadian Computer Collector) told me about your channel and ngl I'm loving it!
What's it like having a celebrity brother?!
Entertaining. I always end up finishing a night with some retro tech after exploring less... wholesome corners of the Internet. It helps keep the nightmares at bay. Last night I watched all the "Max Headroom Incident" (broadcast TV hijack) videos I could find.
We had a similar one back in the day - not same model but same idea, as the main control panel on a Lawrence Mega tortilla press line. The operator had touch screen access to the main functions of the line on this screen.
Ours connected to a bunch of Allen-Bradly ladder logic PLC hardware actually controlling the discrete sections. Every now and then, I had to show the maintenance guys how to correct for a divide by zero error... that was a really nasty one, as it would halt the line completely and you couldn't get into the menus until that fault was corrected. Our fix was to connect with a laptop via serial cable and update one of the registers to a positive int - the instant you applied that change, the control panel came right back to life...
what I find when I worked around machines of that vintage still in use at a factory, the hard drive would die, a machine tech would grab whatever drive they could find, make a 2gb partition, copy whatever the 1 program is, and boot it from the floppy, problem solved
Nice piece of industrial hardware, definitely built for the environment it was expected to operate in.
Most of these pcs (some still in use where I work) are attached to and come with multi-million dollar tools used for or in production. Tool manufacturers would integrate the PCs into the tool so you had to buy a whole new tool to upgrade the PC. That's why a lot of manufacturing plants still have systems from the 90s or early 2000s in use
Ah, an old IBM Deskstar. Certain models of those drives were so prone to failure back in the day that people started calling them Deathstars.
I work for a company that refurbish industrial electronics. This is indeed a Human machine interface for a CNC machine of some sort. The fan has likely been replaced at some point hence the hack connections. HDD has obviously been replaced.
That interface card with the 9pin D-sub connector will be a RS-485 interface for interfacing with the CNC machine's controller computer.
I have no idea what that KIC card is. Would be interested to find out.
KIC card: Keyboard interface card.
The front panel on these things often include keys that are not standard on an ordinary PC keyboard and would therefore not be supported on an ordinary PC PS/2 keyboard controller.
That card alone goes for about $100 on ebay.
Did you find any dates anywhere inside the machine? The 100MHz Pentium could be a red herring when determining its age. Industrial and embedded systems often use older CPUs because they're adequate to the job and time tested. Even today there are industrial boards (PC/104 form factor) that use modern spins on 486s! So the HDD might be a better indication of from when the system dates than the CPU. I had some IBM Deskstars about that size in the early 2000s, for example. Terribly unreliable things! :) Also, I don't know what system you used to create the partitions on the CF cards and other HDDs you tried, but partition offsets are different now than they used to be. If this machine were on my desk, my next step would be to get a working floppy in there, boot to DOS, and re-fdisk the smallest HDD you have, starting with 2GB (max FAT16) partitions. If that doesn't work, I'd assume there was a problem with the hardware. How do the capacitors look? Best of luck getting this up and running! :)
Amateur, 4GB is the max FAT16 partition, at least in the Windows NT and newer world. But that comes with a compromise that it's no longer MS-DOS compatible.
Oddly enough I learned these things while modifying my PSP. I found the absolute fastest memory cards for PSP at the time were 4GB, formatted to FAT16, and using the FAT driver file from firmware version 3.71.
Yes it's doable. Try it. Get a 4GB memory card, pop it into Windows, and it should offer you the option to format as FAT16, though it'll come with a warning that it's not MS-DOS compatible. The catch is that the cluster size is 64KB, while MS-DOS only supported a max of 32KB cluster size.
Honestly, with the amount of experience I have with the FAT file system, I could probably manage to convince that thing to run Windows 2000 or even perhaps a patched MicroXP.
I was only trying to help, and I was referring to specifically to DOS, which does have a 2GB limit. There's no need for name calling.
Wow I hadn't thought about AB in years. Late eighties I used an AB MC68000 based machine that ran microware OS-9 (OS-K)
Looks like it's from an industrial electric cabinet (Rittal lock). The amount of dust is not unusual in a production environment, we're talking about complex production machines that run 24/7 for at least 5 days a week over many, many years. In the company where I work we don't even shut down the machines for weekends or holidays but only clean them - power stays on in order to avoid electronic quirks as soon as you would cold start the production machines again.
But the use of a mechanical hard drive is unusual. Normally you would opt for flash memory due to its higher tolerance against heat, shocks and mechanical wear. This was also standard in the 1990s, long before Pentium CPUs were released.
Get an IDE DOM (disk on module) of 512MB formatted from MS-DOS 6.22 and it will probably work fine. Also you may need to use XT-IDE in a card or EPROM on a NIC to bypass any drive / BIOS limitations, although its unlikely that a Pentium of that era had any problems booting a large drive, b ut you never know. We need parts 2 and 3 for this, with full restoration , thorough cleaning inside-out, retrobright and new touch screen cover! Many print shops have thick transparrent films they can print with all the labels over the keyboard membrane and replace the damaged one.
I don't think there's anything to retrobright here, it's pretty much all metal, probably powercoated.
I don't want to sound like "one of those guys" but you might want to use the "fdisk -l"command under Linux to see if the drive even works or what format the drive has.
Edit: When drives first started getting bigger than 2gig, IBM came out with a line of hard drives that could be configured to force the drive electronics to "pretend" it was only 2 gig. Basically if it was a 20 gig drive the 2 gig jumper would waste 18 gigs of drive space. This was for backwards compatibility on industrial machines like this that the custom software was still in 16 bit mode. It was cheaper to waste the drive space than it was to re-tool the entire shop to use 32 bit software.
Only Action Retro would try a 240GB SSD inside this CNC controller
Nah send one to his senior druger
Max your soldering iron should be set to for general purpose soldering with standard 60/40 solder is 700 F/370 C.
Don't need maintenence if you don't have a filter..
furry ☹
I don't know anything about these machines but I do love 90s industrial.
"What makes it tick?"
That thing never ticked. It only ever very seriously tocked.
Merry Christmas and thanks for all the brilliant entertainment.
I bet it went to a old CNC machine or something of that sorts.
LOL @ “percussive” maintenance. I use that method religiously in many situations
This looks a lot like the computers I’ve used on equipment for shearing and braking sheet metal. For sure this is intended for industrial use.
Since it came out of some industrial application I think it is reasonable that the previous owner destroyed the hard drive along with its data before offloading it onto someone else. You can tell there was a locking screw on the front panel to conceal the power, IR I/O, plus the two PS/2 ports. If the power button wasn't meant to be easily accessed chances are neither were the front mounted ports.
Nah, that drive failed from old age. DeskStars have a pretty bad track record, like Medialyst drives. Even though I've messed with dozens and dozens of properly ancient hard drives, I haven't seen too many failed ones and almost all of those were from those two series (and 2.5" SCSI GoDrives used in the early Apple Powerbooks). He used physical violence to even make it spin up again, which suggests a stuck mechanism to me, possibly some kind of rubber that has melted inside the drive.
already saw it in the comments, but was about to say, that his is a machine attatched to cnc machines, seen plenty of those layout etc and similar devices used for cnc
IBM Deathstars of that era were known to love dieing for simply no reason. Sometimes a USB interface and cheapo external PSU may not have enough omph to fully spin up a drive, sometimes you'll need to hook it up to a proper PC to get a read.
IBM ‘DeathStar’ click of death. I lost all my college work to one of those back in the day. No backup’s because we were young and stupid. That was very bad, also lost all my early music production and most of my early digital photos.
You ought to mount it in your wall and install some type of voice recognition software on it for a full HAL experience 😂
0:59 total missed opportunity to erase the board with the santa hat on your head!
On some old PCs the floppy drive has to be working in order for the system to boot
The white metal sheet looks like the door of a rack cabinet that was modified for holding this PC, you should be able to remove it and add some feet to have a more desktop-y looking AIO. The motherboard seems like some really nice quality stuff.
It's a modified enclosure, Rittal is the company.
You will get more out of it with a PLC5 from AB, or an SLC 100 or 500.
We had the portable version that had an amber CRT.
And JIC, AB stands for awesome bucks.
You would run a graphic interface networked to a PLC rack running a logic program, either ladder or function blocks.
Great in industrial settings.
With a BIOS from 1992, it's going to have a maximum IDE size limit of 528mb
The core of the BIOS is from 1992 but the added modules and support code are later. If the whole BIOS were from 1992 it probably wouldn't be able to boot a Pentium. My Pentium PC has the same "1992" BIOS and works perfectly up to 8 gigabytes. Larger drives still work but the BIOS can't use the extra capacity.
Back when that 41.1gb hard drive came out, hard drives needed shock absorbers. Even such light "percussive maintenance" was more than enough to make them never work again.
That motherboard looks perfect for early windows/late dos era gaming.
Yeah, it pretty much is!
Some 303 aerospace protectant i believe would shine up that plastic interface and remove some of the scuffs.
This looks the same as we had in the factory back in the day on our CNC machines
Nice! Please show us more industrial computers! 😀👍
I love this more than I can say. It's like it's from space.
I think it's common in factory in the past, and in fact some of them is probably still in use nowadays (because why not). That's said, nowadays pretty much everything use touch screen instead, unless when you can't touch it, in which case people just plug in a mouse and use on screen keyboard.
This is what you had to do before reliable microcontrollers were a thing. Ice cream maker? Shove an entire full ATX PC in there. VCR? Horizontal form-factor desktop with 2 TNTs acting as parallel coprocessors.
Neat, an Allen-Bradley HMI. I work on them everyday! Recently, my job is undergoing hardware upgrades.
I'm REALLY looking forward to Part 2!!! I'd love to have some kind of old bit like this, and put something like a NUC in it, have all the audio, video, and other I/O put out to the case panels... have like a 24" gaming monitor inside a bolt-on or hardware mountable industrial frame with it. Yeah, I'm kinda weird into this stuff. But hey, I still was really interested in this. I hope it goes well.
Ah the good old IBM "Deathstar" Deskstar, notorious for their click of death, often within months from new. The 60GXP series is the worst if I recall correctly, and I believe the 120GXP series no longer had this issue.
The boot hang with the flash cards, MB probably has janky support for DMA/UDMA that needs to be disabled.
One of those serial ports is an RS-232 network input, for remotely sending G-Code (the cartesian coordinate system code that comprises the programs that CNC machines run on)
I fkn LOVE that you busted out 80s KMFDM
hell yeah!
That particular hard drive, and even more particularly the 80 GB variant, are known as "DeathStars". They typically didn't survive their warranty period, let alone 25 years. It may have been a "this will work and it's off the shelf" replacement, probably jumpered down to a 2 GB limit. They wouldn't care about the wasted capacity if they just wanted the system working as it always had.
See if one of those drives can be set to report as a 2 GB drive, that might work. That was a problem with some early Pentium boards, just as with the 486 systems of the time.