Glad to see my old mitac is getting some love, you got further than I did. Also awesome meeting you! Hope things are going well.

@psivewri

Жыл бұрын

Yeah I'm going well thanks! I'll get around to making a video about that G4 Powermac at some point as well 👍

@bluemi858

Жыл бұрын

@@psivewri looking forward to that g4 mac video

@LegoWormNoah101

Жыл бұрын

I was very worried the motherboard itself had gone bad

@milkbucket2011

Жыл бұрын

@@psivewri I was worried that the power button would snap right off!

@wilkebitter5742

Жыл бұрын

Did the unit have it's original use back in Australia as well? I found it curious that on the back it had the German post office logo (the horn 0:25) and even a "TÜV" certificate on the inside so it's been cleared at some point for german office use 🤔😋

“Novell Labs Tested and Approved” means that computer can run Novell NetWare, which was a networking operating system designed for cooperative multitasking over the network. You no longer hear about NetWare because its market segment was absorbed by Microsoft and Novell moved on to SUSE Linux when it acquired the company.

@grahamek86

Жыл бұрын

Novell put up a strong fight against Active Directory and had a lot more functionality out the box. Unfortunately the native AD integration within Windows just won SysAdmins over. I used to work at University of Glasgow and they had Novell NetWare based student labs right up until 2007-08.

@e2e-active712

Жыл бұрын

I think MicroFocus still develop a version of NetWare although I think they changed the name

@shibe32

Жыл бұрын

That good to know .

@ThermoCoupleNZ

Жыл бұрын

you know a guy is a little wet behind the ears when no idea what Novell is/was lol :-) I spend 5 years supporting an IPX Wan back in the day

For those drives that scanned perfectly but had issues writing, most of the time it is just due to weak sectors since they haven't been written to for such a long time, causing the data to fade. After all, the drives are well over 20 years old so it is common to see now a drive from that era that scans fine but doesn't write entirely perfect. Give it a couple full formats, and it should refresh the entire drive media.

@vwestlife

Жыл бұрын

The problem here is actually that this system has a maximum hard drive size limit of 504 (binary) or 528 (decimal) MB -- it can't address any greater than 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors per track. This was a problem with all IDE-based systems up until the mid-1990s late 486 / early Pentium era, when new PCs began implementing LBA (Logical Block Addressing) to allow hard drive sizes to exceed the 504 / 528 MB limit. Two ways to get around this limit are to either use drive overlay software, or install an updated BIOS chip.

Your experience failing repeatedly with the hard drives reminds me of literally any old computer project I’ve done. So many hurdles, but the joy is in the journey.

Oh my god, I think this is the PC I used exactly 32 years ago in a MiTAC Computer dealer in Taiwan!!

I absolutely love that case design!

The File Manager from Windows 3.11 has been made available for download on Windows 10/11 in the Microsoft Store

I have one recommendation: find an ISA network card for file transfers. Also as for the performance of that 386SX-16, I would treat it like a 286 with a 386 instruction set attached. If you ever want to upgrade the CPU, a 386SX-40 from AMD and an 80 MHz crystal would max it out and allow you to run Windows 95, as long as you upgrade the RAM with it. I ran Win95 on the AMD 386SX-40 with 16MB of RAM just fine, albeit rather slow.

@BalancedSpirit79

Жыл бұрын

I agree, if that had a better CPU and at least 8 megs of RAM it could easily run 95. He might even be able to find a 486 upgrade from one of those old companies like Evergreen.

@liammarkey6933

Жыл бұрын

Wasn’t the CPU integrated into the mobo? 🤔

@BalancedSpirit79

Жыл бұрын

@@liammarkey6933 I saw an empty socket, although that could possibly be for a 387 coprocessor

@JVHShack

Жыл бұрын

Tbh, the CPU can be replaced with some SMD soldering skills, lots of flux, a soldering iron, and patience. Necroware released a video on this very topic a while back.

@JVHShack

Жыл бұрын

@@BalancedSpirit79 You are correct in your assumption of that socket. It is indeed for a 387 FPU.

Even though he is much younger than me, it's wild he also grew up with Windows 3.1 and has the same childhood memories of Paintbrush, Solitaire, midi music, and DOS games. With most people I meet in their 20's, Windows XP was their childhood OS. 😳

@lucasrem

Жыл бұрын

everyone here did that, they are still in Windows....

The 640k base memory isn't soldered. It's part of the 4x 1 MB sticks. Systems of that era always notice the first 640k as base because that was the typical maximum in the original 8088-based IBM PC's.

@oso2k

Жыл бұрын

Also, I think I heard you say PRECOMP as "Precompression". It's Precompensation. Great video though!

@gersonl

Жыл бұрын

It's Bill Gates fault. "640K ought to be enough for anyone" he said. And here we are. Still that 640K base memory on IBM compatible pc's.

@redleader6442

Жыл бұрын

@@gersonl At least that's more than 4 times the 128k that a certain someone else said would be enough for an entire GUI based system 3 years later.

@tennickjestzajety69

Жыл бұрын

​@@gersonl these are not his words. it's a urban legend.

This thing looks so damn cool!

I tend to restore daily usable stuff... you'd be surprised how old hardware can be and still be usable today... if you install drivers properly and choose a nice fit as an OS

CF to IDE adaptors are handy little beasts. Make sure you have a range of CF cards to try. I've found some CFs that work well and others are not compatible with these old BIOSs.

@EgoShredder

Жыл бұрын

I've had good luck using Sandisk Ultra II CompactFlash cards with most machines, including Atari STE and Falcon 030 etc.

640K base memory doesn't mean RAM soldered to the motherboard, it's the natively addressable memory space on the CPU architecture. Anything above that 640KB was considered extended memory area.

I was a Service Tech for Mitac in the UK - worked in the North West. The PC's where mostly bought from a store called Dixons. Nearly 25% arrived at the buyers house DOA. We always got it in the neck from the buyers when we turned up.

Great video as always! Love to see these kind of content

@LightlyInsane1

Жыл бұрын

u were first comment

I never get any notifications for your videos, I never get them in my recommendations either. But I always get your community posts so I can watch your amazing videos

Those bodges to the board were probably there from the factory. Big boards like that are expensive. It's often cheaper to fix a problem by hand on a production run then to get the boards remade.

@KevinFields777

Жыл бұрын

And these were definitely more common from small manufacturers who couldn't afford to just throw a dodgy board away, unlike Dell or Hewlett-Packard. Definitely not industry standard by the end of the 1990s though, manufacturing costs had significantly come down and it was more cost- and time-efficient to chuck them than spend time diagnosing and repairing them.

I recognised that Clarence drawing immediately. love big lez show

Hypertek Computers is a name I haven't hear of in a long time. I remember one of my first jobs in the 90's when they first opened in Macquarie Park Sydney was working in there warehouse assembling there computers. As well as taking the front bezels and stamping the Hypertek name on them. They also made memory modules and network cards which we also had to put into there retail packing box for sale at various retailers like Harvey Norman.

@lucasrem

Жыл бұрын

it was a production company in Taiwan, my guess it's a white Tulip design board. This guy is not understanding these old systems, how you do disks in the old days, or what bios it is, IBM compatible, who did that????

I love the fact that you took your time to explain everything into details

Your vids are always a treat. Cool seeing Novell stuff.

Glad to see I'm not the only one with a storage media collection

Best content ever

im glad to see your back at it, I was missing your videos!

Psivewri I love your channel so much and am binge watching you!

the best thing about the clarence you drew is that it looks exactly like the show

10:50 High 5! I love picking Tropical Beach Deck when playing Solitaire too! I particularly like the sun makes face to me!

Your content is much appreciated 🙏🏽

I had this one in the early 90s! But I remember it looking slightly different, for instance the activity LEDs were a different style. Anyway, really happy I finally got to see one again, wish I still had mine.

I enjoyed watching you experiment with different configurations in order to breathe new life into a vintage computer. It's kind of like someone rescue a pet from an animal shelter.Thanks for another great video.

Both the brothers are slaying on their vids. Love your videos 😁😁

Nice find, thanks for the video!

Wonderful computer I have similar 386SX 16mhz 4mb ram. Keep on DOS just to remember me for the good old days.

such a nostlgic device :D love your videos :D

So cool to see a CPU without a heatsink

That computer looks really cool!

@hugoknapp

Жыл бұрын

Literally just clicked on this thinking it was my system prefs lol

@zerofeltan

Жыл бұрын

@@hugoknapp lmaoo

wow that has basically the same specs as my old laptop i got with 3.11 for workgroups, and i like this one's design!

LMAO you go on paintbrush and thought- "hmm... I should draw Clarence!"

7:08 Cool feature!

Great video bro, greetings from Venezuela!

This one deserves all the love it can get... Also i do like the concept of CF card adapters it's just i prefer spinning drives

Amazing review 👍

Love your videos

Nice little find.

neat machine, loved the video

Great video! You'll need the Cinco MIDI Organizer for all those MIDI files.

Those rubber feet have survived 32 Australian summers. Legendary.

Great video I love your videos dude 😈👌

This channel needs more views!

wow...flashback to my 1990's existence of trial and error and staying up all night hoping to get some ancient OS installed and the PC functioning!!!

@mattblatchley2061

Жыл бұрын

COOL old 386... I got one from my school's library for $5...got AOL 3.0 running on it and then donated it...I'M KICKING MYSELF... I kept the Mac Classic tho

I was 10 year, 2 days old when that case was stamped!

I was just a few months old when this computer was manufactured. I feel old lol!

Hi psivewri its a very good video man keep it up

OnTrack Disk manager is the best solution to install large hard drives on old machines, I used it to mount a 4 GB drive in my 286!

nice video!

Nice little machine

Did anybody notice The Ju 87d model or more commonly known as the Stuka dive bomber at 1:54 in the bottom left corner of the screen!! It’s very cool!

I love your hair dude!

i feel so much nostalgia.. as a kid i played some games on this little but nifty machine, and it was awsome! i have never seen one again in person since then. so a rare find i guess?

@lucasrem

Жыл бұрын

I found a lot of these systems in 1995, overcomplete office Novell machines. My task was, remove all programs from PC's, run all on the NT network and online, so we got a lot of trash. gave them away, after i did install DOS + all games on them as DOOM and heretic, clusters of machines so many were trashed, 386 being replaced to run Windows on Pentium. Over 100 machines, all gave them away, kids loved them!

The problems you had with the hard disks probably were due to the limitations of that era's BIOSes for the drive parameters. Usually on 2/3/486 PCs the BIOS limits for those settings were 1024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors, which means a 504 MB hard drive. Drives where those values were exceeded weren't recognized or if they were, usually they worked erratically due to sector addressing issues. In fact some hard drives bigger than 504 MB had a jumper to artificially limit the capacity to that number, so the drive could be installed in an old PC. You were lucky with that Seagate working in your old machine. BTW a Seagate ST32122 was in my first Pentium PC, and I still have it around (I still have that PC too) :-)

@cdos9186

Жыл бұрын

Appreciate the knowledge a ton. Unfortunately now most people just assume the drive isn't working correctly which is sad since they are unaware of this issue. You can't just throw in any capacity drive and expect it to work correctly, and I appreciate that you mentioned it for me and others!

@mima85

Жыл бұрын

@@cdos9186 You're welcome :-) I was there when those old PCs were still around, my first PC was an 8088 and the one that came after was a 486, so I had the occasion to see in first person their quirks or read about them in IT magazines. To be fair, Psivewri is younger than me probably by 10 years so is normal for him to not know all the details about PCs and parts typical of the 90ies. On the other hand I for sure miss a good number of details about PCs, accessories and parts from the 80ies and earlier. We all have to learn something, it's normal :-)

That was a lower end machine in 1991, as the 486 was just starting to come out. That was the year I graduated from high school, and I had purchased a Tandy 1000TL two years before. The performance of machines was jumping ahead by leaps and bounds back then. Thankfully things have evened out a bit these days.

it looks so good... I still like the Win3 UI .... such a neat pc ....

Definitely interesting to see how much computers have evolved, comparing anything to the Mac mini

Great vid! i love old tech and i never expected windows 3.1 for a new video

@LightlyInsane1

Жыл бұрын

And psivwri if you are reading this (which u r probably not) Can you join your minecraft server and tell me if you are?

what you been smokin?? just chill out a little, slow down, and relax...

You always wanted to go to a tropical beach as a kid? But you're Australian! In my mind's eye Australia is one huge tropical beach!😋 Anyway, gr8 video, m8!

Good video.. I did notice one thing though when you got it working with the later drive there was drive overlay software working. Drive overlay software makes almost any old computer even with bios limitation run modern drives. The final drive would that have had drive overlay software installed? Drive overlay software overrides ancient bios cylinder/ heads / values. It was displayed clearly in the video

This is a awesome computer!!! Will you do the Acer Aspire desktop you showed us a few months ago? I had one back in the day (with a Pentium 133) and I really miss it!!! Best regards from Portugal!!!

I always picked the Haunted House cards for solitaire. I loved Halloween as a kid

Nice PC and good for old games

NOW BRO CAN LAND ON THE MOON WITH THIS PC

This Video is so cool :)

Can't believe I forgot to watch this the other day

My first mitac device was a Apple ii clone 5.25” disk drive, came with my first computer, which was also an Apple ii + clone, recently , I find out that those Apple ii original disk drive were also made by mitac, means they were an oem factory in the 70-80s.

Lovely pc, reminds me of an Amiga 1000

Novell is a Network Software company that needed hardware approved for it to work with the software and the Novell Netware OS. It was extremely secure OS for it’s time and still is.

@DavidWonn

Жыл бұрын

When an NT4 workstation was connected to a Novell Netware server, its replacement login window was actually less secure than the default one supplied by NT4. It was too easy to bring up a help window and bypass it, granting local PC access without even signing in!

Just going to point out that all of the memory is on the modules, which are 1mb each. 640k "base" memory was a nomenclature carried over from the 8088.

This pc survive all those years impressive

cool PC :)

I accually have a 1980s radio shack trs 80 colour computer 2 but i dont have anything old enough peripheral wise to test it. Apparantly it worked last time it was used. It is also really dirty and has all of its original documents and the casette deck with games and joysticks.

I'm amazed nobody has ever mentioned what the sticker at 0:43 actually means. The machine was most likely sold with Novel Netware 3.X (from 1990). The sticker determining that it was a machine from their approved qualified vendor list. (QVL). At the time, Novell offered their netware network filesystem which was huge for all sorts of commercial and enterprise networking. This later evolved into NetWare Directory Services, which came 6 years before the first version of Microsoft Active Directory. This 6 year lead made novell netware used for managing computer systems and networks for many, many years to come, and is still used to some degree in the present. Once Microsoft launched Active Directory in 1999 on it's embryonic state, war would begin across system administrators and C-Level staff trying to choose one service over the other, or trying to maintain and upkeep their current structure much to microsoft's pressure and dismay. For the authentic experience, try finding a copy of Netware 3.x 386 and running that.

@compmanio36

Жыл бұрын

One of my first jobs was taking an old Netware environment and converting it over to NT 4.0. It was a lot of fun.

@cdos9186

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the information! You seem like you actually know what is going on with that sticker.

@lucasrem

Жыл бұрын

Vendor list, yeah, no 3Com card needed! they all cry novell sticker here, why they do that????? Cry a brand they know ???

On the back there's an old sticker from our postal service, that used to do our telephone lines and also the internet connections in the 90s here in Germany. I'm curious if this machine is from Germany indeed? 🤔 Funny how small the world is 😁

The first computer I had was a 486 wit Windows 3.11

For BIOSes that cannot auto-detect hard drives, I like to use XTIDE Universal BIOS. I have it flashed to an EPROM and in the PROM socket of an ISA ethernet card. That will boot as an option ROM and should allow the system to detect drives the BIOS cannot. You can also get an XTIDE card that has the BIOS ROM and even a CompactFlash reader all built into one, I usually prefer this over HDDs as it makes the system faster and it' easier to copy files back and forth.

you can use ontrack disk manager to get the 386 support bigger drives.

You may be able to use the larger HDD with Ontrack Disk Manager. I used ODM to use a 40GB drive in a 286

nice little beast, nearest i have is a trigem 386sx, not quite as slim, as has a 5 1/4 bay just above the 3 1/2 floppy, but similar age, and looks same or very near bios

What kind of sound card did you install in that PC? The issues you had getting the hard drive working must've been very irritating. This would make a good early DOS gaming PC.

I never thought I was going to rickrolled... ☠

I really miss my first PC. It was a 1997 Mitac.

any other skitz legends not recognising claz mate from big lez show? i don't know waddiyatalkinabeet but this was great to see on a Windows 3.11 PC 😂

What's that Husqvarna Viking-someting software visible on the desktop at 3:01?

I suspect that case likely shipped originally with a metal bar that the ISA riser met with that doubled as support for the center of the case to allow a CRT to be placed on top. The drive seek error is always a floppy drive thing most bios allowed the user to disable the on boot seek also but replacing the cmos battery will allow the settings to remain saved as well. Those old dalas clock batteries are terrible they do make fairly easily solderable replacements that use the new standard CR2032 coin cell batteries.

Awesome! Was Mitac a brand that was only sold in Australia? I’ve never heard of it before watching this video, but there were a ton of PC clone manufacturers by 1990.

@JackBandicootsBunker

Жыл бұрын

MITAC is a Taiwanese brand, which still exists today. It is the owner of TYAN (Workstation Motherboards) and Getac (Rugged Computers).

@EgoShredder

Жыл бұрын

@@JackBandicootsBunker I have an old Mitac Mio 168 Pocket PC from circa 2004, which I guess is the same company.

miniITX when ITX wasn't even a thing. Love it!

I watched it as soon as it came out

Scandisk, especially old versions, won’t detect all hard disk errors. You might want to invest in Spinrite from GRC, which does an exhaustive scan for older drives and will mark bad sectors on the hardware level so they persist even through formats.

@psivewri you need some longer videos, some of us enjoy them 😁

i have the same pc 5:58 but it has a bx pro 100 motherboard and 2 dvd drive slots. i picked it up from a person who threw it away but i havent tested it yet.