The ISA GPU is a Video Seven Vega VGA, 256K (max 800x600 16c), also supports EGA, CGA, MDA and Herc on the 9 pin, really belongs in a retro XT more than a 286. Detalis of it on DOSDAYS. Is there much love for 286's, they are kind of inbetween the original retro 8088/8086 and the beginnings of the modern era 386, the 286 could be a faster DOS machine than a 386 of the same MHz, and could run Windows 3.x in standard mode, but I don't think games leveraged the extra RAM as 286 protected mode never really took off
That is probably one of the last 286 machines, 386 machines started becoming available in 1986. We used to get some machines almost as soon as they were released so that we could port our software across and take advantage of new hardware features. I remember having 286s back in 1983.
6:41 That’s interesting. It looks like a PC Chips board. The Connor drive must have been one of the last under their brand name. I have some of the same design labelled as Seagate.
286 working! When I saw what I thought was a ton of tantalum caps I didn't hold much hope for power on...Very pleased to hear that bleep 😅 looking forward to next video on it
Check electrics first on that drive but in my experience the problem is often stiction of the disc (no platter rotation) or heads stuck to the landing zone (depending on design, can also cause no platter rotation). The violent method I used to resort to was to power it up, wait for the platter brake solenoid to click off (if there is one) then twist the drive in the plane of rotation of the discs. Sometimes that is enough to get the platter spindle moving in the bearing and start to move the grease which frees up more as time goes on and the platter speeds up. If the heads are really stuck, harder twisting may work but, if not, and if it's a stepper motor actuator, it's sometimes possible to rotate it a fraction of a turn manually *with the power off* to just move the heads then try a power cycle. Could be worth double bagging it and sticking it in the freezer overnight for a freeze-thaw cycle - never worked for me but did make the odd unreadable (but spinning) disc readable whilst still frozen! The last resort is using a big plastic bag as a "clean room", wear gloves and take the top cover off, manually move things *slightly* reassemble and test ... Whatever you do, don't bounce or hit the drive because if you do free any head you will probably damage it irreparably. Only if the bearing is stuck solid should you ever consider oil - literally a drop or two. It may find it's way into the bearing and soften the grease but it can go all the way past the bearing seals and the vapour can contaminate and wreck the platter surfaces anyway ... definitely a last throw of the dice.
Great to see this PC, had one very similar & sold lots of them. Power supply should be pretty straight forward, please lets get this baby going ! Cheers Baz
13:08 We used to label all our 5.25" floppy drive lock levers S/E/F like the fire selector switches on HK sub-machine guns :) We also used to use 5.25 floppies to open locked doors around the offices by sliding them in the cracks and pushing the snub back - we ruined hundreds like that and annoyed the security guys no end. Distant memories now
That 286 machine is gold, it is in such good condition. XT-IDE is what you should look for to connect a more modern hard disk. I am using an SD card as a hard disk on my 286.
Heya, love to see those old pc my 1st pc was a Philips P2000 with a mini casette recorder I believe it was a 8060 or 8080 prossesor not sure and then at the left site you had 2 slots for modules to put in I only had the slot 1 with the basic controler card I write 1 program for it but can't remember it anymore ( 40 years ago lol ).
I have an old 8086 machine and to get it to boot I have to use the eraser trick on it. The HDD spindle sticks out of the bottom so I put a pencil eraser on it and spin the pencil like I'm trying to light a fire with a stick. Once it gets going it runs. Needs a bit of a push to get going though.
Keep hold of the 5.25" floppy drive if it still works 😄 Seeing the finds you get on the island, is like going back in time to car-boot in the UK 10 years ago or more. there is no chance I would find a 5.25" floppy drive here these days. and I did they would want an arm and a leg for it.
Boot it from diskette. Then work your way through to booting from HD. It‘s an MFM disk. It‘s got its own controller, maybe a driver issue…. IDE probably wasn‘t there these days.
ST-506 .. MFM drive .. remember Gibson’s “Spinrite” & “Spinrite 2” disk utilities? AT power connectors .. black wires go next to each other! (or you let out the magic smoke) …
We were using 286 processors in 1984/5 ... IIRC my first 286 box was 1987, with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk! The 80186 did exist - RM were the only company I know who used them to any extent in their "Nimbus" education boxes (the first motherboard I ever fault found to component level and in those days were even allowed a full circuit diagram set! :-) )
Yeah I'll look at that old power supply on my next video 🙂 I'm sure those old hard drives were called ST-506. A pre-runner to IDE though SCSI may have been around at the same time. I wonder what capacity it may be? 10-20Mb?
@@LearnElectronicsRepair I think ST-506 is the connector-type and MFM is the "protocol", we used them both in the days. But again, this is from memory ;-)
@@LearnElectronicsRepair yes, the mfm /rll controller is a pre interface to IDE ,8, 16 bit SCSI and other. Important is, you must register the eg. Cylinder,heads,sectors from the harddisk (is written in the harddisk) in the controller .Mostly is your controller and harddisk are bound with euch other. No autodetection😭. 5 MB or 20 MB wasn't earlier not rare but very excpensive. Will it not run.. Look Google "mfm_reader_emulator".
@@PaulZwiers I remember MFM from Amiga Floppies. Multi Frequency Modulation I think. Wasn't that some way that you could represent data from 00 to FF without ever having more than two zero bits in sequence which could cause the disk controller to lose sync? Then you could use 'special' bytes with three zero bits in sequence as index to mark the start of a sector. This is all from memory, I haven't googled it.
@@LearnElectronicsRepair MFM can have 3 consecutive zeroes (bit pattern 1-0-1 becomes 01-00-01). GCR encoding is the one where you'll never have more than two consecutive zeroes (four bits being encoded as five), because a zero is always represented as "no (magnetic) transition," meaning no clock pulse.
I found what I suspect is the same motherboard on ebay, the seller (in Ukraine) is asking about £96. Didn't find any sold though other makes sold (working) between £25 and £75.
A 286 machine.... if I remember correctly way back in those days you would have an orange screen or a green monitor screen, also I don't recall an actual operating system back in those days you would run the programs directly from the disk... Or you went into DOS. Man, it hurts to think that far back in time. 🙂 as with both machines... I believe we should insert a fresh bios battery... And when it comes to inserting the correct time and date??? so we might eliminate some of the potential error messages I'm curious... As to how the machine will behave, remember the famous Y2K bug... I can't recall if any of this makes a difference in getting the machine up and running it may not be important at all and just something to overlook... Also, I'm not so sure we should invest too much time other than just general discussion about how things were back in those days... But whatever decision you make of course I will be here... Look at how much is changed and how we have to have interfaces and adapters so we can just get the machine to run and get the keyboard and mouse going.... Do you think in the future..... We will have an AI Headset interface... Too 286 PC interface... 🙂 time marches on.... and in 20 years from now guys like us... Just might want to continue exploring the past of the early PC era age 🙂
My oldest fix was an IBM 8080 with two 5.25" drives and a green screen. It came with a cloth bound DOS manual and all receipts. IIRC it was over 2000GBP and sale was 1982. Boot to one floppy which included a word processor which was used by an author. Issue was just dirty heads, so no deep dive required. This was approaching Y2K, so it had a good run, but customer wisely decided to upgrade 🙂 p.s I kept it for many years but eventually I decided I did not want to become a home for old computors.
A 286 can run VGA. You just have to have the right card and monitor, of course. I've run win 3.1 on a 286. Trust me, you don't want to do that. But it will work. You can literally count the cards when you win at solitaire as they fly around. Yeah that Dallas real time clock is going to be a problem with that old bomber. The battery is inside of it.
My first PC was a 286. ❤ Unfortunately I don't have it anymore. 😢 Yes, please repair that stuff! - Can't be difficult... 🤣 I'm quite sure it's worth something on retro market.
I think a 286 may be too old. People want the Win95 era stuff. A 286 can run Windows 3.1 though. Just very slowly. The 386 was a big step up. A 286 is 16 bit and a 386 is 32 bit. The 286 is halfway back to 8 bit machines. I fooled with 286s but never ran one for myself. We demolished an office and got truckloads of old PCs out of it. Some were 286.
It has some weight, so price for shipping tends to make these a tough sell. Looks like you have a bus mouse card, ega/cga/vga graphics. You might get the hard disk to spin up with a drop of oil, but miniscribe were always junk. Some of the mfm controller cards have an 8085 on them and a eprom bios. Try booting it from floppy. See what speed the 286 is… possibly theres a math co processor.
The ISA GPU is a Video Seven Vega VGA, 256K (max 800x600 16c), also supports EGA, CGA, MDA and Herc on the 9 pin, really belongs in a retro XT more than a 286. Detalis of it on DOSDAYS.
Is there much love for 286's, they are kind of inbetween the original retro 8088/8086 and the beginnings of the modern era 386, the 286 could be a faster DOS machine than a 386 of the same MHz, and could run Windows 3.x in standard mode, but I don't think games leveraged the extra RAM as 286 protected mode never really took off
That is probably one of the last 286 machines, 386 machines started becoming available in 1986. We used to get some machines almost as soon as they were released so that we could port our software across and take advantage of new hardware features. I remember having 286s back in 1983.
6:41 That’s interesting. It looks like a PC Chips board. The Connor drive must have been one of the last under their brand name. I have some of the same design labelled as Seagate.
Dear Richard, Slot A is for AMD processors (early Athlons), Slot 1 is for Pentium 2-3!
Regards Mark
Yeah my head knows that but sometimes my mouth doesn't lol I never found a slot A motherboard yet.
286 working! When I saw what I thought was a ton of tantalum caps I didn't hold much hope for power on...Very pleased to hear that bleep 😅 looking forward to next video on it
Check electrics first on that drive but in my experience the problem is often stiction of the disc (no platter rotation) or heads stuck to the landing zone (depending on design, can also cause no platter rotation). The violent method I used to resort to was to power it up, wait for the platter brake solenoid to click off (if there is one) then twist the drive in the plane of rotation of the discs. Sometimes that is enough to get the platter spindle moving in the bearing and start to move the grease which frees up more as time goes on and the platter speeds up. If the heads are really stuck, harder twisting may work but, if not, and if it's a stepper motor actuator, it's sometimes possible to rotate it a fraction of a turn manually *with the power off* to just move the heads then try a power cycle. Could be worth double bagging it and sticking it in the freezer overnight for a freeze-thaw cycle - never worked for me but did make the odd unreadable (but spinning) disc readable whilst still frozen! The last resort is using a big plastic bag as a "clean room", wear gloves and take the top cover off, manually move things *slightly* reassemble and test ...
Whatever you do, don't bounce or hit the drive because if you do free any head you will probably damage it irreparably.
Only if the bearing is stuck solid should you ever consider oil - literally a drop or two. It may find it's way into the bearing and soften the grease but it can go all the way past the bearing seals and the vapour can contaminate and wreck the platter surfaces anyway ... definitely a last throw of the dice.
It does look like it has a stepper motor (heads I imagine) Thanks for the hints 🙂
Great to see this PC, had one very similar & sold lots of them.
Power supply should be pretty straight forward, please lets get this baby going !
Cheers
Baz
13:08 We used to label all our 5.25" floppy drive lock levers S/E/F like the fire selector switches on HK sub-machine guns :)
We also used to use 5.25 floppies to open locked doors around the offices by sliding them in the cracks and pushing the snub back - we ruined hundreds like that and annoyed the security guys no end.
Distant memories now
That 286 machine is gold, it is in such good condition. XT-IDE is what you should look for to connect a more modern hard disk. I am using an SD card as a hard disk on my 286.
Heya, love to see those old pc my 1st pc was a Philips P2000 with a mini casette recorder I believe it was a 8060 or 8080 prossesor not sure and then at the left site you had 2 slots for modules to put in I only had the slot 1 with the basic controler card I write 1 program for it but can't remember it anymore ( 40 years ago lol ).
I have an old 8086 machine and to get it to boot I have to use the eraser trick on it. The HDD spindle sticks out of the bottom so I put a pencil eraser on it and spin the pencil like I'm trying to light a fire with a stick. Once it gets going it runs. Needs a bit of a push to get going though.
6:41 filter the search into computers and tablets.
6:41 Media Vision sound card
OH ! A Dallas real time, I wonder what state thats in ? PSU should be fun as it so old, will that make it easyer ?.......cheers
1982 is when the 286 came out.
I have one of those cases in my loft. It's badge Power Computing but doesn't house a PC, it houses my amiga 1200 with Zorro slots and 060 accelerator.
Keep hold of the 5.25" floppy drive if it still works 😄
Seeing the finds you get on the island, is like going back in time to car-boot in the UK 10 years ago or more. there is no chance I would find a 5.25" floppy drive here these days. and I did they would want an arm and a leg for it.
Boot it from diskette. Then work your way through to booting from HD. It‘s an MFM disk. It‘s got its own controller, maybe a driver issue…. IDE probably wasn‘t there these days.
ST-506 .. MFM drive .. remember Gibson’s “Spinrite” & “Spinrite 2” disk utilities?
AT power connectors .. black wires go next to each other! (or you let out the magic smoke) …
Hey there were a Pentium 50 as well Dickie I only ever saw one, must have been rare!
We were using 286 processors in 1984/5 ... IIRC my first 286 box was 1987, with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk! The 80186 did exist - RM were the only company I know who used them to any extent in their "Nimbus" education boxes (the first motherboard I ever fault found to component level and in those days were even allowed a full circuit diagram set! :-) )
Thanks for the info, I knew that the 80186 chips existed, I just didn't think they were ever used in DOS PCs.
A old AT PC with MFM harddisk 🤩🥰🤩
Richard ....Yea please repair the power supply🥳🥳
Yeah I'll look at that old power supply on my next video 🙂 I'm sure those old hard drives were called ST-506. A pre-runner to IDE though SCSI may have been around at the same time. I wonder what capacity it may be? 10-20Mb?
@@LearnElectronicsRepair I think ST-506 is the connector-type and MFM is the "protocol", we used them both in the days. But again, this is from memory ;-)
@@LearnElectronicsRepair yes, the mfm /rll controller is a pre interface to IDE ,8, 16 bit SCSI and other. Important is, you must register the eg. Cylinder,heads,sectors from the harddisk (is written in the harddisk) in the controller .Mostly is your controller and harddisk are bound with euch other. No autodetection😭. 5 MB or 20 MB wasn't earlier not rare but very excpensive. Will it not run.. Look Google "mfm_reader_emulator".
@@PaulZwiers I remember MFM from Amiga Floppies. Multi Frequency Modulation I think. Wasn't that some way that you could represent data from 00 to FF without ever having more than two zero bits in sequence which could cause the disk controller to lose sync? Then you could use 'special' bytes with three zero bits in sequence as index to mark the start of a sector. This is all from memory, I haven't googled it.
@@LearnElectronicsRepair MFM can have 3 consecutive zeroes (bit pattern 1-0-1 becomes 01-00-01).
GCR encoding is the one where you'll never have more than two consecutive zeroes (four bits being encoded as five), because a zero is always represented as "no (magnetic) transition," meaning no clock pulse.
I found what I suspect is the same motherboard on ebay, the seller (in Ukraine) is asking about £96. Didn't find any sold though other makes sold (working) between £25 and £75.
An worrabout the old XT?
I think the Philips has de looks / design of their professional equipment like oscillocopes etc. Maybe that's why it may be a bit rare.
Hello ...from morocco ...ilike when you say hmmmmm😂
hmmmm OK 😅
Please show repair of the Power Supply and the HDD.
A 286 machine.... if I remember correctly way back in those days you would have an orange screen or a green monitor screen, also I don't recall an actual operating system back in those days you would run the programs directly from the disk... Or you went into DOS. Man, it hurts to think that far back in time. 🙂 as with both machines... I believe we should insert a fresh bios battery... And when it comes to inserting the correct time and date??? so we might eliminate some of the potential error messages I'm curious... As to how the machine will behave, remember the famous Y2K bug... I can't recall if any of this makes a difference in getting the machine up and running it may not be important at all and just something to overlook... Also, I'm not so sure we should invest too much time other than just general discussion about how things were back in those days... But whatever decision you make of course I will be here... Look at how much is changed and how we have to have interfaces and adapters so we can just get the machine to run and get the keyboard and mouse going.... Do you think in the future..... We will have an AI Headset interface... Too 286 PC interface... 🙂 time marches on.... and in 20 years from now guys like us... Just might want to continue exploring the past of the early PC era age 🙂
My oldest fix was an IBM 8080 with two 5.25" drives and a green screen. It came with a cloth bound DOS manual and all receipts. IIRC it was over 2000GBP and sale was 1982. Boot to one floppy which included a word processor which was used by an author. Issue was just dirty heads, so no deep dive required. This was approaching Y2K, so it had a good run, but customer wisely decided to upgrade 🙂
p.s I kept it for many years but eventually I decided I did not want to become a home for old computors.
A 286 can run VGA. You just have to have the right card and monitor, of course. I've run win 3.1 on a 286. Trust me, you don't want to do that. But it will work. You can literally count the cards when you win at solitaire as they fly around. Yeah that Dallas real time clock is going to be a problem with that old bomber. The battery is inside of it.
My first PC was a 286. ❤
Unfortunately I don't have it anymore. 😢
Yes, please repair that stuff! - Can't be difficult... 🤣
I'm quite sure it's worth something on retro market.
I think a 286 may be too old. People want the Win95 era stuff. A 286 can run Windows 3.1 though. Just very slowly. The 386 was a big step up. A 286 is 16 bit and a 386 is 32 bit. The 286 is halfway back to 8 bit machines. I fooled with 286s but never ran one for myself. We demolished an office and got truckloads of old PCs out of it. Some were 286.
@@1pcfred who needs Windows? 😁
@@markhonigschmid6116 pretty much everyone when that PC was made. Linux was still years away.
It has some weight, so price for shipping tends to make these a tough sell. Looks like you have a bus mouse card, ega/cga/vga graphics.
You might get the hard disk to spin up with a drop of oil, but miniscribe were always junk. Some of the mfm controller cards have an 8085 on them and a eprom bios. Try booting it from floppy. See what speed the 286 is… possibly theres a math co processor.
We can have another look when I try to fix the PSU tomorrow