Why Pay $1000 for a 25 year old PC! - NIXSYS Windows 98 PC

[@ErickPolsky]

I worked with a company that had million dollar lab equipment. The software was timed to the processor (486) so it only worked on a specific chipset. Their warehouse had a pallet of replacement parts for that one machine standing by to keep it running.

[@YR7A]

I was surprised to learn that it's very common to encounter things like this in all types of industry. It's probably far, far cheaper to keep that machine running and pay for that pallet of replacement parts than it is to get new software made for the equipment or straight up replace the equipment.

[@triaxelongd3337]

​@@YR7Aalso new software can be buggy and may not work with older hardware. Its just a big hassle sometimes.

[@KimPossibleShockwave]

@@YR7A Yup! It's simple economics. Your factory uses Windows 95 or 98 to run a bit of custom software which controls all your machines or a key machine in the assembly line? Paying like £500 every few years for replacement parts to keep that machine up and running compared to spending £50,000+ for upgrades/modernization which may or may not work? Yeah, I wouldn't take the risk.

[@Niberspace]

were you ever tempted to play Dune 2 on it when everyone was away for Christmas break?

[@Zack_Wester]

@@YR7A dont help that even today new produced machine got two options. IT controled whit some rediculus DRM that will brick it as soon as the internet betwen the factory that the machine is used in and the contry that made the factory (aka all the time), or just anything goes belly upp. oh you bought 20 10 milion machines well to bad that Machine factory whent bust last week because now you got 10 pieces of scrap. better to use a old 98 solution then deal whit that kind of risk.

[@chrisvan62]

I work at a paper mill, a lot of our equipment, HMIs, PLCs, etc are 20-40 years old so we've got a LOT of XP, 98, and some DOS. A computer like this is something we'd definitely get when one of our towers crap out. There's a lot of days I spend just cloning backups and installing 98 and XP on laptops for field usage.

[@travisscavoni369]

I also work at a paper mill, and the computers we use run Windows 7 because supposedly the VNC we use won't run on a newer OS. At least that is what one of our IT guys told me.

[@InhalingWeasel]

Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't it be just easier to buy a modern PC and run the software in a virtual machine. Surely it can be configured to communicate with the old industrial machines without actually having to use old hardware.

[@ahmadaamer6]

@@InhalingWeasel I would assume that it's to eliminate any issues that could come up with virtual machines. It's just more reputable to have a dedicated system to run the old hardware.

[@ethelredhardrede1838]

@@InhalingWeasel Hardware issues, primarily the serial port I suspect. Yes there are USB to serial adapters. Apparently they are not reliable.

[@pavelsovicka5292]

@@InhalingWeasel That could work just fine. Or it could make your work full of misery and pain. The old software might be FUBAR from the virtualisation, the hardware interface might not work correctly. Some old hardware is even incapable of using an USB to serial converter through a virtual serial port driver and requires the hardware port. There is a lot of quirky stuff going on in legacy industrial equipment and as Anthony said in the video: For a business that needs a reliable operating machine cashing out 1k of USD is not that big of a deal. Also you could actually pay a lot more in employee time just making it go on the newer PC...

[@Babihrse]

When it comes to older stuff this fella absolutely blows it out of the water compared to the stuff Linus talks about. He's really knowledgeable and presents old historical stuff like it was just yesterday. Maybe I'm just nostalgic but he's exactly on point. He'd play red alert on win 98 and it'd crash and he'd say yep that's not an emulation error that's exactly how it'd behave in 98 random computer locking up errors that even ctrl alt delete couldn't fix.

[@KimPossibleShockwave]

Oh hell, you just took me back to my childhood! I remember playing Command and Conquer: Red Alert when it first came out for my Windows 95 PC, haha. I was 8 at the time, and I used to spend twelve hours at a time playing it without breaks (the headaches I had were legendary). I miss those days...

[@Number6_]

It was just yesterday.

[@Babihrse]

@@KimPossibleShockwave the irrational abrasiveness you got when you were on one of those missions without a base and had to make it to the end of the level with a man left. 1 man running towards the end of the inside the nerve gas facility level after loosing most of the squad to a flame tower. Go on little man with health in the red run run. your about to complete it after losing 20 times. Someone touches your back asks you what your doing FUCKOFFNDONTTOUCHME

[@beerfish109]

Anthony would do amazingly well as an computer history teacher. Genuinely a joy to listen to

[@joefries7046]

Love the guy hes awesome

[@magnumass]

his first IT job was in 2006, nah

[@dualboy24]

@@matuopm He is okay, but I grew up the same era as him, and its all common knowledge for back then.

[@beerfish109]

@@shortsrus sure, now. This vid was posted pre acknowledgement of transition.

[@JasonEllingsworth]

@@beerfish109 I was bummed to see he is another one of those drinking the woke kool-aid. I lean left all day but that stuff is going too far for me. We should be embracing who we are, instead of trying to change what we are. Why can't he just accept he's a dude who likes to be girly, instead of this nonsense of trying to tell people he IS a girl. Ugh.

[@kernelpickle]

Well, that’s an interesting business model that seems crazy, but I work in manufacturing IT and I had to revive a Win98 PC this past year that was a critical system on a production line that was finally decommissioned less than 6 months ago. The line was already scheduled to finish up its final run of parts and when it went down because the spinning rust in it died, it needed to get brought back online to finish up the run of parts, and it was NOT worth the hassle or cost to upgrade it. I had to create a bootable DOS USB stick so I could restore a Norton Ghost image. Fun fact, there are actually companies that make industrial grade SSDs with a native PATA interface, so you can slot it right into an ancient machine without anything else needed. They apparently have smart controllers in them that know how to manage the wear leveling and other modern SSD type features needed to prolong the longevity. Spending $1,000 in order to bring up a production line that’s down is absolutely worth it, because the alternative (if there is still a company supporting those PLCs, HMIs and machines will charge $50-100k to upfit that line with newer PCs. We’re literally talking about a PC with some software installed on it, and they’re charging tens of thousands. Anytime I fix an old ass PC at work I save them a minimum of $10k, so I’m well loved by the guys who operate our ancient gauge machines that check parts are built to spec.

[@mikebutterface8583]

Remind me when we were in the last night before a line was being decommissioned and i was “filling in” for the IT guy that has been there for almost 20 years because, shrug i don’t know i sat in the room with him. I’m being somewhat facetious because i was at least a desktop administrator prior at the job. Anyway, last night this line needs to run and the server starts crapping out and can’t start the line. The Production IT guys (ladder logic PLC programmer types) didn’t understand what a RAID was and would just try pulling a disk out, trying boot, insert another disk, etc. i was so po’d. There was a hot spare and all they were doing is causing it to try running degraded while copying to the new spare which was also about gone. It’s very scary when you actually see how things are supported and we assemble parts for a very high end auto maker.

[@kernelpickle]

@@mikebutterface8583 Yup, people would be shocked how the sausage is made in the auto industry. I work for a domestic automaker in one of their engine plants, and we make V6's right now and have for several years. The funny thing is that we also make the V6 engine blocks for an Italian manufacturer that used to be part of company, and is known for their exotics being red. Suffice to say the people who drive those cars and pay that kind of money would flip their lid if they knew parts of their engines were actually manufactured in the same facility that builds V6's for much more mundane cars and SUVs. They shouldn't care because we actually know what we're doing because we build more engines in a month than they do in a year, and those low volume OEMs aren't known for their quality.

[@MikeStavola]

I have a bag of 2GB PATA SSDs in my lab right now. They've saved my butt many times.

[@MGSsancho]

For a cheap price of $1k, I would have one of these machines already configured but in the box stored away as an emergency spare.

[@MuseHijinks]

Hobbyists would also be interested in owning such a system. It's a neat thing to have on top of some industries still using older stuff.

[@BenjaminBills]

Also, Linus....Don't lose this guy. He's able to articulate in an entertaining manner the knowledge that many of us have and love reminiscing.

[@beeman4266]

Yeah, Anthony is the best.

[@guysmiley4830]

He's more likeable too. Sorry Linus but he is.

[@NopeSecret]

Its like watching big smart linus.

[@mehvids]

@Maiahi is Anthony still working for LTT? Haven’t seen him in the latest videos these days

[@pop_ulation]

oh wow i did not read your comment before i made mine!

[@danbarnes4069]

I love how the computer looks like a Windows XP/ Vista computer but it runs windows 98.

[@raikitsunagi]

True, it should be white and more plastic to run 98 🤔

[@danbarnes4069]

@@raikitsunagi I agree, most people are familiar with those beige boxes sitting the the lounge paired with a CRT display and the keyboard and mouse which comes with the computer.

[@Dan-Simms]

@@raikitsunagi or more like beige, then really bling it out with Noctua fans haha!

[@SmilyTheMare]

i was thinking that it looked like a xp case

[@vincent570]

I noticed this as well good catch. We old.

[@sharpefilms2287]

I love hearing Anthony talk about why enterprise class stuff will cost more and people will still pay it. I work in film and we get that kinda thing all the time, “why are you paying 10 grand for that workstation, I could build it for half that.” Yes, you could, so could I. However then if anything goes wrong it’s on us to fix it and that takes time away from what we are actually being paid to do. Enterprise customers will GLADLY pay a premium to know that a system has been tested to work and will have the necessary support if it doesn’t. Time is money and it makes so much more sense to spend it and get to doing things we can bill for then to save a buck and miss a deadline later.

[@RickMyBalls]

Not helping your argument much if you still miss the deadline. People will say anything to justify getting duped.

[@HowIsAsh]

@@RickMyBalls Yeah they just can't build good pc's then lmao.

[@pissoffkake]

At half the cost for a DIY some other supplier should probably be able to give a better quote. And at some point using internal resources will probably make sense, if you have them. But your (and his) point still stands. If your job is doing something else entirely, wasting a lot of time on doing something that is NOT your job, like building and fixing the computers on the workplace, is time you are not spending on doing your actual job that brings in the money. And if you have a viabe business, working to bring in the money is probably more profitable than mucking around with other tasks.

[@veduci22]

"I love hearing Anthony talk about why enterprise class stuff will cost more and people will still pay it." Let's not pretend that enterprise "stuff" doesn't also generate fat profit margins much higher than some cheap consumer toys...

[@MozTS]

Time is literally money. Enterprise you pay for time you save in support and fucking around

[@ittos90]

This is EXACTLY what I needed! Our company runs a paging system for several hospitals. The system is running on an old XP machine and requires ISA cards

[@definitlynotbenlente7671]

is there no way to run it on a more modern system like linux??

[@zorkmid1083]

​@@definitlynotbenlente7671 Even (recent) Linux may not support ISA. You'd have to dig up some old-as-crap, unsupported-for-years version of Linux which may not have the drivers for all your hardware and isn't too user-friendly with the install.

[@Singurarity88]

@@zorkmid1083 Convert them to a new standard and move on. Investing thousands of dollars to hold up old tech just for the fear of conversion (and there is one) is just plain stupid, i think.

[@zorkmid1083]

@@Singurarity88 The capital costs for upgrading your system to those new standards may be prohibitive. You'll have to: 1) find compatible new hardware, 2) software that will work with the hardware, 3) retraining the people to use the new software and hardware, then 4) a lengthy debugging process. None of these 4 steps are a given success. Maybe the original hardware manufacturer went out of business or merged with someone else, and no one produces the computer hardware which does precisely this. Or they came out with an entirely new system, which, again, may not do exactly what you want, or isn't supported by the software you're using. As you're well aware, computer technology is constantly evolving, so it's not unheard of to have parts of your system growing out of spec with each other. Edit: oh yeah, you'll have to do all that while your business is still running.

[@Singurarity88]

@@zorkmid1083 But isn't that the thing? Just upgrading when it's neccesary and not keeping old (dying) things alive? Me as an IT Expert would suggest to move on and stop replacing old hardware. Now you guys come in and want to sell your old hardware for that reason? Modern Systems don't depend on liars, and i personally think this is a step forward.

[@lillerosin2915]

omg this dude is such a great hire for Linus back in the day. he is so knowledgeable and a joy to listen and learn from when he talks tech and specific's. An absolute treat and you rarely find articulate people in this way these days. he makes it all so interesting that you just have to listen to the end. Great job man! But you honestly should have been a teacher in my opinion. this was just great! Thank you!

[@daltyd4820]

If you think about it, Anthony being on this channel means he can educate millions of people, instead of only reaching students at a specific school

[@gooooblaster1800]

He’s a natural being in front of the camera even from the beginning

[@iscrewyouall]

@@daltyd4820 this, becoming a teacher will only limit his reach

[@lillerosin2915]

@@daltyd4820 not really correct but ... :o)

[@lillerosin2915]

@@iscrewyouall you are wrong but whatever floats your boat :)

[@PhonePhreak3z]

More Anthony videos I love them please give him his own retro tech/ Linux for beginners and advanced channel he deserves it!

[@ryanpaaz]

Linus talked about Anthony doing Linux content before. TLDR was that he only has one Anthony and while the niche stuff is cool, Anthony is also his go-to guy for benchmarks and new hardware, so having that as a priority really pays LTT bills.

[@nathanross4036]

Anthony is morbidly obese and should not be the face of LTT. He's not even that good of a host. James and Riley are way better hosts

[@Greippi10]

Anthony is awesome! I'm constantly in awe of his knowledge of legacy tech, it's really nostalgic because a lot of this stuff comes from the time when I was into tech. But I fell off the tech train, so it's nice to see him carrying the torch! He's also a great presenter and really pleasant to listen to!

[@aarondavis8943]

Anthony rocks. All round excellent at explaining stuff and obviously highly knowledgeable. He has a perfect presenter voice, too. He could be a radio DJ or NPR host!

[@cyscott2714]

I forgot how fragile those versions of Windows were. Doing loads of things could lead to a blue screen or an outright crash and reboot. You knew you were in trouble when safe mode wouldn't boot.

[@steinbauge4591]

a lot of old specialized stuff will run DOS and do only one thing. It can go on forever. If it communicates by standard ports it can be replaced today.

[@kinaceman]

always have backups of the registry!

[@Subtra]

i still remember, of thing that are still fragile today are printers, its like they never changed at all in the last 100 Years of IT Technology XD

[@exgenica]

@@Subtra Except that around 1980, an IBM ink jet printer cost something like US$20,000 and was about half the size of a typical home refrigerator. Now, for about $60, one can buy a far superior, faster, higher print quality, *far more reliable* ink jet printer the size of a couple shoeboxes.

[@Subtra]

@@exgenica still doesnt change the fragile part, i mean yes its more reliable and stuff but office printers still break down regulary like a clockwork, if you use one for yourself its another matter and a copyshop should use an industrial one of course. Best part about printers these days, if something goes wrong it shows you where it feels wrong, other then random error codes nobody can decipher anyway XD

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

6:42 Cool, the power supply provides -5V. That's important for ISA device support, though there are purpose-built transformers available these days, at least in the hobby market. Fun fact, the "reserved" pin that is usually empty on the 24-pin motherboard power connector used to be the -5V line.

[@tweakpc]

But this is really only necessary for very old and special devices, for example some ISA sound cards, Controller Cards.... Even older AT systems do not necessarily need -5V. I have already operated a PIII 450MHz Slot 1 retro PC with a modern DCtoDC power supply without any problems. The power consumption of these old systems is also very low.

[@thundereagle4130]

@@tweakpc It is important for the Soundblaster 16 and 32 and the Gravis Ultrasound. Some ISA cards used it, other didn't. It is kinda hit or miss. I have a PIII 700 Mhz with a Voodoo SLI and SB AWE 32 and a normal Be Quiet PSU wasn't enough (besides the fact my SB didn't work due to the -5v problem).

[@Platomenti]

I used to work as technician on a hospital, many CT Scan actually still powered by an old Pentium IV or III machine with that ISA slot card connected to the CT Scan. So when the PC is borken or something it is really hard to find replacement I remember the hospital had to disable CT Scan for 5-7 days because we are waiting for the parts (I remember that we need to hunting for parts from old school and goverment institution) and it causes huge mess because many people need the CT Scan, so company like that is a life savers (literally) when a CT Scan PC broke you can simply order new one, installing driver and software needed and have a down time of approx. 1-2 days possibly saving countless life.

[@lolumo]

I guess its an old CT machine that isn't compatiblke with newer PCs, with the hospital considering it to be cheaper to keep getting PCs instead of spending millions on the new CT

[@volkhen0]

Why not have backup PC ready to be swapped? These computers are really cheap.

[@Elkarlo77]

@@volkhen0 When they were scavenging for old Parts, that putts you at the problem that this hardware can literally die on the shelves. @Namak : ISA has one Feature which is very hard to emulate on newer Connections including PCI: Absolut Realtime without Buffering and there was the odd time when Microcomputers were not as avaible and PCIE already implemented, when you still could buy 815E Boards for this Purpose as the "King" Tualatin PIII had the best Realtime Performance till the C2D and Athlon 64 X2 launched. So from 2000-2006 was this odd time new scientific Machines still came out with ISA Boards, with PIII Maschines, when the Prozessor and ISA was already totally obsolete. Today you putt simply a hardened Raspberry pi in it, so an ARM Prozessor with lot of Ram, which passes the results over.

[@hunn20004]

Borken is now an official internet word

[@mikebutterface8583]

Why does this procedure cost so much then to run on some old antiquated machinery. Being facetious, but yeah…

[@wvcollenburg]

I have worked for 'the industry leader' in virtualization and one of my customers was 'that dutch lithography machine builder'. They very often asked for legacy support such as w98 because the machines they build are being delivered with an application set that is built on top of the at that time current OS, but the machine needs to run 20 years + because of the investment they represent.

[@Porabany]

Thats very ASML of you :)

[@bradford5833]

I worked in Academia for a research university, stuff like this is always in need. Especially for labs, some of the labs have equipment that can be 20+ years old and the company is defunct or wants crazy money for a more recent OS compatible version of their software for this one specific special use machine. I wish I knew this company existed 5 years ago.

[@CHIEF_420]

🎓

[@1omerfaruk]

Wouldn't a virtual machine with old OS be more direct? or is it more hussle?

[@SAMarcus]

LOL, yeah. I was going to work on a retrofit job a couple years back when a hospital wanted to switch up to Win 7. That got delayed, delayed, delayed as they desperately tried to find either updated software that could read the existing files or other ways to transfer the software to the new systems. Some of the software was running in DOS on Win 95 machines... and the company that designed it was long dead with no replacements. And with HIPPA, there were a lot of issues with how the files were encrypted and not being allowed to just transfer them into new software that wasn't a direct upgrade of the old stuff.

[@SAMarcus]

@@1omerfaruk No, the issue becomes hardware compatibility as well. And also, good luck finding newer PCs that have legacy hardware like parallel ports. USB to whatever adapters often can't communicate properly and don't work which then requires weird software written up to fix that which of course leads to a different set of bugs, etc...

[@katanah3195]

@@SAMarcus Hey, the nice thing about a hospital having a bunch of computer stuff still running in really old operating systems, means at least the computers won't get viruses - no one writes viruses for old systems.

[@roberttrains]

Kinda wish I knew about this company a couple of years ago. The IT company I worked for had a water department contract and a new boss got hired. She cleaned house and upgraded everyone’s computer with the help of geek squad. They did a great job. Everything was shinny and new including the very custom SKADA computer that controlled all the pumps and valves in the county. When it came time to make a adjustment to the valves the employee had a hard time communicating to the equipment. After two trips form geek squad they finally call our company and ask us how we fixed it last time that is was broken. we informed the tech the old computer was custom built by the maker of the SKADA system and could not be replaced and it is the only thing that will run the equipment. we suggested that they reinstall the old computer and everything would work again. the computer is by now long gone in some e waste facility by now. The boss of course called us liars and called the manufacturer of the control system. The manufacturer agreed with us saying that the county refused to upgrade the system and the system is going on 32 years old so it needed to be upgraded to the latest system. It would cost over 21 million dollars to retrofit all the valves and pumps to run on the new equipment. So there it sat a beautiful new 21 million dollar computer that could only play solitaire until 5-8 months when the new controllers get installed. Her career was measured in hours not years after that.

[@andlinux]

I love these stories, people who think they know all but in fact they are so dumb. 😀

[@tanja-k]

Now invested in this story, what happened next? 🍿

[@FlyingPlastic356]

I have similar story, but reversed. I was once called by a company begging for us to fix their controller on their (at that time) extremely critical machine. When I checked the control system, it was an almost 35 years old controller that was obsoleted by our company nearly a decade ago. We have to set this controller obsolete because there are some crucial components that our vendor no longer produces since they have those SKU obsolete for some time, at that time. So, me not knowing what happened, just did my best and contact everyone, including colleagues from 2 different countries with guru-like experiences on this old controller, and they both roughly said that they should have upgraded this a long time ago. They sold their last spare unit years ago, and nobody can make or repair it anymore since the parts no longer exist or available anywhere. And so, sat there a multi-million dollar critical machine which didn't work with no spare part anymore. I found out that they rejected upgrade offers from our past colleagues years ago because they're too tight to spend couple of grand worth of upgrades even though we have warned them for years. Moral of the story: management. Sometimes they're too edgy and spend millions on unnecessary things that don't work, or they're too tight and does not spend a penny on important things until it breaks and make the whole company grinded to a halt.

[@PrograError]

@@tanja-k im guessing they upgraded it... even if it ain't cheap...

[@MikhaelAhava]

@@FlyingPlastic356 intriguing.

[@xenonkay]

I installed Win98 on a socket 775 system years ago just to see how far it could go and its PCI Express support actually surprised me. It had a PCIe (not AGP) 6600GT in it that that just worked straight away. The OS had no concept of what PCIe was and such cards showed up as ordinary PCI devices in the device manager, but they worked anyway as long as there were Win98 drivers available. I also tried a generic PCIe I/O controller based on a JMB363 chip and that worked too.

[@stefanl5183]

That's because PCI Express is compatible with PCI from a software point of view. That's why you can use those simple adapters you buy on ebay or ali express to adapt PCI cards to PCIe slots.

[@GodmanchesterGoblin]

I loved this. Thanks, Anthony. From 1992 to 1995 I designed specialist ISA bus cards for avionics databus testing (ARINC 429 / 575 / 629). This was in-development ground based testing; ISA hardware is not flight friendly. These cards sold in minute quantities (at very high prices) to major aircraft manufacturers. It warms my heart that thirty years later a company has decided that proper host PC support for legacy specialist hardware is a niche worth pursuing. I wish them every success.

[@seanlawrence6029]

ARINC 429 is alive and going strong.

[@FL4SHK]

I can also confirm that ARINC 429 is still being used.

[@pipeeeeees]

I’m a young electrical engineer (born 1998), and I actually had to design a drop-in replacement for an ISA interface board used in one of our products. It’s cool to see that at one time at least ISA was very common in industry

[@zfox1]

3:12 except that he actually meant RS232. and the long-range one could also be RS485, also a very reliable serial interface

[@MrPorisius]

I knew this, but thanks for pointing it out for everyone. I had to pause and restart the video because I was like "What? They messed up the correction as well?"

[@Jimmeh_B]

Yeah, I caught that too.

[@davidcain3752]

Yea definitely a goof on Anthony/editors part

[@TrainMasterMan]

Was just about to type this. They need to correct the correction :)

[@Mr.Morden]

12:53 Speaking of old stuff... No children, Anthony is not referring to a PlayStation keyboard and mouse. He is referring to PS/2 which is a type of connector computers used before USB for input devices like keyboards and mice. Before that they used AT keyboard connectors which were bigger, stronger, and more reliable, similar to XLR audio connectors today. Mice and various types of game controllers used a serial port.

[@harrybaals2549]

I worked in a warehouse in Toronto, and we had piles and piles of old computers. We would sell Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 systems for $500 plus to businesses that relied on legacy software. A popular reason was for POS systems. Apparently, most POS software is subscription based, so they preferred to stick with software that they fully owned, as well as not having to deal with the hassle of re-training staff and porting inventory data over

[@drCox12]

A few moths ago we had exactly this problem at work. An old x86 (AMD 386) computer running DOS went bad. It caused occasional errors writing to the flash memory card and the card wasn't the culprit. Had to be replaced immediately because a complete failure would mean that a production machine worth a seven-digit sum that makes products worth a five-digit sum per day is just dead. That said: A critical replacement part for only 1000 Dollars is an absolute bargain where I work.

[@TJ-vh2ps]

This tracks with my experience: getting Windows 95-98 to work with your hardware was an accomplishment in and of itself.

[@Clemppu]

It still is! I love to dabble with old machines and try to get them running. Sometimes it's a breeze, sometimes you're in a world of hurt. 😁

[@fredericbrown8871]

​@@Clemppu Recently tinkered with retro Win 9x builds and for me remembering how worked stuff we used to do all the time (because we were constantly reinstalling Windows back in the days) was the hardest part on officially supported hardware. Installing Win 9x on more 'modern' system (like Core2s), that's exactly like you describe (... more often than not the world of pain I'd say, but so satisfying when you get it to work). Happily we have Google nowadays, unlike in the days!

[@M33f3r]

Yeah that’s why they made the second edition. I’m not sure if this is running that or not but dear lord I hope so. Hunting down dll files and gremlins is not something I ever want to do again

[@jasperwillem]

Our home had a packerd hell custom build from a sale somewhere, I could have learned an instrument in the time I spend troubleshooting it.

[@bami2]

3:34 This can be easily explained. For a lot of schools/colleges around that era, they had volume licensing for their windows, yet every pc came with a loose retail windows key sticker and install disk. My dad worked as a sys/network admin and I have literal stacks of still sealed windows XP licenses and install discs. edit: to everyone who wants one, I'm not selling them or even distributing them for free. That would be software piracy since I'm not an authorized reseller and the only reason these keys work is because it's an oversight in how OEMs license windows, not because they are actually legal licenses. XP is end-of-life anyways so you shouldn't connect a PC running it to the internet and doesn't receive updates anymore so you might as well don't even bother with activating it.

[@crf80fdarkdays]

I would pay decent money for one of em

[@crf80fdarkdays]

I would pay decent money for one of em

[@narutofanz4]

can you sell me one? = )

[@mikkojala]

hey i would give you 50€ for a pop

[@helloworld145]

It wouldn't be software piracy since Windows XP is abandonware

[@ExcelsiorTech]

I work at an engineering department at a university. I bought from this company a brand new Pentium III specifically because I needed the ISA ports to use with very old lab equipment and its software. Upgrading the software would’ve cost tens of thousands of dollars while buying something like this doesn’t set me back much more than a grand at most.

[@lowbird7947]

Couldn't you just buy a usb2isa card instead?

[@ExcelsiorTech]

@@lowbird7947 I wish. It had an assigned IRQ that would mess with things like that. I tried that first. 😵‍💫 I could not even use boards later than Pentium 3 because they all emulate ISA and have problems.

[@linuxguy1199]

​@@lowbird7947 No, most ISA drivers for custom stuff rely upon drivers that do direct memory reads and writes, a USB to ISA card does not memory map to the same locations and thus the drivers would not be compatiable.

[@miamitten1123]

@@ExcelsiorTech what’s work does your lab do that would require old equipment to be used and an ‘old’ PC to maintain it?

[@ExcelsiorTech]

@@miamitten1123 I think it was for a gas chromatography machine. The craziest thing was that it was running Windows NT 4… Lol. I had to go through great lengths just to get USB working and all the device drivers and such. Also I used the same sata to IDE adapters that they use on this video.

[@Twenty_Six_Hundred]

Love these videos where Anthony takes us back to the past. I grew up with DOS and Win98 so it's just pure goodness seeing the retro side of things get some love.

[@aussiepunkrocksV20]

Love going to the edge with Windows 98 support. One I built most recently was a PCI-Express nVidia gForce 6600GT, Core2Duo 6600 (running single core of course), 1GB DDR2, Audigy 2 ZS... full DOS FM synth and Digital Sound compatibility thanks to the legacy compatibility still in the VIA P4M900 chipset

[@PatrickDKing]

That's pretty cool. I remember back when all our business pcs were running XP, we delays upgrading to windows 7 for quite a while because our accounting software wouldn't work on 64 bit windows 7, XP on ours was 32 bit. Then the manufacturer made some updates and we could run it fine on windows 7 64 bit. My philosophy is if it is bought and paid for, reliable, and still working, keep on using it.

[@pandemicneetbux2110]

To a degree depending on use case, yeah. Provided you aren't at risk of security threats for example. Although honestly my bigger issue is I hated every edition of Windows after 98, and basically just tolerated XP because it was "fine" despite feeling like it was made for children. This got worse over the years and I've not tolerated anything after 7. 10 I finally got talked into as finding a 7 key was such a pain in the ass and I realized it was so old a lot of my games just won't work with it, even though I consider the whole operating system bloatware and spyware. Funny, everyone on ebay is slamming win10 into it no matter how old. I don't even know why they do this, because like fucking hell a laptop with 4gb of RAM is ever going to run this piece of shit and the software you need it to run. Good God, I'm using 8gb of RAM right now just to type this and have Adrenalin, Steam, and GOG Galaxy on in the background. I've seen windows 11 and it's AWFUL. It looks like they're now trying to copy some of what I hate about Macs.

[@PatrickDKing]

@@pandemicneetbux2110 True, I doubt we were on anyones radar to attack but we always kept our accounting pcs and backup pc offline and didn't even put browsers on them because there was no need to, just data entry and printing. On Windows 7 we did hook them up to the internet because by then some vendors were integrated into the software and the data needed to transfer. I hated vista mostly b/c it was buggy and many games wouldn't play, but eventually it got ironed out and by windows 7 many 97% or so of things got caught up. Biggest problem I had was legacy games having a 32 bit executable and not a 64 bit. Then it was pretty smooth and stable for the last years of its life. We delayed windows 10 b/c it looked too smartphone tablety. And we wanted to make sure everything we used would work on it. Ultimately we bit the bullet and slowly, sloooowly upgraded pcs. Looking back, I'd just do fresh installs of windows 10. Upgrading from 7 was so hit or miss. A pc could run for hours, seem to almost be done then error out and take another hour reversing everything, then magically finally have success with an upgrade. Although the installed programs were present thru upgrade, all the pcs we "upgraded" had to eventually have fresh windows 10 install put on for stability issues. I still prefer the windows 7 layout but now that I know where a lot of things got hidden in windows 10 its slightly easier to deal with. I still hate it though.

[@ost3005]

Wow, recognising the IDE cables and then being confused why Anthony is explaining what they are makes me realise i'm officially old and nobody has seen one for years Should probably specify I’m only 21 as well 😅

[@Rezzell]

Yep. I still have a computer with both IDE and Sata cables, functional and usable. But we're old, no doubt about that.

[@roguecommandprompt5268]

I was about to say that about ISA slots lol your comment will do :)

[@boltinabottle6307]

Those are actually PATA cables. PATA and SATA are both IDE standards.

[@codygrinnell8676]

lol!! I have a 2 OG Xbox systems!! I upgraded the IDE cable to a higher bandwidth one!! I'm going to be Modding it at some point as well

[@christopherpittman2689]

I’ve still got a pair of Voodoo 2 cards in a box somewhere 😂 and last time I tried my first 486 box still boots.

[@markphillips6170]

There's defintely a market for this kind of system. I used to do IT support for a company that did embroidery (on uniforms, etc) that had a fairly ancient PC give up the ghost. This was the one that handle the designs for embroidery machines (I guess they were like giant sewing machines) so it was crucial to get things going again. The software would only run on Windows 98 and would only export to a 3 1/2" floppy or by serial port. This was back in 2008 so it wasn't too difficult to get it up and running again. Replacing it with a more modern system wasn't an option. For a business, spending £1000 on a new/old PC or half a million to replace otherwise working machinery is a no-brainer

[@ec1888cfc]

I've seen oil platforms using this stuff as part of instrument and control systems, for safety systems over rides etc to force valves open and what not. It's mental but there's a lot of stuff like this out there.

[@zimbu_]

Wouldn't be surprised if these guys get a lot more business from this video. That looked great when you opened it up. Companies who have a sudden need for this will be asking how soon they can get it delivered, not how much it costs.

[@samonsthewise]

neighbor would have killed for this service last week, but i figured out the base address for his parallel port PCI card. so i bet your right.

[@ShinyQuagsire]

13:52 The cool thing about USB drives is that USB Mass Storage is just a subset of SCSI, so it makes a lot of sense to show up as a zip drive kinda thing. USB being half-duplex and kinda dinky before 3.0 also meant a custom protocol wouldn't make much sense.

[@tirkentube]

i'm sitting here wondering.... why i'm running windows 10 and my SD cards of all shapes and sizes all still show up just like this? i mean sometimes they'll have a name on them, but they are still treated as "removeable USB device" and windows still suggests ejecting it in the system tray before removing it. so, anthony acts like this process is a thing of the past, but to me, it's still very much current. i mean even if i plug my android phone up to my PC, it shows up like that. EDIT: that being said, when XP came out, i was using an external USB HDD and running games directly from the drive, even though it showed up as "removeable disk" lol. so, i mean, it worked. they loaded slightly slower, but i think this was USB 2.0 days anyway, so, really not much different speeds than an internal drive at that point.

[@grn1]

@@tirkentube His point about removing drives was that the way the drives were formatted and the way Win98 handled external storage meant that just pulling the plug was far more likely to corrupt data. With modern devices, even if it still suggest removing it first, you can generally get away with just unplugging the device. I still try to remove media properly just in case it's still writing data in the background but unless you specifically set a USB device to use caching it shouldn't be a problem (caching speeds up certain operations but means that data being written to a drive may not actually be fully written when the normal copy/paste dialog goes away). He also mentioned journaling which helps correct partially corrupted file system data which can happen when you remove a drive before it's done being written to. FAT32 doesn't have journaling while NTFS and most newer file systems do (NTFS was introduced with Window XP and was one of their selling points for the then new OS).

[@stefanl5183]

@@grn1 "NTFS was introduced with Window XP " NTFS was around LONG before XP.. It was introduce in 1993 in Windows NT 3.1. In fact, NTFS stands for NT Filing System. So, windows NT had NTFS long before XP came out. XP was windows NT 5.1.

[@grn1]

@@stefanl5183 I distinctly remember NTFS being a big deal for Windows XP. After a quick web search it looks like the version of NTFS in XP was upgraded quite a bit to have similar performance to FAT32. I think it may have been the first Windows that defaulted to and/or required NTFS. I also remember them making a big deal about XP no longer being an app that ran on top of DOS like previous versions of Windows (while the command line can be accessed and compatibility was there it wasn't DOS anymore). Of course this was 20+ years ago at this point so my memory could be a bit foggy.

[@stefanl5183]

@@grn1 "I think it may have been the first Windows that defaulted to and/or required NTFS." No! Windows NT 3.1 "defaulted" to NTFS, and Windows NT never ran "on top of Dos", as you refer to it. I think what you are referring to is that win9x booted through a Dos like system as it loaded, but this was NEVER the case with the NT versions of windows. Windows NT was always a full 32 bit protected mode operating system. And that's where NTFS came from. Before NTFS windows NT used HPFS which was a joint effort between IBM and microsoft and was also used in OS/2.

[@mej684]

We had a milling machine from the 70's that needed a new pc. I agree with Anthony, we had to buy an ancient rig to run the serial connections. It was either spend $500 on an old pc or $100k on a new milling machine.

[@LordSandwichII]

Surely there is a way to interface with the machine using a modern pc, even if you have to custom make an interface with an Arduino. I mean, how hard could that be?...

[@oliverlemke465]

@@LordSandwichII Maybe there is, but you’re neglecting the economics of the situation. Trying to find some makeshift solution is gonna cost quite some manhours, and if it happens to fail, will result in hours, if not days of production standstill until you find the bug. Why do all that if you can just get an old PC, which is warrantied and proven to work?

[@LordSandwichII]

@@oliverlemke465 I wasn't being serious. I realise that it could be pretty hard. Although I would say that that should be considered as a long term solution, in case the situation arises that an old computer is no longer accessible or affordable.

[@rangefreewords]

💯 If Linus went to the Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs level of IT for one episode, I'd watch.

[@TheDIMONART]

@@LordSandwichII Arduino in serious industrial CNC machine? No..

[@DeKempster]

I'm working in OT at it doesn't surprise me one bit that companies like this exist. I see win XP running scada application more than it should. Heck DOS is still being used. Not even taking about PLC's that are 40 years old and still running (Siemens S5, Allen Bradley PLC2 and the like). IT can learn something from this Regarding the serial he is probably refering to RS-485 with fieldbusses like Profibus-DP. Which indeed can go over a kilometer.

[@Mdudeman13]

I work at a water treatment plant and it's the same way, about a year ago they upgraded the main PLC for our conventional treatment plant from a PLC2 to Micrologix 1400, talk about a huge upgrade. They've been better about upgrading the computers however since upgrading to newer versions of Wonderware Intouch is pretty straight forward.

[@fonkbadonk5370]

I'm an automation engineer with IT background, and the last S5 we replaced at our customers was about 10 years ago, but just a few weeks ago we were asked if we could revive a small sub-plant where the HMI was based on a WinNT 4.0(!) PC with a Siemens communication processor that doesn't have any drivers for any newer OS. Given the limited scope of functions this needs, we're probably going to end up replacing it with a somewhat recent touch panel via a new ethernet capable interface card. But everything else is from about 1997 and will be for many years to come. Many don't quite realize on how old things this world runs on to this day, and does so surprisingly well.

[@Noughtta]

PLC tech here, I worked on a program that was stored on a windows 98 machine just like this. I work in industrial automation and you find stuff like this all the time. If it works, why change it?

[@kristopherleslie8343]

Nothing to learn for IT, it’s a minority aspect of these still running around.

[@kristopherleslie8343]

@@Noughtta same reason NASA hasn’t changed stuff but it’s a point of failure but the ones who signs the checks don’t run a risk analysis 😐

[@blackraen]

6:42 Man, early to mid 2000s power supplies... That was the period where I learned you don't go cheap on a PSU. I feel like 9 out of every 10 times I had to go visit a friend/relative/etc that was having "computer problems", it was due to a dead PSU.

[@W1ldTangent]

Can confirm, my body count was 5 PSUs replaced in about a 5 year time span from various branches of the family tree 😂

[@button-puncher]

PC Power & Cooling power supplies! They were the go-to back in the day. So much junk back then. I remember more than once power up a PC with a generic PS and seeing a green flash out the back as some component vaporized.

[@MrDuncl]

We had a large expensive environmental test chamber at work. The controller was a built in PC with an ISA card to read all the sensors and control the contactors and a tiny open frame VGA monitor in the front panel. The most unusual thing was that the entire system ran from a 3.5" floppy which was big enough to hold the control software and user sequences (ramp temperature to XX degrees then hold for x hours etc). A colleague thought it would be good to run it from a Compact Flash in an IDE adaptor but for some reason he could never get that to work properly (probably some obscure part of the software still trying to access A:\).

[@taner65th]

Im so glad Anthony is getting more screen time in videos.

[@RedstoneMiner18]

Same

[@SumPatti]

Yes, he's so good on camera

[@ndgoliberty]

Anthony and Dan are my new favorites.

[@ggill1313]

Y’all say this like he hasn’t been for awhile lol

[@DeKempster]

Yeah, it's not as dumbed down as when other presenters are

[@candle86]

Something you didn't touch on is the fact that because it has ISA it doesn't have to run Windows 98, it can run MS-DOS and those ISA slots give it the ability to use really old DOS only cards in that enviroment. It's why my 98 machine has 1 ISA slot, though mine is for a soundblaster Awe64, but I need that for DOS game compatability

[@ripleyhrgiger4669]

The 2001 benchmark brought back so many memories. I used to think that was the most amazing looking thing in the world back then.

[@hedgeearthridge6807]

I thought it was going to be one of the weird proprietary operating systems like the ones IBM made and still makes, like OS/2. But wow, I was wrong!

[@raminatox]

At this point Win98 could qualify as "one of the weird proprietary operating systems"...

[@patrickbateman3840]

@@TalesOfWar you know Microsoft didn’t work on the Kernel it work on the gui

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

I think they're almost entirely gone now, but I saw an ATM booting into eComStation within the last few years. I have yet to confirm ArcaOS in the wild but I wouldn't be surprised if I ran into it unknowingly.

[@ethelredhardrede1838]

@@TalesOfWar Umm, IBM was making OS/2 to screw MS and the clone business. Oddly MS understood what was going on and had a much better understanding of the market.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

@@patrickbateman3840 Microsoft worked on aspects other than the GUI. For example, HPFS, which evolved into NTFS, and LAN Manager, which became SMB, were written primarily by Microsoft.

[@otakuotaku6774]

Can we just take a minute of Respect for Windows 98

[@otaku_otaku1564]

Big respect

[@RedstoneMiner18]

I own a windows 98 pc myself :D

[@hitman627]

Windows after 24 year: I'm still here

[@mrprogrammer9116]

Have a lot of memories with that one

[@jakimcampbell]

I took that minute when I watched the ad that came before the video

[@XaitTV]

I recently started a study within IT and just last week we had about older computing systems. This video couldn't have come at a better time for me, the information in this video is so relevant to what my lessons are going over! Thanks LTT :D

[@Neoxon619]

It’s videos is like this that remind me of the old curse of every other Windows OS being crap. Also it reminds me of how old I’m getting.

[@RedstoneMiner18]

I own a windows 98 pc myself

[@Wave_Duck]

@Ian Visser Windows 11 is windows 10 but with a new coat of paint

[@otherssingpuree1779]

Dos 5.x -> 98 -> ME -> Vista -> 8 ->7 This was my journey. 7 was a magical experience.

[@dazzab111]

@@otherssingpuree1779 Windows XP was amazing too....but I really miss Windows 7.......11 is trash.

[@ETHANR26]

microsoft payin people just to make confusing stupid comments lmao

[@EfrainMan]

I used to work at a company that, as late as 2014 when I left, definitely had a mix of modern hardware and old stuff like this for using their old manufacturing machines. They relied on ISA cards (card connector standard even older than PCI) to communicate to the database software the machines relied on, and they definitely had to make sure the power supplies were old enough to feed the ISA slots the right kind of power, otherwise they just would not work.

[@mainiac430]

As an IT field tech I come across many companies that use these older machines for everything from sensor IOs to controllers that will run machines that will last forever. Alot of these computers run in dirty environments and while I can replace componants like power supplies and hdds...if a system board fries...its done. Companies like this one are a huge need.

[@Silverhazey_]

I saw Anthony in the thumbnail. I dropped everything to click and watch asap. This man and his enthusiasm for tech, Linux, retro gaming, it’s just the best.

[@DabBubbles420]

Lol same, was scrolling and all there was was minecraft, crap and more crap then ANTHONY! Dude kicks ass with his knowledge and enthusiasm

[@yosutzuhruoj]

Yes, he's very entertaining while being educational. All the marks of a great teacher.

[@anthropicPanda]

Agreed...

[@woooooooooow]

That's why I'm here

[@ScoobaMusic]

That case is actually used by a bunch of Custom PC Builders, Bytespeed, DakTek, and a bunch of other companies you probably haven't heard of. I work in a computer recycling facility, I've seen this many times.

[@TheTreyBombay]

I believe it is manufactured by InWin, we used a very similar case.

[@NukEverything]

yep the case is defaul xD alot of pcs was like that around 2010 if u buy prebuild like for 1000

[@athmaid]

@@TheTreyBombay any idea where I could get one of those new in the EU?

[@dataterminal]

@@athmaid maybe not that exact case, but evercase sell 'retro' cases new stock.

[@Mdudeman13]

Had a ton of Bytespeed computers at school lol.

[@kirtmoore8719]

I am a repair tech for arcade games. Many of the computer based machines run Linux. But most use "Windows 98 Embedded" which I believe is a stripped down version of 98 that acts as the foundation for many driving and flying games. The serial port is connected to the I/O board (input / output) for analog devices such as steering, acceleration, braking, shifter, cabinet lighting effects, diagnostic buttons, etc. In this environment, serial is fast and reliable. These I/O boards are sometimes as big as a motherboard and some also act as a key or Dongle to prevent piracy of the software. USB is used by some manufacturers and many use both together. My experience is that, due to vibrations in active arcade games, serial is more reliable that USB which often has issues due to the weak physical connection with the sockets. A microsecond disconnect due to a bad connection will easily freeze the program. Common with USB. Some manufacturers use the audio program to reconfigure the audio in, aux and microphone ports to all be outputs to a 6 channel amplifier for surround sound and bass reflex speaker under the seat. These systems are not built to be upgraded (with the exception of future video card replacements and drivers). Windows 98 Embedded is an extremely stable platform and very flexible. Because it has only one thing to do, it can do it very fast. Exceeding all but the best home PC gaming systems. Unnecessary things are disabled. No need for Microsoft support. These systems run for years with few issues. Dell and Lenovo PCs are used mostly but custom built systems are not uncommon. Many manufacturers use a mounted motherboard but no PC. Much easier to work on.

[@BatBeardGames]

There's a lot of industrial applications that run very specific and old software. My dad's lab as a chemist had windows 98, me, xp, machines running different stuff.

[@dxanatos2]

Yeah, we still have some machines where the control software only runs on Windows XP. We virtualized some of them, but that's not always an option. (For example if the PC also needs some proprietary card to connect to the machine. Or the maintenance contract states that IT is not allowed to touch the Hardware)

[@shingofan]

@@dxanatos2 That's such a bizarre contract clause - why would something like that exist?

[@dxanatos2]

@@shingofan I honestly have no idea.

[@VanisherXP]

@@dxanatos2 So the third party can continue to extract money out of your company instead of IT obsoleting them?

[@GYTCommnts]

I think there are industrial "secrets" clauses related to that.

[@phydeux]

Hey Anthony, one of the biggest use cases for something like this is in lab situations where every component and driver needs to be thoroughly validated and trusted to maintain exacting performance tolerances. And where buying new lab software can cost a fortune and require years of new hardware validation. It's more economical in both time and money just to buy what you know will meet your requirement and keep the Windows 11 machines for your office computer.

[@nktslp3650]

Coming from someone who is currently coding in a 60 years old programming language, I totally understand the concept of old modern stuff. Sometimes, you just can't replace the old if it works well and/or your entire structure revolves around it. Old doesn't always mean obsolete. For the curious, COBOL is language I'm talking about. And around 50% of the entire financial structure is build around it, and IBM is still maintaining the language and developping new hardware for it.

[@SilverX95]

You probably had to set the bios setting to point to the graphics card some older motherboards didn't have Auto detection when you had an AGP card installed you had to use the integrated graphics to set it up beforehand

[@ELSTERLING]

It's also probable that even most of the AGP cards they have don't have 9X drivers or just don't have good 9X drivers. I believe the last line officially supported for Nvidia was the Geforce 6xxx and for ATI/AMD it was the Xxxx line and even then the drivers weren't exactly well supported or stable. Realistically theiir best chances are probably a Radeon 9x00 or a Geforce 4 or older.

[@Vile-Flesh]

@@ELSTERLING Geforce 4 still feels new to me. I remember when we got our Ti 4200 and UT2k4 looked and played amazing.

[@ppmguire]

@@ELSTERLING He had either a 9700 or 9800 Pro in his hand.

[@yensteel]

@@Vile-Flesh Had a 4200 Ti and played UT2k4 as well! Then boom! Radeon 9700 pro made it look slow. Highest end at $399. Then the hairdryer card.

[@PaulsComputerEmp]

@@ppmguire 99% 9700 pro

[@dethvx]

I'm sure it would be shocking to know how much of our infrastructure is still running on ancient tech. The original engineers of the solution have long since moved on or retired and there is no budget to modernize so it just gets kept on life support.

[@boredapathetic]

i work with many large companies and a lot of them are indeed working with legacy tech. mostly older software actually, but there are some with deathly old hardware as well.

[@haminator55]

I work with legacy software rather than hardware, but I've got to say I quite like the job security that comes with it. Often there actually is budget to modernise stuff, but little reason to actually do it. A lot of the code I work with was written in the 80s but is rock solid, not much reason to replace it.

[@boredapathetic]

@@haminator55 you’ve found a niche, that’s always good for job security. also, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, eh?

[@mateuszzimon8216]

@@boredapathetic i was working in company where we called them snowflake's, they have a CNC machine operating on 133MHz 16MB, on win95.

[@boredapathetic]

@@mateuszzimon8216 yikes, i’m surprised Windows doesn’t eat up most of that memory.. what’s left for the CNC application?

[@Autunite]

I've worked as an automation technician in both dairy production and water/sewage treatment. In one dairy I worked at, they had a robot that took samples of milk cartons and put drops of sample in a tray, that then were analyzed to check for bacterial growth. This was a robot that cost $3 million. The PC running this machine has an ISA Yamaha servo controller card, an ISA I/O-card and serial interface to control the robot. Midst the hectic spring season, the PC decided to die. A company creating legacy PCs delivered a new one with express shipping for about $2500, and it had the guts of an old Windows XP machine, but new. $2500 is way cheaper than $3-5 mill for a new robot, and added wait ontop of that.

[@mattwestling164]

Windows 98 takes me back to simpler, and yet more complicated times. 😁

[@veltcardio]

frustrating times

[@cvspvr]

@@veltcardio THE AGE OF PAIN!

[@Gatitasecsii]

Always happy to watch videos hosted by Anthony just telling us what he knows mostly from experience.

[@BoyProdigyX]

There's something about how Anthony presents that makes me trust absolutely ANYTHING he has to say haha

[@nightcorefusion3884]

On the topic of the windows key. "genuine" ones are simple to come by. Because we know how the random generation works now. Using the same formula Microsoft used in the day, you can "create" your own key.

[@JelleBesseling]

yea but how do you get the nice looking official sticker?

[@vidm96]

This reminds me of my highschool. When I started highschool in 2009, the building was brand new. We were the first batch of students to start their first year in that building. This new building also featured computer controlled* blinds in the main auditorium. These blinds were controlled through serial with a very proprietary piece of software running on a windows XP PC. Somehow, this system would also only work with that specific PC. Other PCs with serial wouldn't work. Shortly after they had finished their work on the school building, the company that had installed this already outdated and weirdly proprietary system went out of business. So if this one PC were to break, the school would have no way of controlling the blinds in their very expensive new building. *They weren't even automated. All the computer program had were some buttons to open and close the blinds...

[@JJFlores197]

Gotta love proprietary stuff with little to no documentation. I work in school tech support. We have upgraded our school marquee signs to more modern and easy to update systems. In the past, they required a special program and license that was tied to the machine. It worked, but it became a hassle over time when the company that made the software either went out of business or dropped all support for the old software. It was also annoying to move the license to a different machine as sometimes a new license had to be regenerated. It was a mess. We've had other proprietary systems that still work, but the people who installed it have long gone so it is only a matter of time before stuff starts breaking and no one knows how to fix it.

[@jimtekkit]

There's a good reason why interfaces like serial, parallel and VGA are refusing to die. The electronics required to generate these signals are incredibly simple and easy to integrate into a design. If you compare a Raspberry Pi to an Arduino, it's not hard to see that a Raspberry Pi is far more complicated due to the infrastructure needed to support those modern I/O ports.

[@jierenzheng7670]

Win98 SE was one of my memorable Windows OS, I remember a time before that with just MSDOS, then windows 3.1

[@BrendenPragasam]

As someone who makes retro pc for people with disabilities, downgrading a Windows 7 or vista pc to work with windows 98 or xp is a far better option for most people Add an ssd, put in only 1 gb of ram( 4 if you are going above distro sp2) and you're gonna have an easier time for alot cheaper

[@IamR3D88]

What kind of software for disabled people runs on 98 but not modern systems?

[@BrendenPragasam]

@@IamR3D88 alot of people with disabilities have memory disorders meaning that they can't get used to anything new

[@dannyspiteri1589]

Anthony is always so watchable. What a dude

[@metallboy25]

😆

[@Gil3344]

When Anthony referred to the serial port initially, the annotation wrote RS - 323 when in reality it's actually RS-232 :)

[@miaso130]

Came here to leave the same comment :)

[@iprot00]

I came here to correct this as well. Huge mistake, had to go check that I'm not stupid and RS-323 doesn't actually exist.

[@Ficus117]

Hello fellow serial users. Was also confused. Should note as well that RS-422 and RS-485 are both rated for up to ~1200 meters.

[@tadmikowsky7520]

Same here!!! I demand that this be corrected!!!!!!!🧐🙂😛

[@rkorkie]

Haha, did the same since I hadn't heard of 323. Probably some Gen Z'er doing their post production :)

[@scott2100]

I work at a DOE funded lab, the amount of crap we have that runs on parallel and serial port for communications is staggering, and some of these devices are less than 5 years old, we only now are transitioning to USB. This stuck with parallel and serial reason is that we have some equipment that is immensely expensive, or doesn't need to be changed out

[@twokei2]

my man so knowledgeable, he explains everything without reading prompter, he literally knows what he saying.

[@Renix]

*she

[@Killerpixel11]

I certainly appreciate companies like this. We have an entire portion of our storage space at work, taken up by various decades old PCs and components as replacements for our customers, bought in bulk and used whenever something is available. They regularly get plugged in and checked so we're sure they work. They pay for that, of course, but for a small-ish local company, it's infinitely cheaper than having to replace their old industrial machinery with new stuff for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Dollars, because their software doesn't run on modern computers. The new machine often does the exact same thing, just with new hard- and software, so there's no advantage to getting it. When we get a customer like this in, we generally try to run their control system in a VM, just to see if it works, but 9 times out of 10 it just straight up doesn't.

[@yearofthegarden]

I really likes this series of old computers, it reminds me of my childhood a lot as the kid who had to keep around old keyboards and navigate through by pressing tab to get the mouse hardware installed from the cd drive. Those were the days... kids have it easy now, internet all the time, anywhere, no more running ethernet lines throughout the house and losing your connection everytime someone called your house.

[@hummel6364]

Reminds me of the Windows 98 PC I recently acquired. It was originally built in 99 or 2000 for video editing, and as such has a floppy drive, a CD *RW* and a DVD *R* drive, as well as an ACTIVELY COOLED IBM 20GB HDD and a non-cooled 30GB operating system drive. Works flawlessly, despite most of the capacitors being very bulgy (I have enough old hardware to harvest the caps from and replace them if I wanted to, but I won't bother cause it's not a historically relevant piece in any way). I got the newest version of Debian (32 bit) to run on it no problem, as well as the Cockpit remote management software. Fun plaything to do dumb stuff with.

[@ljcool17]

Man, I remember all the trouble I've been through with 98. It's a night and day experience to what we have now mostly with stability.

[@raychat2816]

I remember these problems, I’m fond of only some of them however, given that I had to format Win98 for many problems, and this happened, A LOT, I hated the fact of having to always remember the floppy Win98 installation startup disk at the time, I was happy to see a much more streamlined windows installation beginning with XP, and a windows installation that dealt soooo much better with a slew of problem , Win 7 which I’m still running nicely today … my next OS is Linux

[@splitt3r]

Things are so much easier now, I remember windows 98 just randomly getting corrupted and installing it off something like 14 floppies, and the floppies themselves were crap and would get corrupted all the time. I remember my dad having these card file things all over his desk with like a couple hundred floppies in total. Would have to dig through that to find another set of windows install disks or driver disks just to get my sound and mouse working

[@the_kombinator]

You know you can boot the 98SE right off the CDROM?

[@malcolminthemetal4992]

I just booted up a new build in Linux (PopOS) this week, and I’m loving it. Not only can I customize the gnome shell to my hearts content, but it just runs well. All of the modern support makes it pretty easy to do everything, including gaming. If I only booted up the rig to game, linux isn’t worth it. But so long as I’m doing any amount of work on it, I’m going to be running linux.

[@drinkscoffeealot]

Man I'm so happy how far along Anthony has come in his presenting skills and has become a regular host on LTT he def. deserves this

[@bricefleckenstein9666]

I worked for ACT for many years. The computer that ran out scanning lines AND WORKED RELIABLY used *QNX* up into the late 2000s. It got replaced by a (then current) Windows 2000 based machine - which machine had more issues in a WEEK on average than the QNX machine averaged in a *YEAR*. Newer is *NOT ALWAYS BETTER* when you need a reliable OS.

[@EliteGeno]

"...I brought into the office to show off to the youth." We are getting old and gotta love it.

[@panomaniac5399]

That was a fun trip to the past. Feels nostalgic to me because I worked in a print shop where we had to run DOS, Win98, WinXP, OS9 and OSX because of legacy hardware and software. Jumping around between the different OSes kept us on our toes - it was the most practical and cost effective way to do it.

[@tactiks7468]

I worked for a company just like that as a builder of newer and older machines! Rarely did we go below XP though! But definitely hardware wise, we would build older machines sometimes, a great company called SuperLogics Inc.

[@ethanlieske9678]

I used to manage old fire safety control systems and HVAC at a large state collage. Almost everything was windows 95/98 in 2008. The windows 95 system was plugged into custom fiber boards so upgrading these systems would have run millions. Stuff like this would have been a god sent as I had to legit garbage pick for replacement parts at one point.

[@alk3myst]

Learned something new. My belief was serial is limited to 15 meters full speed and about 60 meters with loss. However; I read MAX232 drivers can do 4800 baud at almost 1400 meters. This makes sense since working in some steel mills on network devices I saw some serial connections that I thought were WAY to long. Also got to see laptops just being held in the air by their ethernet connections :)

[@candle86]

Also Anthony you need to remove the Intel Extreme graphics driver, and disable it in the bios, it's using the AGP port, and depending on how they wrote the new bios it may not auto disable the onboard video. Ontop of that ensure that the AGP Gart driver is installed. As for using an ATI cards they work, but I'd recommend a Geforce 4 or FX card with 45.23 drivers at the newest so you keep good speed and palletized texture support

[@Hadisabetghadam]

Why is this computer not booted with an AGP card? The reason is that the priority of the video card is not set to AGP in BIOS If you set the card settings to AGP, it will work. I don't guarantee it, but it will work

[@VaultVulp]

11:09 My thoughts exactly! How much I wished to play those "benchmark games" - they looked awesome and fun! And it didn't make any sense to me to create game-looking non-games, so I spent hours trying to launch these "games" in a playble mode. :)

[@2Guys1ControllerShow]

This dude is my jam. I swear I have watched everything he's done.

[@welcometocattown2036]

"is there just some warehouse full of some like new old stock of the stuff?" Anthony has stumbled onto the darkest secret of production and waste worldwide. I wonder sometimes about all of the resources, precious metals, plastics, batteries, chemicals, on and on, that just never shipped, never sold, and just pack either massive pockets in landfills or are crammed into huge warehouses and forgotten to the annals of time. We have all seen the unsold car graveyard pictures before. You know what I am talking about.

[@derrickfoster644]

Except most of those pictures of un-sold cars are misleading and not real. Car companies are not going to produce signifigently more then they expect they are going to sell.

[@9.5.9.5]

@@nuclearchef-san8304 What the actual fuck are you rambling about

[@derrickfoster644]

@@nuclearchef-san8304 not saying it doesn't happen, but those photos showing hundreds or thousands of "un-sold" cars are generally misleading.

[@CouchPotator]

@@nuclearchef-san8304 1900 miles is not the odometer of an unsold car

[@adammontgomery6464]

Guy who invented the M disc was my college professor. Super smart guy, wish I could have taken more classes from him. Unfortunate that the M disc was developed just in time for discs to start phasing out.

[@greatwavefan397]

Wow, you're lucky!

[@AlaskaTrucker]

Great video and brings back a lot of memories - I loved 98 SE! A question I'd like to throw at you is this: In 1982 (I think) Dad bought a brand new IBM computer to keep his books on, the machine was $1000, or $1500, back then in the early 80s. I think it was IBMs first or maybe second computer ever made for an individual's use. When the internet became available he bought a new machine - Windows 95. Dad put the IBM back in the original box and stored it in the closet. We still have that machine, in the original box. I think the manuals are still there as well. Is that machine something that anyone would be interested in? What should I ask for it, if I sell it - it probably still works. Thanks for the video on NOS 98 SE!

[@ColJonSquall1]

Ah yes, PCs that would be beneficial to my dad's work. A rock crushing gravel plant, where the equipment is designed to run on specialized expansion cards. I had to clean their tower PC out once, and when I say Tower PC, I mean, the PC that ran the control tower, that ran the plant. They recently needed to find someone to fix it. Well knowing this company exists, its kind of heartwarming that companies don't have to reinvent the wheel to keep going.

[@antipothis]

I really aced a garage sale recently, found an old windows 2000 pc in a barn, covered in spiderwebs, that I got for 5 bucks with monitor. Cleaned it up, and it booted first try. Celeron 800mhz, intergrated intel directx 8 3d graphics, sound card, with usb, and a staggering 20 gig drive. Thing runs great, and was able to install and run my og half-life disk no problem at all. Just a spectacular find, and hilarious how it was literally like a barn classic car find covered with a tarp.

[@anon_y_mousse]

This really takes me back. I used to game on a Win98 computer back in the day with onboard graphics. Unreal engine games were the best because they ran at nearly full speed most of the time. So many hours playing U1, UT and DS9: The Fallen. Oh yeah, fun times.

[@utenatenjou2139]

Don't be surprised, there still are a lot of industrial equipment that definitely can't use new PC. e.g. ports, controller, software that no longer run on newer OSes.

[@brightmal]

The first PC I ever built was at this tech level. I had a Pentium 2 350, 64mb of ram, a voodoo 2, and my secret weapon, a SCSI 9 GB HDD. And 98 SE with that hardware was still a glitchy mess after my Amiga 1200. A huge backward step in 1999.

[@FunkyM217]

It was a damn shame that Commodore never knew what they had in the Amiga. If they'd had competitive specs in '94, they'd still be around today, and maybe even be the ones keeping Apple honest.

[@thetickler8531]

Oh my thats blast from past SCSI cards and Amiga 1200 I never went past the 500 but Yes Amiga was in a league of its own, kinda like Sega i feel like they were ahead of their time tech wise but behind times marketing wise

[@MostlyPennyCat]

My first PC was: Celeron 433 overclocked to give hundred and something. 128MB SD-RAM Kyro 2 AGP GPU Some Sound Blaster card CD-ROM and a 15GB HDD on an IDE PATA bus. It was my upgrade from my Acorn Archimedes A3000 And it was a huge buggy mess but could play 3D games pretty well and all they way up to Return to Castle Wolfenstein where I had to finally retire the Kyro, a real beast of a GPU But yeah, Windows is absolute garbage compared to RISC OS.

[@SeeJayPlayGames]

@@FunkyM217 Oh damn, someone mentioned the Amiga's failure. I gotta rant for a bit. ;) Arguably it was poor management. Upper management (specifically, Gould and Ali) were greedy and short-sighted, stifled development and made too many cost-saving decisions that ended up sinking the ship in the long run. Third party developers like GVP stepped in and made expansion products that Commodore didn't even offer, and if they did, theirs were better... that helped bouy the Amiga line for a few more years, but without enough development and marketing effort from Commodore, it was doomed to fail. Also Commodore didn't know how to market the Amiga in the US; they were positioning it as a high-end creative workstation and only sold them through authorized resellers, whereas Commodore UK positioned it as the ultimate (but still affordable) gaming computer and sold them (at least the low-end ones) wherever video games were sold. Guess where the Amiga did better. Granted, the market was a lot different then, and the perception was that the PC was the "serious" computer and the Mac was the one for creative types, so where was the Amiga's niche? Well, it turned out to be video, at least as long as NTSC was still the standard, once devices like genlocks and DCTV and the Video Toaster arrived. Had the revolutionary AAA chipset gone as originally planned, instead of becoming the evolutionary, barely adequate AGA, maybe things might have been different, but I think it might have just been too little too late. Ironically, it was the very architecture that allowed it to succeed in the mid 80's and early 90's with 2D gaming and video production that held it back because it was never evolved enough to keep pace. If only they had advanced the platform enough to keep up with the developments on the PC... maybe by 1994, Amigas would have (commonly) had 68040s and chunky pixel modes, and been able to play DOOM and maybe stuck around for some time and been competitive. That was one of the "killer apps" that got a lot of people (myself included) to finally admit the PC had won. That and the Commodore bankruptcy. But I have a feeling that the suits would have wrecked things anyway; it was just a matter of time with asshats at the helm. I say all this as someone who owned an Amiga (two, actually) for almost 4 years, and had nothing but the best hopes for it.

[@fattomandeibu]

I broke out my old A1200 the other day and it still works. The hard disk sounds like it's on its last legs, but it still manages to get into Workbench, and to be fair to it, it's almost 30 years old, it's a miracle it booted at all. Both floppy drives still worked, too. CD drive(or at least the SCSI to PCIMIA card, the drive powers up and still plays music through headphones) is dead, though.

[@GregMacLellan]

3:05 The port on the back is RS-232, pretty common on the earliest PCs up until USB replaced it in the late 90s. It was gone from most PCs by the early 2000's. Dial-up modems were the most common use, but also used for configuring routers/switches, bar code scanners, and (rarely) mice and printers. There's still lots of uses of RS-232 in networking, IoT and some industrial systems, and you can still buy USB and ethernet adapters for it. RS-485 is the industrial version that can go for very long distances, and is good in noisy environments. It's still extremely common today in factories and building automation. RS-422 is somewhat of a hybrid of them, and was used in early Macs (before USB replaced it). Seems like the only place you'd find it today is broadcast equipment.

[@callmebigpapa]

Thanks for posting this info, I knew this since I am old but wanted to be sure someone shared it but didn't way to post a dup.

[@Drinkyoghurt]

Seeing 3dMark 2001 really brings back memories. I also remember that back in the days you could choose between PCI (NOT PCI-E) and AGP card, and AGP was definitely the faster one. Initially it caused a lot of confusion when PCI-Express came out because like many I thought it was slower than AGP.

[@engineeringvision9507]

"AGP is a version of PCI-E" smh

[@psycronizer]

but why would you ever think that ? PCI-E was the new scheme to replace AGP, that was it's entire purpose, strictly speaking it wasn't just for graphics cards, but that was/is the core use that every man and his dog used PCI-E for...

[@mikebutterface8583]

The real reason these things still exist is due to corporations unwillingness to upgrade. Most companies dont really realize who/what they need. They just put some system in place, hope someone learns it and move on. The lack of give a f on IT stuff is just insane. I can only imagine how aome old physical equipment was “maimtained” based on how IT os treated these days. Most important department in the whole Enterprise and they try to pay as little as they can get away with…. This is also why an IT guy can make an exec or a plant manager look like a complete numbskull. See: Equifax blames one guy for their servers not being updated. Multi million dollar company losses 147 million peoples data to hackers and blames one dude. Pffft.

[@isaarunarom7830]

I work for one of the world's largest grocery companies. All my frozen food is ordered on an old IBM that runs dos. We talking arrow keys and a green screen, the mouse does nothing. My refrigerated goods are ordered on a handheld windows 98 or xp? Its old too. And my suplys are ordered over a regular web browser on a pc thay runs a newer windows os. And my in department production tracking is done in ios on overly expensive apple products. Refuses to spend money where it's needed, wastes money on new toys used to track ourselves rather than investing in the systems we allready have to improve things.

[@W1ldTangent]

The places where these sort of machines tend to still be found wouldn't be considered "IT", they're "OT", Operational Technology, and oftentimes the purchasing decisions for such go through an entirely different chain of people than the IT department. More than once I've had a strange new MAC show up on my network only to find out some other department got a new toy with a RJ-45 jack and just stuck a cable right in. IT isn't always perfect, but it doesn't help when we're subverted or actively evaded until the new equipment we weren't consulted on is already in the door and paid for.

[@mikebutterface8583]

@@W1ldTangent i heard that at my company they ordered some kiosk for some reason or another and eventually turned it into a juke box, lol. Then it broke and they chunked it. Also, i love how we got this really expensive keyence microscope that can 3d scan in small parts that largely goes unused and the Japanese “special” Dell ( that isn’t as special as overpriced) that came with it. It’s funny to watch departments save money all year only to buy junk at the end for fear of cuts in their budget if they don’t spend it….

[@mikebutterface8583]

@@isaarunarom7830 good ole technology. Just say the Napoleon dynamite song and move on lol!

[@mikebutterface8583]

@@W1ldTangent well they should at least be behind a firewall, IT. When wannacry came out we had one machine that was infected. Guess what it was, a DMZ glove box controller. Couldn’t communicate with anything else. I hope there is IT in the OT or youre SOL, LOL

[@EspyMelly]

I can definitely believe that there are a ton of businesses out there with employees that wouldn't touch a computer outside of work and haven't experienced anything newer than Windows 98.

[@davidchristoffersen1404]

I must give these guys credit , the email explaining why they do it is amazing , it is basicly telling them "We do it because there is a need".

[@KaosPCtech]

This is so amazing, the PC does look a bit newer for Windows98. The hardware and programs installed to it are pretty cool, too bad you couldn't get AGP and games running. I have older Win98/WinXP specs: Motherboard: Asus CUV4X CPU: Pentium III (pretty sure it's a Coppermine) AGP: ATI Radeon 9700 RAM: 256mb or 512mb (can't remember) Storage: 8GB HDD, 20GB HDD, 2xCD drives (ones a burner), 1 floppy drive with a Ethernet Adapter card, (not sure if its 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps) I also have an old CRT monitor to go with it but its newer dell (its black) I bought the monitor for $20 and the person gave me the old computer for free (I added the AGP and RAM myself and have a few PS/2 mouse and keyboards)

[@ZMacZ]

15:43 Since it's an industrial computer, the basic functionality of the drivers under Win98SE, may be just that, basic. You can check if each of the components, including mainboard drivers still exist somewhere on the Net. Especially AGP, since these sometimes needed a driver both for the AGP port and the graphics card. Also, any system resources shared and not claimed by any device would be blocked from usage, even if the component would normally accept input from it, which was true for all IRQ's, DMA channels, and even memory adresses. Also, not locking memory adresses were a frequent cause for blue screens, where Windows would see accesible memory, assume it to be regular memory, but instead writing into a device's memory allocation.

[@ZMacZ]

Also, using a USB output, is best handled by the mixer, just about the only thing that had few bugs if any. The sound mixer (volume), has both an recording pane, and a playback pane. When looking under recording, that's what is recorded by soundrec32. When you want to hear any channel through any output,including the USB sound, switch the mixer to playback pane, and put a checkmark in the box for whichever sound channel, usually MIDI, general, or simply check all. The OS then hands over any sound to whichever chosen output device, chosen under the output pane of the sound devices. You may aslso need to check a digital output box under sound devices. It may be that the USB sound transmitter is only accpeting digital sound, since it's connected through a USB port, which has no analog transmission capabilities.

[@ZMacZ]

I just want to help Anthony.

[@ZMacZ]

17:12 LOL, there just are some things I know about those old systems. If you pay for the postage, I'll check it out, and send it back better. (lots !) Those days I'd computer more and game less, these days it's reverse.

[@ZMacZ]

Good game titles few and far between, today, way too many games.

[@StubbornBishop]

That video benchmark with cars and robots actually had a short demo game! It was amazing, it only let you fire 4-6 rockets and that was it, but I remember wanting to play a full game so bad!

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

Great trip down memory lane for an SI still using these parts . The weirdest part of this whole story. The point sits that if the ISA cards cant be made in a new form factor the only solution is to keep using the isa card. Hopefully we got some people involved in offering solutions known for stability for some of these systems .

[@Kitty-oy5nj]

You can buy ISA Riser boards that plug into PCI slots, and just run win98 in a VM for gods sake.

[@Kitty-oy5nj]

You can also buy a ISA adapter that runs of USB called usb2isar as its fast enough

[@Killerpixel11]

@@Kitty-oy5nj Good luck running any sort of proprietary specialty software in a VM. It ain't happening.

[@ZuckerbroTx3]

@@Killerpixel11 honestly. Most of our win98 / winxp systems used to configure our machines are running perfectly fine in virtual box vms.

[@adamfoxton6341]

​@@Kitty-oy5nj Yeah, no. PCI devices talk to a controller, ISA cards talk directly to the CPU and RAM. It's a fundamentally different architecture, and software that sets register bits or directly manipulates RAM is not going to have any way to talk to the card over PCI or USB. To get this working you're also going to have to rewrite the application to use the other interface. And that's if it's simple. But with something even as basic as RS232 the difference in timing between I/O pins and data can completely screw up data handling, so there's probably some hardware work to be done there too so that everything ends up in sync. By the time you've employed a team to develop, test, validate, deploy, and support a solution like that it's going to be cheaper to buy a $1000 PC every few years.

[@technologicalelite8076]

7:31 "It'll always quench your thirst, no matter your socket type." Very clever Anthony 😂.

[@_GhostMiner]

"I'd find this in an office in 2006" Except that it'd have Windows xp instead.

[@TimsVideoArchief]

We still got a windows 98 laptop at work for the occasional legacy software thing

[@Hexagonaldonut]

@@Prophes0r Chief, there are PoS systems that still run DOS. Sometimes you need basically the most outdated multi-system OS available.

[@Janus54]

@@Prophes0r I work at the biggest beer factory in Romania (and like top 5 in Europe) all the computers that run the production side (control big, heavy equipment) run windows 95 or 98, can't tell exactly

[@deViant14]

@@Prophes0r but if it looked like this one's plastic, it would be XP.

[@Tony-pb2gi]

@@Prophes0r Why would they have upgraded the case then?