[intro sounds]
Regular viewers may recall that about a year ago, I encountered a stationery shop in Norwich,
which had a PC from 1994 for sale in the window.
Now, this being Norwich, it's perfectly normal to expect some things are behind the times.
But this shop felt like it was stuck in a 25 year old time warp.
It was in the process of shutting down, but I couldn't tell if it had been shutting down
for 25 years, or I just caught it at a good time.
But anyway, I secured this hotch potch of a PC from the owner with a nice Panasonic
dot-matrix printer, and fax machine with a brand new ink cartridge, for about £80.
Which was nice.
Fast forward back to today, and it feels the right time to take a closer inspection of
this mystery setup.
So we can determine what it's made up of, what's inside it and what's on it, whilst
investigating a bit of its history along the way.
Now, we might not find vintage pornography like the last mystery PC I looked at, but
surely there must be something of interest.
I must admit, the look of this thing just fills me with glee.
The mish-mash of unmatched monitor, keyboard and base unit just harks back to the mid-90s.
Back then, it was pretty expensive to pick up an IBM-PC compatible, and there was a local
shop which sold mismatched combinations like this, for bargain prices.
You know, perhaps an old Compaq 386 base unit discarded by a business, paired with random
monitor brand and a Dell keyboard.
But who cared, because it meant you could finally get a proper PC and get down to business...
and by that, I mean, playing Doom.
So, I genuinely like what we have going on here.
In fact the ICL DRS keyboard and monitor are likely a match.
The DRS standing for Distributed Resource System, the brand was initially used for ICL
servers, but by the late 80s united their IBM PC Compatibles and Unix systems under
one banner.
A quick inspection on the bottom reveals this keyboard was once owned by British Gas.
As for the monitor, it's post 1990, when Fujitsu had acquired 80% of ICL, but bears an ownership
sticker on the back from the very shop I bought it from.
This monitor and keyboard pairing was seen on various systems including the 286 based
ICL DRS 45.
However, here, we've got a Dell Optiplex 466/LE base unit, which was definitely never sold
by ICL or Fujitsu.
I can only guess that the previous owner decided to upgrade his base unit, but kept the existing
keyboard and monitor combination.
Now, the Optiplex range was a business line of PCs first released by Dell in 1993.
This particular model is the second phase of Optiplex; a more streamlined, low-profile
range, which almost certainly sought inspiration from Compaq's sleek Prolinear range.
As a business machine, we're unlikely to find thrills and excitement, but let's take a look
inside anyway.
Getting inside is as simple as a couple of finger screws and a slide.
There's a bit of dust, but otherwise it's quite sparse in here.
As usual with these low-profile cases, we've got a 16-bit ISA riser card, although judging
by the VESA Local bus slot, it's clear some versions have a full local bus riser card.
If that were the case, we could install a relatively fast video card like the Cirrus
Logic 5428.
The 90s were awash with catchy names... but as it stands, it doesn't matter, because we're
got an integrated Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429 graphics chipset, which, I believe is running at the
local bus speed of 33MHz anyway.
It also has 1MB of RAM, allowing a maximum resolution of 1280x1024 with 16 colors.
Which for 1994, wasn't half bad.
In fact, most of the components we see here, weren't half bad, and if you had some spare
time between spreadsheets, more than capable of running most games of the era.
Excellent.
The LIF socketed CPU has a fairly substantial heat-sink for a 486DX2/66, but better to be
safe than sorry.
RAM is served up by a single 16MB SIMM module, whilst storage needs are catered for by a
540MB IDE Quantum Lightning ProDrive.
We've even got a CD-ROM stashed away under the 3.5" floppy drive.
Clearly this is an after-market upgrade, as 32x drives weren't out until around 1997.
On the back panel, there's not much going on, we've got a 150W power supply, PS/2 connectors,
2 9-pin serial ports, a parallel port and VGA out.
Oh, there's also a lock if you want to prevent people from opening the case.
Alright time to fire this machine up...
Now first up, we've got a BIOS error.
Turns out I'll need to re-open the machine and get a new coin battery in.
I didn't see it on first inspection, as it turns out, it's HERE.
Yeah, tucked away behind that riser card.
But we just need to sort out a few settings and then can boot.
Now, look at this incredible DOS boot up sequence.
Isn't that something.
So pure.
So elegant.
I live for this.
So, we're put straight into DOS.
Which is nice.
A quick DIR command indicates that, really, there's not a lot going on this drive.
I don't think we're going to find too many secrets, but you never know.
The only directory which stands out is, this one, PAGE, let's take a look in there.
Ahhhhh, of course, it's an accounting program.
Page Financial Controller.
Another one of those stand out names.
So, it looks like that stationery shopped survived 25 years of trading 90s goods, purely
by having a good DOS accounting system.
There's actually a crap load of customer data still on here as well.
So, it looks like this computer had a fairly mundane life as an accounting machine.
One can only speculate what the CD-ROM drive was for.
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I never talked about the monitor did I?
It's a pretty crisp display.
These ICL Fujitsu monitors are always pretty solid.
Same with the keyboard.
The keys have a nice response, they're not loose, and there's a nice action to them.
Underneath we've got almost a Fujitsu Peerless spring over dome switch.
There's a buckling spring, but these very fragile metal switches, which connect when
pressed, thus triggering an input.
Anyway, I think I'm going to dedicate the rest of this video to just exposing what a
pure machine this is.
It feels.
Y'know, it feels like a brand new DOS PC, waiting for good things to happen to it.
On the inside at least.
It's running DOS 6.20, so not the arguably best version of DOS 6.22, but this one is
nice, it has a few quirks.
One of those was the provision of the DBLSPACE program.
This allowed you to compress your hard drive and effectively "double" it's space, at the
cost of speed.
But DBLSPACE in DOS 6 actually had quite a significant flaw, in that, it could lose your
data at the drop of a hat.
It was corrected for this release of DOS, but the rapidly following DOS 6.22. would
actually replace DBLSPACE with DRVSPACE, to get around the stigma attached to it, and
some code infringement issues with Stacker from Stac electronics.
It's for this reason that DOS 6.2 is a rarer breed than 6.22.
But all the regulars are here, Scandisk, Degfrag, which reveals a nice uniform drive.
There's even classics like QBASIC, in case you wanted to do some coding, EDIT, and of
course, MEMMAKER.
Now MEMMAKER's goal is to optimise your startup files, to create more free DOS Memory.
You see, when DOS boots, it runs the files Config.sys, which loads drivers, sets variables
and configures the base DOS configuration and Autoexec.bat which executes any programs
which need loading on startup.
MEMMAKER will try and optimise which parts of memory these drivers and programs are loaded,
to free up as much conventional DOS memory as possible.
I've done videos on this in the past if you want to find out more.
But all this is just so damn nostalgic.
You'd think I'd be over it by now, but I'm not.
But we've also got good old Windows 3.1 on here.
So let's take a closer look at that.....
Ahhhhhh, yes, my favourite version of Windows.
So simple.
So easy to use.
There seems to be nothing on here, apart from the base programs.
File manager, is really what File Explorer is on Windows now.
Because Program Manager is really where the bulk of Windows 3.1 takes place, and it's
really doing its own thing.
Under the Control panel we can go through some exceptional colour palettes.
I've substituted an LCD screen here, just because it removes the on screen flicker,
so it makes sense to use the Windows LCD colour mode.
Didn't often get a chance to crack this out in the 90s, but there's no doubt that HOT
DOG is still the colour scheme of choice.
Man, I just loved playing around with Windows backgrounds.
In these early days, you could either set a monochrome repeating pattern, which used
far less memory, or if you were feeling lavish, you could opt for an actual tiled image.
This is only 16 colour mode, so the 256 colour balls, don't really work too well.
Now DOS 6.2 actually came with slew of Windows versions of its programs, so we've got stuff
like Microsoft Undelete, if you needed to recover deleted files.
Although this isn't recycle bin, it was never a certainty you could retrieve something you've
deleted.
There doesn't seem to be much we can salvage from this machine.
Microsoft Anti-Virus was pretty terrible.
But, it was better than no virus protection at all.
Especially if you were in the habit of swapping floppies with mates.
SmartDrive allowed you to manage your DOS cache in Windows.
Nice to have, but not essential.
Of course it's easy to forget that Windows 3.1 is simply running on top of DOS.
It's really an operating system itself, just a graphical user interface, with it's own
program environment.
Of course, we also get all the usual Windows programs.
Paint, Write, even Cardfile.
I mean, this was the early-90s.
People were actually still using paper cardfiles at this point, so if you were going to transfer
addresses and names to computer, it made sense to have it in a similar style.
Weird now-days of course.
And of course, we get the Windows games.
Solitaire and Minesweeper... ahh, hours of entertainment.
Now, at this point, I was going to load some games on this beast and really see what it
can do.
But, there were a few problems.
Firstly, look what this SHITTING disk drive did to one of my floppy disks.
Yeah, this was a floppy I need for another video as well.
I've had to source an alternative from eBay.
Anyway, it read it fine, but then decided to scratch the living jesus out of it.
THAT.
Is a seriously misaligned floppy head.
The CD-ROM drive wasn't much better.
Yeaaaah, it's completely dead.
It's trying to read the disc, but it's simply not spinning it up, so that 32X malarkey,
has quickly changed to 0x speed.
This is going to need fixing, or more likely, I'll swap a new drive in.
So that really brings this machine to a close.
I think it definitely has scope for the future.
I've been after a nice 486DX2/66 machine for a while.
It's the processor which really represents that early to mid-90s era for me.
It was the dogs-bollocks for a while, and a lot of games from that generation are built
to run best under it's pure, maths co-processing might.
I reckon, this might be a good 90s DOS trudging machine.
Maybe not for actual 3D games.
But Doom, Descent, Pacific Strike, that whole era, is perfect for this.
I haven't got time to start it in this video, but I reckon a new floppy drive, and a quad
speed CD-ROM and we're sorted.
Don't want to be too flash, otherwise it lacks the authenticity of the era.
So, stay tuned for some upgrades on this fine Stationery Shop PC, and thanks for watching.
Until next time, have a great evening.