Compaq Deskpro 286 - Unboxing & Exploration

[@stephanieiwaniuk6088]

I'm at work right now but as soon as I am off I will watch! Edit: Back from work now! I think the screws are original. The Seagate drive I was unable to test, but I had the 2 ide drives I found with the other 2 computers found checked and they were wiped, so it is safe to assume the previous owner wiped all 3. Speaking of, I found some ribbon cables when looking in the boxes for the other computers. I'll take pictures and email them to you. If they are the correct cables I will send them to you. In regards to the cards, the previous owner did work in IT with computer networking. That might help identify the cards. Also, the box says that it comes with 640kb of memory! How much more memory could you need, haha! Feel free to name the computer whatever you would like. I am just glad it is in relatively working condition and that you are able to use it! Enjoy the computer, and have a great week! Thanks for the awesome videos!!

[@MichaelMJD]

Thanks again so much for sending this my way!

[@stephanieiwaniuk6088]

@@MichaelMJD No worries! Thank you so much for the incredible videos!

[@lucyinchat]

​@Corporeal Undead Greed ain't the way, bro.

[@SupaPhly0]

​@@corporealundead3085maybe they just didn't want to sell on ebay and wanted to send it to a youtuber they like? ever thought about that?

[@jasedxyz]

@Corporeal Undead "hey send 80% of profit to this person" "of COURSE they do it for non profit. Wake up."

[@dungeonseeker3087]

Fun fact about 286 systems, the internal hardware on the motherboards is pretty much identical across all motherboards meaning that the system BIOS on 286s is almost always fully interchangeable so you could quite easily go grab a much newer and feature packed Award 286 BIOS, burn it to a ROM chip and swap the BIOS ROM on the board. It totally removes the need to have a separate disk to configure BIOS settings. Adrian Black did a video covering it a while back, IIRC he tried like 4 different 286 BIOSes and they all worked.

[@Caseytify]

I did not know that.

[@booboo699254]

Don't do that in these systems... these are dual speed 286 that use the keyboard for turbo on/off. There are plenty of disk images for the Compaq 286 to download.

[@80sCompaqPC]

⁠​⁠@@booboo699254Yeah, Compaqs aren’t exactly like any clone. They have special features you’ll lose with a generic BIOS, like the keyboard-selected CPU speed, and the Compaq dual-mode graphics support to name a few.

[@JustPyroYT]

14:50 damn, that diskette wall looks amazing! :D

[@nathanmcneill8712]

hi michael mjd does the windows xp freestyle version include the xp startup sounds

[@nathanmcneill8712]

and shutdown

[@olfreal]

Du bist wirklich echt überall wo ich bin!

[@JustPyroYT]

@@olfreal haha 😂

[@Techmej]

Can we just appreciate this man's content it makes us all happy

[@poipians]

morning to all my mjd fans :)

[@kanbekan]

Meanwhile it's 12 AM in my country

[@JustPyroYT]

Its 6PM in my country but thanks

[@numerobsod221]

hi

[@stephanieiwaniuk6088]

Good morning!

[@ketnevs1878]

Right now we have 2 am. Good night

[@RetroAnachronist]

Those torx/flathead screws were a signature of Compaq most of their existence.

[@stonent]

And when HP bought them out, they continued using them.

[@SockyNoob]

@@stonent yep

[@stephanieiwaniuk6088]

Yup, the screws were with the computer. Just couldn't find the right screwdriver around my apartment, so I left the hardrives and screws out rather than risk breaking something because I didn't have the proper equipment. Also took the lithium battery out from the computer to avoid potential delays at customs, luckily the screws were previously removed. I wanted to leave any disassembly/reassembly to a professional, as I am not confident in my ability to work on computer hardware.

[@Speedy4you10]

I kind of hate peeking in the reflection on the tv but looks like to me you have a nice house and setup. Keep up the videos man! Thank you.

[@sutorippuwebmaster8783]

Always fascinating to peek inside these older boxes and see just how much motherboard design has changed and begun to incorporate by default over the years instead of needing 2-3 expansion cards for basic things like disk drive I/O.

[@jbritain]

Don't think we haven't forgotten about that compaq portable!

[@JosephDavies]

I know I haven't forgotten! Still hoping! :D

[@sadmac356]

I sure haven't, found a whole new channel and made friends thanks to it

[@JosephDavies]

If you don't mind tinkering a bit with microcontrollers and Python, Adafruit has a Floppy Featherwing that can be assembled into something that can read and write floppies of various kinds. That might be a good flexible solution for you if you find yourself with this problem even somewhat often.

[@jjjacer]

@5:00 yeah compaq liked using the combo torx/flathead screws on alot of their machines, at least up to the pentium era, sorta like those screws rarely did you find one stripped that you couldnt remove it

[@eDoc2020]

It went way beyond that. HP kept using those screws on their business machines, at least through the Windows 8 era. They probably still do but the neweset I've had my hands on is a 2016 model.

[@stonent]

I had the older 8086 version of this machine and they appeared to use the same exact monitor. The OEM video card in the Deskpro 8086 was the same card as in the portable and even had the internal CGA plug still on it. Something I found amusing about he video card in your system was on a website. "The Graphics Solution was a graphics card by ATI, launched on September 22nd, 1986. Built on the 800 nm process, and based on the CW16800-A graphics processor, the card does not support DirectX. Since Graphics Solution does not support DirectX 11 or DirectX 12, it might not be able to run all the latest games." You have the -B version of the video chip which according to Wikipedia added Plantronics ColorPlus compatibility, so you should be able to get Tandy-like graphics in some games like Planet X3 by The 8-Bit Guy.

[@ChloeKenobi]

7:58 “cracked, but still intact” same

[@Neksus-M06]

The one we had came with a newer HD, Conner 40MB, with both EGA and controller by Compaq. I have so many memories. But we moved and I kept only the working parts. It was heavy with the monitor. :) Keyboard wasn't that good though. IIRC, 30 years have gone by. Edit: still have the high density 5.25 FDD

[@Windows_98]

i love the checkered pattern on the floppy disk wall, a cool way to reuse old and broken floppies, lol

[@guitarkid660]

I have been subscribed for 3 years man, keep up the work, your videos are really good.

[@MichaelMJD]

Thank you!

[@RetroGamerOG_]

Hello! I knew this video was going to go up because of the tweet! And this is a great retro unboxing!

[@galaxystudiosgaming]

I can’t wait to see the return of the compaq portable because that is why I subscribed.

[@foxsell]

This is lovely which brings me back to my 1980s..

[@bitslasher89]

Late to the party, but someone over on VOGONS taught me how to read the serial number on these which tell you the year and week it was made. It's the first 4 digits. The first digit on these are always 4. The next digit is the last digit of the year. The next two digits are the week of the year. So for your machine, you have 4802 which means 2nd week of 1988.

[@stephanieiwaniuk6088]

That is super cool to know, thank you!

[@TheStarscouts]

Hope you're able to install an operating system on this. Also "the 80s PC" is a good name for this computer since it's similar to the 98 PC's name.

[@foxsell]

Lovely sound spinning up! Good old days!

[@kFY514]

Even if the hard drive has an OS on it, it likely won't boot until it's properly configured in the BIOS. And this thing doesn't have the BIOS setup in ROM; it came with a "BIOS setup" on a floppy disk, which is why it's asking for that Diagnostics diskette. I also expect that booting this thing off 3.5" floppy without first going through that Diagnostics setup booted off 5.25" (as that's likely the default) might be problematic, too. So, you probably need some other machine with a 5.25" drive, and some floppies to go with that, anyway. I hope that Diagnostics disk image can be found on The Internet Archive or something...

[@lanceleader2]

Years ago I sent one of these to the E-waste center, for some reason I kept the lock and a set of Compaq branded keys. I'll give them to you if you want.

[@CesareVesdani]

I am a fan of Compaq computers.

[@computerkid1416]

Since he won't do a face reveal, I automatically associate him with that Windows XP bobble head now. Plot twist would be if he actually does look like the bobble head guy.

[@seeblu]

that pci compaq card was fun to look at for me, too

[@stevesmusic1862]

I love the wall of floppy disks!

[@blainepalmerza]

Awesome video, Michael!

[@Vamsheedharan]

5:00 - MJD hair revealed!

[@Cherijo78]

I used one of these with the Amber monitor as a kid at my father's house. We had dual hard drives in it. By that point it was already long in the tooth, and he had bought it second hand. Still, I cut my teeth on it as a preteen going on BBS's with a 2400 baud modem. The biggest mistake people make with these older MFM hard drives is not parking the heads. The heads do not auto park on these drives, so if you are going to move them, you must run the utility to park them or you could physically damage the drive and or heads inside. I've seen people transport these older computers in their vehicles and completely wreck the hard drive in the process because they did not park the heads. Shipping it without parking the heads is almost guaranteed disaster. When I got my current IBM 5160 No one had parked the heads before transporting it. Luckily there wasn't much physical damage to the drive and I was able to recover it with a low level format properly, and it only seems to have lost one sector. There's nothing like the sound of an ancient MFM, so I beg of people to please preserve these drives and remember to park your heads!

[@Alexa26]

My dad used to have one of these and he loved it! But like yours it yellowed, great video! :D

[@liliwinnt6]

14:48 wall of floppy disks! bizarre lol

[@OrMain]

It came with a blanket as a gift😂😂 - Looking at the IBM OS/2 installer box, it is sad that it was not popular in the personal computer market at the time. A real 32-bit operating system, way ahead of its time, even superior to Windows 95 and Windows NT.

[@stephanieiwaniuk6088]

Donated the blanket... just so happened to come with a computer :)

[@eddiehimself]

Those combination torx-flathead screws have been used by Compaq since forever, and they still use them on HP (who bought out Compaq) PCs to this day I believe.

[@macaprasok]

Yesssssss new video

[@ijnfus]

feels so good to get the notify of a nee mjd video

[@nathanmcneill8712]

hi mate i cant get my precision touchpad to work or sound on my laptop when installing this is there a fix

[@larryk731]

A working hardcard in 2023 - wow. I had 1 in 1986 in my 10 mhz xt clone and used it all throughput college. it died around 1991.

[@jasonhaman4670]

And with a Kalok HDD, no less. Miraculous.

[@stephanieiwaniuk6088]

I'll be honest, I didn't even know what a hard card was until this comment/video. Was a hard card/hard drive combo better than just a hard drive in the late 80s early 90s? Or did hard drives just not exist without the card back then? Just curious because I don't really know the difference, except what I can find on Wikipedia.

[@larryk731]

@Stephanie Iwaniuk It was an easy method of adding a hard drive to an older machine since it was (effectively) plug and play. My parents purchased it for me so I had no idea of the actual cost. I can't say if it was better or not - it was better for me since I had 2 full height floppy disk drives and no space for a hard drive. It was cheaper to buy a traditional hard drive and controller card but that was morel work and didn't always fit in the case. I guess you could call it a retrofit device.

[@stephanieiwaniuk6088]

@@larryk731 Awesome, thank you! That is really cool to know

[@marcischneider9093]

Ty Stephanie for the cool donation And you Michael for the video. Pretty cool!!

[@nezu_cc]

As they say, one man's trash is another man's treasure.

[@vwestlife]

The hard drive might still have data on it, but the computer can't read it because due to the battery going dead, it lost the parameters for the drive (cylinders, heads, etc.) in the BIOS setup, and this Compaq is far too old to have automatic hard drive detection -- that didn't become common until the mid-1990s.

[@MichaelMJD]

Yeah, unfortunately I don't have the diskette needed to configure the drive. From what I understand this computer doesn't have the setup utility stored in ROM.

[@vwestlife]

@@MichaelMJD I can make you a 5.25" boot disk with GSETUP on it which should work. Get in touch with me via the e-mail link on the About page of my KZbin channel.

[@ArchangelTirael]

Michael is slowly turning from 32-bit Guy to 16-bit Guy now. :)

[@chrism869]

The 98 machine isn't old enough, but this is old enough

[@VicTheVicar]

Dude, just use the floppy drive from this machine in your semi-modern machine to make boot disks. You might need to rearrange jumpers, but if the drive expects a cable twist then don't worry.

[@redson8210]

:OOOO he didn't forget the Compaq Portable

[@DanielC_YT]

As of this writing I'm seventeen seconds in, and already this looks like fun.

[@generalsquirrel9548]

2:04 thats a chonky drive

[@hattree]

Wow, I had one of those back in the day.

[@madgaming69420]

The portable is dead but not FORGOTTEN

[@iamgermane]

You should try and find some ZEOS and Northgate computers from MN. They were up there with Dell at one point.

[@ALMASHNI-MAN]

What the... is that how large hard drives used to be? 1:58

[@snap_oversteer]

Yep, some hard drives from that era were even full height, so twice the height of this one. 3.5" drives were more common near the end of 80s.

[@ALMASHNI-MAN]

@@snap_oversteer well computers did used to be the size of a wall so it only makes sense that it's components where also big, now we can a a full fledged gaming pc in a small cube.

[@GiuseppeGaetanoSabatelli]

I have an old Epson QX-16 (Dual 8086 and z80 system) with a dead CGA monitor. Seeing this Compaq reminded me of it. lol. The original owner said it worked great until the monitor died. Considering I've done Z80 assembly on the TI-83 Plus, I was hyped to goof around with it. How does one get CGA video converted to a useful video signal?

[@ikbintom]

Wow this PC is in amazing condition.

[@corvusaflame713]

Classy hardware.

[@iamgermane]

Do you have any of those old computer mags from the early 1990s that were the size of a phone book?

[@disasterocks]

That's such a big package I havent even watched the video yet lmao

[@Se7enFanBoi]

Cool video

[@GBlastMan]

How about Steph286?

[@Ollytodd]

What ever happened to the Compaq portable 1

[@AACraft555]

you should do a full restoration on it

[@dglcomputers1498]

Those flathead/star screws will be original, I've seen other Compaq machines use them.

[@_Nothsa]

I love the Compaq computers

[@stefhannington2218]

The Compaq portable 😂

[@vinhtran9308]

Pls try OS/2 1.x on it, just for the whole painful experience! Just kidding, you may need a RAM expansion board for it (sth like 6-8 megs). But only OS/2 can fully unleash the power of a 286: its protected mode, that allows more memory and seamless multitasking.

[@AlejandroRodolfoMendez]

I suggest getting either a boot by network card that uses the Ethernet empty chip to boot to dos and had network, the ide to usb or the ide to SD cards for this. Technology connections and lgr have videos on those cards. Maybe a floppy emulator if you want. So far it's a great pc I hope you can do lot of stuff with it. Specially old games and software that Requires 5'14" floppies

[@SQKILL2]

We've received one of those MFM HDDs where I work and those are pretty tough son's of bi***'s to destroy with a drill press. The cassing if super tough and heavy. I don't know what kind of metal was used to make those cassings but respect

[@uran7292]

Has anyone encountered such a strange problem on the 386th? There is an adapter and a 256 MB flash card, and when connected to a computer, the image on the monitor stops displaying. As soon as I take the adapter out of the computer, the image appears again

[@Freda.693]

Now we know what his hair looks like! 5:00

[@IchinoseRodrigo]

lets go!

[@andrewdupuis1151]

cool you have tv has video caset i use to have one meny years ago

[@EstMega0]

name it the adopted Compaq

[@aaronrowepalmer]

8:28 Why does this say WINCH?

[@chaseohara4781]

Without the setup disk and setting the BIOS up properly, the computer likely won't be able to use the hard drive anyways. Depending on the hard drive, some of the settings might be through the driver board, but even so the BIOS will need information about the hard drive like type, sectors, etc., to use it. At this point in time plug and play, even in a Very rudimentary form almost didn't exist in the PC space.

[@samfire826musicofficial]

Another way to dispose of a hard drive with sensitive data Cut a bit of the built in controller board off

[@karamatf]

lmao i had this growing up might be somewhere in storage this does looks like a older version mine had vga lol and the biggest problem was to be able to ground it the fun i had removing the front panel and telling everyone to turn on the pc and they would get shocked i used a screwdriver to turn on the pc lol

[@youtubedingus]

yay

[@cjhawk67]

Torx T15 was kind of Compaqs thing in the 80s up to the early 90s

[@eDoc2020]

They didn't stop, at least in their pro lineup. I've worked on HP business machines from circa 2015 and they still use those screws. From pictures I can find of later models they still haven't stopped, at least not on full-size units.

[@eg1885]

The hard drive may be blank but without setting the options it won't try to read the drive because it can't recognize it.

[@adamsfusion]

Slim chance this thing will support 3.5" floppies without a new floppy expansion card. They're way too large (data-wise) for the IO card to recognize this early in the game. Get a floppy drive emulator like a Gotek and flash it with Flash Floppy. It'll save you SO MUCH headache across all sorts of different computers. It's the one peripheral I'm fine to put in entirely-old-parted computers. Working floppies are tipping on the edge of harsh rarity and there are many newer alternatives to work around it.

[@Cherijo78]

It should support 720k 3 and 1/2-in floppies. My old IBM 5160 does out of the box. It's the 1.44 MB ones that won't run without a different floppy card usually.

[@andresbravo2003]

Compaq was really great since it was made in Houston Texas.

[@GeiPeeruPuutin]

i used a compaq 286e yesterday lol

[@ipodworshiper]

i vote big bertha as the name

[@cat77769]

Before the end of the millennium in 2977 years you will have to make the compaq portable 1 part 2

[@shermanmacoy]

Buen video 😃

[@emchodevetkov9438]

Stephanie is cool

[@GatorInVirtual]

The fact that the Compaq Portable wasn't named the Compaq Compact is a tragedy

[@hyperturbotechnomike]

The Compaq-T

[@hyperturbotechnomike]

HP still uses the same screws with torx and flathead

[@SockyNoob]

Interesting way to package something. Guess that's one way to reduce plastic waste.

[@stephanieiwaniuk6088]

Was just an extra blanket that my cousin's dog tore a hole in when she was a puppy, haha! Reduce, reuse, recycle! (I also didn't have any bubble wrap around my apartment and running to buy some was a lot of effort).

[@phr3dmcc0y]

I would have installed the seagate drive into another PC with working smaller floppy drives, then do a drive check on the drive, then do a format, and sys C on it, then copy a dos package to the drive and transplant it back to the compaq. UNLESS of course I had a 3.5 drive that I could put in the compaq.......

[@clementpruvost8670]

Compaq Portable : *when I will get a 2nd part?*

[@nikicze1220]

Rarely thing!

[@Nyancat762]

It’s so cool

[@readybear64]

“We will hopefully do a part 2 before the millennial is over” *ouch*

[@kaitlyn__L]

Only 977 years to get round to it

[@GamesCell]

Try Windows 95 on this 286. I bet it’s obsolete for such an OS.

[@eDoc2020]

Yes. Windows 3.10 is the last version of Windows for a 286. You need a 386 for 95, NT, or even 3.11.

[@rockpie.iso.tar.bz2]

WHERE IS THE COMPAQ PORTABLE PART 2

[@SockyNoob]

Steph286

[@DrStinks]

Mornin'

[@EmberwolfXR]

what this must be said: do not destroy a drive this old::::if u cant erase it:::::have some one do it::::::Data on a 30 year old hard drive is most likely not valid any more....not to mention there very expensive to replace....

[@Hadisabetghadam]

I Am loved....... but You Can Get Vga Video Card Is Great