One of the big things that “saved” CISC was the decoupling of the architectural instruction set from the actual internal micro-architecture. Most CPUs today translate from one ISA to another on the fly. This gives your chip designers huge flexibility in designing the processor’s internals without breaking compatibility.

Yeah, in the 1994 - 1997 era these WinNT RISC systems started to show up which became very popular with the Lightwave crowd. Not only would this be loads faster than the last model Amiga offered in 1994, the company went out of business. These were 100mHz+ compared to MC68040 models offered at nominal 25mHz with faster 3rd party add-on boards, but not this kind of speed for a while. The MC68060 accelerators were only good for 50-66mHz or so. Most of the folks in the circles I was familiar with opted for the DEC Alpha based RISC systems as they were very cost effective, also ran WinNT, but DEC developed a rather miraculous software-based emulation system for x86 compatibility called FX32. After the first couple times launching a new piece of software the system would instead run a copy made of new native code. It was so good it was even compatible with some x86 hardware drivers. I was able to do Premiere editing with a Personal Animation Recorder, which was a hardware based DDR, using a dedicated encoder/decoder board with attached SCSI drive, letting me do realtime broadcast quality video while any other PC would struggle to play anything higher resolution than 320x240 in full color with something like MPEG or Sorensen compression. These workstations had at least the perceived coolness of running the same chip as in an SGI, which was what I had at work during this period, until '99.

6:26 The BBC Micro did not have an ARM CPU, it was a MOS Technology 6502. The first ARM CPU was in the Acorn Archimedes line of computers beginning in 1987, which was sold under the BBC licensed brand mainly in the educational market. Those BBC branded models had red function keys (a throwback to its BBC Micro lineage,) the models intended for the home market had green function keys, and business market machines had gray function keys.

Thank you KZfaq for finally doing your job of recommending me something I'm _actually_ interested in! Great video, thank you!

i was totally waiting for him to talk about apple silicon and was like why did he not mention that.... then i looked at the upload date

I used to have an old pre-release version of Windows NT5 (before they changed the name to 2000 (I mean, NT5 was supposed to ship in 1997, but you know, it's going to be easier to just ship in 1999 and call it 2000 so it sounds like it's from the future)) that would still install on alpha/mips(/and some other RISC, I think) machines. They could have left in support in the actual release, but I think they felt like it was time to let the totally awesome future pass them by.

I don’t know how I was fed this video when it’s only 50 views in, but I am enjoying it thoroughly !

That brought back memories. I used to work for IDT, a MIPS partner that produced the processors, and part of my job was to help developers port applications to Windows NT on MIPS. I had a pool of Deskstation machines that I would loan out to developers. They were R4000 based not R4600 however. The R4600 was just coming out at the time and we had some R4600 machines in house.

If it was my machine I'd probably look into installing a BSD unix. It's been a while since I used BSD, but it has an extensive "port"-system which basically means that all apps (many thousands!) can be automatically downloaded and compiled (from source-code) on your system; the latter being important as you probably won't find many R4600 executables out there. That should allow you to run alot of software on it. Thanx for the video, used to drool over these things.

Really nice tour thank you. The most famous home computer here in the UK with RISC was the Acorn (of ARM fame) Archimedes. A really great little range of machines which went into most schools

Don't forget the terminator on the SCSI card :) Your videos bring back a lot of memories. EISA cards shared with IBM Microchannel that they could be configured in BIOS and not with jumper settings. What a bonus in the day!

I'm working on a product that uses a CPU with 48 MIPS64 cores. That architecture is still alive and well!

We had a couple DeskStation Raptor Reflex towers at my job in the late 90s, and they were mainly used for LightWave and Photoshop. What's interesting was that they had an x86 emulator called FX!32 from Digital, which was how we could run Photoshop. There's very little online about it but it not only emulated an x86, it would find ways to improve the performance over time.

If you haven't formatted the scsi drive yet, then you can easily get the my administrator password as well as all other account names and passwords.. you'll want to run either LCP or ophcrack against the SAM database. There are actually dozens of tools to do this but the two I mentioned above work wonderfully. Let us see it in all of its natively setup glory! Thanks and good luck.

I also had a BBC-1 and a BBC-2, a Master-128, and an archimedes. The 6502 is an awesome processor :)

Great video! I have already heard about RISC processors, but never seen one being used. Nice piece of computer history. You sir have earned a new subscriber! Cheers.

Update: Apple’s new desktop and laptop chips made in-house are ARM based. We’ve come full circle.

Love seeing videos on these old PCs. I was a kid when this was new so I never really got a chance to work on them myself, although I did get to work on a bunch of old Sparc systems later on.

Fascinating how everything circles back around at some point. Great video!

Ahh this feels good, hearing all the talk of RISC and SIMMs... Makes me wish I still had some of my old PC kit.

I liked the quality of the production on this video so I'm subscribing!

The x86 architecture we use today is in fact a RISC processor disguised as CISC for backwards compatibility. Since Pentium, Intel used a microcode translation layer to convert the legacy CISC instructions to internal RISC ones, and you can also use the RISC instructions directly since the newer (SSE) revisions of the instruction set.

This is similar to one Olivetti made using the Dec Alpha. It never gained any traction in the market, but my word, it was fast!

Came expecting another old PC review and startup, came out with a lot of new knowledge on old processors! Instant like and subscribe.

It's fun to think of these RISC vs CISC comparisons today because any RISC processor today is way more complex than any CISC processor from the 80s

Arm support has technically been around the whole time with Windows CE / Mobile / Windows 8 RT / Windows 10 IoT and beyond

That BIOS is very comprehensive, thanks for the great video.

That BIOS is pretty neat!

Awesome video, it's really neat to see computer hardware that was not really common back in the day.

I was doing a training course at Pyramid Computers in early 1994 and Bull computers were also there, testing their prototype MIPS NT desktop PC's - they looked IDENTICAL to this one with the slanted top so I wonder if the Bull ones were actually Tyne manufactured (or Tyne re-branded them?). Pyramid were a manufacturer of MIPS powered mini computers, using MIPS R4400 CPU's and similar running UNIX (SVR4 - DC/OSx) in their big 42-U Nile and the MIPS R10000 CPU in their Reliant RM1000 machines (A couple of these RM1000's ran Link cashpoints and BT had one for many years in the UK - I saw the demo machine they'd built!). I don't think Bull ever sold their MIPS Workstations, and Pyramid got bought by Siemens Nixdorf ultimately.

The fan issue is likely due to a bad power supply. It can also happen due to devices inside the computer with bad caps, and when devices have bad caps, they can sometimes can load a power supply quite a bit. So be sure to check the voltage getting to the fan with a scope and or multimeter.

The MIPS R4k processors are super cool! Very jealous that you own this system, I've always wanted an R4k machine.

LIke many others intelligently commenting (am I still on YT?), this appeared as a recommended video and I'm glad I took the chance on that click. Brought me back to the late 90's when I worked "desktop" as it was known back then and we marveled at the DEC Alpha and it's "crazy" 1 gigahertz speed. My side business was building PCs and I'd tear my hair out getting SCSI, Soundblaster, IDE, etc. cards to work nicely with the rest of the system and getting the OS operational. Queue Obi-wan meme with "VESA LOCAL BUS? THAT IS A NAME I HAVE NOT HEARD FOR A LONG, LONG TIME." Nice job with the video and nice job cleaning up those cards before filming :)

The Mips version of lightwave was a bit of a pain and the HIIP image loaders were such a pain as the 3rd party company that made those never got the libraries to work reliably on MIPS NT. Lightwave had been ported to MIPS for screamernet (The lightwave render farm software) and at one point I had a box of those motherboards that was used for the Screamer box. I believe they were actually desk station boards. I do have a copy of the full MIPS lightwave install around here that I could make an iso of if you want it. Lightwave at that time was ported to MIPS and Dec alpha and I believe Deskstation did make an alpha workstation as well but it's been a few decades and my memory isn't what it was. If I dig up any documentation on deskstation I'll post it.

The hardware key was a parallel port "key" that the program would periodically check for the presence of. If it wasn't there it wouldn't run.

That is a really cool computer. Thanks for the great vid!

Fun fact: NT ran on MIPS before it ran on x86. ARC was also the firmware interface that the newer SGI systems used, and was the NT flavor of firmware/PALcode for the DEC Alpha. NetBSD runs on this machine (NetBSD/arc), so there's an option if you want a contemporary OS for it.

The section about RISC ARM CPUs was very interesting. I always wondered what made the Apples so different and incompatible. Now I know. Thanks for the history!

Wow, that BIOS looks so awesome when compared to the modern "splashscreen" ones that hide all the tech details so as not to hurt the poor user's feelings. All the blinky tables, delicious!

There are some ARM-based Windows mini-PCs out there (usually found on AliExpress). They're basically Surface RT hardware with some USB and HDMI in place of the touchscreen. So, in a way, we've already got desktop PCs with RISC back on the market.

You brought back some memories for me. In early 2000 I started working as a sysadmin for a university that was a big DEC shop. They had investigated NT on AlphaServers (I believe some 1000s ran it and a couple 4100s were bought for possible use) in the late 90s but didn't find it of great utility and the announcement that 2000 wouldn't be on that platform was the final nail. I only got to briefly play with them in the last week we ran it and the machines were re-purposed for VMS work, which they ran until sometime in the 2010s - I had left the place before that was decommissioned.

I’m 2022 you nailed the use of ARM everywhere. Cheers

Take my like, kind sir. Very cool piece of history.

Excellent video, answered a bunch of my questions

Very cool. I was aware there was a MIPS release of Windows NT (there was an Alpha release too I think) but never saw MIPS chips outside of SGI machines. Have had a few of those but all running Irix of course. SGI did a Windows NT machine (Visual Workstation) later but it was a strange machine with an Intel chip. This machine is interesting, presumably the maker really thought RISC was the future most of us thought it was at the time. Looks very 'off the shelf' compared to the SGI machines of the time!

Interesting video, Took me back in time a little bit. Nostalgia!

Thanks for the time warp - great video.

Very cool look back in time. 64mb ram in 4 sticks means they are 16mb a piece, I remember buying 1 16mb simm for a 486 in 92 or 93 and it was almost 200bucks. Thanks for the upload!!

really hoped to see rendering performances over other systems of the time

MIPS is quite common for consumer wireless routers, and DD-WRT is among the most common (aftermarket, at least) Linux-based... firmware? Operating system? on them. While I'm not suggesting trying to run DD-WRT on it, it's possible that you can get a MIPS-based Linux distribution to run on it.

Probably the smartest thing Microsoft ever did was to hire Dave Cutler away from DEC to be the architect of NT. The NT name is long gone from their OS, but it is still NT, nonetheless.

I love how the bios shows everything getting detected, tested and started. Intersting machine, it feels strange because it's exactly like a classic x86 pc but it isn't on x86 arch. Speaking fo the dallas RTC+Battery chip, I've the chills thinking about it because of my old IBM PS/1 model 2011: if the battery is depleted the floppy drive doesn't work!

After years of watching this kind of content KZfaq how did i not know of this channel before now ? guess they got the algo fixed !

Hello I’m from the future, RISC is making a comeback in the form of ARM-based Macs and PCs 😎

the AUI network card will work just get a AUI adapter

Sophie Wilson's ISA for the ARM CPU has to be the most prevalent bit of tech of this era.

If you want to replace the clock chip and make it look nice and have a removable battery, you could look into the alt12887 project where you build a new 12887 using an SOIC-24 DS12885 or TI/Benchmarq BQ3285 , a 6pf 32.768khz oscillator and a cr1220 battery holder and two rows of 12pin headers . Or for cheaper you can get a bunch of ds12885s from Aliexpress in DIP-24 encapsulation bend up pins 2 and 3 and solder a 6pf 32.768khz crystal between them and then glue whatever type of battery holder you want on top of the dip-24 chip and then solder the battery positive to pin 20 and the battery negative to pin 16. Their are many posibilities of different battery configurations, you could use a cr12xx or cr16xx holder which would fit nicely on the top of the chip,cr20xx or larger holder would stick of the side of the chip a lot, a cr2 photo battery holder would probably fit nicely. a cr123a holder would be a bit bigger than the chip, you could also get a 2xAA battery holder and a couple energizer ultimate lithium batteries and bend pins 16 and 20 up on the chip and use a 5 position DuPont connector with the outer position populated and connected to the battery holder.

ARM1 was completed in 1985 and put to use in the original Acorn Archimedes line of computers released in 1987. AMR2 was completed in 1989 and put to use in the Acorn Archimedes A3000 computer, the last Acorn microcomputer released that bore the "BBC Microcomputer" nomenclature. The BBC Micro was released in 1981, using the MOS 6502 CPU as used in the Commodore PET / VIC20, and Apple II. As a sidenote, the BBC Micro was derived from an Acorn prototype platform internally named "Proton" which was supposed to be based around a 16 Bit CPU with the 6502 and associated I/O devices only acting as an "Intelligent" I/O platform for the 16 bit host. This idea made it to launch in the BBC Micro in the form of the "Tube" bus, which allows second processors to be easily connected to the BBC micro and use the micro as simply an I/O Host. The ARM development was done on the BBC Micro using this bus after Acorn visited MOS technologies and felt their approach to designing a 16 bit extension of the 6502 was a bit too "Cottage industry" (their exact words) and Sophie Wilson felt her team could do better at home; and thus the ARM architecture was born. Even back during the prototyping days of ARM in the mid-80s, it was an incredibly power saving chip. Their original prototype board provided enough power to run the processor through the protection diodes on the TUBE bus - which they discovered by accident when they connected it one time and forgot to connect the power supply to the ARM prototype board. It was working anyway. 34 years on, one can still connect a new ARM second processor to the TUBE bus on the BBC Micro. Yes, the Raspberry Pi can be interfaced with the BBC Micro via the TUBE bus allowing the Beeb to execute code on the 1GHz+ ARM on the Raspberry Pi. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/iLKRmMSgrb7QZH0.html And yes, someone's porting Doom to the 1981 platform and it's modern co-processor :) kzfaq.info/get/bejne/jJx4hNWJqLi-o6s.html Honestly, growing up in a country and a time where Acorn Computers reigned supreme, at home and at school, gave me (and many others) great perspective into the rest of the computing world. Everything else just seemed so primitive. Toy like. Infantile. I'm very happy Acorn and their engineers live on in the ARM architecture to this day, I believe they've now licensed over 12 billion ARM cores.

I remember back in the day seeing a PC magazine where the headline was "Windows at 500mhz" before there was a 500mhz x86 cpu talking bout a Dec.

I worked at an ISP in the late 90s and we ran NT 4.0 on a couple of Dec Alpha systems. It has been soooo long since I had seen the NT boot up screen :)

What a great walk down memory lane - I designed this beauty :)

Hello from the future RISC is having a big moment again :)

Ah man! I've been looking for one of those machines for a while now!

Wow, a trip down memory lane. I remember Alpha RISC

Nokia was concerned about the amount of data executable software for the ARM would take up. So ARM came up with the Thumb instruction set, which was a cut-down version where each instruction was 16 bits. The processor could run in thumb or normal (32-bit instruction) modes. C code compiled with this took up less room, which still mattered for phones. It did not run as fast however, esp. for hand-coded, so the 32-bit mode was still very useful, as well as for backwards compatibility. Because of this ARM got the deal which went on to make them a company worth billions. I used to write software in ARM assembler for the Archimedes and later the Game Boy Advance. I did some code for the PS1, but we mostly coded that in C, rather than MIPS.

Good old stuff... never saw this one... but worked a lot with various other RISC machines in the old days.

Cool video! Thanks for making it. ✨

The magnet(s) inside the CPU fan may have depolarized and the motor will just exert a lower force. You can apparently see this in model trains too. Take with a grain of salt since I'm just repeating what others have said and not looked into it.

You should probably be able to run NetBSD on this. Together with its ports that should give you access to most open source stuff. Not sure if you can find a Linux version that can support this and still has repositories to install software from.

NT was actually originally built on custom built i860 RISC PC's. It was ported to x86 once the kernel was fairly stable.

Got to this video through KZfaq recommendations. Sorry for reviving this old comments thread. It's also the first time I see Windows NT on a MIPS processor. I knew there was a MIPS port of NT, but I've never seen an actual machine that could run this port. I bet this thing can run a MIPS port of Debian Linux as well. Some corrections about Windows on ARM: Microsoft actually made an ARM port of Windows back in Windows 7 days. There was an experimental version of Windows 7 on ARM which was demoed but never actually released. Windows 8 had a fully functional ARM port in form of Windows RT (artificially limited to just Store or MS signed desktop apps) and Windows 10 has an ARM port as well.

Same here... I only ever saw one MIPS NT machine with my own eyes but never used it. We had some DEC Alpha NT machines that we actually used.

Just found your channel, I'm impressed! Put NT 3.1 on it please!

Acorn Uused the 6503 CPU in their BBC Micro computers. They developed the ARM for use in the Archimedes omputer.

Great video! WinNT machines always interesting to come across, WinXP arch with Win98 GUI, no WinXP overhead, drivers and the such had to be loaded manually, xp drivers (most of them) would work though. Seems to me most NT machines had technical propietary apps loaded, usually weird stuff I could never figure out. The last one I used drove an AGFA film pos exposure unit. You'd just turn it on and make sure 2 apps got sparked up, that's it. My work was done on another PC then loaded to a Mac running Quark Express and fed from there into the AGFAs NT. Final output was exposed film loaded into a light sealed capsule, that had to be taken to the back of the shop and loaded into a developer unit.

Modern x86 CPU's are actually RISC, the CISC instructions are handled by microcode to translate them into a combination of RISC commands. AMD started this around the Athalon XP era, Intel implemented it in the Core line of CPU's.

BBC Micro models A & B were based on the MOS 6502 8 bit platform, Acorn build development machines with a second RISC chip for development of the ARM platform which went into the Archimedes, but these were never generally released.

Very interesting machine! Great video!

4:54 - Intel introduced its EM64T (Expanded Memory 64 Technology) starting with Core 2 Duo processors to support 64-bit OSes. The Intel Xeon, was initially a native 64-bit processor, but later versions of Intel Xeon and Core CPUs are x86_64, meaning that they can run both 32-bit and 64-bit OSes and applications.

ARM chips were developed by Acorn and originally stood for Acorn Risc Machine and was available as an add on for the BBC to develop and test with, but it was never used in a BBC computer. The first computer it was used in was the Acorn Archimedes 300 series back in 1987. The ARM 1 chip was missing several key instructions and was never built into a computer and was used as a demomstrator at a number of computer shows to preview the technology. As for claims that the G3 was not as fast as an intel Pentium, Photoshop was demonstrated many times with a G3 PowerMac completing workflows faster with a G3 processor clocked at less than half the Windows machine next to it running the same workflows, again similar with AVID systems and many more. By the time of the G5 debacle where IBM and Motorola both failed to deliver decent performance, Intel had abandoned the P4 and was working on the core processors, which finally put Intel on a decent footing as they had been thrashed in floating point performance and general efficiency for years by the Athlon and were still embarrassed by having to adopt AMD's 64 bit extensions after the failure of itanium. Risc support was added in Windows 8 with Windows RT, not Windows 10, the latter only corrects the mistakes made earlier and paired with the right ARM based chips, can deliver better performance overall, never mind better performance per watt. With ARM based Windows 10 laptops available, well supported and well liked and ARM based Macbooks rumored for the end of the year, Intel should be worried, if not regretting selling off all their ARM portfolio to their competitors in the early 2000's

This goes back to the early days of Windows NT. There were "extraction layers" so that NT could support many different processors, and architectures. As the Intel processors became more powerful. they mostly eclipsed the other ones. MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC, were just a few of what was available back then.

So easy to reset the password for the admin account on NT. You could have just booted a live Linux CD, mounted the windows drive and used any number of password tools to reset the account. Maybe next time! Great video!

Winworldpc is my go to site for vintage software

Lightwave is a really fun program, I used to enjoy 4.0 on the mac in the late 90s. Dongle emulator time!

Should be able to run Microsoft Visual C++ on there, at least Version 4 had a dedicated MIPS version. Though it also sounds like version 6 might be able to do it, though I was only able to find a copy of 4. Would at least get you some large application to run, and possibly allow you to compile over some other applications.

At 7:30 the BBC Micro was based on the 6502 processor. The ARM was used in its successor, the Acorn Archimedes.

brilliant fantastic video to watch on youtube thank you take care.

I understand where the confusion arose re: ARM/BBC Micro. The original ARM chip was designed and prototyped on a BBC Model B. A few years back, an expansion board was developed to allow a BBC Micro user to use a Raspberry Pi as a coprocessor. So, in a sense, some BBC Micros actually _do_ have ARM-based (co)processors in them! [cool machine btw... gotta love the 1990s RISC-based oddballs like the Tyne]

Oh the wonderful sound of multiple SCSI Hard Drives spinning up lol. PC's have become for the most part, silent if using SSD's. Thank you for your video. I enjoyed it. 👍🙂👍

Good info on RISC and ARM!

Nuh uh, ARM2 didn't show up until the Acorn Archimedes. It was not released on the BBC Micro, even though, development started on the BBC Micro, due to the Tube bus.

Gosh darn it to heck! I wanted to see the air compressor action!

This was a fun video. If you happen to have a backup image of that original scsi hdd, you might be able to crack the old password with a Hiren boot cd, assuming the dos tools work with risc. There are also several linux password recovery iso out there that may work. Would be loads of fun to try!

Risc is coming back big time

Fantastic video, very interesting !

By the way awesome channel subscribed right away

7:31 foreshadowing the M1 Macs......

I watched the whole video very nice content! (new subscriber)

I am still using a machine like this to host my old BBS!

Not sure if anyone else has pointed it out, but I'm pretty sure this Tyne lived its life as a rendering server alongside an Amiga - that Raptor folder that was on the SCSI drive is dropping some big hints. I've an old Amiga World in my collection that was raving about the Raptor rendering system, might have to dig up an issue number...