I just bought a 33yr old virus infected PC (Part 1/3) 

This virus (Stoned) is notable as it was the first recorded instance of a computer virus having the ability to be asymptomatic. The virus only displays the message if the boot time is divisible by 8, certain machines actually have a fixed boot and could get infected but never show the message. Since the virus spreads by infecting boot sectors it meant every floppy used on that computer would get infected but the system owner would have no idea they were spreading a virus. Pretty clever stuff.

It's a period correct computer virus. It would almost be shame to delete it!

I am a bit jealous. Both of the computer and the virus.

"Turn on the brightness and contrast ", the amount of staff members I had to tell them to check that first lol

Wow a machine infected with the 1987 Stoned DOS Virus x) (I think it has 12% chance that on boot it will show the : "Your PC is now Stoned!" message)

Those old MFM/RLL drives are temperature sensitive, so you may have better luck at reading the data when the drive has fully warmed up. And try SpinRite, as it can low-level format the drive while preserving the existing data.

Grape? Brings a whole new meaning to “vintage” PC! 😄

This reminded me of an old PC we found in our lab. It had been running on the network doing nothing for about six years and we forgot about it. Well, almost nothing. It had been collecting every virus that had ever gotten into our network.

That's kind of amazing to find a virus this old still in the wild. I really hope you're able to restore at least some of the data and see what else is there.

Always love seeing old technology, crazy to think we all carry around something in our pockets that is way more powerful than a old PC like that could ever be.

Reminds me of my "Leading Edge" S. Korean clone computer I bought for an ungodly amount of money in 1986 (came with DOS 3.1). When I ordered the machine, it was to have a 20 MB hard drive. But when I took delivery, they had "upgraded" me to a whopping 30 MB drive. I knew I was set for life with all that extra storage! I mean, how could I ever fill it up? The machine had that "sexy" orange-yellow display, which I thought was so much more stylish than the green screen PCs at JPL at that time.

The “Grape” brand may have just been 2 guys in a garage assembling IBM compatible machines in the mid 1980’s and then slapping their company logo sticker on the case. I had one from a company called “Jet”. (Yep, “Jet” was 2 guys in a garage assembling IBM compatible machines)

Those damn Hippie PC's...Always stoned ! :D

Those batch files on the main directory were a major red flag to me. I had the feeling that they could be part of that virus.

@16:57 Man, it's been many decades since I last saw this virus message. I think these push-button flip-top XT cases are the best design ever made.

I remember discovering a virus because it changed the file size of one of the boot programs. This was by pure instinct, it took a while to get software to confirm it. Machines were slow enough back then that you could practically feel when a computer was infected because it tended to make the startup a tad bit longer.

I'm just happy for you getting this machine at all. I can't even find a horizontal AT case, let alone a working hardware in it.

well we've had, Apples, Apricots and now Grapes, a great fruit salad of computers available in the 80's and early 90's😊😊

This is the first video I’ve seen on this channel and I couldn’t stop watching! It was amazing to see the old tech working and realising how much it’s changed over time!

The exact version of Mah Jongg on this PC is Arcanum Computing's Mah Jongg Solitaire from 1987, as indicated by presence of the MAHSTATS file in the C: drive root.

Back in the time when viruses were (relatively) harmless. I do remember the ‘ping-pong’ virus, I guess that was the first one I ever saw. It was so cute! 😊 Or perhaps the Yankee Doodle virus. Perhaps an idea for a future episode?

Oh no! My friend's family had a 286 growing up and they got that exact same virus!

I really like those old power switches. Back then I used to call them flip-flops, because they make flip when switching on and flop when switching off.

Only channel I can watch at 2x speed and it still doesn't feel fast. Love the videos though!

Format c: /u from floppy, virus then is gone. Ah, the good old days.

I think it's amazing of how much computer hardware has advanced, everything that was done by the CPU and a metric ton of expansion cards at 30 years ago, now its done by just two processors, the CPU and the PCH, you can have fully working PCs without any expansion cards at all, just an APU, some RAM and Storage

Love that amber screen, it takes me back. We dumped them by the dozens in the 2000s and now it's almost impossible to find one for a reasonable price.

I wonder how you notice if your PC is stoned. It starts to get the munchies and rants about aliens? In any case, this is some seriously cool, hefty looking retro machine. I really like it! I bet no cat would be able to push that one off the desk!

A random vintage 80s PC infected with an equally vintage virus in october. Danooct1 probably shed a manly tear. 😂

Started messing with PCs in the '90s. I got them from thrift stores. Old XTs were a dime a dozen pre 2000 (5 to 10 Dollars US a piece). There definitely is something satisfying about the click of an old XT/286 pc power switch.

I just discovered your channel, and I'm loving your content. Keep up the good work, you just got a new subscriber.

I like to believe somewhere there is a office building with sleezy 80s con men waiting for people To use a old computer infected with one of their viruses.

“Mom, I want an Apple II.” “We can’t all have an apple, we got a grape at home.” *The Grape at home*

Some years ago, I found an old XT in the garbage that was also infested with old viruses. The funniest one was that every time you tried to open a file or run a program, it would make a strange noise and scramble the screen with a constant message that "Your computer is now stoned!" It was the then known Stoned Virus, I believe. The machine was rather easy to clean of viruses then. I now regret that I actually disposed of it a year or so later as it had some interesting features on it and some add on cards. 😕 PS: LMAO!! I wrote the top part of my statement BEFORE I got to the part of your video that said YOUR machine had the Stoned Virus too like the XT I found!! The only difference is is that mine actually started up into the hard disk!! I wish that I could remember what anti virus program I used at the time to remove it from the system! Funny how both my PC AND yours had the same old virus on it! 🤔😂

Watching this is so nostalgic. It brought memories of DOS 2.0 (before it even became MS-DOS).

A joy to watch! Many thanks for sharing.

As always....love your content.....great pacing and you have a great voice for this.

Very cool. Reminds me of my first ever PC as I had a similar case with the buttons that opened like this. Not exactly the same around the keyboard but still a nice blast from the past. I really wish I still had my old XT.

Very nice, always love your videos! You are in good company, I bought a computer with the Stealth.C virus recently. Did a virus scan on every retro PC in the house after that just to be certain!!

I remember learning assembler at the time the stoned virus appeared and doing some debug found other messages in the disassembly code like "Legalise Marijuana Now". One by one each PC in the class become slower and slower until the admins came and rebuilt them. I don't think people believed me after but now you have provided some proof.

It's funny how these old PCs could reliably hold full size cards while in modern PCs the GPUs sag

Growing up we had a Tandy 1000sx without a hard drive, and everytime we booted it from the floppy it would say your computer is now stoned! If I remember correctly that did not harm anything we did on the computer.

Wow, for some reason I enjoyed that right to the end, great key board skills!

I subbed! nice work, can't wait to see you fix it!!!

Damn I wish more old machines turned up around here. Although I’d probably never go outside and keep working on them

That car hood action is pretty cool.

Amazing to watch! I have a case similar to this one with the "car hood" top opening. I've frankensteined it with an official IBM bezel from a broken 5150 case, and I love how easy it is to access everything inside without screws now.

Time to put that floppy into a bunch of other retro PCs and make sure they all still work properly...

This is really neat, I absolutely loved this PC and its style, the case is very easy to open and also it is very clean and looks brand-new inside, im looking forward to the next episode 😄😍

Great video! back in the days I've had the same Taxan Monochrom KX12 monitor. Mine was a green one, if I remember correctly there was KX-1212 and KX12-1213, one was the amber, the other was the green version. The monitor worked with my Plantron XT16, which was a 8MHz Turbo XT with two floppies. At that time I couldn't afford a HDD :-)

Don't know about you, but seeing the screwdriver scrape along the beautiful plastic.. I felt that 😢

Oh sweet memories. I probably built and sold 500 of these machines back in 86-87. The “grape” is just a made up name some store called them. They are all generic clones sold without a name badge which the store would add later. My store called our brand “maestro”. The hard disk controller is often mistakenly called an “MFM” controller but MFM is the encoding on the hard disk. In this case the encoding is actually RLL which could pack more data on the drive. The controller’s correct name is the “ST506/412” disk interface. I could tell right away the hard disk was RLL since it has a green LED. It was customary for MFM encoded drives to use red LEDs and RLL to use green. Equally, the floppy has a red LED which means 360k. If it had been a high density 1.2MB drive it would be amber. It also requires a different drive controller card. The amber screen leads me to believe that this would have been one of the last GRAPE XTs produced since green was earlier, amber was later. Paperwhite mono screens were last before colour became the standard monitor with AT class and beyond machines. The display card appears to be a Hercules graphics compatible card. They always had a million chips on a full length card. CGA EGA and later VGA were half size cards usually. The power supply is an XT 130 watt monster (for the day). Not powerful enough to mine bitcoin, but good enough to run Lotus 123!

Haha. I Haven't seen stoned virus in such a long time :) Brilliant to see an XT still running. Must have been a powerful system in it's day 30Mb and 640K !

Had the 'Stoned' virus on my first PC, a luggable Cordata 286, bought a 'future proofed' anti virus software called 'Untouchable', yes it did clean the virus, no, it didn't last forever as the manufacturer claimed lol.

A working Run Length Limited HDD!! They were lucky to survive 5 years let alone 35 years.

Man this takes me back. My aunt used to have a computer with an Amber monochrome display, and in the rare cases I would go over to her house, I sometimes got to play Alley Cat on her computer.

I had a similar thing happen with one of the drives I bought for my collection. Received the drive and I plug it in and see if it boots something. Gives an error message saying operating system not found and the screen shakes like crazy which I had never seen before. Didn’t think much of it. Formated it, copied some stuff on it and tested it (Was working fine). A few weeks later I plug one of my drives onto my modern PC with a USB-IDE bridge and Windows Defender reports a DOS Virus. Turns out the drive that got that weird shaking screen infected one of my floppies which in turn infected a lot of my other drives. Also by some crazy coincidence the day I received that drive was the day the payload was supposed to activate which is why I saw the shaking screen. Don’t recall the name of the virus but I still have a recording of the shaking screen on my phone.

Drives were not specific to MFM or RLL, it is the controller that does the encoding. In many cases, drives that were spec'ed as MFM will work with an RLL controller, though that is not guaranteed to work. A drive spec'd for RLL will also work with an MFM controller (but why would you want to do that?).

Thanks for a very nice walk down memory lane.

Fun fact: Grape was a big advertiser in Computer Shopper back in the day (I got my PC repair start in 1987). The sold cases, power supplies and a small selection of prebuilts. The hot hack was to run MFM drives off of RLL controllers for 150% capacity. Having 30mb instead of 20 was a huge bragging points. I can still remember to this day: C:\> g=c800:5

I haven't see that in 30 years... I started using it before I learned how to read. it was amazing

I believe SMS in this case is Scientific Microsystems. You will find the same controller on some Plus Hardcards.

And another instant like. Very nice as always. Thanks!

It felt like 5 minutes in when you announced that you were not going to fix the PC just yet and I wondered what you were going to do in the last 15 minutes of the video. :D Looking forward to another episode about this machine! :)

what a beauty. I adore amber screens

Now you're putting the thought in my head of "What If I took one of my vintage PCs that is wipeable and purposely infected it to see what would happen, then cured it?"

LOL thanks so much for sharing this! My very first ever PC was an IBM 8086 XT same machine inside and out (although the one you bought has a monster huge HDD compared to mine.) This was a real trip in nostalgia for me. And wow, I've been playing Tetris for a loooong time lol.

"This must be the gaming pc my son wants for his birthday!"

I would do a low level format of the hard drive using the Hard drive BIOS. Use a freshly created bootdisk to boot and reapply a high level format to the hard drive. Then you can spinrite to check it further. On a heavily out of whack hard drive, Spinrite will take forever trying to recover data, when it is clear that it is probably past that. Sad that the old data is mostly gone, but that cannot be helped, at least in a non-destructive and inexpensive way.

Grape computer? Judging from the color of the pc is looks more like a lemon...

Lovely video! :) luv the old computers. Retro forever!

Love the flip top lid cases!

I believe the ST-238R was my first hard drive, an RLL drive+controller. From a bit of looking, this is the same but sometimes they left the R off. I asked for it for Christmas in 1988. Dad bought two, one for himself and one for me - with the catch I had to install his, too LOL. The Grape name sounds very value familiar. Either way, I had a case very much like this one. Fun, thanks!

Just a hint from my side: Try to recap the harddrive! I had an ST-225 and an ST-238R which behaved exactly like your drive (sector not found). I tried to low level format the drive, but it didn't work. After recapping (tantalums + electrolytic only) the drives remained working again! :)

Awesome find! I agree with other folks here that you might want to try a recap on that hard drive. Great video as always!

Every one of the cards in there is an inexpensive "clone" card. These were extremely popular choices for the budge conscious owner needing to repair a machine, or this case, a "cheap clone" manufacture that one could find in the pages of magazines like "PC Shopper." Getting the "Stoned" virus message was a flash back to my early days as a PC tech. I cleaned up MANY machines that had virus, including the Stoned Virus.

An old Grape PC. I wonder if it has fermented into a Wine computer.

It looks a lot like the early IBM xts! I wonder what's in all those bat files. Startup commands for all the software? I used to do that before I had Windows or a menu programme

Congratulations on getting now your own wild copy of Stoned virus x)

Brings back memories! loved this video

I had an XT at my parent's place for years but they threw it out years ago....

Thanks for the video, brought back memories when I had a XT too, it was a 8088-2 @ 8MHz, with strangely 704kB of ram although 640 was only useable. I couldnt afford a HD at the time so had 2 x 360Kb floppy drives. CGA output to a monochrome monitor. It came with a CGA card. I also had an Epson LX80 printer with it.

This is cool. I love old computers. Hoping one day to start collecting them!

I love green... but when it comes to these old Monochrome CRTs - the amber color is simply gorgeous to look at!

Wow, I forgot about that Tetris game, I played that a lot in the 80s in ega colours. Now I only need to find a game where you played text based boat trying to bomb tesxt based submarines...... Something tells me you will know it.

Cool machine. My first PC was a 286 10MHz with an Amber Hercules display. I was so happy to finally get my hands on a PC! I do remember the old hard drives had to be manually set up in the BIOS to configure the number of cylinders, heads and sectors. Is that something you had to do? I'm thinking that might be part of the problem with the drive.

Great video love your work new subscriber from cheers from Australia

This computer is almost as old as me. It's crazy to think how technology has advanced since then. Thanks for showing us the ins and outs, Retro.

This is a fairly generic case, as I use to have a case just like this with a 486 66Mhz intel motherboard in it, 3.5in 1.44MB floppy, 1GB HDD, and 2X CD-ROM that my parents helped me upgrade with an Intel 100Mhz overdrive chip, a sound blaster 16 ISA card, a 33.6K internal modem, and 16MB RAM(I don't remember the VGA card, I think it was some crappy OAK card, but it got the job done for basic DOS games) so I could run Win 95 on it better for my school work, till I could save up for a proper AMD K6-II 550Mhz build a few years later.

Cracks me up how huge that video card is. My RTX 2060 Super isn't even that big! Might explain my performance issues. Bigger is always better, right? 🤣🤣🤣 You truly have a retro computer, complete with a retro virus.

nice input man. very cool.

This is hands down the most legendary video title I've ever had the pleasure to fall over whilst reading. It deserves to be in all caps and I can't believe I'm saying that but damn, it's the truth.

I can find nothing about a "Grape" PC clone. Motherboard markings might have been helpful in that effort.

One of the first viruses I ran across when I first started computers. It you keep it up. It might also say. Legalize Marijuana. Also a good ready to make sure your disks are write protected. LOL

This brings back memories! So much has changed...

Nice system mate !!!

forget apple, i use grape

You know it's a little yellowed But it's not that bad it's almost like a patina.

Idk why but I wanna see that 33 year old pc having modern day mother board and other modern pc stuff

Old but Gold. Love it