What mysteries lurk inside this mint Turbo XT?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.ย. 2024
- #HardDriveBirthday #PCArcheology
On today's video, another episode of PC Archeology. It's been a while but it's back. This time, it's a pristine IBM PC XT clone. Does it work? Does it hold any secrets? Let's find out together!
--- Info
Mitac Inc.
MPC160TS-D1 (MPC160TS, MPC160)
Made around 1987
Amdex 410A (410) Monitor
Amdex Corp.
2201 Lively Blvd, Elk Grove Village, Illinois, 60007 USA
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A bit of trivia, the company “PC’s Limited” in the listing at 6:10 renamed itself to Dell Computer Corp in 1987 and of course, still exists.
Mitac is still around as well, as an ODM house, and they've actually built PCs for Dell before (years ago at work, we had a P4-era Dell that was built by them).
I bought like 2-3 Notebooks from weird companies and it turned out that they were rebrands of Mitac Notebooks!
Victor Technologies was Chuck Peddle's startup, but using an 8086.
I think Michael had actually already incorporated the name (or a variation of if) back in 1984 and just used PC's Limited as his DBA... I could be wrong, but I feel like I read that somewhere. But, +1 for relevant history!
...For better or worse.
Mitac is still around, but these days they make satellite navigation systems. If you've ever used a Magellan, Navman or Mio satnav system or GPS-related product, it's highly likely it was made by Mitac.
Do you think it's the same company?
I had a Magellan unit back in like 2007.. mitac made?
@@adriansdigitalbasement It's definitely the same company. And while MiTAC themselves withdrew from the PC market in 2010, they have a subsidiary (Tyan) that is still heavily involved in the PC server market.
@@floydian06 ahhh that explains tyan. Its an oddly small company for the market footprint it has. They report having under 100 full time employees.
They also do rugged laptops and industrial PCs
Very nostalgic. I scrimped and saved my freshman and sophomore year of college to afford an XT clone for my studies in computer science. I finally could afford one in Jan 1987, and used it for all of my courses through the remainder of my undergraduate degree. I kept it for a couple of years after graduation when I finally upgraded to a 386SX. Good times, good memories. Still boggles the mind that my first hard drive was 30 MB of capacity, and by today's standards you could barely store a single compressed image in that space... (You kids today don't know how good you have it, lol)
Wow. What a tank! Not only is this machine amazingly clean, it honestly looks like that it was never opened before you did. All stock components, and beside the inevitable mechanical issues and aged tantalum caps, it fully fired up. That's some astounding build quality.
A great XT clone, certainly. Preserved so well and truly it's a keeper! Beautiful inside and out. I see why they sold and won the market. PC software, ubiquity and the modular design were hugely important. But boy oh boy were PC's primitive in many ways compared to Amigas.
At an old job, I used an IBM 268 6Mhz AT. With 640K, 40MB HDD, EGA and 5.25" and 3.5" floppies. The original invoice was inside w other papers. it was over $18,000 CDN - due to EGA and the "super large" HDD.
Given the price of the machine, did the work being done with it merit the price tag? I always wondered about that.
@@AltimaNEO GIS related stuff. I used it to compile from C, software for interfacing large RS232 serial digitizers used to make maps. Mostly for ocean mapping GIS. The software was $50K and supported other hardware like stereo plotters and terminals for entering soundings using our own designed and built ISA boards. Sold all over the world.
I’m really curious about the 3.5” drive. I can’t seem to find any reference to what (if anything) IBM would have offered. Was it stock? Dealer option?
A lot of ATs have 3.5” drives, but they all seem to be added aftermarket and are often HD, suggesting that they were a later upgrade.
@@nickwallette6201 I think it was a much later option. I think the order was for dual 5.25" 1.2MB floppies. But it's been a long time ago for me, I left in '96
Wow, I had to read tat twice - surely I got it wrong!
As a note, I'd go and deal with the burn in using a burn-in remover screensaver. It won't eliminate it, but it will certainly help.
I really should write one of those for DOS. It would be incredibly easy to make with a custom block graphics character set, but it would be preferable to use graphics mode.
I'd also clean that screen cover, and adjust the flyback. This is not to mention checking the HV caps and chokes.
Hi Adrian! I wonder if this was one of the PCs assembled and sold at the University of Oregon Bookstore. I worked there from 1988-1992 and I personally assembled *hundreds* of PCs, many of them were Mitac XTs just like this one. This one pre-dates me slightly, so (if so) it was probably put together by my old boss, John Clute (HI John!). The UofO Bookstore was just a screwdriver shop, we assembled low-cost systems for students that usually just had DOS and Word Perfect on them, just enough for school work. Mitac were particularly reliable, that's why we sold them. Later we sold ALR PCs (also built like a tank), Amiga, and Atari STs (omg, those unreliable power supplies!!). Glad to see this old workhorse is still functional. Thanks for the video and all your content, cheers!
Wordstar
8:11, all the screws are in - 😅 In 2002, I took over an IT manager job from a guy who had opened up the PCs so often that he got lazy and had been leaving the screws out. I discovered this when I pulled a malfunctioning computer out from under a desk, and when I lifted it up, the case cover just came right off in my hands. Having to remove six screws is admittedly a bit of a pain, and arguably overkill, but it's definitely good practice to at least leave two of them in. 15:40, why wouldn't they just put the reset button on the front? Who knows? I know! It's because in 1987, power supplies and PCs were hard-switched, which meant that the moment you pressed the reset button, the computer would reboot. That meant accidentally brushing the button while reaching for something in front of the computer, a curious child, or, for those of us who liked to put our big ol' desktops on the floor, one false foot move could all result in an instant reboot and loss of whatever we were working on. My first computer, built in 1989, had a reset button on the front, and all of the above resulted in data loss at one time or another. That's why Mitac chose to put the reset button on the back.
Dad bought a Packard Bell PB 500 Turbo XT computer with a CGA monitor and 30 MB hard drive from Macy's.in 1989.
I was thrilled when I discovered thumb screws. My current desktop has one and I believe a clamp holding the cards in place.
My desktop is turning 6 this month and all that I have done is upgrade the RAM and SSD. I don't think I ever enjoyed that level of reliability before! :)
@@drippingwax mine is now 10 years old (with 11 year old specs) but it’s only just starting to run up against its limits, and it still isn’t hardly ever getting properly sluggish, because I’d given it an i7 2600 and CPU development was slow enough (up until Ryzen’s 2nd gen) that it practically didn’t age at all in the first 5 years I had it.
A few years ago it was on par with the cheapest i3 and I think it’s now similar to one of the Pentiums… honestly it still compiles and transcodes (my two actually heavy tasks) just as fast as it ever did, and while I wouldn’t want to edit 4k video on it, 2k is still just fine (just like it was when new, so no surprise). It has enough grunt to software decode 2k VP9 and HEVC, but without a ton of room to spare - I doubt the i5 2500 could do so because it has to lean quite heavily on the SMT to keep up with realtime.
Of course the GPU it came with became obsolete waaay faster, but I barely played games on it and most of those were indie titles with low spec graphics or Civ (CPU bound) anyway. But I did replace it with an RX480 for a few mainstream 3D titles, whenever it was that that came out.
Honestly it could probably last me another few years, but my laptop (bought at the same time) has been doing less well, and those M1 or M2 laptops are mighty tempting. And I think their compute power probably beats my 2600, considering the base processor is competitive with current i5s, so I feel like I’d owe it to myself to use that in a desktop configuration at home if I got one. But I’d feel kind of sorry for my “future proofed”, decade old i7 purchase to just sit there doing nothing, rather than waiting until Electron apps finally beat it into submission.
…….not sure why I said all that, mulling on your comment about reliability got me thinking about how there may never be another decade when a power user can use the same CPU for a decade, I guess. I can understand basic users managing to squeak by with an 8-10 year old machine, but I still do Photoshop (CS6 admittedly, not the current version), audio and video editing, transcoding and compiling on mine; and usually use 50-100 browser tabs at the same time as those tasks. I suspect whatever model(s) it gets replaced with will probably only last half as long at best - Intel isn’t sitting on its laurels anymore.
'Can confirm this hard drive is not a brick.'
I just saw that video a few days ago. It's one of those amusing horrifying wtf tech tales.
I saw that video too! Very much an “OMG stop digging WTF is wrong with you?!” experience 🤣
This one is more cathartic and Tech ASMR than the CoCo one. It makes me remember that in days gone by we actually had much more control over the world than now. You rescued this machine from a death by word processing and gave it new life as a game machine (although limited). I can sleep now. You made today complete.
The keyboard has actually got an IBM Model F *AT* layout.
The XT layout had no space between the Enter key and the numeric keypad.
I thought the AT keyboard had 12 function keys on top, instead of 10 on the left.
@@drippingwax nope
That XT power switch was the pinnacle of power switch design. Every power switch since then has been inferior!
*kerchunk*
I had one computer with a giant power switch in the front and when I opened the case I realized there was a metal arm flipping the actual switch in the back.
A good example (though not the origin) of the term Big Red Switch.
I would call it the apex or dare I say, acme but as Ed McMahon says: "you are correct, Sir".
(that guy still owes me 10 million dollars)
Ironic that today's posting of this video is on the Hard Drive's birthday. Happy Birthday HDD!
I caught that too. 35 years young and originally had no bad sectors listen on the label!
*excellent* video as always, Adrian! Love the serendipity of the HDD being QA'd at Miniscribe exactly 35 years ago to the day this video came out :D
It's too funny! I totally didn't plan that but how amusing.
Mitac made their own disk drives back then. The computer lab at my high school was filled with Apple ][+s and had MItac disk drives connected to them. Solid little units, and not as expensive as the Apple units.
that's a little puzzling to me, unless Mitac had specialty floppy disk drives for Apple. Because Apple formatted disks entirely differently than PCs (and clones). Of course my 5.25" memories are a bit fuzzy now, but I seem to remember that the physical drive mechanisms were distinct. That's why people put out a chunck of change for KryoFlux drives. A PC drive couldn't read Apple Disks, and vice-versa. I think there are some more affordable versions on eBay and various sites. But not many companies made drives for both Apple and PC clones.
The original apple 2 floppy drives were shugart floppies and I remember a lot of other companies used the same drive mechanism. So the miatec drives mechanism would be able to ride if they had the right encoding software
@@johnnyrichards2119 That's almost assuredly what they did. The drives looked like they used the Shugart mechanism, although they did sound slightly different than the Disk ][ drives. I'm sure they did what Apple did; put their own circuit boards on a Shugart drive and package it with a metal casing.
Mitac was a major Taiwanese manufacturer of floppy disk drives for many years. Most of their products were sold to other manufacturers, and quite a few of their drives could be found in countless PC clones, including several that I own. I also have one of the Mitac Apple II drives, and it has been very reliable and works perfectly to this day. As far as I know, they made the complete mechanism themselves, although the mechanical parts could have been a clone of the Shugart design. The Disk II used a particularly simple design inside the drive itself, making it relatively easy to copy.
10:42 "This drive is not a brick." LOL
Learned about MiniScribe's scandal only a month ago.
Tiny explosions always keep videos exciting.
Another good oil is musical instrument oil. It is typically called valve and slide oil and is used for valve instruments like trumpets and also trombone slides. It is a really light viscosity oil and comes in small dropper bottles. Get it at any music supply.
Amazing when you realize that when this PC was built the Amiga had been on the market for two years and how far ahead it was at that time. It gives a perspective.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing, recalling the excitement when I bought my A1000 in November '86.
The Amiga was sadly just slightly before my time, which was all Win95 and some Win98, so when I first saw the promotional video from 1985 (the “I Am Amiga” one) I kept thinking “yeah, so? Everything does that”. Then I went and looked when it was from, and went “oh crap, that’s way earlier than Windows or Mac!! Damn!!” …and I’ve had a fond spot for them ever since!
Even more basic than these PCs, arguably, the ZX Spectrum was still sold all through the 80s and into the early 90s! I bet the kids with A500s felt so special, they’re impressive enough after a C64 but after a Speccy? Phwoar!
@@kaitlyn__L I had a C128 then and remember when I bought my first Amiga in 1987. It felt like science fiction and the leap was enormous.
You describe just finding WordPerfect and such things as "boring" on these old drives. I actually don't think there's any such thing as a boring drive, unless it's just blank or a base install of DOS. I love to see the ecosystem that the former user of the machine was working in. Even the most "bland" and "boring" drives have stories to tell and for me, that's the best part of finding old drives like this that still function.
This so reminds me of my first PC (second computer, first was a speccy, I was 16 when I had saved up enough to buy it) -- a Spring Circle Super Turbo PC with hercules card, amber monitor, which I used at first with The Quill and then... Only with WordPerfect. It never had a hard drive, and when I got a new computer, I donated it to my future mother-in-law. Who used to write her memoirs on it.
when i was a kid, i had an apple II + clone, and it came with Mitac Apple Drive clones. same company. Interesting that they made ibm clones as well, most likely a bit later than the time i had the apple II + clone. :)
5:37: I love that that the cheapest option included on that chart is the Atari PC (for $699.95). Power without the price!
I'm really impressed with how clean the inside of the system is. Being 35 years old, I would have expected it to be pretty dirty. It had to have been used for a fairly short time before being packed away and stored.
This is 35 years old and I was old enough to use it. I am old. Sure, I have a grey beard, but I usually manage to not think about it.
Maybe it was used as a lab PC in a clean room enviroment?
At my work we have optical setups under laminar flow boxes and the PCs for them are sparkly clean even after many years of daily use.
i used to love seeing what's on old computers its amazing what you can come across
@Adrian's Digital Basement
38:42 No apologies needed! This was actually very interesting! I never saw one of these systems except in catalogs. Kinda cool IMHO! I would re-oil that fan in the PSU, but otherwise a very nice find!
Adrian, your videos are never boring. This one took me back to my first computer, a 286 clone with EGA graphics, 640K RAM and a huge 20MB hard drive. Purchased in 1988 for around $1800 with printer and monitor. That was a huge amount of money for me at that time, but it was one of the best investments I ever made, as my employer had just released a product based around the IBM PS/2 Model 30, and somebody in our office needed to understand PCs.
"I apologize that this wasn't more interesting" - are you kidding me? Love those episodes so much! :D
Mitac was one of the companies that used to put full page ads in computer magazines back in the day...they were a mail order specialist. You could spec it out how you wanted it.
I built hundreds of XT Turbo clones back in the day. Lots of Seagate ST225 and ST238 hard drives. it's funny how rapidly we went from 20 MB hard drives to 80 MB. hard drives to gigabyte hard drives and now we're in the terabytes.
.. and there's 16GB capacity upwards available as microSD cards, and you pay a fraction of what the old MFM drives would've cost.
Solidly built is a good description for the IBM machines and their direct clones like this one =) Steel was definitely cheaper back in the early 80s and IBM pricing was pretty insane as well, so they didn't skimp on build quality. Anyone who's ever picked up an early 80s IBM XT keyboard or an original model M will know that there was NO saving cost by using thin steel! The XT case is made of pretty thick steel and the baseplate in the keyboard is, well, hefty is a good description!
I can imagine an IBM XT case getting run over by a car and the car having way more damage than the case of the PC.
Usually on XT clones, any RAM above 640K is available for use with a RAM drive or print spooler, which would require a driver disk from the OEM. Depending on how it's mapped, it may also be available for upper memory blocks using USE!UMBS.SYS.
It didn't seem to be visible to the memory scan on Checkit, so based on my experience making my UMB RAM boards in the past, it won't work with USE!UMBS in this case. There must have been a driver to turn it into EMS perhaps, although even that usually shows up in the upper space (page frame addressing) and I didn't see that either. Maybe switches on the motherboard configure this -- it might have all been disabled, who knows LOL!
I might be wrong but didn't they make some that have a register we could use to page that kind of added RAM? Not sure if it was a proprietary thing because you'd need to build your code to use it.
@@adriansdigitalbasement That sort of stuff can be affected by the BIOS settings, might want to check there. I remember having a 1Mb machine and the upper 384k being available as XMS/EMS/UMB but it wasn't available when a particular setting was turned off. Being such a long time ago I forget which one it was.
Would an XT clone even have BIOS settings?
@@sparcie HIMEM.SYS? But you need at least a 286 to address that RAM, because the XT had specific allocation for most of the memory above 640K (Video etc)
That function key template on the keyboard brings me way back to my parents' Tandon. What a blast from the past.
That is a thing of beauty! It was probably in a laboratory or clean room setting, which could explain the the burn in, but no dust inside...
It looked like it could have been built in 2017, nevermind 1987... wow
Yes. Experienced that too, lab PCs under laminar flow boxes, sparkly clean after ~10 years of daily use. I honestly love it to work on them.
Great video! Would love to quickly reverse-engineer the speed setting utils, and discover how it's being implemented.
I forgot to upload those utilities. I stuck them here: github.com/misterblack1/mitac_utilities/tree/main
Huh. They're actually EXEs with .COM extensions. Probably to buff up the size a bit.
You output 0x7F (slow) or 0xFF (fast) to port 0x00C0, apparently.
@@fnjesusfreak Do you think they used EXE2BIN?
@@drippingwax Nah, they're MZ files. EXE2BIN removes the MZ header.
10:21 Happy Birthday, Miniscribe!
8:38 WOW super clean!
The magazine article and ads brought back memories. Not that specific article, but just in general. I miss the late 80s through mid 90s. The Internet is great, but something about the days before it is more wondrous for me. I'm amazed how much I was able to learn about computers and music, relying on magazines, books, friends, user groups and TV shows.
I really don't think these displays are dim due to age. I have 40-50+ year old Crt's that are still perfectly bright. These amber phosphors were never overly bright back in the day. I recall them being dull back then too. Most computer rooms, offices, etc. Where these lives were dim too. Everyone today is used to Eye Searing Brightness and crispy high contrast TFT's, OLEDs and the like. We used to turn DOWN the contrast and brightness to reduce eye strain.
I still turn mine down and fortunate enough to have an office to turn off the overhead lights off and use a floor lamp
It's got burn in, so it does at least have a lot of hours on it. It was at least a tad brighter back in it's prime.
I do recall not having my new amber monitor cranked up, and it was plenty bright in a room with a skylight window. They were definitely real easy on the eyes, especially in a dark room at night.
Heh, yeah it's not age but lots of use..... but indeed, amber is by far the most dim of all screen types I've ever seen. That new old stock one I had on my second channel really proved that. The mesh certainly doesn't help though.
The eye searing brightness has really gone too far on new displays. I find I need to choose the lowest backlight setting much of the time. My hugely worn out 1982 B&W TV is the only modern CRT I've used which looks dim to me. The tube in my 1940s TV also looks a bit dim but that's probably just because it's a much older non-aluminized design.
Always interesting seeing these old machines and workings. Great video!
Al ready watched on the patron channel but letting all the ad's play so you can get the full monihtazation. Keep up the great work.
Occasionally one of these old PC videos show up and get the nostalgia flowing. I haven't thought about XTs since my days at "Big Blue".
Lets not forget the quite rare XT-286, It was esentially a XT motherboard adopted for a seimens (If I remember correctly) 286-12MHz but was limited to the XTs original maximum of 1MB of RAM with no means of expansion besides an XT style EMS memory card and driver card. In an effort to entice customers into buying a 286 cheaper than an AT.
I think I can help you Adrian. I have an owner's manual for the MPC160T Mitac that also has some boot disks in the back. I've seen it recently and I will send it to you when I find it.
My parents bought one in the late 80's for doing the finances and inventory for Dad's business. It became the family computer after the newness wore off and my siblings and I wrote lots of school papers and played a lot of CGA-era games on it. I wound up taking it to college with me in the late 90's then donated it to my college's programming lab since they needed a DOS 3.x 8-bit machine for running software with an old EEPROM programmer. I never knew what happened to it after I graduated and the college closed several years ago. Thank you for the video, brings back tons of memories!
I haven’t worked on computer like this for over 30 years but it brought back memories. I really enjoyed watching thanks for making the videos.
14:33 - My Juko NEST V.30 has 1,024k (the standard 4x256k DIP, + parity) and you can make the extra 384k into EMS.
I know it's not really nice for most owners who obtain them but I like seeing burn in on old hardware. It satisfies me knowing that the machine has been well exercised in it's youth and wasn't simply a waste of money and time for the original owner. When they're in good condition as well, I like to think it must have been looked after.
I had an old Compaq 8086 that I got in the 90s that had the logo of a bank burned in to the screen. No hiding where it came from.
Yeah. A real Blast From the Past.
I'm puzzled by the combination of the burned in screen and the amazingly clean interior of the computer. One thing that occurs to me is that the monitor may have become burnt in on a different system.
I had one of those Amdek Monochrome Monitors and really liked it. Got that for my 8 bit system. A Lobo Max-80.
The other thing I don't understand - being a person who swapped components to debug and repair systems - rather than using Volt meters and solder - is how you could just clip off a part and not have a negative result.
.
The tantalum capacitors on these motherboards help to filter out transients that could otherwise occur on the power rails. As long as the noise isn't too bad everything will still work fine. In this case the blown one filters a 12v rail which likely isn't even used on the motherboard itself.
Well, seeing as the monitor exterior had been cleaned up (painted or otherwise), it seems reasonable that the computer received the same treatment. The exterior of the PC looked great too.
@@eDoc2020
Thanks. That's the problem I have with working on a component level. There's a lot of stuff about the actual electronics I don't understand.
.
@@Qyngali Yes - that could well be.
.
Tech Time Traveller recently did a video on miniscribe, and now it seems to be coming up a lot.
Heh yep! Funny isn't it?
Mitac seemed to have made pretty good stuff! Made their own boards, clone parts (if you could say "made" I think you know what I'm saying)
Thank you Adrian..not boring at all!! This is an integral part of computing history...fascinating! Thank you.
Interesting to see that tantalum explode on cam! Keyboard bad - press F1 😂
well, we didn't actually see it. It exploded when Adrian had the back of the keyboard in front of the camera. I was disappointed, no "magic smoke". It was audible, though.
This stuff is very interesting to me. One of my first jobs in the PC world was assembling PC Clones - I worked for a company named "American Computer Support Services" or "ACSS" for short, and I built at least a couple hundred PC's ... started with the PC/XT clones, we also sold 286, and 386 systems. The office was in Overland Park Kansas - worked out of a guys basement at that time. From there I went to a peripheral manufacturer named "Tallgrass Technologies" where we created disk/tape sub systems for PC's. TGT had some pretty advanced stuff at the time.
Twinhead was a clone manufacturer (I had one of their machines as a kid), and I've seen their parts in another machine, a Canon one, and Canon parts in the Twinhead machine. I think this may have been common among the Taiwanese clones. I suspect that many clone manufacturers were buying and using each others parts, possibly to save on the design costs. Perhaps they had some kind of agreement to help spread out the cost.
A kind gentleman recently gave me a machine very much like this. I hope they know how much I appreciated it!
It's in good hands now!
I remember the advertisement for it: it said it had an elephant's memory because it had 256 Kb of Ram. But even then that was the least ram seen on PC class machines. Even the Amstrads were called 1512 for the 512Kb
This is a good reminder that back in the day, a personal computer might be the second or third most expensive thing you owned.
Indeed, might have been house, car then computer!
@@adriansdigitalbasement 70s - early 80s it might have even been house, computer, and then car. There was a time when taking out a "computer loan" wasn't all that uncommon.
I just about cracked up, as he said it was a miniscribe drive. I said in my mind... the brick... and then Adrian said its not one of the br8icks. lol
“Bad Caps… Bad Caps… Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when Adrian gets to you?” 🎶🎵🎶
Haha, that burn-in looks strikingly similar to OLED burn-in from captions today! Not-quite-rectangles, looking like a and e and g and so on all mushed together.
Those mesh screen covers baffle the heck out of me everytime I see them. They didn't realize how dirty and hard to clean it would be? did they think people were computing in complete clean rooms with no dust? lol
Considering how many computers are still made that require constant ventilation via fan intakes, yet I've never seen one with an air filter, clearly they still do think that.
back in the early 90's my company paid money for a company to come in and retrofit these mesh filters onto all the monitors as people were complaining about glare. About a year later I had to go round cutting a lot of them them back off with a scalpel blade as they had gotten too dirty to be able to see through which caused the users to complain more. Waste of everyone's time and money....
Just a word of advice. I read or heard somewhere way back in the days that if you park your hard disk you should power cycle it before using it again. Might depend on the brand of the drive though, but still.
Nah that must be some kind of urban legend. It just moves the heads to a particular cylinder on the disk. If you go to use the disk again, it just moves the head to whatever cylinder it needs to read the data. Many drives soon after would just auto park when idle, like that miniscribe drive I had a recent short about would do that. (And all modern hard drives)
@@adriansdigitalbasement I actually found the source for my memory - the manual to the Atari Megafile hard disk. It states that you need to power off the drive after parking it. The Megafile used a Seagate ST238R drive, so maybe it was just for Seagate's hard disks. When I googled for it I found others mentioning this as well, that you should power of the disk after parking it.
@@jonord The drive itself still shouldn't care. I'd guess it's the software on the Atari which would get confused by a parked disk. Either that or it's nothing at all.
33:32: "I'm gonna hot-swap it while the machine is on."
As below mitac has done loads of fulfillment for others.
I remember selling mitac computers but mostly laptops.
That PC was so well done and contained MiTAC-made components because MiTAC was no puny PC clone manufacturer. Check them out on Wikipedia. They're still around.
They do a lot of rugged PCs and industrial
I don't think that's the key, though. Many small manufacturers made quality PCs. I think a bigger contrast was from DOS computers compared to post-Windows95 and Macs. They all got flimsier and more disposable.
Something I just ran across was a NAS designed for old computers and gaming consoles. It is called RetroNAS. It supports Older windows Apple and even Dos file serving. Its SMB is configured for older windows versions. It is built around PI OS or Debian Linux version 11 A dos machine with only a network card and Packet driver can use is for extra disk space This is by using something called DFS distributed File System Since many of the old protocols are unencrypted or otherwise insecure, it should not be exposed to the public internet. This great for networking old machines, real or emulated (Pdp-11 Pdp-10s and other machines from the early internet. Good Luck.
Keyboard is a BTC foam & foil mechanism, the stuck key is basically a symptom that the foam on the key switch had desintegreated and it needs to be replaced, quite common problem on cheaper keyboards during the late 80's and early 90's
Oh right! I had no idea if was a foam and foil. Well, it's not great feeling board, explained by the foam and foil.
I LOVE those old XT power switches. I'd love a modern PC with one.
You can pretty easily make one. I know where I can get a bunch of those switches. In fact, if I cannot repair my 1989 386 (same case size) power supply (probably new caps needed) I'm going to put a good quality ATX power supply within the enclosure of the original AT power supply, keeping the switch :D
Really clean machine for its age. It reminds me of my Tandy 1000sx that I grew up with and was around $2900 and that too was 4.77mhz
I remember that weird anti-glare coating, the Apple IIs at school had them and I couldn't resist skritching my fingernails over them
Owned several Twinhead laptops. Great machines for the time (early 90s). Interesting they were affiliated with Mitac. Still learning new things.
I used to own an 1988 PC XT clone with two identical 360K Teac floppies. They also would not let you lower the lever/latch without a disk inside the drive.
I suspect the high prices on the IBM, NCR and ITT systems were a bit of a smokescreen - they mainly sold to businesses with considerable volume discounts. Those volume discounts wouldn't look as spicy if the consumer price wasn't jacked up.
I have found a laptop on a local flea market here in Hungary, with exactly the same desktop components and specifications. The only difference is the motherboard form factor and the floppy drive, it is a 3.5 inch floppy instead and it has an MDA video card. The laptop was designed in Hungary, in 1985 by the way.
It has 2 short PC ISA slots under the keyboard.And a Seagate 20MB HDD instead of a Miniscribe. I would really like to have a working Miniscribe HDD in my collection.
Poor little amber monitor. Hopefully there will be a rescue operation sometime where it's getting cleaned and maybe CRT swapped. Enjoyed this epsiode, as always.
Fun! I imagine that the user was upgraded to a better AT-class machine but kept the monitor. I remember using a Deskpro 386 at work in mid-87, so the hardware improvement tsunami was well underway.
Neat, a BIOS that actually says "Keyboard bad. Press F1 to continue." like the old joke.
"burn in" brings back memories of working at Syntrex in Eatontown in the 80's. Go ahead and insult me, I can take it.
Excellent review and a proper level of care taken prior to a full power on. Thumbs up to you Adrian!
I always think of Mitac as a company that made laptop parts (mostly enclosures/plastics) for smaller OEMs. Nice little system 👍
This is the exact model my dad had purchased and we started with a CGA graphics card on it. I spent so many hours on this model growing up. One particular game I loved playing on it was Lightspeed. Unfortunately my Dad donated it away at some point so I do not still have it in my collection :(
Interesting about the prices. In 1989 I was in my 2nd year of college and I purchased a Zenith 286-25 with monitor, EGA graphics and 512k/20gb HD for $1895 if I recall. The most expensive computer I ever purchased, even my 2020 Mac mini was cheap compared to that. My least expensive I purchased was a second hand Celeron NUC for 2018 for $100.
BR button cells are NOT rechargable.
The difference is BR formulations are higher temperature tolerance.
A CR should be a suitable replacement, provided you keep the device within more narrow temperature ranges. (Many late XTs were designed as industrial computers and could be used in high temperature situations.)
Happy birthday MiniScribe Hard Drive! :)
i had keyboard with those switches
they are basically a spring loaded plastic piece that pokes microswitch made out of metal dome and a metal peg trough a rubber membrane, you can cut around those 4 pegs, the mushroomed part and open them to clean then melt them back to hold the top, but the top part don't even have to be helf down because it stay in place good enough with friction alone
also switching that keyboard from at to xt and vice versa might magically fix it
For a system with memory that simply uses larger memory chips to reduce space, it is possible that it was designed for cost rather than features. If it were to offer that memory to you in any meaningful way, it would likely be as a register that turns the remaining 128K into RAM in the A000-BFFF area of ROM space.
I can't get over how clean/beautiful that PC is!
The monitor is probably not painted, but just does not have bromium in it. Bromium (or something like that) makes ABS yellow over time, but it is necessary to keep fire safety specs and those were changing over the years.
Bromium, however, isn't the only substance to make ABS yellow. I've researched this in various vintage PC sites, and TH-cam videos about Retrobrite (or Retr0brite lol) It's a rather mysterious process, and retrobrite can either be done under ultraviolet (and sunlight) or with just heat. There are incredible complex chemical processes making plastic yellow over time.
Very nice , as good as new except the burn in on the screen .
I remember those many many years ago , there was 356 and even just released 486 but
schools still have those old XT models .
Lots of fun using those back in the times .
edit not 356 but 386 typos ..... ha ha ..
Alternatives to a wide angle lens are a lower table or a higher ceiling :-)
LOL!
That higher ceiling idea sounds like a winner.
Honestly, with that keyboard, that monitor and WordPerfect that would still make a pretty damn good writing workstation. The only downside is the noise of the PSU and HDD.
The machines priced near same price as IBM went into a captive market. Like NCR and ICL for example went mostly into contract jobs like corporate, gov and supermarkets.
Love the way you did the keyboard test, Great Video
Fun video!, But still... Gets me thinking. For around $2000 in 1987...
For that, you could have an Amiga 500 with 1M RAM, RGB Color monitor, and an external floppy for like $1400 I am guessing. Now, you could also have gotten that setup with a 20M hard drive, but those external Amiga SCSI drives were like $500 back then. So you'd still be under the $2000, but not by much. However an Amiga with an external floppy would have given you two 720k drives. Back that, that was decent!
And for the people saying this person needed WordPerfect, guess what was released for the Amiga in 1987? WordPerfect.
I got my A500 with 1084s monitor and the external floppy for just under $1000 back in 1987. I think that came with a Panasonic 9-pin printer too? It was a package deal at the college bookstore. (I got the extra 512kRAM about 6 months later and the 20M Dataflyer hard drive about 6 months after that. ) Yes, I used Word Perfect on it.
Either way, great vid and a cute machine (I did have an XT with Hercules I had pieced together about that time too).
PCs were considered "business machines" and Amigas toys, expensive toys. At least amongst the adult population at the time. My mom, who was really into computers, was amazed when I showed her PageSetter(?) and ProWrite on my 500 as she assumed it could only be used for games and programming. Luckily it was my Amiga, so I could decide when she could use it.
@@OscarSommerbo Agreed. I don't blame people who were buying PCs. Commodore had some of the worst marketing ever. Oh well, such is life. All fun in the end...
I'd say the only thing this had over an Amiga was the nice high res MDA screen ... but that's it. The Atari ST also had Wordperfect and it also had a nice high res MDA screen. Plus, if all you're doing is word perfect, then some floppy disks is plenty! Plus, an ST (or Amiga) would be fanless and quiet.
@@adriansdigitalbasement Agreed. If you were just doing Wordperfect style wordprocessing, I think both the Amiga and ST were good enough. But when you got into desktop publishing (the higher end stuff), you really needed the higher res options. And those were available on those other systems, but required separate monitors (Amiga A2024 or Atari HiRes) or some flicker fixer/scan doubler for the Amiga with a monitor that supported it. Still, I think if Atari or Commodore had been able to market better, one of them could have competed. For the price at that time, you were just getting so much more. Of course, by the time the 486 systems came out, it was game over. But I had my A1200 and a 486 by then. ;-)
@@desiv1170 I had WordPerfect for my Apple IIe. It was definitely inferior to WordPerfect for DOS. Plus, drive formats were incompatible, I couldn't exchange disks with someone using WP on a PC. Could Amiga do FAT?
I think IBM (and clones) had a much superior library of business software to choose from. That's also how Compaq succeeded. You may forget how there were previously many "workalike" 86 and 286 PCs that had an MS-DOS that wasn't very compatible with PC-DOS software, including Tandy. In the end, I think if was the amount of software (including games) that propelled PC clones forward. And eventually killed Amiga.
If you just compared hardware stat-for-stat, there were a lot of "superior" machines to IBM and clones, including the Apple IIgs. The early Macs were also inferior to Amiga, some Atari computers, even inferior to the IIgs!, but Jobs got a lot of people to write and port software.
If you just look at hardware, it's a total mystery why PC clones and Macs survived and other computers didn't. It's the software and "Developers! developers! developers!"🤣
I have that exact 'reliance' monochrome card and it is a Twinhead clone. Great video as always Adrian!
When I got my Hyundai Super-16 TE (turbo XT @ 10MHz), it came with two bad bypass caps on the mono card (which left some impressive skid stains), and several bad tantalums. I opted to just swap out all of the tantalums. Unlike electrolytics, which fade out open circuit with age, tantalums are very reliable... Until they're suddenly not. At which point, as you saw, they fail rather spectacularly.
i sold MiTac laptops in Australia in the mid 90's .... they had some cool upgrade features others didnt offer back then
OMG! This was a trip down memory lane! Thank you!