E-ISA vs MCA: When IBM Lost the lead in PC market

[@sarahts21]

From what I remember at the time to license MCA you had to also pay for every clone you'd ever made prior to licensing MCA. It was IBM being "we're IBM" and as usual going splat.

[@evoblade2000]

Ahh... retroactive licensing fees. No wonder it was a non-starter.

[@ProfessorFate]

I was told this back in the days of the System 360 Mainframes. I was a college freshman and asked my professor why they had just ripped out an IBM mainframe and put in something else. To this day I clearly remember what he said: “Their middle name is ‘Business’ and that’s what you get.”

[@abdulazizalserhani7625]

Another lasting technical standard that the PS/2 managed to set was that it introduced VGA graphics to the PC market

[@RetroBytesUK]

Good point, if anything that is probably the most significant affect the ps/2 had on the market.

[@scottcampbell2707]

@@RetroBytesUK PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports stuck around too.

[@h.mandelene3279]

I remember. IBM took one last gasp at trying to win back the PC market with XGA but everyone else made ANOTHER compatible product and called it SuperVGA.

[@edgeeffect]

I had a VGA in my Wyse 286. ???

[@richardsequeirateixeira]

The 3.5 inch floppies 💾 which lasted pretty much until 2000. Before PS/2 , the PC and compatibles used 5.25 inch floppies.

[@DutchmanDavid]

I just got this video as an advertisement... First advertisement I've clicked on in literal years! No regrets!

[@fakhriannabi3441]

Me too

[@wghardy5577]

Same here

[@random007nadir]

I never thought I'd hear an 8-bit version of The Art Of Noise's Close To The Edge. But now I have.

[@edgeeffect]

I'm just trolling you... but... technically, the original version of Close To The Edit was 8-bit already - considering the Fairlight CMI was driven by twin 6809s.

[@random007nadir]

@@edgeeffect I believe later versions managed 12 bits, but I've no idea what the development timeline looked like or what version of the equipment The Art Of Noise used.

[@edgeeffect]

@@random007nadir they were right at the "hey, those new Fairlight things, I've got to get one...." stage.

[@osholio]

I built a Novell 3.11 network using a PS/2 486 as the non-dedicated server. Running on thin ethernet around an office (don't forget the terminators or bad things happen). Beautiful machines internally, just so very, very expensive. Beyond servers, E-ISA and MCA just didn't have any impact on anything I saw back in the day. Great video!

[@RetroBytesUK]

I was rather fond of netware, dispite the abends caused by 3rd party software that was trying to rouine my life. I even liked Netware 4 especially the whole zen desktop stuff. We ran in mostly on Compaq servers with smart array e-isa raid controllers.

[@scottjohnson5415]

I too ran Novell, starting with 3.11. E-ISA was a huge performance boost, especially with RAID cards. We were using Compaq Proliant servers, and then Dell. I remember some of the cards had DIP switches on them that you had to fiddle with.

[@MicrophonicFool]

Ya, in the early 90's in our government office, people would recondition their own offices, and in doing so disconnect their thin net wire. After the entire network went down, I would have to run around a 4 story office tower asking who might be moving/renovating and find the black hole wire that needs a terminator. Sometimes while on this chore I don't reach the person who did it, and unbenownst to me, the network was ok now. Follwing that we went to 100mbps active thin net 'switches' as they called them. It required a point-to-point rewire, but no more terminations.

[@johnforde7735]

I remember the bank that I was working with at the time decided to standardise on MicroChannel. Most of us techie types completely opposed it as unnecessarily expensive and not the direction the industry was heading in.

[@corydorastube]

The one I worked for went for SystemPro and later Proliant servers and Deskpro desktops. We had a handful of MCA bus machines because they had the software for our WORM drives.

[@annebokma4637]

Yeah but what do the experts know right? 😂

[@memovilmx6239]

bankers thinking: expensive is better

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

6:15 Look at the unusual alternating shape of those pins. This was done to maintain compatibility with AT-bus pinouts, so AT-bus cards could also be plugged in. The backward-compatible pins made contact at the bottom, while the extra EISA-bus pins had their contacts at that second level further up.

[@daishi5571]

Imagine all the pins in a row! lol

[@tarstarkusz]

I have an EISA PC (a Compaq Pentium, also has 2 PCI slots) and EISA was an even bigger flop than microchannel. At least microchannel had a lot of desktop PCs with MCA, EISA was nearly entirely confined to the server market, though, to be fair, EISA was pretty common in servers. But microchannel was also heavily supported in servers, especially IBM servers. Aside from this one desktop EISA machine I happen to own, I am not aware of a single other machine meant for the desktop with an EISA bus. (I've worked in IT since the early 90s) Tandy is one of the "gang of nine" which defined EISA and I don't think they built a single machine with EISA. Also, once VLB came out, EISA's days were numbered and PCI more or less burred it.

[@another3997]

@@tarstarkusz EISA was clearly the more successful, simply because more manufacturers used it and more cards were available. MCA was a flop. Your personal experience is only that... yours, not everyone else's. I had a cheap 486 PC with EISA slots. VLB was only for graphics cards, and whilst not a failure, it wasn't not a huge success either. It was PCI that killed all of them off.

[@tarstarkusz]

@@another3997 EISA was pretty common on non-IBM servers. But IBM put MCA in all their desktop machines and they were very successful. They were very successful with big corporations. I supported them in several larger corporations at the time. EISA was practically non-existent in the desktop market. There were no cheap 486 motherboards with EISA. There were no cheap EISA cards either. They were almost all very high end server stuff. VLB is NOT just for video. I have a VLB disk controller in my possession and used them in the past. I also currently own several 486 motherboards with 3 VLB slots. VLB was what was common cheap 486 motherboards, not EISA. EISA should have been common, but it never was outside of servers (it was the standard in servers). The large presence in the server market meant most EISA cards were very expensive. The disk controllers tended to be scsi, not IDE, which is what end users were using. The network cards tended to be expensive. Video is not important on servers of the era. The machines were locked away in closets and remotely administered. Even the EISA machine I have today was a 5,000 Dollar high end Compaq workstation. PCI blew both of them away and very quickly became the standard on both the desktop and server markets.

[@chouseification]

@@tarstarkusz I'm going to have to completely and fully agree with A Nother. First off, IBM simply DID NOT put MCA into all of their desktop machines, even the PS/2 line in the key time period had a variety of models - many did come with MCA but nearly as many did not. On those random PS/2 machines (a very small % of all PCs sold in the era), you'll rarely ever see more than a disk controller card, a memory upgrade card, and a video card. Sure, they made all sorts of (astonishingly expensive) MCA cards, but due to the cost, only corporate users typically ever added on stuff like SCSI disks or Ethernet. Indeed, in college one of my buddies actually did have an MCA '386 PS/2 machine, and we laughed (and ran) when we saw the price of the Ethernet cards; luckily his machine had a few 16 bit ISA slots as well, or else he would not have been able to get on the campus network (this was early '90s and we had direct internet access to our dorms and apartments via 10 Mbit Ethernet in those days). As to EISA, it lived a quite healthy period in the server market - something that IBM had mostly ignored completely in their quest to own the desktop via MCA. Big blue failed badly... it's OK to accept that, but it's not OK to spread falsehoods just because your limited familiarity with that time period and the hardware you actually ran into. Protip: you clearly worked at a small shop that didn't get to play with the good toys based on your "story". The reality was much different.

[@virtualinfinity6280]

The Dolch portable is an impressive machine. I clearly remember them, they actually *defined* the high-end in portable computing - with an appropriate price tag. That made them quite rare, as there were loads of cheaper altenatives available. Having two CPUs in something carryable, was outright ridiculous back then.

[@RetroBytesUK]

They really where great machines. Even up to the p3 era they had some nice machines. I recently picked up a dolch knock off machine that needs a little work done on it. Its a shame what few machines are left get scavened for their keyboard.

[@nicolek4076]

Oddly, despite being one of the gang of nine, I remember Olivetti showing an MCA bus PC. I was working there at the time, so it might merely have been a prototype. I also remember Compaq making a sever boo-boo in implementing the ISA bus by omitting a memory timing signal that "no-one used any more". Except they did. All the affected PCs had to be returned for a new motherboard.

[@KipIngram]

That's kind of nuts - that bus had a SPECIFICATION; why would leave out a signal? Did they want to do something else with that pin as a "new upgrade feature" or something?

[@kitsunedude]

Absolute gold mine! I've been looking into older tech and the ways things were done back in the day, this is exactly what I've been looking for! Great content, thanks for covering all these older machines!

[@PaulGrayUK]

Brilliant telling of that whole subject, I recall that era very well and oh don't get me started upon the IBM PS/2 models that had a riser card and the penchant for people to use their computer as a monitor stand - ZX81 rampack wobble, naaa IBM beat that with MCA riser bus card wobble so all your card could wobble at once.

[@dsa3df3]

In the first half of the video, I thought that was the worst background music you could possibly have, obviously other than something with vocals. And then the madlad actually put on something with vocals.

[@cyneater6300]

I like your style you seem to pick up on bit and bobs no one else has covered and make it intresting also bring back so many memories

[@KeyJ_trbl]

Small correction: There's no relation between FreeDOS and DOSBox. DOSBox is a stand-alone emulator that has its DOS "built-in". While you _can_ use DOSBox with actual FreeDOS or MS-DOS (or even Windows 9x), in 99.9% of the cases it just runs on its internal DOS emulation.

[@SianaGearz]

Yes. As opposed to any actual DOS, the DOSBox emulation doesn't actually consume any RAM within the emulated machine and just provides invocation points such as software interrupt handlers, which get satisfied by pure magic - it just doesn't exist as software within the emulated environment, it's folded into the machine emulation. DOSBox-X fork, however, does bundle some utilities from FreeDOS.

[@edwardwong654]

A Compaq 80386 with a companion 80387 math co-processor was the Bugatti of its time. I got an AST Research 80386 DX but without the 80387 and it was pretty good. Those were different days. I now use a Macbook Pro on Apple iron (ARM) and it is pretty good.

[@Clavichordist]

Cool stuff! An insurance company I worked in computer operations for in the 1990s had one of those Dolch machines connected to their network as a packet-sniffer. I forgot about that until I saw it again in the video. They also had a single IBM PS/2 microchannel machine. This was for one application and the machine always had some kind of issue with it which required us to call in support for. My brother had an EISA based machine used as an RIP for his ECRM VR30 imagesetter. This was required for the huge differential SCSI controller similar to the one you show in the video which was used to drive the imagesetter. The only other cards plugged into the buss were a standard video card and a 3-COM 3C509 NIC with a thin-net and RJ45 ports on it. Setting up the cards was painful because a special EISA configuration utility had to run to write an ID to the system ROM instead of flipping jumpers on the cards to set the addresses.

[@RowanHawkins]

Yeah that whole EISA config thing was a total pain in the butt. It was just as bad as needing a 286 configuration disc. I'm so glad PCI won out even if Plug and Pray was a bit buggy at first. My EISA joy was an off lease Dual Pentium Pro 200 and wide scsi controller attached to an external drive stack.

[@Clavichordist]

@@RowanHawkins I'm glad PCI won the battle as well. I have more than a few scrapes and cuts from playing with jumpers. Those were the days!

[@Hollaendaren]

I'm still using a PS/2 keyboard on my main PC (Ryzen 3950X) to this day. I tried a USB keyboard once about 15 years ago on a machine that probably wasn't really ready for it, had some kind of problem with it back then, and I've had trust issues ever since. I'm sticking with what I know works until nobody adds PS/2 ports to their boards any more ;) Meanwhile I'm not using my actual PS/2 machine (a model 50) because I don't have any MCA cards to put in it and I like to have sound and network on all my retro machines.

[@RetroBytesUK]

My keyboard at work is PS/2, I just have a PS/2 to USB adapter as the machine does not have a PS/2 port. I really like the keyboard so I'm keeping hold of it. It's getting a bit old now as I got it in 2000, my mouse is even older.

[@m1k3e]

I *still* use my IBM Model M via PS/2. Best keyboard ever!

[@RetroBytesUK]

The model M is a great keyboard, expensive to buy now saddly.

[@eternalephemera]

RetroBytes Unicomp in the US still makes them, in both PS/2 and USB versions.

[@stephenjacks8196]

Did you ever notice the PS/2 to USB adapter that came with PS/2 keyboards is straight through? Your PS/2 keyboard is natively USB with a ps/2 adapter. You probably still use a serial mouse.

[@williambendsen5090]

That was interesting. I did fall asleep, but I also watched the rest of it the next day. I really liked how there was a history lesson along with a fairly unique computer, combined into one video.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I'm really glad you like the structure of it. Even if it did help you to sleep on the first viewing :-) Truth be told I've fallen asleep during the odd LGR video, that guy has a very soothing voice.

[@stephenjacks8196]

Some YT vids use computer voice text-to-speech and some are very annoying and hard to fall asleep to.

[@livefreeprintguns]

I love your videos, so underrated. My first computer was an Macintosh Performa 630CD so EISA was a little behind me in terms of when I started using PC hardware, but I did have a few machines I got dumpster diving at a local electronics surplus store but they never really threw out any EISA cards.

[@edwardwong654]

I worked at IBM Global Business Service as an architect for 6 years. They make good typewriters.

[@MoultrieGeek]

In the early 90's I did desk-side and network support for E.I. DuPont and PS/2's were everywhere, much to our annoyance. MCA machines were a real pain as we had to bring a floppy for every known MCA card just to get the thing to boot when it 'forgot' what was on the bus. I forget what the numeric error code was (702 I think) that told you it was going to be a long morning tracking down some oddball network card that no one had ever heard of from a vendor that went out of business six months ago. Thoroughly enjoyed this but one bit of criticism: that 8 bit background music was really annoying.

[@LatitudeSky]

IBM had good ideas with OS/2 and it is still in use, in places. But what they did with PS/2 was unite all the competitors behind the EISA platform and those that followed. Had IBM not attempted their MCA license fee bonanza, it is likely the market would have been more fragmented and left more room for IBM to stay in the PC game. But that is not what happened. Ooops.

[@NullStaticVoid]

I have seen MicroChannel Architecture on an IBM PC my friend got from his older brother. As far as E-ISA, I've owned plenty of PCs with ISA slots. Some next to PCI and AGP slots actually. They were pretty standard for things like modems and printer or serial port cards for a long time. Especially the cheap ones. Though most of those were ISA really.

[@Carewolf]

No VL local bus?

[@KipIngram]

I quite like the music you choose to use in these videos. It's from even further back than the technology, of course, but it sets the mood super-well.

[@AlejandroRodolfoMendez]

Great video, the story part was quite informative and it was surprisingly interesting to see a pc of That time running so well

[@enzoclaudino3213]

Really good work, I literally watched all of your videos it’s a pity there aren’t more...

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thanks Enzo, nice of you to say. I'm working on my next one atm, and I'm trying to get one out every month.

[@johnbrown3155]

Did anyone else ever use a machine with e-isa ? I worked for ICL sub-company in the 90's that mostly used Compaq servers and they where most E-ISA, with some having PCI and E-ISA.

[@random007nadir]

Don't have it now, but I used to have a 486 server board with eisa. Chunky.

[@bekar_au]

I built many machines with EISA slots, a bunch of server boxes using SCSI controllers. There wasn't anything really special about them from an operating stand point; they just worked if you had the appropriate drivers. Mostly NT based OS.

[@r5cpt]

I love how the 2nd part of the video has F-all to do with MCA.

[@DanielleWhite]

Descent II was one of my favorite games of the era. I also played a lot of Rise of the Triad then; in 1995 I worked for a correspondence school that was fairly well known in the US. My shift was until 8 PM. Management all left by 5 and we'd kick off a net game of R.O.T.T. I love your point about MCA largely succeeding in demonstrating that IBM no longer controlled that market. Sometime in the 90s I read an article in one of the PC magazines that had a rapid-fire list of computer industry lessons. IBM was in it twice, for MCA and the PC Jr. For the former as best i can recall the lesson was "don't try to control a market that you've already lost control of."

[@indysawmill]

I remember these days and hours of LAN parties playing DOOM and Descent. Another one we played was Rise of the Triad, which was revolutionary for physics in a game.

[@1anwrang13r]

Are you sure that EISA network card in the Dolch was a gigabit one? The fibre connector looked more like one for FDDI which fits better with it being a mid-90s machine. Gigabit Ethernet was a few years later.

[@ChrisSmith-tc4df]

Yeah, I was going to write the same thing.

[@gnarfgnarf4004]

OS/2 was developed from scratch, and was not encumbered a legacy of DOS compatibility, 16-bit applications, and drivers like Windows was. This enabled IBM to innovate radically and more quickly. I developed a multi-threaded program, written paradoxically with Microsoft's Programmer Workbench, the character-based precursor to Visual Studio. However, this freedom from legacy code also meant there were few applications available for OS/2, and the only drivers were for IBM printers. OS/2 eventually disappeared in spite of its technological superiority at the time. IBM's development environment was called C-Set, and, in spite of being a 32-bit compiler, was inferior to Programmer's Workbench. For instance, after a compilation, if you double-clicked on an error message, it would open up the source code in a separate editor window, in a proportional typeface. You could not trigger a compilation from this window. You had to make your change, save & close, then go back to the compiler window. Brain-dead. There was no Resource Workshop for designing dialog boxes visually. You had to write all the statements in a text editor, and wouldn't see the appearance until compiling and running the program. This slowed down development. While debugging, I recall trying to step into the GUI part of the application code. This locked up the computer so bad we had to re-install OS/2, a tedious process requiring 22 diskettes. The IBM documentation was so inscrutable that even for ver. 2 of OS/2, we had to refer to Microsoft's ver. 1 manuals. IBM's support gave an interesting insight into OS/2's downfall. My client had an expensive OS/2 support contract with IBM. The client's contacts were two guys in the PC support section. When I required technical support to answer some obscure and specialized questions about OS/2, it didn't make sense to get the client's guys involved, even though they were supposed to be the only official go-between with IBM. So I called IBM with the client's authorization, and impersonated one of the support techs. After a few calls I slipped and used my name. The IBM guy was livid and tore a strip of me, saying that as an independent contractor, I had no business blah blah. Here I was just trying to get a customer up & running.

[@chouseification]

One note from a Yank who did play with MCA and a little bit with EISA. At least here in the US, we didn't say it as "e-ISA" (two separate words as you do), it was said like "eeisa" (sort of like Lisa but no L) very consistently by anybody familiar with the standard. Of course it didn't last all that long as VLB, AGP, and PCI were each only a few years away (and from from each other).

[@Carewolf]

Wasn't VLB contemporay to EISA? I remember EISA being this weird expensive standard like SCSI, that only servers had where all desktops had VLB because a VLB slot was backwards compatible with ISA cards, besides offering 32 bit on top.

[@chouseification]

@@Carewolf EISA was several years earlier.

[@Carewolf]

@@chouseification Right.. We had the other proprietary local buses before VLB

[@chouseification]

@@Carewolf Exactly. I remember EISA being on the cover of all the computer shopper and magazines like that when I was early on in high school, but I didn't actually see a VLB machine until my freshman year at college when one of the neighbor kids picked up a Gateway 2000 back when they had the cow print on the box and all that. As you say, there were a few vendor specific ones in between.

[@marksterling8286]

I was working in pc support and remember building NetWare file servers with the eisa scsi and madge network cards. I also remember the Mca cards been a pain to setup without the reference disk for the bios.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I assume you where ising token ring then, or did Madge produce Ethernet cards too ?

[@marksterling8286]

Token ring through and through, in about 1995 moved from a routed bunch of token ring networks to using 2 3com superstack ii token ring switches with spanning tree to create a fully redundant cut through switching collapsed backbone. Loved those madge cards

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

7:05 But the title of standard-setter had passed from IBM long before. By 1985, what defined “compatibility” was the ability to run Microsoft Flight Simulator. So, whether you liked it or not, from that point on, it was more appropriate to refer to these PCs as “Microsoft-compatible”.

[@c128stuff]

That is a bit more complex I'm afraid. In 1985, there still existed machines which did use MS DOS, but were not 'PC compatible'. That is, anything relying on PC bios functionality would need to be rewritten or wouldn't work, because those machines did not use a PC BIOS clone, and used their own vendor and often machine specific MS DOS version. For that reason alone, talking about 'Microsoft compatible' is just as confusing as talking about 'IBM compatible'.

[@jeremygeorgia4943]

I really wish I could find an EISA graphics card that was affordable. Though my computer will never be a gaming machine, an EISA accelerator would make it a more passable gaming machine. A 32 bit or even a 64 bit one might be nice. Back in the day, I always used the VLB, and it definitely made a huge difference in my favorite game titles. Right now, I just have a generic Everex card. I haven't even tested it to see if it will do SVGA modes.

[@VenomStryker]

Great video, but the background music was sort of loud. Maybe that is better now though since this video is over 2 years old.

[@kesslerrb]

I definitely used a Dolch as a portable sniffer platform

[@wskinnyodden]

Never used an MCA card and only had a PC with that onboard in front of me once. EISA fares ever worse. The only time I actually had a board with that on front of me was way after that thing was long dead.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

5:27 Now there’s an interesting one: a debate over which GUI display architecture should become the standard on Unix systems. I didn’t realize some people were keen on adopting IBM’s OS/2 Presentation Manager instead of X11 (here described as “DEC Windows”). One of those is pretty much dead and gone, while the other is still in active use on Linux systems like the one I am using right now. It may eventually be supplanted with Wayland, but it seems that’s not going to happen in a hurry.

[@scottjohnson5415]

I used OS/2 on a Citrix remote access server with eight incoming modem lines. OS/2 was extremely reliable, especially when compared to Windows NT at the time. It was basically set it, and forget it.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Aesthetically, I definitely think Presentation Manager looked better than the various DEs for X at the time… but compatibility-wise I can understand why that didn’t happen.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Interesting, isn’t it: I clearly said “GUI display architecture”, yet some people immediately assume I mean “GUI appearance” or “GUI theme”. Any GUI architecture worth its salt can implement an endless range of different themes, appearances and behaviours. I would say X11 has certainly proven that over the decades.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I didn’t assume you meant the theme, which is why _I_ specified the theme. I have no idea if the PM arch would’ve been easy to implement or not, I just said I preferred how it looked over the actual themes available at the time. Obviously X can look like anything, since today it usually looks like Ubuntu or Gnome. Get that chip off your shoulder.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

@@kaitlyn__L It’s quite clear what I said, and what you said. You said nothing about any “theme”. You mentioned “DEs for X at the time”, but I don’t think you were aware of the range that was available, even back in the 1990s -- look at SGI, for example. And Looking Glass, for another example. The guiding principle of X, like in so many things *nix, was “mechanism, not policy”. Instead of dictating a look, it gave you the tools to implement your desired look. Nowadays, it seems the entire concept of an “operating system” (outside of the Linux world) has come to be defined by how its GUI looks. Look at Windows 11, for example: it is basically just Windows 10 with a different skin.

[@LaurentiusTriarius]

I wonder how baller it would be to game on it back then, co-workers probably would have reported it, adding a soundcard?! Pure evil back in the 1990's corporate environments...

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

Lovely vid. I know a man IRL who uses OS/2 to this day... the Betamax of home computing!

[@RetroBytesUK]

Wow that's commitment to an OS, how many years has it been since he got an update. I know a third party took on development a few years back, but I remember hearing they had stopped a while back. It's a shame it did not get open sourced, as back then OS/2 was a good os.

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

@@RetroBytesUK Yeah, he just likes it and it works. No virus problems, and it keeps working. He's not even an IBM person!

[@MattSaettler]

One thing that's not mentioned about this period and IBM's plans for the PS/2 is ABIOS. This was a new, extended bios (that they would NOT make public) that, they thought, would allow OS/2 to perform way better on a PS/2 computer compared to a PC compatible. I'm not really sure what logic they used because there are serious logic holes in that plan. But what other choice did they have to try to regain control?

[@Neeboopsh]

my first actual machine was a pentium system on the intel neptune chipset. dual socket pentiums. i couldnt afford both chips, nt4 wasnt out yet, but it was coming. and i could fart around in win95 until nt4 came. was also looking forward to os2 warp being a legit os with multi cpu support (man was i shooting for the stars back then. a kid could dream of parallel processing and advanced scheduling in the os. i was 14 i think). eventually got a second 75mhz (oh yeah) pentium. both cpus were silicon lottery winners. with a seemingly excessive 16" fan pushing i could run both at 120 pretty stable. could run them at 133 but very unstable. not usable at all other than bragging rights.

[@shinypb]

Delightful video - thanks for making and sharing it. That portable PC really is quite lovely.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thanks Mark, that's nice of you to say. It really is a cracking little gaming rig, the keyboard is really nice on it too. Since doing the video I've been getting to DOS networking stuff setup as there are a few of us talking about having a 90's style lan party.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

11:11 That’s a pretty comprehensive collection of connectors on that Ethernet card: AUI, BNC/thinwire *and* RJ-45.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

8:44 Apple Macs used SCSI for their hard drives (and some other devices) for quite a few years. It was only when PATA drives became cheaper that they switched. (Note I don’t describe the latter as “IDE”. “IDE” stands for “Integrated Drive Electronics”, which meant that the disk controller was integrated into the drive, instead of being a separate adapter card. And SCSI was a form of “IDE”, after all.)

[@rfvtgbzhn]

The standard that came later ATA (und much later PATA, it wasn't called like that before SATA came out) was actually called IDE when it was still a proprietary standard by Western Digital, it was only renamed to ATA when it was made to an industry standard.

[@Don-jt7ch]

Keep up the good work and the channel will skyrocket.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Kind of you to say.

[@coolvideos8864]

BG music too loud!

[@jameslewis2635]

If you could get hold of one, I think that a Voodoo 2 card would be a great addition to this machine. Otherwise I would be tempted to just grab a standard PCI video card and modify it to either have an internal display port or just file down the slot cover to allow you to loop the cable back into the machine (hackey and visually crude but it would work).

[@tomschmidt381]

I was in the PC industry during the 90s and was a EISA fanboy. I was sad when Intel pushed PCI and EISA fell by the wayside. Another piece of tech-trivia is EISA was the first to adopt the notion of plug-n-play but only in a rudimentary form.

[@rashidisw]

This video conveniently skip the things happen between E-ISA and PCI, the Very Long Bus (VLB).

[@tomschmidt381]

@@rashidisw I think you are referring to VESA Local Bus, I had totally forgotten about that effort. There was also the IEEE Futurebus standard that never went anywhere.

[@justinhannah1023]

9:03 this eisa network capture board is 100 meg FDDI, not gigabit. I doubt gigabit capture would have been possible back then. 😄

[@rpgspree]

univbe... Boy, does that take me back to a time when things where both simpler and more complicated. LOL I think one of the uses for it was to get older hardware that supported VGA and was only technically held back by a lack of a VESA version update from the manufacture.

[@piecaruso97]

Very nice video, your channel has a lot of potential, keep up the good work

[@RetroBytesUK]

That's kind of you to say thanks.

[@scottjohnson5415]

I used EISA network and SCSI cards on our server. We did have a remote access server that ran on top of OS/2 Warp Server. It was a very solid operating system that hardly crashed, especially considering how bad Windows NT was. We also used NetWare for our print and file services. Also another solid operating system.

[@williamallen7836]

Reply Corp also made MCA cards. Reply Corp was founded by a group of ex IBM engineers that worked on the original MCA project. In 1995 - 2000 I worked at a company called Back Thru The Future Microcomputers. They purchased and resold computers & componets from corporations back then. Now they only do electronics recycling & data destruction. We recieved 4 pallets of a bunch of different MCA cards made by Reply Corp.

[@miinyoo]

Descent 2 was far and away my favorite PC game from the 90's. There were a ton of greats but spelunking in a space ship always brought me the most joy.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Glad to know I was not the only one.

[@KipIngram]

The 1980s were GREAT. If you offered me a magic button box that would let me rewind the world to there, while still keeping my current "life circumstances," I'd press it in a HEARTBEAT. It's not that nothing good has happened since then - we've definitely made improvements. But there was just so much to love about that era.

[@richardharvey950]

I worked for Apricot Computers during this time and they used MCA in their Apricot Qi range of computers.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Apricot made some very cool hardware.

[@scunnerdarkly4929]

Nice chiptune rendition of the Art of Noise’s Close to the Edit, period-perfect.

[@davecardboard9567]

Love the "computer sound card" version of Close to Edit in the background music!

[@TeionM83]

"even the smallest Linux distro needs more than 16 MB to work" Actually, KolibriOS can fit on a high density 3.5" floppy and runs on a system with at least 8 MB RAM. And it has a very Windows XP-ish GUI too.

[@gort5768]

It was built on Menuet, with their own monolothic kernel that wasnt posix compliant (as opposed to linux, kernel wise)

[@Chalisque]

I remember an MCA machine and the BIOS utility which came on a floppy and, if you used a BIOS floppy which missed an info file for a particular expansion card, it disabled that card until you found said device info file.

[@jamescameron1861]

Oddly enough, I only ever saw an EISA box once. And it was a server, with a 486DX50 if I remember correctly... In fairness, it was 30 years ago. EISA was used for the NIC. This was an AUI connector going into 10Base5...

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

3:41 “Quick Pascal Expected From Microsoft” ... did Microsoft ever actually ship a Pascal compiler?

[@BigSleepyOx]

yes

[@connclissmann6514]

Mitac in Taiwan did licence the MCA bus. I wonder how that worked out for them? Mind you, look down the back of a HP drawer somewhere to find traces of Compaq.

[@scotthannan8669]

The Art of Noise tune in the background is neat.

[@KipIngram]

I can recommend the TV show "Halt and Catch Fire" as an entertaining "pseudo history" of t his era. It's definitely not "history," but it touches on the culture quite well. One of the more unrealistic bits has a couple of guys (a sales guy and an engineer) from the "focus company" literally ripping off the IBM BIOS by dumping the ROM using a circuit the engineer built. They walked through the whole thing writing down hex bytes. We know that's a crock, because IBM PUBLISHED the BIOS listing in the Technical Reference document. It was already written down on paper for you, so that whole scene was for drama only.

[@mbrit]

The 8-bit version of Close to the Edit really works for me.

[@awetisimgaming7473]

I actually bought almost that exact bus logic eisa scsi card, not even knowing what the standard really was, and my consumer mmx 133 rig has no clue that it exists. Not sure if you need the full slot, or if the hardware is messed up, but I figured I'd get back to it soon enough.

[@KipIngram]

The truth is that IBM didn't realize what they had. Their initial projections regarding PC sales was that they'd sell 200k units, tops. The business decisions around the work were made on that basis, at least in the beginning. I've no doubt they would have done things VERY differently if they'd realized how big it was going to become.

[@robertleeluben]

When I worked for Kislak bank I had access to 2 similar 486 machines, one had os2 and the other had Windows 3.1. What a difference it was to have both, the os2 machine could play wing commander in a window at enough fps to play the win31 machine couldn't touch it in any way. This was before win95 so it was quite a shock to see how much more the os2 machine could do

[@captainz9]

OS/2, especially Warp, was a great OS... It probably should've killed Windows, but I think pushing it along with the MCA machines killed it - nobody wanted to pay IBM for all their hardware.

[@ian_b]

My first PC was a PS/2, a secondhand 286 based Model 60. It's huge and beautiful and built like a tank.

[@ronjon7942]

Laf, so was mine! Kimda wish I still had it.

[@felderup]

the isa was just the commonly used s-100 connector and pinout that you could find on a bunch of other 8bit systems, they were usually backplane based, the processor was on a card like the modern picmg boards.

[@Yesterzine]

It's not surprise the gang of 9 includes the makers of both my first 2 PCs, Epson and Compaq.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I know a few poeple who had an Epson as their first PC.

[@JoaoVitor-cw2vg]

Gangbang

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I think Tandy played it both ways, either at the beginning or later, by also licensing MCA from IBM.

[@RobertdeRooy]

DOSBox does *NOT* include FreeDOS. It has it's own DOS emulation. You can however optionally boot real DOS in DOSBox, including FreeDOS, but this is not done by most people as you loose a lot of DOSBox features by doing so.

[@pgknippel]

Nice job with ‘Close To The Edit’!

[@TatsuZZmage]

Warcraft 2 sound test: your sound card works perfectly,your sound card works perfectly,your sound card works perfectly, IT DOESN'T GET ANY BETTER THEN THIS.

[@tiberiusbrain]

I just got this recommended by the algorythm overlord of youtube. Looks interesting

[@RetroBytesUK]

Hooe our algorithmic over lords have not let you down.

[@tiberiusbrain]

@@RetroBytesUK they have not, you gained a sub :) Great video, really enjoyed it

[@portalarlequin2023]

I loved the visual metaphor!

[@Wulfdane]

IBM tried to go proprietary; but consumers wanted compatibility and clone PCs offered that.

[@SianaGearz]

DOSBox (upstream) doesn't bundle any FreeDOS, in fact it's missing most of the DOS functionality, it's just an emulated core. DOSBox-X however does bundle a few utilities that stem from FreeDOS.

[@tambarskelfir]

Encouraging you to make more of these things.

[@scharkalvin]

Tandy was one of the few companies that actually licensed the microchannel and produced a 3rd party machine using it.

[@kevinm3586]

Another was Apricot with their Qi PCs and VX servers. The servers were on caster wheels, had a sliding, electronically operated door at the front and looked like fridges. An image not helped by a light that came on when the door opened.

[@edgeeffect]

Ironically both buses failed abysmally... i saw a lot of 386s and most of them just had 16-bit ISA... 486 brought usVESA... and the Pentium PCI. I got a load of MCA out of a skip once, and never ever saw an EISA. Where did you get that naff PC sounding version of Close To The Edit?... I love it.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

1:30 No, they were still primarily shipping 16-bit PCs at this point. So the OS was designed to work best on 16-bit machines, not 32 bits. This was a mistake.

[@RetroBytesUK]

So the OS I'm referring to here is what would become OS2 and NT, which was designed as a 32bit OS hence the requirement for a 386 as it used the 386's 32bit addressing mode and the ring 0 supervisor. Where confusion might arise is that the SX version of the 386 while 32bit internal was 16bit externally meaning that lots of boards could be made cheaply as they could be 16bit. The DX version of the 386 was external and internal 32bit, so a supporting board would have to have a full 32bit data path too.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

NT was a 32-bit OS, but OS/2 was not--not initially.

[@bekar_au]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 OS/2 2.x onwards most definitely was 32bit only. 1.x however, I've only got very faint memories running it.

[@ronjon7942]

Ah, Decent2! My favorite - I may have to dust it off and give it a go! Thnx for reminding me of it.

[@RobSchofield]

Great, very enjoyable. I had a fair number of E-ISA machines and they were pretty good beasties. The last one I still have is the DEC multi-processor 433mp, which I hope to resurrect someday. More!

[@captainz9]

I still have an Everex Megacube (486/33 EISA), used to be our Oracle Db server in the 90s... Was such a unique looking box I had to grab it from the computer recycling pallet.

[@82726jsjsufhejsjshshdjso]

Mate someone could 3D print you a cover for your missing panel. It’ll look nice. I’ll print and post you it but I can’t design it sadly

[@PaulaBean]

I didn't play games on MSDOS. I developed business software on it. For me, an XT/AT was a tool to generate income. I bought my first XT for $1500 and made a multiple of that by creating software for clients.

[@rfvtgbzhn]

13:35 don't hard disks still have a jumper, which can limit their capacity to 32GB?

[@SenileOtaku]

Now had IBM been more like the later version, one that realized it could make money by providing technical/engineering/development resources, they could have made their money by opening the MicroChannel specification, then sold the chipsets, engineering support, systems validation, etc. If IBM hadn't been stingy about opening the spec, they probably would have made MORE money than they did by trying the game of vendor lock-in. With the added benefit that the market and end-users wouldn't have had to deal with all the DMA/IRQ and other such nightmares for so long. I expect the early "reference diskettes" would later have become stored in chips on the boards themselves, and maybe even the basic driver binaries as well. Just think, PCI and PCIe functionality more than 10 years earlier.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I think you are spot on, if they had taken a much more open approach, IBM would have made far more money on it. Also there would have been no need for the gang of six to create EISA.

[@xcoder1122]

if dig deep into the history of OS/2, you will find out, that one of the main reasons why IBM and Microsoft couldn't finish the project together was that the IBM programmers were very unsatisfied with the code quality produced by the Microsoft developers. They said something along the lines that the code from the Microsoft developers is chaotic, full of bugs, and their design choices are a mess. And if you look at the quality of the later on produced systems, OS/2 vs Windows, you can clearly see that OS/2 was the way better system. Not only was it faster and way more stable, it was even able to run Windows apps in an emulation layer at native speed. Then why did Windows win that battle? Two reasons: OS/2 was not bundled with PCs, you had to purchase it, whereas Microsoft tried to make deals to get Windows bundled as much as possible, so most people got Windows with their new computer and would have to first buy OS/2. The other reason was the price: Even if you had to buy Windows, OS/2 was at least twice the price.

[@janglur]

What is the background music? I like it!

[@Kikay0n]

So many memories! Cheers mate!

[@5urg3x]

I would LOVE an AS/400 based video...Those things...I bet some folks are still using them right now.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I know of at least one place that still is, much to the annoyance of their IBM rep.

[@KellyClowers]

oh god, Descent 2 I think was the one game that made me nauseous... yep, that was it. That floaty interface. Great video though, thanks!

[@KellyClowers]

Just very recently modern games have started doing something that makes me get sick after a while. So far Elden Ring is the worst, can't do that for more than maybe 20 minutes...

[@mycosys]

It it really a glass platter drive that early?? They were rare before 2000, would have been interesting to see what it was

[@fauxpas5598]

0:03 That's not just "8-Bit Music", that appears to be an OPL-2 FM synthesis version of "Close to the Edit", by Art of Noise!

[@RetroBytesUK]

It is indeed close to the edit 😄

[@RetroBytesUK]

Its a BBC micro verison (SN76489)

[@RowanHawkins]

Ah so that is a Network General sniffer. When you.first said Dolce, I hoped. I have the version before that which used a 16 bit card in Zeinth 5200. It is unfortunately not working as is a bunch of my really cool period tech.