EEVblog

The full version of EEVblog #1028 on the main channel, with the extra struggles with getting the floppy drive working.
For those interested in how I edited a 39min video down to 29min in the final edit.

[@TheEPROM9]

Old computers are a passion project. Hard work but fun

[@WereCatf]

Dave gets complaints about the amount of rambling in his video, Dave proceeds to upload a version of the video with even more rambling! Classic.

[@Gameboygenius]

Complete with fiddling around with the item while talking. Wouldn't want it any other way!

[@EEVblog2]

:-P

[@gudenau]

Then there are the people like us that would listen to him all day.

[@TheBekker_]

This was awesome, really appreciate you going the extra mile to get this working :) love small embedded systems :)

[@pnjunction5689]

Wow, that was a nice trip down the memory lane! I love old computer stuff.

[@rsutherland76]

This was my late 1980's and 1990's condensed down to a 39 minute video. The struggle was real...

[@christopherguy1217]

That was exactly how I remember 3.5" floppy drives, never working when you needed them. It looked like the bios supported CD-ROM so you could install an old Linux or Novell networks server software.

[@ForViewingOnly]

This project certainly tested your tenacity... I'm glad you stuck with it Dave.

[@DJignyte]

This was great! Cheers, Dave!

[@avejst]

Wow, what a drive of memory lane... Thanks for sharing 😀👍

[@siva9244]

Great work !.

[@KerboOnYT]

Love the flashback 🙂 I've got one of these PC/104 things in a drawer somewhere and should dig it out to tinker

[@hughieandrolf]

I love the dumpster that just keeps on giving. I gotta get me one of these!

[@annaoaulinovna]

i loved this video!

[@Gameboygenius]

Many USB keyboards and mice from the '00s are dual standard so all they had to do at the factory was to hook up the right lead. That's how those USB to PS2 adapters work, all passive. Useful info for anyone doing any sort of work with retro computers. ;)

[@raminrajabioskouei781]

Love it

[@brucelytle1144]

I've got a pile of these in complete units set up to run with just a +12 vdc supply. They were meant to be used by a trucking company in the 90's. Ought to go dig em out a see if they boot win95 or linux.

[@ypey1]

love it, good ol' days

[@vladimir0700]

Ah yes, how fondly I remember PC104

[@joopterwijn]

Your a Hero!

[@ChrisLX200]

That brought back memories :-) I 'upgraded' to an 80386 long after owning with an 8086 with an MFM hard disk which was a full size 5-1/4" format with 10MB (megabyte) capacity. After the 8086 I moved up to 80286 so your PC is actually quite advanced compared to earlier versions. On the 8086 I mostly ran Lotus Symphony (a sort of spreadsheet + word processor program) from DOS, but somewhere I also have a Windows V.1 floppy drive which came as an alternative new-fangled OS to CPM which was considered superior at the time!

[@sprybug]

I know of your troubles. In a lot of my personal projects I use old PC's, cuz they're cheap and I have a lot of them. Getting them to get to the point of being able to do anything with them is a real pain because you have to do just what Dave did. I have this old Pentium laptop that I am using in a project and it took me a long time to get it to the point where I could do something with it. I finally got one of those Floppy drive to USB jump drive devices off of ebay and a 44 pin IDE to SD Card device so I could boot from a SD card instead of a hard drive. BTW, Pengo for the win! There was this one arcade I used to go to when I was young and that was the game I always went to!

[@Coiltec]

When buying a USB floppy, make sure it has USB 3.2 for maximum transfer speeds and future compatibility

[@Valenorious]

I'm sure Eliza could help you come to terms with those frustrations getting it to boot up.

[@Valenorious]

Dammit, just when I sent it you played it. watch before respond!

[@sgwong513]

This bring back my old memory on dos...miss all the dos game...

[@sparkplug1018]

Love these retro videos Dave. Rematched your Acorn teardown video recently, thanks for the recommendation to watch Micro Men. Was a really interesting movie. Do you still have that system in the lab?

[@richfiles]

22:20 Sorry to hear about your difficulties finding a PS/2 connector. Picking just the right one must have been a nightmare, in that sea of choices! LOL

[@andycristea]

I believe that is Windows 8, not Vista. That's why the key did not work. :D

[@sparkplug1018]

Pretty sure the upgrade would work for a 7 or 8 key, could be wrong though.

[@fattomandeibu]

Crickey, when these things started to come out, I'd've been making my transition from a C64 to A1200. Mad to think there were miniature computers like this just going around. Of course, it'd've cost several times(at least 10, I'm imagining) the price of said A1200 so I'd've never had one, even a regular 286 or A4000 would've been well beyond my wallet, but it's still well cool to see.

[@radarmusen]

Nice video, I guess that I have seen some piggyback board without knowing that it was a old standard.

[@hankbizzo5]

Could we get a look inside the disk on chip?? Thanks for the content..

[@sanityd1]

Just found one of these in an unlabelled black box from an auction, I saw the 20gb scsi hdd below it and thought, wow you really couldn't get a CPU mobo this small back then...oh I know what it is, time to rewatch Dave's videos on them.

[@jonas-fr]

Nice video Dave! Would you know how to manage the ISA ports since ISA cards needs sometimes -5V and -12/+12V? Is a separate powersupply (dedicated PC/104 board) needed?

[@zsombor_99]

If you want something nice on this mini computer, I suggest "Dazzle", which is a beautiful DOS screensaver! 😉

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

Is there a PC104 board using the AMD A10-7800k APU and 64GB of DDR3 RAM? as that would have given them build in HDMI video, There is a HAYNES build your own computer book and on one of the pages there is the Vista Business WPA key I actually have the key but I don't think that I would be allowed to upload key, what about CP/M 86 that came with the AMSTRAD PC1912/1640.

[@38911bytefree]

34:00 and that is why I keep my old trusty notebooks, one with 95, one with 98 and one with XP. I have made disks many times over the years. Of course you can get images from the internet, still need a proper floppy drive that works fine.

[@jacka.4774]

I was wondering if you would please help identify a PC104 and another board that it's connected with?

[@topherteardowns4679]

....after that helacious battle to even get dos booted, I think every single person who was on the fence abour arduino, is now a fanboy.

[@iamblue8272]

I have a pcm 9375 ( advantech ) but i don't know how to use the I/O port :(

[@awesomeferret]

Only 10 minutes? I was expecting this to be like 50+ minutes.

[@EdwinNoorlander]

Dave’s going old style. He has even got dust on the monitor feet.

[@jacka.4774]

Hi, I been trying to figure out a pc104, please help. I need to connect a monitor to it and see if it boots up or does it have an error.. some of the equipment that I work with has them installed inside. it has no commonly identifiable monitor, keyboard or mouse connection. I am a 5 volt contributor on the patreon but for some reason I can not massage any one with my computer. I am still running xp and an old version of the browser, so, that is the reason. but if I can get any push in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated.

[@Markokk888]

More videos like this!

[@birkett26]

You can't use a Vista Business key to activate 8 / 8.1

[@jacka.4774]

thank you I wish I could find out more about pc 104, I actually work on equipment that have these board in. but the oems change the names of the board to their own internal names. for some reason the machines stop communicating with the network and OEMs blame it on the PC /104 board assembly, and they are sold for about 5K. Yap 5K. it fixes the unit alright. but I am thinking it has to be a memory or some chip that does out right? so why should the customer pay 5K. I love to be able to fix it for a reasonable price under 1K, I be happy they be happy.

[@printxii]

Kids now days don't know the headaches just dealing with floppy drive.

[@nikgolinar4378]

Dan B I'm 13. I know it 😂. I really mean it, i even have 360kb floppies

[@sparkplug1018]

Installing drive controller cards, setting IRQ address's. Oh yes the fun of late 80's early 90;s computers. Still fun to mess with every now and then though. Still have the IBM XT set up in the office.

[@stonent]

A solid light on the floppy meant you had the data cable connected backwards. Very useful.

[@Manawyrm]

If you're doing anything like this again: You don't need to mock around with these bloody floppy drives anymore, you can just use normal CDs, any CD burning tool like ImgBurn oder CDBurnerXP will let you select Bootable 1.4M Floppy Emulation, and then you can just give it a floppy image. This will even work on these old 386'es, because their BIOS is newer...

[@technixbul]

You need Win98 (or image of Win98 CD) to create MS-DOS boot disk, because that was the last one who can proper create those disks, or some virtual machine maybe ... then you can put whatever aditional files you want on to this bootable diskette.

[@Seegalgalguntijak]

Dave, I would have been happy to watch the 39 minute version of this video, but I only knew about its existence halfway through the 29 minute video. I don't want to use my time to watch 29 minutes of it twice, so I rather won't watch it at all. That was not very cleverly made. Either put it prominently into the description if there is a longer version on your second channel or something else, because now I feel that I've missed something, which I can only get back by "wasting" 29 minutes watching something I have already seen. Alternatively, you could tell me the time codes of each segment that you put into this video so that I can only watch those.

[@GRBtutorials]

The new part is between 24:55 and 27:20, i believe.

[@Fake_Blood]

My god this brought back memories of battling with 640k of memory and corrupted floppy disks. Good riddance, I don't miss those times one bit.

[@phizicks]

But Raspberry Pi and Arduino were probably the first to open source their product and have the prices below $50. So sure not the first but they broke grounds in other areas.

[@martinwashington3152]

CubeSats too :D

[@HeyBirt]

Stacking a tower of boards, a bad idea for 30 years. Boards plugged into a backplane works OK, more than 1board stacked on another is a PITA.

[@sheadjohn]

arduino complained that the previous systems were too expensive. they never claimed. when did the basic chip come out? i played with that a little a long time ago. it was expensive though. hundreds of dollars to get set up. at least a weeks pay.

[@Combat.Wombat.official]

doesn't command.com hold format? as in "format c: /s"

[@PinguimFU]

Duncan Massive that is part of the format.com file command.com is the basic command line and that's it haha

[@Combat.Wombat.official]

Gabriel Paiva ya could of just said that it isn't an internal command inside of command.com, but I see by the 'haha' at the end of your comment that you are probably some 8yr old

[@PinguimFU]

Sorry I didn't mean to insult you in any way all I was trying to say was that back in the day when hard drives still were counted I'm megabytes they had to divide everything to save space that's all. PS: a 24 year old here that is just to tired of being serious all the time

[@captapraelium1591]

It's not that they had to do so for reasons of disk capacity, it was (and is) considered best practice for each tool do do one job and do it well. Sadly it's a concept only really still embraced by linux.

[@AzCcc]

So why is this more appropriate for industrial applications than Raspberry Pi et al. ?

[@lroy730]

So I have a USB floppy and the mighty Dave Doesn't ? Of coarse Dave is the King EE I'm just an amateur ..

[@Xsses]

28:15 LOL

[@andro7x]

But does it play Doom?

[@_WalterTec.77.]

usted parece el fabricante, las mini pc son la vanguardia tecnologicas. Que bueno seria que podamos conectar las memorias ssd directamente al procesador en 2, 4, 8, 16 módulos, y conectividad inalambrica son escritorio remoto por wifi, procesa el 3d y emite un archivo strem. y hacemos una computación 2.0

[@lroy730]

Play DOS Tank !!

[@dabombinablemi6188]

Arduino are cheap toys next to PC/104.

[@pyrofer]

DO NOT use the VGA pinout shown in this video. It's dangerous. The shown pinout grounds all pins 6 to 10, this is WRONG. Pin 9 has 5v on a lot of systems. If you ground it you could cause damage to the machine. PIN 9 IS 5V NOT GROUND.

[@ricardo.mazeto]

I hate to be the one saying that but, please, next time clean your throat.

[@theedrstrangelove]

He's probing this when all he had to do was read the spec sheet. Clickbait.