As someone who worked in technical support at Intel when this system was on its very final days of official support - I can firmly say this is the worst 486 computer ever made. This system *IS* the Lovecraftian horror. I had one regular-caller customer who ran one of these as a NetWare 3 server as late as 1999, who constantly tried to get support on it. (He also had a newer system that WAS still supported, that he would open a ticket about, then when he got to level 3 support (me) he'd switch and start talking about this system.) Side (much longer) note: This system's existence helped pay off my college student loans. I worked for Intel over Y2k. Intel had already determined that all of the products with currently active support would handle Y2k just fine; but a few "recently support-expired" products *MIGHT* be impacted. This was one of them. The specific case was that internally, the system rolled the date over one digit at a time - so internally, 1999 would become 1990, then 1900, then 1000, then 2000. Only a few clock cycles of the CPU between each, but there was that tiny fraction of a second that the internal hardware clock would read an invalid date. Most operating systems no longer relied on the hardware clock for datekeeping while the system was on, and would sanity-check the results anyway. But.... Novell Netware 3 was one of the operating systems that actually made direct hardware calls to the clock regularly. And we knew there were customers who still ran it. So, in the extraordinarily unlikely event that an already obsolete system running an obsolete operating system happened to do a "date check" during those microseconds that the hardware would have an "invalid date" - there was a chance that the OS might crash. So, because Intel didn't want to appear to be "doing nothing" - they put level 3 technical support on high alert. For one week before Jan 1 to one week after, our level of support would *ONLY* accept "confirmed Y2k related tickets" from level 2 support. AND we would have at least one person on-premise sitting at a desk ready to accept these tickets 24/7 (normally level 3 support was M-F, 8-6.) *AND* all members of the team were on-call for the whole time. Required to carry a pager (remember those?) and be able to be in the office in one hour from being paged. I was a contract employee at the time, not a direct Intel employee. Only direct Intel employees could be in the building after hours unless accompanied by a direct intel employee. So in our department of 4 people, 2 of us couldn't be the only person there for 24/7 coverage. So the poor 2 direct employees had to split the overnight coverage that whole time. (Our boss joined them to at least add SOME extra leeway.) Oh, and they were all salaried. Us contract employees were hourly. Which is how paying off my student loans comes in to play. It turned out that the employment agency I worked through counted "on call" as the equivalent of being in the building working. So I clocked in Monday at 8 AM, then didn't clock out again until the *NEXT* Friday at 6 PM. After 8 hours, I was on time-and-a-half, after 12 hours, I was on double-time. And my boss had given me a 20% pay raise just a couple weeks before. This was split across two paychecks (I had to call and talk to my employment agency to confirm that I hadn't just forgotten to clock out and then took two weeks off.) But it paid off my student loans.

Ok first, I have to say, this video like all your videos is amazing. Your perseverance is inspiring! I can't believe how frustrating that machine is though. Serious credit where credit is due, I would have given up long ago!

Oh man, the dos version of Norton Utilities. That takes me back. Norton used to be a great set of utilities, before it became the bloated behemoth mess it is these days. I used to sit and watch the defrag for fun. It was always oddly satisfying to watch.

I remember downloading the QNX "Incredible 1.44M Demo" back in the late '90s/early '00s. Thought it was pretty cool to have a floppy that booted up to a full GUI even if the usage was pretty limited.

I installed many of these for Reuters in the 90s. Should have a resource cd with all the drivers somewhere if you want them.

QNX is rad, I remember that boot floppy demo. It was originally created by a Canadian company and powered these monstrosities called the Unisys ICON back in the mid-80s. Eventually QNX was bought out by another Canadian company RIM/Blackberry! (I think it got sold to someone in between there actually, 'cause it's used in lots of automotive applications)

QNX was one of the operating systems I discovered back in 99/2000 when I went down the alternative OSes rabbit hole after discovering BeOS 5 personal edition. I got really excited for Blackberry 10 devices because Blackberry developed it on the QNX platform.

A couple years ago I removed an IBM PS/1 from daily database service since it was brand new. Imaged the drive, tossed it onto a new machine and a little bit of DOSBox later the ancient DB program still runs happily

ARCServe! We still use arcserve where I work. It's awful. It feels like it hasn't been updated since 1998.

I would love to see what it takes to make NetBSD work.

This channel should be renamed That Being Said.

Very helpful digital forensics video for beginners

What a gem of a series I’ve stumble upon. 😍 Subscribed!

Thanks KZfaq for showing me Part 1 on this series just in time for me to finish the earlier parts to watch this Video now

Your perseverance through this is definitely commendable! An absolutely chaotic machine. Would love to see you tackle compiling Linux for it, but I don't think anyone would blame you for just putting it aside on display as "Least compatible 486"!

I Loved that part about the machines past. Would love to see more people do similar

These episodes/parts about this machine have been fascinating, thanks for the hard work. I hate to say it...when you asked what to do next with the machine I replied without thinking, “it’s time to throw it back!” I’m not sure how much more you can beat your head against this old thing. 😂

I'm hear for the stories of Lovecraftian horrors

Just in time! Can't wait to watch this!

This was a fun iceberg video without the iceberg.

A very interesting approach to retro computing :)

Once again an outstanding video. It's like you're doing in retrospect all the things I did in the 80's and 90's in real time. If you set up Unixware on a machine, things will officially be spooky

HI, by chance I come across your videos about LP486E; it was my first "real PC" in the 90's. I used DOS 6.22 first, than Win 3.11 but I manged to upgrade to Win 95OSR2 without problems; my LP486E worked with the "NCRSDMS" driver included in Windows 95 that had to be installed manually as not recognized automatically during setup, I remember well. Then, the other problem was only the LAN Driver, I got a driver written by a group of fan of this machine. Hope to be useful, thank for the videos that brought me 30 yrs back ...

this is a super weird computer for sure!

As always... Thanks a lot for the profound insights. It was really a pleasure to listen to you... Especially when you started mentioning QNX :-D Nicely done!

If you still have this system, I would be more than happy to rehome it. I have a couple machines from the 80s and early 90s that are workstation and server class. And always find their quirks fascinating. I can see it has the mezzanine connector for co-processor addon's, namely a Weitek floating point unit. Absolutely fascinating!

This is brilliant, what an intense 3.11 install/"desktop" Regarding digital forensics: Have two HDD images of laptops used within an engineering firm, one was a Toshiba 200CDT that was connected to and used to program some PLC stuff with the KEPware program. Kepware is still around. The other was an AST Ascentia J50 that has a documentation program from Mitsubishi Electric called MELSEC MEDOC. I find it really interesting to see all the complex and advanced programs that was thrown onto the x86 (or equivalent) platform even in the early days of desktop computing. And that both ran on the somewhat unstable first release of Win95! I'll end this somewhat long comment by giving a thumbs up to all your interesting videos and topic, and also an honorary mention to that excellent HP monitor to show it all on - no capture card needed! ≈T

I'd love to see all of those suggestions, especially compiling Linux.

it is a frustrating deep dive into the rabbit hole but somehow I'm looking forward to see it running a custom built linux and make the machine "usable" even today...

Seing QNX again brings back some memories. I only tried QNX 4 with the demo disk, but I used QNX 6 through 6.2 as my main desktop operating system for over a year. Photon microGUI was very fast and lightweight and although the Voyager browser didn't render many sites corretcly, it was good enough for me. My computer back then was too old for Windows and even on Linux and OpenBSD, running Netscape was just too bloated for that old Pentium machine, even with the MMX and RAM upgrades. Fortunately I was able to buy a new computer in 2002 and Phoenix (now Firefox) came out a little after that.

You went through much more hell than I would have been willing to go through just to keep using a SCSI drive. I would install some solid state job like an IDE to CF or SD card adapter and used the IDE channel and disabling or bypassing the SCSI interface either through onboard jumpers or bios setting. I'm sure the solid state options would be much faster than using the SCSI over a normal IDE drive anyhow

I wonder if NetBSD and Linux are failing to boot because of a lack of RAM. From memory, both have compressed kernels which can be quite large when decompressed into RAM to run. It'll be interesting to see if adding more RAM makes a difference. Good luck!

The NT4 setup script can be modified to allow a lower amount of memory to install. Change the value from 12288kb to a lower number, to allow the installer to install in less than 12mb.

Loved the video. For an old SCSI like that I'd try using SpinRite from GRC to fix it. If the bios can see it SpinRite can.

QNX is also used, for example, in the current generation of Sync 3 in-car entertainment systems by Ford. It succeeded the Windows CE-based Sync 1 and 2, and will be succeeded by Android in a couple of years.

I actually was inspired to do some digital forensics on old computers in my possession, not limited to the Compaq Presario desktop I got at a thrift store (and a hard drive taken out of a Dell Dimension 4100 that an old teacher of mine gave me).

If it was my machine, I think I'd be going down the alternative SCSI card route and installing NeXTSTEP. I used to have a NeXT Turbo Color machine, and it was wonderful for developing on.

Memtest answer, more tests more likely to be good....back when I was a technician I had a few boxes that were ok until 40 or even 50+ passes

I hit the NetBSD boot loop on a spare hdd myself. This is on a Intel Core 2 Quad rig. Might be the reason my local NetBSD mirror (U.K.) sticks with NetBSD 8.1.

Hmmm did you try disabling the L1 cache again? Seems the problems started after that ?

so just out of curiosity what distro of Linux do you use because I use Arch Linux I run KDE as a desktop environment and I use the linux-zen kernel?

Did OpenBSD have support for that SCSI card? A lot of the BSDs share drivers.

What about gentoo? Would it run? I assume an older version starting from stage 2 or even stage 1 could be interesting. If there is enough energy and time also a LFS session could be possible.

The only hope I can muster is to somehow build a recent version of Linux kernel and somehow enable OpenFirmware Device Tree support on x86 platform, then either let GRUB chain-load Das U-boot or let GRUB itself to feed the kernel a device tree that specifically tells each driver where to look for things. Basically I am treating this machine as a x86-based embedded system and using a bunch of techniques commonly found on ARM platforms.

Presumably most viewers of this ThemTube channel do have some sort of historical IT experience, but most of you forgot that in theses days the challenge was to get everything properly configured and setuped with incompatibilities, resource conflicts an proper driver support. 🧐

I'd recommend buildroot for making a Linux based "disto" to install on this machine.

you might need to either recompile the linux kernel with the right driver and command line options, or if the driver is already in the kernel, find out what kernel command line options you need to insert into your grub or lilo config.

Could you drop an Adaptec SCSI board in there. Adaptec boards are bomb proof with many different OS supported drivers

where can we download an image of the harddisk?

Incredible. So many years in use without proper reinstalling of the OS... A very weird machine.

oh this is gonna be hell, i just know it

Good video. I don't have this Pro Workstation, so don't have experience with it. However I do love the pizza box style, it reminds me a lot of the Commodore 128D & 128DCR (I don't have those, only C-64's). Have you asked around in vintage PC forums about these issues you mentioned? I searched VCF & found these using search "Intel Professional Workstation" >> www.vcfed.org/forum/search.php?searchid=12047597 . You might find more hits just using "Professional Workstation" idk. And try other vintage forums. Also, you were wondering what to do with this PC. Here are some of my blanket suggestions: 1. So it looks like this has a 33mhz 486. Does this PC have an all-encompassing crystal oscillator clock (OSC) on the main board? What if you replace it with a 40mhz oscillator? Or whatever frequency that will get it to 40mhz. That should help speed it up a little without burning it up too much. Just an idea. You may need to stick a passive heatsink (with or without fan) on the 486. I assume it does not have an Overdrive slot. What was that empty socket on the left of the 486? Is that for an FPU? Or is it to upgrade the CPU? 2. I also searched VCF for some blanket 486 O/S ideas & found one thread > www.vcfed.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-13163.html 3. What about PC GEOS? i had that back in the day (1990's) for my 8088's & 286's, i.e. Geoworks Ensemble 2.0. But afaik the most current versions are with Breadbox/bluewaysw > github.com/bluewaysw/ now now known as open-source FreeGEOS. I have not tried it (yet?). It also used to be NewDeal before Breadbox. You should be able to find the original files of Geoworks Ensemble & Breadbox Ensemble at winworldpc.com , but I'm not sure if that's legal or what. I still have my PC\GEOS 1.2 & 2.0 installation floppies. 4. If you stick with WfW 3.11, perhaps try Calmira? It is a UI shell that changes 3.x to look like 9x or XP. I have used Calmira XP before on a couple of my Win 3.1 machines in the past & it was awesome. www.calmira.de Look for Calmira XP 3.33 . There is also an LFN version, but I did not have luck with that. Calmira is inactive though, since 2008. There was also a Vista version I think. 5. I had another idea brewing, but now I forgot! And by the way, I used to work for Intel Corp. I was at the Hawthorn Farms campus in Hillsboro, Oregon. By the time I got there in the early mid 1990's, the 486's were pretty much phased out & the Pentium 60's had already started. It's been 15 years since I left & have not visited it since.

Its a good chip, but in the days before opensource, someone had to write a driver - and someone had to test a driver, and in the case of linux, someone had to break a driver, fix a driver, break it again, fix it again... This, in the manual was a lie: "Video drivers for SCO UNIX should be obtained from the respective UNIX distributor." They were not. They were only available via Intel Dial up support. The file 'LPUNIXKIT' is an Intel file And "Boot Diskette supplied for R2. SDMS Ver 1.6 drivers" is in that kit.

By the way, regarding the percentage readout in MemTest, I have a feeling it's supposed to be read as Pass 1 %, Pass 2 %, but due to the lack of screen real-estate it's just all glommed together as Pass1% and Pass2%.

A very interesting series. Nine months later without an update and I imagine you've run out of ideas to get the damn thing working properly.

I like the Ubuntu idea

Wow!

When you start with the Pentium 2s and 3s and later, where they've been on broadband internet the whole time... that's when it will get interesting. A 486 was merely better at running Windows 3.1 and fairly basic versions of MS Office than a 386.

If you would try compile a custom distro, remember to disable flags, such old hardware may crash with new gcc optimizations due to lower RAM etc...

As cool as SCSI is, screw it if you can use a CF card. Install Windows 95 OSR2/B with BootGUI=0 so that you have FAT32 on DOS and CIFS if you need it. If the builtin LAN chip doesn't work with 95 get an ISA network card that does. You have two slots, one for a Soundblaster, i would have used an AWE32 just because and because some folks from the Vogons forum have written initialization tools for old machines that don't have PnP. And the other for whatever you fancy unless you need it for a working network card. I would have used it to make it possible to change the CF card to better experiment with different OSes and to easily get a bunch of games on there. And with a CF card you can easily dd yourself a definitive state that you can always come back to if you want to experiment with old software under 95.

I’d love to see Linux get patched to run this. Sounds like it’s just moving some memory addresses around

Holy crap. That processor was made a week before I was born.

Well, that was interesting... not sure I have anything to add, other than noticing that after you did the low-level format, it appears that you neglected to do the necessary filesystem format. -- I hie from the MFM era myself, and well do I remember my ST225's annual rewhacks. (Until I discovered that putting a fan on the campstove-HD meant it never lost its marbles again.) Alas, I understand this "dance with them that brung you" thing all too well.. many a time I've argued with some cranky piece of hardware until it gave in and behaved, rather than digging a known-good replacement out of the parts box. It's the principle of the thing, ya know? PS. First vid where I've been able to see comments at ALL in about a week. (Affected Chrome and SeaMonkey but not Palemooon... affected PCLinuxOS/KDE but not WinXP... wtf.) Perhaps a good omen??

"Oh, Turbo Basic, I see... But the Spectrum was stupid fast compared to that piece of Architectural Archeology. I must forgot witch letter I used for the DVD before flashing the Bios... Still tryin' to get your voice over recognizable by the system manager? I don't know, Dude, it must be the DVD tray... QNX? Well, I liked so much those summer camp stupid check the box tests..."

Try installing Banyan Vines.

He pronounces DOS like a serial killer would

I think it's cool just as a QNX machine.

Wait Norton was actually useful! And I grew up in the 1995 world of dial-up and windows 95.

So wait you're saying it's Windows NOT for workgroups?

Every time I read "Digital Forensics" I think of Evidence Elininator... lulz When he gets out of jail he needs to make it for Windows 10.

If I'm testing memory, minimum of 1000% or it's not complete.

No SpinRite?

200% should mean it went over it twice. God I hope that's what it means.

Someone find a way of porting the old 3.1 driver for him !

intel is the The Computer Inside.

I've got one - no idea where I got it - of these systems stored away too...

Came for the forensics, stayed for the lovecraftian horror that is this computer. Personally, I would have long since let it go. There are simply much better 486 based computers out there and that's including the bizarre embedded 486 computers.

I'd bet this thing was in use less than 5 years ago...

Hey Is there a Part 4 ? :)

i never end up getting the cookie

No one knows exists...that's mean to all those people that had BB10 devices...oh wait...nope that is no one

So this was used for a university for a few years then scavenged out of the bin and continued for a bit as a cheap system.

Atrocious support by Intel. Hmmm wait.. aren't we supposed to buy new motherboards every 2 years? Looks like a rather old scheme. ;)

Boat anchor

“DOSS” not “DAWS”.

Go Bold + 8MB Ram & 487 FPU then QNX...

Send the unit to e-waste... Problem solved...

It pronounced "DOSS" not "DAWS".

Pleassssssseeeee pleassssseeee stop saying "dAWs".... It is pronounced "doss".... Like "floss" but with a d.

I'd love to see all of those suggestions, especially compiling Linux.