A 386 A.I. Co-Processor from 1986, an EGA card driving a composite CRT, and an ISA Prototype Card

Welcome to Mid-Week-Mini-Mail-Call #41! This week we have some interesting stuff: A 386DX Artificial Intelligence Co-Processor ISA card from 1986, an ATI EGA card directly driving a composite CRT, and an ISA comprehensive Prototype Card for hobbyists. Oh, and some ZIP and LS-120 drives!
0:00 Intro
0:41 Unboxing
4:34 AY-3-8210A sound chip from Radio Shack
5:38 ISA hobbyist prototyping card
11:00 Zip Drive and Disks
18:30 386DX artificial intelligence coprocessor
26:29 LS-120 Drive
29:21 ATI EGA Wonder Card
36:07 Driving a composite monitor from an EGA card
42:56 Outro
-- Video Links
Support me on Patreon:
/ adriansdigitalbasement
General Instrument AY-3-8910
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General...
Datasheet for the AY-3-8210A
map.grauw.nl/resources/sound/g...
JDR Microdevices
JDR PDS-601 (8-bit) and PDS-611 (16-bit) ($79 in 1991)
worldradiohistory.com/hd2/IDX...
SIPP memory
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPP_me...
386 Hummingboard by A.I. Architects Inc. (supposedly $7,000-$19,000 in 1986 w/16mb)
www.computerhistory.org/colle...
groups.google.com/g/net.lang....
books.google.com/books?id=Ejw...
books.google.com/books?id=izw...
LS-120 (SuperDisk) on Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
The larger 3.5" drive LS-120 SuperDIsk drive:
Model: LKM-F433-1
The smaller (laptop) drive LS-120 SuperDisk drive:
LKM-FB33-5
ATI EGA Wonder (March 1987)
Chipset: ATI16899-0 + CHIPS P86C435
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Won...
- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/s.nl/it.A/id.16...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.com/products/digi...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress.com/item/33000...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/itm/TS100-65W-MI...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.com/product/121gw/
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Logic-DS...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/itm/1-2-5-10PCS-...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress.com/item/32537...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Links
My GitHub repository:
github.com/misterblack1?tab=r...
Commodore Computer Club / Vancouver, WA - Portland, OR - PDX Commodore Users Group
www.commodorecomputerclub.com/
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino

[@AndrewTubbiolo]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who found this hardware interesting. I'm betting that the LISP card was probably used by a group who were doing surveys of galactic populations and types. I got that card in the early 2000's with a old camera system from the University of Arizona surplus auction. I think I may know who was using that card, and see if he recognizes it. Maybe he can help with any documentation or at least some insights on how to use it.

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

That would be amazing -- if we can't find more about it, it will forever just be a curiosity. If we can boot it, then I will have to brush up on my LISP!

[@squirlmy]

@@adriansdigitalbasement IDK if you are aware of Symbolics, the creators of LISP machines, including Symbolics 3600 with the "Space Cadet Keyboard", but they created the Ivory LISP card which fit into 68k Macintosh computers. It may have required a Quadra, and may have been NuBus.The chip itself was a hardware implementation of LISP, and ran "Open Genera", and all-LISP OS. It's a fascinating story. While starting to fail, and giving up on hardware, they ported Open Genera to the first 64-bit chip, a DEC Alpha. Unfortunately they were sticklers for speed, and wrote so much of it into the chip's microcode, that it wouldn't run on second-generation Alpha chips. My ex was basically the last employee of Symbolics (later bought by owners-employees). Also Stallman's anger at Symbolics and their commercialization of LISP written at MIT is what inspired him to start the "Free Software Movement".

[@Dragon1276]

I always read throughout the turn of the century that LISP was such a great language, but no one ever really used it, why? And if you know about LISP, generally, how does it compare to Pascal and Swift?

[@rog2224]

@@Dragon1276 Lisp is handy for writing extensions in Emacs(I'm not a *nix head, but I knew people right up to the mid-00s who did that sort of thing) Personally, I found it unintuitive as a language, with a tendency to get lost in a maze of recursion and parentheses. YMMV, but I detested my time with it, and would avoid it more than I would COBOL-77, and I regarded COBOL a PITA. I think it's still used in some Neural network applications, especially the sort based on decision trees in the early stages of the diagnostic. I'd have to check that.

[@AndrewTubbiolo]

@@Dragon1276 I don't know. I'm a pointers and structures guy. C. I don't know what LISP is predicated on.

[@custardo]

That Hummingboard is definitely a case of "if you have to ask for the price, you can't afford it"

[@hotlavatube]

Price was about $1595 in 1988 according to my search on Archive.org text contents.

[@onesixfive]

@@hotlavatube $3,546.13 with inflation! ouch!

[@alerey4363]

For Apple there was the "PC compatibility card" with a full intel 486 and copro, ram, video card and parallel port in a PCI slot to be inserted in a desktop PowerPC Mac; it had a cool control panel from which u pass control to the pc card and the system would run both CPUs with their own OSes (MacOS and windows, which u need to install apart) and with a key combination (I think it was cmd+enter) it would switch back and forth between dos/windows and MacOS in real time

[@haraldhimmel5687]

@@onesixfive Not all that pricey considered how much decent home computers in general often did cost at the time. I find 1.5k really surprising but thats probably only with the very basic set of ram chips.

[@-x21-]

@@hotlavatube 1mb back in around 1993 was about $100cad. 24mb would have been $2400 in around 1993...

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Incidentally, I tested the larger 3.5" IDE LS-120 drive on an era correct machine and it does work! It was able to boot to DOS on a 3.5" HD floppy. It makes some strange noises that don't sound quite right, but I got no errors...

[@gbowne1]

Newer Windows versions doesn't always like the old drives. I figured it might be just need to be in a machine from the era.

[@0toleranz]

I’ve used these LS120 drives in 3 of my computers back in the days for backing up data after 2 dead Zip drives and floppy streamers became to slow because of growing data sizes. They always had a bit of strange sounds when using regular floppies I remember when searching between data and fat table/directory. It wasn’t that obvious with the larger 120mb disks. The coolest feature to valve was the electronic eject mechanism which only macs had back in the time. The reason I used 3.5‘‘ drives was two of my computers had small pizzabox style cases with only 3.5‘‘ slots of which 2 were available from the front. I loved these cool cases which were proprietary form factor 486 boards w. onboard tvga and smc 10/100 network. Cant remember who the manufacturer was. They came with really nice Eizo 19‘‘ color crt screens which must have cost a fortune.

[@crayzeape2230]

It looks like a bit of disassembly on the laptop LS-120 will reveal a 40pin IDE connector.

[@pandersen7984]

looks like the black ls-120 would fit ThinkPad laptops of the era. I think the drives were made by Mitsubishi and Phillips. An earlier drive was the 20MB Flopitical drive. Interesting drives at the time, but possibly prone to errors due to dust. I have a few in storage roughly between Win89SE and WinXP.

[@VicTheVicar]

Congrats on 100k! The Mid-Week-Mini-Mail-Calls are one of the highlights of the week!

[@hobbypotter]

This was a fun flashback! I used to work at JDR Microdevices (1983-1993) during the time that prototype card left the building lol. Loved working there ... we worked hard, but it was seriously fun! They gave EVERY employee their own computer (after they learned how to build it.), it didn't matter what department you worked in. I couldn't tell you anything about today's computer components, but the ones you were unpacking ... I know those!

[@vwestlife]

The price of the JDR PC Bus Breadboard ranged from $49.95 to $79.95 in their 1992 catalog, depending if you wanted the 8-bit or 16-bit version, and with or without decode circuitry.

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Such a deal all things considered!

[@mndlessdrwer]

Surprisingly reasonable. About the cost of one of the Intel-based dev boards these days. We've definitely made strides in development boards, but the flexibility of being able to directly build into a breadboard with direct pin jumper access to all of your chips is ridiculously flexible compared to our current stuff which has more restrictive pinouts for you to use.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@mndlessdrwer my thoughts exactly

[@jhpyle2]

I have the PDS-600 without the decode circuitry, which was cheaper and gave you more breadboard space. It was easy enough to add chips for communicating with the bus. I just followed the instructions in the book “Build Your Own Universal Computer Interface” by Bruce Chubb.

[@dieSpinnt]

​@@mndlessdrwer If you don't had a rack-mounted motherboard (in 1992, as hobbyist) this piece was cumbersome to use. Also bus-applications (pun: on a bus card) where nearly impossible to realize as the breadboard-space does not allow that. I always thought of it as a toy. Nonetheless it allows first steps of discovery into a great area. Parallel-Port based shenanigans ("Wiggler") were also common these days and allowed some more comfort, (spatial) detaching your experiment from the PC. For a (modern) comparison: A decent card for the PCIe bus with a FPGA (which can replace thousands of breadboards) is around from $1,000 to $10,000+. Add to that the cost of the most important thing: Decent high-speed interfaces and connectors to the actual R+D experiment. Without that you send and receive .... bullshit:) BTW There are of course also entry-level boards and sometimes Ebay helps ... or simply not asking for the latest nonsense ... Maybe PCI is enough for tinkering? To modern stuff like Arduino/Intel-SoC: MCU's (as in SoC or Single-Chip-Computer) are not Microprocessors with their surrounding ecosystem! Such a BUS-Application/Card shown is a totally different use-case. Of course, a SoC or MCU system can also integrate a bus. Such as the mentioned Intel, or STM32-ARM with FSMC. But PCI specifications and the associated timings are a completely different beast than simple port I/O. Nevertheless: Don't be put off!:)

[@guillaumegaudin694]

The prototyping card allows you to turn your vintage computer into a massively oversized raspberry pi, but slower

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Yeah much much much slower LOL!

[@darkstatehk]

People aged 45 - 60 watching this as of the video posting date, lived in amazing times during their youth and into adulthood when it comes to computers and technology. I used to love the computer clubs that popped up around the country and disk copy parties!

[@recursiveidentity]

Yep, I remember fondly my "Amiga Users Group" where we would just basically copy each other's games...

[@georgemaragos2378]

@@recursiveidentity can you still sing the yo-ho song on Quick Nibble Copy Program

[@TimSedlmeyer]

To change DOS from using 80x25 for output you need to use the MODE command. For example for the 132x25 mode you were using the command would be "MODE CON: COLS=132 LINES=25".

[@xmaniac99]

or mode co132 depending on which version of DOS :-)

[@GreenAppelPie]

I knew there was a thing as soon as he mentioned it, like a work on the tip of your tongue.

[@GreenAppelPie]

I successfully recycled the SIPPs from my 286 to use in my 386 SIMMs. It was 4 modules for a total of 1M, I was a very poor student back then.

[@frostphoto2600]

I've been following you and your retro adventures for about 6ish months and I can honestly say that I'm 100% hooked. Born in '82 your video's hit a sweet spot of things I've missed and thing I've never learned about. I just became a Patreon subscriber, and thank you for your content and I agree with previous commenters you are 100% the Bob Ross of retro computing.

[@GrahamTinkers]

You can solder turned pin headers onto standard 30 pin sims to make thin into sipp modules. I did this for a ram card in my A2000.

[@rdoetjes]

That’s actually a great idea!!!

[@cheater00]

SIPP = single inline pin package btw (Adrian asked)

[@cheater00]

I wouldn't add any memory in - it may well be the card came as it is now, with two empty slots. Might be parity modules or cache.

[@big0bad0brad]

Just to add, if you try to solder on pins, you may want to put the pins into an unsoldered socket first to get the alignment right (buy one off digikey or ebay something) - then you will have them on straight. You could use a socket attached on a board but you may have to get creative to line it up for soldering.

[@IanSlothieRolfe]

I came here to say this, those sockets will take standard "turned pin" headers (not the square pin type). They are easy to get, I use them all the time to make modules to plug into breadboards.

[@Lee_Adamson_OCF]

Adrian: "I've never had any problems with Zip drives." Zip Drive: "Hold my beer and watch this."

[@christopherbaar4498]

Neat that the LS-120 is also a 3 mode floppy drive. 3.5 inch 1.2 MB formatted disks were used on multiple Japanese computers (NEC PC-98xx, Fujitsu FM Towns, and Sharp x68000 Compact). Earlier models of the NEC and Sharp computers used 5.25 inch 1.2 MB drives, so I think this format came about to simplify software distribution. Not sure why the FM Towns also adopted it, except maybe to have cross compatibility.

[@andrasszabo7386]

I have met ZIP drives that didn't like any of my USB IDE adapters but worked fine on IDE cables on my motherboard.

[@SteveJones172pilot]

One of your best mail calls! I remember having that proto board. Got it for my birthday from my dad. Unfortunately, I never did much with it, as by the time I got it, ISA was on the way out, and I always wished I could have gotten a PCI version. I challenge you to proto up a test of at AY audio chip on that board. That would be the perfect match to use both items! I can confirm that the original COCO1/COCO2 did NOT have any dedicated sound chip, but although I am pretty sure, I can't exclude the COCO 3 specifically. I bet the confusion is that I think the Tandy 1000 may have had one of those chips in it. As for the EGA, I remember that being the GOLD STANDARD in it's day, and I had a friend who got that exact card and it was awesome. I was always jealous of that card.

[@edgeeffect]

I was just watching Curious Marc and thinking that the best thing about having a successful KZbin channel is that people give you stuff. It's brilliant to think that you might have CREATED a thriving retro scene in Portland just by passing on your donation surplus. I'd have LOVED that prototyping board back in the day... my daily driver was a 286 but I had a couple of old floppy only XT clones and that board would have let me do "Arduino stuff" all the way back then... nice!

[@ianmcass]

I usually skip intro sequences but I listen to yours every time :)

[@lm4278]

Hi Adrian! I appreciate your videos! Thanks for doing them!

[@86smoke]

Adrian, I remember trying to get a ZIP drive working via USB bridge - and I never succeeded. Try it directly via ATA cable.

[@sasiuru]

Another article (InfoWorld, August 18th 1986) says price for that AI Hummigboard card was $7000. That's probably a starting price...

[@fnmatrix]

That's just the starting price. For this $7,000, you get a 16mHz Intel 80386; a 1MB on-board RAM that is ex- pandable to 24MB with lM-bit memory chips (currently to 6MB with 256K-bit chips); a 32-bit data path with 2K cache; memory sharing with the host PC processor using the Intel above-board standard; optional support for Intel 80286 or 80387 floating-point processors; AAAI-86 Conference article - AI Magazine Volume 8 Number 1 (1987) - By Jeff Stone

[@Troppa17]

@@fnmatrix You could easily add $150 per MB of memory. So additional $3600 for the mermory and at least plus $400 for the i387-16 in 1987.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@Troppa17 so 11-12k.... more like 25k with inflation. That’s a spicy meatball

[@saifal-badri]

Nothing more exciting than seeing a video card I have here, your research and testing is amazing thanks a lot

[@kawiluver25]

Thank you for still doing these ! I as well as many others were sad to hear you might slow it down. We appreciate you! You have become part of my life I thank you dearly for these videos they cheat me up greatly during a hard time! Thank you again!

[@sayrken]

100k HYPE!!! Congratulations =D !!!!!

[@ultrametric9317]

The next year saw the VGAWonder (1988) which added VGA resolutions, and really cemented ATI's reputation. Soon the Mach coprocessor cards appeared, Mach8 and Mach32, and ATI was firmly established as the premier maker of graphics cards. The Mach cards could emulate an IBM 8514/a 1024x768 256-color solution, the first genuine hi-res full-color turnkey PC graphics solution. It's hard to remember that at this time, programs had their own hardware drivers included, there was no standardization, and hardware was evolving at lightning speed, particularly bus mastering hardware with coprocessors like the Mach. So that card you have there is a real piece of history.

[@toddrlyons]

I loved the ATi gushing. Thanks! Canadian geeks were so proud of that company.

[@RetroFett]

100K Adrian! Congrats, love how quickly your channel has hit the milestone.

[@74teppic]

Congrats on hitting 100k subs, very well deserved.

[@KarlBate]

Always fascinating and informative. What you have Adrian is a very relaxed but always engaged style. Personally l find your weekly releases both informative and therapeutic. For some reason you have given a great deal of calm in the last year or more now due to the human malware. As sort of retro ASMR. Thank you

[@cookingwithchefjeff]

The St. John's Bridge Atari logo shirt is pretty awesome. Well done!

[@brainiac9579]

I did get to play with a JDR PDS-601 as a lab study project (T.S.O., might ring a bell to some older QC residents). Anyway, we were using a 286 as a PLC, programmed in Assembly language. What a pain that system was to troubleshoot, but man was it efficient and powerful. This is my favorite mini mail call so far, Adrian! Keep them coming!

[@spacehitchhiker4264]

PLC in assembly? Why did nobody write a ladder logic converter for that?

[@AureliusR]

@@spacehitchhiker4264 They probably were implementing the actual PLC system which would take ladder logic and then act on it.

[@catcam]

100000 subscribers !!! Well deserved, great content. Stay safe!

[@parrottm76262]

Love, love, love all the varied hardware featured on this one. I am super intrigued by that Hummingboard.

[@dinomagick]

YES~~ Grats on 100K ADRIAN!!!!!!!

[@mushroomsamba82]

grats on the 100k adrian!

[@ArjanvanVught]

Congrats with the 100K subs!

[@mattymuc]

Finally 100k Congratulations!

[@jonathancombe9991]

Ah and here you are again, great to see. I know you said you might not have time for 2 videos a week (I don't blame you I can appreciate how much time and effort it must take and am very grateful for all the great videos you produce) and I wondered if you might have had a few celebratory drinks after hitting 100K subscribers that might also lead to no Wed video this week!

[@jeremypiel5544]

Love the external hard drive interface... Bought one almost 10 years ago when I got into fixing computers. It still fascinates people that I can pull the hard drive out of the computer and save the files/photos they thought were lost. Well worth the 20.00 I spent

[@Johnny-es9xg]

Thanks for the great content as usual.

[@Schattiz]

Wow! 100k!! Congrats!!

[@Tranarpnorra]

Oh lord. When I began my first employment back in the very early nineties (1991), the SIP/SIPP was all the rage. Brand new standard breaking from the "old" DIP-packages. The SIP/SIPP standard didn't last long though, maybe a year or something, until the SIMM-modules were all the rage. This gives me serious flashbacks on my early days as a PC technician. To add to the injury, I, as long with a very regular customer that I remember vividly, were dearly in love with the ZIP-drives. It was a very welcome "high"-density storage medium at the time. Still have an old 1992, "do-it-all 90's" compatible PC with a ZIP-drive in it. By the way, the 386DX "all-in-one" plug in card with 1M of memory cost something like 2000$ dollars here in Sweden. If you wanted the 387 math co-processor to go along with it the price went way up. Keep up the good work Adrian!

[@vhm14u2c]

Some interesting toys, thanks for sharing!

[@peterwhitby5965]

Congratulations on 100,000 Subscribers, excellent news been waiting for this, so pleased for you. You deserve every sub and 10x more. Keep up the great work, Thank You. Kind Regards.

[@bigjnsa]

Adrian congrats on hitting 100k subscribers!

[@Codeaholic1]

You're definitely not imagining the adapter board. I had one for adapting a CDROM drive to regular 3.5" IDE and power. It came with one of the supermicro cases I bought many years ago.

[@organiccold]

Cool video as always Adrian. Oh and congratulations for the 100k :)

[@justinkochenderfer]

Love Adrian! Everyone get on his Patreon and support this man! We love your content!

[@KomradeMikhail]

I still use LS-120 SuperDisks in most of my retro rigs, in a similar way that many retro tinkerers still use Zip disks. They have many issues on Macs... But if your retro shenanigans are limited to PC only, then SuperDisk is superior to Zip in every way. Most importantly, LS-120 is natively supported in motherboard BIOS firmware. Even back as far as Socket 7 Pentium, and as recently as UEFI on Haswell Socket 1150. This includes booting OS from disk even when booting from CD is not supported. The drives came in all the major flavors: PATA (IDE), internal SCSI, external SCSI, Parallel Port, USB... And if you crack open an external enclosure you usually find an internal variety inside. They hold 126 MB when formatted. They read and write normal 1.44MB and 720KB floppies at a much faster rate. You can replace your normal A:\ drive. DOS, Win98, WinXP, Win10, Linux.

[@mikeuk666]

keep up the great work Adrian 🕹 ♥

[@cairsahrstjoseph996]

Yayy! 100K Congrats : )

[@dairedarcy1130]

TFW you remember it’s Wednesday, and it’s time for a trip to Adrians digital basement!

[@vangelis1972]

dear Andrian, congratulations for 100K subs!!!!!

[@mogwaay]

Really enjoyed the EGA card exploration, I've picked up a couple of EGA cards with another on the way for a 8088 homebrew build of mine but I have yet to explore how (or if!) they work so nice to have an overview of this one.

[@angryrailfan5711]

Congrats on 100k.

[@lennybaker4060]

Adrain... I used to have one of the monochrome monitors that you used in this video that was used on an old IBM compatible computer. MAN that brought back memories!!!!!

[@HolgerT]

There was a time in the mid 90s, when I was already home-working as a technical writer (which was quite seldom back then), the Zip drive was my means of data transfer between my home office and the computer in the office. And I was very happy with it, it worked very reliably.

[@laxr5rs]

Every time I see a new video from you, I gasp. Heheh. Yay!

[@celticht32]

The AY sound chip was used in the speech and sound pack for the COCO... so it was a cart not built in...

[@SteveJones172pilot]

AHH.. that makes sense. I KNEW it wasn't IN the coco, and i never had a S&S card.

[@celticht32]

@@SteveJones172pilot =) Glad I could help.. I think if I remember at one time there was an article in either Hot COCO or Rainbow which showed you how to make a home brew S&S Cart for a coco...

[@SteveJones172pilot]

@@celticht32 if "15 year old me" had known that, I'd have been all over it! I always wanted a S&S cartridge and was very much into music/midi stuff., It probably came out after I had largely moved to the IBM PC world.. it's fun to reminisce about all this stuff!

[@rodneydaub3812]

4:44 Holy crap, I spent a lot of time in Radio Shack's in the past and I distinctly remember this sound chip being on the shelves ...

[@SteveJones172pilot]

Yeah.,, I remember buying that off the shelf (and never doing anything with it).. It was among the "cool chips" radio shack had, along with the speech chip pair and the touch tone encoders/decoders and stuff.. :-)

[@damouze]

I have never had any issues with a ZIP drive and I loved them and used to own several of them. Back when I was studying at university I carried a minitiature installation of Slackware on a ZIP disk around with me, complete with networking, GCC and even a SWAP partition. As the computers in the labs all had ZIP drives installed in them and were capable of booting from it (and I also carried a Slackware boot disk with me just in case I encountered a PC that did not) I was able to do my coding assignments (nerd alert!) under Linux. Fun times.... btw.. Concratulations on hitting the 100k subscriber mark!

[@frogz]

congratz on 100k!!! i have some unique items i'm probably going to send in before long including some old mac crap, i literally used to have a stack of old mac computers in my old house before i moved i used as a chair! when i moved, i scrapped them for parts and saved the cool stuff

[@frogz]

my last 1 i had of ide to laptop ide connector ripped, its a flat flex from dell gx240/260 SFF pentium 4 era, it was super common to use laptop drives in SFF cases and ide was standard then, dont forget archive.org for OLD drivers and shit, if you can find anything to do with their original servers from the early 90s if they still supported it

[@sporktek]

That card was $7000 and it was used with Golden Common (GC) Lisp programming language software.

[@gasmice]

Golden Common Lisp appears stuck in time in 2001 (search gclisp in your favorite search engine)

[@suluturnip]

Hell yeah. Another video!

[@econtrerasd]

I'm almost sure I had the very same EGA card back in the day, it served me well for many years!, My father bought the EGA monitor and it look amazing!

[@csudsuindustries]

I still have the Zip disks from the 97/98 where I kept all the Real Video files of SouthPark Season 1 and 2.

[@JamesSkemp]

Oh man, Real. That's a brand I haven't heard in a long time. Reminds me of all those sites that used to use RealAudio for background music. There were a couple pre-podcast sites, and a few radio stations would use it. Every once in a while they wouldn't have things setup right and you could just download the full audio.

[@recursiveidentity]

I had mine for a long time, but I've still got the files saved in a folder called "from zip discs" :)

[@georgemaragos2378]

HAHA i have the same small screen real media files for south park - grainy but it was the best compromise of data size and view ability at the time

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@JamesSkemp there’s a couple of proto-Spotify services from 2000 (which died in the bubble burst) which used Real too.

[@johnsonlam]

Hi Adrian, I use LS-120 quite a lot, actually they're not very fast with 1.44MB disk, just compatible and maybe slightly faster. But if you got 120MB disk they can hold 120MB data, that's the selling point back in the old days, 20MB more than ZIP and no need to have an extra drive, since it can read write old 720MB also, I still have one LS-120 USB drive, they can use directly under Windows 7 and 10, no driver needed. When BIOS have support, no drive required under MS-DOS.

[@bitoxic]

Congrats! 100k! 🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Thank you!!

[@EsotericArctos]

I agree with you on ZIP Disks. I had several that were used for backup and a few that were daily drivers. I never had one fail. I found them to be really reliable. Thanks for another video

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

I really think it was the drives that died -- with that click of death, but the disks all seemed to last and be durable. I think of all the old ones I've tried recently -- 20+ years later -- have worked just fine. Better than I can say for 1.44mb disks which at this point seem to be 50% bad.

[@EsotericArctos]

@@adriansdigitalbasement I agree with your sentiments. I do have memories of repairing the Zip100 USB drive a few times but never a disk failure. I had the USB drive with the translucent blue case for a while. Looked good but the springs kept falling off inside

[@Diggnuts]

Quite a .... Wild Card..... Hats off to you sir!

[@kagatosr]

Hey hey! 100K! 🎉

[@invictus0x0]

I've had several of those internal IDE zip 100 drives that did exactly the same thing on a usb adapter, but worked perfectly when connected directly via IDE.

[@kaitlyn__L]

That LISP card is totally fascinating! Turning the host processor into just an I/O handler is pretty interesting. What a dense board. Also interesting they were comparing it to VAXen (if I’m not mistaken). I also love that the prototyping board came with a bunch of breadboard instead of needing to add your own like with modern ones! Totally sweet!

[@GeomancerHT]

100K baby!

[@ncc74656m]

I used to install a few programs like AIM directly on my zip disk and my homework and stuff for my computer class, cause my uni's computers were fairly locked down, but I could run them directly from the disk and chat with folks while in classes.

[@TorquemadaRex]

I used LS 120 Drives and i loved it.

[@Mr.OCanada]

Not a big deal but with the constant graphics mode changes and sync lines it may be worth adding a disclaimer to the video along the lines of the typical warnings about people sensitive to epileptic episodes or the like. My friend left the room as I was watching this and I didn't think it was bad but she did. I had an Epson equity II with green monochrome and Hercules Video adapter. Awesome card for playing Sierra games. Thanks for this video! ATI was awesome back in the day. AMD was a good merge.

[@ovalteen4404]

One of my electronics classes was about interfacing with computers, and we used a board similar to that one. It didn't have a built-on breadboard, but it did buffer the bus. Of course my final project, which was a digital sound card, had to bypass the buffer chips in order to work with the DMA controller. The other problem was when wires broke while plugged into those machine pin sockets.

[@Damaniel3]

A mid 80's card with a 386 and 387 on board, along with 24MB of RAM (or even with just the 12 in this case) had to be a five figure purchase for sure.

[@Evangeline-Katherine]

I love to see the bench session,,, 🤗🤗🤗🤗

[@Lejar6972]

You can see the dithering happening in the camera feed with the graphics card where the pixels shown are changed every time the scanline passes. Super cool!

[@tmsmottl]

When I was in college the first time my PC came with a LS-120 drive, which after some serious work to get functional under Windows NT 4, was great. It read floppies noticeably quicker, but more so I found a bunch in the programming lab that also had them installed so I could move large files back and forth to my dorm room easily, kind of like what you did with your email on the ZIP disk. I didn't have a compiler on my dorm computer but sometimes I'd work on code in a text editor and it made it easy to move back and forth.

Oh man! I have memories about this.

[@DanPellegrino486]

I forgot today was Wednesday! What a great surprise!

[@MOS6582]

I’m always astonished by the Good Samaritans who donate their cool gear rather than throwing it straight up on eBay. Kudos. Also Archer/Radio Shack/Tandy catalogue numbers were a portal to a world of opportunity.

[@eDoc2020]

Adrian, why don't you connect the 8910 sound chip to a PC using the prototyping card? That way you can demonstrate both in one go. Btw you have '8210' written in the description instead of the proper 8910. Might want to do a quick s/8210/8910 on the text.

[@tenmillionvolts]

On the topic of old pc upgrades, I remember the day we switched over from our Burroughs mainframe / terminals setup to a single 486 pc. The difference was shockkkking. And we didn't have to change the removable hard disk platters out anymore. It felt like the future had arrived!

[@nalinux]

In the late 90's, i would have kill to have this ISA test card. I remember I made an ADC 8 bits on the parallel port, with the software in C and running on Dos and Linux.

[@ESDI80]

I made my own SIPPs by using bus wire and soldering to the back of each SIMM. They fit in the pin header perfectly and worked great.

[@proCaylak]

MMMC no. 41 huh? There's a saying in Turkey, "41 kere maşallah" which roughly means "41 times magnificient". That's really wonderful! looking forward for more :)

[@RonHelton]

The Theory of Operation document for the JDR PDS-601 breadboard was written on March 3, 1994. Author: Ken West

[@AureliusR]

I would kill to find one of those prototyping cards! That would make the type of stuff I do with my old machines so much easier

[@shmehfleh3115]

I had two zip drives, and both suffered the click of death. I eventually got a check for 15 bucks from that class action suit.

[@nyccollin]

Exactly. No idea why anyone would want to deal with those nowadays.

[@notacop1477]

ZIP drives worked very well for me. Even used them bootable for Shapeshifter on the Amiga 3000

[@TheCantrell]

I’ve been considering getting an EGA wonder to replace the stock CGA card in my Compaq Portable II. Neat stuff!

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

It would only work with the optional daughterboard -- which will be unobtanium these days. Otherwise it would be AMAZING to be able to get EGA grayscale on a Portable!

[@needgamesnow3466]

I am all kinds of confused today. So youtube shows me a "new" video from this channel, and I clicked it and you were talking about finding a tv set in the garbage and fixing it. So I was thinking "why no mid-week mail call?" then I remembered you mentioned a week or two back you might not be doing as many videos each week, so I just went with it thinking you were holding off on a new mail call video. I get about 10 minutes into the tv repair and I keep feeling like I have seen it before - that is when I realized it was from 2019!!! lol. Damn you youtube!

[@EricJorgensen]

I might have those pins, will have to dig in the parts bins

[@mathieuguillemain]

I use the same ATI EGA Wonder with my portable IBM 5155 through the onboard 3-pin Berg connector. That makes the excellent Zenith internal monochrome composite monitor really shine vs the original IBM CGA card!

[@Cruzer1157]

That EGA-Wonder board was my first video board! (I might still have it). Its successor was the VGA-Wonder (also from ATI), and I was so pleased that I have not purchased anything other than ATI boards since. :-D

[@nilz23]

We used those laptop ide adapters all the time in data acquisition machines we made. It had a standard PC motherboard but a cheap laptop low profile cd rom drive. While we made all of the DAQ hardware, we did not make those adapters so there's probably a lot of them floating around.

[@robintst]

I used my Zip disks for so long that once I moved up to an external HDD, the folder with all my stuff from those disks is still called ZIP Backups and it's still where I keep my current stuff which is just kind of out of a joke tradition at this point. lol

[@tenmillionvolts]

I bought a 2nd hand pc with a built in zip drive. I had only ever seen the external drives. Was so excited I tried to get a disk. They were so rare and expensive where I live that I never used it at all. Sad