Let's check out some of these mystery pizza-box systems! Vintage computer teardown and test. 

literally the 1st piece of software from a store I ever bought in my life, 1997.. (I think I bought Netscape Navigator also at the same time, both on floppies)

My copy of After Dark came with a pretty great Asteroids clone called Lunatic Fringe!

​@@IrnBruNYC Dit it have Lawnmower Man?

I loved AfterDark!!

I'd love to figure out exactly which card is required by this board and try to create a reproduction of it!

I obtained one recently for a 486 variant of their 386 board. 8MB is usually enough for 386s and most 486 stuff, but 8 extra never hurt anyone. :)

I'd probably get fired on the first delivery for eating all of the pizza!

Thanks! I've never seen a board like that. Wonder if we could figure out which board is intended for that slot and reverse-engineer it. I can't imagine it's more than a few bus transceivers and passive components.

@@miketech1024 pretty much. but 8mb on a 386 is plenty for 99.9% of people with the only use being games. if the board accepts 4mb 30-pin simms... the memory board becomes moot. if you ebay search for "386 memory board" you can see some examples.

Thanks! Yeah those Caviars make some of the best sounds of all the drives I've tested so far from this haul. That MFM drive from the NEC PowerMate was quite musical as well.

@@miketech1024 The louder the better I say! 😉

I'm thinking about transferring my Ryzen 7 system into one of these beige cases.

Wow that's interesting! They lasted a lot longer than I would have thought.

I like the whole thing for the memory refresh. So much that I thought I forgot, just had a light coating of dust on it.

I've always just used some fresh leaded solder... desoldering alloy sounds fancy.

It works incredibly well for removing SMD chips and other multi-pin components like HDMI ports. It makes very short work of modern lead-free solder without the crazy high temps that are normally required.

It sounds like Wood's metal, but please be careful, it is apparently toxic, since it contains cadmium.

there is a product called soldering wick basically it's braided copper wire mesh ribbon that literally pulls the hot solder right off the board i mainly use it if i somehow mess up with the solder and have to start over which doesn't happen very often but it's not a non-zero chance

Thanks!

@@miketech1024 Yw buddy! :).

i found a listing for a dell vostro 200 on ebay and bought it it was listed as for parts but when i first looked in the case i realized it was complete and it was just password locked funny thing is if you know how to. you can completely bypass the password the machine had the admin account disabled but funny thing is there is a secret hidden Administrator account that is not able to be disabled just for that reason of regaining access to computers with lost passwords so i went on turned the other admin account back on and logged in apparently someone forgot to properly erase the hard drive tsk-tsk because i found vacation photos and more stuff from a probably defunct tuxedo rental company weird thing is there were no names so i couldn't actually find out if they wanted those photos back i actually bought it just for the tower because i had a disembodied computer laying in a box just waiting for a new home but i ended up with a standard office computer running xp i compared what i did to a fallout 3 style hacking minigame i actually had to look up how to change the username of the main account since it was firstname lastname and it wouldn't work if i typed firstname_lastname it's been a while so i have actually forgotten again the steps of doing that but now if i wanted to i could rename the main account.

I got a slim version of that for $20

I could probably still get use out of it today, except for the thing with the short filenames. I used to be ashamed to admit this to a geek crowd, but I'm still using Word 2000 --- on a Win7 system! 🙂

@@keithbrown7685 LOL Keith, I still use Word 2003 on my Win 10 system. I've got Word 2010, but never liked the ribbon on the top. IMO opinion Word 6.0-2003 were the best Word versions.

Just curious. Did you have the Lawnmower Man plugin?

@@keithbrown7685 for some reason I thought I had, but I can't find it now :(

Very likely. They probably just badged an off-the-shelf case.

Ah that explains all the weird spacey sounds!

@@miketech1024 I think the icons and sounds were also on the "Science" theme, at least on Windows 98 (that inherited a few of the Plus! 95 themes). And that wallpaper is from another of the themes, Dangerous Creatures, I think. (I had to look up the english names for the themes, btw)

There was once an i386 distro called Damn Small Linux. The entire image was only 50MB! Sadly, it is long-dead. Might see what I can do to resurrect it as it is perfect for old machines. Long ago I modified it with graphics drivers and loaded it into a RAMdisk. It made an insanely fast gaming OS!

I'm really surprised at the number of hard drives I've tested from this period that still work perfectly fine!

Pretty surprised myself that I hadn't heard of it. We even had the flying toaster screensaver, but it came in the form of a single SCR file with no such branding. Yeah I've used that liquid electrical tape before. It is definitely permanent! I usually use either hot glue or RTV to seal up the holes in the RTC, just in case I need to remove the connections for some reason.

@@miketech1024 A friend of mine and I had a running joke that if there is anything left of Humanity at the end of time it will be fossilized plastic, and liquid electrical tape. Nothing survives what that liquid electrical tape can, haha!

I'd almost prefer some kind of power sanding tool with a delicate setting. I swear I'd take forever with sandpaper, and I probably wouldn't get it right anyway.

@@keithbrown7685 Sanding metal cases is a lot like using salt in cooking. You can't undo sanding once done and you can't dial back salt once added. So slow is better, especially when you go in guns-ablazing thinking you're sanding steel only to discover it's aluminum. (Learn from my mistake)

Good to know! I've always heard VLB can be quite unstable at higher clock speeds.

@@miketech1024 It can definitely get flaky. Many cards and motherboards have jumpers to alter timing/wait states on the bus to compensate for >33MHz FSB. That jumper sets the same signals on the bus whether it's on the card or the motherboard, so it usually only has to be set in one place. Multiple VLB cards installed with a higher FSB is somewhat trickier. You may find that the cards have to be in specific slots to work properly. With my system, it seemed to work best jumpered to >33MHz even with the FSB at 33MHz. It's totally stable at 40Mhz, and it POSTs at 50MHz, but I didn't stress test the system as I want to place thermistors on the CPU and VRM to make sure things are sane with the CPU at 200MHz.

I like my pizza with extra sausage, if you catch my meaning.

@@fatguywitholdcomputers9351 😉

All orders must be submitted via dial-up BBS. 🙂

@@miketech1024 can I get the number to this BBS? ^.^

I think it's the visual aesthetic. Maybe there's some space savings to be had, too.

none of these are "pizza box" cases. pizza box form factor was/is extremely rare for pc compatible computers. most of them were Sun, HP, SGI, etc... Unix machines. Pizza boxes are generally not sized as these cases, except in places like Chicago or Detroit. these are plain ol' desktop form factor.

@@316diag agreed. IBM also had pizza boxes and they were AIZ Unix also

Never have come across After Dark (or flying toasters of any kind) in a professional environment. I did go straight into admin/engineer roles, completely bypassing helpdesk/desktop type work. So that may be why. The days of CRT monitors were well over by the time I entered the workforce also. I work 100% in the cloud these days (DevOps and Azure) so the only server hardware exposure I get these days are the ones in the home lab.

Interesting. I wonder if they licensed it from AOL.

@@miketech1024 Hard to say :) The date of the first release of this communicator is August 2000.

I know, right? His expression had me rolling!!

Could be, I'll have to test it.

More content for me!

Child me once modified all of the AOL sounds using WAV files from a website called fart.com. This was peak hilarity for an 8-year-old!