Glad you'll be remaking the earlier videos! Really enjoying these, and they've just gotten much better lately.

I miss that era of PC computing... never has been as fun or fascinating since then...

I love early 90s PCs

A look at my Windows 3.1-based 386-DX40 PC-Compatible.  The last one on the list, although video re-makes of earlier systems are planned at some stage. 

There are also a few strays I need to clean up, get working and add to the collection.  These might also see time in front of the camera.

Greetings Terry!
I just wanted to remind you that there are people out here extremely thankful for your videos!
Thank you so much for all your hard work!

My first Dos based PC (aside from my first computer being an Apple //e) was a 386SX/16 with 2MB ram and a 20MB MFM HDD. I bought it used for I think around $420 with a SVGA monitor. Almost a year later I found a 386DX40 motherboard for cheap. I swapped that and also added 2 more megs of ram. Only thing I needed was a new hard drive. Well, the computer expo was in town and they had HUGE 420MB hard drives on sale for only $180!! It was 2 whole weeks paycheck but I really wanted it! Couldn't make it to the show so I ended finding an 80MB HDD on a BBS for $40. My system was awesome! Added a 2x cd-rom and a 16 bit sound card to experience "multimedia". Eventually started a BBS and ended up having a 4 line BBS with 2 cd rom pushing out thousands of free shareware software titles to users. Then decided I wanted to be a mail server. My computer would call into the servers 3 times a day for "mail-runs". Those were the days...

Excellent, I got myself a cup of coffee and some Terry.

My childhood. Thanks for this review from Russia!

The port on the end of the sound card you weren't sure about.... its for a CDROM. There were 4 different standards at the time. I remember Phillips, Mitsubishi and Creative had their own. Cannot remember the 4th.

I've spent several hours on Street Rod 2 because of this vid. It's ridiculously addictive and needs an android/iOS port!

Street Rod 1&2 were great games. I used to play them on the school computers along with Dune 2 and Wolfenstein 3d.

The connector on the sound card was most likely for a particular CD ROM player.

I played alot of dos games in the past..meaning in the 90´s there among a lot of hours in Streed Rod a nice game of the days ...dos was more a charming time..for me that is ;)

For the youngsters: The LED (not LCD) display that shows the speed, didn't actually measure the speed, it was just a two-digit display with 14 jumpers that you could set to "always on", "only on in turbo mode", "only on in non-turbo mode" or you could remove the jumper to be always off. Most computer cases came with the jumpers "pre-programmed" to show "HI" and "LO" and of course eventually there were computers that had 3 digit displays so they could show "100" or more.

i had one of that!!! oh my God!!!!!

У меня был такой )

Hi, great video with that retro pc!
I remember my old Intel 386 sx-33, has a botton that controlated the "turbo mode". In off turbo the processor run as 25 Mhz, in ON turbo as 33Mhz, that is because some programs request less velocity to work fine and some games as "Pacman" running better in low power. Greetings and tks for the longing :D

They did if someone ADDED them. CD-Roms back then were new and just getting a going. They were sort of more work to use back then because the Windows GUI 3X wasn't made to run it, and DOS offered support to copy pretty efficiently. by producing a single file to produce instructions for the handling process to read the CD-Rom and produce the information in the matter of browing a 3 inch floppy. You could NOT burn as well. For this to work the person would EXIT and use DOS. But the thing was that for Windows 3X it would always leave the user going back to DOS where most of the gaming support was. Games for Windows 3X were very basic, but they still were toyed with because the graphics were different from DOS's, and it was clear that they would be the future. Some of this programming was to be in use it was known for an Operating system Microsoft was making. The operating system left the programming phase and entered the testing phase in 1993. The Operating system became available in 1994 and was known as you guessed it Windows 95. A new future was MADE where the Operating system could handle most affiars. A lot of those machines were hung onto, and a number of people bought CD-Roms which became mandatory to upgrade the above such computers. Floppy support was availalable for installing Windows 95 but they stripped out a lot of features and it required too many floppy discs. CD-Roms are sixty bucks today, but the 8 and 16 X's were $600.00 or something. But the demand did start dropping prices in time although it was something people NEEDED, and they WISHED to keep the prices up for a clean sweep profit. Windows 98 did NOT offer floppy support of course. So computers like the one above could find the second bay occupying a CD-Rom. Often back then in 93 a second floppy drive would get added because in the DOS days 2 floppies before Windows 95 was necessary. You either would have to swap Floppies for EVERY file which is Option A for 1 drive, or copy it to the HD which was best to NOT do this before transfering to Floppy B. With Windows 95 the copy and paste options made it pointless and it was better to free up IRQ space. But Terry wants to show them in their original stock condition. Please don't tell me, but that motherboard looks like a SiS motherboard. I hate them. They are horrible for compadibility. That made motherboards past the year 2000. But, they could NEVER make them function their extras. For instance, the 1 I got the graphics card likes to DROP out. That kind of problem usually pops up in IRQ handling if the programming of either the drivers are not working in sync. They wouldn't fix it. It would piss me off when my screen went dark. But then they were the LAST using that design style, but this board was made during a period where a few companies were using it. My SiS is one of their last models so its newer. I got tired of fooling with it. I came across the SiS, I didn';t buy it. If you see that on your board, FORGET it, get rid of it and find another. I think they might have been good boards though POSSIBLY in the Windows 3.1 Day, and maybe during the 9X era with errors. But the difference was by time the 2000/NT/XP core came out lots of companies had Solved this issue and COULD have the device handling operation worked out. SiS decided that it didn't matter I believe. Because people think that Windows handles it fully and that has been NEVER true. Window's operating system software for examples uses a GUI generator which is called DirectX which handles the visual palette scheme for the operating system, which communicates with the drivers handling, which intern the communication runs threw the motherboard processing chip which handles the IRQ addressing. The drivers people install are supposed to work with the IRQ handling in making it understand the PART. But, the firmware of the board has to do a returnfair. Well, SiS decided TO NOT make sure their firmware work properly. Theirfor they closed quietly after the millennium. Bad Firmware isn't cool. It even would drop its own IRQ handling which is basically like if your using your telivision that your channel would just go offair. They attributed it to static contact error generated by the contacts not setting properly although they were always in. The lie on the error worked for awhile to the people because re-setting the seating of the expansion cards would solve this issue. Anyway, to do this you have to of course turn the computer OFF, unplug it, open the case to reset the seating which means to take it out and put it back in. R.I.P. By the way I love Jezzball, but your doing it wrong. Its best to wait for the balls to split in the center, so there HALF on the LEFT and RIGHT. Now the balls remain in 2 sets. Split it again with a ball on the half. Then section off the squares in highest denominations you dare because if the ball hits the cut, you lose. The more cuts you make and LARGER at once, the more points. Windows 3.1 was mostly useful for Network gateway sharing, it had a SOUND player so you could listen to music, it did NOT come with but Windows 3X office processors were more efficient than the DOS ones. So Windows 3.1 was useful support, but it wasn't everything. Its why Microsoft made Windows 95, Macs had a real operating system already. Anyway, fighting and ALWAYS trying to make your crap work in your computer isn't fun. Anyway, each version of the Windows Core was them cutting down on DOS operations for the handling process. 3.1 was ALMOST DOS entirely. Windows 9X (95/98 resorted to DOS half of the the time). ME is 98 where they CORED out 9x shared operations to see how they would FIX this. Theirfor they sold it with a manager to RECORD the error and used the WEB to send it to them. Now, the fact is they were using people charging them for a system that wouldn't work. It did make windows NT, but they always promised to FIX it. Anyway, they NEVER did. if you have a copy of ME, flush or don't cuz its not good in the pipes. LOL. Anyway don't use it. That version of Windows was sort of fun in an annoying way, but the fact is I was never getting paid. I think Windows ME was the only millenium bug that ever existed although a error was apparent our CLOCKS would stop working on EVERYTHING. NT/2000/XP core Windows handled 70% operations. Now, the Vista/Windows 7/8/8.1 or 9 or WTF you call it did all. Although Vista only worked right on 1 brand of computer which they used for testing. I loved watching them try to fix it. They had to REBUILD it so Windows 7 or most versions use only 40% of the vista core although the basic is Vista with a cloak handler. So don't use basic EVER. 8.1 or 9 are the same, but people weren't liking the GUI and they were trying to fix the new GUI. Windows 10 works pretty well, but I don't like the damn thing. My freind was using it in Tablet mode for a week because they shut the damn thing off. Windows 10 has a new core because they made the CORE to function tablet devices.

the cam is bit choppy or its my computer

I've had a windows 3.1 hankering lately. A 486 DX4 100 to run it on would be nice too.

does it run club penguin???

That sound card isn't generic and it is pretty rare, it is worth $90 US.

Thumbs up

JezzBall Ruled!

i used to have an Acer Acros with a intel 486sx 25Mhz and it had a Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum audio card, very good card it had line in, line out, mic and it also had a scsi controller, i still have the CD rom that came with the card

Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!

That's a Media-Visiom Pro-Audio Spectrum (or compatible).Sound card. The connector is for a SCSI cd-rom. Not IDE. At the time, it was the Go-To sound card. It was compatible with the ADLIB, Soundblaster, and PAS. It could be a bitch to configure, if you were low on free IRQs.

we need back turbo button!

I almost only used filemanager :D

Well... you could have lh'ed and devicehigh'ed some of those drivers... ;)

Today's generation in front of config.sys:
"G'huh?!?!?"

Great video, I really love Your videos of these old classic machines. I remember  my first pc. A 486DX33Mhz With 2MB ram and 120 MB HDD and a 1 MB Tseng ET 4000 gfx card.The thing I hated the most about Windows 3.1 was the "General protection failure in kernel 386" Error Message,  man I can't tell how many times that it made me loose my work. Thankfully pc's has gotten on a New Level of stability these days. Still I love all these classic machines and I am thankfull that I have experienced most of the golden era of home Computing, from 8bit and onwards.
Thanks Terry for keeping these classics alive,keep up the good work

Can you imagine trying to explain to today's kids that 40mhz was once considered "turbo speed"?

I must admit I like these boring beige box x86es because there is a lot of good DOS gaming to be had. After my first computer experience with the BBC I Used these throughout my first few years at school. Looking forward to seeing the remakes of your older computer videos.

I never had any 286-486 era PC's myself. I went from 8088 Amstrad PC-1640 straight to first Pentium if I remember correctly. I was still using my Amiga 500 until that time.

I suspect that set of header pins on the end of the sound card opposite the backplate end are for a CD-ROM drive, possibly some other daughter board for better MIDI synthesis like Wavetable Synthesis for instance.  I understand that a lot of early sound cards also provided the data interface for a CD-ROM drive, and I believe these data interfaces for proprietary to the manufacturer, I understand that Creative Labs was well known for doing this.  I'm sure you already knew that.  

i love computer

My parents help me to get 386 sx, 25 Meg speed pc and I maxed it out accessories. 16 meg RAM, 387 co - processor, 8 bit colour, two hard drives up to 270 Meg hard drives, MSDOS 6.2, HP 500C inkjet printer, Two utilities to help management Quemm was one. It couldn't cope with internet as it was too slow to cope with Netscape 1.

going back in memory ..thanks , good vid

It seems to be an overkill to use a 386 with just 1MB of RAM.

2:28 LED
NOT LCD

I remember my dad’s first beige box. It was a 486 DX-33 in a big tower case. We got it in late 1992 and was the successor of my dad’s Acorn Archimedes 310 and BBC model B. The 486 had 16 Megabytes of ram and a Paradise SVGA card. One thing that 9 year old me found Interresting about this computer was the turbo button. Games wise, the pc a little bit of a step back in terms of sound in games, I was used to amiga mod style music on the archimedes. Eventually we added a soundblaster 16 and a 5x speed cd-rom later on. The biggest gripe with MS DOS was always the memory issues with games, needing enough conventional memory, high-loading stuff it was quirky and always user-friendly.

LED Seven segment displays

good video

As you will find by googleing the turbo button slowed down the machine so it can be more compatible with games that would run too fast on a faster processor. From Wikipedia: 'Contrary to what its name suggests, the "turbo" button was intended to let a computer run slower than the speed for which it had been designed.
With the introduction of CPUs which ran faster than the original 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 used in the IBM Personal Computer, programs which relied on the CPU's frequency for timing were executing faster than intended. Games in particular were often rendered unplayable. To provide some compatibility, the "turbo" button was added.
Disengaging turbo mode slows the system down to a state compatible with original 8086/8088 chips.
The average user, who was not relying on outdated software, would have wanted to take care that they always had turbo mode activated, to get the most performance out of their computer.'

I remember QEMM386...

Damn man.... I remember our first 386 and the day we upgraded to a 486. Seemed light-years ahead. Hard to believe it was nearly 30 years ago..

I was 10 years old when my mother went to a business in tottenham court road and paid something obscene for a 386 for me.. i think i put lemmings on there if i remember correctly and that was the start of my career in IT. Years later I partitioned the drive and ran Windows NT to test on, yep that death by blue screen. It was so slow but i didn't realise that at the time of course.

Good video. BTW: LED Display, not LCD. The connector at the end of the sound card is an additional IDE port; For HD/CDROM.

Media Vision PAS16 Sound card with 50-pin SCSI connector.

Miss you windows 3.1!!!

Absolutely loved the days of Windows 3.1 etc. In my opinion those were the days, people actually needed to know a little bit about DOS, and internal components of how Windows operates. Computer machines were more like actual machines with clicky noisy hard drives, flickering lights actual disk drives that you could insert disks into, (not just USB ports) and the occasional CD drive if you are lucky. They were not some quiet little box sitting in the corner of the desk or hidden out of sight.

In the Windows 3.1 era, computers were coming along in leaps and bounds as others have said and it was a recipe for intrigue and excitement. To have a computer running at 66mhz instead of 33mhz was spectacular, and let's not forget the moment in time when the 586 or Pentium came out, that was awesome!.

My computer interests have fallen since the days of post Windows 7, there is just no more character in computers anymore, if you run Microsoft Windows its all just the same old same old and it's all about controlling the user. One must question the point of the monochrome icons in Windows 8 onwards when a Windows program 20 something years ago had colour icons galore!, not very inviting if you ask me considering at one point in time actually having colour icons you could select was a thing of monumental feat.

I'm strongly thinking of rebuilding my computer with an old cream coloured desktop case, complete with 3.5 inch floppy drives, but with all the modern internal components just for the nostalgic point.


Nice video Terry!

Anybody know what is the value price of that kind of computer from 1990 ?

I had a 80386DX 33mhz pc clone. It ran pretty well. It helped me all the through high school. It was literally my first PC right after a Commodore 64. Prodigy was my first ISP. Ahh, nostalgia.

Very interesting. This system look like any standard 486 or P1 based setup. I never knew that there was this style of board architecture made for 386. Every 386 I have ever seen or had was proprietary based machines like Compaq, IBM PS/2, Packard Bell, etc. I didn't even know that there was a 40mhz 386 until now, I always thought the fastest 386 based chip was a 386/33. That machine should run windows 95 with ease aswell.

this was my dads first pc build

Can anyone tell me what model and brand of this exact pc?

greens say yes deal

Omg i love the old school look of this setup haha with all those white bezel on everything

I had one of this at 1992 until 2001...very good machine and very expensive!.

This was my childhood computer. I think we got it around 91-92. I remember playing those games...good times:) thanks for bringing back the memories

Do you have any information on the case of this pc? I have been looking for this case for a long time. TY! And great video.

I remember this case, my Pentium 100 was in this case. Mine had a CD-ROM drive on the 5.25" bay, and a 3.5" hdd. The buttons and locks were on my old case as well. My 386 sx-16 computer was a pizza box desktop.

17:00 OMG Street Rod II!

Someone had installed that on a 386 in the library at school and we played it.

I'm the age where I should've had a computer of this era (8088, 80286, 386) but sadly my first machine was a TRS-80 CC3, but then I jumped right to a homebuilt amd 486DX2-66 machine. I wish I had had the 8088, 286 & 386 prior to obtaining a 486. I still feel that I have missed out on the best early Intel based computers. I especially missed the intel processors which you needed a math coprocessor (the 287 & 387) to run floating pt math processes.

what does 'PC-compatible' mean?

my first 'proper' PC - Wang 386 SX25 with windows 3.1 MSDOS5 (or 6 cannot remember) MS publisher and MS Works 3.5" Floppy Disk drive .. cost 1000 Irish Punts in 1993 I think it was

You forgot about the younger people who are familiar

Cool, i was have an old 486 DX-2 .. but it was broken ..

Thank you

11:20 Didn't Win NT ver1 come out before Win95?

Back in those days, I hardly ever used Windows (until Win95 came out).. I usually just stuck with DOS and Q-DOS. I loved Q-DOS. It just seemed faster to navigate through disks and files than Windows.

During bootup when bios shows specs, it shows display type VGA/PGA/EGA.. I don't think I have ever seen PGA before

press the turbo button. to change 33 66 mode hz

It looks so clean and new, wow

A seven-segment display on the case?

get windows 10

Hi, there Tezza, would you like to do a computer review of the Compaq computer line of computers? As this was the first successful PC Clone computer that ever came out.

whale viewing

Anyone remember WinGL the precursor to DirectX?

I remember using Norton Commander for all file management outside of Windows 3.1
So many memories seeing the old Windows 3.11 boot logo :)

tudai?

Few years "older"? I think it should be few years younger.
Yeah.

The 25MHz 486SX, ate the 386DX-40 for breakfast in general. The difference
was 15-50% depending on the application or game. The exception was when
you had the 387 math's coprocessor installed and you had intensive software
that supports it, then the 386DX 40 is faster. The average person back in the
90's, running typical software though, the 486SX 25 was a far better option.
The 20MHz 486SX was rubbish, partly because of poor chipset's, poorly
designed motherboards and poor implementation. In practice the 486SX 20,
was slightly slower than a 386DX-33!

Missing this time somehow, when only real addicts could take a computer to its pieces and to upgrade and work with it and stuff. :-D

O yea. Well can it play Pong?

Jurassic PC...I used one !!

we had an apricot xen 16mhz 386 640k ram 30 meg hdd running windows 2 at work in the early 90s. it ran aldus pagemaker, coral draw as well as a lazer printer.
god knows how it managed it.

its from Palmerston North!!! OMG cause i recognize the pc A Logo

good แบ่งน้ำหนัก จอ และ เครื่อง ให้หนักพอๆกัน
ช่อง disk อยู่สูง ไม่ติด keyboard

I'd never heard of PSSI in the 1980's FYI FOR THOSE ADVANCED COMPUTER TECH'S DURING THE 1980's WEST HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT. CAN'T SAY 1990's because I was in the United States Army Active Duty..........my Active duty status started in late July of 1987, I was in no way a computer nerd back then, I could play Tempest, Galaga, Centipede, and Lethal Enforcer though, didn't play Pac Man or Ms Pac Man that much.

i dont see why this is surprising.. my old 386 ran windows 3.1.1 with no isues

turbo button!!

I appreciate your uploads. Love the vintage machines.

I wonder if a program was ever developed that gave Windows 3.1 a start menu panel like on the "Chicago" versions. When I was taking Computer Programming 1 in high school, we worked on machines that had Windows 3.1, but I mostly stayed in DOS as I was doing my work in QBASIC which was a DOS program. When I took Computer Programming 1 (Pascal) and Computer Programming 2 (C++), my teacher (same teacher for both school years) refused to put Windows on his work stations. Of course, there was no real need for it because both the programs we used were DOS programs from Borland. I aced QBASIC because I grew up with Color BASIC for the TRS80 Color Computer, and they were very close code wise. I thought Pascal was a little unwieldy, but I thought C++ was a very powerful and straight forward programming language. In general, C++ is still being used today sometimes in the form of G++ and for GUI environments which I never got into. BASIC is still around too, but mainly for children and beginners. I think Pascal died.

I love these videos!!!!! they show so much that other people miss when they review/show/explain old hardware
I was born in 91 so I never saw DOS and my earliest memory of anything having to do with a PC was Windows 98

autoexec.bat, config.sys

I envy you my 386 computer lying in a barn and a mouse made a nest vnem. When I thought about it the computer is dead and refused work.

Wow, I always wanted to go to intel museum of technology. Thanks to your videos, I do not have to travel to USA :)
Great work!

when I was a student I bought an Elonex 386sx16. Soon after I bought the pc windows 3.1 was released and that made it very useful. At that time I still has msdos based software so you needed to know more than just turn on the pc and jump into Windows 10 as we do today. I upgraded my ram from 1mb to 2mb for £50. my HD was a mere 30mb and later on I upgraded and fitted a 60mb HD. I had a very noisy 24pin Panasonic dot matrix printer which could produce very decent output. A few years later I upgraded to a 486dx32 (?) and started writing my own windows software. The 486 was very fast compared to the 386, particularly when compiling.

Great great videos man. Keep it up!

Looks pretty much as the one we got at home in the 90s, my father got one pretty well equipped, it had harvard graphics, word, excel, windows 3.1, and had autocad r12, pretty good package for its time

My very first PC thought it was a 386SX25 with only DOS 5.0

Finally a fellow New Zealander who is in to this stuff.

Under 386 Enhanced, go to the advanced settings and enable 32bit disk and file access. It will make your 386 significantly faster in Windows.

does it rain a lot in NZ? You seem to have to say that noise in the background is rain and not the machine in a lot of videos lol.

Just thinking if your Hard-Drive stops working you can use a IDE2SATA adapter to let you use a SATA Hard-Drive up to about 256GB so a SATA SSD might be worth trying as it might make it run quieter, I wonder did you remove the Ethernet Adapter as you didn't want to get infected.

The 386 era I remember well, and these were considered very powerful machines for those still using 286's, especially the 386DX series. Computers began to really take off at this point with the arrival of 286 and 386 chips more so, Windows 3.0 and 3.1, then 3.11 were major turning points and leaps..it wasn't long before the internet started to gain wide mainstream popularity. Does anyone remember using 286 machines and earlier to connect to BBS's (Bulletin Board Services) the forerunner to the modern internet? You would dial-up on your 14.4kb modem (or 28.8k if you were rich) and connect to a text mode service where you could download some files, talk in chatrooms, post classifieds, and read news etc. Downloading a file even 1MB could take half a day lol and run your phone bill up so high if you got addicted to BBS's that the phone service soon suspended service or cut you off lol.

Someone, amongst all my junk..I have an original set of Windows 2.0 disks. I kid you not. Windows 2! I have no idea what they looked like (never installed or used it).

I well remember writing quite elaborate config.sys files with boot menus defining the hardware requirements of various games (and Windows). It was preferable to the dreaded 'boot floppy'. Thanks for the vid.

great videos
thank you so much for takeing the time.
keep up the good work.

Hi, there Tezza in the future would you do a review on the PC computers from 1994 TO 1995?

Excellent video! What company made the 386 PC in this video? I kept seeing American Megatrends, but I looked them up and I don't think that they ever manufactured any PCs, just parts for them.

Awesome Video bro this took me back. Our first computer had Lotus 123 if i remember right lol, i always played a golf game on it. And then we upgraded to win 3.1 on 386-SX I might be off on the details lol been awhile .

The first time I used a PC was at a introductory course. They were Pentium 70 with Win 3.11 and Word 6.0.
The strange thing is that there were some odd hangovers from Win 3.11 buried inside Win 95, not sure about Win ME.
Program Manager still existed & you could get the system to boot up into that. I can't remember whether you had to edit the registry or some other system file. I did remember doing just that for the curiosity value & returning the system to normal straight afterwards.
Apparently Progman.exe still existed in Win XP before SP2 & I have SP4.
I used to prefer Winfile when I ran Win 95. My first PC being a 485 with 8M mem & a 540Mb HDD. Somehow it ran Win 95, though I have seen Win 95 on slower stuff.

The computers used to display the CPU speed. these days we don't care too much now about GHZ.

windows was laughable at that time and i pitied everybody who had to work with it. but the hardware was cheap and fast. loads of great games with very deep and complex gameplay were available on this generation of pc.. was very envious of that!

I can't believe that some people accumulate and keep this junk at home...

Great video. This was the machine I wanted as a kid and never managed to get. God it takes me back

you have my two favorite games :D

The 1981 IBM pc 5150 has ISA also so does the AT... its 8 bit though but started before the XT.

386-DX. Wow, that's actually vintage. I was 10 around that time.
Now, when you press that Turbo-button, I bet GTA V would run smoothly at maxed settings. No?  ; )

are you from new zealand ?

my teacher had the same pc in our classroom back in 2005 and was running windows 95 upgrade edition

This was basically our first home computer! I was probably 10-11 years old at the time Some guy my dad worked with built it for us. I remember the specs., a 386 running MS-DOS 5.00. We later got Windows 3.1. It had a 60MB hard drive and 2MB of RAM. I can't remember the speed, but it also had 1.44 MB floppy drive and the 1.2 MB floppy drive.

For video cards of that era, the video RAM was strictly used for a framebuffer. It was therefore a pretty straightforward calculation to figure out what modes the card would support based on the video memory. For example the memory required for 1024x768 @ 24-bit color = 2359296 bytes, far more than this card's 1MB. A 1MB card could do 1024x786 at 256 colors (8 bits per pixel), 800x600 at 65535 colors (16 bits per pixel) or 640x480 at 16.7 million colors (24-bits per pixel). I never saw a card with more than 1MB until the late 90s and by then 3D cards were starting to use the memory for more than just frame buffering.

and street road 2. my unsleeping nights. :))) thanks man :)

386 dx 40, it is i think? :) what a years were they!!!

who wants to bay a 133MHZ pc i still have it with win98 and and.

My first computer I ever used was my families 486SX/33mhz which my dad upgraded to a 486DX4/120mhz in late 1995. It had a quad speed CD-ROM, 15MB ram, 450MB hard drive, SB pro 2 and a dual 5.25"/3.5" floppy combo drive and a Zip drive.

The connector on the end of the sound card is probably for a cd drive

Are you from Australia?

You should use retro bright to spruce this PC up a little bit.

Hi Terry, if i may: Wonderful channel and awesome collection!

Your sound card is a Mediavision Pro Audio Spectrum 16, model 650-0044. The connector on J14 is actually a 50pin SCSI connector for a SCSI interface CDROM. These interfaces are NOT bootable.

The Sound Blaster compatibility comes from the MVD201 Thunderboard chipset, which actually gives Sound Blaster 2.0 compatibility meaning it can do 44KHz mono sampling. It is of course backwards compatible with Sound Blaster 1.0, 1.5 and AdLib as well.

The card is however very capable sound wise and is 16 sampling capable when it's used natively. Many games had support for Pro Audio Spectrum 16 and they sound better this way than selecting Sound Blaster.

Your Pro Audio Spectrum 16 however depends on -5V rail since ISA B5 is present on the card. This won't be a problem for you since you use an AT power supply that provides the -5V rail. However if in the future you need to replace your power supply and all you can get is an ATX PSU and adapter, keep in mind that ATX power supplies deprecated the -5V rail since ATX 2.0 revision.

Keep your videos comin' up!! They're awesome.

connector on the end of soundcard is for an old type of cd-rom drive ;)

Ah. I've played street rod 2:)

the connector at the end of the sound card was for the built in cdrom controller on the card.  this was common at the time.  used an IDE cable but was not IDE standard

AMD chips were quite good back in the day. I'm still running an old Athlon XP 1800 that, while it's running at about 1.5 Ghz, it's comparable to a 1.7 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 chip of that time (2001-ish). It was my main box up until 2006 when I got a Dell laptop with a Core Duo chipset (with a dedicated ATI card). Both machines are still running although the old AMD box is now a 24/7 backup server running Bittorrent Sync that my household computers back up to.

The connector on the end of the soundcard was for controlling CDROM drives.  I have a drive of this type in my loft!

In 1992 when I was 11, I came home from school one day to find that my dad had bought a 486 PC for the family :D . My previous experience of computers was a ZX81 and a Commodore Plus 4.

Thanks for the video, a lot of good memories, I used to have an AT 286 (I remember there were XTs at that time as well) and then I upgraded to a 486.

my 386SX 25Mhz had a 1x cdrom drive and a sound blaster pro. so a 386DX 40Mhz can probably have a cdrom drive, but it would be tricky to use the IDE port on the sound card...

Instant like just for the display showing us the CPU clock. I really forgot, that we had them on PC's back then. And it's very nice walk through.

Brilliant selection of videos, as an older computer user myself, I have absolutely enjoyed watching your videos this week, especially as I work with and still enjoy using computers and have been doing so for 30+ years now, I am from the UK, England (Morecambe) to be exact and disposable income for the average working man is very low here and I cannot afford the prices charged for old computers on ebay etc, don't end it on the 386 ISA bus, you could still cover things like the rise and fall of AGP 2, 4 and 8x video with implementation of the PCI bus and even PCI express, also cover the early Pentium II/III and Athlon slot cartridge processors, upto the introduction of Hyper Threading and dual core, even the Amiga A1200, (All of which I have owned and had to sell to upgrade).
Good work and thanks for the nostalgia.

It's not PC-compatible, it's IBM PC-compatible.

Whats the game at like 17:00 with the drivers licence? I used to play it all the time

I actually had one of those

I bought a cheap case once, later model than that, which had that LED display on it.  I think it was for a PC I assembled for someone else, but I don't recall for sure.  I mighta had my old 486 DX/4 120 in it.  I thought it was kind of an interesting cosmetic addition.  
I also actually recall having one game that needed the turbo button.  It was a fighting robot game and if you ran it full speed the robots moved so fast you couldn't control them, lol.
It's been a looong time since I messed with controller cards, let me throw out a guess on that big port on the back.  I know the small one is the COM 1, well, it typically is, which is almost always used for the mouse.   IIRC, that big one is the LPT (or LPT-1?) or parallel printer port.
On the sound card the external port is typically called a game port or joystick port or MIDI port, I believe those all mean the same thing.   That internal connector is typically for a CD ROM, however, that one has too many pins for an IDE drive, so my guess is SCSI??

I immediately recognized "Chips Challenge" when I saw that.  I found that on an old PC someone threw out and I played it quite a bit.  It gets pretty challenging at the higher levels.
And of all the times I've seen Jezzball, I don't think I ever tried to play it.  I may have to dig through some files and see if I can find it, lol.

I also need to stop watching these vids, I have some old stuff I need to toss and watching these just makes me want to keep everything.  :(

Wow this brings back some memories!  I had a 386DX25 based PC with 4 megs of RAM around 1989/1990.  It was awesome.  That sound card appears to be a variant of the Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum 16 family of sound cards.  The connector on the far end is a SCSI connector for connecting a CD-ROM drive (or other SCSI device).  The Pro Audio Spectrum 16 was a very good card in its day, and the game port also could be used as a MIDI interface for musical instruments.  Sometimes it was bundled with a SCSI CD-ROM drive in multimedia kits that were popular back in the day.

I'll give you $200 for that 386 PC-Compatible

Love the retro game gfx. 

is that a commodore version of the cm8833 on the left?

My first was a 80486 DX4 100 Overdrive. Running 16mb RAM and a 120mb HDD, everyone was very jealous of my machine!

Classic and in pristine condition! Love it.

connector on the soundcard is for cdrom ide

I have VERY faint memories of having a 3.1 machine when I was young. I remember a ski game that was on the computer, and some floppy disk games, one being Monopoly, and another one was some civil war strategy game. I'm 23 (going to be 24 in August 2014) so this had to be when I was 4, maybe when I was 5 (I don't think my parents got a Windows 95 machine right away). 

You have naice machine :) I have at home 486/8MB/120 MB Disk/ Windows 3.11

I've not actually played Street Rod II, but I really like the background music that you hear during what seems to be a good percentage of the game.  

Can it play Crysis?

;)

Very nice video! I think that the front lock is really a keyboard-lock switch, right? I recall being rather confused by that rather useless feature of some similar computers back in the early 90's. I wonder why they even bothered putting it in. I guess they stopped appearing a few years later for a reason... Anyway, great video. Cheers,

I believe you mentioned that the parallel port and serial port multi I/O card has a game port on it, maybe I misheard you, but I'm pretty sure that's what you said, most sound cards back then had a game port on them, that's what the large port on the backplate of the sound card is, near where the headphone and microphone and speaker sockets are, that's where you'd plug in your joystick if you're using one for games, but are you saying the Multi I/O card also has a joystick port on it too?  

Well done Tezza! Loved every one you made!

Great video... Seeing this brings back memories.  My first office job was using mainly DOS apps.  I was made unemployed for a couple of years. After that I found the world had moved on into Windows apps.  These where the first machines I used with Windows.  I'm now a bit of a Linux geek (was getting bored with Windows and wanted to learn something new), but I still like to run DOS aps in DOSBox (a multiplatform DOS emulator), and have discovered Windows 3x runs very well.

This particular level of machine brings back a lot of memory. The 40Mhz in particular were the AMD variant being faster than the standard Intel 33Mhz versions. Myself and a partner started a business and got ourselves the latest machines i.e. 386-40SX machines. We used the Borland C compiler but then the very 1st version of Visual C from Microsoft came out, much slower at compiling but it had a debugger that ran in Windows (instead of switching to DOS as the Borland one did).
Been a great series will be good to see some of your earlier ones with more detail etc.

Sad) know so much and because of my skin color.I could.never get akin where I lived seeing the CPU brings back memories sad ones when I yada dream of having a PC shop and that was all crushed they would rather hire a felon or rapist any day over me sad and I know so much I used to buy them broken and fix and really sale them thousand upon thousands od computers for the past 18 years I can fix a PC just bye the sound aandgow your is is running that's all I need Andorra can figure out ay bad parts etc with out mostly ever taking the cover off and setting up windows so it works right not half ass it like every one else I ever seen Do PC work now can't even get 50 bucks for 300 worth of repairs ands work cleaning I usaly put at lest ten hours into any PC I fix or resale pluses testing for a few week most times sector testing I miss jumpers and irqs so bad

Sold thousands of these PC's lolewll 186286 386 and so on old days when you could make money with PC's

those are some of the systems I dreamed of owning back then. I finally got my first PC in 1994 , It was a 486 and i could not have been happier. I still sit here using computers today 19 years later.

Had me worried there for a moment!  Glad this is not the end and that more is to come :-)

Being a young teen by then, I remember screwing the autoexec.bat and config.sys configurations big time when trying the new games to run.... learned a lot.

Thanks for the video Terry!

I gotta admit, when I saw the thumbnail for this video I thought, "Why the hell is this guy covering a boring 'Generic Beige'?... As it turns out, there was every reason to do so. It was a time when Commodore, Atari and Acorn were near death as the last standing alternatives to the 'Big Two', Apple and the Wintel boxes... It's nice to know we are entering an age where alternative hardware and platforms are sneaking back into the mainstream market. Looking forward to your redux vids of machines from the fuzzy era, before things got a bit bland...

The Turbo button was still very much relevant even on a 386 or 486 if you were wanting to play older DOS games on a faster PC, if you ran the games with Turbo turned on, the games would run way too fast.  I remember Microsoft Jezzball, I was never good at it, but I sure do remember it well, I used to play it on my Dad's PC.