PC archeology: The PC Partner by Leading Technology
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 พ.ค. 2023
- #pcarcheology
On the bench today we have a tasty early 90s computer, the "PC Partner" by Leading Technologies Inc. This machine looks suspiciously like another XT computer I have from a different brand, so let's try to unravel the mysteries of this stylish little PC.
--- Info
PC Partner IX/65 by Leading Technology Inc.
FCC ID IFS80-2451
Northwest Computer Support Inc.
--- Video Links
PC Partner review:
books.google.com/books?id=GsP...
VTech Holdings:
www.referenceforbusiness.com/...
Hyper DOS: (uploaded in 2017 by someone else)
archive.org/details/hyperdos
Adrian's Digital Basement Merch store:
my-store-c82bd2-2.creator-spr...
Adrian's Digital Basement ][ (Second Channel)
/ @adriansdigitalbasement2
Support the channel on Patreon:
/ adriansdigitalbasement
-- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/s.nl/it.A/id.16...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.com/products/digi...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress.com/item/33000...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/itm/TS100-65W-MI...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.com/product/121gw/
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Logic-DS...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/itm/1-2-5-10PCS-...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress.com/item/32537...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Links
My GitHub repository:
github.com/misterblack1?tab=r...
Commodore Computer Club / Vancouver, WA - Portland, OR - PDX Commodore Users Group
www.commodorecomputerclub.com/
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
I worked for Leading Technology back in 1991 through 1992. I remember this PC. It was their low budget system, which is why they offered the 8 bit VGA card to keep costs low. In the Portland area, the largest seller of Leading Technology machines was Smith's Home Furnishings. This particular model had a few quirks. One is the power supply. It is apparent this machine hadn't been used much, since it seems to be working, but those power supplies were prone to failure and even taking the motherboard out with them. I can't tell you how many times I would send both replacement power supplies and motherboards out for techs to replace in these machines. I would recommend using a better power supply if you want to keep this thing running. Second was that plastic peg under the lid which was positioned over the motherboard. The case was such cheap plastic that it needed some support, however, if you put anything too heavy on the machine, you start putting stress directly on the board. This would also cause board failures. We had to recommend that customers not put anything directly on the PC, including the monitor. The third problem was HyperDOS, aka DiaperDOS. It had a very poor database architecture that would cause people to lose their documents and contacts, especially if the power failed unexpectedly while using the program. And lastly, was the hard drive. It was prone to stiction. I can't begin to tell you how many times I would get a customer that would complain that the system wouldn't boot and I would just ask them to lift the front of the machine about a half an inch and drop it while powering on and it would spin up. I would, of course order a drive replacement. Leading Technology used some VTech components as they were one of the initial suppliers to Leading Tech. VTech bought Leading Technology in 1992 and dissolved the company. That is when I left the company and went to work for Central Point Software. I could write another post on some of that company's history, as well.
This is awesome historical information. Thank you for posting this.
YO ADRIAN!! have yourself a read of this, brother!
It's eye-opening to belatedly learn how flimsy everything was, even with big name brand companies that seemed so solid and reputable - and that _felt_ like they'd been around forever (despite the IBM-compatible PC market being at most a decade old).
Adrian please interview this person.
DiaperDOS xD
@@quetzalcoatl-pl The GUI-shaming was real.
My last DOS customer passed away a few months ago, she had a computerized sewing machine to make custom embroidered work and the machine needed DOS to run the software. I had a collection of old laptops that I could install DOS on for her, she bought 3 of the machines from me, so she always had a spare in her home businesses. I do miss the old gal, she had a great sense of humor, and our fathers were drinking buddies back in the 60's.
I still have a customer running a dos 5.0 386, for some kind of machine in the machine shop. It works. I have a spare motherboard for it.
Sad to hear of her passing but cool story
I worked in a printing plant where we had an old web press from the late 80's. The machine needed its color data for each job delivered by floppy disk. These machines cost millions of dollars new & no one is in a big rush to replace the machines.
If you can boot to DOS and you want to reset the BIOS.
Run the DOS debug command. Type O 70,10 enter, Type O 71,10 enter, Reset the system.
This will force garbage values into the CMOS registers and should give a CMOS checksum error on reboot.
This is also useful if you want to clear an unknown BIOS password.
Good call!
Awesome tip!!
The reason the CHS (cylinder/heads/sectors) layout matters for old MBR partitions on LBA disks is that the partition table uses CHS values. The first few sectors of the disk are reserved for the partition table and boot loader so the first partition can't start less than one head into the disk which means that the CHS to LBA translation for ALL data depends on the specifics of the layout.
An example to illustrate this. Lets assume two different CHS geometries with the same number of sectors (same disk), to get simple numbers we'll use 400 tracks, 2 heads, 10 sectors and 100 tracks, 4 heads and 20 sectors (8000 sectors total). IIRC the default position for the first partition is C=0, H=1, S=0 which translates to LBA sector 10 for the first layout, LBA sector 20 for the second layout.
The sector LBA number is calculated using the following formula: c*HS + h*S + s - where H/S are from the CHS mapping (C only matters for "where is the end of data"), c/h/s are the requested cylinder/head/sector. Lets do another example, if we have a partition starting at 50/0/0 (CHS) this corresponds to it starting at LBA sector 1000 in the 400 cylinder example layout, LBA sector 4000 on the 100 cylinder example layout.
The PC (non-UEFI) HD boot process works by the BIOS loads the bootloader from the fixed position on the disk just after the partition table (still first cyl/head so this works regardless), these older bootloaders then tends to parses the partition table, find the "active" partition and then uses INT 13h (BIOS) calls to read the OS loader from the partition using c/h/s numbers. So if the mapping is wrong it gets invalid data and the "signature check" fails (IIRC first two? bytes needs to be something specific) so it spits out the dreaded "Missing operating system" or a variant depending on exact boot loader. Non-DOS bootloaders can vary in the details (can it parse filesystems? or is it ultra-stupid and just read the next stage from fixed C/H/S or LBA numbers embedded in the boot loader during install. Or...) but the end result tends to be the same - they simply can't work without getting the right data back.
The only big change since then for "BIOS boot" ís that newer bootloaders uses "extended INT 13h" BIOS calls using LBA sector numbers instead.
Note that getting the CHS values wrong for an actual CHS disk often also leads to boot issues too even if it's not ALWAYS fatal like for an LBA disk. IIRC there's also standard disk geometries that only differs between the non-CHS values (like the "write pre-comp"), getting these wrong may be harmless or cause issues much later.
All this is from memory, it's a long, long time since I had to hex edit partition tables but the broad strokes should be correct.
This is also really important when using things like an SD-to-IDE adapter - modern systems will often partition the card differently (different C/H/S values), which either renders it unusable on some systems, or makes things work until an unsupported CHS combination is reached (and only then corrupting data). The way around that is by creating the partition table on the target machine (or at least one of the same vintage). Modern systems (or direct access to the SD card) use linear access anyways, so it won't make a difference on those systems.
This comment could be a video on its own :)
I'm actually left handed. Having been a sysadmin in the past, I just leave the buttons set up normal and put the mouse on the right. At my current job, I drive my coworkers nuts by driving two computers at once with a mouse in each hand 😂
aaaahh that aesthetic is so YESS 😍
Love how he's got that keyboard too! It looks great.
GoldStar was one of the main manufacturer of integrated ISA multi I/O ICs (2 serial, 1 parallel, FDC, IDE address decoder). Common multi I/O chips by GoldStar are called "Prime 2", "Prime 2c", "Prime 3", and likely they also had a "Prime" without a number before.
Moreover such cards were quite fast for the time as well as capabale of running at unusual ISA clock speeds.
Worth noting Goldstar is LG now having been previously called Lucky Goldstar
@@OtterlyInsane I remember telling other kids in school that it didn’t stand for “Life’s Good” (as the ads imply) but rather Lucky Goldstar. Most of them didn’t believe me lol. TBF I only knew because my dad had a GoldStar TV, and one time when discussing it he mentioned they’d merged with another company and changed their name to LG. We had exactly one blank GoldStar VHS tape too!
The copy protection from battle chess II is asking for a chess move from Appendix A in the manual (the example in the manual is "Blue's third move in game #5, Morphy vs. Ching Ti" is K5F1). It's an interesting chess variant called Xiangqi that started me down a rabbithole of learning about and collecting all kinds of Chess variations in the early 90s.
If you are interested in chess variants, this is a pretty neat one to check out (and the Battle Chess animations are pretty fun like the original Battle Chess).
Wolfenstein Spear of destiny did the same.
I worked at a small computer store here in Canada in the mid 90's where we assembled our own made-to-order PC clone systems. For a short time, we also sold VTech branded pre-built PC's. By that time, they were all mid-tower, early Pentium era systems. They appeared well made and were priced quite competitively. They sold quite well, but their biggest hurdle was really the VTech name which was associated in most people's minds with children's electronics toys.
Hello from Winnipeg also
Howdy from a former A&B Sound computer dept. sales manager in Vancouver B.C.! I was there from 1994 to 1996, it was such a fascinating time to be in the industry as we were moving from x86 chips to the mighty Pentium, and DOS 5.1/Windows 3.1 to the mighty Windows 95, and EVERYONE seemed to be buying or upgrading a PC or else mortgaging 3+ years to Telus for a Motorola StarTAC flip-cellphone.
I still have the Motorola leather jacket I won as the 2nd highest seller of StarTACs in all of Canada for A&B in 1996. Since we were competing with smaller clone sellers like yours, we had to offer some level of in-store tech support. Guess who got to do that with absolutely no base pay increase along with management duties as well as still selling my quota of hardware and software? Good memories, mosttimes.
A&B, that pulled out some memories from way back when vinyl was all they sold
VTech is an amazing company. Still is
If it's suitable for kids it's likely to be built quite basic and robust, a company that got the basics down and is also quite experienced in building robust stuff evokes trust towards them in me to be completely honest. people back then just had a different mindset I guess
Working at Best Buy in Missouri in 1993 and 1994, I had a lot of people with these machines come in and ask me questions about it. That suggests to me that Best Buy sold a lot of these machines in the early 90s.
I think it would be a good idea to put a sticker "press 'S' for setup" on the case somewhere :D
A-ha! "Leading Edge". At my job back in 1988, it was THE slowest computer in our workplace. It was relegated to burning PROMs :)
It was such a pig, we nick-named it "Trailing Edge"! I remember their logo resembled a 'warning' triangle!
Idea for a future show: go over all the DOS and other utilities that you use for troubleshooting these old systems. It's cool to see these old systems come alive after all these years.
Ditto.
This is Windows 3.0 - no TTFs, no 386 enhanced mode, no multimedia without the enhancement pack, no registry, no OLE. It would be fun to get it working because that makes this computer sort of special. Windows 3.0 had a very brief moment in the Sun (haha) before the 3.1x versions appeared, which would not run at all on 286 computers. So this was the stepping off point for Microsoft's world domination - and it was a deliberate choice that IBM did NOT make, preferring to develop OS/2 for the 286. Say what you want about Microsoft, they made the right decisions at the right time.
Win 3.0 DID have a 386 Enhanced mode. The registry didn’t come in until W95; prior to this it was INI files dotted about the system for each application. The lottery of removing these if you wanted to remove an application was supposedly the motivation for developing the registry…
Windows 3.1 can run on a 286 in standard mode. Requires a command line option. It will not be able to run DOS programs and Windows programs simultaneously as the 286 cannot switch in and out of protected mode seamlessly.
I remember that company well enough that I recognized the styling and colors in the thumbnail before I even read the title of the video. I remember seeing them for sale in the early 1990s when I was in the Navy. I think they sold them at the base exchange.
I an rather envious of anyone who owns this model of computer. The colors and shapes of the aesthetics are absolutely gorgeous, and they scream 1990 art direction. So good! I wish I owned one!
Teal and purple, the colors of the 1990's
These videos really bring me back... I purchased windows 3.0 only after getting a newer video card (I think one of the early ATI cards) and wanting an OS that would give me a graphical desktop.
Oh this is my kind of PC. I'm in love! I'm putting this one on my search list alongside the Wavy Packard Bell and the full tower Gateway. Fantastic video!
The first PC we had when I was a kid was a Leading Technology 286, I believe. I learned Basic, QBasic and QuickBasic on that PC. I always ran it at 8Mhz because I was afraid putting it in "Turbo" for too long would burn it out or something. Lol.
Whoever designed the PC Partner case had a great eye for style. I love it! So 80's.
I remember discovering the usefulness of Norton Utilities disk editor to read the parameters of the partition table for the situation you have. Commonly if someone created a partition on a hard drive while installed in another system you needed to use the same cylinders heads and sectors to preserve the data. Also, if a drive had been jumpered to be a slave to another drive for the purpose of copying data from the old system to a new one there was often weirdness created by the first IDE drive being the controller for both drives because of how logical block addressing worked.
I remember pc partner. I used to sell hardware like motherboards and maybe keyboards and speakers in the shop i worked in at the time. This was in the late 90s and early 2000s The logo and colour scheme was still identical to the pc you are looking at there
The Laser 3000 was my second computer. I got it for Christmas 1985. Here in Australia it was sold by Dick Smith Electronics which was our competitor to Tandy/Radio Shack. It was known as the Dick Smith Cat here in Australia. I had the computer itself, a 5 1/4" floppy drive and later bought the 16k emulator cartridge that slotted into the right side that brought it up to 64KB of ram and allowed for ProDos compatability. In 1988 I replaced it with the Laser 128.
My cousin had one of these for his office. It saw daily heavy use and held up quite well. I always thought the styling reminded me of a Greek temple
Solid video as usual. These videos and a stack of novels got me through my hospital stay in January.
I had one of these machines!! I'm also in Portland, I got it from a seller at #1 Flea Market on Division (the old Division Street Corral) back in the early 2000s when I was probably 10 years old. It was almost identical to this one. I don't remember much about it other than I was fascinated by the colorful feet and had to have it. Thank you for helping me revive this lost memory.
That windows installation might be dependent on the original videocard...
Could be a late guarantee replacement that wasn't useful anymore.
My dentist had that, his x-ray machine was driven through a 486 and they sent him another 486, brand new, as a replacement.
He replaced it with a P-II, speeding things up.
I loved that Goldstar ram, it was solid when I was selling it in early 90's. Selling clones, RAM was $100/meg and hard drives were $1/meg, sold lots of Caviar 120meg drives (and even Ariel drives with glass platters). Would fit about 60 AOC 14" monitors in the van from the distributor. Some good memories from those days!
Man, I miss the days when PCs were a passion project for companies. You can see the care that went into the design on this one.
Man, you take me back to my first PC Purchase, I ordered it out of an add in computer shopper back in 1993, We had been using a Commodore 128 with a good monitor and a couple of 1571 drives even had a cassette drive with it but of course, I wanted MORE! Thus the order. The old 386 took me through the learning curve of DOS vs Commodore Basic, and when Workers Comp sent me to college to learn a new trade after an accident took me out of Law Enforcement, I bought my 386 to college. I began school with it, but needed more power so purchased a 486 with a DX Processor and full complement of RAM so I could use the programs that I needed to do my course work to become a legal assistant. I sold the 386 to a fellow student after installing Windows 95 on it (via floppy drive) which slowed the machine to almost useless, but the buyer wanted 95 so that's what she got. We were the only 2 students to ace the course work, 2 years with a 4.0 GPA, both of us were older then average and really put our heads into the course, not partying like the rest of the class, that makes a difference. I used a front end for DOS as well, first one I got from a Packard Bell system which was a gui for DOS, then back to a menu system that allowed for greater ease of setup for me although I don't recall the menu system name, it was a great little DOS program that allowed my wife who was not at all computer literate to use the system but she preferred to stay with the commodore for her games and printshop work. She actually did a pretty good business printing custom greeting cards for folks in our town as we were in the few who had computers and printers in the town.
Thanks for all of the time and research. Such a clean machine.. awesome.
Those teal and purple colors tones they chose are making me think of those swishy design patterns you used to see on Styrofoam cups in convenience stores back around what was probably the same time as this computer's original run. T'was the style at the time, heh.
about windows:
You replaced the graphics card.
Could be "Just" the usual WIndows 3 issue where it tries to load the old Graphics card.
So you just gotta go into the WIndows folder and run SETUP, see if that gives you anything (did WIn3 have Graphics drivers??)
I came to post this exact thing
Definitely. A wrong video driver can result in either a crash or a halt at the Windows 3.1 splash screen, depending on the card and drivers selected. I would imagine that 3.0 would do the same thing being so similar. I wonder why it started the second time. Windows 3.1 is not "smart" enough to go into a "safe-mode" so it shouldn't have started. Also, looking at the menu bars, it may have been in 256 color mode. The only thing I can think of is that the video cards are similar enough but not quite the same.
It's astounding, time is fleeting............
24:58 "You're not gonna be running like Quake or Doom on this thing"... as a kid with my siblings, our first computer was a Packard Bell 386SX-25, and we did in fact play Doom on that thing. It wasn't a great experience but it's what we had. Although you better believe our minds were blown at the performance change when our next PC was a Pentium 100MHz.
I got one of these about 6 months ago and had the trouble with getting into the bias like you did. Then I let it set for 6 months and got it out again today and happened to discover this video and it reminded me how hard it was to get into the bios. It's a nice little 386 machine and I'm glad I got it. I think I only paid about 150 to 175 for it. Thanks to you, I now know how to get back into the BIOS.
Kind of funny that I am watching this in a Ryzen 7 5800h machine. The time and advances between the machines are incredible. I did have a 386 sx laptop but never a desktop. Went from 286 to 386-40 desktops.
Back in the late 80's or early 90's I used Lotus Works at my job. That simple program produced a lot of documents and stored a lot of small databases and spreadsheets for me. In many ways, it gave me the functionality of Windows while running a DOS based XT class PC that didn't even have a hard drive. Even when I got a better system, I stayed with Lotus Works for my record keeping for several years.. Seeing it here brings back a lot of memories.
Back in the early '90s when I was working at a computer shop assembling PCs, every 40MB IDE HDD was configured as type 17. I worked out that the Miniscribe 8051A actually had 26 sectors per track and configuring it natively increased performance as well as adding a bit more space, but was told to configure them as type 17 anyway. I guess it was for ease of troubleshooting.
It is indeed a mechanical keyboard :) its got SMK 2nd Generation cherry mount switches. Same ones used on the laser 2269 keyboard :)
If you see keycaps with that specific all caps font, 99% chance its SMK 2nd gen under them
EDIT: they are VERY nice clicky switches even if the boards they put them in are cheapo
We know the previous owner is left handed! 😁
Also, I wonder if Windows worked via the launcher due to it using some special command line switches in its launch shortcut
Huge nostalgia here. The very first computer store I worked at sold both new and used computers. My first day I was taken to the storage space and given minimal instructions on picking parts and pieces to put together a "refurbished" system for sale in the used computer outlet. And this is the exact system I prepared as the first (of many) to be for sale. It didn't require much besides putting a hard drive in it and installing the OS. As I recall the OS would have been DrDos 5.0 because we had tons of copies of it shrink wrapped with licences. I chose it because we had the matching keyboard and monitor and the case was very clean and attractive. Within the hour or so between putting it in the store for sale and bringing the second system in the first one had sold.
This setup is quite similar to the generic AT clone I picked up last summer. 16 MHz 386SX with no math co-processor, Seagate ST-157A hard disk which spun up and is completely working after a bit of fudging around, 1.2MB and 1.44 MB floppy drives and even the battery connector looks the same. In my case though it was a Rayovac 844 4.5V block battery taped to the side of the power supply, which thankfully hadn't leaked - it was just completely dead (the power output was a whopping 0.033 volts). I actually replaced it with a battery holder for 3 AAs and was even able to use the original double-sided tape to stick it in the same place.
Incidentally, mine also didn't boot from the hard disk even though it seemingly had a functional DOS and Windows 3.1 installation (I could poke around by booting DOS from a floppy disk and everything seemed fine). When I redid the CMOS settings I picked Type 14 for the hard drive, since that was what I read on some old website to be a match for the ST-157A. But apparently it wasn't the same HDD type that was used when the PC was originally set up over 30 years ago, as I had to do a complete repartition and reformat to get it booting. Maybe it would've also worked if I picked one of the other 43 MB types in CMOS, but it's obviously too late to find out now!
I love your PC archeology series!
My childhood computer was a Leading Technology PC Partner, 386 16. So happy to see this.
31:21 That's brilliant. I felt the excitement, too.
My family had a Leading Technologies PC Partner like that one, but it was a 386DX-40mhz w/math coprocessor, 4mb ram, 128kb cache, 512K 16-bit vga, 120 MB hard drive, 1.44 MB floppy, creative multimedia package (SB16 & 2x cd-rom), and had matching keyboard, mouse, and VGA monitor shown in that ad. It was the family's first PC. We Went from the Ti-99/4a to a C64, then the 386. When the "family" computer got upgraded to a Pentium 75mhz the 386 became mine and I used it in high school until I bought a PowerMac Mini Tower (beige G3) before starting college. Loved that old 386, played a lot of games on that thing. Wish I had it today. Playing the old point and click games on ScummVM just isn't the same as original hardware.
Very cool looking case and it's so clean inside that it looks basically unused. I do remember Leading Technology. Mouse button swap may indicate the original owner was left handed. Amazing performance with Amiga games.
They either were left handed, or were crazy.
what a beautiful vintage machine! thank you for sharing.
I had this PC back when I lived in Shelton, WA in 1992 - 1995 and I took it with me when I lived near Spokane, WA. I loved this PC and upgraded the ram and hard drive. it died on me in 1997 and by that time I moved on to a better computer.
Thanks for sharing. DOS GUI are always fun to see. Nice T-shirt btw
I really enjoyed this video. I had a similar PC from the early90s, Many kids in my neighborhood wanted to play the games i had on my PC. They all had to take turns. It was pretty Awesome!!
Very nice machine! 🖥 I actually have the matching Leading Edge monitor that was shown in the ad! I use it quite a bit, and it is shown in my Am386DX video on my channel!
Suddenly feeling old. My first computer was a 386SX Packard Bell from Best Buy.
What you were saying about the IDE head, sector, and cylinder translation and the partition and boot record is correct. Decades ago I did phone support for Norton Utilities and you do need to get the sectors per track and heads to match what the bios was set to when the drive was partitioned and formatted. In manually rebuilding partition tables we would set the drive type to one that seemed close like you did but then using a sector editor we would look for the partition table and the boot record. Looking at the partition table on the first sector on head 0 of the first cylinder you could look at the ending head and sector which should be the number of heads and sectors per track. From there it is just a matter of calculating the number of cylinders for the total size of the drive. The reason that boot failes if you do not have the sector/track and heads wrong is that the bootstrap loader will read the first 3 sectors of the boot partition and execute it so if the sectors/track and heads is off it will read the wrong sectors are read and who know what you end up executing.
Man, growing up in Oregon I remember seeing these everywhere in the 90s. I don't remember who sold them in my home town of Roseburg, but they had to have been sold somewhere because they were at many garage sales in the late 90s. That was definitely a weird wave of nostalgia seeing that case.
Thank you Adrian. Loved the video, loved the t-shirt more. My first PC was a 386SX 40mhz, after a Vic20 and a CPC6128, and I have fond memories of Win3.0, but more of Win3.1... keep up the good work.
I remember the days when Phoenix, AMI and a few others were still available as the BIOS options back in the day who knew that AMI would be the one to outlast them all.
For these older machines F2 is normally the way to access bios.
Thanks, that was a fun video. :)
First PC with a color monitor was a Packard Bell 386SX. First one that ever worked on. I remember putting in a Sound Blaster 16. It had a open socket for a DSP chip. I bought the chip, added it and it really made a difference. That 386SX needed all the help that it could get.
I remember DiaperDOS , I mean HyperDOS , Nice you are Uploading it for others to use . It is a very useful DOS :) QC
ST-157A is super reliable HDD. Contrary to the "Don't low level format" I actually saved a couple of them using low level format option in the AMI BIOS (it's not really a low level format though) - problems which were otherwise unfixable using standard DOS tools were solved thanks to this.
Wow, everything inside that machine is clean and shiny! Nice.
And I believe I know of Leading Technology as a sponsor of the old Computer Chronicles TV show.
Later in the video you mentioned Leading Edge and I actually think THAT was the company who sponsored Computer Chronicles.
It looks like both a computer and a kids toy that VTech would have made back in the day. Very unique design choice.
I went to college in 1990 for CompSci and I was a TA for a Lotus123 class. Seeing Lotus Works brought back memories :)
Windows 3.0 : you changed the video card, drivers?
You: Changed the color of your computer.
WIN 3.0 : i'not gonna boot.
also WIN 3.0 : i'm not gonna tell you whats going on.
ESC, F1, F2, DEL are the most common keys for the BIOS back then. F10 and F12 were sometimes used but extremely rare.
My very first PC, or at least the first PC that I could call mine, was a 386SX clone with a WD 40 MB hard drive. The BIOS setup on my old 386 was a whole lot like that one, right down to the same list of available drive types. One thing that was different about my old 386 is that the BIOS didn't support user-definable drive types. This became an issue when I tried to upgrade the 40MB drive to a 100MB drive: The BIOS didn't support 100MB drives natively, and thus couldn't boot to it. I had to keep the 40MB drive installed, and use a TSR provided by Seagate to get the system to recognize the new hard drive. Unfortunately, that 40MB WD drive was a stepper motor unit, and thus much MUCH slower than the 100MB Seagate. I was stuck with it as the boot drive for the entire time I owned that PC.
8:27 I love how the french translation on the left is just effed like : "CAUTION : It is forbidden, Under No Circumstances To open this pencil case. This unit is not "utilisolo"(Not a real word) To the user."
thats a nice computer...thank you adrian for these great computer videoes you show.they have saved me from bad depression....and gives me a break😊
Hello ,
This is good computer story originated from 1990s.
Good will,good work,good informations
Keep up the good work.
I will continue to follow your videos .
Wonderful Tech archeology..
Quite fascinating I really like those PC archaeology videos because you never know what's inside and what's the story behind as well, the laser VTech and leading technology already know it because I seen the video of the 8 bit guy most I specifically the laser 128 and the laser XT. Of course I can't forget your video of the laser 128 as well as specifically the laserEX. As for this machine it is really cool especially neon aesthetic look of the 80's. Neat
I had this drive in a 386SX back in the late 90s and the BIOS had it set to Type 14! And that's what I've used since. I still have that drive and one other. Great sounding drives too!
Adrian, you should add the original "Wing Commander" (Origin Systems) to the games you test with EGA or 256 color MCGA (VGA-ish) machines. It is an odd game in that it has great support for 286 and EGA as well as (VGA) MCGA, but also in that I had to undo the Turbo button on my 386DX33 to make it 16MHz or the game would run too fast to be playable. Seems like a pretty nice test on this type of machine to me.
You can also use various versions and settings on the utility "MOSLO" to software degrade machine performance to use it on faster machines.
Its sequel, "Wing Commander 2", will automatically adjust itself and frame-limit, so it remains playable on higher speed computers.
I love the rocky horror picture show shirt! One of my favorite movies :)
I have a PC Partner! Well, specifically 'PC Partner VP' by Leading Technology. And sure enough it's VTech, as all the manuals as well as the install 5.25 floppies are labeled VTech. Though mine, file no 'E127018' is a 486SX/33, with a date of March 4, 1993 on the bottom. My dad bought it from the Home Shopping Network. Basically the same front panel to the case, but it's wider and has a total of 4 drive bays. No matching keyboard though. I haven't turned it on in about 12 years though I plan on poking at it sometime in the next few months. (No leaky batteries thankfully, it also uses AA batteries. But I probably should peek at the caps in the power supply...)
Something like your t-shirt would be a great computer channel name, "The Rocky Horror Computer Show," which would be just about every classic computer show... "oh look at this, blown caps... all over the place and corroding! GREAT!"
This was my first computer! I got it when I was in 6th grade. We bought it at a store in Springfield, OH called Roberds.
It was a 386-20, with 1MB of ram and a 40MB hard drive. The case and matching keyboard were the best thing about this -- and it had a matching VGA monitor that went with it. Unfortunately, the monitor was HORRIBLE, because it used an aperture grille on it that made 640x480 VGA blurry. I remember struggling to read small text on the monitor, and we eventually replaced it, but the look of the monitor itself was amazing -- the bezel had this really unique stair-stepped appearance.
I eventually upgraded the machine to 2MB of memory, a SoundBlaster Pro, and a parallel-port CD-ROM drive.
I do remember the odd key combination to get into SETUP -- Something tells me that it was really strange, like F12 or CTRL-SHIFT-S or some other thing during POST.
To get into the cmos setup you need to partner the pc with a leading S.
You need to get something like the DOS version of HWINFO 32/64 onto that card memory drive, so you can pull up the hardware info (yes it should see all the way back to 286 motherboards) and see the chipset information, then you could figure out what the BIOS chipset was and see if you could find a command/manual for it.
Oh and a side note, the Windows 3.0 to get it to load, the HyperDos is probably using a boot config and arrangement for the memory handling, which is why straight from Dos Windows would not load. (You would have to build a batch file, or manually enter all the memory configurations to allow Windows 3.0 to load)
This is a super cute little PC!
IDE drives are suprisingly reliable in my experiance, I have HDDs that are going on 20 years old ive tested that were in great condition.
Windows versions of Lotus Works was popular in our rural schools (here in north central Missouri at-least, also had it on our Macs) till sometime in the early/mid 90s if i recall.
And unless the RAM is RAMBUS, RAM normally gets pretty warm, though if its not RAMBUS too hot to touch IS an issue.
haha loved the intro great Advertising 😅
That's a great looking keyboard. I have to say, this machine looks great.
so the keyboard IC (intel 8042) has a small internal RAM for buffering keystrokes from the keyboard. it's 32 bytes, I think and that's enough for 16 keystrokes (up & down events). if the BIOS isn't actively emptying that buffer (ie. when it's busy POSTing, or not servicing interrupts for some other reason), then the buffer can easily fill up (ie. by mashing the keyboard), and on most older machines the full 8042 buffer results in a PC speaker beep. If you fill the buffer by keyboard mashing incorrect keys during POST, then _even if_ you press the correct key after that, then it's not going to register because that correct keypress isn't going to get buffered, and when the BIOS is done POSTing, reads the buffered keystrokes, it's not going to read the one it's looking for.
interestingly the 8042 requires an interrupt to be handled by the CPU in order to toggle the caps-lock LED, so a good way to tell if your CPU is processing interrupts is to toggle the caps-lock. if that doesn't work then the CPU is probably locked up with interrupts disabled - time to power-cycle!
This takes me back, the joy of a simple fresh dos+win3 install with its limitless potential. When I first saw it was thinking that’s probably a 386SX maybe purchased from a catalog.
Ooh... HyperDOS! That's so... Hyper. Cool computer ;)
1:29 - Total 'Miami Vice' color scheme!
I had this. It was like 3k! Hyperdos. Pretty useless in hindsight but brought me lots of joy somehow haha. Those lines and colors hit me hard with nostalgia.
Wish I'd more to say. All I have to say is: "WOW!"
That hyper DOS is quite cute, especially the faux lined paper made in text mode. :D Really heavy skeumorphism. It's great.
The Laser 12 mhz 286 was my 1st ever PC....I loved playing the Duke Nuke game on it........bring back so many memories
When I worked at ZDS they wanted to reach out past big government and corporate contracts, and instead of building a lower cost machine for the home market, they had a company in Taiwan produce these lower cost PC clones. They had a similar form factor case and an 85-100 watt psu. They left out the 5.25" drive, so you would assume another hdd could be put there. The issue was the power supply was a bit anemic to add another hdd. IIRC it was offered in 386sx, 386dx, and 486dx. Their pc's were marketed through Crutchfield catalogs.
Wow this brought back some memories. My brother and I had this exact same model of computer. He and I saved up together and got it from Best Buy. It was the first computer I ever opened up and installed hardware, that being a modem. Ah browsing the early web thanks to Internet access through a popular local PC user group. Hyperdos was a pain to me. We much preferred just using DOS, avoiding Windows at all costs. I remember memory pains playing the games we wanted to play then we learned about QEMM (Quarterdeck Essential Memory Manager) thanks to a friendly person at CompUSA we shopped at. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. 😁👍
I purchased one of these from Smith's in 1992. I upgraded the video card, ram, and OS making it an overall satisfactory system. Used it for several years without any problems and passed it on to my eldest offspring. It died a sudden death one night in a UofO dorm room, the victim of beer inundation.
I purchased it in '91 not 92'.
i like the looks of it
I had a Leading Technology 386 SX-16 my parents bought me back in late 1989. The quality of these machines were pretty good.
That's cool -- do you recall where it came from? Was it a Big-Box Store or Sears like the PC Magazine article indicated?
@@adriansdigitalbasement My parents bought it for me at Electronic Boutique in the mall back in December of 1989. It is different from the model you showed on your video.