Exploring a PC Built by Bond, J. Bond - The 99¢ 386

[@5roundsrapid263]

My mom worked in a pharmacy in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and backed up records daily on a tape drive just like this. They took the tapes home every night.

[@NoNameForNone]

My dad did the same, only once a week: take the tape home, check if it was correct and store it off-site. Bonus was we'd get a company sponsored tape drive which we could freely use for our own backups.

[@squirlmy]

Wait... who is "they"??? Pharmacy owners? Managers? Pharmacist? The would be very much against HIPPA nowadays.

[@mar4kl]

Back in the day, I did the same. I started off backing up on diskettes, but that got too time-consuming after a few years. Around then, I noticed an unused tape drive in my employer's computer "boneyard", and asked about it. They had outgrown it and replaced it with a newer model. It was perfect for my old 386 PC, so I took it home, installed it, and after a successful test, i got more tapes and started using them for backup. That drive used wider tapes, though, maybe DC 6150s. When I replaced that computer, I bought an Exabyte Eagle96 tape drive that store up to 3.2GB per tape, compressed. That drive looked a lot more like this Colorado 250 from the front. I thought I remembered the MC3000XL QIC-EXtra cartridges as longer than the 250MB QIC cartridges shown in the video, but after looking them up online to refresh my memory, I think maybe they were wider but were inserted sideways into the drive. In any case, I had 3 cartridges. One was in my desk at work, one in my carry bag, and one in the drive, and I would rotate them several times per week.

[@_sabot]

In my first company our sysop loved to mock the new trainees he got in his department. He told them the story that he got delivered fresh new backup tapes and because the manufacturer once fooled him in the past by sending tapes that didn't had the capacity they were labeled as, they should measure it. We had a long hallway in the building and he tasked them with taking the tape out, rolling it out and measure the length with a yardstick. So at least once a year if you saw a young poor guy on his knees with a yardstick in the hallway, everyone knew that Stefan had a new victim.

[@zchen27]

The servers my mom worked on in the mid-2000s still used them. Granted they were an university's servers and they don't tend to remove legacy stuff from administrative systems fast.

[@TheRetu81]

I remember using J. Bond mouse driver in DOS. It was small enough to fit into the upper memory block, so it was ideal for freeing enough conventional memory for the more demanding games like Falcon 3.0.

[@jishan6992]

Installing a mouse driver to free up memory for games must've been quite a era. Now we just take everything for granted

[@marblemunkey]

​@@jishan6992 It was a thing. You wound up with boot floppies matched with the game you wanted to play, with the specific arcane combination of TSR drivers and memory extender/expander required that specific game.

[@jishan6992]

@@marblemunkey the heck so you'd be switching out the entire OS everytime you wanted to play a game?

[@SomeGuy_GRM]

@@jishan6992 yeah, kinda. A basic DOS installation fits on a floppy disk. Some early PCs didn't even have a hard disk and ran entirely off of floppy.

[@jishan6992]

@@marblemunkey that's what I was wondering actually, I have seen ton of videos Retro computer and they always slide in a floppy to boot in to the OS. Also I have seen playing games that would come in multiple floppies, how did that work?

[@Alec_Reaper]

MI6 machine

[@sinchrotron]

Why so?

[@mysticmarble94]

@@sinchrotron "" J Bond "" as in James Bond, the MI6 agent.

[@codykyle511]

😂

[@ovejrp1]

It has license to kill!

[@RSGCProductions]

​@@ovejrp1Thankfully it doesn't kill software. Just bad guys.

[@gstcomputing65]

You are so right about vintage computer price inflation. In early 2007, I bought a working Tandy 1000 HX with a CM-11 monitor and manuals for $50. You will pay well over $500 for that today.

[@drg5352]

I used to go through flea markets ni the late 90's/early 2000. I bought 486 and P1 systems for $10-20. C128 for $20. I think the most expensive was a P1 Win95 laptop that worked, and had SimCity 2000 installed. I regret not buying up everything I found back then.

[@dyl9013]

I don't remember any details or specs because I was like 13 but I remember buying a Windows 98 PC with a keyboard, mouse and even a monitor for like $30. It had a lot of Bible and chess software on it

[@CherryPixelBun]

@@dyl9013 I wish I could have gotten my WIn98 PC for that price. Thankfully I paid under $100 still for what's basically a Pentium II machine but it's a 2006 tiny office PC that was built with legacy hardware/software in mind so it's got all the ports and all the drivers for using in Windows 98

[@offspringfan89]

I call this inflation "LGR tax" 😅.

[@mima85]

I saved a bunch of such systems from the trash in the 00ies, still having them in my collection. Glad I did that back then, when those old PCs were just... well, old PCs, good only for the recycler. In absolutely NO. F**IN'. WAY. I would spend the amounts of money required today for a 386, 486 or a Pentium machine.

[@mpettengill1981]

Oh my - Wolf 3D with a PC speaker on a 386. So many hours of my youth spent on that. Relating to finding PCs, I was lucky enough to find the exact make and model of computer I had growing and was able to buy it last summer. An AST 386/25 SX. I had an ebay saved search and as soon as it came up I bought it for a not unreasonable buy-it-now price. It even came with the matching keyboard. I gave it a good cleaning and inspection when I it arrived and it everything worked as it should. I guess my point is while the online prices are not as good as they used to be, and true deals much harder to find, if you really want one or two machines for a collection it's still cheaper than a lot of hobbies :)

[@KrzysztofC-1]

There is something about Win 3.11 Icons, windows style, etc. that I will never forget, always nostalgic about it. I also played a bit with OS/2 Warp, those were the golden days of computing.

[@stuckin2003]

that red and green DOS prompt styling is sick...wish I would have thought to try that back in the day!

[@denniswoycheshen]

I made the prompt brighter once. I totally forget how 10 year old me did it, but I had fun. :)

[@editingsecrets]

@@denniswoycheshen High bit of the BIOS color code toggles partial or full intensity.

[@asdfasdfasdfasdeff]

I remember loading ansi.sys and being able to do some really neat things with the prompt!

[@mardus_ee]

It was all in the MS-DOS Help program about config . sys, ansi . sys, and autoexec . bat. I used to put a clock on the command line (nice way to check the time with just the Return key), change text color to dark cyan, and the newline contained the DOS prompt. It was possible to change what the default commands did, so, that DIR sorted all the files right - folders first, sort by extension, sort by name, and show by page, if there were more files that wouldn't fit in one screen.

[@denniswoycheshen]

@@mardus_ee wow, that sounds like something that I really missed. I was about 7 or 8 when I started messing with computers so reading the documents wasn't exactly what I wanted to do, or could fully understand. So you could basically customize dos to your liking? I never thought it was even capable of such things. Computers are weird. :)

[@lyianx]

14:50 OMG.. My dad had a tape drive that i used frequently as well. I INSTANTLY remembered the exact noise the drive made when you inserted it in, each tone shift as it read the tape lol. Brings me back. (My dad's drive was external, connected though the parallel port and had a pass-though for the printer).

[@BrassicGamer]

Cut my finger on a 1993 PC yesterday - good times! I, too, acquired a 99p 386 from eBay around the same time. It required a 220mi round trip, however, but I still have that machine and love it. My dad disposed of our first PC (also a 386) so this was the perfect replacement. Love going back to it sometimes because of the simplicity of the games. A more innocent time.

[@stevesether]

From circa 1998 to around 2003 I ran a little AMD 386-40 on Linux with 32 megabytes memory. It was connected to the internet via DSL and ran my mailserver and a nameserver for my domain. This was LONG before anyone offered free nameserver service, or even email service for your domains, so you had to DIY or pay quite a lot. I was pretty proud of the thing being able to do all that on a machine that was pretty slow and obsolete for the early 2000s. Finally had to retire it because of the spam problem. I wanted to run some spam filtering software, but the little 386 was vastly under-powered. I hesitated getting rid of it because it held a lot of nostalgia even then, but thought "well... if I really want one of these things again, I can just pick one up cheap at a thrift store". 20 years later and it would have been worth several hundred bucks I guess. Oh well.. I think I came out ahead not having to drag it around and store it somewhere for the past 20 years. But those 386s were some of the first computers that could do real tasks.

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

I had a DEC Digital Desktop with a 40Mhz 386, 256KB Cache, 1MB VESA VGA, and 32MB Memory. It was gave to me free around 1999. It must have cost a fortune when it was new. It was upgraded to 32MB (obviously), a 33.6Kbps ISA Modem, 16x IDE CD-ROM, and a 8.6GB IDE HDD using Western Digital EZ-Drive. It had Windows 95 on it. I gave it to my Dad so he could try out this "computer stuff" without buying a new one. He just threw it away I guess when he bought a new PC.

[@stevesether]

@@TheLionAndTheLamb777 I'm amazed it'd run windows 95. Looks like it met minimum requirements.

[@PowerSynopsis]

That shirt is somethin' else, man. Pure style.

[@kespeth2]

Looks like you won Ebay on this one...what a steal! I guess the "not in working condition" scared everyone else off.

[@rommix0]

And you'd be surprised how many of those "not working/untested" items still work.

[@HamburgerAmy]

@@rommix0 RETROPC hardware channel kinda shows you the odds of getting "not working" parts that end up working or are salvageable... i'd land it at ~75% hardware he buys

[@GeorgeVCohea-dw7ou]

@@rommix0 It's mostly sellers who want to get rid of something but don't have the wherewithal for testing ancient and unpredictable hardware and/or patience for eBay red tape.

[@Grak70]

@@rommix0very true. I got a professional ThermoFischer hotplate and stirrer that retailed new for well over $700 from a guy who said it didn’t work for $100. Turns out he just didn’t know how to turn it on and it was pretty much fully functional.

[@renakunisaki]

Sometimes the ones that are actually not working only need a simple repair. I got a vacuum robot that retails for $1000, for $50, that just needed one transistor replaced.

[@fensoxx]

There is something about tape drives that lent me a sense of ease. Used to backup tons of really important machines to LTO tape. You rotate through your tapes, and the off-day tapes are on a shelf somewhere. And you know. You absolutely know. That if the shit hits the fan, you’ve got like 6 tape backups ready to go and one of them has got to work.

[@pokehybridtrainer]

That shirt you're wearing seems vintage itself, woah. Such a chill vibe to this video, and it's a nice little story from the nice find to exploring it.

[@retropuffer2986]

I remember the 386 days because my PC friends were all in on building PCs rather than buying pre-built. They were building 386 VGA systems by the late 80s which put all us 68K users on notice!

[@MrDuncl]

My first desktop PC (I had a Toshiba T3100 laptop with Gas Plasma display before that) was a no name 386 motherboard etc in an IBM PC XT case.

[@Kalvinjj]

Sounds like the equivalent of today's PC builders showing off their watercooled Threadripper RTX 4090 monsters

[@psycadelicrash2695]

@@Kalvinjj price wise, these rigs are not too far off considering their retail price

[@theo-dr2dz]

@@Kalvinjj Not really. We did that too back then. There were these computer shops where you could just choose from a list of standard components from a list. So you chose a case, a power supply, a hard drive, a cd-rom, a graphics card etc. And they would assemble it and a few days later you could retrieve it. All these components were standard issue stuff; we were students, couldn't afford the high end stuff anyway. We also upgraded them ourselves: put in extra hard disks, extra memory, modems, better graphics cards etc. Once I replaced the motherboard, but that essentially replaces the computer, you just recycle the case and power supply. And at some point, computers needed a bigger power supply. It really was the cheap way of having a relatively up to date computer.

[@Kalvinjj]

@@theo-dr2dz I mean more about the parts in question vs. what the average user had instead. Tho I could be wrong on where they actually sit market-wise on the period in question.

[@Arbiter099]

The blood toll to engage the machine spirit must be paid.

[@andymate2006]

That tape drive brings back memories when I was in high school. They used to backup their network storage onto one of those and the computers used to run Novel Netware with another program called OASIS. At the end of the day I would see the Librarian insert a tape and go into some sort of backup software and you would hear the exact same noises that tape drive did.

[@iRedMCYT]

The thing seems very holiday focused. The DOS prompt is Christmas, and the BIOS is Halloween!

[@ATomRileyA]

Brings back lots of memories, also cutting your finger is part of the experience lol. I remember looking at those tape drives and wanting one, a friend of my dads had one of those and also some bigger server type tape drives always thought they were cool but way out of my price range. Reminds me that a relative of mine tipped me off to a office/factory that was being cleared out at had a hundred or so of computers like that, including 286's and a bunch of other big cards for driving cnc machines, i took a few and wanted to take all of them but had no where to store them, wish i had now and also a schools worth of bbc micros and Acorn Archimedes that i could not take either but tried to find homes for most of them.

[@Catastropheshe]

"Let's look at this " type of video is one of my favorite type of video 😂😂😂

[@animalyze7120]

486 ran these games well even without the Math Co processor, but you really needed it on the 386 models. While not marketed for gaming the MathCo did show a noticeable improvement. Love these videos!

[@guerrillaradio9953]

Had a 386sx25 and can confirm! The 80387 made a noticeable difference on mine, even though I had 12mb of RAM. Really sped up Indy Car Racing, Doom I, actually allowed me to sort of run Doom II, and Jetfighter never looked better 😌

[@si4632]

nonsense doom didnt even use FPU @@guerrillaradio9953

[@si4632]

probably the extra cache inside the 486 that made all the difference

[@ESDI80]

The 386DX is a very capable system. I put together a 386DX-33 system a while back and tossed in a 387DX math co-pro. SimCity 2000 ran great on it since SimCity 2000 will benifit form the 387.. Those tapes drives are very interesting. One of the common faults I've found on them is the rubber drive wheel inside the drive will turn to mush. I've been successful in replacing the rubber drive wheel with a pair of O-Rings that I glued to the metal shaft the original rubber wheel was attached too. The tapes if properly stored in a climate controlled area seem to hold up well. If not, then the drive belt inside the cartridge tends to snap leaving a huge mess like your tape did when the drive ate it. The other thing is to flow the driver out if not used for along time. The drive uses optical sensors to detect the start and end position of the tape. If those sensors get clogged the tape will unspool inside the cartridge. I have a few PCs have these drives and they work well. My go to these days is the external Zip drive, or an external SCSI hard drive for backing up old PCs. Best is installing a NIC and attaching to a Samba server running on Linux. 🙂

[@Dawwwg]

Oh man, what a flashback, my (own) first PC was a AMD 386 DX40 clone machine with a J-Bond motherboard and also 8MB, an ET4000 GPU, same HDD large PC speaker and sharp case edges 😂 I recall replacing the HDD with a 810MB one, which doubled de transfer-rate to ~1.0MB per second !

[@MegaTerryNutkins]

I've scored precisely 2 items for 99p start bids - a collection only Zenith 8088 laptop and a P3 Fujitsu Lifebook S series ultraportable. Surprisingly the seller actually posted the Lifebook.

[@ns219000]

My grandpa had TONS of those backup tapes. And that XTREE GOLD flash screen- man, good memories of some good times!

[@kingneutron1]

Xtree Pro Gold was the best back in the day for DOS. Then came Norton Commander, Ztree Bold, and Midnight Commander for *NIX

[@phazonclash]

Hey, the Aston Martin was a nice touch!

[@dmhendricks]

The sound of that Colorado drive really takes me back. I owned the 250MB model in the 90s and used it regularly.

[@heikkint]

Man i love that red switch and the Ka-chunk sound they make. And watching that Tape drive do it's thing is just bliss.

[@JohnCharb87]

Cool. I like these PC videos. Especially the ones from brands I've never heard of.

[@editingsecrets]

300 pages of 'em in Computer Shopper magazine back in the day.

[@KevinTan]

it's been a while since i watched an LGR vid, time to binge them all. i do miss those oregon trail device vids and ms dos games feature

[@LGR]

I've got another channel now called LGR Blerbs that contains that type of content, if you haven't seen :) kzbin.info/www/bejne/aancd6ekgM1gqKc

[@KevinTan]

@@LGR woooah thank you! i also miss lgr food

[@TheLegoPerson]

​@@KevinTan @LGR yesssss we all miss LGR Foods

[@modernscholar02]

​@kibin ☻「キビン」 LGR food is an amazing channel and I miss content from there greatly.

[@Lauty3590]

@@modernscholar02 same! I've tried a couple of LGR's recipes and they were fantastic, please bring it back Clint!

[@DarkestHourAS]

I have been racking my brain to try to find the mahjong games my grandmother used to play... I'll be darned if finally you mentioning moraff finally clicked in my memory and let me find it. Thank you!

[@fhwolthuis]

Nice machine. It might nog look like much, but we've got to remember that these things were pretty expensive for most people back in the day, and I'm sure the first owner was very happy with it.

[@TeaAndFloppyDisks]

Definitely. When we got our first PC at home (I think a 386 or so) the choice was between the PC and a car, because they cost about the same.

[@SilverJackLeg]

True, the when I looked for my first PC, the 286-12MHz was the main thing, like a middle ground. If you couldn't make it, there were some XT's 4,77MHz. There was also a 286-16MHz (NEAT) for a solid amount more. And there were first 386 machines, with practically unreachable prices. And all that with still monochrome monitor. More ofter than not, it was 286 with color EGA or 386 with monochrome option. But not both.

[@Trusteft]

Having Windows 3.11 on PCs in the early 90s was quite common from what I remember/experienced back then. The reason was that it was the version that was mostly "pirated". I am not saying that that is the case with this PC. Nor that it was my case *cough* *cough*. Good video.

[@St0rmcrash]

I've also read that after a certain point pretty much all PCs shipped with Workgroups 3.11 regardless of networking because it had way faster/better hard drive access. Basically 3.11 had 32 bit file access in protected mode and no longer had to slow down and drop to DOS to access the disc

[@MrDuncl]

The nickname was Windows for Warehouses as it was a slow seller. It could easily had been discounted down to the same price as normal Windows.

[@chriskalkman3815]

That thing is in damn good shape. I just bought a Socket 362 motherboard from 2000 and I'm slowly working to build a Pentium III Windows 98 machine!

[@michaelwood9866]

im on the retro computer train today as i just watched philscomputerlab and thisdoesnotcompute and now LGR!!!! man it's a great day!!!

[@editingsecrets]

By bedtime you might've seen a whopping 32 MB of PC power!!

[@michaelwood9866]

@@editingsecrets yes i did and it was awesome!!!!!!!!

[@ClassicGameSessions]

That nostalgic time of the 386 days was awesome. Fun times watching Clint on this one, some solids games too!

[@TheMegaross91]

Honestly I like the generic random company pc's more than the big brand ones because that's what we had for years. My old man worked crazy overtime to buy us our first PC and it was from some local company. For it's time it was a decent machine too, weird spec if I look back at it now though...

[@paulrobertmarino7623]

I had one of those Colorado 250Mb drives it's actually was commonly referred to at the time as an "ftape" drive in other words it actually can run off a floppy controller as a third drive. It's actually still supported on Linux and was still supported by Windows 2000 when i retired mine. They also had an external version which ran off of a parallel port. In fact mine was originally an external drive that I pulled out of the controller later and hooked up to my floppy controller because it was much faster that way.

[@hysel1234]

I used the HP Colorado tape solution using an external enclosure connected to an LPT1 port. Those were the days :)

[@MrDuncl]

We had the same at work after I suggested they bought it.

[@AlexBlues]

Friend I am from that time, and reminded me of fantastic things, not that I have stopped using, today I still use, but the memories that when I started the initial septup my freedom started too! Cool thanks! From Brazil.

[@joncarter3761]

Ah man that Tseng ET4000 reminds me of my first PC, it was a 486/33 with one and I used to play Duke Nukem 3D with the smallest screen area running like a slideshow on it! It wasn't until I upgraded to a Pentium I could finally run the game in 240p with 30ish fps!

[@heffe2001]

I seem to remember there was a piece of software that allowed you to use those old QIC tape drives as a drive letter in dos, allowing you to acces them as any other disk type device, but for the life of me can't remember what it was called. I loved these old white/beige boxes back in the day, I worked at several local PC builders back between about '88 to sometime around '00.. I probably built several thousand clones during that time. I remember one Christmas I had a bench that was stacked 10 cases deep, putting each piece in each one assembly-line style. I built 'em way faster than the other guys at that place, lol.

[@dave4shmups]

Well from Denver, Colorado I think you did a great job with this video! And it’s cool that Colorado Memory Systems was based up in Loveland!

[@dwcinnc]

My first build was one of these in 1991. I purchased parts from C&SO in Winston-Salem. A motherboard with an AMD 386 was around $300. I purchased more parts when I could afford them. My first HD for it was a 100 megabyte Seagate drive for $300. Your demonstration of Windows 3.1 brings back memories. I remember that AMI Pro was my favorite word processor.

[@jkody]

It's insanity what the vintage market has turned into. In the late 90's and 2000's, you couldn't give an old 386/486 machine away. They were thrown away by the millions.

[@gregorycosta1043]

It's true! I remember in 1997 or 1998, my uncle gave us a 486 that his company was getting rid of (my first desktop). We had to buy a monitor for it. I remember that it was a 15" HP that my uncle got for $300.

[@riverhill86]

Seeing that tapedrive in action was nice, thanks for a great video once again

[@editingsecrets]

I just realized that what I should have done in high school in the late 1980s was send postcards to all the doctors, accountants etc in town: "I'm a high school student who knows computers. I'll talk with you to find out what you need, recommend the components, and come by your office after school or on the weekend to build it for $100 per machine." Instead of making ten bucks an hour at a job, I could've done five of these a week and made a cool $2k a month. Thanks, brain, for pointing this out to me 35 years too late!

[@RandomInsano2]

Man, these videos are why I’m subscribed! I’d watch these retrospective computer videos all day. I can appreciate Clint not enjoying making the content I *really* like but it’s too bad.

[@TerminallyNerdy]

Endlessly fascinated by these vids Clint. Keep up the great work!

[@erniemiller1953]

I sold Windows For Workgroups when it came out in 1992. We called lots of research businesses, and sold a lot of them to people using PCs without networking. This was because WFWG was the first personal PC 32-bit Windows operating system and we told them, as we were directed by Microsoft, that because it was 32-bit instead of 16-bit.

[@rommix0]

I love these kind of videos.

[@LGR]

Happy to hear!

[@InitialiseDisk]

These are the videos I love. Just a simple demonstration.

[@mayw6571]

A great video to (re)build a retro PC to! I miss generic boxes like this actually, they were always interesting to see what was inside

[@thesmokingcap]

Love a good video on a random PC and seeing whats inside

[@AdamIsUrqed]

Bond: "Do you expect me to talk?" Goldfinger: "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to DOS!"

[@TheBrokenTech]

That would have been quite the high rolling machine in its day. My very first PC build was extremely similar, but I bought as much of it used or cheap as I could in 1993, and it was still well over a grand in 1993 money. My 4mb or ram was $100/mb, 540mb HDD was $1/mb, and I think I paid $250 for my AMD 386DX40, on a board, with a Cyrix co-processor and that exact video card (but with half the ram). I do not miss the hardware prices of that time. Without ever having anything genuinely high performance and always doing it on a budget, I think I spent about 10 grand on PC "things" in the '90s.

[@MrDuncl]

I recall ringing a friend from a pay phone at the Computer Shopper show at Olympia. "Hey Roberts. They've got 4MByte SIMS for only £100. Do you want me to get you one" Of course he did.

[@TheBrokenTech]

@@MrDuncl I do miss those computer shows. The 540mb drive I mentioned above came from one as did my first few cases, bulk packs of floppy discs, lots of cables and assorted bits... It was like internet shopping before the internet. 😆

[@nasabear]

I had a Tseng Labs ET4000 in a 386 system. They were one of the first cards to offer 16-bit and 24-bit color.

[@mycosys]

Had an ET4000/W32p overclocked to 50MHz in an ol 486DX2-80 OC to 100. That thing was a bit blitting beast back in teh day

[@TheBrokenTech]

I think I still do have my ET4000 stuffed into a P166 machine somewhere around here. 😆

[@SeñorDossierOficial]

​@@mycosys what was the tseng 4000 original core clock?

[@orangeActiondotcom]

I just picked up a complete 486DX4/100 for 99c back in March this year using the same method you did here -- winning with a lazy bid but getting it at opening price because no competition forced it any higher. In fact, I caught it on a relisting because I'd missed the ending of the first auction. Truthfully, who knows how long it had been been sitting there getting relisted every week with no one noticing it. I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand how eBay works; even in 2023 I still see people complaining 'eBay is rigged' because they were 'automatically outbid as soon as I put a bid in'. That's good, I think it means those of us who bother to learn it will continue to secure good deals.

[@unbearifiedbear1885]

Yeah you have to spend at least _some_ effort gaming the filters, most people simply don't take the time I always go _"ending soonest"_ first, there are *dozens* of zero bid auctions finishing every minute.. great way to pick up insane bargains, even for stuff just to resell ...and yes, peoples nearly 2 decade long inability to realise how you are putting in the max you _would_ pay and eBay automatically increases your bid to that max limit as the auction continues, is both hilarious and invaluable lol - I don't even know how many auctions I've sniped using this - _"2s remaining"_ are among the sweetest words in the English language 😂

[@DavidWonn]

I'm glad I collected my retro PCs at thrift stores and even as throwaways from past jobs when I did. You definitely scored a good deal on this one. Office 4.3 happens to be among my favorite versions, especially for Excel 5.0, which nearly identical to the 95 version. I even employed my own tricks for adding color in DOS by using QBasic rather than the ansi sys to save on conventional memory. Some tricks can be seen on my channel if interested.

[@MrTPiatt]

I truly enjoy watching all your content that you thoroughly examine and admire in a nostalgic kind of awe and intrigue....I find your findings fascinating and entertaining. Thank you for sharing.

[@ayior]

To think that in 10-20 years the devices we're writing these comments on will be seen in the same light

[@MrTPiatt]

@@ayior IKR

[@IAmNotAFunguy]

QIC tape deserves a review/retrospective from Techmoan.

[@Markimark151]

You’re so lucky to get that computer for about a dollar! Because scalpers and retro computer collectors have jacked up the prices for many retro computers even ones from the early 2000s! Like a non-working Dell Dimension is sold for $100! Because it’s loaded with multiple disk drives and a Zip drive!

[@Wassenhoven420]

at some point the prices have to start going up for people to justify holding onto these things. They are getting old enough now that people are only going to have them if they seek them out for purchase (no garage sales or give aways). The time of people dumping off that old computer in their closet (of these varieties) is coming to an end.

[@Markimark151]

@@Wassenhoven420 but this has to stop skyrocketing, I don’t think a working retro computer should be worth as much as a modern brand new computer like close to $1000! Some of the unique computer parts are worth something, but hundreds for non-working computers feels kind of wrong, it’s like selling a broken NES or Commodore 64 for hundreds!

[@michaelcoe5628]

I used to work as a tech support assistant at a British children's book publishers in the late 1990s, and the writers/editors were using machines very similar to these. Every night, the last step in everyone's work routine was to slap the backup tape into the drive and run a backup. Incidental file (just those that had changed) backups every day, and a full drive backup on Friday. Those tapes were SUPPOSED to go into the massive, walk-in fire safe, but users being users, this was often ignored. The whir of tapes in the late afternoon was always somewhat gratifying. That 486 machines could somehow run Quark Xpress and not come to an immediate grinding halt was always amazing to me. Their ONE resident photoshop expert was always needing more storage, and when I left, his 'powerful' Pentium III photoshop beast was running a separate drive chassis with 4x 2GB hard drives, and his machine was the only one that had then massive 8GB tape backup drive (which took something like 30-40 minutes to make a full backup - which I believe we actually had to enforce with threat of dismissal before he would perform the backup. On the subject of tapes, they were rock-solid reliable for data, but because tape, they were ALSO a pain to keep from getting tangled. I had a good half-dozen calls for tape tangle issues from the editors and artists during my 18 months at the company.

[@LongplayScrapbook]

I think our family owned a computer like this back in the day. I always pressed the power switch on the back to turn it off when it was bed time.

[@destrozar]

Yet another awesome video. Thank you Clint.

[@kbtinkering]

Clint, great video. In my latest video I actually built a custom 386 using that exact motherboard. Recognized it as soon as you opened the case. Cool to see the actual model of PC it must have come from.

[@mathieucuny8872]

How nostalgic! That's exactly how I experienced Doom on my first 386SX-25MHz. Low details in a reduced window. Not the greatest experience, but I loved it anyways...

[@cccycling5835]

My parents actually met while working at AMD in the early 80s so I grew up right in the heart of Silicon Valley. It’s always fun seeing the vintage computer manuals and recognizing the roads and streets. 93 W Montague in Milpitas is still a busy tech business center, I put gas there 😂

[@ErrorMessageNotFound]

There were tools back in the day that let you mount one of those tapes as a drive letter in dos and you could actually run stuff off of it. It was stupid slow obviously, but it did work.

[@virtualworld-01]

Do you remember the name of the tool?

[@beauslim]

I had one of those tape drives briefly back in the day. It connected to the parallel port and was unreliable. Returned it and bought a used SCSI tape drive, which used some HUGE tapes but worked well.

[@treespunk]

13:20 Wow you unlocked a memory by mentioning Steve Moraff! I don't know if you would make a video on him and his games but I'd be all over it if you did. I only had demo versions of his games, like SphereJongg and Ultra Blast 95, but I nonetheless played them a whole lot as a kid. I really wanted the 'Jongg CD

[@eDoc2020]

Your comment reminds me of what I believe was a pinball game for Windows. If you closed it another window would pop up to buy the full version and it would proudly announce over the speakers that he was Steve Moraff.

[@treespunk]

@@eDoc2020 Hi! I'm Steve Moraff. Please purchase these games.

[@BrokeDad1]

I have a few dozen old systems (laptops and desktops) stacked up in the back of my workshop along with various boxes of vintage hardware. I went through them about a year ago and they all worked then. I guess holding onto them for decades wasn't such a bad idea considering retro prices now.

[@autingo6583]

prices for those tape streamers fell quickly like with all computer-related stuff. by 1994 qic-80 120mb tapes had become the medium of choice for pc software piracy on our schoolyard. it took until 1997 that the first few folks got some of those early consumer-grade cd-writers. these happy few were very much into making music, had earned quite a bit of money with their hobby and were of course also very keen on burning their own music with the shiny new gear. because of these lucky circumstances we were happy to skip zip drives altogether.

[@unbearifiedbear1885]

I was one of 2 people in my school with a CD-RW drive in '98 Not only did it make me instantly popular with *everyone;* it also made me a healthy income for a 14yo 😂❤

[@asdfasdfasdfasdeff]

bro the sounds of that tape drive initializing brought back so many memories. i was a young kid that bought one to back up all the "warez" from the old bbs days. Of course once I found out that it was unable to compress data already compressed (duh) it really only backed up about 120mb i believe. i wish i kept the tapes... long gone.

[@tiobetio9501]

My first computer was a 386 with 1mb of RAM. 8 megs would've been an absolute dream for me. I had to save up for a few months to upgrade my next computer, a 486 that came with 2 megs of RAM. Cost me around 400 bucks to upgrade it to 8 megs.

[@flow221]

Wow, the grinding whine of that Colorado drive brings back memories. I had one in my first PC circa 1994. Slow and prone to failure as tape drives tend to be, but it came in handy a few times.

[@slaeshjag]

"Very unlikely that you'd feel any particular nostalgia to these generic cases". I find that amusing, in your examples, you show no less that two cases I have nostalgia for. I have an exact match of the case at 1:46 minus the badges next to my feet, and a big tower version of 1:55 was housing my childhood PC that first got me into computers :)

[@troyfowler5177]

Very first Tech Support job I ever had was for Colorado Memory Systems in the mid 90's. MAN! That sound takes me back! It looks like that tape just came unspooled. The tape isn't attached to the spool. The drive is supposed to stop before it unwinds completely via a light through a holes in the tape. If the holes were blocked or the spool got loose, it would do exactly what it did. You could try manually remounting the tape around the spool. Just be sure to wind it past the holes, (unless the tape is broken, then of course everything I just suggested is moot.).

[@straightpipediesel]

The FCC ID was issued October 1991 to J Bond Computer Systems Corporation, out of Milpitas, California (just North of San Jose).

[@lexington476]

10:01 yep that's a case from the early 90s. How I survived my earlier days without contracting tetanus from those cases I have no idea. Cases and a little bit later in the '90s server rack rails 🙂. My first IT job in the very late 90s I sliced my hand open on a set of server rails... to this day I always handle server rails with gloves 😎.

[@mykeljmoney]

Now that is one sexy looking pc. Always happy for a new LGR!

[@Toasty1992]

watching clint for a ages an my personal fav is the "greetings", i even do that myself in day to day life heh :) i went to fix a pc for a mate an did "greetings" and turned out he was a fellow follower :D, propa nerded out for hours :D

[@AcornElectron]

Yeah, I’ll like this. Interesting and informative as always C.

[@matthewpaulargall9102]

Very charming computer, and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups is also very charming.

[@tylerdean980]

I got a machine in a case like this; it’s a 486 that was used as an engine tester from Snap-On. Still have the software on floppy

[@_..-.._..-.._]

15:45 This 100% made me spit my coffee out 😂 the reveal and childlike movement is perfect 👌

[@MUMSUniverse]

Never heard of this band before, but I got to say, the pc & the owners little mods make me ❤💚 this pc.

[@dingusbingus7463]

I get to watch some LGR before I start work? Now this is epic

[@markzzzsmith]

That 386 is a rocketship! 8MB of RAM! 500MB of disk space! I loaded up a 386 with 5MB of RAM and that was after it had been retired (I put it in an original IBM XT case if I recall, correctly). I'd had my 80486 for at least a year by then, and had 8MB of RAM in that, and intially had a 200MB drive in that, although my plan was to put another 200MB drive in it. Didn't do that, instead put a 1GB SCSI drive in it with an AHA1542 controller, so that I could later get a SCSI CDROM drive. I added the CDROM drive in about 1995, 3 or 4 years after adding the SCSI controller.

[@andywolan]

My dad’s pc had that Colorado Backup 250MB tape drive back in the 90’s. There is also a Windows version of the Colorado Backup software, which had an interesting interface for the time.

[@nena_DP]

It's the same with ISA sound blaster cards here at least. Impossible to find and when they show up they're like 10x compared to 5-7 years ago. I'm glad I bought myself a few a decade ago.

[@Saustrup]

Damn, this is a delicious flashback to the 90s. I can't believe I'm now finding myself trawling through ebay, looking for systems that we happily dragged directly to recycling back in 2000. Sadly we have proven WAY to efficient at recycling, so the market here in Denmark is pretty dry, and most opportunities come from Poland, Greece and the US.

[@reprapmlp]

10:00 blood sacrifice is vital to ensure correct functioning of computers

[@o0Donuts0o]

My first PC was a generic 386 SX 33 which my dad got some time in 1993. Same year we added the Sound Blaster 16. He balked at the idea of me opening the machine up and inserting this foreign card. Man, the things you could seemed endless back then.

[@williambrown319]

You know the rules of the pre 2k machines. It will always require a blood sacrifice

[@DavidKehley]

Had a rough day today but now I feel better that I watched LGR

[@petermoeller5901]

Wow, this was timewarp for me. The counting/ticking sound of the RAM. The Colorado tape drive. The AMD CPU. I had totally forgotten about all this. And in 5 minutes probably I forget it again.

[@005AGIMA]

20 minute mark made me smile Clint. Ah to see others "enjoying" the "386 Doom experience. Yep. That was my introduction to Doom, and the reason I brought an Atari Jaguar lol. 68000 > 386dx,? Well... It was in my house 😂

[@PrimarchBentley]

Listening to that Colorado chugging away brings back memories in a way I didn't expect...

[@johnclemens1338]

Oh wow, this is nearly exactly the generic system my dad bought the family around 1993 from a local computer shop, right down to the amd dx33 and colorado tape drive.. and that christmas we got a SB pro 2 w/ sb cdrom. Had an Oak OTI-O77 graphics card in it. Why do I remember the hardware so well? Because after my dad upgraded the family system to a pentium, he gave this one to me, and I put this new thing called Linux on it that I'd heard about during my HS internship that *came with a free C compiler!*. One got intimately familiar with hardware on your system running Linux in those days. I still have the X11 custom modeline scars. Took overnight to compile a custom kernel. Good times.