PC archeology: The HP Vectra N Series, a well made pizza box PC from the early 90s

#PCArcheology
On today's video, another episode of PC Archeology! We have two HP Vectra machines, both from the early 90s and it's an interesting look at where the PC industry had gone in the 10 years since the original IBM PC 5150 came out. Massive amounts of integration and improvements had happened in that short time.
--- Info
HP Vectra 386/20N
HP Vectra 486/25N
--- Video Links
HP Museum page on the 486N:
www.hpmuseum.net/display_item....
HP Museum page on the 386N:
www.hpmuseum.net/display_item....
HP Vectra:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Vectra
VIDSPEED v3.0:
vetusware.com/download/VIDSPE...
SPEED600 (Landmark Speedtest) and Topbench available here:
www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-...
Cubic Player (Open Cubic Player:)
github.com/mywave82/opencubic...
Adrian's Digital Basement Merch store:
my-store-c82bd2-2.creator-spr...
Adrian's Digital Basement ][ (Second Channel)
/ @adriansdigitalbasement2
Support the channel on Patreon:
/ adriansdigitalbasement
-- 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

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

As some have pointed out, the 386SX does have 16k of cache memory! Seems that it's a bug that CACHECHK didn't detect it properly, but you can see it in the improved timings. I went and tested with my 386SX test bench (Clocked at 20mhz) and I was shocked to find it also has 8k of cache -- inside the chipset! See here: imgur.com/a/5uemm8g

[@senilyDeluxe]

I have a weird 20 MHz 386SX with 32k of external cache, Landmark reports 28MHz performance, but it came with a Paradise video card that got around 700 chars/ms. I upgraded it to an Oak Tech 512k that does about 2200 chars/ms. Most of my Tseng cards manage around 2600 to 4000something, only one exceeds 6000 and I'm pretty sure the S3 of the 486 is either VLB or uses some trickery. Either that or all my ISA video cards kinda suck. I'm still happy even with the slower cards. I'm a total X-Wing CD addict and for fun I ran it on different (S)VGA cards and only on my oldest card Deico (Cirrus Logic) from 1988 (600c/ms) that can't even do 800x600 there just a little slowdown noticeable.

[@BrendaEM]

Some MBs had dip sockets for adding cache, too.

[@paulstaf]

You kept talking about the 386 being clean, no software installed, and barely used.... DID YOU NOT SEE THE BIG STICKER ON THE FLOPPY DRIVE saying that the machine was a demonstration machine?

[@paulstaf]

Didn't mean to sound rude, just pointing out the fact in CAPS so that it might catch your eye. I use a computer to watch youtube videos and don't know how to tag you using a web browser. :)

[@ItsaRomethingeveryday]

it's almost mind blowing how much personal computers have advanced in last twenty plus years, stuff like this is nearly unattainable around here anymore, I have a 3.3 ghz pc tower here and absolutely no one wants it,

[@draggonhedd]

Check out that sticker on the Floppy drive! "This unit is for demonstration purposes only" I think you found a sales model!

[@brentboswell1294]

Leftover from when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were still alive, they still made stuff in the USA, and HP was one big, happy company (computers, test equipment, and printers under one roof).

[@ClearComplexity]

They would have been a lot happier if they listened to Wozniak when he proposed his personal computer idea to them before leaving to make Apple with Jobs. Hindsight 20/20 I guess lol.

[@brentboswell1294]

@@ClearComplexity HP was already a very successful company back then. They didn't enter the consumer marketplace until the 1980's. They were making enough money with government, military, and industrial sales 😉. It was the scientific types who convinced the company that their products (like printers) were good enough for consumer use. Engineering students knew them from the calculator business.

[@orbitalgolem91]

Actually the PC division was based in Grenoble in France in the '90s. Many of the PCs were assembled there.

[@jbloodwo]

I think what “server mode” did was disabled keyboard checking so you could start with no keyboard attached and not get a keyboard error

[@jimpad5608]

@@orbitalgolem91 - actually there were two PC divisions, grenoble and Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale turned into the PC server division and grenoble continued to do personal systems. I worked for the Sunnyvale division.

[@Intellivision78]

As a Swede.. I was surpriced to se that it was reading: "Om apparaten kopplas till ett utbrett ledningsnät, skall den anslutas till ett jordat uttag." in the back. It made my day.

[@tjay7233]

Just passed over the fact it is a demonstration unit. Could be why it is so clean.

[@DarkDeviant]

My first pc was a Vectra 486. Bought it in 1997 for £60. Used to play Quake at 11 FPS lol. Wish I had kept it. Great machine!

[@rodhester2166]

so fun. I had two packard bell computers for decades, a 386 and a 486, both with windows 3.11, I finally sold them to a collector.. I miss them..

[@vwestlife]

The PS/2 Model 55SX was IBM's slimline desktop 386SX system. It was quite popular with businesses because it was their lowest-cost MCA-based system. I remember in the late '90s my local bank was still using a bunch of them.

[@MatroxMillennium]

I picked up a couple of those from Computer Reset last year. They were both broken, but I managed to use parts from the more broken one to fix the less broken one.

[@saf271828]

I had a PS/2 Model 25SX, which also had a 386SX in it and 4MB. It ran OS/2 2.0 fantastically!

[@minty_Joe]

I was just about to say that same model! :-) I had one I got in my last year of high school; actually, 2 of them. One thing I learned: Don't plug an MCA card in while its running. The first one I did it by accident. The riser board got loose, I went to re-seat it. There was a pop, blue smoke and a hole through the chip closest to the fuse. Needless to say, I had a backup and transferred RAM and drives to the working one.

[@orbitalgolem91]

Having flashbacks to my time with the HP Medical division as a software engineer in the early - mid '90s, my first job out of college. Used these for both development and production units. Nowhere near as well built as the Vectra QS/20 and 386/25 models though - you could throw those off the roof and they'd keep working. Loved the 386/25 and the later Pentium Pro-based mini towers in the late '90s. At that time HP's PC division was actually based in Grenoble in France. Good memories.

[@GigAHerZ64]

Yes, please! Do benchmark your ISA graphics cards! And please, beware of ISA bus speeds and different waitstate settings for every setup. Most of "weird" differences can be explained by these 2 things.

[@JeremyLevi]

Indeed, on later machines you could often set the clock speed of the ISA bus independent of the main bus speed instead of a fixed divisor. On my AMD 486-DX40 VLB bus PC there was a BIOS option that let me set the ISA bus all the way up to 12MHz max, although it was dependant on which particular ISA cards you had being able to keep up. IIRC I could only set mine at 10MHz or the 8-bit SB2.0 value card I had in there would crap out.

[@JeppeMller]

We should all contribute to a database with retro hardware benchmarks 🙂

[@SteveMorton]

Yes those Vectra's are great machines. I managed to get one for not a lot of money because it had partially failed the Year 2K test! The machine worked on a LanManager network connecting to an ICL4500 server for shared files etc. I used the machine to run a packet radio mailbox under Linux for a number of years until about 2003 when a lot of the users stopped using Packet Radio when broadband started to become available in my area. Mine was a 486 machine and it really was nicely made and worked without any issues.

[@realstevef]

The HP Vectra towers I supported in the late 90's were also made in France, and very proprietary just like yours.

[@lasskinn474]

I used a late 90s vectra tower i got for free for some years in the '00s as an mp3 and irc chat station running beos (i just wanted to muck around with beos, ran the dano beta). got uptimes of 200 days+, basically just as long as there was electricity(electricity was pretty stable where I lived then). in beos the audio subsystem sometimes crashed but you could restart it without restarting the os.

[@garthhowe297]

The HP, and Compaq, business desktops from that era, were very well made. Unfortunately price competition from companies like Dell forced these companies to reduce the engineering and innovation, in order to be more cost competitive.

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Yes, a definite "race to the bottom!" Apple bucked that trend and it seems more recently others have realized that having premium offerings is a good strategy too.

[@Bimon1234567]

@@adriansdigitalbasement Dell is definitely not among those. Even their premium priced products are full of proprietary garbage that is not compatible with regular components.

[@willg125]

and don't forget Olivetti! I have a beast of a computer from AT+T, the PC6300 plus. Came with all the bells and whistles and the machine is so well constructed.

[@OscarSommerbo]

That was sold in Sweden. The "Only connect to GFI outlet" text is vintage Sweden. That machine was properly decommissioned before sold/given away, and/or it was used as a dumb terminal. Many computers of that era in Sweden were replacements for dumb video terminals, but the SCSI-card is puzzling, as is the integrated log on. Even more interesting is the absence of asset tags, bigger companies, such that would use dumb terminals, have a habit of branding (as in burning) an asset tag into the chassis of the machine. But it could have been early enough that asset tags wasn't used everywhere.

[@jvanb231]

Cubic Player; I remember that. I also have fond memories of DMP and Scream Tracker. I want to see how that 486 deals with Second Reality :)

[@TechTimeTraveller]

I used to call those 'donut box' form factor. Man I feel bad now that we used to just trash these things left and right. Glad a couple are getting some TLC!

[@adventureoflinkmk2]

So what, when they get refurbished and cleaned and all that.. will they go chasing after waterfalls or don't want any scrubs or live out 600# lives 😂

[@brentboswell1294]

The parts in their form factor (beyond expansion slots) was generally not industry standard and therefore unique to the machine.

[@TechTimeTraveller]

@@brentboswell1294 yeah I'm just talking about the height of the chassis vs a pizza box like the Sun 3/80

[@tbirdapalooza]

Same thing here. I did computer repair as a teenager in the early ‘00s and would get a lot of donor / abandoned machines come through. The second you saw that it was HP, you knew there was nothing worth salvaging and pitched it right into the dumpster (er… e-waste recycling center…)

[@DaveMcAnulty]

QEMM was an excellent memory manager, you might want to check it out further.

[@jkeelsnc]

I had QEMM and it was absolutely fantastic. It totally put MS emm386.exe and himem.sys to shame. Optimize worked MUCH better than Memmaker at freeing up conventional memory. Excellent program!! I am surprised more isn’t mentioned about it in the retro pc world these days.

[@Drew-Dastardly]

Yes and DESQview was amazing at the time. DOS multi-tasking.

[@2disbetter]

Somebody probably already told you but you set the floppy drive to low density 5 1/4 instead of the 3 1/2 high density that is in it when you were editing the bios settings on the 386 model. Clearly you figured that out as you should the memtest working, but I thought I would say it anyway. Great video as usual. I really appreciate them!

[@cleverlyblonde]

There is a label in Swedish about connect it to a grounded power plug as well on the back of the 386. That was interesting.

[@ZenithMusicNet]

Your voice-over voice honestly sounds so much better, less raspy and grainy than with the clip-on mic.

[@Natomon01]

I believe that "QEMM" was a system-optimization utility that focused on shifting system resources into and out of extended memory. I've never used it myself, but I've heard people extol its virtues. If you want a good gaming PC memory-optimization is a must.

[@cairsahrstjoseph996]

You are just a wholesome guy and God bless and I hope you do retro for the next 80 years

[@colinstu]

I used to have one of those 386 Vectras... got it cheap from a thrift shop 20yrs ago. Sadly don't have it anymore.... was a solid machine, and great styling. Their matching keyboards were also handsome. It had the exact same clock battery setup as yours did.

[@KAPTKipper]

21:10 that Overdrive socket supports the Pentium Overdrive CPUs. You can see the extra row of pins on each side that it would use. So it can be even upgraded from its upgraded state. I did a few of these back in the early 90's the integer/FPU speed was better, IO speeds were not improved.

[@jimpad5608]

No it will not support any pentium cpu. I actually wrote the 486 upgrade engineering document which is still archived on a server in Russia.

[@KAPTKipper]

OverDrive Pentiums are special and only work in these sockets.

[@Null_Experis]

They'll also support the AMD 133/P75 CPUs too if you have the voltage converter interposers like the Trinity Works Power Stacker 5x86. My IBM Alaris Cougar with its weird Blue Lightning 386/486 CPU actually has one of those blue overdrive sockets and I was able to get one working in it just fine.

[@xmaniac99]

It was made in IDA which stands for Isle de Abeau. HP manufacturing and training center in France until the late 1990s.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Explains why the lock is from a French lock company too!

[@BadManiac]

That 386-20 is the absolutely perfect DOS adventure game machine, plop an early sound card with OPL-2 and play some Sierra and Lucas games :D Also the integer mixer in the mod player is more than likely using what was called "fixed point" math functions, which is a trick to use CPU integer functions to perform floating point math, and isn't necessarily much lower precision, if at all. So chances are the sound in the end is probably more or less identical. Could be fun to check the sound output with an oscilloscope to see if you can actually see any difference.

[@kaitlyn__L]

That’s interesting, especially since the samples themselves will be integer. But then I haven’t looked into the maths behind mixing channels together digitally, so maybe it’s self evident why.

[@BrokeDad1]

I remember using these a lot in rack mounted test systems back in the day since they fit nicely being that form factor. Most of them we put in a HPIB/GPIB card to talk to the various test equipment. I can also remember several that simply ran off floppy disks. You would have to load the appropriate program for what you were testing. It was a constant chore to make sure those floppies always had a good backup copy as they all would eventually go bad for one reason or another.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Oh, that must be deliberate given how many much rank mount test gear they made (make?). I hadn’t noticed it was the right size for that, just thought it was nicely compact. That’s great

[@highpath4776]

Indeed for a home PC I recommended these to friends, they just worked. Which is all you needed

[@solarbirdyz]

I have a couple of the brief ATB standard power supplies - at least, that's what I was told they were called - which had support for soft-power-on switching. My 1998 gaming rig (which I've recently put back together ^_^ ) used that semi-standard, and the PSU had given up, so I ended up rebuilding it and now it's fine again.

[@MrVipeg]

Thank you for the great video! I really like IBM compatible machines. Adrian, could you please share somehow your tracker music collection?

[@badscrew4023]

I worked at a computer store between 1995 and 1997, and the Vectras were maybe the most well built computers we sold

[@thepirategamerboy12]

I have an HP Vectra VL2 4/66. Works very well.

[@speedbird737]

First time I saw Windows 3.0 was on an HP Vectra PC. In our UK office we an HP site so had HP3000 mini computers but we also had HP120 PCs with touch screens!

[@TheCerealHobbyist]

I supported 1,200 Vectra Peentium 2s in my first enterprise IT job. So easy to work on (we'd drop more RAM in). All NT 4 Workstation, which they ran like a top. This makes me so nostalgic.

[@PixelatedH2O]

My very first PC was a 486/66 with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups in 1996, so this video brought back a lot of memories

[@patrickbateman3490]

@20:41 This fan has always fascinated me since my childhood. I am actively looking for this Vectra model... hard to find. You are a lucky man :)

[@nynexman4464]

I kind of like the formfactor, lot easier to keep around than a full desktop or tower. Lack of CD-ROM would be a bit annoying, but with modern tools like CF to IDE probably not a big deal. I'm fairly sure I have some soundblasters kicking around in the attic. Have to keep an eye out for one of those machines.

[@Null_Experis]

That's what the SCSI cards were for, external CD Drives, tape drive, hard drives, etc. These were business class machines, so easy access to backup hardware and ability to image machines would be a must to deploy them.

[@crazypete8888]

Some awesome nostalgia here. My first PC when I was like 12 in the mid 90s was one of these. Mine was a 386, I think a 386/25… or maybe a /20. My dad got it for me used at a computer store that had a bunch, probably surplus from a business. I also had the matching monitor/keyboard/mouse. That’s where I learned DOS and Basic. Eventually set up Windows 3.11 on it too. Have had many much better computers since but still have best memories playing shareware diskette games on that thing. Thanks for the video.

[@davidflorey]

As someone who has owned a few HP Vectras, and still works with HP products today, I firmly feel that the Vectra series was the best product line HP ever released!

[@StevenIngram]

My personal memory associates Vectra computers with Math and Physics labs at the University I attended back in the late 80s/early 90s. Their entire computer labs were Vectras with monochrome vga displays (amber if memory serves). :) The complement of software was something like Mathematica, TrueBasic, SPSS, etc. The games we snuck in to play on them were Mechwarrior (the original), A10 tank killer (shooting camels with TOW missiles was hilarious) and some helicopter game I can't remember.

[@StevenIngram]

Aha! The helicopter game was LHX Attack Chopper. :)

[@tupchurch]

I have really enjoyed your videos. I have watched bunches of them. I hope you continue to grow. You are very thorough in your repairs. I am very impressed with your work. I probably would never get as deep as you and I don't own any old hardware but it is very interesting to watch.

[@DanBowkley]

Once upon a time I was an HP warranty service tech, I wrangled probably a hundred or so Vectra machines at a hospital along with a bunch of laser printers. Those computers were built like a brick outhouse..the only things I ever saw were dust bunnies and the occasional broken CD tray. Exactly what you want in an enterprise sort of environment.

[@CScottEdwardsScottGeek]

Back in the day, when I was at HP in the 90's these were all on our desks... Yeap the lock was great in an office environment. And yes there were only about 10 different physical keys for the locks. Meaning they got keyed with the same combination. Management had a full set in case they needed to get into the box. They were good pc's- these replaced our Terminals to our Main Frames. We ran Reflections as our terminal emulator. Dos 6 and later we moved up to Windows 95, and the hardware got better and faster over time. Yeah, those were the days, 386/486 and finally the Pentium. Great Channel btw... good stuff.

[@TheGeoffers08]

Ahhh that so takes my mind back. My first job in IT was around circa 1990. Looking after HP3000 computers running the proprietary MPE operating system, and then also HP9000 Unix beasts. We had all users on HP dumb terminals, but gradually we brought folks over to HP Vectra desktops, on token ring network, running terminal emulation. The Vectras were built like tanks! Loved working with them....ahhh a trip down memory lane. Thanks Adrian!

[@midnitemonty]

Circa 1992 while in HS, I setup handfuls of 286 based HP Vectra's with the 5.25" drives in them to use for typing class in place of old IBM type writers. I believe we used WordStar to practice with. Love the QEMM memory manager! I used 386Max to optimize my memory back in the day to play games.

[@Megabobster]

i would definitely be interested in an in depth video(s) on comparing the speed of ISA cards to each other and in different machines, and maybe a little bit of ISA bus overclocking too. i found that my 486 is stable with a very slight increase in the ISA bus speed and it's not life changing but it gets me a few extra points on benchmarks

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Thanks for the feedback. I have a perfect machine for this -- where I can control the ISA clock speed and CPU clock speed easily. (a 386SX)

[@pipschannel1222]

Yeah I would love to see that too! I did a lot of tweaking and benchmarking of my own ISA VGA cards as well and the winners in terms of performance are the Tseng ET4000ax, the Western Digital wd90c11-lr and believe it or not the Trident 8900D is also super fast for an ISA card. These cards are very fast (for what they are) as is but if you set their DRAM to 0 wait states (the Trident had a "hidden" jumper for this) and overclock the ISA bus a little they can actually outperform some of my cheaper VLB cards! The Tseng ET4000 is my favourite DOS/ISA card though as both its display quality and performance are amazing (for an old ISA card), it's SVGA modes are natively supported by a lot of games , it runs in every ISA machine I have so compatibility is great and of course because of its lore ;-) 👍👍

[@mogwaay]

Id second that. I built my own 8088 machine and really wanted to run it at clock speeds higher than 8MHz and ISA bus speed was one of the big problems. Improved it a bit with by adding wait states for video mem access to get to 10MhZ EGA but would love to see your take on over locking the ISA bus...

[@ChaosHusky]

I've had some machines be stable at 10MHz, some at 12 and a few at 14! Well, i say stable.. Had the odd hiccup at 14MHz where it wouldn't re-load properly exiting applications and would reset but that's about all it did, no data loss!

[@jamesshelton308]

LoL, that moment I realize I grew up playing that pinball game but never knew the title.

[@timmooney7528]

In 97 we had customers that would still ask for a 5.25" floppy, however these were customers the type that stuffed every 5.25" bay on a desktop with a device. One customer would buy a new pc every year so he could brag to his buddies.

[@budzillasohoski9858]

You are so smart and kind. I enjoy how you take your viewers on a ride with you on your repairs. I don’t know a 1000th of what you do but you make it easy for me to follow along anyway and I never feel left out as you are so thorough in your explanations. Kudos to you my friend and thank you for your wonderful content.

[@januszkszczotek8587]

Nice machines. I always loved pizza box designs.

[@timballam3675]

One of the more common reasons you will find a EU based HP system in the US is that it was sold as part of a system (cleanliness might go towards medical) I remember getting US HP systems imported and then delivering them to a very secure site here in the UK a long time ago. Also the single chip SCSI card was often supplied with a Scanner or CD drive to reduce costs, Epson used to include one with their upper range flatbed scanners.

[@briangoldberg4439]

thanks fer the video adrian. you're the best

[@cliffshockley4406]

Looks like with the cleanliness of the internals, and the load of software, I'd bet it was a cold spare computer sitting in the IT department of a medium size company.

[@georgemaragos2378]

HI, my permanent sat overtime for a while was to cycle 6 pc's in a department. Each PC was turned on and memory and drive config placed on a sticker, then it was swapped with maintenance spare. This was mainly due to win 95-98 requiring clean up when it failed, so machines were rotated, reimaged, ran overnight for stability and placed in the rotation stack. Regards George

[@dansimpson6844]

Those Vectra are nice. I have a Vectra XM 5/20 (Pentium 120) it is a bit bigger and will accept a 5.25" drive. Great for running DOS to make retro floppies from images, etc.

[@JamesHalfHorse]

The vectra 386/20 was my first decent computer upgrade from my IBM XT. It made a good gaming machine with a Gravis Ultrasound in it at least what I played. Sim City, Doom, Doom II and Wolfenstein. The GUS came with a cd interface and drive. Beautiful purple colored card. The 386 was not really much to write home about as you mention but with 4mb of ram it ran game, windows 3.1 and stuff like that okay especially coming from an XT. Looking at it I think mine was a bit bigger. A convertable desktop/tower design. You could flip the control panel around so it would be facing the right way. It did have a 5.25 bay that was free which I put the CDROM in but the guts inside look roughly the same. It was 30 years ago and my memory is rusty.

[@demofilm]

We had the 468 . Along with the printer and monitor. It was very expensive. And I still can remember that start up sounds

[@maedero05]

Nifty machines ! Simcity Classic, Cib 3,arcade games would run great. SCSI card sugest there would be a extrnal cdrom or backup drive present. Win386 optimized for 386 compaq, hp and otheres provided a special version of windows 3 for these systems !

[@NJRoadfan]

The later Vectra VL2 series added back the 5.25 bay so you could install that cutting edge CD-ROM drive. I had a VL2 back in the day and still have the keyboard from it. Nice machine, had onboard VL-Bus video and I think the IDE was on the local bus too. It also came with a fairly uncommon 486SX2-50Mhz CPU.

[@djdublo]

Yes a VGA card mega test would be great! Cirrus logic, that takes me back!

[@fredflintstone8048]

Correction; The SX vs DX designation on the 386 had an entirely different meaning than it did on the 486. On the 386 SX it meant 16 bit bus vs. 386 DX meant 32 bit bus. No 386 was ever built with a built in math coprocessor. It always required adding the math coprocessor in a separate slot, which was designated as a 80387. In the case of the 486, the SX vs. DX designation did in fact mean no functioning coprocessor in the processor vs. a built in functioning coprocessor in the 486 designation. The rumor had it at the time that the earlier 486 processors had a lot of coprocessor failures during testing and therefore had the copro disabled and the chip was marked and sold more cheaply as an SX. Mother boards often had a slot for the math copro, but what you would do is get a fully functioning 486 DX and set a switch that would shut off the SX. The semiconductor business hardly ever throws anything away. The same went for RAM chips. Ram chips were tested after manufacturing and they would fail under tests at different speeds. They were marked with the rates that they would pass at and were shipped to market.

[@kaitlyn__L]

The 487 was actually an entire 486DX, and the slot acted more like an accelerator card (just one that was wired-in to the motherboard)? That’s hilarious. And yeah it clearly must have been something to do with yields… didn’t Intel do something similar more recently where CPUs with integrated GPUs that failed were just sold as the GPU-less version of the chip?

[@PearComputingDevices]

HP kept with basically the same design until the Pentium II, I had a Vectra Pentium 75 that I upgraded to a 166 and it was a fantastic computer

[@bonzaihb3432]

Seeing PoP, I was instantly reminded of my gaming experience of my "own" (dad's outdated) 8086 XT machine - it indeed was running PoP, Wolfcraft and other games on Hercules with 8MHz :) My "very own" machine then was a 486DX40 out of Vobis Store, horrid machine, was more in the shop than at my place. Completely screwed up hardware, everything inside had been swapped within the first half year. Quite discouraging for someone who saved up all pocket money to finally buy a PC. But after that it got heavily used and maxed out as far as it could go over the time... :)

[@hugolandgren4114]

There is a Swedish waring text on the label: "If the device is connected to a "wide area power grid" (not sure exactly what that bit means in Swedish), it should be connected to a earthed socket."

[@kaitlyn__L]

I think the term in English is national grid :) Though honestly the Swedish phraseology is better… large nations don’t tend to have a single unified grid, but they still call it “the national grid”..!

[@Colaholiker]

Interestingly, I had Pinball Fantasies on my PC bach in the day, and I wasted sooo many hours of my life playing it. However, I remember it having a different intro... To this day I remember the music and sound effects it had.

[@mogwaay]

There's no maybe about it Adrian,a deep dive into ISA video speeds and benching your old cards is defo my bag 😋

[@newdawn8477]

My father at one point found a pizza box style which would of been a 1.5U, we could never find a riser that fit it but it had a 386, 16Mb ram, pci, built in graphics, parallel and serial, built in 10/100 network adapter, 80mb internal hard drive and floppy. PSU was a non standard thin style. It ran windows 3.11 fairly well, with little slow down. We tried 95 but that was a buggy mess at that point.

[@OldPoi77]

I had one of the 486 versions that I used to make music on after the Amiga stuff I had was lost, I loved it, it came with a box of windows 95 disks and a formatted HDD and taught me everything i needed to know about PCs.

[@AndyMcClements]

Oh wow. An HP Vectra ES was my first PC architecture computer back in the late 80's, it got a motherboard swap after afew years and in the early 90's was my first Linux box, installed from floppies. HP back then was so so different to the HP of today..

[@marcroulleau9510]

LPX form factor, I really like it ! Thank You

[@EvilTurkeySlices]

I love pizza box machines. They are small and compact, but usually perform fairly well. I recently picked up an old Compaq deskpro that has a slot 1 Pentium iii. It works pretty well for quite a few late 90’s games with the iGPU and an SB Live!

[@weepingscorpion8739]

It was nice to see that both of these had SCSI cards installed because at least that way you use external SCSI CD-ROM drives. But I have a feeling that retro CD-ROM drives, be it parallel or SCSI are getting rare. Or maybe it's just me who is out of luck.

[@thesteelrodent1796]

the majority wore out or were scrapped, so you have to be lucky to get hold of a CD drive that still works

[@weepingscorpion8739]

@@thesteelrodent1796 seeing how high the prices of these are online, I'm not surprised. I know that there are backpack devices which allow you to use regular IDE drives but these are getting expensive too. As for SCSI, the towers are probably very expensive now too.

[@leandrocosta3709]

When my 166mmx pentium fried and I was forced to go back to the ol' 486DX-66, I had no heart to install windows 95 back in it. Way too slow for what I was used to, so I installed Debian instead, without the GUI. That was my introduction to Linux. I struggled a lot, though lol That video certainly pushed some buttons. I found what seems to be my old 386DX-40. A baby board. Part of it is badly corroded due to battery leakage, but I'm trying to save it. It's got a math coprocessor and full memory sticks. Gotta find a PSU for it and will also probably need to scrounge a video card to test it, though.

[@hessex1899]

By vectron's kindly claw this is the best video on yt today. :)

[@BCProgramming]

Somebody may have noted it already, but the IDENTIFY DEVICE ATA command started to get implemented in IDE Drives starting around 1987, so the tail end of 386 systems probably had that capability. (I had a 40Mhz Am386 system which had auto-detect, myself)

[@ozzyp97]

I can't be sure about this one, but the power switch on my VL2 works exactly like an ATX PSU: It pulls one of the pins on the MB connector to ground. You'd obviously have to solder some new connectors, but it shouldn't be too difficult rig the guts of a modern PSU to the stock case if push comes to shove.

[@ChairmanMeow1]

This was the first PC I ever owned!! 486x, 33mhz, 200mb HD. HP Vectra.

[@dazza3g]

Adrian, for 486 machines.. I would like to see classic Whacky Wheels being played... great sound and will really test the soundcard and CPU

[@frugalprepper]

I deployed 1000's of those Vectras back in the day, First Dos/Windows 3.11 then Windows 95, and some windows 98 on the later Pentium versions.

[@dirkcrossi6574]

This little pc loooks realy beautifull

[@MattSeremet]

23:21 yes I remember that screen from my school computer lab! I still quote it occasionally when I can think of an applicable variation. I don't think anyone gets the reference lol

[@lburbo23]

I had one of those 486/25N (SX) models around late '99 - early 2000 that I got for free from our local teen center I used to hang out at. Really nice little unit, well built and pretty solid. Wish I could remember what I did with it. Today I have a very clean VL2 4/50 which I will hold onto as long as I can!

[@Synthematix]

I had the vectra pentium MMX tower version around about 1999, those vectra pcs are absolutely brilliant and very reliable, unlike the junk they make today.

[@Walczyk]

I love this comment section, so helpful and informative!

[@oldguy9051]

If you compare the bytes/ms on the 486 machine with the ET4000 ones you will notice that the most used VGA resolutions all have better throughput: 320x200x256, 640x680x256, 800x600x256 and 1024x768x256 - all are well above 6400 bytes/ms. This is clearly a very optimized implementation where unusual resolutions didn't get as much "love". I also suspect that the 640x400x256 mode drastically lost performance because of the 70 Hz mode - there seems to be a memory access conflict of some sort. It would be really interesting to compare video benchmarks on those various old machines with different bus systems (ISA, VLB, PCI etc.)!

[@tigheklory]

Loved the video, I regret tossing a bunch of my ISA video cards, I only kept 2 S3 cards and a Matrox, now seeing those benchmarks I wish I tested them first. Oh and looking forward to restoring Coleco Adam.

[@evergreengamer5767]

great video have soft spot for the "pizza box" pc too and had 486 33n but sadly younger me tossed it when bios gave cpu error and wouldnt go past that post test screen, kept psu cause thought it looked neat ended up selling psu few years back to somebody who was trying to fix a similar 486 vectra

[@twobob]

Ok so I didn't start admining domain controllers until a bit after this but a complete spitball is that the actual login profile was passed back from the domain controller. Which would explain why you are seeing the default. Hope that helps. It could be that links to network provisioned programs are appended to the desktop or w/e they managed to back-weld into 3.11. At a guess it was used for networked data entry. A fancy terminal. In a nutshell you aren't getting the login script the original person did. Some really arcane digging around inside the registry/files could possibly net you the name of such a file but not it's content. It's been decades and I forget, however a dedicated person can usually dredge a disturbing amount out of the seemingly emptiest computer. N.B. People who casually dispose of their machines ;) Domain controlled ones are, in general, the toughest.

[@twobob]

I remember that shutdown system. I edited my resource files to say "It is NEVER safe to turn off Windows 95". That looks like a bosses computer, that got outdated and upgraded, thrown in a back room and used by a kid. Another total guess: Once upon a time that also had a domain profile. Seem to recall a whole pile of that stuff was just graphics resources. It wasn't until Dave and his team ported in the mutli-lingual NT (xp ish?) work that they became text. Up to that point Great fun could be had creating the worlds most monstrous and badly thought through Start Bar graphics UI's and whatnot. Ah good times. EDIT: Looking around now I see that many did that that same edit as "IT'S NOT SAFE TO TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER". lol. see. fun times.

[@photolabguy]

These kind of computers make me miss the days of dialing up a BBS.

[@daveloomis]

Someone else probably mentioned this, but the 1k throughput in 640x 256color mode was for 70hz. It performed way better (above 8k) in 60hz mode.

[@Stratotank3r]

Back in 2000 in my student times I had a Vectra VL2 4/66 with DX2/66 and 16MB of RAM. Used that thing as Internet Router with fli4l (flexible internet router for linux) to provide Internet for 10 studenst in my dorm via my 5 Port Hub that was cascaded via BNC to a 8Port Hub. Anyone remembers the collision LEDs on that Hubs? That thing was really stuck in active back than! But the Vectra was a very silent and reliable machine.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Collision domains sure do be like that. Wifi does it all the time even today, since it’s all one shared air space within a range. I guess a hub would be the same even today, but it’s hard to find one that isn’t actually a switch!

[@davidreese9984]

This device could have been a standalone print server. That would explain the lack of additional software. More than powerful enough for that!

[@pieroc91]

This definitely hits a soft spot on me. The very first machines i serviced from an institution were actually Vectra VE Pentium machines, they were abnormally fast like your 386 one and i suspect that was because they indeed have that cache module on board that most run of the mill clones didn't eve have the socket for. Later i used a few IBM 300gl which i suspect were competing on the market and even they were similarly fast, i found the IBMs to have a specially annoying BIOS that considered simple stuff as critical problems. Always loved the way the mainboard is removed from those machines, much like 68k macs.

[@lisardman]

I used these machines at my school in the late 90:s. I think that I managed to use a dx4 66mhz processor on that machine. Upgraded the internal videomem to 1mb. It was a good machine. :)

[@NaoPb]

Very nice. I used to have one of those.

[@danmenes3143]

HP still makes some nice compact machines. I'm watching this on something that might be more accurately called a Danish box than a pizza box.

[@atkelar]

Not 100% sure but I think the "network server mode" disabled the POST keyboard check - i.e. it would boot without waiting for "Keyboard error, press F1" in case of a cold boot. So you wouldn't have to go to the server room after a power hiccup. But I might be wrong, it's just an option that I have seen in these 90s BIOSes.

[@bjn714]

Talking about how clean the 386 is... You completely missed the sticker on the floppy drive saying that it is "FOR DEMONSTRATION USE ONLY. REGULATORY SUBMISSIONS ARE IN PROGRESS, THEREFORE OWNERSHIP MUST REMAIN WITH HEWLETT-PACKARD." So it was clearly a pre-production demo sample that was not supposed to ever wind up in consumer hands! Neat!

[@Charlesb88]

If you want to use CD-ROM and 5 1/4" Floppy disks with the HP Vector, their are two simple relatively solutions. For a CD-ROM drive, you can get a vintage external SCSI model (and a vintage SCSI card if your Vector doesn't have one already installed). As for 5 1/4" Floppies, there were 5 1/4" external floppy drive made back in the day that connected via your parallel printer port, especially for small form factor PC's like this one so you should be able to locate one on the vintage used computing market (VWestLife has a recent vid on one sold under the Tandy brand but universally DOS PC compatible). With these two external drives you'd have a fully kitted out compact PC system. If you wanted it to be more compact under normal use than you can always disconnect the external drives and store them away when not in use, especially if you replace the internal HD with a SD or CF card solution and copy all your 5 1/4" and CD-ROM contents to folders on your system SD/CF Card (most CD-ROM games back then didn't have copy protection looking for a physical CD-ROM disk in a drive.) as copy to a hard drive back then was impossible given CD-ROMs held 3x the size of the largest HD you could get in the early 90's.).

[@wishusknight3009]

I had a Hewett Rand sx20 mb (very early in the SX life cycle) with a 32k external cache. And it even required simms in a group of 4. Many very early sx machines had cache due to there being such a huge disparity between it and the cheapest DX in both price and performance. And cache does help them out pretty significantly.