I laughed hard when it started snapping at you like an angry dog.

I've got a few notable facts about the blue lightning actually: - Being 386 derived, it has no built-in floating point unit, and uses a 387 math coprocessor socket. - The design stems from their 486SLC design, which was a similarly souped up 386SX, and thus has a couple of quirks inherited from that design, namely an inability to cache more than 16 MB of RAM. At least you can actually access more than 16 MB with one, though. It has 16K of L1 vs the SLCs 2K and the regular 486DXs 8K. - Again, because it is 386 derived, it has issues being detected by most software identification utilities. I've seen many humorous interpretations made by various packages. I think my favorite one thus far was when mine was detected as a 68 MHz 486SX. Most software will compare the instruction set with how long it takes to complete a specific instruction to determine clock speed, and because the blue lightning has execution characteristics of a 386 with the instruction set of a 486, software can often end up confused. It doesn't help that the real blue lightnings never supported the CPUID instruction. This one isn't actually a fact about the blue lightning in particular, more an overview of all of the IBM specific chips, but due to their licensing agreement with Intel, they could only sell CPUs as part of a major assembly or whole machine so anything you see with a blue lightning was made at the very least mostly by IBM. They tended to pair excellent supporting hardware with it in their day, for example, my board has excellent local bus IDE, a floppy controller, parallel port and dual 16550A UART based serial ports onboard, a rarity at that point in time. The 16550A UARTs are notable because a lot of companies still got away with using 8250s and the 16550As were capable of much higher baud rates.

The door with the key is not designed technically for a hard drive. Those machines were also used in the medical industry and that Bay usually housed a card that ran to a scanner for medical purposes.

In the early ‘00s I convinced my parents to buy an IBM desktop PC from a newspaper ad. It was a basic Pentium III Celeron with a microATX motherboard, black and blue case with IBM badge. Shipped with XP or ME, ours had XP. I remember being curious back in the day as to why some places (BIOS and drivers) referred to it as an “Ambra Ispirati” rather than an IBM. I guess Ambra lived on in some form within IBM Canada until at least 2001.

My first PC was an Ambra Sprinta II, 486 33MHz, 4MB RAM and 170MB HDD. Bought it with hard earned money as a teen in 1995. I later upgraded it with SB16 and 2x CDROM. I still have (and love) this machine, and have now upgraded it ever further (you can find it on vogons if you search for it). Let me tell you though...You could NOT remove the HDD without the key. It was mounted on a rail and would ONLY slide out backwards.

I am mostly surprised that IBM even licensed Phoenix BIOS instead of using their own BIOS implementation and went full clone

I remember supporting Ambra computers. The power button mount was bad and over time would break. I hacked many new power buttons on to these

Very nicely done video! Burst out laughing at the angry caddy CD-ROM drive. I love that BIOS diagnostic screen, reminds me of the setup menus of ThinkPads of the 1990s. I have an Ambra subnotebook (SN425C) that was OEM'ed by Chicony. I like to think of it as the ThinkPad's long-lost cousin. Still works great, too!

11:50 sick back track. Makes me feel nostalgic.

Fantastic video! No clue these even existed until right now.

Awesome video Serial Port. Hopefully the recapping of that sound card goes well. Look forward to the next video!

Yo, that is one of the coolest POST screens ive ever seen. Makes me wish i could customize my own to match it. Sure, I'm running my "desktop" off a VM on a rackmounted server but the three times a year I actually restart would be way cooler than the boring text that's there today. ❤

I have a deep unsatisfiable need for that dual socket Pentium. I'm sure there's no software that uses it but that's just so cool!

Fantastic quality for a small channel. Excited to see you grow.

How times change... I remember reading a PC mag around 1990 which advertised a 256 meg external hard drive. The cost? Around $2200. 😮

Fun fact: As the US constitution requires a census every ten years and this took longer and longer the bigger the country grew, inventor and engineer Herman Hollerith built a machine that would automate parts of this task. Input data would be stamped onto punch cards (a technique already used by looms at that time) and a machine with multiple counters would then collect and count this data, way faster and less error prone than counting anything by hand. This was so successful that he founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 to produce more of those machines. Later on that company merged with two other companies to become the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation: CTR. 1924 this company renamed itself to IBM.

The fact that this channel already has 8k subs is honestly incredible. You’ve done an incredible job.

Seeing the prices in those ads is crazy, I never spent anywhere near that to DIY similar systems at the time! Really highlights the value in learning to build your own back then!

0:45 I spy a plastic film for peeling! That CDROM drive looks really interesting. I've been pretty deep into this era of PC stuff and ive never heard of ambra....This is super interesting!

Look forward to where this goes!

The chassis layout, with the daughter board and drive bay and button positions, are exactly like my old IBM Aptiva tower. Looks like IBM either reused leftover chassis, or reused the tooling.

I got one of the AMbra PCs at a yard sale recently. It does have the Blue Lightning CPU. I have it running and booting under DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. This can easily run Windows 95 and I replaced the CD ROM drive with a look alike CD writer. Works perfect, I did have a hard drive that worked on this.

My first PC was a Packard Bell With Windows 3.1.1 with a 486DX2 (50Mhz). I was 10 years old. Before that, I grew up with my grandpa's desktop playing the original SIm City and other games on the 5 1/4 floppy on DOS.

I still have my first 1976 computer. It is a Poly 88 from PolyMorphic Systems. Ah yes, back in 1976 I got my first dose of an S-100 based bus system computer. I found an old small TV an turned that into my computer monitor, and threw together my own keyboard. Program storage was recorded via the use of a cassette tape player. My 1986 Heathkit Hero 2000 robot is still working, so things really can last quite some time if taken car of.

I haven't heard the name Ambra in like 30 years. My friend's family had one, a 486SX model and that startup screen brings all sorts of nostalgia. Thanks for the video!

The big, big price drop came from highly integrated late 80’s 286 boards and early 90’s 386 boards. Early 286 boards had monstrous amounts of chips on a large mainbord; later 286 and 386 had like 3 big chips, a clock, some cache and some memory modules. 386DX-40 was extremely common, very cheap and powerful enough to play the three amazing games of 1992 and it came along at just the right time as cheap and somewhat useful sound cards replaced PC speaker. The three must-have games of 1992 was Wolfenstein 3D, ultima underworld and Ultima 7. Ultima underworld is such a technical and gameplay achievement that is almost as impressive as the 1969 Xerox presentation of the computer mouse, windowed personal computing and teleconferencing. The closest thing to ultima underworld were space games like Elite; but they weren’t really that close. I’d go so far as to call it the first immersive game of any kind.

I really hope we see this system more. I love early "odd ball" systems.

Blue Lightning is just IBM's variant of the Cyrix/ST Cx486 DX2/66. Nothing special other than the fancy blue heatsink. Cyrix's version has the green heatsink.

OMG, that POST animation is so amazing! 😮😍

Wow this was totally off my radar, and I thought I had a pretty good working knowledge of this time period. Interesting stuff!

The thing about the term PC is for middle aged Europeans like me, PC _specifically_ refers to IBM PC compatible or Wintel computers, whereas Americans (and it seems younger people) seem to think PC is a broader term that means Personal Computer. That's why I find it odd to hear the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and especially the Amiga referred to as PCs. I was around when the Amiga was current, in a country where the Amiga was popular. Back in my day, PC *ONLY* meant computers compatible with the IBM PC, which the Amiga, C64, Spectrum, BBC Micro etc weren't! Not even the Amstrad CPC and PCW were, although the Amstrad PCs were! Their Mega PC also played MegaDrive games! Do you have an Amstrad Mega PC in the museum? Also, the one thing that astounds me, the prices of computers back then! And software! Even _before_ you factor in inflation they're mindblowing! I have a fairly decent laptop that was only £900 in 2019 and here we have desktops going for $2500 in the 1990s!

I vaguely recall taking a look at a blue lightning mother board at a computer show... as I recall it had an awesome clock speed for the time, around 100MHZ but that it was only a 16 bit chip. The vendor claimed that it was designed to take older legacy applications to a new level rather than something for either new users or folks that wanted new stuff. In other words if you wanted to stay in the DOS world and run your old Dos apps really fast, this was the processer for you. To be honest, I had a lot of customers at that time who were running businesses in the dos world and really didn't see a purpose for windows or fancy bells and whistles. In fact, I think I serviced the last Dos machine in around 2005. It was an older gentleman who made his living as a writer and he was very happy with his old dos word processer and had no interest in learning anything new... So yes I do believe there was a market for the blue lightning in certain business applications and for a relatively short window of time. Imagine Lotus 123 1.0 at 100MHZ... wow.

Fantastic video. I'm amazing at the apparent time and effort it takes to produce a quality KZfaq video like this one. Well done. As a card-carrying computer pioneer (starting circa 1958), I followed this video with great interest. One thing to mention about IBM's exit from the PC business is its diastrous and hugely expensive operating system, OS/2. While this was a feature-rich OS, it proved to take too much power and memory to operate efficiently, plus users perceived it to be an proprietary IBM product that would run only on IBM platforms. I understand that OS/2 eventally cost IBM a loss of over $1 billion. Meanwhile, Windows 95 (I believe) was becoming more mature and users flocked to it in droves as it came bundled with PCs. An initial and huge mistake IBM made was not retaining the rights to MS-DOS which Microsoft developed under contract to IBM. Actually, IBM would have done better to engage Digital Research and their CP/M OS. Why that didn't happen is an interesting story. The rest is history,.

in the 90s, there's already a lot of manufacturers/shops/sellers of PC compatible motherboards, memory, drives, and many other peripherals wherein people can literally assemble their own PC based on their budgets and preferences..

Obviously I never heard about AMbra, because they never showed up in the market here. The early to mid 90s was so wild in terms of hardware. Sure there was Intel x86, but also AMD, Cyrix, NexGen, VIA, IDT and more. And then obviously the multitude of non x86 designs of the time, PA-RISC, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, 68k, the first designs for IA-64

BTW, the use of drum and bass on the background is so dank. Makes an already bad ass video even more bad ass! 🤩❤

CD-Rom Drive: "Finally, I have awakened! I hunger for souls!" "...Let's just disconnect the CD-Rom power supply." "NOOOoooooooo!"

I just love this channel❤TY Serial Port for covering this odd but interesting phase in IBM PC history. Looking forward to hearing about this snappy unit again! Also: That complete sales listing...what an absolute treat edit: Later noticed the restoration part was already done & uploaded, yay!

It's been a long time since I laid eyes on that computer. It's the 1st computer I ever bought and it didn't come with the math Co-processor I had to buy it and install it. When I first got mine it had only 8mb of ram and a 400mb or maybe a 440 hardrive. It also cost me $5000.000. I don't remember if I had to add more ram for Windows 95 but when first bought it it had dos 6.22 and Win 3.1. I had computers before this that my parents bought me but this is the 1st one I bought. I can remember playing Doom with my neighbours after I got a modem. Sound Blaster 16 also came with it. To install windows 95 you have to turn that virus checker off or 95 wont install. I think I had to finance mine or I paid for the bloatware that came with it I got swindled because mine cost me 5k but it came with so many cd's and 3.5 floppies.

Loved the post , cdrom was talking to you lol 😅 Nice machine and quite fast for day ..I had a pentuim 66mhz with 4mb of ram ..16mb was a massive amount

It's definitely IBM despite having a different faceplate and logo. Anyone who has ever worked on early PPC IBM systems or early Apple clones can recognize what's going on here. But it's very neat. Love the video!

The icons this computer shows during boot up are just so cool!

Is that a multi-disc CD-ROM drive? What kind of sound card was in that PC? I love the animation on the Ambra logo when the machine boots up, that's not the kind of thing you'd see on a PC of that vintage.

I'm pretty sure my grandad had an Ambra 386. I was trying to remember the brand for years and this sparked a memory.

Nice segment about the FDIV bug. Back in the day you'd' see parody "Insel Intide" logos and things like "At Intel, quality is job 1.003012523".

The boot screen is nice!

My second pc was an Ambra 386-sx, brings back memories, had 4mb ram and a 80mb hdd and external plextor scsi writer.

I have an IBM Aptiva 2176-C77, looks similar to this in some way inside. Pretty cool machine!

CD-ROM is a Philips/LMSI CM-206. I replaced a lot of those drives. EVERY ONE of them ate their gears after a few open/close cycles. Not sure why they used a Jeep winch for a tray motor. Anyway if you can repair it you'll have the only working CM-206 in existance.

Excellent and entertaining!

Nice video!

I was just getting into that, was a good tune, 9:23.

Wow. I had messed with Ambra machines in the late 90s as surplus machines, but had no idea they were related to IBM.

Cool pc. Nice video. This pc looks like a small business server from the chasis. I hope you get fixed and get a use or put it in a good place.

Can confirm early Blue Lightning cpus were built within the 386 design specification and licence. They’re usually a qpf132 that can be connected to 100 or full 132 active pins and will switch between 16 and 32 bit external operation depending on bus width. Rumour is 24 bit also works and ram configuration in some weird boards supports this. Chip is a 3.x volt chip but is rumoured 5v tolerant. 2x and 3x multipliers available and max speed supposedly 33.3x3=100mhz though IBM rated at 3x25=75 official max. Spec of the top BL3 included 16kb cache, 3x multi. All have a handful of additional 486SX instructions for compatibility. Transistor count, package, ALU behaviour still 386 territory. But yes later ones were just 486DX2 chips nothing special.

The reminders thing is literally just a reminder to do a daily chore of using the PC. It was sometimes practice to daily run antivirus before work and the software would ans sometimes shut down your PC when you were done. Same with backups. But it had to be initiated by the user.

Had never heard of the Ambra till just now. I was the envy of my friends as I had a DX2-66. at the time.

Very cool POST

I like this BIOS post screen.

Amazing content.

A opti chipset. This reminds me to something special from '93. I had a 486dx33 on a opti motherboard with opti local bus. Opti local bus was 32bit eisa slots on 33MHz, this combined wit a opti et4000 vga card and a caching diskcontroller with a 16MHz amd 80186 and 1MB ram just for pumping data (240MB seagate). 4MB ram for the processor, try that in these days. At that moment the 486dx50 was the fastest intel consumer processor.

After the expensive FDIV bug and catching a flaw on the P4 there was never anymore issues......."Meltdown and Spectre" lol. I'm making light of it but there have been more bugs.

Up until the early 1990s, many computers were made in the USA. With that said, I'd like to see a video about US factories, including locations.

It seems, the CD-Rom is hungry :). Thx for the great Video!

OMG 😮...I totally forgot about old cases being one piece you had to pull from the body... Now it's all coming back in flashes

IBM essentially made a template for how to make a clone PC with fairly intricate details. They realized their mistake and tried to correct it with the PS/2 which was a lot more locked down. But it was too late.

PS/1, PS/2, Ambra, Aptiva... I can't remember the rest of the verse until it gets back to Kokomo-o-o-o... Intellistation, Lenovo...

This is definitely the same chassis underneath as the early generation IBM Aptiva I have, which it's self shares the same chassis as the an IBM PS/1.

9:22 OMG! its infested by poltergeist activity! 😆 this version of phoenix bios had a kewl diagnostic screen , I don't remember having seen anything like that B4. of course, it has been years since I have worked on comps of this vintage,

The mouse became the Packard Bell mouse in the 486/Pentium days

Those blue lighting cpu's look so similar to the Cyrix5x86 cpu's but where green instead of blue, even the font looks the same from what I can remember wasn't the Cyrix cpu's made from IBM which may be why they look so similar.

I remember very well FDIV mitigation in Linux kernels in the 90s (I was a relatively early adopter.) The F00F bug soon followed.

I had an Ambra monitor on my clone PC, that one Linus had looked very similar!

That 1st generation Intel Pentium floating point math error became the basis of the Steven Spielberg cartoon series "Freakazoid", an internet powered "Superhero". Just a bit of trivia to mention. Rewatch the pilot sometime and laugh

Hi whats the title of that track at 10:53 ? Thanks

Oh funny the insides look surprisingly simliar to my IBM PS/1000 Blue lightning My version is IBM branded though and it was made (apparently) as a low cost/high profit margin PC to be sold exclusively by a retail chain called Media Markt in Germany (or maybe even europe... not sure) I don't know about the mainboard in your machine, but the daughter board in it looks exactly the same as on mine.

Ibm is still the go to default for good computer for business tho

Nice video, how is the drum & bass track called please?

Interesting that it has a Phoinex-BIOS - in other words a clone BIOS that sort of was reverse engineered from the original IBM BIOS?

I've had several IBM machines from this era that have this same weird expansion card riser board. I guess it enables having a bunch of ports flat on the motherboard while still having a full compliment of expansion slots. Stacking the IO ports as is done with ATX seems an obvious and obviously better design. *shrug*

I would love to restore that cdrom drive. I'm very active on VCFED. ;)

12:55 i was like i never seen those reminder options, then u ask if we ever seen them lol, nope

i think that CD rom drive would make for a great movie prop

I remember when this model disappeared without a trace. It was the first Ambra Alert.

You should check it BEFORE you supply power. That bad capacitor should have been noticed when the system was cold.

This is good stuff. Have a comment for engagement.

I had one of the 1st PC clones. 2 360k floppy drives.

that cd rom reminded me of the floppotron lol

That was the easiest molex connector to ever be disconnected.

Too bad it isn't a DX4-100+, but this combination of VLB graphics and 16MB RAM still was a dream come true for many and should do pretty well for anything before Quake 1 ( 1996 ). At about that time I had a 486-SX 25, a cheap Highscreen thingy with a Trident 9000 ISA card sporting 256kb of RAM while the system only had 4MB - with but the PC speaker for sound. Suffice to say I was rather underwhelmed, especially since the same priced model at the time, a 386 DX-40 with even a Soundblaster 1, had better performance due to the FPU. As for history ... we lost great a many products and companies in that ... lets be nice and call it "market positioning race". I was especially sorry for Aureal and their Vortex line, as well as PowerVR with their Kyro line. S3 too had it rough too, as did 3DFX of course, and I still feel the day I couldn't get an ELSA graphics card anymore. Not to mention all the Risc based CPUs that went under - though ironically enough the ones I miss the most isn't Cyrix or IDT but the AMD K5 series - a pretty impressive yet rather underappreciated soon discarded design.

Looks like an old gateway i got in my barn haha

.. That CD-ROM drive is CLEARLY an ABBA fan.. Don't you think I recognize the beat of "Take a Chance"?

5:03 - Absolutely bizarre pronunciation of "peripheral".

Strange that an IBM PC would use a Phoenix bios, which accelerated the cloning of IBM systems in the first place.

Just to think that the SMALLEST Micro SD card that I own is not only LARGER in size, it's also probably FASTER than the drive of those days.

i have a device that matches that shutter door it uses a standard drive bay i wanted to find at least a functional tape for that tape streamer

OMG, my sister had one of these.

I had an old IBM... and a few older tech before that... Lol

6:02 bode mastigando? Ou é a inteligência artificial agindo?

Really the phenomena of IBM losing the PC market they created was a failure not of IBM but of Wall Street. Its a pattern we see time and time again. IBM had grown the market and was under attack from companies willing to accept far less gross margin. The volume of PC's sold was growing almost logarithmically. Brilliant Wall Street analysts saw this and hyped the stock at first then pivoted when the inevitable price wars occurred. In other words the market commoditized. This of course is great for the consumer however it meant although IBM made more money overall on the market it was at substantially lower margin per unit sold. Wall Street Analysts demanded IBM exit the market as they wanted to see upwards of 65% or more gross margin - what they had seen for a brief period in the beginning of the new sector. That was terribly flawed "first order" thinking. As such IBM was forced to exit even though they made tremendous bottom line revenue AND retained a great "moat" due to their internal innovation capability. (IE the IBM R/T RISC computer etc. ) It is a classic tail of opportunity lost due to external forces that were not competitors. What analyst has ever made a product? And note the IBM R/T RISC computer was capable of running the licensed Apple Mac OS and its GUI. (It was based upon IBM's POWER PC architecture.) My theory is while the ankle biters were killing eachother making the same box - IBM would have dominated selling solutions and continuing to define the market. If they were only allowed to do so. Unfortunately they had to exit to appease the great gods of Wall Street and thousands of good paying jobs were lost. Of course IBM made a comeback a decade later selling blade servers to the new Internet datacenter market. These were virtually the same tech but had better margins.