Rarest of the Rare | The Mindset II Computer 

Doubt it lol

We are not your wife, we are not the one you need to convince that you bought it by accident. But I'm sure she's proud you didn't just click buy-now. :) As allways, great video. Thx.

Time to move up to unintentional!

That was definitely not "accidental". Looking forward to more like these.

Not a flippin' chance. More power to ya

Yes. You wouldn't have been saving digital video files anywhere for sure due to technological limitations. The expectation was you used the computer as an intermediary, your sources were overlaid onto whatever software you were working on and the final output went to VCR or some other analog recording device.

For sure. I don't want other M2 owners stuck!

Remarkably so!

Wouldn't mind a modern PC case with similar aesthetic!

Nova Scotia seems to be a trend lately.. they mention it in the latest season of Only Murders in the Building. :) But yeah there seems to be a grouping of serious collectors there.. I think a bunch of Kenbak-1s turned up there a while back and then this fellow who has been unloading gear for 5 or 6 years now.

@TechTimeTraveller for a small place we do seem to get a bit of recognition here and there 😅 but I will say there is a fairly strong retro community here between gaming, PCs and arcade hardware. The stuff never seems to sit around unsold

Thank you for watching!!

I hope so. I'd love to see what can be done with the hardware fully utilized. The one complication is there are so few Mindsets out there there may not be enough of a base to really encourage new development.

Let's be fair, as a member of the 1977 Microcomputer Trinity, the Commodore PET is a lot more common. Looking at prices, the machines are bafflingly unreasonably priced for their relative commonality. They're not unobtainium like the original stock Apple ][ and Mindset for example.

But Vampire Weekend asked who gives a fuck about an oxford comma

Thanks, I hate it

Oxford Comma Forever!!!

@@Derpy1969 unnecessary and not how people speak.

​@@TheEradorthe oxford comma exactly replicates how people speak. Commas denote a small pause in speech, and when people enumerate a list, they put small pauses between each item in the list. That's what the oxford comma is.

Probably wouldn't be too hard. They already have this machine in emulation via MAME.

Many thanks for watching!

I really hope that doesn't exist. Can't afford more! Lol

Apple came out of Atari as well - it's where Jobs and Woz worked prior to founding Apple, and the rumor always was they were stealing parts from Atari for use creating the Apple I. Atari was sorta the Fairchild of the '70s and early '80s.

Certainly possible. They didn't runa ton of ads because of their financial situation but they did run some.

Many thanks!!

Yeah I guess because I've been collecting so long, back to a time when you couldn't give this stuff away, I find anything into 4 figures to be crazy expensive. Really there's no intrinsic value to these things. It's speculative and I think when my generation cashes out prices will probably fall a fair bit.

@@TechTimeTraveller Well I probably accidentally came upon my own answer. Demand. There's a lot of demand for PETs for example. Even among Millennials like myself(born in 1986). So that drives prices up. It wasn't even that long ago to my mind when you couldn't give a Commodore 64, or an Atari 800. Now those are starting to creep slowly towards the $500 mark and that's only going to go up. Since the other side of the demand is that stock is dwindling. Old machine die and become parts for other machines at the best of times. Never mind all the example that have just been thrown away. So sad...

Not just in looks either. There's functionality it has, which might not have been included without the Mindset machines existing first.

I think the Atari ST picked up a few tricks from it as well. The styling is vaguely similar, and I think the ST also sported similar graphics resolutions. The Mindset PC made a small splash when it hit the market. Unfortunately, they never had the financing to take advantage of it, and the lack of full compatibility probably helped kill it.

Many thanks!!

Thank you. The CPU was an Intel 80186 I think clocked at 6mhz. There is a fuller documentary video I did about the machine that covers the details.. really the only things that seem to have changed with the Mindset II is the memory.

@@TechTimeTraveller Thanks for the reply. At the time I recall I was using several Z80 based machines running CPM. Ahhh, those were the days.

@@TechTimeTraveller It's so strange to see a the 80186 in action, as it really wasn't all that popular and a very niche chip. The 286 was much more popular, but it's still a relatively uncommon chip. Since things didn't really take off until the 386 which for its time was really impressive. Still so few machines used the 186 and it's really nice to see an example in action.

@@natsume-hime2473 And if anyone is wondering _why_ the 80186 didn't take off that much... The 186 was kind of a system-on-a-chip, with a lot of the motherboard logic built in, so it could be used in embedded systems. _But,_ because it came out in 1982, it was largely designed _before_ the (1981) IBM PC got popular -- and it used different memory addresses and such than the PC for that motherboard logic. This wasn't a problem for the few programs that worked entirely with calls to the operating system (e.g., to MS-DOS). But the IBM PC's BIOS was slow enough to be a bottleneck when using DOS this way, so MS-DOS programs often bypassed the operating system, and accessed the PC's hardware directly for better performance. Thus, 186 systems could never _quite_ be fully compatible with IBM PC software. The Tandy 2000 was another computer that used the 80186 -- and had the same problem make it a disappointment in the marketplace. (Though it was rather less of a flop than the Mindset.)

Man I would kill even just to see a picture of that. I think less than 100 of the hard drive cartridges were ever made.

Unfortunately so far the only people I've found were the two developers of the Video Titler software. I've tried sending messages out to other staff names I've found but nothing so far.

@@TechTimeTraveller Thats too bad as fans like yourself help keep the memory alive and not lost to history.

Or try to repair the nonworking machine. Custom IC's can be reverse engineered with patience.

@@wishusknight3009 that route might be a bit of a sunk cost fallacy considering it's missing a few more bits to make it a usable working system. No foul in repurposing an otherwise useless Mindset system unit.. Sell off the mainboard to someone with a more complete unit in need of one.

@@Drmcclung Its mostly 74 logic outside of a handful of custom ic's. And the other parts are there to be documented. A logic analyzer, some test equipment and some expertise will save that from a useless retromod worth far less than even that system being broken. I would be willing to even try it myself.

@@wishusknight3009 you must have missed the part where a Mindset system unit on its own (a working one) is completely useless without the Mindset keyboard and disk unit that fits on top. What would you do with a repaired and still unusable system unit?

@@Drmcclung You must have missed the part where i said that the other parts were there to document. Anything can be reproduced and eventually will be. I can see retromoding a classic mac or breadbin, but you DONT destroy something like this, even if its unusable. They are too rare to be turned into something you can 3dprint anyhow. /smh

I must admit I've never really figured out how to do that properly. I was hoping bitsavers would pick them up.

@@TechTimeTraveller ask Tech Tangents. He's dumped lots of stuff already.

Hopefully my pics of the cart will help them recreate what they need.

Last joystick that sold by itself went for $600.. ulp.

Date makes sense too yeah.

I'm not an expert but basically digital RGB (think they call it RGBi also) is the type of RGB you has on classic PCs.. it can only produce 8 colors, plus intensity which yields 16 max. Analog on the other hand is not limited that way.. I think the Mindset could pull 16 colors from any of the 512 in its palette, whereas with digital rgb I think it could only pull the usual 16 PCs used.

@@TechTimeTraveller interesting, thank you! found your channel almost a year ago probably, i love it.

@@herzogsbuick Many thanks!! Appreciate your enjoyment of it!

I think the goal was to coopt PC users by maintaining some compatibility to the PC, but with better hardware. And go after video/graphics professionals with something much cheaper than what they used. The 186 offered relatively inexpensive improvement over the 8086/8088 since it's 16 bit, and it was able to be exported; the 286 was subject to restrictions. They really missed the appeal of the PC and why people chose that platform in ever larger numbers.

@@TechTimeTraveller The 8086 is a 16 bit chip. The 80888 is at least partially 16 bit. In fact, the 8086 has 3 buses. Internal, external and addressing. It has a 20bit address bus and 16bit internal bus with 16 bit registers. The 80186 is not a big departure from either 8088 or 8086 except for it has much of the supporting hardware in the chip. It's a kind of "integrated solution" Do you have a source for the export restrictions? I cannot find any information saying the 80286 was subject to export restrictions. It was not a particularly fast chip for the time and didn't even have a math co-processor onboard. I don't believe EGA or even VGA later on was genlock compatible. That would have made those video chips really useless for this application. So they would have had to create another video chip to upgrade its capabilities. That would have been expensive. I do agree that even at $3500, this was MUCH, MUCH cheaper than the broadcast hardware of the day, though that hardware was far more capable. AFAIK, the entry level stuff was 100grand. It might have been a good idea to partner with Commodore with a white label Amiga mindset could have put their name on and developed a SCSI interface for the Amiga and shipped it with a hard disk. But it also might have been too much to ask for a near bankrupt Mindset to creating a scsi expansion card for that Amiga. In the end, it's kind of funny because the Amiga was everything they wanted the Mindset to be. Near broadcast quality multimedia in a small box. Maybe not quite good enough for broadcast (at that point), but definitely good enough for training material and other video products requiring computer generated graphics and tiling and also computerized sound for the professional video market. I work in IT and I used to work for the local energy provider at their corporate office. They had a department for producing video programs for things like electricity safety to be shown in schools and other things like that. They had a whole row of Amiga 2000s and a large system, probably a 1/2 million dollars of equipment. Even though they had the 1/2 million Dollar setup for professional broadcast video, those Amigas were still being used for smaller simpler stuff and this was in 1995. They were on their way out though. They were scheduled to be removed, but I left before that was done.

When the Mindset PC first came out in '84 it was way, way ahead of the curve, especially for a semi-compatible PC. Unfortunately semi-compatible didn't really cut it in the marketplace, and Mindset never had the kind of money Atari and Commodore were able to pour into launching the ST and the Amiga a couple of years later, both of which were far more powerful. Per an article in an '85 issue of Creative Computing, Jack Tramiel looked into trying to buy Mindset outright when he was setting up shop at Atari, but by that point the tech was a bit dated, they didn't have a GUI interface for it, and it wasn't clear how well one would run on the Mindset's increasingly antiquated hardware. They really needed hardware that was Macintosh class, which the Mindset wasn't. I do wonder if the ST would have been more-successful had it been based around a 286, ran CPM and GEM and been largely PC compatible. It probably would have taken more time to develop the chipset to give the 286 68K-level performance, but Atari ended up taking over six months making CPM 68K and GEM work on the Motorola processor since Digital Research was nowhere near done with the port when Atari decided to use CPM 68K and GEM as the ST's OS. Whereas CPM and GEM were pretty much already ready to roll on the 286. Maybe in the end Atari would have been better off buying Mindset, building a 286-based version of the hardware and using Intel-based CPM and GEM. They probably still would have beaten the Amiga to market and had the advantage of being able to run a lot of PC software - maybe all of it with a bit of emulation magic.

@@sunspot42 I think the ST would have done worse, at least in the market it found relative success in, the home market. It probably would have driven the price up and not been as fast and not as good a game machine. GEM would have been a good stopgap if it was available. GEOS was even better. Much lighter on the system requirements. But it wasn't released until 1990. As a productivity machine, I think it would have been the better way to go probably. Having the GEM OS running on top of DR DOS as standard would have set it above the competition in the PC market while remaining PC compatible. I don't know if it was available for DOS or not. But if it was only CP/M 86, it would have been a deathknell to the ST. It was or should have been obvious to anyone in 1985 that launching a new CP/M system in 1985 was a bad idea except for a tiny market married to CP/M. I don't think EGA has a good high res (640x480x16) mode. You got stuck with 640x350 making everything look elongated. I'm no expert in NTSC broadcasting, but I don't think you can genlock with a EGA or VGA card. If this is true, it kind of kills the idea of Mindset using it. The only sound standards that existed for PC in 1985 was the PC Jr/Tandy 1000 sound chip. It would have been nice though to have a cheap PC compatible with built in MIDI support.

@@tarstarkusz The ST ran GEM, on CPM 68K. But Atari ended up having to do most of the work getting CPM 68K up and running and GEM ported over to it. It took considerable time and effort and delayed the launch of the ST by over 6 months. GEM was available for CPM as well as for MS-DOS and DR's own Concurrent DOS on the x86, so one option might have been for Atari to just scoop up Mindset, get a 286 version of the Mindset PC up and running and get GEM running atop MS-DOS on the new hardware. I agree the 286 wasn't as fast as the Mac or Amiga's Motorola 68000, but it's possible with enough helper chips it could have provided similar enough performance along with PC compatibility. That would have been a huge selling point - an inexpensive all-in-one PC compatible that looked and acted like a Mac but ran common PC productivity packages and potentially many games. They would have had to forge their own graphics modes and sound standard, but that wouldn't have been a huge stumbling block in 1985. If they could have got prices down to around $1,000 they would have moved a ton of machines and likely gotten quite a bit of software support from developers for whatever graphics and sound standards they introduced. Bonus points if they'd been smart enough to release a card for other PCs to provide them with the same functionality as their new standards.

Because you could run many of the most popular PC software offerings without having to purchase 3rd party hardware.

@@TechTimeTraveller Thanks for the reply. IIRC, back in the day reviewers had an unofficial rule for what was PC compatible -- could it run off the shelf versions of Lotus 123 and Microsoft Flight Simulator? If the answer was yes to both, they would deem it compatible. Based on what you showed this video, I very much doubt it would meet that minimal unofficial 'standard'. I don't mean to be argumentative, but this would not be the machine I would have bought if compatibility were an issue.

@r0kus I'm always up for discussion. In fact Mindset did stipulate 123 was one of the key software packages they had to have working, and they listed it as compatible in their ads. However Flight Simulator was not. Mindset basically dismissed graphical games I think as irrelevant which was a huge mistake. However in my documentary video on Mindset I was surprised to find some CGA software did in fact work. It was totally hit and miss. For someone like my Dad, who would have been a buyer back then, he wouldn't have cared about the games, just Lotus and other apps, whereas with Amiga he was looking at hundreds extra to get compatibility, albeit with not great performance. He might have gone Mindset in that situation. But I think most buyers just wanted a PC that worked with all PC software, so Mindset lost out.

to be honest, why would anyone choose A1000 in the first place? It was a flop, the first successful Amiga was A500/A2000. Besides that it wasnt easy to get A1000 in 1985, the Commodore did something we call paper launch today. The mass production of A1000 really started in December 1985 and production was halted in Q2 1986 due to poor demand and risk of bankruptcy for Commodore.

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Well, I bought my A1000 in 1985, before it was a "flop" and before the A500 was available. The Amiga line was not considered a flop. I was happy to see the less expensive model come out, but I don't regret being an early adopter

I didn't try that.. I'm pretty sure the pinout from the M2's 27256 is same as the M1's 27128.. and the code should be mostly similar. Hmm.. have to try this now.

Bahaha

I've heard of that method but haven't really tried to apply it here.. hmm.. interesting. I've just been poring through past auctions on worthpoint wherever keyboard serials are shown and connecting that to the machine serials to establish that they form a predictable pattern.