In this video we're going to look at this 35 yr old 286 PC that I bought for 30 EUR. A complete system with monitor, keyboard, mouse and even a printer. But does it work ? And if it doesn't, can I fix it ? Stay tuned.
You may get more out of the Post Code Card if you put it the right way into the slot. It seems to be clearly marked "Rear" with an arrow pointing proudly away from the rear.
It was... interesting to see the voltage indicator LEDs flashing like that though - presumably they ended up connected to data or address lines, showing bus activity.
Thanks for another wonderful video on an obscure beige box clone. It’s always fun watching you restore these things and seeing multimeter and soddering iron in action!
I like watching your videos! Just a hint, it's better to use thin magnet wire or cut up some stranded wire to obtain a single strand for fixing these small signal traces. It doesn't look good and puts a lot of mechanical strain on the traces if you use such thick wire. :) Also, try to hold the glass fiber pen vertically to the PCB and use it like a brush (less force) and adjust it so the fibers barely stick out. Will make a lot less mess and the pen lasts much longer. :)
Not a bad score for 30 euro’s. Some of the parts like the 5.25” floppy drives by themselves can go for a lot more. Despite the need for the repair I’d say you’ve got a very good deal.
i recently was given a really old computer a dell 333d from 1990! it has a standard side 3 inch floppy drive and a 5.25" floppy drive it has some strange drive that makes me think of a weird front facing cassette interface system my grandfather might know more but i can't just go and ask him because i live far away my dad says it might be a beta tape but not betamax does anyone know where i can find documentation about the computer?
@@slycooper1001 That tape drive you describe is most likely a tape streamer. It's a bespoke computer data backup system, these sort of things still exist. Back in the day you store over a gigabyte of data on them.
I just sold that exact keyboard. Futaba clicky switches but most were degraded to the point of feeling like linear switches. Too bad. The ones that worked still had a great snappy sound (and so loud!). Really love that amber monitor. Don't retrobright it! :)
Wow! ~28 Years ago my Aunt had a simmilar PC. The Case was the same design (But with round Buttons). She had also a Star Printer. But it was a LC-24 with single sheet feeder. Nice coinsidence ;-)
i like how these motherboards from this era for 286/386 are so compact. nice rescue, one thing you might do is put some nail polish over the exposed metal to keep from corroding.
I have one of the first 386 full AT boards that had that Chips 8 IC chipset and intel 385 cache controller chip. No onboard ram, it is all in 2 ram boards on proprietary local bus slots. The board is 14 inches square and fully populated with out any bit of space anywhere on it. not even with onboard IO or anything. 8 ISA slots with 2 used by ram boards. Its pretty crazy for a 20mhz machine of 1988. I tried bumping it to 25 for a while and it mostly worked pretty well but for a few unexplained crashes that didn't happen at 20. Crazy enough with only 32k of cache, its actually faster than one of the latest 386dx boards with 256k cache running at 25mhz. Even with the newer board having a plethora of timing and tuning options in bios. It comes down to the old dog having true zero waitstate operation and interleaving of ram banks. Something the newer board did away with for simplicity and cost.
Funny story. I used to have an ST-157A around '97 that wouldn't start. Somehow I figured out that it would start if it was literally warmed up. So, I put it in the oven on 50C for 10 minutes or so, and then it would fire right up! It kept on working like that for years, as it was in a home server that barely ever powercycled.
my little secret to soldering a bodge wire to a via is to add a bit of solder to the wire, enough for a solder "droplet" to form from gravity and anchor it (and the wire) to the top of the via. a wire close to the size of the via really helps in this.
Always good to see a bit of detective work has been successful in bringing this machine back to life. Apart from the drives it looks like it has a decent keyboard, possibly with mechanical switches. Would be interested to see who made it.
More than 30 years ago I wrote my first real program in QuickBASIC. It was a sidelight of my job in the communications support department of a large electric utility. It took three months and took me into the realm of direct hardware access. The IT department programmers wanted $73,000 to do the job and I had knowledge of the rare hardware it had to connect to. Don't underestimate the real world capabilities of equipment from the '80s.
Huh? With different PDP and VAXes I guess it was possible to do everything MS-DOS/640KB-ought-to-be-enough did in late 80s. Unfortunately I don't know much and was a kid in 80s and teen in 90s :-))) But nowadays watching YT videos about different equipment and even small "industrial" computers, I am sure engineering guys didn't feel limited much with hardware and memory, especially in the second half of 80s.
When I upgraded my pc case that was my 2nd case. I had 286 in an old large IBM red stone chassis crossing over from the XT to AT with an 40mb ST251 MFM HDD on an 16bit controller
How hot is your iron? seems like it very quickly charred the board, if you use good leaded solder you shouldn't need to go over 300c, but the solder mask might just be old and bad. And as for patching small broken traces like that, you can also just bridge the gap with solder. As for the time not progressing, it likely considers 01:00 January 1st 1980 as the "reset" time, which it goes back to when the settings have been lost, and thus it considers the setting invalid until you change it.
And regarding those old times: today I'm 50 years old and totally puzzled, how my 15y old self managed to learn programming with Turbo Pascal 4.5, C (Microsoft Quick C), the first versions of C++ (Borland Turbo C++ 1.0), and even some x86 Assembly with a total lack of any Internet. All knowledge at these times came in tiny pieces from monthly issued computer magazines and from exchange with a few close friends. At least I can say, it all payed out being a nerd at those times. Thanks for your videos!
Hi i am a old computer nerd so to speak i started whit old ABC 80 ABC 100 and before that is was Amiga and those then it was from 8086 and well up 286 386 ect...In my time we started whit old computers not computers we have today but they where fun and i learn from them how it work ect...i use to be a collector so i have some left most floppy disk whit orginal program and there is a lot but it seams today no one is interested of those old floppy disk---i remember when it was Dos and the oldest windows on one diskett..L.O.L....i have use all windows fro start and one i miss and think they should not abandon is windows 7...so much memory for an old man like me..L.O.L...It is all ways nice to see that there is so many Nostalgic people like me who stil like the old time the old generation "the steam locomotive time"..L.O.L.... ...I been working whit computers for many many years but not like this not the electric and repair motherboard ect i have only build computers and repair and serving so it is nice to see how it works "on the deep" i have for many years wanted to learn to repair motherboard and more but my eyes is not the best and maybe i dont have the patient i dont know..L.O.L....But any way i learn some from you now...:)....Thanks from Erik in sweden...:)
I have a Seagate ST-157N (SCSI Variant) hard disk in my Macintosh SE, and it works great. But my ST-157A has mostly bad sectors unfortunately. Pretty good deal for the price too!
Ooh, I see an Seagate ST-157A :) Wonder what the condition of the drive is. Maybe run MHDD for bad sectors and speedsys for performance checks. If you're using MHDD, you'll need MHDD 3.0 as it's the last version to support non-LBA drives 👍🏻
God damn that is one beautiful computer. Why does it seem to be so easy to get hold of vintage PCs in Benelux?! It’s really rare to find these things for sale here in Sweden…
I wouldn't recommend using your finger to clear off fiberglass shavings RS! Micro cuts aren't fun. Otherwise, great video. Always love an old pc restoration.
Try TYPING the correct memory amount in the BIOS. I had a similar problem with a 286 and the memory could only be changed if you typed a number into it.
If you wanna do less collateral damage, use a scalpel to precisely remove solder mask instead of the fiberglass pen. Also, fine magnet wire works a lot better for little bodge repairs of cut traces. You'll also want to tin all the exposed copper to reduce future corrosion. Good job getting it up and running again.
using a particular alloy solder allows me to bridge small gaps like that without even using a bodge wire. It fails me what it is at the moment, but works great. And lacquer will seal the copper and prevent corrosion. Though fully tinning them is best as well.
@@wishusknight3009 yeah, but I don't think he'd bother with repairing the solder mask. This was a super quick and dirty repair, so I didn't even bother mentioning it.
0:48 Are you sure this video card is even working ? There's no video BIOS which should be required to make it run. For the bios issues, sometimes you have to run the CMOS setup twice to make it work properly. It's a bit weird and inconvenient but I've seen that happening several times before. Maybe the 32.768KHz crystal has died ? That would explain why the clock doesn't tick anymore.
Probably the printer is the most valuable and useful part of this collection :-) But computer's exterior is gorgeous with a "bezeled" monitor. I don't know why but when I saw this setup I had a thought that this was a CAD station. But isn't the 286 too slow for the CAD?
Great video & nice little board!! I have an early 386 board that has 4 DIP switches to configure the amount of RAM installed... maybe is the same here??
With small breaks in the traces on circuit boards, I've seen people repair them by making a small solder bridge over it. Is there a reason you didn't try that?
i got 2 or 3 old computers over here. In the Netherlands. Pentium 2 if im not mistaken. If anyone in the Netherlands is interested in them, get in contact and we make a deal. Im not gonna ship em to outside of the Netherlands, unless someone is willing to pay for the shippingcosts as well.
Seems like no make and model shown on some of my old MBs or am I missing something? Would be nice to know what all the settings are and if manuals available on the web. Also why are some of old components sold for a few dollars when new now some sellers wanted hundreds or even thousands of dollars for it? Who are buying those?
Great video, I really enjoyed it. A really good find for €30,-. I have a question though: what tool are you using to scrape away the solder mask? It looks very useful and a lot more precise than sand paper. 🙂
Where did you find that beauty? Here were I live, a 286 with printer, manuals, software is 4000€, an broken one (not tested, as is) start at 200€. Edit: That Oak OTI067 can be upgraded to 1M. Can both cards be used on that computer at the same time (like it was the case with Hercules and VGA) or you have to set the 8-bit ISA card to mono?
Kinda crazy here is that the two "G2" chipset chips seem to have fully identical markings. What do they even do, that you need to just plop two of the same chip and it all works? Not like that on the more modern chipsets with north and southbridge and all that.
Are you in the UK? I have a skt 7 pentium MMX PC complete with case, PSU, CPU, RAM, HDD, 2 optical drives and W98SE. I work on it occationally when i have spare time and will be listing it on eBay eventually.
@@simontay4851 Nope. I am not in the UK. I am just looking for a Baby AT motherboard under maybe 50 euro to replace a motherboard that I probably killed when I was replacing the din-5 to a din-6 ps/2 keyboard socket, it was kinda having problems before anyways. But if I lived in the UK, sure I would like to have those computers. I been looking around and prices are raising. I deleted my ebay account because most of sellers want paypal over credit card instead of paypal-bank account. Maybe @Retrospector78 wants your computers when he visits the UK to make more videos. I hope he has a big car to fit all of your PCs.
A serious question: why is this no name PC clone worth anything? It is neither Commodore nor Apple, nor IBM, not even Amstrad. It can't do anything useful in modern terms. I understand the joy of tinkering with old electronics, but where does the monetary value come from?
Wondering if you've ever come across that rare combo that was a 386/486 combined with a Sega megadrive. It looked very much like that but you could slide the front panel which hid the drive bays and revealed the game cartridge socket and joystick ports. Always wanted one, never got one lol, but it was a rare beast indeed. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-nOyza3cOOqM.html Nvm: someone uploaded 😄 mega PC
