I think I can speak for the vast majority of your viewers in saying that we enjoy ALL your content. Watching your videos is like hanging out with a friend and your enthusiasm is contagious. The topics you cover are interesting and your knowledge is impressive but most of all, we just like you. :)

@damienthorne9328

4 ай бұрын

That describes it extremely accurate. Often I don't understand more than 50% of what he does and explains. But it's interesting and calming to watch Adrian. And his joy at what he does is infectuous.

@jandjrandr

4 ай бұрын

To me, Adrian is like the Bob Ross of retro computing.

@gregshadoan4049

4 ай бұрын

Yes, please, let us see them all.

@horusfalcon

4 ай бұрын

Absolutely! Sometimes I have to pause for a while and do something else, but I prefer to watch when I can give Adrian's videos the attention they deserve.

@awilliams1701

4 ай бұрын

for the most part. I skip the CRT videos.

Hi Adrian, I was the President of a large disability provider including a school. The technology for using computer aided communication started in the 1980s. It replaced picture boards where a person would point to a preprinted page that had pictures. That actually has never gone completely away as its not dependent on having access to power and also can be easily customized. At the same time as this was developed there were self contained devices as well as computer based. Many used a plug in cartridge. SOme of the more sophisiticated systems also allowed you to load images from a mater set into a cartridge that met the needs of the person.

@kaitlyn__L

4 ай бұрын

I like the electronic picture boards, the ones that have many customisable pages and will speak out words or phrases. (“AAC”)

@MLampner

4 ай бұрын

@@kaitlyn__L yes they are very useful. The same sort of technology drove Stephen Hawkins ability to communicate. At one point we invested in creating a closed social network for our people served so they could communicate as more and more of the world was via the net. It was picture based so a person could send a message that would come up as text at the other end and family members could choose from some basic sentences that would be turned back to pictures at the other end. We dropped this as platforms like Facetime and Zoom developed and provide face to face communications - but our non-verbal people still kept the ability to send pictograms. With modern AI I think the system we developed could have gone much further.

@Kocorochan

4 ай бұрын

You also have a lot of freedom with laminated bits of paper and velcro. Found one of my brothers the other day!

@OneSwitch

4 ай бұрын

The grid scan and select system was born with POSM in 1960. This ESAM system sits on those shoulders and all the work that sprouted from that time around the world. Quite a lot of work was done in the 1970s with computers and disability access (such as MAVIS, Carba Linguaduc, Prentke Romich and others), but it exploded with affordable computers in the 1980s. This system demoed was $2000 USD plus all in AFAIK. Definitely looks like it was a labour of love.

That was my dead link on the aboveboard! I uploaded all those docs to the IA.

@networkg

4 ай бұрын

And that is why I never forget to send a small donation to the Internet Archive !

@BrennanYoung

2 ай бұрын

not all heroes wear capes

On the contrary the c64 stuff was very interesting it never ceases to amaze me what that amazing little computer could be used for .

@volvo09

4 ай бұрын

Yeah that was cool, and it used a basic computer instead of an expensive Intel based machine for the time.

ESAM'S KEE: It was one of the first public blitz boards for helping non-verbal handicapped persons. The system cost in Sweden was approx $400. And the system was config with Swedish words instead. How do i know this you ask. My sister had this system. And you are right the external cords on the button box is for external buttons. For ppl that only had head movements. So the leaned the head left or right. later on it worked with an eyelid button. So save that system it worth alot. And im happy to see this system again.

Adrien, long time viewer. The last items you tested would now be considered AAC (Augmentative Alternative Communication). I know it well since i use modern descendants of such devices (some of my videos showcase that). I've used AAC the early 90s. From what I know, the examples you have aren't exactly cutting edge, but are contemporary for that time. That being said, those simple device and that software changed someone's life. At the time, I was still handwriting notes to communicate. Fast forward to now and I'm keenly aware how crucial and powerful it is to my own voice. The key is remembering it's "augmentative" not primary. Garbled as it is, there's absolutely no better way to communicate my independent thoughts, desires, ideas. Although when *I* decide necessary, I still use devices which have their roots firmly planted in those beautiful comm tools you have.

Win32s was a 32-bit application runtime environment for Windows 3.1. So those games on that disc do probably work with Windows 3.1. I remember back in the day playing a few early Windows 95 games on Windows 3.1 that were Win32s compatible. Ultra Pinball was one of those games. Performance was shaky, but it did work.

@TheUAoB

4 ай бұрын

I recall Lemmings was Win32s compatible. I remember running it on Win3.11 on a 486 PC card in my Acorn.

@Andrew_Chalmaev

4 ай бұрын

Win32s was needed not only to run 32bit games on 16bit Windows. Microsoft TCP/IP protocol (installed separately, it was not a part of Windows 3) was 32bit and required Win32s too!

@ChrisDreher

3 ай бұрын

I came here to paste the same info about Win32s.

The curve tracer is meant to be connected to the oscilloscope in XY mode, and you can use it to compare characteristics of 2 (or in this case even 3) transistors. They were used for finding matching pairs of transistors for building A-class amplifiers.

@ericpaul4575

4 ай бұрын

Also used to find bad parts. Some transistors will work a low voltages but not where they need to.

@Derpy1969

4 ай бұрын

This guy nails it.

@TheLoto13

20 күн бұрын

Could this be simular to a huntron tracker?

esam's kee was trademarked, and the trademark was for "COMPUTER INTERFACE UNIT FOR USE BY DISABLED PERSONS IN ACCESSING A COMPUTER"

Thank you for the deeper exploration of assistive technology at the end of the video. I don't feel like it was lacking or unexciting. It's really cool to see the history of the real benefits of hardware and software that made life easier for folks who needed greater accessibility.

@robertpanuski4213

4 ай бұрын

Agreed! All the content was interesting, but the best was the last! So cool & cool it was developed for the 64. Wondering if this may have been the basses for Intel's device developed for Dr. Hawking's around the late 80s?

@DavidPlass

4 ай бұрын

And I felt that Adrian was respectful of folks who need to use those assistive technologies.

The modern term for something like the ESAM kit is AAC (not the audio codec, but augmentative and alternative communication). Very cool that it was done on a computer as affordable as the C64.

@StealthCampADL

4 ай бұрын

I saw something similar done on the Amstrad CPC range, using the DK Tronics Speech Synth. I'm also getting a vague memory of something custom too..

The ESAM kit is interesting, as i have a 6 yo who is currently learning how to use the modern equivalent. He is nonverbal. As soon as I seen the cartridge boot, i knew what it was. I wonder if Robin @ 8 bit show and tell can modify the rom dump to work without the voice synth, maybe using the SAM (software automated mouth) as this would be a neat way to introduce my kid to The C64.

@kaitlyn__L

4 ай бұрын

Props to you for supporting your kid. I was diagnosed autistic at a young age but wasn’t “allowed” to be nonverbal. (It was intermittent, so of course “but you were happily talking half an hour ago/yesterday!” and no real understanding.) Sometimes writing on paper sufficed, but I had no idea how much stress that all caused until I’d finally left school and could go days (or weeks) between speaking as I needed, consequence-free.

In the future, you can use fishing line or a guitar string to saw that heatsink off.

Longer Episodes the Better! We never know what we will find with this random boxes of equipment! 😀

@OttawaOldFart

4 ай бұрын

I concur.

Win32s was a 32-bit subsystem for Windows 3.1 and 3.11. It basically allows some 32-bit applications to be run on 16-bit versions of Windows.

@aliencray7269

4 ай бұрын

And you can install original 95 to use program manager instead of explorer

@HwAoRrDk

4 ай бұрын

For instance, there was a Win32S version of WinZip. It was faster than the regular version. That was basically the whole reason I used to have Win32S installed. 😄

@robotnaoborot

4 ай бұрын

win32s was also supported by os/2

@terminusaquo1980

4 ай бұрын

@@aliencray7269 That's because Windows 95 and 98 included Program Manager but it was not the default interface.

@monad_tcp

4 ай бұрын

@@terminusaquo1980 I was going to say that, I remember as a kid just going to system folder and clicking on all executables. That's how I became a programmer, I wanted to know what those DLLs did.

*RCA WG-206 High Voltage Probe:* According to the instructions you showed on screen, that model probe has an internal 1090-megohm resistor, and is designed to be used with an RCA multimeter with an 11-megohm input resistance. It basically acts as a voltage divider, with the high voltage across the entire resistance of 1101-megohms (1090+11 in series) with the meter measuring across just the 11-meg internal to itself. It sees only 1/100th of the high voltage, so you need to multiply the reading by 100 to determine the actual high voltage. Displaying 350 volts times 100 would mean you're measuring 35,000 volts (35 KV). You can picture the voltage divider resistances like a potentiometer, the wiper contact tapping off a percentage of the voltage across the full resistance. If the wiper is tapping off 1/4 of the pot, you need to multiply the measured voltage by 4 to get the full value. Modern meters have high input impedances, so you'd need to know that specification for your own meter to figure out the conversion factor for the HV probe.

For the Pentium Overdrive, one of the reasons why there was an overdrive for socket 5 is because socket 7 has a split voltage rail so that the core voltage can run at a separate voltage than the I/O CPU voltage, which runs at 3.3v. (There were also some early socket 7 motherboards that did not implement the split-voltage rail.) Because of the extra voltage rail, the socket 5 has one less pin than socket 7. A socket 7 CPU cannot fit in a socket 5. As you surmised, the other reason is the multiplier. They could set the multiplier on their own in case the motherboard couldn't (if the fan is not detected or failed, it will drop to a 1x multiplier).

@TheMechanator

4 ай бұрын

That is correct. There were some IBM PS Series machines that would use that Pentium Overdrive but there was a specific pin that had to be omitted, otherwise the BIOS would clock the multiplier down and no boost in performance. It was called an "interposer mod board" that had to be ordered. I deployed some of these at Freightliner in Portland, OR. Soon after that, the Pentium II machines were being deployed and I really couldn't get the interposer from IBM any more as it was discontinued as a FRU part. After looking at the rare mod socket on socket minus a pin, I would just clip off the pin not needed and install them into the IBMs and left it that way on the machines that got their last upgrade before being upgraded in the food chain. Mind you even a Pentium overdrive was better than the 3270 terminals it replaced. :} Thanks for the flashback seeing the things. They were Tandy Tough to overheat at the time.

I had some of those Intel ISA memory boards back in high school, and at one point I was using one in a 486 for reasons I no longer remember. Normal DOS stuff ran fine, but anything that used XMS (including games like Doom or Descent) slideshowed like crazy. I actually wrote most of that Wikipedia article on ESDI many years ago, and the thing about the bridge boards was based on how Maxtor and Control Data designed their early SCSI drives...there was a servo processor that handled the ESDI-ish stuff, and a command processor that translated the SCSI commands to something the rest of the drive could understand, similar to the actual bridge boards companies like Adaptec were making around the same time.

ESAM -> edge of my seat content. My mother was an educator with a lower budget district in the state north of yours. Unless the students parents could afford the device or it was provided by a charity it would have been the OT (occupational therapist) domain only and Apple.

The enhanced learning on the C64 was fascinating... bringing the technology into peripherals that allowed so much more accessibility; my hats off to the creators.

In the 1970s, I used a similar transistor curve tracer to find complementary transistors for audio amplifier. It was a handy tool and used it often. That way I always had a very well designed amplifier.

That speech cartridge is AMAZING! This is what makes treasure hunting _so_ much fun!

"Use my house for its intended purpose." I felt that.

@NuntiusLegis

4 ай бұрын

A room supposed to be cozy doesn't work without a computer for me. ;-)

I won't speak for everyone but I love these mystery-box videos. Do as many as you want!

The curve tracer is right up your alley. It’s usually built in on many oscilloscopes, and shows patterns on screen to see if an electronic part works or not. Most have 2 probes that injects a tiny AC signal, and shows results on screen. If it’s a short, will show up down, if it’s open, shows left-right, if it’s a diode will show a ‘L’ pattern, a resistor will show diagonal. Capacitor will show circle/oval. Cool stuff.

Thanks for sharing the Adaptative Goodies for the 64. That was truly amazing, I had no idea they had that level of technology setup. My wife is a special education teacher and was amazed. I've helped her setup several LAMP boards (the symbol based screens) and they really have not changed a ton. In "modern" tech those extra inputs on the panel would be to connect an item like a wheelchair mounted head button for a student who could move their head over to tap it. It's not often I get her to watch any of these tech videos but this was really great to share with her. Thanks again!

My Dad had that probe. It was designed to be plugged into a VTVM with a standard 10 meg input resistance so for current meters you need to shunt it with a 10 meg resistor.

@TzOk

4 ай бұрын

Most modern multimeters have 10MegOhm input resistance... but this probe expects a 100MOhm one.

That Votrax SC-01 is probably worth more than everything else you looked at today (except maybe the curve tracer). They are super rare now.

@LeftoverBeefcake

4 ай бұрын

Agreed, I have collected a few speech synths for the C64 and it definitely is a rarity.

PC Power & Cooling is a manufacturer of power supply units out of Bonsall, CA. For a long time, they were the premier manufacturer of personal computer and other power supplies. They were my go-to back in the day for nearly silent and nearly bulletproof PSUs. In 2014, apparently, they were acquired by OCZ. In their day, there were very few manufacturers who could hold a candle to them. Lambda and Delta were two other American concerns during that time who could hang with them, but all things for a price. I see where Lambda was acquired by TDK, so I would expect them to still have standards of high quality, and Delta primarily concerns itself with industrial and medical power systems now. When they were making PC PSUs they were absolutely formidable. (There is a Delta unit in a computer for a test rig where I used to work that has been in service for over fifty years and is still going strong.)

@button-puncher

4 ай бұрын

EXACTLY. I remember seeing them winning reviews in boot (then Maximum PC) magazine. Power Supplies in the 90's were JUNK. So many people just used whatever came with their case. I've personally seen the green flash of death at least a couple times. I still have a Turbo 400 from one of my first builds. Thankfully Super Flower and Seasonic started selling to the aftermarket around the same time that PC P&C went away. Seasonic is still my go-to to this day.

@SeeJayPlayGames

4 ай бұрын

fifty years? Since 1974? Doubtful since the first IBM PC was 1981... Maybe you mean 40 years? Which would still be impressive...

@michaelcatchpole7230

3 ай бұрын

I remember selling servers in a PC Power & Cooling case that went for $1200. Held two motherboards, redundant hot swappable power supplies, and I think 17 drive bays. I also remember them as one of the first to sell reliable replacement fans.

@button-puncher

3 ай бұрын

@@michaelcatchpole7230 WOW. That's a beast. I don't remember them selling fans but I do remember the the first 'good' quiet fans were Panasonic Panaflo L1A fans. I used them in everything. Still have a bunch.

I do love your long form videos. I love having them running in the background even while I'm at work. I prefer them to the mindless scrolling of the KZread shorts. I'm sure I don't speak for everyone but the occasional super long video is always welcome to see in my opinion. Especially when digging through seemingly lost tech. Keep of the great work. Always look forward to your videos! Stay healthy stay safe, and we'll see you next time 😅!

@Starchface

4 ай бұрын

I am mystified why KZread pushes the "shorts" so relentlessly. I have absolutely zero interest. Half an hour or longer is typical of videos I watch.

@adriansdigitalbasement

4 ай бұрын

Yeah I click on them from time to time, and then am immediately annoyed by them. Even if it's mildly interesting, I want to know MORE! There's just not enough useful info in them for me.....

@Ramdileo_sys

4 ай бұрын

@@adriansdigitalbasement ... Adrian At 27:22.. apply some Acetone with a syringe all around in the gap between the CPU and the Heatsink.. and let it get in... my work ??... for get the Heatsink loose??🤔

@kaitlyn__L

4 ай бұрын

@@Starchfacepurely a business decision based on view time losses to TikTok. But just as with politics, trying to become a clone of a competitor doesn’t work - people usually prefer the original over the imitator.

I absolutely love that Star Industries mouse. 🤣 I think you're being too hard an that awesome '80s era mascot.

@raggededge82

4 ай бұрын

agreed! I'd love to have a mouse like that.

@NuntiusLegis

4 ай бұрын

I'm on Adrian's side here - the 80s can't be blamed for every occurance of bad taste. ;-) (I actually like some of the edged 80's designs, like on cars.)

You need to make a dedicated video on the last assistive technology device, that was off the chain!

A transistor tester can be used for many purposes: 1) Matching transistors. This is the reason why there are two sockets. You can switch back and forth and watch the curves jump. The less they jump, the closer the transistors match. 2) Checking the linearity of a transistor. Transistors are not perfect, they vary in linearity quite a lot. Using a tester, you can select transistors which are more linear than average. Also transistors vary a lot. That’s why there is such a huge range in the datasheet (min/average/max). Nowadays they are mostly very close to the average but back then you were very lucky to be close to the average. 3) Checking for bad transistors. Sometimes they do weird stuff at certain currents. On the tester you can see bumps and dips in the curve if the transistor is bad. A static test won’t reveal those faults if the transistor is working in general. 4) Checking the frequency behaviour of a transistor. By plotting the curve faster and slower, you can measure the speed the transistor reacts to the base current which is very important for high frequency applications. I once had an old CCTV monitor on one of my C64. Suddenly there was a bright vertical bar on the screen. Moving the mouse arrow through the bar from left to right made it move to the left again and then back to the right. The horizontal video line “looped” and painted the area three times! On a transistor tester, there was a prominet dip in the curve so increasing the base current after a certain value made the transistor conduct less. This was the transistor generating the sawtooth signal for the horizontal deflection.

I love it when the CBM 64 does stuff ( other than play games ) - great video Adrian

@bugjamdrm6747

4 ай бұрын

Full ACK! The bad reputation of the C64 as a pure toy/gaming computer is totally unjustified, given the endless possibilities through its various ports. I am very happy that another hitherto forgotten application has been salvaged here!

PC Power and Cooling was legendary in their time. They made cases, coolers and some of the best power supplies you could get. They got bought out by OCZ and was utterly brand-name exploited and ruined shortly afterward.

@Zadkiel343

4 ай бұрын

They were smart to sell out when they did. PCP&C PSUs were the best of the PSU OEMs because they used higher quality components, and a unique highly-clamped single-rail design that resulted in a more reliable and stable output than anyone else. About the time PCP&C sold out, other players in the PSU scene (seagate, enermax (RIP), corsair etc) stepped up to produce PSUs of the same quality that PCP&C had been making - This was mostly driven by need, tolerances of the motherboard & components suddenly became much tighter around this time, and for them to continue to make the 'loose' but cheaper PSUs they had been doing would have resulted in way too high a return rate and reputation damage. Within a year of PCP&C selling, the high-end PSU market vanished, because all the major OEMs were forced to step up and what was the old 'high-end' PSU market suddenly became the new normal. If PCP&C had stayed they'd have changed from being a big fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a big pond.

@areitz

4 ай бұрын

Agree, I have a lot of nostalgia for PC Power & Cooling. I still have an ATX case that I got in the late 90’s, that was head and shoulders above the competition for its time.

@lsorense

4 ай бұрын

I still have one of those fans on my 486. Ball bearing fan and still running silent.

I loved the memory card! in 1990 I was leading a team designing the first fully automated package sorting hub for RPS, now FedEx Ground. Each hub used three 80386 IBM PCs with a custom RTOS, each with three of these cards for 24 MB of ram in each PC. We paid ~$24,000 for the three PCs in 1989 money, worth ~$60k today. Good times!

It’s still common for Intel (and other IC manufacturers) to bin their parts. It depends on how many transistors are successfully formed on the die. Generally speaking, chips that come from near the center of the wafer tend to be more successful and will generally be installed on more expensive products (for example, an i9), whereas the chips towards the outside of the wafer have less functioning transistors and will be installed on less expensive products (like an i3). There are often differences in the package as well (like cache) but the chips themselves are often the same, just depends on how successful the manufacturing was.

Back in the early 90's I was doing a project at work replacing 486's in Compaq Prosignia servers with Pentium Overdrive chips. These were running Netware or Lotus Notes Server on Windows and OS/2. The upgrade helped quite a bit. These were EISA machines, and the Compaq Netflex cards were amazing, they were Ethernet, but you could add a token ring daughter card to turn them into Tokenring, using the same physical ports in the slot cover. Good machines, I recycled the ones I had in the mid aughts when I moved as they were like 50lbs each and had the loudest hard drives (upside down with these little green rails). 🙂

Oh, the old towel returns!!

@dangerotterisrea

4 ай бұрын

and it is rough but glorious!

@tomr3422

4 ай бұрын

It was only a matter of time until its glorious return

I believe the SAM in ESAM refers to the "Software Automatic Mouth" which was a very efficiently written speech generator that originally came out in 1982.

Please do make more of these types of videos

As soon as I read the SC-01 chip, I realized it was one of those speech chips which was also featured in one of your older videos. When I used to work in a small electronics firm called Semitronics in the Philippines owned by Earl Henry Hornbostel, he had people using curve tracers to spec out unmarked transistors which he purchased in bulk and will then be sold as replacements for known but difficult to find semiconductors.

Good find on the curve tracer,, Mr. Carlson has videos on how they work and also how to convert an old tube type oscilloscope to operate as a curve tracer,, :-)

CuriousMarc uses his HP curve tracer to check marginal transistors. Great for hunting down "odd" faults.

@jeromethiel4323

4 ай бұрын

Had to use one in college. The thing was i gigantic vacuum tube oscilloscope with a plug in module for doing transistor curves. Basically you'd set it up, clip on a land camera system, and take a photograph of the traces. Then you could actually drawn some lines on the photograph to determine your Q point and min/max inputs for that specific transistor. Back in the old days, a lot of "hand made" premium audio amps used hand matched transistors in the power stages for maximum fidelity of class AB and B amps, because "matched" transistors gave you the best fidelity (each transistor was doing one half of the waveform, so it was important both transistors had comparable characteristics). Luckily these days, transistor manufacturing has gotten so good, people typically don't bother anymore. But back in the early days, transistors were highly variable, even within transistor types. You could pull two transistors with the same part number, and they'd be fairly close, but not that close to each other. For most uses, it really didn't matter. But HiFi nuts will be HiFi nuts... ^-^

@humidbeing

4 ай бұрын

He mentions the exact model Marc has. So it's pretty safe to say he's seen the videos.

Honestly I think most of us binge your videos, so the long-format stuff just caters to that more. I love these long vids where you're just exploring old tech and trying to make it work, and I look forward to the next video like this one!

24:20 This PCMCIA - CF adapter works with Amiga 600 and 1200. You can easily transfer a file from PC to Amiga.

@CheshireNoir

4 ай бұрын

I use one similar to bulk transfer software to my Amiga 600 when playing with WHDLoad

I believe that Kraftwerk used the Votrax synthesized speech on quite a few of their mid 70s LPs like Radioactivity... also on Electric Cafe from 1986. Would love for you to a deep dive on that as I love early speech synthesis.... the "Voder" from 1930s still blows my mind.

That VOTRAX chip's worth a fortune!

Adrian, really enjoyed it. It's similar to what I enjoy about the Super Mini Mail Calls, bit of the joy of discovering. One thing I'd like to see you do is a follow up video. You ask viewers for information and I think it would be great if you can highlight it. One video with quick fire, minute long segments going over answers you receive (like why Intel made that Pentium chip or the ESAM for C64 at the end).

That digital to analog card is fantastic! You can control things that need analog voltages! For instance a test bed for circuit boards, or a sun tracker for solar panels, a light show, nearly limitless!

That Votrax SC-01 is not only rare and expensive, but it is the early Mockingboard speech chip if you have a Mockingboard for your Apple II!

I love these box dives. Really interesting to see what people were up to back in the day. So don't worry about the length, I enjoy every minute of it.

Regarding the Windows 95 Shareware games: "Win32s" is the "Windows 32 Subsystem" for Windows 3.1. Before Windows 95 was released, Microsoft released Win32s for Win 3.1, so developers could get a, "head start" on writing Windows 95 programs. So, yes, those shareware games in theory can run on Windows 3.1, if you can find and install the Win32s package for it.

Adrian's Digital Towel features in this video. This makes me strangely happy. You can NEVER replace that towel!

@nurmr

4 ай бұрын

You could hitchhike the length and breadth of the galaxy with that towel!

@kaitlyn__L

4 ай бұрын

I hope he always knows where his towel is.

@gmirwin

4 ай бұрын

Adrian is one hoopy frood.

Adrian - are you going to tell us about the lucky guy/gal? Package is in the making btw.

The Curve Tracer is a key piece of gear for repairman and builders of Stereo Amplifiers. Just randomly replacing failed transistors on one channel results in an imbalance. It "works" after but the customer would notice it's slightly different one side vs the other. This device coupled with a scope allows you to track down an exact match to the other channels pre amp transistors or for frequency control.

40 Best Games... Minutes of fun for the whole family. 😊

Have to say that ESAM stuff was pretty intriguing, nice to see there was some development going on to help people with communication back then (granted we all know that Stephen Hawking had his setup, but that probably cost millions to develop!), and the fact it still works is pretty amazing too... :D

The curve tracer is like a super-powered version of the simple component tester you often show. It can tell you a lot more about the characteristics of a transistor or diode (gain, breakdown voltage, threshold voltage, etc), and can be used for matching parts to specific purposes (less relevant in the digital realm) or for identifying parts that test good at the very low probing voltages used by either multimeters or modern component testers (a transistor that tests fine at 3V might fail to operate correctly at 20V). That one does require an oscilloscope with an X/Y mode, as you discovered reading the documentation. It's designed for use with old-school analog oscilloscopes, although a digital or software scope with an X/Y mode could likely be made to work with it as well.

Both of those logitech mices were common in schools in the UK and were branded as Research Machines (now RM Education) - who competed with Acorn etc for UK schools networks. They were all quadrature output when sold by RM, however the lugs were different design than the ones on yours however they were still 9 pin din.

The tape eraser brought back some fun memories. I used to work for radioshack from 2002-2006. Us employees had a blast playing with some of the old equipment that the stores hung on to for YEARS. It's a real shame that radioshack went the way of the Dodo. I worked there towards the end of the era of being able to buy electrical components. There was just something enjoyable about going through the component bins when looking for a part.

@TheMechanator

4 ай бұрын

I worked for TE Electronics that serviced the Radio Shack service plans for Tandy as a separate division from 1994-1997. Housed in Computer City, at Hayden Island, Portland Oregon. It was hella fun having access to all the microfiche and service manuals for anything Tandy related that I could order. I refurbished many devices for my own personal use from my collection of "It's dead and not worth fixing" pile on my own time and the tape eraser was common to find several in each shop. At the time there were 3-4 surplus shops that you could pick components from and sometimes whole machines that were being scrapped from the Silicon Forest industry. I had no shortage of electromechanical goodies to chose from in that era. One way to deeply immerse one self into the trailing but leading edge of technology was to pick up the dumpster tossed stuff and look into how it worked. Yes, I was the kid who took everything apart at an early age, and that is why I watch Adrian's channel.

That sc-01 is a jackpot chip. It was used in the mockingboard speech1 board before the a-d models that used the sc-02 aka ssi-263a. Nice find!

Chipped chip. Awesome episode.

I actually enjoy the long form videos. The content is interesting, & I enjoy the little discoveries along the way. I also enjoy listening to both of your channels while driving. It beats the normal content on the radio. Keep up the good work.

"Back in the Day" I set up an Amiga 500 with a printer and speakers. My friend's sister used it to do medical billing and transcription for local doctors. She worked from a command line (shell) that directed all output to the narrator device that was included with those early Amigas. She was amazing. But whenever I went over to assist her, I needed to bring a monitor so I could see what was going on. Pretty amazing "enabling technology" from a floppy based system.

This video really has some LGR vibes and I'm loving it! Your amazing troubleshooting and repair videos are really what makes this channel unique for me, but I would love to see some more thrift/grab-box/retro-demo type videos as well.

Adrian seems like the type of guy who says technical thing without knowing what it actually means but because hes done it so much now he actually does know what hes saying

The Votrax SC-01 is a great find! I played with it back in the 70's and interfaced it to a Z-80 computer as my first speech synthesizer. Now they are highly sought after for repairing certain arcade games that used them, easily fetching $200 on eBay (if they work).

About binning parts and selling lower bins: there were 4 core AMD chips which supported disabling any core and they would sell 3 core versions with one core disabled to increase yeild. And, like frequency binning, as production quality improved with subsequent runs they didn't have enough chips with a bad core so they would disable a working core to have something to sell in the lower price slot. Some people were able to reenable the 4 core on the nominally 3 core chip. Some things never change. As far as i know frequency binning of this kind still happens for CPUs and GPUs.

@kaitlyn__L

4 ай бұрын

This happened with early Ryzens as well. “6-core” chips were 8-core dual-die chips with one core disabled on each die.

@jeffymooch

4 ай бұрын

was that the chip models you could enable cores with a sufficiently graphite filled pencil trace?

@KenjiUmino

4 ай бұрын

@@jeffymooch no, the graphite pencil thing was to unlock the multiplier on early socket A athlon chips - that was way before multi core CPUs - for the later 64bit multi core chips, you had to have a setting in the bios to unlock cores and multiplier

@jeffymooch

4 ай бұрын

@@KenjiUminothanks.

Modern equivalents (vastly superiour, obviously) include "Clicker IV" and "Speaking for Myself", both used here in the UK in the very late 90's to mid 2000's. Used at special needs schools, the teacher would make a "grid" of common words and maybe some specific words designed for that particular pupil using clipart or small pictograms to represent them. The pupil would point to the pictures to build a sentence. Now what you have there seems to be a very early version on an 8 bit machine. More research perhaps?

A mechanical pencil is great for straightening CPU pins. 👍 (EDIT: I keep one on my bench with the refills removed just for that purpose - hugs the bent pin perfectly while you straighten it)

@raggededge82

4 ай бұрын

I read this tip years ago and it's elegant in its simplicity

@budgetmerch

4 ай бұрын

@@raggededge82 Indeed - it works very well and the risk of folding a pin flat or breaking it off is pretty much eliminated.

The "40 Best" install and play video sounds like it would be hilarious. You could call it Win95 Shareware Shenanigans.

@cpt_nordbart

4 ай бұрын

It's more an LGR thing... And even that is like 5 minutes of entertainment for 2 hours of work.

The D/A card is interesting. It might be possible to turn it into a crude audio card or synthesizer, depending on how fast those chips can switch. Another option is to work with other synthesizers that take an analog control voltage, like patch-cable style synths (think Moog). All of that would take some very custom programming to pull off.

PC Power & Cooling was a brand that prided themselves on quality-first power supplies. They were very much in the camp of "PSUs are the most underrated part in your computer." They bragged about how reliable and stable their supplies were, and even eschewed the new (at the time) trend of modular cabling, as it just added in-line resistance and a failure point -- anathema to the goal of delivering better, more stable power. They were a bit pricey, and no-frills, in an era of cold-cathode lighting and water-cooled, overclocked Pentium 4s and Athlon XPs. Based on their fixation with quality, I figured it might be worth paying a premium vs. the sea of unknown-origin boutique-branded supplies with blue LEDs behind the fans. I special-ordered one at the local computer store, used it for a few months, and then it died. I replaced it with one branded by Cooler Master, that had blue LEDs behind the fan. It worked fine until it was replaced during an upgrade. So that's my PCP&C story.

That was delightful, and so incredible the ESAM stuff works. You are awesome and I love your videos 😊

If you took an XT or AT and plugged that D/A board into it, you could motorize an old Kenmore vacuum cleaner and attach some sensors, and voila! Your very own Retro Roomba!

Great video! I really appreciate the deep dive style videos like this

That C64 system came with a local 503 number. You should try calling and see if maybe its still active. You might be able to get some answers from the creator himself!

Compuadd was a high-end clone mfg. Had a few of their units. The 6ch output board makes a great soundcard. Easy to do drivers for. I've done a few. Don't junk it!

Def enjoyed this type of content, it's like finding and going through cool stuff yourself!

Hi there Adrian, my first time to comment on a video of yours. That last bit of ESAM was amazing, seeing an affordable computer combined with good engineering help other people living a better life or at least better help.

34:21 That was the same style of mouse we had for most of the school computers in the 90s. Most of the machines in school at the time were from RM Nimbus. Many of them in the upstairs rooms were 186 machines, with Green phosphor monitors. lol Those machines were quite old, even by the time I started at the school, but they were still there in 1997 when I left. They had some 186 PCs with colour monitors, too, but not as many. They were unbelievably SLOW to log in to the user account, and ran on a 10-Base T (10Mbit/s) network. If somebody unplugged one of the network cables, the entire network would crash, and would take the IT guys about an hour to reboot the server and all the machines. As you can imagine, that happened quite a lot, so we could get out of doing much work. lol I think the same style of mouse was often included with the Archimedes machines. (which were obviously also very popular in UK schools in the 90s, due to the deal Acorn had with the BBC.) It was mostly the BBC Micro in schools in the 80s, with the CUB monitor and disk drives. Then in the late 80s and early 90s, it was more PCs, with a few Archimedes maybe in the art department etc.

@electronash

4 ай бұрын

Oh, and almost all of the Staff passwords started with "ST", followed by a number. So it didn't take long for certain students to find the teacher's initials, then go through the numbers to log in. lol

@electronash

4 ай бұрын

I think Star Industries might be the same "Star" who made our colour ribbon printer in the 80s. We had a Star LC-10, then later the LC-24 (IIRC) hooked up to our Olivetti PC-1. And also the Amstrad CPC 6128, which had a modem connected. My very first holiday abroad (to Mallorca, around 1988) was booked using the Amstrad and modem, a good five years before we had access to the actual Internet. (my Dad managed to spy the ABTA number from the local travel agents, which he could then use to log into their system, book the holiday, and cut out the commision fees. lol. Obviously he still had to pay for the hotel and flights, but it worked out fine.)

Another interesting video, thank you! Yes, I would be happy to see more of this type.

Love this format of episode. The longer the better for me :) Thanks for the great content!

The curve tracer hooks via those leads in the back to an oscilloscope. Have you ever seen the graphical display of semiconductor charactics in a data sheet? The curve tracer is what displays them. Basicly ti varies the emitter to collector voltage and displays the collector current. It repeats this for several different base voltages (or currents), and since it operates in XY mode, it can display several curves at the same time superimposed on top of each other. You can even use a semiconductor curve tracer to plot vacuum tube characteristics if the tracer can operate at high enough voltages.

I had an AT&T 7300/3B1, so I recognized the mouse immediately. Amazing computer, especially with the PC compatibility board!

Yes please! Looks like Treasure hunt as well as Mail Call at the same time. And I like it a lot.

Adrian - I ♥ your content 🥰 I'm a Technical Architect/Software Engineer/Hardware Engineer from the UK (in my 50's) and hack around with a lot of hardware myself (especially ARM and RISC-V based single board computers like the Raspberry Pi, Pico and Milk-V Duos, PICs, Arduinos and all that. I specialise in Linux systems so naturally my door bell is ridiculously over-engineered - made from a Banana Pi (running Armbian) + USB audio + butchered PC speakers. Why shouldn't you SSH into your door bell + run Python (and SAMBA) on it! My childhood computer was/is a fully working Sharp MZ-80K (have some tapes) but it would be FAR too expensive to ship from the UK. I'll think about it...

Just so you know, it is a DC37 connector. The letter after the 'D' is the connector size. A is 15 pins normal, B is 25 pins, C is 37 pins, D is 50 pins (three rows), E is 9 pins. The VGA connector is actually a DE15 connector (E size shell, 15 pins).

That UNIX PC mouse is absolutely cherry. :)

yes---please do! You are so solid in what you do. Thanks for your time and energy. I'm grateful.

I love this content, you go through the treasures and actually test them!! Plus obscure stuff gets documented, it’s just great

This was great, looking forward to the next video like this!

Your knowledge and expertise is breathtaking...... very cool video

Love the length of this video

Adrian this was great! Please keep doing this, and I loved learning about the speech synthesis/accessibility board system.

PCMCIA was orginally invented as a memory extension. Back in the days I owned a PCMCIA memory card which simply appeared as an additional HDD. So escentially it’s an ancient form of SSD. It worked with Win95 so I guess it would also work with DOS. In fact, you didn’t even had to have an HDD at all, at least my laptop could boot from the PCMCIA memory. The German Deutsche Bahn federal railroad used those cards for their EBuLa system. There was a custom PC sitting in the dashboard of a locomotive displaying information about the route. Elektronischer Buchfahrplan und Verzeichnis der Langsamfahrstellen = Electronic timetable book and directory of slow speed sections So instead of written notes handed to the train driver, the train driver receives a PCMCIA card which is plugged into the EbuLa. Then the Route is displayed on the screen and the progress is also shown on the screen. The main information is speed limits, especially reduced speed limits at construction sites.

more boxes! haha kinda cool old stuff you don't see today

Awesome video again yet again. Love Adrian's work.

In the event you're not already familiar to a degree: regarding that ESDI drive controller - In my DOS days, I remember low-level formatting my RLL hard drive (MFM subset) using DOS's debug command. At a DOS prompt, type debug g=c800:5 and it should take you into the formatting utility in that ROM.