From what I remember at the time to license MCA you had to also pay for every clone you'd ever made prior to licensing MCA. It was IBM being "we're IBM" and as usual going splat.

Another lasting technical standard that the PS/2 managed to set was that it introduced VGA graphics to the PC market

I just got this video as an advertisement... First advertisement I've clicked on in literal years! No regrets!

I never thought I'd hear an 8-bit version of The Art Of Noise's Close To The Edge. But now I have.

I built a Novell 3.11 network using a PS/2 486 as the non-dedicated server. Running on thin ethernet around an office (don't forget the terminators or bad things happen). Beautiful machines internally, just so very, very expensive. Beyond servers, E-ISA and MCA just didn't have any impact on anything I saw back in the day. Great video!

I remember the bank that I was working with at the time decided to standardise on MicroChannel. Most of us techie types completely opposed it as unnecessarily expensive and not the direction the industry was heading in.

Oddly, despite being one of the gang of nine, I remember Olivetti showing an MCA bus PC. I was working there at the time, so it might merely have been a prototype. I also remember Compaq making a sever boo-boo in implementing the ISA bus by omitting a memory timing signal that "no-one used any more". Except they did. All the affected PCs had to be returned for a new motherboard.

Brilliant telling of that whole subject, I recall that era very well and oh don't get me started upon the IBM PS/2 models that had a riser card and the penchant for people to use their computer as a monitor stand - ZX81 rampack wobble, naaa IBM beat that with MCA riser bus card wobble so all your card could wobble at once.

The Dolch portable is an impressive machine. I clearly remember them, they actually *defined* the high-end in portable computing - with an appropriate price tag. That made them quite rare, as there were loads of cheaper altenatives available. Having two CPUs in something carryable, was outright ridiculous back then.

6:15 Look at the unusual alternating shape of those pins. This was done to maintain compatibility with AT-bus pinouts, so AT-bus cards could also be plugged in. The backward-compatible pins made contact at the bottom, while the extra EISA-bus pins had their contacts at that second level further up.

That was interesting. I did fall asleep, but I also watched the rest of it the next day. I really liked how there was a history lesson along with a fairly unique computer, combined into one video.

I like your style you seem to pick up on bit and bobs no one else has covered and make it intresting also bring back so many memories

Absolute gold mine! I've been looking into older tech and the ways things were done back in the day, this is exactly what I've been looking for! Great content, thanks for covering all these older machines!

I quite like the music you choose to use in these videos. It's from even further back than the technology, of course, but it sets the mood super-well.

Cool stuff! An insurance company I worked in computer operations for in the 1990s had one of those Dolch machines connected to their network as a packet-sniffer. I forgot about that until I saw it again in the video. They also had a single IBM PS/2 microchannel machine. This was for one application and the machine always had some kind of issue with it which required us to call in support for. My brother had an EISA based machine used as an RIP for his ECRM VR30 imagesetter. This was required for the huge differential SCSI controller similar to the one you show in the video which was used to drive the imagesetter. The only other cards plugged into the buss were a standard video card and a 3-COM 3C509 NIC with a thin-net and RJ45 ports on it. Setting up the cards was painful because a special EISA configuration utility had to run to write an ID to the system ROM instead of flipping jumpers on the cards to set the addresses.

Great video, the story part was quite informative and it was surprisingly interesting to see a pc of That time running so well

I love your videos, so underrated. My first computer was an Macintosh Performa 630CD so EISA was a little behind me in terms of when I started using PC hardware, but I did have a few machines I got dumpster diving at a local electronics surplus store but they never really threw out any EISA cards.

Small correction: There's no relation between FreeDOS and DOSBox. DOSBox is a stand-alone emulator that has its DOS "built-in". While you _can_ use DOSBox with actual FreeDOS or MS-DOS (or even Windows 9x), in 99.9% of the cases it just runs on its internal DOS emulation.

Delightful video - thanks for making and sharing it. That portable PC really is quite lovely.

Really good work, I literally watched all of your videos it’s a pity there aren’t more...

Descent II was one of my favorite games of the era. I also played a lot of Rise of the Triad then; in 1995 I worked for a correspondence school that was fairly well known in the US. My shift was until 8 PM. Management all left by 5 and we'd kick off a net game of R.O.T.T. I love your point about MCA largely succeeding in demonstrating that IBM no longer controlled that market. Sometime in the 90s I read an article in one of the PC magazines that had a rapid-fire list of computer industry lessons. IBM was in it twice, for MCA and the PC Jr. For the former as best i can recall the lesson was "don't try to control a market that you've already lost control of."

Very nice video, your channel has a lot of potential, keep up the good work

Keep up the good work and the channel will skyrocket.

So many memories! Cheers mate!

I'm still using a PS/2 keyboard on my main PC (Ryzen 3950X) to this day. I tried a USB keyboard once about 15 years ago on a machine that probably wasn't really ready for it, had some kind of problem with it back then, and I've had trust issues ever since. I'm sticking with what I know works until nobody adds PS/2 ports to their boards any more ;) Meanwhile I'm not using my actual PS/2 machine (a model 50) because I don't have any MCA cards to put in it and I like to have sound and network on all my retro machines.

I remember these days and hours of LAN parties playing DOOM and Descent. Another one we played was Rise of the Triad, which was revolutionary for physics in a game.

IBM had good ideas with OS/2 and it is still in use, in places. But what they did with PS/2 was unite all the competitors behind the EISA platform and those that followed. Had IBM not attempted their MCA license fee bonanza, it is likely the market would have been more fragmented and left more room for IBM to stay in the PC game. But that is not what happened. Ooops.

I worked at IBM Global Business Service as an architect for 6 years. They make good typewriters.

In the early 90's I did desk-side and network support for E.I. DuPont and PS/2's were everywhere, much to our annoyance. MCA machines were a real pain as we had to bring a floppy for every known MCA card just to get the thing to boot when it 'forgot' what was on the bus. I forget what the numeric error code was (702 I think) that told you it was going to be a long morning tracking down some oddball network card that no one had ever heard of from a vendor that went out of business six months ago. Thoroughly enjoyed this but one bit of criticism: that 8 bit background music was really annoying.

Nice job with ‘Close To The Edit’!

my first actual machine was a pentium system on the intel neptune chipset. dual socket pentiums. i couldnt afford both chips, nt4 wasnt out yet, but it was coming. and i could fart around in win95 until nt4 came. was also looking forward to os2 warp being a legit os with multi cpu support (man was i shooting for the stars back then. a kid could dream of parallel processing and advanced scheduling in the os. i was 14 i think). eventually got a second 75mhz (oh yeah) pentium. both cpus were silicon lottery winners. with a seemingly excessive 16" fan pushing i could run both at 120 pretty stable. could run them at 133 but very unstable. not usable at all other than bragging rights.

Love the "computer sound card" version of Close to Edit in the background music!

In the first half of the video, I thought that was the worst background music you could possibly have, obviously other than something with vocals. And then the madlad actually put on something with vocals.

Lovely vid. I know a man IRL who uses OS/2 to this day... the Betamax of home computing!

Great video and i like your humour, thank you 🙂

I have seen MicroChannel Architecture on an IBM PC my friend got from his older brother. As far as E-ISA, I've owned plenty of PCs with ISA slots. Some next to PCI and AGP slots actually. They were pretty standard for things like modems and printer or serial port cards for a long time. Especially the cheap ones. Though most of those were ISA really.

I loved the visual metaphor!

Encouraging you to make more of these things.

Nice chiptune rendition of the Art of Noise’s Close to the Edit, period-perfect.

Descent 2 was far and away my favorite PC game from the 90's. There were a ton of greats but spelunking in a space ship always brought me the most joy.

univbe... Boy, does that take me back to a time when things where both simpler and more complicated. LOL I think one of the uses for it was to get older hardware that supported VGA and was only technically held back by a lack of a VESA version update from the manufacture.

Another great video.. 🙂

A Compaq 80386 with a companion 80387 math co-processor was the Bugatti of its time. I got an AST Research 80386 DX but without the 80387 and it was pretty good. Those were different days. I now use a Macbook Pro on Apple iron (ARM) and it is pretty good.

Did anyone else ever use a machine with e-isa ? I worked for ICL sub-company in the 90's that mostly used Compaq servers and they where most E-ISA, with some having PCI and E-ISA.

Great, very enjoyable. I had a fair number of E-ISA machines and they were pretty good beasties. The last one I still have is the DEC multi-processor 433mp, which I hope to resurrect someday. More!

Loved this

Ah, Decent2! My favorite - I may have to dust it off and give it a go! Thnx for reminding me of it.

I love how the 2nd part of the video has F-all to do with MCA.

Great vid. New sub.

I was working in pc support and remember building NetWare file servers with the eisa scsi and madge network cards. I also remember the Mca cards been a pain to setup without the reference disk for the bios.

Cracking Video dude.

The Art of Noise tune in the background is neat.

OS/2 was developed from scratch, and was not encumbered a legacy of DOS compatibility, 16-bit applications, and drivers like Windows was. This enabled IBM to innovate radically and more quickly. I developed a multi-threaded program, written paradoxically with Microsoft's Programmer Workbench, the character-based precursor to Visual Studio. However, this freedom from legacy code also meant there were few applications available for OS/2, and the only drivers were for IBM printers. OS/2 eventually disappeared in spite of its technological superiority at the time. IBM's development environment was called C-Set, and, in spite of being a 32-bit compiler, was inferior to Programmer's Workbench. For instance, after a compilation, if you double-clicked on an error message, it would open up the source code in a separate editor window, in a proportional typeface. You could not trigger a compilation from this window. You had to make your change, save & close, then go back to the compiler window. Brain-dead. There was no Resource Workshop for designing dialog boxes visually. You had to write all the statements in a text editor, and wouldn't see the appearance until compiling and running the program. This slowed down development. While debugging, I recall trying to step into the GUI part of the application code. This locked up the computer so bad we had to re-install OS/2, a tedious process requiring 22 diskettes. The IBM documentation was so inscrutable that even for ver. 2 of OS/2, we had to refer to Microsoft's ver. 1 manuals. IBM's support gave an interesting insight into OS/2's downfall. My client had an expensive OS/2 support contract with IBM. The client's contacts were two guys in the PC support section. When I required technical support to answer some obscure and specialized questions about OS/2, it didn't make sense to get the client's guys involved, even though they were supposed to be the only official go-between with IBM. So I called IBM with the client's authorization, and impersonated one of the support techs. After a few calls I slipped and used my name. The IBM guy was livid and tore a strip of me, saying that as an independent contractor, I had no business blah blah. Here I was just trying to get a customer up & running.

I wonder how baller it would be to game on it back then, co-workers probably would have reported it, adding a soundcard?! Pure evil back in the 1990's corporate environments...

The 1980s were GREAT. If you offered me a magic button box that would let me rewind the world to there, while still keeping my current "life circumstances," I'd press it in a HEARTBEAT. It's not that nothing good has happened since then - we've definitely made improvements. But there was just so much to love about that era.

Fun to see!

I used EISA network and SCSI cards on our server. We did have a remote access server that ran on top of OS/2 Warp Server. It was a very solid operating system that hardly crashed, especially considering how bad Windows NT was. We also used NetWare for our print and file services. Also another solid operating system.

I really wish I could find an EISA graphics card that was affordable. Though my computer will never be a gaming machine, an EISA accelerator would make it a more passable gaming machine. A 32 bit or even a 64 bit one might be nice. Back in the day, I always used the VLB, and it definitely made a huge difference in my favorite game titles. Right now, I just have a generic Everex card. I haven't even tested it to see if it will do SVGA modes.

HEY SIR. LOVE YOU, YOUR STYLE.

Great video, but the background music was sort of loud. Maybe that is better now though since this video is over 2 years old.

11:11 That’s a pretty comprehensive collection of connectors on that Ethernet card: AUI, BNC/thinwire *and* RJ-45.

I definitely used a Dolch as a portable sniffer platform

The 8-bit version of Close to the Edit really works for me.

Never used an MCA card and only had a PC with that onboard in front of me once. EISA fares ever worse. The only time I actually had a board with that on front of me was way after that thing was long dead.

Reply Corp also made MCA cards. Reply Corp was founded by a group of ex IBM engineers that worked on the original MCA project. In 1995 - 2000 I worked at a company called Back Thru The Future Microcomputers. They purchased and resold computers & componets from corporations back then. Now they only do electronics recycling & data destruction. We recieved 4 pallets of a bunch of different MCA cards made by Reply Corp.

Warcraft 2 sound test: your sound card works perfectly,your sound card works perfectly,your sound card works perfectly, IT DOESN'T GET ANY BETTER THEN THIS.

I can recommend the TV show "Halt and Catch Fire" as an entertaining "pseudo history" of t his era. It's definitely not "history," but it touches on the culture quite well. One of the more unrealistic bits has a couple of guys (a sales guy and an engineer) from the "focus company" literally ripping off the IBM BIOS by dumping the ROM using a circuit the engineer built. They walked through the whole thing writing down hex bytes. We know that's a crock, because IBM PUBLISHED the BIOS listing in the Technical Reference document. It was already written down on paper for you, so that whole scene was for drama only.

If you could get hold of one, I think that a Voodoo 2 card would be a great addition to this machine. Otherwise I would be tempted to just grab a standard PCI video card and modify it to either have an internal display port or just file down the slot cover to allow you to loop the cable back into the machine (hackey and visually crude but it would work).

I worked for Apricot Computers during this time and they used MCA in their Apricot Qi range of computers.

One thing that's not mentioned about this period and IBM's plans for the PS/2 is ABIOS. This was a new, extended bios (that they would NOT make public) that, they thought, would allow OS/2 to perform way better on a PS/2 computer compared to a PC compatible. I'm not really sure what logic they used because there are serious logic holes in that plan. But what other choice did they have to try to regain control?

7:05 But the title of standard-setter had passed from IBM long before. By 1985, what defined “compatibility” was the ability to run Microsoft Flight Simulator. So, whether you liked it or not, from that point on, it was more appropriate to refer to these PCs as “Microsoft-compatible”.

Oddly enough, I only ever saw an EISA box once. And it was a server, with a 486DX50 if I remember correctly... In fairness, it was 30 years ago. EISA was used for the NIC. This was an AUI connector going into 10Base5...

I remember an MCA machine and the BIOS utility which came on a floppy and, if you used a BIOS floppy which missed an info file for a particular expansion card, it disabled that card until you found said device info file.

5:27 Now there’s an interesting one: a debate over which GUI display architecture should become the standard on Unix systems. I didn’t realize some people were keen on adopting IBM’s OS/2 Presentation Manager instead of X11 (here described as “DEC Windows”). One of those is pretty much dead and gone, while the other is still in active use on Linux systems like the one I am using right now. It may eventually be supplanted with Wayland, but it seems that’s not going to happen in a hurry.

Mitac in Taiwan did licence the MCA bus. I wonder how that worked out for them? Mind you, look down the back of a HP drawer somewhere to find traces of Compaq.

Dolch packet sniffers! Used one! Neat!

One note from a Yank who did play with MCA and a little bit with EISA. At least here in the US, we didn't say it as "e-ISA" (two separate words as you do), it was said like "eeisa" (sort of like Lisa but no L) very consistently by anybody familiar with the standard. Of course it didn't last all that long as VLB, AGP, and PCI were each only a few years away (and from from each other).

the isa was just the commonly used s-100 connector and pinout that you could find on a bunch of other 8bit systems, they were usually backplane based, the processor was on a card like the modern picmg boards.

I was in the PC industry during the 90s and was a EISA fanboy. I was sad when Intel pushed PCI and EISA fell by the wayside. Another piece of tech-trivia is EISA was the first to adopt the notion of plug-n-play but only in a rudimentary form.

My first PC was a PS/2, a secondhand 286 based Model 60. It's huge and beautiful and built like a tank.

I actually bought almost that exact bus logic eisa scsi card, not even knowing what the standard really was, and my consumer mmx 133 rig has no clue that it exists. Not sure if you need the full slot, or if the hardware is messed up, but I figured I'd get back to it soon enough.

I just got this recommended by the algorythm overlord of youtube. Looks interesting

Are you sure that EISA network card in the Dolch was a gigabit one? The fibre connector looked more like one for FDDI which fits better with it being a mid-90s machine. Gigabit Ethernet was a few years later.

oh god, Descent 2 I think was the one game that made me nauseous... yep, that was it. That floaty interface. Great video though, thanks!

What is the background music? I like it!

When I worked for Kislak bank I had access to 2 similar 486 machines, one had os2 and the other had Windows 3.1. What a difference it was to have both, the os2 machine could play wing commander in a window at enough fps to play the win31 machine couldn't touch it in any way. This was before win95 so it was quite a shock to see how much more the os2 machine could do

8:44 Apple Macs used SCSI for their hard drives (and some other devices) for quite a few years. It was only when PATA drives became cheaper that they switched. (Note I don’t describe the latter as “IDE”. “IDE” stands for “Integrated Drive Electronics”, which meant that the disk controller was integrated into the drive, instead of being a separate adapter card. And SCSI was a form of “IDE”, after all.)

An amazing video. Have my like and sub.

The truth is that IBM didn't realize what they had. Their initial projections regarding PC sales was that they'd sell 200k units, tops. The business decisions around the work were made on that basis, at least in the beginning. I've no doubt they would have done things VERY differently if they'd realized how big it was going to become.

I might say using a Yamaha-hahahahaha card would make for a better DOS Sound! the PCI versions work good with at least emm386 or freedos equivalent to one of three DMA workaround solutions! Heh, still liking this though!

I still have a set of O/S2 Warp floppies.

I didn't play games on MSDOS. I developed business software on it. For me, an XT/AT was a tool to generate income. I bought my first XT for $1500 and made a multiple of that by creating software for clients.

DOSBox (upstream) doesn't bundle any FreeDOS, in fact it's missing most of the DOS functionality, it's just an emulated core. DOSBox-X however does bundle a few utilities that stem from FreeDOS.

Ah so that is a Network General sniffer. When you.first said Dolce, I hoped. I have the version before that which used a 16 bit card in Zeinth 5200. It is unfortunately not working as is a bunch of my really cool period tech.

13:35 don't hard disks still have a jumper, which can limit their capacity to 32GB?

9:03 this eisa network capture board is 100 meg FDDI, not gigabit. I doubt gigabit capture would have been possible back then. 😄

3:41 “Quick Pascal Expected From Microsoft” ... did Microsoft ever actually ship a Pascal compiler?

IBM tried to go proprietary; but consumers wanted compatibility and clone PCs offered that.

I would LOVE an AS/400 based video...Those things...I bet some folks are still using them right now.

That Sasquatch in a business suit who is tearing that PC apart is hard to watch