You are genuinely the only person I can watch for an hour straight without getting bored and skipping through the video. You're videos are so awesome man. Keep up the amazing work!!
You wouldn't believe how many businesses dispose of IT equipment without scrubbing the disk drives. They tend to be SMBs with one IT guy on the end of a phone somewhere in a remote state. I used to spend days low-level formatting SCSI disks just to throw them away. These days I DBAN them and pile them up for periodic shredding down to electronic coffee grounds! Keep up the great work on the channel.
Yup! Having spent decades in corporate IT I can't say I'm surprised. Several passes with random data combined with physical destruction was SOP when I worked for DoD contractors.
A few years back, I bought a computer lot from from a local city's court. When I went to pick them up, I was only supposed to get 6, but there was another pile next to that pile that they told me I could have. I loaded everything up, got home, and started going through the computers. The pile I purchased had their hard drives removed. The other pile did not... Several had documents containing arrest warrants, social security numbers, and a really good buffalo chicken dip recipe that I still use to this day. I ended up wiping the drives thoroughly and never heard anything from the court, but I don't think I was supposed to get the second pile of computers.
🤣 The buffalo chicken dip recipe… That’s some sensitive data! Yeah it’s amazing how much data falls through the cracks. It’s a good thing these systems fall into the hands of people like us and not identity thieves.
Just wanted to say how much I appreciate your channel, reminds me of working at my first job at a small computer store in the wild west of PC's in 1996... Also I am now calmed by the clicks of your test drives, lets all hope those never fully die!
As always, your videos serve to relax and entertain. I love your content. Congratulations on the growth of your channel, Mike, you cutie. You deserve it. I noticed you took off the pride flag from the clock :( Big hug, Mike, keep up the great work.
That Micron and the Dell you compared it to are just a couple of makers who used that case. It was also used by OmniTech, CompUSA, HP used it in their Kayak series, even UMax (one of the Apple cloners) used it in their high end models. I'm sure there are others I haven't listed. I still don't know who actually made it, although I wonder if it was Foxconn. Best 90s OEM case ever made.
Hi Mike!! The Feature Connector is the same set of pins you'll find for example on Trident or S3 PCI cards from that era, apparently it was used on some MPEG accelerator cards but hardly used.On the other hand, the Wave connector would be like the ones found on Soundcars for plugging in external wavetable modules. I think it's a nice bonus from the board makers, having everything on board and also provide the same features as if there were discrete cards. Keep the videos coming!!!
You have *NO IDEA* how badly I want to relive the AOL 2.5 days. I was very active in the Hackintosh warez scene and even began learning how to script/program using a utility called OneClick. Man, those were the days!
I don't even have a drive indicator on my modern laptop & yet I can come here and literally hear drive activity, it's beautiful. I see more retro RU-vidrs just resorting to the quiet CF / SD / SSD replacements. This is why I appreciate you keeping it as true as you can while you still can!
Ex-NT4 admin here. Yes, it was very different from 2000 and 2003. You'd be able to find your way around 2000 without any trouble with your 2003 experience, but NT4 was pretty spartan. I'd forgotten NT4 had *any* MMC functionality at all. It was all EXEs for the main server utilities. No Active Directory on NT4 either, AD didn't come along until 2000. I rarely used NT4 after about 2003, but the place I worked then had a couple of NT4 servers lingering around. I was responsible for moving them to VMware off physical hardware so they probably survived 10 years longer than they should have, long after I'd departed for greener pastures. But you've heard the story... Biz-critical server, software vendor went out of business and a long-gone employee named Dan lost the original media. I heard the same story at two different employers about a dead-end server and the guy's name was Dan both times.
Good ol’ Dan! 🤣 Yeah I was pretty helpless in NT4. My last company still had a Server 2003 VM (they did a P2V at some point) which I was tasked with migrating and retiring. This was in 2019…. Sure it was retro-cool and all but this was a live corporate environment… Thanks for the comment, gave me a chuckle!
Thanks! I'm going to do everything I can to save that board. There has to be a way to re-connect the middle layers to those vias. I've ordered some micro drill bits to see if I can expose the interconnects inside those vias.
Another great video! This one was jam packed. I love watching you dive into and take apart all these computers. It’s my favorite Friday morning activity. Yes I can attest to the fact you like to drill things lol. Thinking back to three holes drilled into the floor. I wonder the people at AOL would think if they knew that email was from a 7 year old HA! That Tonka game was a trip. Looking at the picture makes me wonder what kid stuck that gift card in the floppy drive. I miss all the old computer sounds. Listening to the hard drive click. Those sounds equate to the computer thinking. I love your videos, they bring back many memories.
I love watching these while I am working on projects. Also going to be great prep for my machines that have been sitting out in the garage for a long time.
That Micron/Dell is just like the Dell I once worked with. Recall a story about a woman who called tech support asking how to remove the sticky side cover. She was told to pick up the CPU box and "bounce it gently on the floor". And I've found cards in computers also. My first old Pentium-100, a thrift store, was being used for baseball card storage. Probably 100+ inside the case, stuffed in the floppy drive, in the optical drive, every crack and crevice had baseball cards crammed inside. Probably a good find for a computer enthusiast who's also a sports card collector.
the videos just keep getting better, love the long vids! and finally a CD ROM drive has a disc in it, last week I sensed it was coming lol , can't wait in time to see all the Franklin E-Waste Haul computers, completed, and ready for the big group photo!!! Congrats on 6K subs also, climbing all the time! all my best!!
1992, Tandy (Radio Shack) 1000 RLX 20 mb hd, 3 1/2" floppy, monitor, keyboard, mouse, dot matrix printer. Three year Warranty, which came in handy since the system had a faulty hard drive. It switched between DOS and Desk Mate(very nice, basic GUI); the technicians could not explain what was going on. Almost $1000.00 spent. After the new hd, it was working well! I mostly used it's version of BASIC, DOS, Desk Mate; Hangman, Print Shop, and Wheel of Fortune!
my recent windows 98 build was in a black tower, which is fine, because I have a black PS/2 keyboard, black serial mouse and black CRT… I just really want an off yellow wish everything the next time around, it just gives it that home feeling of you know everything‘s gonna be all right when you look at it. Thx Mike :)))
I had an NEC Ready in 1997. It was a little bit of an upgrade to the one you have there but it was still the same form factor. It was a 233MMX and came new with a 4 gig hard drive and 32 megs of ram. I remember it included this neat tutorial software with a wizard guy that would walk around on your screen and teach you how to use the computer.
@@youtubasoarus We had the very same model from the video, and yeah, I never saw anyone else with an NEC computer at the time. I think NEC stopped making PCs just 5 years later or so. It was a pretty sweet machine, though.
WOW... you're getting PTSD?!? I managed a network of 20+ Win NT4 machines and it is what made me change gears and steer my career to being a Linux/BSD admin. :) Great video!
Pentium motherboards require that all 4 of the SIMM72 modules be populated in order to work, because the Pentium requires all the 64 data bits accessable
Lol.. exchange server ptsd is indeed a real tithing! Funny story: an old boss of mine from long ago wanted a HDD upgrade for our amiga computer, so he called up the dealer, and the sales person asked IDE or SCSI? My boss responded: SCSI? no… I want a good one!
i miss the scrolling of loads of processed files ,made you appreciate how busy it is ,now its all hidden , never liked the stuttering /freezing progress bar
I am listening you dig through ancient computers while trying to get my Amiga Video Toaster set up. You want to dig through some oddball hardware, the Amiga is a treasure for such things! Though the prices have become ridiculous...
Can't wait for the video about this HP DDS3 Tape Drive! I also bought one lately and just run it on Windows 10! It works but I'm a newbie here so I hope your video will make me feel better here! PS. You do a great work with your channel, please do it as long as possible! 🤗
I have that exact Micron Millennia that I found back in 2002...minus the target gift card and tonka cd lol. Same video card, cpu, dial up modem and nic. The only difference is it had a quantum bigfoot hard drive that somehow the owner rigged into the case. Those things are huge!
I feel I'm repeating myself but I get so excited or nostalgic whenever I see an OPL sound chip. To me the value of these chips is only going to get more valuable. Plus I get so excited about a 'classic' video card. And CPUs on daughter or riser cards still blow me away. Great work. X
those dell/micron cases are a foxconn inhouse design, fun fact the case design was also used for a macintosh clone. also the drive cage shoud just be one or two screws and you should be able to just tilt or pull the cage out without removing the other sidepanel.
Some good tips there about trace repair, and a great use for old desoldering braid. Yes, board trace repair can be a really fun thing, especially on these multilayer boards, we have some Sony 4 and 6-layer boards at work in BVH-3000 series video recorders, the traces got eaten not by batteries but by leaking Elna high-temperature capacitors, they are made more fun by the fact that the seal fails on the bottom of the capacitor and the leftover seal adheres to the board, it takes between 4 and 10 hours of work on each board. I really hope you can save that Pentium VLB board, if you do you should configure Openstep x86 on it, just like Cannon did with 486 machines to make a turnkey high end DTP machine.
The IR pick up on the first one isn't for data transfer between devices, it is for an actual remote control that could navigate the PC. I think every PC big name tried it in that period of a couple years.
That case style that Micron and Dell used was also used with the UMAX S900 Macintosh clone. It was one of the first ATX cases out there. That case design lived into 2001 or so when Dell finally replaced it with the grey/black clamshell cases with those terribly placed front USB ports.
Yes, we got a batch of those Micron Millennia systems at a multimedia software company I worked at. And around the same time we also got one of those UMAX Macintosh clones with the same case. And since I did side work of fixing people's home computers, so I also saw one of the Dell systems with the same case. I'm thinking there might even have been a Digital home computer in the same case as well (more than 25 years ago, memory isn't so good).
The Micron Millennia was the last new pre-built desktop/tower PC I ever bought. After that I assembled all my PC's from components. I'm not sure of the exact model but the front panel is just like the one you have in the video. I do remember that the front panel power button broke so I had to poke the switch behind the front panel with a pencil to start it up. Brick & mortar computer stores like Egghead, CompUSA, CompuAdd, Radio Shack and computer fairs were my main source of parts until the early 2000's when online retailers such as PC Connection and CDW offered a vast array of PC parts. Of course I bought a few pre-made laptops and upgraded the RAM and storage. I've also bought some inexpensive used PC's off of eBay and Craigslist to uses as secondary or tertiary PC's.
My technique for replacing destroyed copper tracks is to use wire wrap wire (30 or 26 GA). It's silver plated and solders like a dream because the silver is oxide/tarnish free having been under insulation which easily strips off. Plus leaving the insulation on for long runs the wire instantly bonds to the circuit board with the tiniest amount of Krazy-Glu, you don't have to solder the wire down along a track, just where the wire terminates to the intact track. I wash all of the flux off and coat the repairs with lacquer. Thanks for letting me know about the rubber Dremel bit.
Oh man, that NEC Ready 7022 was my family's first ever brand new computer (hand-me-downs before then). It cost a small fortune at the time, but I used the ever living hell out of the thing. Came with a full copy of Descent, too. Good times.
I actually remember having that Tonka game back in the day when I was in probably 2nd or 3rd grade. Got it from the book fair the school system did back then.
I remember selling those micron PCs at office depot, they were pretty nice units but the market was cramped with to many brands, so they folded that side of it and concentrated on their dram business. I also remember all the others when they were new.
That Windows NT blue start up screen at 59:26 brings back memories, I'd totally forgotten it did that on boot up and how slow it was. This would have been in 1997 or 98 so not sure which version it was, it might have been NT 4. These were IBM workstations running Avid Media Composer and they had a SCSI drive as the main C drive. All the external media drives were on SCSI chains, mostly 9 or 18GB but occasionally a 36GB. Then at some point they were all upgraded to Windows 2000.
The optical drive that's installed on the NEC is a 40x drive (hence CD Master 40E). Samsung sold a metric buttload of drives on the OEM market in the late 90's and early 2000's. eMachines was one of their biggest customers, but every mom and pop shop in my area carried their drives as well.
Good god, Server NT 4.0 looked like the wild west. My experience like yours goes back to 2003 (2003 Small Business Server to be exact) and apparently there was so much more creature comforts that 2000 or 2003 brought that made our lives easier. Granted when I got my first sysadmin job, it was the year of our Lord 2010 and Server 2003 was already old. It helped to tap in on my experience from building complete AD domains in my bedroom growing up. After typing that, I'm pretty sure I know why my life took the path it did. Not bad.
I was pretty lost in NT4. PowerShell probably wasn't even thought of yet! At my last job, they were still running a Server 2003 VM (they did a P2V) which I had to retire... In 2019... Yeah we are very fortunate to have been such tech-curious kids! It's amazing how much those early experiences helped accelerate my career!
The onboard sound adapter in the first machine you took apart is an Opti 930. I had an ISA card version when I was younger - it had very decent Sound Blaster Pro and Adlib compatibility for DOS gaming.
Interesting Machines, Both Dell and Micron got a lot of use out of that model of Case I have a Newer Micron and a Dell 4100 Same Case as yours just newer Front Face Plates. Thanks for the Video.
magnet wire is what louis rossmann uses for trace repair. Your method will work as you know, this isn't a critique, just if you are having trouble with small traces that is more ideal.
Cool computers! The second one was the most interesting one cuz of the games. I actually remember having two Blue's Clues PC games, one was an ABC game and the other was Blue's Birthday, the latter felt like an actual Blue's Clues epsiode so that one holds up the most! Those were made by Humongous Entertainment who made the Freddi Fish, Putt-Putt, and Pajama Sam games! I only played the Freddi Fish games back in the day, only recently started playing some of the others in the past few years. Still have my copy of Freddi Fish 5 after all these years, had to get it resurfaced tho. Awesome vid and can't wait to see what you show next!😁👌
The NEC system, I LOVE IT!! I like the way you fix and clean this vintage machines. You can use stuff like PCem to emulate these but you will never get the real experience like what a CRT and a Pentium 2 would get you. I really liked the server machine, I have never seen a dual Slot 1 motherboard with on SCSI, that's insane! The ATI 3D Rage IIc is a VERY unpowered and common 3D AGP video card and some could even do hardware DVD playback. The 25th is my last day of school for me, so you will see more content on my channel!
Thanks! I agree there is simply no replacement for the sights and sounds of real hardware. I do appreciate that things like PCem, DosBox and 86Box lowers the barrier of entry to DOS gaming (no need to buy an expensive retro machine), but I need real hardware. Even when playing NES games, emulation just isn’t the same for me. I can’t explain it either because the NES is silent. Yeah servers usually come with super basic video cards. Especially modern servers because usually we’re just loading a hypervisor on there, connecting it to the network and it never sees a monitor again until it needs on-prem maintenance. I was surprised to see that this card had any 3D capabilities at all. Awesome, can’t wait to see what you upload!
@@miketech1024 Yeah, I plan on doing a overview video on my Windows 98 PC nicknamed MadMax because of the black drives in a beige case (i couldnt find anything DVD-ROM/CD-RW IDE drives in beige at a good price at the time) and installing OS2 Warp 4 or 4.52,
That one fan you noted was somewhat silent reminded me of some fan blade design from MIT with toroidal blades. It is supposed to be more silent. Although this is on drones, don't dismiss it as being just for drones like some narrow minded people who don't know that things have multiple uses. Maybe they even work better for those uses than their original intended use! Or maybe something that was designed for something else works really well for a lot of things. One thing I would mention about that fan you had is that the blades didn't have sharp corners. They were nicely rounded and that is not something you usually see on PC fans. Some of them have pointy and sharp blades that make them a little bit dangerous when they run without a grill over them. Also that grill would help prevent them from ruining wires that are too close.
There are STL files to 3D print these fans also. I guess the best thing to do is have one that the hub motor is easy enough to remove and remove the plastic from to have a base to put that onto.
Hello, still watching the video but I had to type this! That Canon Innova socket 4 pentium 60 with VLB, mine had the bug so I exchanged the MB under warranty! I use to own one of these, I watch a shitload of retro related content and had encountered maybe 2 innova systems so I never expected to see one like the one I had, If you need the restore floppy disk images let me know (MS-DOS + Windows 3.1) not to sure if I mine came with a western digital video card.
Thanks! Hopefully I can save this board from the evil Varta battery. You should upload those restore disks to archive.org to help future Canon Innova discoverers!
@@miketech1024 Yeah good idea, I will locate the files, upload and share them... after I watched the video to the end I noticed it is also a Pentium 60, for bonus points check if it also have have the bug, I remember my hard disk drive was a tad smaller, was 420 (also WD) but can't remember the brand of the sound card or video card. Found the CD with the files, they were already backed up, but I wanted to ZIP file the original files with the early file dates. Funny that my new DVD recorder didn't detect this or any of my CDs from 1996 but an old CD-ROM on my Athlon XP copied everything flawlessly. I will upload the files as soon as I can. Thanks for your content, that Canon Pentium really bring me back.
Many years ago for some reason I set up a Compaq ML370 (IIRC) with either a BSD or Debian on it as my file server. Dual 733MHz Pentium III. It had an onboard ATI Rage IIc. I wonder if those were standard issue for Compaq and HP? It sounded like a vacuum cleaner running without the driver to tell the fan to spin down. I hacked the driver from RHEL onto it somehow, which helped a lot! Also, about 6 or 7 years ago I was out with some friends and drove past a few old computers outside a small office block, so I grabbed them. A few were desktops (one was better than my then current system so that got swapped in), but one was a generic server with Windows Server 2003.Turns out it belonged to a financial planner's office and all of the personal data was in the recycling bin. Driver's licenses, scans of Medicare cards, correspondence, you name it. I figure someone unqualified just selected the files and hit delete without knowing what they were doing. Rest assured I DBANed that thing immediately.
Wow! I swear some very basic data sanitization course should be a part of whatever qualifications are required to be a CPA or other finance-oriented professional. I see this stuff all too often.
The Micron PC is the exact one I used to hate. Micron was based in Nampa, Idaho and went out of Business in the early 2000's.... Micron, the memory company is still in business, under the brand, Crucial. the PC division was a totally separate company and wound up folding due to hardware changes and a ever changing market. the Micron towers were ATX ready and would be reused, providing you could get extra hardware. (standoff's, etc.) they supported up to 2 hard drives and a nice tower if all the parts were there. I recycled plenty of them in days past....
Micron is huge, they make dram chips for many things, crucial is the retail side of them. The PC side folded mainly because there were to many cheap PC in the market like emachines and such.
Love these videos! Always watch your stuff. I'd like to see you incorporate your Epiphone guitar into more of it. I don't know how or why but the one time you did do that I thought it was cool
Thanks! Not sure if there will be many more opportunities to break out the SG on here. It may make a re-appearance when I build the retro audio recording rig though.
My high school had a few of those HP servers honestly never really cared for them they were prone to multiple component failures…. Usually the power supply would take a dump and take the drives with it….also if memory serves me correctly the power supply /motherboard was proprietary an off the shelf power supply would fry the motherboard….
