Jeez, I must've torn down and rebuilt a hundred of these in high school. Those thumb screws were appreciated. I was tasked with maintaining the PCs for a semester and I'll never forget being introduced to the "computer closet." A small room stacked floor to ceiling with dysfunctional Optiplexes, Prolineas, and Presarios, all 486s. My job was to reformat all of them with Windows 95, remove the modems, install ethernet, and get them on the school intranet. I installed Doom on all of them, haha. I kinda want one again now after seeing this, haven't thought about the things in years.

Ahh, I worked for ten years in the large Oxfam just down the road from this place - we used this shop for emergency stationary orders all the time. The owners were/are such a lovely couple! Best laminator in the whole of Norwich. (^_^)

I reckon the original owner installed the cd-rom drive solely for playing music cd’s whilst doing the accounting work. Those old cd-rom drives have their own audio circuitry with built-in dac that goes straight to the headphone socket. No sound card required! I remember playing (around 1997) Mario VGA on my 486 and listening to my favorite music cd’s at the same time with headphone plugged into the cd-rom drive. It was really neat. Sadly modern Sata drives haven’t got this option as the audio cd playback is now handled in software whist back in the day it worked seperatly of the sound card.

Dell actually still has this PC in their database! Go to support.dell.com and punch in service tag JKP4C - you've got a BIOS update waiting for you there! You appear to be on version A01, but A07/A08 is available: 1. Updated copyright to 1996. 2. Fixed address reported on memory errors. 3. Added a delay in ATPOST to prevent systems without hard drives from continually rebooting. 4. Attempt floppy boot before any PnP boot card. 5. Added delay in POST to keep systems with no IDE hard drives from continually rebooting. 6. Fixed problem with hitting -alt-numeric keypad enter where the system would think the control key was still down even after you released it. 7. Year 2000 code. 8. Added password status field and the ability to lock the system password. 9. Caching of BIOS F000 segment disabled to prevent system from locking on boot in compatible mode, and to allow a user to go into setup when emm386 was loaded Hurry up, you aren't Y2K compliant! :D

There's something pure and comforting about playing Windows 3.1 Solitaire and Minesweeper on a machine with a loud, whiny hard drive spinning away and a mouse with clicks audible from the next county over.

The keyboard was once owned by British Gas... and it still is. :-P

In the mid 90's I was tasked to extend the server life of a lawyer's study. That server happened to be the kind originally paired to that beautiful fujitsu monitor of yours. A very nice file server that was a bit limited by software. On the cheap I turned it into a Slackware Linux box, with two modems. One you could dialup to connect to from the outside on the go, and the other used for scheduled smtp to send mails in bulk at night to avoid hogging the internet by day. (These were still early dialup days, people in the office would share the 56.6 modem with a dial on demand proxy from the comfort of their office). As far as I know, my kludge gave that office 2 years of respite before they were finally forced to upgrade more professionally. The Fujitsu was very nice to work with, very standard parts, and easy internal access. And of course, a very solid machine as I worked on it way past its prime and all in all it lasted about 10 years without trouble.

You can feed the service tag at 5:47 into Dell's website and it still brings up the system type and its configuration as-sold.

The whole "Windows 3.1 isn't really an operating system" thing is actually a bit of a misconception. Or rather, it highlights how well Microsoft managed at making the transition between DOS and Windows seamless. Windows 3.1 very much IS an operating system, but it's just structured in a way which to the modern eye seems incredibly bizarre. The kernel is actually 32-bit code and does proper multitasking - but the things it multitasks are NOT Windows applications, but rather 16-bit virtual DOS machines, some of which may just run as normal DOS windows, some of which may run device drivers, and one of which is the 16-bit Windows environment. Windows applications within the latter are then cooperatively multitasked (ie not "proper" multitasking) but there's some incredibly clever code that sits in the kernel such that when you press ctrl+alt+delete you can normally get out of a "stuck" Windows application without bringing down the rest of your applications. Why have this bizarre architecture? Simple, because it allowed people without the fancy new 32-bit Enhanced Mode (386) CPUs to run effectively just the Windows bit directly on hardware without the kernel; in that case of course you lose the ability to multitask with DOS applications and you lost the ability to use the fancy new (more importantly, faster) Windows device drivers (though actually 3.1 dropped support for "Real Mode" and required a 286 with "protected mode" which allowed it to provide some very rudimentary features but not full DOS multitasking like on a 386). Windows 95 was the first consumer OS that really works in a familiar way compared to modern Windows, though it still made several compromises either for backwards compatibility or to meet the target system requirements.

"allowing a maximum resolution of 1280 x 124" Super widescreen!

Man, that's just screaming out for some late era Sierra gaming.

The CD-ROM drive might just need the lens cleaning. If it can't get a focus on the disc then it won't spin up. I fixed several CD drives back in the day with nothing but a cotton bud. I also test machines with blank floppy disks first, after learning the lesson the hard way with a Mac Plus that immediately scratches any disks put in it. I still have that one somewhere and never got round to fixing it.

Tsk, of course you couldn't undelete anything - you ran a defrag first. Everyone knows to not change anything before undelete!

Back in 1998-2000 I worked for a local (to Norwich) company called matrix group ltd, who specialised in buying company computers in bulk, wiping them and setting them up for home users, the boss of the company was also the sales man and 90% of what he would say was that every computer would do “word processing” because back then that’s really all they were good for. We literally sold hundreds of these set ups and I would not be surprised if we sold this one, we had a ware house stacked with those keyboards and monitors and the 32x cd rom drive is definitely the same style of cheap off brand model we use to fit. Pushing the need for a cd rom drive was an easy way to make some extra money on every computer sold. Almost all the computers we sold at that time had windows 3.1 unless you wanted to pay extra. Basically we would install 3.1 without a licence but you’d have to pay for a win95 licence. We would also fit a 56k modem if you wanted (it was a bitch on these machines) likely because of the dodgy software distribution the company never branded or marked their computers in any way and normally we used sprays and scrapers to remove any evidence of the previous corporate owner. If you wanted something new and better then you have better like Cyrix processors the company is long since dead, it was based on Belmore road in Thorpe and I think it was Anglia Internet that appeared just round the corner from someone’s garage and grew and eventually took its place. These videos help me reminisce about the crap I used to have to nail together back then.

Normal people: Thumbscrews. Norwich: Fingerscrews.

Even saw it in the window. Shame the shop is gone, was always fun to look around that area for randoms :)

That's bang up to date. For Norwich.

9:17 Of course those monitors are crisp and solid. They are actually Nokia monitors.

the tray on the cd drive isn't closing all the way, the laser carriage lift needs to be lubricated on the bottom of the tray and possibly needs a belt

Apple says that they did dark mode first, but really it all started and MS-DOS!

You won me over at "vintage pornography"

Only in Norwich.

15:15 Do... do you not know how to play solitaire?

Lesson learned: always use expendable media in untested devices. Then you shove you doom 2 into the CD drive... ah well, maybe you have a few spares.

*opens solitaire* *Drags black 6 onto red 5* *Closes solitaire*

the lock an the case sometimes disables the keyboard and/or mouse- "ruined" the family PC in the 90s with that for 3 weeks until I randomly turned the key again

I remember that stationary shop and was a little sad to see it shut but it really came as no surprise. I never saw a single customer in there and pretty much everything in the window was yellowed as if it had been in stock for years. Like a lot of shops down Magdalen Street and other back roads in Norwich really, almost stuck in a time warp.

Thanks for taking time to have actual captions for the Deaf. That PC takes me back.

So chill, so relaxed. I loved this exploration of a random found machine. Great video to watch just when you want to chill out.

I remember when we had these beige Dell Optiplex 486s at work. Unfortunately that was 2003. Still, it only needed to run Lotus notes and the mainframe terminal software so I guess that was good enough.

These shops really do exist! When I moved to Munich in 2016 and explored the neighbourhood I found a VCR service shop, specific and only for Betamax, still open every work day in the middle of Munich! (rents are out the world there) I thought exactly the same thing with the time hole.

Back in the days when we owned our o/s. I always loved old pc cases as they were huge with tons of space for drives. If anything buying an old ATX is ideal for a home server as you can jam so much in them.

the service tag on the back still works! but dell doesn't have anything or it save for some utilities and even a BIOS upgrade that you should consider installing in the next update.

6:41 Oh that brings back memories. I remember that earear sound and the boot up display saying it's accessing high memory.

Nice machine. Needs a Soundblaster card as well

I was running a Tiny pc back then. I had that machine for about 10 years. Lots of upgrades along its journey.

My old man had one of these! He bought it in 1996 and that's when I was introduced to Doom, Quake and that wonderful dial up jingle you get before logging online. I miss that old box, I still have the correct Dell monitor it was sold with somewhere...

Nice random retro find! I love going through all the old computers I've picked up and its amazing the stuff people have left on there!

that startup sound and sequence, channel name delivers in spades! spent many a year tuning, tweaking and writing many a dos bootup sequence! thanks for the trip down memory lane 🍻

It was a nice time when you knew what just about every file on your computer was for, or at least where it came from. Stuff just goes everywhere now, and there's aspects to Windows that we'll never know everything about. I would consume every piece of information I could find about command line options for things like DOS utilities, trying to see if there was some new trick I could take advantage of. It always seemed like there were secrets to discover, so computers were still very magical and exciting to me. Even when you delved into the realm of assembly code, interrupts, and I/O ports, things like Ralf Brown's Interrupt List was this treasure trove of secrets about your hardware, waiting to be tapped into on the lowest levels. Computers just don't offer that kind of fascination anymore, though, I don't believe. There's just so many layers of code to get anywhere near the hardware. Minimal tweaks rarely gain you any noticeable horsepower. Things like Raspberry Pi exist, but even Linux is a mess of abstraction to get through. I guess I miss DOS and all the potential it offered. I just don't miss real mode and segmented memory.

My father owned a 486DX2-66. I loved that machine. It replaces our 386SX-16. Massive step up.

I'm watching this on my Optiplex computer at work in 2020. It's crazy to realize how long the Optiplex model has been going!

Pure nostalgia ! Thanks ! (IT Professional 1987-2012) : )

7:12 - Yuji Naka - I see what you're up to on that PC, young man!

Those start-up sounds, God I miss computing in the 90s

The service tag, JKP4C, still looks up on support.dell.com, to show the original configuration. It had an Etherlink III card in it, 64MB RAM, 486DX2/66 and Quantum LPS540 drive as shipped. Looks like it may have come with Banyan Vines as well.

Love the sound of the old keyboard and machine noises takes me back they just so different to today’s machines :)

I love these old business bangers. I concentrated on Siemens Nixdorf and they come, depending on model with Tseng ET4000 onboard, lush amounts of memory, and a Riser card that allows for enough room for a soundcard, a network card and often even PCI slots - for a voodoo card, for example. Also they usually very early features PS/2 mouse and keyboard and they stack well - under my KVM switch - so i can have so many systems/OSes on one Monitor/keyboard mouse combo. it's pretty awesome.

We had a few of these and the previous generation 433Ls (my favourite PC), we kept them going until about 2002 (NHS so no money). When Dell introduced the Optiplex 575L there was an issue with the graphics, it reserved memory slap bang in upper memory so we had fun with MemMaker trying to fit all the drivers in the remaining space.

I love how Nostalgia Nerd probably just gave the world the most accurate representation of what a hacker really looks like in an Ad lol.

@ 9:25 That's an NMB Hi-Tek Series 725 keyboard mechanism, some (early) Amigas use that switch mech.

I love your enthusiasm for vintage computers, and I enjoy watching the reminders about how bad they really were. I don't miss them at all.

It wasn't uncommon for people to use their old monitor, mouse & keyboard on a new computer back then.

oh man, all those oldschool wallpapers. nice. talk about bringing back memories.

Nice to see Norwich selling cutting edge equipment

The place I worked at in the late 90s had a bunch of these. We had them running Win 95 and then later Win 98. Unbelieveably the Service Code on the back (JKP4C) still works on the Dell website. Looks like it has the original hard drive but it would have had a 3Com 3c509 network card installed at the factory.

God, this is so great. I'm 33 so my sisters and I would play on a early IBM that was DOS and had 3.1 as well and that's how we learned at 5 years old to access games and whatnot using DOS!

The only reason that I recognised how a cardfile worked or what it was that I came into recently which had been generated many decades ago, was that I Had memories of "cardfile" on Windows 3.1. It was an ultimate "ah-ha" moment.

I remember upgrading my PC to a 486 DX2 66 from an SX 33, I played DOOM all night and failed several tests at school the next day, I think I actually fell asleep during one of them. A lot of the time the integrated graphics on those Dells, HPs and Compaqs were actually bloody good or more to the point, bloody good for the previous generation :P I still remember getting my first PCI graphics card, I had never seen DOOM without a huge border run so smooth then bloody Quake came out and I was right back to slide shows :'( The "family PC" could play anything I liked but I had to wait till my very religious family had gone to bed and play without sound, headphones would have meant I wouldn't hear it if anyone woke up and came my way :P

That PC is probably one I dreamed of back then. I wouldn't get a PC until 1994 but had looked at them in magazine and ads for about 4 years just drooling for one. To me it came down to between Dell and Micron. I wanted Micron more but I bet in 93 I was also wanting that Dell. Weird as my first PC in 94 had a Trident chip in it with 512k or ram and it ran stuff at 320x200. Haha I love old DOS boots....Das Boot DOS boot..haha get it..sigh.

Part 2 would be a great idea for such a machine.

5:08 Whoa I never noticed this! That's an interesting SMD package O__O looks like THT bent out of shape, haha!

After replacing the dead floppy and CD drives, I'd also put in a sound card, 8GB IDE hard drive (also install EZ-Drive because the PC's BIOS probably doesn't natively go that high), and an ethernet card for easy file transfer.

Ahhhh, yeah, that's the nostalgia spot. What Optiplexes and similar builds lack in rarity and personality, they make up for in being just awesomely solid machines in every sense of the word. The cornerstone of early-mid 90s personal PCs. When I eventually start buying some era-appropriate computers, I'm aiming for one of these babies first.

I usually have listening to the sponsorship bits in videos but even I have to admit that was a smooth segway into the sponsor. I've literally dreamed of finding an old and in decent shape computer like this, but most I find it a falling apart Windows XP tower.

I like how the retro tech KZfaqrs name their PCs. So now Nostalgia Nerd now has the Stationary Shop PC, whilst LGR has his Woodgrain PC, and Michael MJD has his 5-dollar PC.

My PC blew up this morning, massive bang from the PSU and electrics tripped.

Hotdog stand looks surprisingly tame in the video :-D In my memory the yellow is much more saturated and annoying. My favourite colour scheme at that time was Neon though, perfected with a homebrew background image designed in Paint - a black background with multi-coloured random airbrush strokes all over! I wonder if I still have one of the PCs running that design! My secondary school had the brilliant idea of buying 21 used IBM PS/Value Point 486 DX/2 66 machines in late 1997 or early 1998 as they were phased out by a bank. The school then proceeded to upgrade them with dirt-cheap sound cards no one ever managed to get as much as a simple beep out of, 32x CD-ROM drives and Windows 95B. Pretty much all of them had 8 MB RAM and 250 MB WD hard drives, which were close to full with Win 95 and Office 97. Putting one computer without much software and no printer into each classroom quickly proved useless and after less than two years, all but two of them were broken, downright vandalised. Cables were cut using Swiss army knives and the most common issue was people going into DOS mode and entering the only command everyone seemed to know: "FORMAT C:". Since we were left to play with these machines pretty much unsupervised I rather quickly did two things: downgrade the bloody thing to DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 (including a whole bunch of software, e.g. a pirated copy of Word 2.1 and various abandonware games) and sourcing a free Citizen dot matrix printer. Especially after some people discovered that QBasic would let you play Snakes (remember, these were the days of Nokia 3310 phones in the hands of all middle-class teenagers!) the computer was considered highly valuable :-) The lock on that Dell reminds me of one more upgrade I performed ^^ As I said, almost all of those IBMs had one single 8 MB SIMM. Except for one, which had two of them installed. While it still worked, it was one of those machines that were never used so I figured no one would actually notice if half the 16 MB were gone. One day I snuck into that classroom and quietly removed one of the SIMMs, transferring it to our own computer. In early 2000 the school moved buildings and took away all those classroom PCs to furnish one of the new PC labs. Around a year later funds became available for new PCs for that lab and we got one of the old ones back because I was on good terms with the IT admin. Again, only 8 MB and loaded with Win 95. This one got upgraded with two more 8 MB SIMMs that were thrown away left and right at that time, DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11 and Word 6.0. I even managed to find a graphics driver for the onboard video that let us use a 17" CRT at 1024x768 16-bit colour! The 9-pin Citizen printer got upgraded to an Epson LQ-100 24-pin that had a proper sheet feeder and produced quite reasonable output for a dot matrix printer. The setup stayed like that until I finished school in 2003. At that point the admin told me I could have the whole setup or it'd be thrown away. Of course I took it!

14:22 "Swapping floppies with mates" hahahaha

"There's neee porn on it."

My first PC was a used Dell Optiplex DX2/66 from AC Computers in Stockport for £250, with half the money from a paper round! I think I deleted the Win 95 folder in mspaint and had to pay another £50 (no disc). It wouldn't write to floppies, until I found if you loaded the BIOS in a DOS window using Ctrl-F10 it would work again. It struggled to run the intro to a FIFA 96 demo CD and I was miffed when a mate got a free Pentium 90 PC from a doorstep. I read years later that AC got in trouble for not supplying the CDs in 'The Register'.

"A couple of finger screws and a slide". Reminds me of the local municipal playground when I was a kid.

That is an NMB/Hi-Tek "Space Invaders" keyboard. The spring isn't supposed to be visible, you pulled off most of the mechanism with the keycap. I have two keyboards with those switches, and they are very nice.

Wow this computer is so much like the computer that got me into learning and using computers.

That DOS bootup is pretty tame. I think my 386 scrolls down the screen at least three complete times before it gets to the DOS prompt.

6'30" What a lovely sound!!

I'm completely forgot about the Hotdog colour scheme in Windows 3.1, totally agree the go to colour scheme

16 Megs of RAM for this DOS machine, if it was originally, was an overkill. Was it really necessary for an accounting machine?

I remember walking into a shop on Tottenham Court Road around 94, and they wanted £1200 for a 486DX-33 machine with monitor........

Subtitle says "scratch the living jesus out of it" but you said "scratch the living hell out of it". The subtitle says "it's completely dead" and you said "it's pretty dead". You said "dog's nuts" and the subtitle says "dogs-bollocks".

More PC vintage goodness. I love this! Great video and thank you for the upload. Correct! You and we can't get enough of this nostalgia.

Also that keyboard is from an ICL DRS Unix box rather than a regular PC. God know how they ended up with that on a PC. They where PC compatible keyboards, but DRS machines where really uncommon.

Brings it all back for me.

You could tell who the villain is by the handlebar mustache, much like the Kaiser who stole our word for twenty.

That last section when the drive damaged the disk reminded me of a (possibly apocryphal) tale I heard in the late 80s. The usual disgruntled, possibly fired, employee left a "present" for his ex employer. Someone puts a 3.5 floppy into the drive to do work and it fails to read or write. Hmm. Probably a faulty disk. Lets try another one. Same problem, ahh, so its the drive that's faulty. Lets use another PC with that disk. .. Oh. Not working. And so on. Eventually most of the disk drives in the office became inoperable, and a lot of other disks suddenly weren't working either. Turned out the ex employee had smeared vaseline on at least one disk that they knew would be used. Which left traces of vaseline on all the r/w heads of the drives he tried it on, therefore wrecking any other disk used in any contaminated drive.

Fujitsu ErgoPRO was a line of computers. I have two. Also the DRS was not just PC's but also some of the old UNIX line.. both SPARC and x86.

It's a strange feeling I get on a present day episode like this. Not the slightest mention of the really hard times the world is going through, and that's good, since now we watch thinks like this not only because we always liked them, but with the added bonus we can try to escape reality for a while. And yet, it's weird to see this roll out as if nothing happened, sponsored content included. Whish I could live life the way it was not long ago, and belong to the now unreal world this video seems to have come out from.

Sings "How much is that PC in the window?"

This doesn't surprise me at all, many electronics shops are behind the times and selling decades old hardware for today's prices. One of our local shops in town was trying to sell one of those knock-off NES Classics that had something like 5000 games on it for $200 and they sell the long since defunct PS/2 mouse/keyboard adapters for a whopping $15. I don't mean the PS/2 to USB either, I mean the old serial port adapters. BUT. I can't beat the price on their used DVD's and bluerays :D

Wow Magdeaen street, that takes me back, I spent so much money in Greg's records and second hand land. :D

Those pastel pink ICL monitor power buttons developed a lovely brown patina of dead skin and tuck shop stickiness at our school. Did you find any hidden folders? That was the usual trick when you were caught short without a floppy and risked saving work on the hdd. I still call it 'file manager' 😂

Man I put 300 of these onto pallets and sent them to auction back when we were doing Y2K compliance work.

Never thought I would regret throwing away all my old CRT's (I had the same monitor as shown here - still have the system which belongs to it though - same buttons and coloring scheme)

That Packard Bell keyboard is freakin beautiful.

Old PC's are like old cars you could open the bonnet and have a tinker around yourself and get away with it.

If Techmoan was into old desktop computers, he would have simply replaced the belts in that cd drive.

LOLOLOL... that lock key took me back... I used to hide my buds n cone and lock it.. ahh them times

15:36 Are- Are we just going to pretend that didn't happen?!

I love the miss matched ICL monitor. I have one of those at my parents house.