I'm probably too late on this one, but I am a biomedical engineering technician (I repair medical equipment in my hospital). If I had to guess, this was attached to a Zeiss microscope in the OR setting (They are very large). The video capture card was most likely used to send video from the microscope to an external display in the operating room during procedures, either that or to some kind of recording device. Hope that helps!

@adamklopfenstein9440

Жыл бұрын

Would make sense then if they had power for that microscope coming off the same PSU; eliminates any chance of ground loops between the two systems.

@Jah_Rastafari_ORIG

Жыл бұрын

(Also late to the game) If it helps, the contraption they just photographed my eyes with (that holds your chin in place) at my annual eye exam was badged Zeiss (1/23rd), hooked (obviously) to a PC.

@Synthematix

6 ай бұрын

Is an 80486 even powerful enough to capture any meaningful live video?

@joebates8659

5 ай бұрын

​@@SynthematixAt the time it was. 480i or less quality

@little_fluffy_clouds

4 ай бұрын

@@Synthematixa 486 is not fast enough to capture and encode video in real time (as opposed to decoding and playing back a low res video file, which is less CPU intensive) and slow disk write speeds was another bottleneck back then. There were specialised video capture EISA or PCI add-in cards with hardware-accelerated MPEG capabilities on board. They were fast enough to capture standard definition video and compressed on the fly to write to the hard disks. For professional video editing workflows, you typically had a disk array in RAID-5 configuration to use with video editing software since SSD storage didn’t exist back then and a single spinning hard drive back in the ‘90s wasn’t fast enough for real time video editing at broadcast resolution.

I don't know if anyone's touched on this, but when you're doing precision research work with specialized equipment, you need absolute reliability and time to validate the build. So it's not unsurprising that they'd use a computer that was a few years older than cutting edge. That way, they'd have time to determine the best combination of hardware, write all the custom code they'd need to run it, and do extensive testing to validate the stability. You don't want to be in the middle of a series of captures and have some random byte go missing and the whole machine craps out. This would be especially important if your specimen is living tissue or being put through some sort of reaction where time is of the essence.

@zippoblackburn3106

5 жыл бұрын

It might be a lot simpler. The special software/hardware probably didn't need a better processor.

@nodeswitch

2 жыл бұрын

Yep, this and and passing ethics, depending on what you're working on as well, can result in the use of some older equipment. Really cool to watch!

@danimayb

2 жыл бұрын

It's a simple case of if it does the job and does it to an expected standard, Then there's no need for more. This is a financial thing, Every business is about minimal expenditure.

@phydeux

2 жыл бұрын

@@danimayb - The problem is that machines this old become expensive again due to their rarity and difficulty finding replacement parts.

@TheChiperSdre34

2 жыл бұрын

Seconding this, medical and lab integrated systems are often sold with older specs. Reason for this is a toss-up between hardware validation, standardization, and probably a little bit increasing profit margins for specialized equipment.

back then, cable management was getting it all crammed in enough to get the cover closed!

@Jon.......

5 жыл бұрын

Heck, back then cable management also included just being able to locate and afford the correct cables. This is back in the day before Google, KZread, Amazon & Ebay. Couldn't always depend on Radio Shack. Still used paper catalogs and stamped envelopes to get things. Might have to run down the local library or book shop to scan through the backs of whatever magazines and trades you could find devoted to PC's.

@LoneWolfZ

5 жыл бұрын

@@Jon....... especially when you had a case full of SCSI drives to hold all your por.....err recipes, yeah, recipes.

@Jon.......

5 жыл бұрын

@@LoneWolfZ oh ... you mean good, old ASCII p*rn ... I believe jpg's were still mostly wet dream material for techies, geeks & nerds back then !

@stevewilliamsuk

5 жыл бұрын

I seem to remember buying cables from a PC shop that were still (E)IDE ribbon cables, but they were folded up in the middle into blue tubes. That made it so much easier.

@nellayema2455

5 жыл бұрын

@@Jon....... Compuserve and Prodigy were life savers back then. Manufacturers actually hosted forums on Compuserve where you could get information, and there were classified ad boards where one could buy and sell equipment "on-line" on both Compuserve and Prodigy, as I recall.

That Matrox card is EISA, not ISA. :) Also Microsoft Inport is *not* PS2, It was what they called a bus mouse. Taking me back quite a ways here.

@frederickevans4113

5 жыл бұрын

I saw the color and shape of the slots on the motherboard and thought "EISA, not ISA". Then I saw the edge connector on the VGA/Capture card. EISA for sure. I didn't remember that about the mouse, but you're correct. Most of my experience from that era was with serial mice and later P/S2 mice, but there was the rare instance of a MS bus mouse crossing my path. I owned a serial mouse before I owned a computer (bought it to use in the computer lab at school. '386 & '486 computers which filled the lab didn't have a GUI nor mice by default). My first computer was an 80286 with 640 KB RAM which I soon upgraded to 1MB and installed Windows 3.0 onto. I also had opportunity to work on older computers running everything from DOS 3, SCO UNIX, Windows NT 4.5, and Sun SOLARIS (both sparc and x86). My wife's current laptop is running Windows 10 on a quad-core "Pentium" from the Core i3/5/7 era, but mine is dual-booting Fedora LINUX 28 and Windows 7 on an i5. If I remember correctly, usually in the BIOS setup utility, you have to specify which slots are populated with ISA cards versus which are populated with EISA cards. I saw and worked on a couple of EISA systems and MCA systems. Hated 'em. My own personal '486-era systems tended to be VLB (VESA Local Bus) and I tried to have both a VLB VGA and a VLB IDE card until the advent of PCI and onboard controllers (Pentium-era, roughly).

@nanaki-seto

5 жыл бұрын

mmmm bus mouse loved my old bus mice and other bus input devices like old school clay ball like 3d input hehe.

@thepirategamerboy12

3 жыл бұрын

AKA PC-98 mice. My 286 has an Inport card in it, so I use my PC-98 mouse on it since I don't have the original Microsoft one and it works fine.

@batmite2000

3 жыл бұрын

@@nanaki-seto One of my old mice had a steel (or some other metal) ball!!! Super heavy and machined perfectly smooth with a matte finish. I threw away the mouse (Buuuuh.) kept the ball. :)

@CTMKD

3 жыл бұрын

@@batmite2000 throw it at animals it's the ultimate weapon

19:18 The Matrox video card is nat an ISA card, it is an EISA card. You can tell by the double row of pins (staggered vertically) on the edge connector. That motherboard has EISA slots which are compatible with ISA cards. Also, I believe the plug in fan board was used because the Matrox card potentially gets very hot in certain modes as indicated by the heat sink. Which is also why the fans and the video card were placed next to each other.

Now, don't take this the wrong way, but WOW, you really know nothing about 1995 computers. Pentiums were brand new, expensive as hell, and normal people didn't buy them. 486's were still mass market particularly in the data capture world. 486 class motherboards would in fact hang on with the DX4's and AMD 5x86 as far on as '97. In 1995 the Pentium 90 wasn't even available yet. It would be like today getting a crappy little industrial motor control box and asking "Why doesn't this have a i9?" The power out was likely for some form of data capture or sync device. With that video capture card it was most likely a start/stop interface for an external camera -- possibly non-visual spectrum such as ultrasound or x-ray. The modem would be handy (and standard at the time) for sending static pictures between medical facilities. Expert's in diagnosis are often not readily available so it helps to call on other locales to get that face time. We see this today with the new "teledoctor" technology which, whilst currently annoying and hard to use, is the start of having access to the input of a true expert in places like the ER when people like neurologists and so forth go home. ... and with what looks like a BT848 or similar capture board in there, PUT THE HUFFING FAN SHROUD BACK IN! When those video chips are put onto the same board as the GPU, they run REALLY hot. The A/B flippability is to deal with if you're up against a case side and/or have no adjoining slot, and/or what side the components that need cooling is on.. Machines from that era ran DISASTROUSLY hot, and the cooling solutions such as that anemic little aluminum sink on the CPU often didn't keep up, particularly with the DX2's and faster chips. Whether they were viable with/without cooling was often more a factor of case design, and those crappy little undersized artsy-fartsy cases generally ran about as cool as a small space heater on high. I've seen those junk undersized ultra-mini cases get too hot to even touch the top of. There's a reason I told clients at the time to suck it up and find the room for a mid or full tower. Nothing at all like today (sarcasm) where people so totally don't put cooling fans in a little plastic slab under their laptops, or how Apple still wouldn't know proper cooling if it stripped naked, painted itself Noctua tan, and hopped up on a table to sing "oh look at what a giant cooling fan I am!" -- there's a reason aftermarket cooling solutions (fans) for Apple products date all the way back to the Apple II. All because Jobbo the clown hated the noise of fans. Hence those G4 cubes that could melt the RAM clear off the video card, or the G3 toilet seats where they underclocked the CPU's at 50% or less their rating so they could wrap them in insulation instead of cooling, resulting in after prolonged use their burning a hole clear through the dialup adapter. Naturally I SO trust crApple today to make a i9 powered laptop. NOT! Just like there's a reason people working with devices like the Commodore 64 will start throwing heat sinks onto the CPU, VICII, SID, etc. Just like how many 8087's rated for 8mhz or faster need a heat sink added to them to make them stable at anything faster than 6mhz (though it often depends on mobo). These things didn't run cool, it's that nobody gave a shit how stable or unstable they were, or how long the product would last. This tech could bake itself easily. More so with cheap cases or poor airflow design choices. I don't see enough venting on that case for anything even resembling airflow, which is probably why the extra cooling steps were taken. (Since in a well ventilated case, you can sneak by without a sink/fan on a DX2/66) The EISA config error is most likely that there's no EISA hard disk interface present, it's going to report that if you have ANY cards in the bottom two master/slave EISA slots, which is why as a rule of thumb on boards like that if the card is not EISA, don't put it into those two slots. A bit like slot 8 in a 5150, if the card isn't designed for it, it causes problems. OFFICALLY it's not supposed to, but many of these clone boards never implemented things 100% right. Part of why VLB was far more common than EISA, and both were put out to pasture by PCI. Like my Biostar socket 3 motherboard with 3 ISA and 4 PCI, which right now has a AMD5x86-133 clocked to 150mhz (50x3, technically not a OC as it's in spec, it's just they didn't advertise it as too many boards couldn't generate a 50mhz FSB). Also wondering why you were so timid about removing the heat sink from the CPU. Compound probably needs a refresh anyways since back then it was probably crappy white silicon grease, and it's clearly not one of the ones glued on since it has the black clips at the edges. Slides out sideways, might need a 'tap' to free up the dried out old compound. To that end I'd probably junk the capture board if you're not going to use it's extra functionality, and put a standard VGA board in there. ... and yeah, 90%+ of PC tape drives -- like the colorado ones -- connected with a pass-though cable to the floppy drive. This is because there was no need for a faster interface given the tape's maximum read/write speeds. It's not like today where people go full Gungan with 10 gigabit Ethernet on home LAN's when they only have a 40mbps Internet connection and no high speed NAS. Meesah sayz yew nevah goes FULL Gungan. The only advantage tape had over floppy was capacity. Seek times didn't exist because you couldn't random access seek. It was a read/write everything or read/write nothing affair. Also don't expect quality key-switches any time AFTER 1994, at least until it got "hot and trendy" again about a decade ago. There's a reason us old timers started hoarding Northgate's and Model M's. CERTAINLY don't expect it in a mini form factor as the handful that were made are rarer than a coherent Trump tweet. Oh and the artsy fartsy "cable management" stuff. Yeah, didn't exist back then because most of the time you were lucky to have the room to run the big ribbon cables ANYWHERE. So long as they weren't crimped on an edge and the lid fit on it, the majority of whitebox builders said "close enough". Laughably, brand names were even WORSE in this regard; there's a reason it was called "Packard Hell". You didn't start to see that sort of thing inside PC's until the MMX age where cooling and airflow started actually being a concern.

@MrGoatflakes

5 жыл бұрын

Also I had a good chuckle myself when I heard the words "cable management". I remember more than once trying to coax a few extra millimeters out of a cable so I could put in an extra damn drive in or something, much blood split on nasty arsed sharp edge punched out cases and many a bad headache from fucking around for countless hours trying to get the right combination of CHS, LBA in BIOS and master/slave jumpers, cable position and god knows what else arcane bullshit I had to pull to get a recalcitrant hdd to work, and even those god awful IDE drives were like heaven compared to the old MFM piece of shit that was my first hdd. And that itself seemed completely magical compared to a floppy... 20MB! WOAH! It was a different time xD

@MrGoatflakes

5 жыл бұрын

Oh, also I remember the first time I pulled apart one of the "new style" keyboard when a friend's stopped working because of a spill. I told him "yeah just pull it apart, wash it with dish soap and warm water, then rinse with clean water, sun dry everything and put it back together and it will be apples". He wasn't convinced. And I was nearly completely flumoxed when I pulled it apart and there were no switches in it, just layers of what seemed like saran wrap to me at the time. But we eventually realised the same treatment worked just fine for these weird new membrane keyboards, you just had to be careful not to be too rough with the plastic or bend the metal plate and get everything back into good alignment. And apart from being baffled at first by the innards, I would be lying if I said any of us really noticed that much of a difference. It's only later when I used some really old Unix dumb terminals that I remembered how nice the old switches really were. But in actual fact the membrane keyboards have proved to have far fewer problems for me over the years than the old mechanicals, which I always seemed to be fixing back in the day. Although if you bend the metal plate, the membrane ones are fucked,, and will constantly register false key presses. I've yet to be able to panel beat one of them back into shape satisfactorily... New mechanicals of course are different, they don't actually make electrical contact and so seem likely to be trouble free unless the metal piece snaps, but honestly I haven't even felt any pressing need to try them, there always seems to be far better things to spend my money on than a >$150 keyboard when $25 at the supermarket will get me a perfectly satisfactory one...

@jasonknight1085

5 жыл бұрын

@@will9357 Good catch, I didn't mean throw it away, I just wouldn't use such a thing in that particular build/case.

@superslammer

5 жыл бұрын

Yeah this whole video irritated me. The shock and amazement and puzzled attitude about a slightly odd 486. It could have been some of the first digital MRIs or x-ray machines and all data was kept on the machine and backed up to tape. I don't know where he got that the machine might have been used at an ophthalmologists office. But a lot of specialty software back then ran from DOS. And being puzzled by a modem's presence? ffs... And I mentioned in a standalone comment... those Colorado tape drives were sold at places like Best Buy back then. I got mine for $150. I got a Iomega ditto tape drive later. -- While this computer has some oddities, it's certainly not something to get worked up about really. Just a standard computer with a few add in cards.

@0311Mushroom

5 жыл бұрын

This video has me laughing. In the early 1990s before the ZIP drive, the QIC80 tape drive became very common. A lot of us ran out of hard drive space in the era of 120mb drives, that let us save and delete programs, and reload them again at a later date. This is an era when few had a CD-ROM, and hard drives were tiny compared to today. Would hate to see this guy work on an XT, which did not even have a BIOS most would recognize.

I worked in a computer store about the time that was made. BTC was the cheap standard keyboard that came with our clone computers, extra charge for a clicky keyboard. The tape drive was the normal low cost (non-scsi) drive we sold (it was SLOW). That video card cost more than the rest of the computer. Modem to transfer images captured to central storage or a doctor. PCs connected to expensive equipment are treated as part of that equipment, not as a computer. I fixed a 286 (new caps) that was being used to control a big machine used in rebuilding forklift truck engines. The software had some kind of key in the bios as it would not run on any other computer. A friend sold a C64 to replace one that died. It was used to run a wheel balancer.

@davidluttrull4581

3 жыл бұрын

My dad had a paint mixing (vehicle paint) computer that was similar. The program was keyed to that specific computer. The software for the mixing machine was multiple thousands of dollars so when the computer had issues he did everything he could to fix it.

@skraegorn7317

2 жыл бұрын

BTC actually made some nicer keyboards. This might have been one of their standard membrane or foam-and-foil boards but their dome-with-slider keyboards they made for Packard Bell were fantastic.

@SonicBoone56

2 жыл бұрын

@@skraegorn7317 BTC dome with slider is great

It's difficult to believe that so much time has passed that what I knew by heart in my late-teens is now considered arcane knowledge that is unknown to most. I now am beginning to understand how the tube radio and amp folks feel now.

@YT-Observer

5 жыл бұрын

i used to know stuff about "valves" er "tubes" - most hardware and even some grocery stores had a?tube tester and a supply of common tubes

@cougarhunter33

5 жыл бұрын

@@YT-Observer I rescued two boxes of new ones from a ham auction a couple years ago. If I didn't bid a dollar for the box, they were likely going to go in the trash. I need to catalog them and see if any of my ham friends can use some of them.

@nightcrawler731

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks Jimmy

@CT-vm4gf

Жыл бұрын

I remember mine breaking down. I wrote to you back in the 90’s to see if you’d fix it. I guess you were busy doing other things.

I've used a bunch of those matrox cards! they are proprietary broadcast video capture cards! AND YES.... They run REALLY HOT!!!!!! that's why all the fans! the heat will KILL the card!

@UnreasonableSteve

5 жыл бұрын

Worst case replace the fans with modern high flow quieter ones.

@kridocaign5722

5 жыл бұрын

Mount modern passive heatsinks to the chips that run hot, and direct a 120mm or larger fan at it.

@volvo09

5 жыл бұрын

Did you do a lot with pc video back in the day? A few years ago I pulled apart an old pentium pc that was used for surveillance and one of the memory slots had a card in it that was not like any memory I've ever seen before, it actually looked like it may have been some type of encoder or processor that needed access to the memory bus to help out processing (but I'm just pulling that outta my butt because I don't know what it was, but it makes sense with PCI being slow). I saved the stick, but I never found out what it could be and if it's proprietary to some software, or useable for anything. There was no other hardware besides a winTV TV tuner cards and an average AGP video card in this PC. (Edit, and it wasn't a cache stick either, it was in the system memory slot with 2 sticks of pc100 memory)

@nathanhamman418

5 жыл бұрын

@@volvo09 Still got it by chance?

@patrickmurphy2323

5 жыл бұрын

I am a gamer, if unsure, water cool it,or just use stock cooling and do not touch the voltages

This computer is very similar to the old Zeiss microscope digital image capture setups that surgical pathologists and cytopathologists used to save images from tissue slides for use in publications and for teaching purposes. I saw a few of these similar machines in storage during my pathology residency. I'm actually watching your video right now on a modern Zeiss microscope PC stereoscopy imaging system.

@edsiefker1301

5 жыл бұрын

Absolutely. This was almost certainly used for digital microscopy. Medical, possibly research. I'd love to see what the software of that era was capable of, too bad the drive is gone.

@Kalvinjj

5 жыл бұрын

Pretty interesting and makes sense. In university our microscope capture PCs are just normal random PCs with a proper add-in card that the microscope's camera was plugged into. Dunno if there are other equipment that would require a purpose-built machine tho, since we just took static pictures from the microscope's camera.

@edsiefker1301

5 жыл бұрын

There's a pretty wide range of setups these days. Some scopes have standard PCs that just take input over USB3. Some scopes have really beefy input cards with insane data transfer rates for high res, high bit-depth, high framerate capture. Some scopes have little android PCs built in to them with basically a souped up camera app. All depends on the application and the budget.

@Kalvinjj

5 жыл бұрын

@@edsiefker1301 Makes sense, in our case the high frame rate and such wouldn't be necessary, still it had some input card on the PC to interface it, but had even USB on the camera itself. For us it was just for taking static pictures of metallography so it didn't need much more than the high dynamic range monochrome camera

@3DRC-707

5 жыл бұрын

Tyty for the conformation!

Having volunteered in the video/lighting/audio industry for years, I can tell you that a lot of proprietary hardware and software has specifications for guaranteed performance. If the product was spec'd to work with a Intel 486DX2 66Mhz, you don't dare go to the DX4 or to the AMD brand. Once you went off spec, even if you found a critical, 100% reproducible, software bug, the company would first blame the non-tested/certified hardware.

486 computers were still quite mainstream in 1995. Not sure why you would be surprised at the age of the clock chip.

@ZeroCool396

5 жыл бұрын

I agree I was born in the early 80's and yes the 486 chip was still around in 1995.In and around that time the 486 was probably the best at the time.

@PublicJohn

5 жыл бұрын

For a dedicated machine with only limited functions a 486 would have been cheap and lasted for years with no need to update. In the 90s I worked for a company that used the cheapest off the shelf items to build computers for cell towers. There just was no need for the newest and fastest. So I agree...this is not shocking at all.

@risquefiasco947

5 жыл бұрын

I sold a lot of 486 systems and CPU's for a long time after the Pentium's arrived. There was a lot of industrial software that was processor specific and that helped keep them in demand beyond the expected lifecycle.

@davetheitguy4516

5 жыл бұрын

Fact is, they were a very reliable and tried-and-true setup. Lots and lots of big businesses harnessed the chip for years after it had left mainstream popularity. Heck, Intel manufactured the i80386 CPU all the way up until September of 2007. While it was majorly obsolete for desktop systems, it still had many, many uses in the embedded systems market.

@holden_tld

5 жыл бұрын

my first pc was a packard bell with a 486dx2 that i got at sam's club in the summer of '95.

Love that power switch on the front!

@harshnemesis

5 жыл бұрын

I have the same one... I had another computer with one as well but that got scrapped

@nsvmmwhy

3 жыл бұрын

Keep fixing gameboys, TRF.

@akaJughead

3 жыл бұрын

That was a feature on those IBM PC clone mini towers

"I'm just gonna leave the cover off because screw it..." truest phrase ever uttered by anyone tinkering with an old computer.

@adventureoflinkmk2

5 жыл бұрын

Right?! Heck my game box (a old HP Pavilion a305w case) has all the panels off, even when it was its original form, all panels were off 😂😂😂😂

@TheWilldrick

5 жыл бұрын

@@adventureoflinkmk2 the one in the video is far worse, is those annoying U shaped that tended to snag on the lower lip and you had to fenagle it for a while to get it properly aligned to screw back in...

@Kalvinjj

5 жыл бұрын

Even new ones may I add, troubleshooting it and assemble the casing all the time is the biggest bother possible

@RustyX2010

5 жыл бұрын

those cases were a pain in the ass!

@KuraIthys

5 жыл бұрын

Not just old computers. Anything whatsoever that isn't working quite right. About 15 years ago I had a job repairing laptops, and it was routine to only reassemble them to the absolute bare minimum required to get them to work until you were absolutely sure it was working... Of course, disassembling a laptop can take 1-2 hours easily, and putting it back together can be similar. So, you have to be as efficient as possible when you officially only have 1 hour per system allocated. (no really. We had 1 hour per system yet non-trivial faults typically took 4-8 hours to fix. There was a lot of cherrypicking of what to fix at any given moment to try and make up for that...) On another note, I've had panels removed from my own stuff for weeks at a time when I wasn't entirely confident the thing was working... ... Also the top cover of my current case was removed for something like the last 3 years because I had a watercooler fitted in a case that didn't really have room for it, so the cooler sat on top... XD The cooler has since failed and I've had to revert to a stock intel cooler, but it was fun while it lasted...

EISA Configuration: From what I recall you needed a special EISA configuration utility floppy from the manufacturer of the motherboard.

@debido2023

5 жыл бұрын

Yes, EISA is post jumper, pre plug and prey. Config with software.

@martyjones7225

5 жыл бұрын

Exactly! Without the EISA setup floppy to boot to that EISA error will never go away. The EISA video card will also need the correct EISA config file on that floppy to be fully utilized.

@ygstuff4898

5 жыл бұрын

EISA was post 16-bit ISA, a 32-bit bus and around the same era as VL-BUS. An EISA bus was wickedly fast, but did require special setup from the config. utility, although it looks like that BIOS setup handles some of it. The system was probably still looking for the HDD that was removed, hence the EISA storage error message,

@gregwolking

5 жыл бұрын

Yep. That error message is coming from the video card BIOS, which is activated *before* the computer's BIOS/Setup utility. It's probably bitching because it can't load the video card settings from the original HDD. As I recall, those cards didn't have any CMOS configuration storage or battery backup of their own, so they had to be initialized from a settings file on disk during boot, whether from floppy or HDD. On the bright side, the card should work just fine as a basic VGA adapter -- you just won't be able to access any of it's advanced features, such as video capture, without the proper config. Sadly, I have no direct experience with an EISA video adapter, so that's the best I have to offer. I would try reaching out to KZreadr LGR (Lazy Game Reviews) for a helping hand. He's heavily into retro-PCs like this. He may have an EISA boot floppy he can copy for you, or at least be able to point you in a better direction where you might get one.

Back in that period, I worked as an electronics tech at a science museum. One of the exhibits I maintained was an "EYE TRACKER". (Our exhibit was based on work originally done at the exploratorium in San Francisco.) It would have you look at an on screen image with your eye in a known location. Video of your eye was then analysed and folded into the onscreen image to show you where / what part of the image you were actually looking at and how your gaze moved around. Your weird 486 looks and sounds exactly like the computer running this E/T exhibit. The time period is right too. I like your theory about the 'turn key' packaged systems. My science museum also had a planetarium attached to it, we ran into a similar 'prepackaged equipment' situation with for that, later on. Hope this is of interest. Cheers!

The video card isn't a "full-length ISA", it's an EISA card. And yes, it's a capture card. You should put the fan card, this board runs hot.

@halbouma6720

5 жыл бұрын

Yeah as soon as I saw that card get pulled out I thought "that's what the fans are for".

@Dr_V

5 жыл бұрын

True, but that particular kind of add-in cooling "card" is very inefficient, with a bit of tinkering you can either set up a case fan (80mm up front and remove all remaining back shields to make way for the airflow) or you can strap a modern video card fan directly on that old one (would give even better cooling and it's not all that hard to do).

@lauratiso

5 жыл бұрын

@@Dr_V I agree with you. I would put an 80mm fan and a heatsink on the chipset.

Call up LGR he'll know exactly what to do

@Bandit-Darville

5 жыл бұрын

He'll just wrap the thing with wood grain foil.

@andrewgwilliam4831

4 жыл бұрын

He's probably got all three models of it, but only two with the original packaging.

@Dillinger86

3 жыл бұрын

The 8 Bit Guy would know more about this machine

@TechnoboxOG

3 жыл бұрын

@@Dillinger86 eeh I wouldnt say that with the curent controversy that he's in rn

@retrorewind6042

3 жыл бұрын

@@TechnoboxOG what controversy?

"Cable management" wasn't a thing in 1991! 😂 Surf Wisely.

@gamer-dna

5 жыл бұрын

I used to tuck+fold and then rubberband my ribbons so I have to disagree! :D

@denshi-oji494

5 жыл бұрын

for the most part, I agree, if you could move the cables and get the cover in, all was good. I have seen many computers back in the day that also had the cable management rubber bands. By the time you need to do something that you needed to open the computer for, the rubber bands were falling apart, and the cables were all over the place again.

@und4287

4 жыл бұрын

Cable Dismanangement

@calvinwalker4654

4 жыл бұрын

Cable management became popular with RGB and glass windows. It has zero to do with airflow like many think. It's just for a window display

@linuxstreamer8910

3 жыл бұрын

in computers of that age there was no real place to hide it

This us like watching someone open a computer that is quite normal for when it was made, that is not familiar with anything less than 5 years old. That video card was quite common for microscope setups. the power output would have been to power the camera and lighting for the microscope. I doubt the video card will last very long in a 24/7 environment without the added fans. There were many special applications that were timing critical, and newer CPUS do not work properly with the older hardware/software configurations. I know of a few newer, not current, microscope inspection systems that are used daily, that are running Windows 98 and Windows 2000. Again due to compatibility issues, it is not possible to just do a simple upgrade. The microscope would also need to be upgraded since it is more integrated than what would have been used on your computer, and would cost more than just buying a new complete microscope inspection system.

@chadzentner8213

3 жыл бұрын

THANK YOU. I am a med tech and all this stuff he was so confused by is 100% normal for lab equipment and I immediately thought that this computer was driving some kind of capture device for a microscope.

@oogieboogie232

3 жыл бұрын

This workstation would be very strange to someone who normally only serviced consumer PCs and only occasionally ran into specialty equipment. We shouldn't let our exposure to industrial and specialty commercial equipment color our judgement, we are the exception.

The best way to clean a leaking alkaline battery is vinegar, followed by an isopropyl rinse. Alkaline batteries use aqueous or alcoholic Potassium Hydroxide. Using isopropyl to remove the battery acid reconstitutes it, and at that point you're merely diluting it. Doing this will leave caustic residue and not dry cleanly. Vinegar reacts with both Potassium Hydroxide and Potassium Carbonate to produce Potassium Acetate, CO2, and Water. This is both neutral and non-toxic, and won't cause further corrosion.

@TiagoTiagoT

5 жыл бұрын

Vinegar won't react badly with anything in a circuit board? Isn't vinegar itself a bit acid?

@virtualtools_3021

4 жыл бұрын

@@TiagoTiagoT the acid in vinegar is volatile and will evaporate so just dry it and it should be fine

@rootbrian4815

3 жыл бұрын

I use the exact same thing to clean out battery leakage.

medical computers are built to a completely different standard! plus all of the certificational stuff medical computer have to go through, it is completely understandable to have a 80486 computer in this role, proprietary medical hardware doesn't change very often!

@ninjamaster3453

5 жыл бұрын

True. Mid 90s had the initial Pentium chip flaws. They would stick to what works.

@TheSqeeek

5 жыл бұрын

It's still this way, too - I just upgraded a bunch of prescription dispensing machines that were still using Pentium 4 era hardware.

@ChristopherSobieniak

5 жыл бұрын

I wouldn't doubt this at all, I've seen plenty of computers in hospitals that weren't made to be home standard.

@JerryEricsson

5 жыл бұрын

Very true, when I moved home after an accident left me disabled, I found that nobody in my home town had any computer knowledge. The one lady who was trying to help folks knew just a little bit about the autoexec and config files and that was about it. So it was, that I became the "Computer guy" for the town, and served in that capacity for quite some time. One time I was at the clinic having a blood draw, when the gal with the needles asked if I could upgrade their computer, it was still running DOS 5 and she wanted 98 put on it. OK so I did the setup for her and she now had Windows 98, she was happy as a kid with a new toy until we found that the software to control her X-Ray machine would only run on DOS5. Thankfully I had DOS 5 setup disks and reformatted her back to the past glory, then we located the setup disks for the machine and I had her back up and running once more. I was very thankful when a fellow opened up a computer repair store here in town so I could retire, alas it never works out that way, I still get calls from former customers as it were when the guy uptown isn't good enough, and they bring me their ragged old machines to revive. Last one was a week ago, man it was trashed, had some bad memory and I no longer have any of that, so the fellow went away dissapointed. Ah well if you care for your machines they will work, this one looked like it had lived in the bottom of a trash heap, covers missing, keys missing, traces of spilt milk and grape jelly all over the screen and keyboard. I tried to explain to him that laptops are not furniture, but I doubt he listened.

@tekvax01

5 жыл бұрын

@@JerryEricsson WOW! I'm both happy and sad for you... hopefully , get to charge for some of this work?! I find some people will pay to have their car or home repaired, by a pro, but computers only get fixed by friends with no talk of remuneration! and that's not fair!

The 486 dx100 was actually sold at the same time as the first Pentiums and was a bit faster then the Pentium 75.

@zulumax1

5 жыл бұрын

AMD DX120 had a faster 40mhz bus and even faster, then there was CYRIX, Pentium was not the only game in town.....

@t.w.3

4 жыл бұрын

@@zulumax1 I remember the Cyrix 166Mhz as well, beating the snot out of the Pentium 60,66 and 75Mhz at much lower cost. Fun times. No bluescreens in those times, just random reboots. :)

@elgatoconruedas7744

3 жыл бұрын

You are wrong. The Am5x86-P75 133Mhz is the best 486 ever and its performance is even a little down to Pentium 75Mhz in some tasks. 486DX4-100 performance is something like a 40% lower than a Pentium-75

@Jah_Rastafari_ORIG

Жыл бұрын

@@elgatoconruedas7744 "The cat w/wheels"...? Named after a pet w/a spinal injury? (*shudder*)

@elgatoconruedas7744

Жыл бұрын

@@Jah_Rastafari_ORIG , not, it's about another completely different reason. I'm from Madrid, and here in Spain the Madrid citizens are named as 'gatos'. And now I'm a truck driver, so I'm a "gato con ruedas" 😅

Dude says "Cable Management" like that was a thing in 1990 LOL. Looks like my old 386 IBM from back in the day.... With the cyrix upgrade baby!

@stevea2909

5 жыл бұрын

Well, my friend, we used cable management on GE mainframes & A/B programmable controllers, back in the mid -.seventies

@SwedishEmpire1700

3 жыл бұрын

A guy i knew back then had the cover off just because he couldnt fit the cables in inthe box LOL he used alot of weird cards in his 486.

In a medical setting, being safe and trustworthy is better than being cutting edge and early Pentium were kind of buggy with FDIV and F00F bugs as examples.

@t.w.3

4 жыл бұрын

And not to forget the heat. I had a Pentium 60Mhz back in 1994, and even with fan and heatsink it melted the power regulator chips off the mainboard and loosened the cpu-socket. This was one of the reasons Intel went with the new Die selection for 90Mhz and above.

1995 is not late. Dedicated machines are not easily upgraded. Some used 386 and 486 to early 2000s.

@hiredgun7186

5 жыл бұрын

i have seen plenty of older CNC machines that used them well into the 2000's

@cjhawk67

5 жыл бұрын

@@hiredgun7186 You could still buy drop in 486 replacement boards with SOC 486 chips for CNCs and other equipment brand new up to at least 2013

@usoppbarbosa981

5 жыл бұрын

Many industrial machines have no need for big computing power. you'd be amazed visiting a semiconductor fab, and see lots of tools running on DOS or old embedded windows out of 386 and 486 controller PCs. One i was working on was using an old 33k modem for troubleshooting. When there was software issues, we had to run one long lead to the nearest phone socket and call software support in india for them to dial in and fix whatever was bugged. Thatwas like.. 2005? still in use today

@mayravixx25

5 жыл бұрын

I'm sure I've even seen some 486 machines. I know I've seen computers that still had a CRT display and barely ran Windows XP.

@mallon04008

5 жыл бұрын

Especially in the medical field where a certain specification of computer gets validated to use with a certain systems. Getting recertified on a upgraded computer can be time-consuming and expensive

It wasn't late for a 486 - I had 1. Remember W95 didn't come out until Aug '95

The added video card is a "touch screen" adapter and since it is an ISA card when they upgraded to newer computers they had go with ones with ISA slots to re-use that card, probably from 386 computers. The power connection was to run the "touch screen" circuity added to the face of the monitor. The modem could easily be as a crude (inexpensive) form if networking. E-mailing results to the main computer of some such, or was added by a later user. The added fan was probable because they didn't turn these off when they left work and sometimes they over heated and became damaged, so they "shotgunned" the problem by adding extra ventilation to all of them.

i think the EISA error means that you have to run EISA configuration utility

@GGigabiteM

5 жыл бұрын

Yes, EISA was not a plug and play slot. It was the industry's solution to IBMs Micro Channel architecture; Which was closed, proprietary and required exorbitant licensing fees from IBM to use. EISA beat MCA in the market, and even IBM had to eventually concede and use the open EISA standard. Neither standard was widely deployed though, EISA only really saw use in servers where the extra bandwidth they provided was beneficial to things like disk controllers and network adapters. Both standards, along with VLB were superseded by PCI in 1994, though I have seen some later servers from the Pentium II era still have a few EISA slots. In order to use an EISA card in a system, you need the system specific EISA configuration utility to configure the resources for the card. If you don't have this program, you won't be able to use EISA cards, but you can use regular 16/8 bit ISA cards since the slot is backwards compatible.

@JohnCookNet

5 жыл бұрын

@@GGigabiteM Perfect refresh. I used Adaptec SCSI and SMC ethernet EISA cards in Novell Netware 3.x servers and recall running configuration utilities you mention to set irqs and memory addresses. They were just as picky as using jumpers to configure and don't recall purchasing or maintaining any EISA cards in standard desktop computers as they were expensive to deploy in large environments.

@denshi-oji494

5 жыл бұрын

Most likely true. There were a few EISA cards that had jumpers, but mostly it was all done by software configuration. There were some cards that did have a ROM configuration entry point that could be accessed by the same method used with many of the hard drive controller cards in the early XT days. You would need to know the correct address point to launch however.

@StaticVapour590

5 жыл бұрын

@@denshi-oji494 Nice to know that

@millebi314

5 жыл бұрын

@GGigabiteM is correct. That EISA error message won't go away unless you have access to the configuration utility (usually a floppy disk). The 9 pin port on the video card was for the "hardware" mouse. It would usually use hardware to map the mouse pointer onto the screen and were generally better quality mice than the typical ones sold at the time (aside from the MS bus mouse card that was added) with generally higher resolutions/accuracy. The BTC brand keyboard was a very typical and reasonably cheap but "good" quality computer keyboard. The options were usually significantly more expensive (buckling spring) or very very cheap/horrible. The BIOS settings seem to indicate that it had something around a ~500 Meg hard drive installed originally. The tape drive also seems reasonable for a hard drive of that size. Tape drives were regularly attached to the floppy cables because the motherboards could not be expected to have 2 ISA-IDE ports and the first cable on the onboard IDE was typically attached to the CD-ROM and the hard drive, so the only place regularly available was the floppy drive cable. In many cases adding a secondary IDE port was a real pain to get all of the interrupts and DMA's set properly, so it was avoided by most tape drive manufacturers.

Industrial and medical Equipment often doesn't use the newest and latest tech because there are special machines or equipment connected who doesn't have driver and software that runs on Modern Computers, for example there are a lot of CNC Machines that run on Computers that still use Windows 95 as Operating Systems but they run Fine.

@ty2010

5 жыл бұрын

Some STILL use OS2 because it allows real time

This was used for medical research studies. The modem was for dialing the data center for unloading patient data.

Drive A: 5" floppy drive Drive B: 3.5" hard "floppy" Drive C: hard disk

@googleuser6814

2 жыл бұрын

^ this

The 486DX2-66 has certification for use in medical equipment. Since this PC was itself some piece of "medical equipment", that could be why it's based around that CPU...?

@freddym8579

5 жыл бұрын

Yeah, when new chips or hardware come to the market they need to be certified for medical use.

@RWL2012

5 жыл бұрын

woah, lots of thumbs ups! cheers people :)

@russellthompson3201

5 жыл бұрын

Good point. If this is a medical grade / FDA approved computer, then the mfgr must keep the same package. Changing equipment would require recert, a painful process. Also, the Pentium came out in 93 and was considered bleeding edge technology. This is where most I.T.ers like me stay with the sage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

@richardcline1337

5 жыл бұрын

Russell, that's also why a lot of us older types that are not into gaming and such do not want to change over to Win10 and have to dump a perfectly good desktop computer that does everything we want it to do on WinXP. A ton of software that was developed for XP will NOT run on Win10 and there are no subs or replacements for that software. Oh, Miscrosoft and Google keep doing their best to force the change but why kill a horse just because you see a younger colt nearby?

(currently at 21:06 so forgive me if this is mentioned later on!) That's actually a Bus mouse port, for machines where a serial or PS/2 mouse was not an option. Microsoft called it InPort (as it says on the card). VWestlife made a video on said mouse and goes into detail about it.

@swinde

5 жыл бұрын

I used a buss mouse for years because I did not want to give up a serial port to the mouse function.

@TomSmith-pl3tw

5 жыл бұрын

I had an optical bus mouse, you had to use a special mouse pad that had a grid painted on it. Much better than a ball mouse, but it was expensive.

When my wife was pregnant mod late 90s I can remember the ultra sound setups. Hell the local hospital just upgraded there's 5 years ago? I bet it was an old 486 like yours and was used for 15 years ++...

It's an ultrasound PC. For pregnant woman. That was easy to work out 😂. The special connector at the back was for the scanning tool they put on the woman's abdomen, the video card was a capture device for taking embryo pics. And 486 dx 2 66 makes perfect sense. The tape drive was for obvious backup of patient records for archive. Etc P.s great save with clock battery, well done!

@scottfirman

5 жыл бұрын

I remember them using one on my wife. It was on a cart and yes, it had the imager plugged into it. The thing was amazing!

@CitizenTechTalk

5 жыл бұрын

@@scottfirman I only knew what It was because I used to be a male nurse 😂. And they truly were state of the art back then, amazing machines! And purpose built for the job. They also had the best resonance imaging of all competing equipment at the time. They also probably cost about $50k at the time as well 😕. But you want the best quality you'll pay for it right?

That mainboard has EISA SLOTS ( Extended Industry Standard Architecture ) in a dition to the ISA SLOTS! That was a high end PC!

Thanks for reviving the memories of this 486 computer. The system was a workhorse. I had used them in industrial applications from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s both with DOS and Linux. Newer systems were expensive, so we kept using the 486s with parts cannibalised from other 486s.

As a former optician the Humphries name is quite familiar to me, and my suspicion is that what you have on your hands is is a computer which was used in an ophthalmologists optometric suite for the purpose of retinal photography. Patients would have been seated at a camera station which would have connected to the pc you have and after being given an injection of contrast material, (most times fluorescein,) a series of photos would be taken of the vascular structure of the retina, to allow the doctor to determine the ocular health of the patient undergoing the procedure. As an aside from experience having undergone this diagnostic the aftermath of the contrast was evidenced by bright yellow urine, almost frighteningly bright, soon after the injection had been administered.

1994 was the area of the first Pentium processor : the Pentium 60, 75, 90 and 100 mhz. It the same time, there was also 486 DX2 66 Mhz, Dx2 80 Mhz and DX3 100 Mhz. Because of an engineering bug with the floating point unit affecting the new Pentium, those CPU where considered unreliable for medical equipment or anything that requires an high level of precision. Here a reference : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug.

@sebastienproulx8704

5 жыл бұрын

I must also add that the cards are EISA, this was used only in workstations. Consumers board had VesaLocal bus. Both types where 32 bits bus. There where replaced by PCI, which appears with the first Pentium. PCI was new in 1995, only video cards where using this bus and some disk controllers. EISA was more mature and reliable at the time.

@ty2010

5 жыл бұрын

@@sebastienproulx8704 I had a 386 board with PCI slots, not microchannel, what could have been the origins on such a thing? Was a DX40 and I ended up running win95 and a network card in it. It was very odd as it still had the bios utilities to interleave the disk and all that.

@davidrobertson1980

4 жыл бұрын

Actually 1993, and you forgot the 486/50 and Pentium-50 FSB50 was quite common and wiki isn't God :)

@ty2010

4 жыл бұрын

@@davidrobertson1980 > finding a board with a board with a 50 mhz bus > manually setting delays and buffers on any peripherals if you do Worse, it wasn't even in the manuals on most things unless it was a build with bleeding edge everything or you're doing a retro build, there was little internet and sparse BBS to refer to either.

the eisa config error is becuause it is missing its harddrive thus its missing the eisa recovery partition or you have to rerun the eisa config utility

@mayravixx25

5 жыл бұрын

It's very likely, and from what I've seen about EISA, it was closed and proprietary, but supposedly EISA is backwards compatible with ISA.

@GrumpyUnkMillions

5 жыл бұрын

EISA was an IBM try to bump ISA out of the way. Get a new IBM PC and all the new IBM EISA bus card... only from Big Blue. PCI was a more genric bus that bumped the proprietary EISA out of the way.

@millebi314

5 жыл бұрын

@@mayravixx25 EISA was actually very open (compared to IBM's MicroChannel). EISA were also significantly cheaper than MCAs as well and supported by many more manufacturers too. EISA slots are backwards compatible with ISA slots, meaning that an ISA card can be inserted into an EISA slot and it will function properly. You can see the extra pins on the IDE card where the EISA slot is deeper than the ISA slot (more pins further up in the connector).

@mayravixx25

5 жыл бұрын

@@millebi314 Huh, guess you learn something new every day.

@schluderjupp

5 жыл бұрын

You can put an ISA Card in a EISA Slot. Yes. That is something you could not do with PCI or Microchannel.

Very interesting find, a 486 EISA machine, they're quite rare, hold on to it. Probably they kept on using a 486 because their software only worked with that capture card, and there weren't many Pentium boards with EISA, if any at all. Too bad the software is gone. The mouse card isn't a PS/2, it's an older standard that only works with its mouse. I don't know what is more rare, the card or the mouse... dunno you will ever find one. The only time in my life I saw one, it was from one of my dad's friends: he was desperate to find a compatible mouse after it broke, and I just directed him to buy a serial mouse. He was astonished that no shop told he that, and he thanked me with a LEGO box :-) The modem was likely used to connect to a remote server, these were the days before LANs and 24h Internet access became commodoties. And the battery... yeah. As soon as you said "it doesn't work with a flat battery" I immediately thought "oh no, it's got a DS1287!". Sometimes I hate being right. In the worst case - chip soldered and no replacement available - you can drill holes in the right spots to cut the battery off and solder an external one, I did it some times and it always worked (I guess I was lucky). It looks like your board was designed for a DS1285 clock chip, a quartz and a battery, but in the end they used the DS1287 that includes them. Just soldering a battery to the board doesn't do anything, because the chip pins for it are bent up to connect to the internal one - and this also explains why it's still good (get rid of it anyway). I wonder who thought that slapping on a battery would solve the problem, if you want to get rid of the DS1287, you have to add the battery, a plain DS1285, and also a quartz.

Damn, was literally born in the very same week that original Dallas Real Time IC was made

I just have to say that over the years I have thoroughly enjoyed your content. The topics are very very similar to my own interests. And it never is bad to take a look at your back catalog. This video is a prime example. The XT/486 era is the computer era where I started dabbling in building and repairing my own computers.

Neat keyboard! I actually have that exact model in my collection, and like you, never thought I'd see another one. It's not rubber dome, but foam with foil for the contacts. I had to split mine open to clean out all the decaying foam, but once I did, it started working just fine.

If it's Medical it's probably due to compatibility, I have a number of medical clients and they use a LOT of out of date tech to be compatible with their equipment and software

@wishusknight3009

5 жыл бұрын

No kidding. Rothballer orthotics products are horrible for that. One of my client still needs windows 3.1 for their ortho scanner.

@GrumpyIan

5 жыл бұрын

@@wishusknight3009 I read an article (think it was in 2012 when I read it) but it said that the US still used computers from the 70s and 80s on nukes for backups/ security. Though I do agree with something like medical there should be some sort of compatibility support from the manufacturer since those machines aren't cheap.

Pretty amused at how offended people are about this. "How dare people not know as much about computers as I do?!" lmao

@negirno

3 жыл бұрын

Yeah, especially that Jason guy. I'm not saying he isn't right, but he came off a tad condescending to me.

@undisclosedwalrus5856

3 жыл бұрын

@@negirno Indeed, people get so worked up about this. "Nothing odd about this computer." I mean, it has a damn tape drive in 1995, so that is immediately odd.

You dishonor IDE cables with no origami skills , 10 lashes.

@Reziac

5 жыл бұрын

LOL, boy does that describe the era of ribbon cables... especially when you'd filled up all your ports and slots. Origami and basket-weaving!

@EvilFookaire

4 жыл бұрын

@@Reziac And a lot of careful/not-so-careful pushing, in attempts to make everything just magically stay in place.

@Reziac

4 жыл бұрын

Oh yes, and the cable that is a quarter inch too short, and what idiot spaced these IDE connectors, anyway?? I used to hoard the long twisty ties just for reducing cable mess. (Didn't like using cable ties, too permanent, saw people cut ribbon cables by accident when they'd tighten 'em too far or worse, try to cut 'em off.)

EISA configuration error: EISA is Enhanced Industry Standard Architecture, an extended version of regular ISA ports that offered greater bandwidth and speed, but remained compatible with normal ISA cards. Now, the only EISA card I could see was the Matrox card. Take note of the edge connector... it's ISA with something extra below it. EISA configuration was a sort of "plug 'n' play" solution, in that you didn't configure the cards with jumpers. Instead EISA cards would come with a configuration diskette, where you could set up IRQs and other options... meaning, you'll need the configuration diskette for the Matrox card. Hopefully an archive or friendly youtuber has a disk image of the right config diskette for your model of graphics card. While the Graphics card works fine, it has still lost its settings, hence the error. Hope it helps :)

@gmscott9319

5 жыл бұрын

You saved me the time of posting that explanation! I had an EISA Mobo for my 486, back in the day. While everyone else was stuck with 33MHz (or 25Mhz) bus speeds, I was able to push up to 40MHz. 50 was not stable because of my graphics card, but at 40, it was rock solid and fast AF.

@wuss999

5 жыл бұрын

Exactly right. I used to work on them in a Naval base back in the day. I always left an EISA configuration disk inside the systems. Came in handy many times I can tell you.

@schluderjupp

5 жыл бұрын

You will need the following to configure the Computer properly: EISA Configuration Diskette for the Motherboard and the EISA Configuration files for the Video Card (once you have them, copy the Files to the Motherboard Configuration Diskette). Closely look at the Motherboard Connectors for the Video Card and the other Cards to really see the difference between ISA and EISA. For the short time it was around, EISA was a pretty good Architecture. But it lost to PCI and is not found anymore. But you need the configuration Diskette for the Motherboard. Happy hunting and I wish you luck.

So, basically, I've watched a 32 minutes vídeo, to see a guy change a battery and "hypothesize the obvious", that big machines that incorporate computers, like Ultrasound machines, X-ray Machines, even ATMs and Car alignment machines, have always used older computers than the machine itself, for reliability purposes. Great.

@grandetaco4416

5 жыл бұрын

I was very surprised that the soldered battery still had power. I was even more surprised that he had a Dallas clock chip from 2016. They still make that?

@fwingebritson

5 жыл бұрын

@@grandetaco4416 yes because the hobby of retro computing keeps them in demand.

@Knaeckebrotsaege

5 жыл бұрын

@@grandetaco4416 The chinese make (actually pretty decent) DS12887+ fakes. They cost around 3-4eur (4-5usd) a piece and work just fine. Used a ton of them for my retro PCs. As for the badly soldered-in battery... the board was likely designed for _either_ the DS12887 RTC chip _or_ an onboard RTC circuit and a barrel type NiCd cell (yes, *those* ones that leaked and destroyed so many 286/386/486 boards) to power it. Someone who got to mess with this PC before the dude in the video got it then tried to "fix" the bad battery message by soldering in a battery, thinking the original was missing and not aware of what the Dallas RTC module is. The next "oops" is that they soldered in a non-rechargeable Lithium cell in place of a rechargeable NiCd, so this "repair" is basically just fireworks waiting to happen...

@OnTheRocks71

4 жыл бұрын

The last hospital I worked in about a year ago had a 16-slice Siemens CT machine, and while the image reconstruction from the scanner itself was handled by some large proprietary machine, the computer used to operate it had a P4 and ran Windows 2000 Pro underneath all the custom software. In medicine, hardware sticks around for a looooooong time.

8:47 hits enter to boot from floppy and the 5 1/4 drive lights up and cannot figure out why it's not booting from 3 2/5 drive...

@TortureBot

5 жыл бұрын

MrShourin takes one to know one. What is a 3 2/5" floppy drive? Lol!

@wolfchacer0139

4 жыл бұрын

3 2/5? I am hoping you mean 3.5" or 3 1/2" course it's typical for experts to make you tube comments pointing out others errors as they add errors of their own. Kind of a blind leading the blind thing I guess.

@hypnotised-clover

4 жыл бұрын

3 2/5 drives, for when you are too specigic.

Actual repair starts around 30:00. Like the content but would like a short version too so I can watch during my lunch break . Keep up the good work !

REMOVE THE BATTERY. even if it tests good... remove it. it's a catastrophic failure waiting to happen. just look up 3.6v battery failures and you'll find plenty of examples on google images. better out than in. else, what you have there is an EISA Socket 3 board, which are EXTREMELY desirable for some people. you may want to sell it after removing that terrible 3.6 bodge battery. it will SELL. especially since it can use ISA and EISA cards, this is a GOOD thing for people making retro game machines.

@andygozzo72

5 жыл бұрын

that battery looks like a lithium, not a nasty nicad/nimh, it looks like it was replaced at some point.original probably was a nicad.. the lithium ones hopefully dont leak as much as the nicads,

@nickwallette6201

5 жыл бұрын

I haven't seen a lithium cell leak, so it's not such an big deal.

@SudosFTW

5 жыл бұрын

68kmla has many horror stories, and I have pics to prove it. Li-SoCI2 batteries don't leak, they vent, and then the fumes corrode, and then from the vent the stuff inside gets out, gets rusty and corrodes the board.

@robert1975031

5 жыл бұрын

@@andygozzo72 that looks a lot like a PRAM battery, they were typically used in macs. seems like they thought this was a cheap fix, and threw it in there, wouldn't be surprised if it's backwards.

@NightWolfx03

5 жыл бұрын

@@andygozzo72 the lithium cells sometimes vent rather vigorously and the stuff they vent is corrosive, I had one absolutely ruin my MAC IIci, as well as corroding the floppy drive and even getting into the vent of the hard drive and ruining it too.

Ok! your conclusions are completely correct... I guess I should have watched the entire video before commenting ... I work in broadcasting, turn-key solutions are always like this... We used the matrox cards with WinNT4 and couldn't upgrade the SP let alone the OS... Good Job sir!

@Kalvinjj

5 жыл бұрын

Sometimes we don't even have to go down to medical or broadcast tier of mission-critical for OS versions to need to be something specific to not have problems all the time. I work part time in my university's AutoCAD PC lab and the Windows 7 machines all behave nicely, even tho they're old and dying (10 years on the hard drives takes it's toll). The Win 10 ones are my biggest headache. It just updates itself at it's own will (regardless of what you set in group policy or services, may I add) or if they don't update, stuff starts to glitch on install without any error code to go by for troubleshooting. Then, when you try updating, it just doesn't. It jams and won't do it regardless how long you leave it. I just wish we could swap those Win 10 to 7 but sadly not really doable, considering the incoming security issues (not really much of a problem in this case tho), no support for new processors and lastly the actual original license of Win 10 on the machines.

@dastardlyman

5 жыл бұрын

@@Kalvinjj run windows uupdate blocker "wub" i use it on my crypto mining pcs to stop them updating . sordum.org its great

@Kalvinjj

5 жыл бұрын

@@dastardlyman Thanks for the suggestion, it's something I would try out, if the update blocking didn't screw up installations of other programs like it just did to me not so long ago. Namely Autodesk stuff doesn't really behave properly during install with tweaked updates, it may or may not install. Revit for example refused to install on some machines that had the update disabled, and since it just glitched itself to oblivion afterwards, it ended up easier to reinstall windows than troubleshooting that update mess. Quite sad this is what is called progress nowadays eh...

i am not surprised seeing a new 486 system even at 1996.back then computers were very expensive and it was typical for home users to buy 2-3 years old stock CPU and motherboard.sound cards and CD ROM drives were optional add on to make your computer 'multimedia'. Pentiums were considered as the high end powerful and expensive CPUs. My first computer actually was a Ti 486DX2 at 80 mhz, 8mb of ram and and 500 MB Hdd,running windows 3.1 back in 1996. dial up modems ohh memories i still remember all the sounds during the connection and slow as hell image loading.

@ty2010

5 жыл бұрын

My dx4 was faster than what most got of the early pentiums, besides the p60 and 90s it was faster than cyrix's at higher clock speeds.

Looks like the machine that maps and takes pictures of the cornea of the eye. Would have been a specialist thing not normal eye exam equipment maybe for a cornea surgeon.

@SixArmedSweater

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, I was thinking eye exams too.

Interesting machine! And the fact that you had the proper replacement clock chip just laying around is pretty awesome.

@tekvax01

5 жыл бұрын

I've got a whole sleeve of those chips! they were used in EVERYTHING back then!

in 1995 my daily driver was a 386

@williamjones4483

5 жыл бұрын

Got my start in '93 with a 286 CPU.

@dougiec6750

4 жыл бұрын

In '95 I used a PCjr at school.

@jurisjancevskis9076

3 жыл бұрын

@@dougiec6750 o w O

@jurisjancevskis9076

3 жыл бұрын

@@dougiec6750 o w U

@jurisjancevskis9076

3 жыл бұрын

@@dougiec6750 U w O

I've had some pretty good luck using a Dremel to grind the top off of those Dallas realtime clock chips to get access to the coin cell that's embedded in the epoxy. Find out which is the positive and negative, cut the battery out (leave the connections going to the chip as long as possible) and solder in longer wires (black and red to keep things tidy and idiot proof) to a two cell "AA" holder. Add a few blobs of two part epoxy over the soldered connections to prevent them from breaking. The chips are rather robust. They have a "real" chip embedded inside the epoxy and the coin battery is soldered to two of the chip pins on top of the "real" chip then slathered in epoxy.

Oh man. You know you're kickin' it oldschool when you open a case and it's a mass of IDE cabling. I do NOT miss those things! This was a really interesting video. I'm glad the algorithm threw this my way. I'm off to view some more of your stuff! Thank you! :)

Early 90s machine...expects cable management. Hahahahaha!!! There was no such thing, the most you could hope for is maybe the ribbon cables to be clipped.

That's a sweet machine. I loved this whole video, thank you, I hope that monster of a TV card can be taken advantage of by something. Matrox had lots of windows software (3.1/95) so there might be hope. Great video anyway :)

My first computer was a 486 DX66 in 1995 and it had the new windows 95. The first Pentium chips had a problem with floating point calculations and where only marginally better than the 486's. The bad press Intel was getting over the floating point errors extended the life of the 486. So yes, this computer is very likely a 1995/96 PC.

@ThnkCmdyFeelTrgdy

5 жыл бұрын

...My first 'computer' was a Radio Shack CoCo2... ahhh... cassette tape drive.... Then I bought an IBM PC Junior... no Hard Disk...heck it predated MFM hard disks...I eventually upgraded it with a custom daughter board.. took the 128K memory to 640K... Honestly, this computer seems advanced compared to what I used to. Heck, its a 486...wasn't that the first intel generation that build in the FPU ?

@mardus_ee

2 жыл бұрын

@@ThnkCmdyFeelTrgdy Floating-point units were separate, and were marked as 487 (companions to 486). I can imagine, that late-generation 486s had built-in FPUs.

@DFX4509B

2 жыл бұрын

@@mardus_ee I'm pretty sure that's for the 486SX, 486DX had a built-in FPU, IIRC.

I was doing phone support for AST Computer, and Compaq when Windows 95 rolled out. The 486DX2, and 486DX4 were the most common CPUs at the time. They ranged in speed from 33MHz - 66MHz with the DX2, and 75MHz - 100MHz with the DX4. In 1991, I had just upgraded my 286 to a 386, and spent $250 to upgrade my 2MB RAM to 4MB. 486s were out of home user's budgets in 1991. In 1995, Pentiums were also still in high-end business machines, and not commonly in home PCs until around 1997. The 486 had a LONG lifespan. I've built many 486 PCs back in the 90s.

Could have ran software where too fast of a cpu would cause timing problems.

@highpath4776

5 жыл бұрын

that applied a lot to 386 software, was it less so done in the 486 33/66 era ? I think it was poss the tape storage/backup unit for the room ?

@KuraIthys

5 жыл бұрын

I think at some point computers were changing fast enough that people realised hard-coding the timing based on CPU speed was a terrible idea. I was learning about game programming around 1998, and one of the first things you have to deal with when making a game engine is timing. The solution in 1998, which might sound slightly insane, but which works well enough, is to time things off the windows system clock. In a modern PC that runs at about 1 millisecond accuracy, which is good enough for most purposes. (if not, you use a high resolution timer, which is usually an API exposing hardware features) In a mid 90's PC, the accuracy of the windows system clock may have only been 3 or 4 milliseconds, but that's still generally good enough. In a game what you'd do is you measure time a frame completes, store it, then do the same for the next frame and look at the difference. Your goal is to keep that to some kind of consistent target, so if you're going too fast you just send the thread to sleep (1998 was of course well into the 32 bit windows era, so multithreading was already a thing). You can also just sit in a busy loop, but this eats CPU cycles accomplishing nothing, which is not good practice on a multitasking OS. If you're going too slowly... Well this largely sorts itself out because you use the actual frame time to determine stuff like movement speeds of objects and the like, NOT the framerate, thus if the framerate drops, objects move further in a single frame, and so on. Now, this works great, but there is an issue here. Although 4ms might not sound like a particularly accurate timer, it's actually a fairly high resolution timer in it's own right. This is possible because 486 and pentium systems (and later), have high resolution hardware timers as part of the CPU... Older computers may not have had any such timers, and anything much slower than about 10 milliseconds becomes extremely difficult to use for timing any kind of realtime behaviour against. Game consoles meanwhile continued to lock things to the framerate well into the early 2000's... Not ideal, because there's many examples of timing weirdness caused by the difference in framerate between PAL (50 hz) and NTSC (60 hz) TV standards, but the developers may not have had a choice. You take a 16 bit console like the SNES... And it has no way of timing anything besides in relation to the video signal. And rather obviously if the framerate changes, so does the entire basis you're using for your timing code. This is true for most consoles (even the following generation that did 3d graphics), and old home computers. For instance, I have an Atari 800XL under my desk, and that, according to documentation has hardware timers. All well and good but read the document closely and you'll notice these timers, aside from not being amazingly precise, are updated by the CPU during Vblank! Which means the timers are, once again, counting the video output timing. And yes, this is a system that has both 50 and 60 hz variants... So, yeah... Timing of computer programs has some weird quirks through much of the early history of computers...

@Darxide23

5 жыл бұрын

Medical equipment has a lot of bureaucracy to go through to get approved. It's more likely a case of "if it ain't broke" and this thing still worked just fine for whatever application it was used for so there was no need to update the hardware.

@Cadmandu2000

5 жыл бұрын

@@Darxide23 For similar "if it ain't broke" reasoning, I feel there was a good chance that it was actually in daily use right up until shortly before Collin acquired it. Perhaps less than a month.

When I saw the same tape drive my instant conclusion was that it looks very similar to the configurations of the computers of my parents medical clinic in Harrow, Ontario. In 1995 I was learning SoftImage 3D Animation on Silicon Graphics Indy machines with different tape backups too.

Can't help thinking my 18 year old nephew would cope better. This sort of "wierd" and "unusual" kit was bread and butter stuff. Even 4-8-6s (not 4-86s) were quite high end. Networks weren't that common (and used BNC co-axe connectors). and the internet was still likely a military or university resource with medical using tape drives and modems for connections to bespoke internal systems (hem!). Hardware often connected directly to interface cards (scsi was popular) - and it cost big money. It was a very good time to be involved in what was still a relatively new field. Jason Knight (below) obviously remembers too - pointless me repeating anything, he's covered it all.

@frederickevans4113

5 жыл бұрын

I started working for a telco in a "3rd world country" in late 1995 and they had LANs around the HQ and at least two other office complexes. I worked in their IT Department. They were also already selling dial-up Internet access to the general public. Almost immediately upon starting work there I had dial-up Internet at home either for free or very subsidized due to my job (it has been about 24 years, I don't remember paying much, if anything, for Internet while working there). I doubt that a "3rd world country" in Central America would have been ahead of the USA in 1995. I spent quite a bit of time on the phone talking n00b customers through how to setup dial-up access to the Internet using Windows 3.1. I got so adept at it that I went to an Asian customer's home (they could not follow my directions over the phone, probably language related) and upon arrival I noticed their computer was completely setup in Mandarin (Chinese). I proceeded to click the icons and setup the dial-up access and got it working in just a couple of minutes. Her comment was one of astonishment that I could read Mandarin. I can't. I had just done it so many times that I knew what to click on and what values to enter regardless of what the language under the icons was. This particular incident was probably at least a year or two into my employment there. In 1995, the Internet was already "a thing" and was already accessible to the public. 1985 was a whole different matter, worse still, 1984.

Ah the BTC 5100c (aka Siig minitouch plus), great snappy rubber dome board if you're into those, and if they're relatively unused. The predecessor of it is actually an alps-style clicky switch version known as the Siig Minitouch or Monterey K110.

EISA is Enhanced ISA. This is a plug n‘ play addition to the ISA bus. EISA config used to be stored in cmos also, so try to enter setup, set date and time and exit with saving. If this brings no success the bios should provide an option to reset the EISA config.

To nitpic slightly, your timline information is a bit off. 486Dx2 66 only came out in 1993, around the same time as the very first Pentiums, which had a bad floating point unit and were very expensive. Windows 95 came out in late 95, and adoption was not instantaneous. The vast majority of PCs at this time were running 16bit Win 3.1 on dos, and there was very little reason to buy a Pentium when a 486 kept a similar clock speed, and could be installed on legacy boards. I went to college on a 486dx4, which I used through 2001. Pentium I took off kinda slowly, and were eclipsed by PII, the main reason you see so many PIs is that everyone was buying them for internets in the late 90s, early 2000s at heavily discounted prices once PII came out.

@MrGoatflakes

5 жыл бұрын

Very true, I heard about the great way forward(tm) that was to be Windows NT, it took its sweet fucking time getting here. I think I was running 95 in about 1996 or 7? I remember I had a really brilliant friend that I ended up sharing a flat with and his favorite trick was to pull out files from win95 until it stop working, then put the last one back, eventually I think he got it to about maybe it was 17mb? So I used that on some weird pentium pro thing that was in a slot 1 motherboard but actually had a pinned processor that was installed on a bridge card. 200MHz maybe? I remember that old Pentium Pro class machine had MMX because I remember thinking "sweet my first vector processor AND first RISC machine" (Pentium Pro and above are basically like a RISC machine to run a microprogram targeting that "RISC machine" and the microprogram is really good at running CISC x86 code). I also remember being super excited when Java first came out, and trying the Hot Java internet browser, on my 56K dial up modem, and remember it running like a total dog lol But the system itself worked fine till past 2001 then I upgraded to something I can't remember what, except that it had an nVidia GeForce4 MX440 in it, my first 3D card, and that I played WoW on it in Linux using Wine. But before that PPro I had really the most crappy 486sx25 I think, don't even think it had VESA Local Buss, and even used my mum and dad's VGA 286 for college in summer (southern hemisphere) 1995-6? I put an extra meg of ram in it, bringing it to 2MB so I could run Turbo C++. All the college machines, well, the wintel ones anyway, were 486dx2-66s and ran Windows for Workgroups (3.11) and Novel Netware, with Xserver and terminal software so we could do programming on a "real computer", some Sparc thing running some dainbrammaged version of SunOS. IIRC the Pentiums only had a bug with floating point division, and eventually intel offered anyone a replacement CPU for anyone that wanted to hand their old borked one in. There was a kernel patch if you ran Linux, but with a performance hit, and you were basically shit out of luck if you needed accurate excel spreadsheets in windows or something, until intel replaced your CPU...

@user-ti4dl8tw7h

5 жыл бұрын

Yep, until the internet boom when AOL took off ("you got mail") where almost everyone owned PC for chats/email mid-90s, not many people were into computers, just some computer geeks had home PCs since early~mid-80s and majority computers were in workplaces, many of them not even running Windows, just DOS with proprietary software designed for their businesses needs

@MrGoatflakes

5 жыл бұрын

@@user-ti4dl8tw7h we had a 286 at home we got in 1991, second hand, but it was a VGA (actually it was better than VGA) Mitac model with 1MB of RAM and a HDD. At that time we picked that up from a local business second hand "serious computer users" were using "a real 386" with preferably an optional, highly desirable and highly expensive 80387 floating point unit or "maths co-processor" as we called it in Australia, "none of that 386SX rubbish" But the 386 although faster wasn't even used for most things, the 286 could run DOS games fine, and the 386's memory management unit didn't come in to use for most people I think I think the only things you couldn't do with a 386 was use "extended" or "expanded" memory managers of some type, which was some kludgey thing to allow you to use more RAM in programs than 640kb that DOS allowed. And let me tell you even using that 640kb took some doing once you had mouse and printer and dos and god knows what leeching your tiny memory. I think there was EMS and XMS, and I think programs could be specially written to use either and often both, but XMS was I later found out 386 and above only. No wonder I couldn't get it working! But I digress. Our 286 was actually superior to many 386 machines my teachers and friends had, because of the video card and montior, which was capable of some weird 1024x768 interlaced mode with 16 or 4 colours given the limitation of the video memory on the card. Although it could do 640x480 and I think even 800x600 by 256 colours from 16.7 million. Which was fucking amazing for us at the time, being used to the Tandy Color Computer II's 128x192 and 4 colours with two rather awful looking palettes! We played a lot of games on it, Lemmings, Eye of the Beholder, Tanks, Golden Axe, X-29 Retaliator, Oil Cap, Mahjong, Warlords, King's Quest and of course who could forget the original Sim City and Sid Meyer's Civilization. Probably much more I just can't recall. My brother did a lot of pixel art using some paint program I forget the name of, but the 256 colours were amazing at the time and he did some quite good work with it. I did a lot of fractal generation. The palette cycling on them at high res was simply mesmerising. I used a program called Fractint, and as the name suggests it used integer mathematics where it could. So it was relatively fast even without a maths co-processor, for the simple fractals at least, but a lot of the advanced stuff I wanted to do like using a fractal to make a height map terrain and render that as planets weren't really suitable to anything but floating point, so it was _painfully_ slow at this and very often I would get booted off the computer with an image half rendered after hogging the computer for almost a day. I also tried my hand at QBasic programming. I wrote a program with a lot of nested structures that took me ages to type in but I never got it working. Because you can't nest structures in QuickBasic or QBasic. At that time I had spent about three weeks solid on it and I just threw my hands up in horror at the horrible software! We also used a lot of WordPerfect 5.1, Borland QuatroPro (spreadsheet) and stuff, and we had a nice laser printer to go with it, those were really new and our teachers were amazed at how nice our writing looked. When we bothered to hand any in lol. Eventually I upgraded it to 2MB of RAM so I could run Borland Turbo C++, which was great. That RAM though was In SIPPs! They were horrible! I had to put literally my entire 86kg at the time weight on the edge of a board the size of a pack of gum, while the entire motherboard flexed horribly, sweating thinking I'm going to break the entire computer! But eventually it went in, and I had a sweet new object oriented language to do stuff in :D Not that I did much except learn how things worked, I don't think I made an entire program once embarrassingly, just programming assignments at university at the time. Although I did make small utility programs to make doing things on the computer easier... But yeah we didn't have the internet until about 1996-7 ish when I managed to connect to the university's dial up using god knows what. But I think by that stage the venerable 286 had been retired for a 486DX2-66 running Windows 95 with a Super VGA card and Super I/O card (IDE, floppy, Parallel and Serial ports) both VESA Local Bus, and an ISA Sound Blaster and a CD-ROM, hanging off either the Super I/O or the Soundblaster, I forget xD. Prior to connecting to the internet, getting software was 1.44MB 3.5 inch floppy discs. We had a 1.2MB 5.25 inch floppy as well, but that was rarely used. But still I managed to get a virus with the floppies, it was called the SLOW virus. Probably it was the last one I ever saw on my system except for I think one easily removed browser hijack in the mid 2000s!

@davidrobertson1980

4 жыл бұрын

@@MrGoatflakes WIndows 3.1 could be run from a 1.44Mb Floppy :) Yes I still have the disk!

excellent summation - and I think you are entirely correct....I have my eyes 'screened' every year (a diabetic issue) and they use similar equipment and the computer is linked to a powerful camera/microscope as you suggested - good stuff TDNC!

That brings back memory's had a 286 with windows 2.1 anyone remember that Guess what year no i am not going to tell you. Colin great video and thanks for the memory wake up

@JS-vz9yn

5 жыл бұрын

1987

@EvilFookaire

4 жыл бұрын

@@JS-vz9yn That'd be the 2.0 or 2.01 version. Windows/286 (The 2.1 version) came out in 1988.

The graphics card has a Brooktree video decoder chip on it (see the chip with the Bt lettering on it)

@BertGrink

5 жыл бұрын

It actually has several Brooktree chips, at least 3: the RAMDAC one is for generating a video signal, the Color Digitizer is for video capture, and then there was a small one which i couldn't decipher. What was hiding underneath that daughterboard is anyone's guess.

@m9078jk3

5 жыл бұрын

@@BertGrink Thanks for the details

26:39 I’ve never ever seen Esperanto as a language choice, anywhere!

@benja54

3 жыл бұрын

I noticed that too! How interesting that it was an option...

@IkarusKommt

2 жыл бұрын

FreeDOS is made by hipster geeks, they like such things.

I would assume this was quite early visual field test device. I knew later models that used USB port webcam and serial port for communication.

EISA is a 32bit extension to the 8/16bit ISA bus, it’s physically backwards compatible (unlike IBMs proprietary 32bit offering called MCA). It is a plug and play bus, but the configuration is done with a setup program supplied with the computer rather than with a firmware setup. It was never very popular in the mass market, but was used in more specialist computers and servers of this age. The hardware was tried and tested.

That 9-pin video connection is CGA

@schluderjupp

5 жыл бұрын

or EGA.

The modem was probably used to send faxes to doctors or other hospitals.

@gertraba4484

5 жыл бұрын

or chat in old time Bulliten boards on AOL

I just found your channel, thanks to youtube algorithms. Interesting delve into custom built PCs for a specific use, as well as the tear down. I also recognised a few of the parts, as that's when I started tinkering with PCs, when I could get parts, and using all the add in cards so I could plug in peripherals, was one of the joys (NOT) of PC ownership. Yeah DAT tape drives connected to the floppy controller, I remember having to set one up for one of the companies I worked for, we even had to use a long CAT cable to each PC from the one with the TAPE drive for backups as we had no network switch. That was a fun weekly task, but we made do in small businesses.

Not a computer scientist, but I *am* a biologist/chemist and I have some familiarity with special computational needs in a lab setting. I think this was a computer used in a laboratory setting, possibly to take high-quality microscope images and send them to a cross-company (in multiple states or countries) database. That explains the video capture card, the weird output port, and the modem connectivity. I base this on two things I know involving computers and biology: 1) There are all sorts of software packages that specifically connect computers to high power microscope or macro cameras *solely* for capturing images or video of cell cultures in vivo. This takes a lot of processing power, and remember that video quality for computers was not the world's best in the 90's. The compact nature of this machine would have fit very, very well on a lab bench when connected to such a high-power camera. This is probably for that, and likely quite state of the art for the time - especially since you mentioned Allergan, a pharmaceutical company. It was possibly used in R&D applications to take photos and video of pharmaceuticals in action on cell and bacterial cultures, say, for an antibiotic. 2) In a lot of laboratory settings, especially chemistry and biology, if it ain't broke you don't fix it. The reason this computer was likely still in use was either due to monetary reasons, or because it as you put it "just worked" better than the updated machines due to backwards compatibility problems on newer systems. I can't tell you how many computers I have used that run XP, 98, or even as far back as *MS-DOS* (!) in order to properly emulate, acquire, or store data for a necessary test that just was not able to be done on updated machines. I've emulated physics stuff in college with MS-DOS in 2012, and used a stats package in a downgraded Excel on Windows XP in about 2016 because it... just worked.

Current PCs also don't store the settings in flash, they use a battery backed piece of RAM inside the PCH chip. The EISA thing is something typical for EISA machines, to setup EISA's PNP you need a machine/motherboard specific program. I guess the battery cell on the board powers the EISA settings memory, but YMMV

that was an ultrasound machine. well part of one.

Just in case not a million people have commented this under here already: the "bizarre" connector you found on the computer that's used as power passthrough, is called a D-Sub 5W5 (with only three pins connected). There were used in high current applications where every pin is rated for 30A. The only application of those I've come across, is certain types of motor control (for a conveyor belt of a cash register in this case). The motor was powered through the large pins, and the IR sensor and the motor control was over the smaller pins on a D-Sub 7W2 connector. And in case you don't want to shell out the money for new DS12887s or mod it with a battery holder, get an open GW-12887-1 drop-in replacement. They come as a small PCB that fits into the 24-pin DIL socket, with a holder for a CR1225. They go for around 25 USD on ebay, so they're not as cheap as a relatively new DS12887, which are still being manufactured.

Why are you so baffled about the modem in a 1995 system? It's 1995 not 1975 my dude.

@eternalcowboy585

5 жыл бұрын

I remember my first modem was a 1200 baud for my c64 and I think as an 8 year old to maybe 10 max I recall dialing into a place called Qcity maybe?? a chat-board....all the B.B.S were awesome....free games yea....lol I was a pirate and I didn't even know it!! But man let me tell you the exciting times was America Online in 95 to 97 era. I meet so many hoes....great lays, but man every one of them turned out to be psychos...lol...it was more fun then too. For instance you really never knew who or WHAT would show up at a meeting, or open a door to an apmertment you just knocked on. Praying to god she aint over 150lbs lol!! Edit: I got curious it was Q-Link/Quantum link...for c64

Really unfortunate the hard drive is missing as it would have told the history of this machine

@MrGoatflakes

5 жыл бұрын

Yeah but probably it had medical in confidence stuff on it, so you can't just fling those details out there you've got a legal requirement to protect it and if you don't you will be sued through the arse. Very sad that such a wonderful machine basically got a lobotomy though.

8:50 Thats the same way computers work today... only the battery type is different. Today you have HDD autodetect and no floppy, so the loss of hardware information is not critical. 20:55 THIS IS NOT PS/2! It is InPort, a bus mouse type. Try to plug in a PS/2 mouse, it won´t fit unless you use extreme force ;)

Hey Colin, I remember 486 machines were absolutly common for 1995. Yes, Pentiums were available, but were very expensive. I would guess this machine could have been used for some kind of medical ultrasonic examination. Greets from Germany

I was in college back when this machine came to life. When I started college in 1994, I brought my old 386SX with me, and for Christmas that year, I treated myself with an ATT 486 which I ordered off Computer Shopper. I sold the 386 for what I paid for the 486, and since Windows 95 had just been introduced, the buyer wanted that OS on the machine. So a friend of mine in college had just been given a copy of 95 by her rich dad, she allowed me to copy it, which I did with some old hacked copy program, and installed it for the buyer of my old machine which barely had enough power to even boot 95 but that's what she wanted. The college machines were still all running 3.11, and we had one set up to run OS2Warp 4. All the machines, of course were capable of being used as terminals for the Linux machine that was hidden somewhere in the bowels of the College, perhaps in a janitors closet. Pentium computers were just being introduced in my second year, which was, of course 1995, but the majority of the machines in the computer labs were 486's. I found a cheap 386 laptop which I used for most of my college writing and such and kept my 486 machine for running games. She had a 20 meg hard drive which was filled with games and some photos and such. Since we had no availability of networking in the dorms, I purchased a modem and had that set up so I could dial out to a local BBS in town, it was run by a fellow student, who kept the "adult" portion of the BBS protected with a password, which he shared with me. I was quite good with computers when I began college, and entered as an older then average student, aged at 48 years old and being a disabled cop was treated quite pleasantly by most of the students and faculty. In the computer classes, I ended up as an assistant to the instructors, and in fact had to teach them quite a bit about how the computers worked. This helped me graduate with a 4.0 GPA at the top of my paralegal class.

Wow a 486 with bad cable management... Duh... during the 486-era / before / and slightly after that, there was no such thing as cable management. No one heard of it before / didn't see the use of it. It was from Windows 95 / 98 onward and even more so with Windows XP that people started to manage there cables. To answer the EISA bit: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Architecture So it probably has something to do with one or more of those cards that are fitted into the PC. My guess is the Modem, or maybe even the parallel-card, pointing towards that tape drive. Something that wasn't a default in a 486 or any PC at that time. Furthermore: the Hardware older then what was for sale, is more likely due to the fact that the software needs to run on the hardware the contractor knows. Newer hardware probably couldn't handle the software. Eye company / clinic is quite likely. As you mentioned Carl Zeiss yourself. The tape drive could be for back-up tasks. The Graphics card will be for the eye-equipment. I have seen that odd pararell port you mentioned once. And I think it was also at an eye company that I saw that.

I think it's the control computer of a Field Analyzer from Humphrey / Zeiss. There is a modern version called Humphrey HFA II-i.

Looking through the details, I would say it was a test bed for the CARL ZEISS Humphrey Matrix 715 Visual Field Analyzer. It's purpose then would be to emulate the functions of the Humphrey Matrix 710 Visual Field Analyzer with improvements. The modem is not actually for modem usage but for a clicker the patient will use during testing. This clicker was used all the way up to at least the 740 models. The power ports in the back were probably within the hardware constraints to run the 715 test bed hardware. The computer hardware is good for a test bed as the expectation will be like with the 715 is to have it as a fully integrated unit. The tape drive was the way forward at the time, while the final product came with what (looks like a 1x or 4x) CD drive and diskette drive. The 60% keyboard, albeit in with different key markers, matches that of the 715. When you say this was probably a one-size-fits-all, computers were rare and were either meant for office use or then for running specific hardware applications.

Man that takes me back. In the summer of 1994 I built myself a 486 DX4-100 MHZ machine. I had worked all summer long to make the money for it. For the time it was a beast. 16 MB of RAM, 420 MB Maxtor IDE hard drive. Diamond branded video card (No clue what the model was but it was PCI) Sound-blaster AWE 64 and even a Viewsonic 17" CRT. Oh yeah and a 33.6 modem since the 56k battle was just getting warmed up and no one knew which standard would win out. I believe I spent about $2200 building that system. The parental units were pissed that I had spent all my summer work money on it. But dad still had a 286 and it would not play Battle of Brittan or Doom. Internet? HA! I had a giant list of bulletin boards to dial up to. And since dad had got the new "Metro" line installed I could call any number in the 214 or 817 area codes with no long distance charges! Oh for the days when you had to search for your teenage porn by looking at a list of .jpg file names on a screen and had to download them to see them. Nothing like waiting 7 to 10 minutes for a picture to load only to find out it sucked. LOL Raise your hands if you spent 5 or more hours trying to get the serial or parallel "networking" running to play a game against a friend. (After lugging the roughly 22 tons of computer gear down from your bedroom over to his house and the upstairs to his room)

Hi All Often vendors will push old tech machine as new, well they are, and 486 was still produced new in 1994 espceccialy late dx2 and dx4 series I worked for a large government enterprise at the time and when i left in 1997 all new machines were still a combination of 486 and pentium 60/75/100 Often the 486 would be chosen especially if you needed ISA cards ans many of the new pc's at the time offered just 1 or no ISA slots, as most new P5 mother boards were using the new PCI style slots Nice find, all i have left of old machine is a first generation Pentium 100, unfortunately it has the dreaded dallas chip, i have bought 3 "new" from ebay but they were all old and flat. I did have 2 of them modded with the external battery 2 to cd3032 cell and the other to a 2 x aaa holder. My prior 483/386 had the old lithium built in battery that often leak, but one of them had ( i still have it ) a small square box with velcro strip for the battery. Some motherboards liek the one you have a re pre drilled for a external battery, which may or may not be rechargeable, the CMOS chip or socket may or may not be a dallas setup with inbuilt battery, so often you can get lucky. Unfortunately some people though using a external battery will back up the dallas when it dies, this is wrong, it will not, well it some times ( like in my one ) keeps the clock going, but the other setting go back to zero. Regards George

@denshi-oji494

5 жыл бұрын

george maragos some of the boards also had a jumper, that was a solder type, not the suitcase type, to select the external battery when a different clock chip without a battery was used.

Your cable management issue can be 100% traced right back to that computer shop you got it from who removed the hard drive, typically when a vehicle gets tossed in the trash as this one was destined for, its never going to be used again, so at that point cable management, who cares its going in the trash. I had an NEC Ready 9012 PC which had that same Dallas clock chip in it, back in the 90's that stupid battery was like $50 because of the integrated battery/clock chip nonsense. On the other side I had a Macintosh Plus Classic from 1987 that had an odd something like a 6V battery that looked like a AA battery only slightly longer and slightly larger in diamater, that thing was a pain to find and was about $8. It was an odd time back then. Most of the systems I worked on in school had the CR2032 or similar batteries. Our server had a similar keyboard as your machine in the video and the keyboard was not only smaller but it was also a water resistant keyboard. Maybe that computer was used in the X-RAY/Cat Scan type labs which would in deed need to capture images, maybe a mammogram or ultrasound machine? I have a 1U rack mount server that was pulled from a hospital that was running their X-RAY machine. So I figured since I got it for about $120 it was some old ancient architecture. It was anything but ancient. It was only a couple years old, and had a quad-core i7 processor at 3.06GHz, 32GB RAM, and had an extremely odd add-on video card. So I contacted the seller and inquired about it...as luck would have it, the seller was the same person who actually built and serviced the systems so he was able to tell me everything about it and it was pulled from a working environment as the hospital upgrades their systems every 2-3 years, so I got a relatively new 1U Rack Mount server which cost the hospital $20k+ when it was new. I was so excited to be able to get it and find that the person I bought it from on ebay actually was the same person who built, installed, maintained, and replaced them so they were able to fill me in on the system. The video card I can't recall the brand but it did similar to the video card in your system, it had an input/output video so it would of course be able to capture the X-Ray image and save to disk.

I'm way late to the party, but as an owner of a DX2-66, I can tell you that they first came out in 1992, and I bought mine in July of 1994. While Pentiums had come out in March 1993, I chose the 486 because it was several hundred dollars less expensive, which left me the ability to get a RAM upgrade to 8MB and a SoundBlaster with CD-ROM drive. I'm willing to bet this piece was built to a spec for a specific purpose.

I used to do installations of a piece of medical software that qualified as a "medical device" and one of the things I learned while working in that industry is that sometimes even a simple change can result in your product needing to go through the FDA approval process. There's a quick approval for types of devices that are known (like a toothbrush) and a lengthy process for devices that are new. Which process the device needs to go through largely depends on the laws at the time, but might also depend on how the company's SOPs are written. So, not only do I suspect that you are right, that this PC was part of a turn-key solution, but also that upgrading the hardware was likely a change that would have temporarily forced their device out of the market until they got re-approved. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if you could find a 386 version of the same device (albeit with a different badge on the front).

I have a 486 board with its original 1992 Dallas clock module that is still good!

the industrial world still sees windows 95 in use on new gear

I'd say this thing was used to record pictures or whatever from some kinda medical equipement (imagery ?) and the modem was maybe used to send it to a local server (something like a NAS, but from the past ^^). I know for sure that administrations, army, hospitals, schools, etc. like to stick to old devices because they like the fact they are proven and reliable. And maybe, for a scanner they didn't have to use a Pentium III btw...

Thought that might have been a power connector, some HP ProCurve switches have a similar connector for external backup power packs.