Huge thanks to LGR for lending his voice; ua-cam.com/users/phreakindee If you're interested in find more about this era of PCs, you might find these videos compelling; LGR - Tandy 1000: ua-cam.com/video/malgCK7qHQAB/v-deo.html 8 Bit Guy - Sanyo MBC-775: ua-cam.com/video/euhp8Vn2FTw/v-deo.html Modern Classic - IBM PC: ua-cam.com/video/0PceJO3CAGI/v-deo.html
You know what I'd like to know, something that suddenly popped in my head that I've never really thought about; why it became the x86 range of CPUs, despite the fact that the first CPU of the range was 8088? Then it became the 8086, than the 80186 (which was never released as a consumer product I believe), and then again the 80286. Why not the 80188 and the 80288?
So how did you get out of WordStar? Hard reset? ;-) I was booting WS on an emulated Osborne I ua-cam.com/video/4x2hfNxM_90/v-deo.html which had no cursor keys, not even a NUM pad like the Sanyo. You had to use the "Wordstar Diamond", meaning keys X E S and D keys were used to move the cursor. Which you did in the Spreadsheet program later. You probably didn't know that you used the Wordstar Diamond, might have other wise had mentioned it. Nice to see for us older folks (well at least me) you cover the 1980s again. For LGR, I knew I know that voice. :-)
@referral madness Yup. I wrote that article. It was initially just an assignment in a technical writing class. The instructor told me that I should submit it for publication. It was edited a good bit.
Bill Sudbrink, as read aloud by LGR. In the age of tech geekdom, popular culture, I suspect it can't get any better than this. Though, if William Shatner had read it out loud, I think it would be mind-blowingly more impressive. Still, you should be proud to make it into the genre of Retro Computing Docuseries. Franky that computer looks amazing for it's time. It is very attractive, even by modern standards... lol modern. In 2005, I was telling my HP vendor, my goal was to have sub $1000 desktop PCs and laptops. Low and behold, they did it, 2 and half decades after the Sanyo MBC-550.
I know it's been said, but it's really cool that there are a group of you guys that are friendly and work together on videos, lending voice-over work, etc.
I love how the computer case looks like your typical HiFi equipment of that era, as well as the keyboard sharing its color scheme with MSX's 🤓 But I wonder, what do you do if those floppies die with the BIOS bootsector on it? 😕
A lot of clones back in the day used a Hercules graphic adapter as an upgrade from CGA. It was only mono chrome but gave a higher resolution that was useful for business. There were even emulators that would allow you to play games that utilised CGA on the Hercules board.
While discussing PC clones running MS-DOS that were not truly "IBM PC Compatible", you forgot to mention the _Holy_ _Trinity_ ... Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Flight Simulator. Which were often used as the standard to test if a clone was "compatible" enough. WordStar and CalcStar are just not going to get productivity done at the same level.
The same level as lotus 123 and word perfect? It was all sticks and stones. It ran Turbo Pascal fantastically, and that's what you could use to do anything serious.
I remember playing flight simulator on my Sanyo MBC-555. I think they had a patch or something. I was pretty young but I remember loading it and seeing echo off and then a bunch of stuff before the game loaded.
My dad spent the dough to get an IBM PC, and I remember how much he'd later spend on RAM (and I think he had a 20 or 40MB "Winchester" drive). At least he'd continue to use it for a whole decade! He only upgraded (to a then decked out Gateway 486 EISA SCSI tower) when color multimedia was prevalent. I also remember all the sets of manuals he got with the hardware and software (pretty classy with set fonts and pastel colors)....way different then today (where there is no documentation included unless you want to download something off the internet).
Wordstar was my moms favorite word processor. She was so attached to it that i was tasked with getting it working on all new family computers every time we upgraded. I didnt get her to give up on it until windows XP!
Really appreciate the effort that you put into the captions (Soothing stroking sounds 😂). I hate watching auto-generated ones, nice to know that hard of hearing/deaf viewers aren't being left behind.
Ah I actually owned this model of Sanyo pc, what memories this brings back. My first pc and my brother and built a serial port on veroboard. It was a disappointing computer because of its compatibility, but we learnt loads on this machine ❤️
Awesome video, great research! The first IBM PC Compatibles I was able to use at home was my sisters Leading Edge PC and my fathers Victor VPCII PC. This was in 1985-86. My first experience at all with IBM PC's was my friends parents business, they had an original IBM 5150 with a 20MB HD and CGA graphics, this was in '83-84.
@Ecliptick That is her UA-cam name. I think her given name is Sara. Check her out at Octav1us on UA-cam.. She does light-hearted reviews of retro gaming stuff.
When looking to purchase my first PC about 30 years ago, these machines were still available, as a UK dealer seemed to have a lot to dispose of, and for considerably less that even an Amstrad PC 1640. I didn't go down that route, but I presume many others did.
Oh man. My first PC. I couldn't get a replacement disk with the bios on it, so in the bin it went in 1992. *Sigh* And those red-striped silver disk holders. I wouldn't have expected they'd seem so familiar, but seeing them again feels like I saw them yesterday. Thanks heaps.
This was a great episode. I love learning about these obscure, forgotten computers that paved the way for what we have today. The more obscure, the better I like it. Thanks Nostalgia Nerd!
One of these was my intro to the 'PC'. I was working at a TV company in '84 and they traded the 555 for a TV but didn't know what to do with it.. I managed to trim down the DOS to just what was required and used Datastar and Reportstar to set up a computer system for keeping track of rentals. Each week they'd add/remove rentals and run a report that would print out new invoices and give a report on who to chase up. In the process it moved from the A drive to the B drive, effectively giving a backup, with the new weeks status in the B drive and last weeks in the A drive. It started my IT career, which is still going today.
wow, thanks for this video, so well done! this machine was my first computer when I was in my early 20s, and it's where I learned how to use spreadsheets, word processors, database programs, it was pivotal in the skill set I was later able to offer. GREAT video!!
Just to note, the 4.77MHz clock of the original IBM PC is also derived from the NTSC clock--the machine would use a 14.32MHz oscillator, or four times the NTSC clock, which was divided down by 4 for the display and by 3 for the CPU (max speed of an 8088 was 5MHz, so fastest they could get was 4.77MHz). So the direct cost savings by running the CPU at 3.58MHz directly would be pretty minimal, all told.
One of my earliest purchases. I loved the machine. It was in many ways better than a PC at the time. Unfortunately, I was drawn to the the early PC clones and ended up selling my MBC550. Great video that brought back pleasant memories!
A bit of a correction. It wasn't that DOS and BIOS couldn't handle text functionality such as cursors, but that you needed to use BIOS routines to do anything other than just read/write from STDIN/STDOUT (ie: interfacing with your computer like its a terminal program). The BIOS routines (int 10h to be exact) could move the cursor, change its type (blinking or underline), scroll part of the text up/down, change colors, etc. But people didn't like to use the BIOS routines because they were slow. Like, really slow. For example, the original IBM 5150 had their original CGA card which could not share the video RAM with the CPU if it was reading text for video output -- if you tried to write to it during anything but vertical blank, it would cause random garbage to appear. (Called "snow" at the time.) The BIOS routines (as implemented by IBM) would always wait for vertical blank to change any video memory, so this made them rather slow. Particularly when clone hardware started to appear which fixed the CGA card's hardware problem and did need the so-called "snow fix." Therefore, writing directly to video memory was possible, and this made text functions a lot faster. At that point it was kinda impossible to shove developers back into the INT 21h/10h box for total %100 cross-system platform and the rest is history. A side note: This is why before we got 386 systems and true virtual hardware access, using DOS apps in Windows 1.0/2.0/286/etc was not very useful -- a DOS program could only use the INT 21h/10h functions to draw text/get keyboard input and be displayed in a window, otherwise Windows had to "shell out" and give the program full access to everything in full-screen mode (taking up critical low-memory). If you used Windows 3.0/3.1, you might remember there still being a shell-out mode for DOS programs in case they did really funky hardware stuff that might clobber Windows 3.x's own stuff. :)
A fascinating machine and thank you for bringing back many memories of the early days of IBM compatible machines. I raise your $999 Sanyo and suggest you take a look at the Advance 86 which was built in the UK by Ferranti in 1983 and was sold through select WH Smiths Home Computer branches from around £360. I know this because my first job was in one of those shops and I remember using and selling them. They were even available without any hard or floppy drives at all - yes, they came with a casette interface as standard! - perfect for the home user market at the time. Some information on these genuinely affordable first UK IBM compatible machines can be found online. I'm sure the world is ready to hear about these almost completely forgotten PC pioneers
Oh nice, I saw one of these on my local Craigslist a while ago and was hoping to find an in depth video on them like this lol. Glad someone finally took a look at it
One odd thing visible in the video but not mentioned is that the indicator LED of the currently selected floppy drive always stays lit, even while it is not being accessed.
This has long been one of my most-wanted PC clones, but i have yet to run across a cheapie. Stoked to finally see a video about it. Never even knew about the matching monitor!
1:05 Byte magazine. I really never got around reading those. But anyone here remember Computer Chronicles?? I still remember the opening "Computer Chronicles is provided to you by Byte magazine, and BIX, the byte information exchange.." That was an absurdly long time ago but it's stuck..
Dam that jolted my memory. I can still vaguely remember some others. Like the Software Publishers Association "dont copy that floppy", Intel Corporation "personal computer enhancements", and Leading Edge "leading the way into the information age" I've seen few snippets of the show here and there, but never the full shows. Well, one can only hope. Who knows, maybe someone kept a full episode somewhere..
There is a channel on here called The Computer Chronicles, not sure if its related to what you are thinking of: ua-cam.com/users/ComputerChroniclesYTvideos
hi nostalgia nerd I don't normally do this and I don't usually write comments but you are just on another Level I'm I've watched most if not all of your videos and I'm absolutely astounded by your attention to detail and and your passion for the Old School of all retro things as specially PC stuff I'm can't wait for more videos keep up the good work much love 👌🏻👍🏼
I remember these beasts. I was in my teens, working for a computer specialist who mostly sold business machines. They had all the usual computers, Apple, Apricot, etc, but got one of these in to see how it would sell. The silver made it look a bit dated even back then, like a cheap Amstrad Hi-Fi of the time. So he had the case and keyboard surround resprayed in a textured spatter finish cream colour, wich was all the rage at the time, as computers moved away from the literal black boxes they used to be. Always lusted after one of these, but it was waaaaaay too much for me at the time. So I had to stick with home computers until the late 80's, when I could afford my first cheap second hand IBM compatible. So this video is a real nostagia trip for me.
I remember my dad got one of these as part of an NRI computer course, and my little sister and I eagerly went to the grocery store to buy a game on a 5 1/4" floppy. Brought it home, it didn't work, returned it (yes, they allowed that!), tried another, didn't work, returned it, tried Zork. Zork worked. It was our first PC game we ever played. Little did we know that our poor little Sanyo didn't even have a graphics card!
I trained on a Sanyo MBC-555 in the 80s. We had the grey disk drive model, double sided!!! We were always amused by the sound “capabilities” which, by the way, can be accessed by typing “beep”. I forget, now, if that was from DOS or BASIC, but it was definitely in one of them. Our machines were running on MS-DOS 2.1 IIRC. I never did know why I couldn’t boot PC disks from other systems on the Sanyo, now I do. I didn’t know about the BIOS, at the time. I STILL have my box of Sanyo disks in storage. No idea if they still work. I kept them in the hope I’d one day be able to recover the software and documents myself, and friends wrote and saved on them. It never occurred to me I could get an MBC-555 from eBay! I might have to start looking. Thanks for the memories! EDIT: Our favourite Sanyo MBC-555 game was a Space Invader clone, called “Cash Crisis”
I picked up one of these at a hock shop's garbage bin for $5 around 1992. They couldn't get it to work, but I was able to copy a Sanyo boot disk from a college mate and it was good to go.
I wouldn't be surprised if the fascia and overall outside of the case originally came from a piece of high-fi gear. I bet Techmoan would know for sure.
Early 80's bought an insurance job lot from a damaged freighter. Complete with mono monitor twin 160kb floppies, Centronics i/f, Word perfect, Spreadsheet thought we on a winner. Never sold one ! Gave them away to anyone who wanted them. Kept one at home for nostalgia.
What a blast from the past! The look and sound really took me back. My father used a Sanyo MBC-555 at work. He used it exclusively for WordStar, so its unique qualities weren’t an issue, but its limits compared to our home XT surprised me.
I had one that I learned DOS assembler programming on back in the day. I do remember the incompatibility forced me to buy a better clone just shortly after I bought it.
Notable about DOS 1.x is that it doesn't support directories. So if you insert a disk with a directory on it, it shows as a file with no extension that seems to be a concatenation of everything in it. The original Compaq luggable that I had, had Compaq DOS 1.2.
I had one of these back in the day. Morgan Computers in the UK were doing a package deal of Sanyo base unit and keyboard with a tiny NEC 9" green monitor and Xerox(?) daisywheel printer. I remember using Wordstar and vaguely remember that I could use/transfer documents saved on a 5" floppy directly on a Compaq PC running Windows 3.1. The video is interesting to see what else the MBC555 could do and also how well made it was. Inevitably when I sold the system I didn't get much for it since very few knew what they were.
The clock - disk provlem was due to a reverse mounted capacitor. You could fix it or mount a new battery backed clock. Loads of things were produced so you could write any format of disk and read all sorts of cpm and msdos disks
This was my first computer and it was magnificent. The floppy controller died on the motherboard and a replacement board was about 95% the cost of a newer more advanced machine. The manual covered both DOS and CP/M simultaneously and badly, and it was clear that English was at best a third language for the engineer that wrote it. Two floppy drives made it a production monster with WordStar. Even had a few games that played decently. Only had the green screen monitor. The Silver Fox was a tricked out version of the 550 which I didn't learn about until after I bought a 550. I doubled the RAM which helped a lot. You never forget your first love.
HOLY COW! This (or something very much like it) was the first computer we ever had in my house as a kid! It was something that my dad had brought home from work. Quite certain it was obsolete and was probably just gathering dust at his office. Don't think we had any of the original disks, either. All I really do remember is having a disk with a few text-based adventure games. Now I'm wondering whatever became of that machine...
I have a Sanyo Telly thats almost exactly the same as that monitor, bought it to run my Amiga on in 1990. Was still working last time I powered it up a couple of years ago!
Probably hugely disrespectful, but I would love to see a sleeper build with that machine as the base, I love the chunky retro design and that keyboard looks awesome..
@@Sweaty_Ken Eh, you just gorra find a vintage machine like that that *isn't* working. It suddenly stops being "disrespectful", and starts being "breathing-a-new-life-into-the-machine"
While I certainly don't miss the speed at which things loaded from them, I miss the sound of floppy drives clunking away. I remember installing games and knowing that if I heard a rhythmic click click click from my 3.5" high density that everything was going just fine and nothing was corrupted. Even with my retro machines I tend to use a GoTek these days just for reliability reasons. Notably, I never seem to be able to *write* disks from images that work reliably using a USB FDD on a modern machine, which makes using floppies without good working copies of the original software nigh impossible.
Sanyo definitely made good stuff, their own way. The 550/555 design carries over from or to the Betacord 4590 / 4650 betamax line. Gorgeous aesthetics indeed. But brings back memories of almost losing a finger in the 4650 tape mech as a young child when I decided I'd try a tape sensor switch repair with it plugged in. Happy to report that my nose picker is working just fine. Of note, Tandy used a similar silver scheme on their early Color Computer models and Model 3. The Model 3 is definitely in my top 3 nicest looking computers ever built as a result. Love it!
I had a friend who had one of these MBC-555's. He had even entered (and won) a contest on the Soft Sector magazine with a one-line program. At the time I was trying to learn (and get through junior high) CP/M on a dual-drive MBC-1100.
That’s a sexy looking machine, like silver/black colour scheme! Did you know that Sanyo also made CD player DAC chips that where used by Sega in their Mega CD? Appearantly a lot of cd players and cd-roms used their audio chips. Btw, those Teac Drives are they the FD-55B model? I couldn’t see it but do these have termination resistors in them (on the A drive). I wonder if they made a version with automatic signal termination like YE-Data did on their later models.
Teac! That's right. The last drive installed had the terminator resistor chip if I recall. It was all just straight through ribbon cable. The IBM used some funky modified cable. The Sanyo was super easy and Tim Purvis or someone had a fancy bios that supported 720M drives. You needed high density disks for that.
I had one that I built from the NRI kit. Good intro to building computers. I loved SoftSector, and it had some very good articles. I added more ram via piggyback method, and also got some arcade style sound function, to replace the standard honk! :) I found a C compiler (MIX C) and a IDE of sorts (CTrace). MIX C also had a pretty decent math package called C/MATH Toolchest. Prob/Stats, ComplexArith/LinearAlg, NumericalAnalysis/DSP I was very pleased that this ran on my MBC550. I used the C compiler and typed in a program I found for a Mandelbrot set. It was strangely satisfying to see that underclocked 8088 draw the M figure, pixel by pixel, until a line was complete, then it would wrap around and draw the next line. To see the complete figure, I would start the .exe at around 11pm, then go to bed. It wasn't fast, but I thought of it more or less as "the little train that could
And that was in 1980's dollars. If you adjust that for inflation, that means even this "affordable" PC was about $2,658. With most PCs being in the $2,000 to $3,000 range, that translates to $5,342 to $8,014 for an average PC. God DAMN, computers were expensive back then.
I remember around 1987, my school wanted to get a bunch of PCs to start a computer lab. The cheapest they could find had the computer, monitor, and floppy all in one unit, like the early macs. They only had one slot, which we used to hold a network card to access software on a server. They worked, but were terrible to take apart and work on.
Loved the video. I really wanted one of these in 1985, it was being sold at my local Computer shop (Sandbox Micro, in Fairborn, Ohio) for the $999 price. But I could not afford it. I ended up with a store demo unit of a Tandy 1000a, which was a better result.
I bought at Sanyo 555. It had 256k of memory. It also came with a monochrome (green) monitor and went for $1499 in Canada in 1986. He has mentioned that it had no ALT key. The industry standard word processor was Word Perfect and it needed a discrete ALT key for some functions. So they bundled Word-Star. (Save was Ctrl-KD. How do I still remember that?!) Mainly though it was a real computer. I could use it for word processing and typed some papers for my grad student wife. Better than a typewriter, although the "near letter quality" dot matrix printer took about six hours to print a ten page document! I guess we all had to start somewhere.
Not only did I own one of these, I sold them. At the time I worked in Computer Dept of London Drugs here in Canada (kind of a mini Walmart before Walmart became Walmart).
My friends parents had one of these when I was a kid, was in their family room cause no one gave a crap about the old thing but I loved it as a kid, used to program up Basic stuff and play on it for hours. No idea whatever happened to it, probably still sitting where it did back when I was a kid.
I remember reading a magazine article about a hack it to improve the 256k maximum installed base memory of a MBC-555 to 512k by literally soldering memory chips piggybacked onto the existing ones, with a couple of other leads for addressing.
Haha.. That computer looks very much like the VCRs Sanyo was making at the time. Actually, the silver plastic look was very popular in most of consumer electronics back then... Silver plastic and fake wood accents... Classy!
Another awesome video! I have been watching your content for a couple of years now and it has always been top notch, keep it up! You should try covering the MiSTer in one of your future videos!
I had one of these computers but I broke it when swapping one of the floppy disc drives for a 3 half inch drive. I guess a simple swap wasn't possible. I really miss it. I've still got the manual for the sake of nostalgia. The monitor lasted another 20 years or so.
I was always curious why more old PC/micro manufacturers didn't try to go for the contemporary hi-fi component look. Having a PC or an MSX in your stack would have looked really cool! This Sanyo is the closest I've seen in a pre-ATX PC.
I remember back in my YTS days in 1988 my training centre had one of these amongst the other pc's and people would try to get in early to snag this as it was so much snappier to use than the other machines in wordperfect. The fact it was silver was also a bonus as silver electronic things were much cooler in the 80's
Huge thanks to LGR for lending his voice; ua-cam.com/users/phreakindee
If you're interested in find more about this era of PCs, you might find these videos compelling;
LGR - Tandy 1000: ua-cam.com/video/malgCK7qHQAB/v-deo.html
8 Bit Guy - Sanyo MBC-775: ua-cam.com/video/euhp8Vn2FTw/v-deo.html
Modern Classic - IBM PC: ua-cam.com/video/0PceJO3CAGI/v-deo.html
What is that music at the end? Please tell~
@@Moi_Gospodin1337 It's called "What we didn't do" by Particle House
@@Nostalgianerd thank you! Btw you lucky you can afford this PC nowadays :3
You know what I'd like to know, something that suddenly popped in my head that I've never really thought about; why it became the x86 range of CPUs, despite the fact that the first CPU of the range was 8088? Then it became the 8086, than the 80186 (which was never released as a consumer product I believe), and then again the 80286. Why not the 80188 and the 80288?
So how did you get out of WordStar? Hard reset? ;-)
I was booting WS on an emulated Osborne I ua-cam.com/video/4x2hfNxM_90/v-deo.html which had no cursor keys, not even a NUM pad like the Sanyo. You had to use the "Wordstar Diamond", meaning keys X E S and D keys were used to move the cursor. Which you did in the Spreadsheet program later. You probably didn't know that you used the Wordstar Diamond, might have other wise had mentioned it.
Nice to see for us older folks (well at least me) you cover the 1980s again.
For LGR, I knew I know that voice. :-)
Funny to hear that old article read out loud. I was in college when I wrote it.
@referral madness Yup. I wrote that article. It was initially just an assignment in a technical writing class. The instructor told me that I should submit it for publication. It was edited a good bit.
Wow, That's Cool!
Bill, that's really cool! A*** for that!
Bill Sudbrink, as read aloud by LGR. In the age of tech geekdom, popular culture, I suspect it can't get any better than this. Though, if William Shatner had read it out loud, I think it would be mind-blowingly more impressive. Still, you should be proud to make it into the genre of Retro Computing Docuseries. Franky that computer looks amazing for it's time. It is very attractive, even by modern standards... lol modern. In 2005, I was telling my HP vendor, my goal was to have sub $1000 desktop PCs and laptops. Low and behold, they did it, 2 and half decades after the Sanyo MBC-550.
@@danilko1 you think so? Cuz I'm much more impressed by Clint from LGR than someone from the cast of any star wars tv show 😝
I know it's been said, but it's really cool that there are a group of you guys that are friendly and work together on videos, lending voice-over work, etc.
They're all amazing fellows.
Was that a cameo by Octav1us as well?
it's… almost like they're setting up a lightweight informal broadcasting corporation…
It makes the videos pretty interesting
@@Pilotgeek Bit late of a reply here, but yes, yes that was Octav1us.
It's always nice to hear LGR. I love it when you two guys work together. Great video.
More of it pls
Who or wat is LGR?
@@benconway9010 typ LGR in utube search then u can orgasm with his vids....
for a second there i thought i was on an LGR vid lol
I love how the computer case looks like your typical HiFi equipment of that era, as well as the keyboard sharing its color scheme with MSX's 🤓
But I wonder, what do you do if those floppies die with the BIOS bootsector on it? 😕
You don't boot your Sanyo-MBC unfortunately.... although there are disk images online at the moment. If you dig hard enough.
I wonder why they chose to put part of the BIOS on the disk. Have I missed the explanation in the video?
@ sounded to me like it MIGHT have been a way to get around the IBM Patent of the BIOS ...?
You would have copied it ASAP back then, and put it away, using the backup day to day.
That was my thoughts. It looks to be one of the nicest looking PCs of that era. I'd have it for just the case.
I can't believe you got a hold of Bill Sudbrink. He also sounds a lot like LGR
It's uncanny.
Reocurring npc
I'm not that hard to find.
@@williamsudbrink4187 found him lol
A lot of clones back in the day used a Hercules graphic adapter as an upgrade from CGA. It was only mono chrome but gave a higher resolution that was useful for business. There were even emulators that would allow you to play games that utilised CGA on the Hercules board.
While discussing PC clones running MS-DOS that were not truly "IBM PC Compatible", you forgot to mention the _Holy_ _Trinity_ ...
Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Flight Simulator.
Which were often used as the standard to test if a clone was "compatible" enough.
WordStar and CalcStar are just not going to get productivity done at the same level.
well without individual function keys and an alt button you are wordperfect 5.1 was no fun
The same level as lotus 123 and word perfect? It was all sticks and stones. It ran Turbo Pascal fantastically, and that's what you could use to do anything serious.
I remember playing flight simulator on my Sanyo MBC-555. I think they had a patch or something. I was pretty young but I remember loading it and seeing echo off and then a bunch of stuff before the game loaded.
@@data5634 Yeah. I remember the same. Echo off then something happened then the game loaded. I wish I still had a copy of it.
My dad spent the dough to get an IBM PC, and I remember how much he'd later spend on RAM (and I think he had a 20 or 40MB "Winchester" drive). At least he'd continue to use it for a whole decade! He only upgraded (to a then decked out Gateway 486 EISA SCSI tower) when color multimedia was prevalent. I also remember all the sets of manuals he got with the hardware and software (pretty classy with set fonts and pastel colors)....way different then today (where there is no documentation included unless you want to download something off the internet).
Wordstar was my moms favorite word processor. She was so attached to it that i was tasked with getting it working on all new family computers every time we upgraded. I didnt get her to give up on it until windows XP!
I was waiting for NN and LGR cross-over episode and I kinda get it
Yep I do love the cross reference with other nostalgic creators as it ads informative content.
Hasn't NN done some talking for LGR already or I'm mistaken and it's the other way around but still
@@SandwichGlitch Oh yeah, was it on LGR's Y2K video from this week? Totally love when tech youtubers provide voiceovers for each other.
Really appreciate the effort that you put into the captions (Soothing stroking sounds 😂). I hate watching auto-generated ones, nice to know that hard of hearing/deaf viewers aren't being left behind.
Ah I actually owned this model of Sanyo pc, what memories this brings back. My first pc and my brother and built a serial port on veroboard. It was a disappointing computer because of its compatibility, but we learnt loads on this machine ❤️
Yeah, now that I remember, there was some kit or cheapie serial board. We needed serial I/O for dial up, fancy printers, etc.
Wow LGR voice overs, getting closer to that thrifting collaboration. I would love to see Clint in Oxfam and you in Goodwill.
I'm not sure Clint would be too impressed by UK charity shops...
@@Nostalgianerd As Techmoan said, it's mostly made up of "dead men's clothing"
The 95% compatible PC.....if I remember correctly. Had a friend with one of these. He *upgraded* to a Commodore 128.
:D
Had an acquaintance who practically finished Uni on a Commodore 128D and printer.
Seems more like a downgrade.
yea what was commodore thinking hey we have the amiga which is 10 times better than the c64 lets make a computer that is twice as good as the c64
Awesome video, great research! The first IBM PC Compatibles I was able to use at home was my sisters Leading Edge PC and my fathers Victor VPCII PC. This was in 1985-86. My first experience at all with IBM PC's was my friends parents business, they had an original IBM 5150 with a 20MB HD and CGA graphics, this was in '83-84.
Love seeing Octavious in the background.
@Ecliptick That is her UA-cam name. I think her given name is Sara. Check her out at Octav1us on UA-cam.. She does light-hearted reviews of retro gaming stuff.
@referral madness Girlfriend I believe.
referral madness No.
When looking to purchase my first PC about 30 years ago, these machines were still available, as a UK dealer seemed to have a lot to dispose of, and for considerably less that even an Amstrad PC 1640. I didn't go down that route, but I presume many others did.
I had a Sanyo 555 "back in the day" Thanks for making this video
So did I. My daughter, now 32 years old, played Math Rescue and Word Rescue on that computer when she was 4 years old. Good memories. :)
What day?
My Dad had this PC for his business accounts. Great hi-res graphics for the time, I used to program simple BASIC games on it. Happy days. 🙂
Oh man. My first PC. I couldn't get a replacement disk with the bios on it, so in the bin it went in 1992. *Sigh*
And those red-striped silver disk holders. I wouldn't have expected they'd seem so familiar, but seeing them again feels like I saw them yesterday.
Thanks heaps.
You and Clint of LGR make a great team
This was a great episode. I love learning about these obscure, forgotten computers that paved the way for what we have today. The more obscure, the better I like it. Thanks Nostalgia Nerd!
One of these was my intro to the 'PC'. I was working at a TV company in '84 and they traded the 555 for a TV but didn't know what to do with it.. I managed to trim down the DOS to just what was required and used Datastar and Reportstar to set up a computer system for keeping track of rentals. Each week they'd add/remove rentals and run a report that would print out new invoices and give a report on who to chase up. In the process it moved from the A drive to the B drive, effectively giving a backup, with the new weeks status in the B drive and last weeks in the A drive. It started my IT career, which is still going today.
I cut my teeth on one of these back in the day. Turbo Pascal worked just fine on Sanyo MS-DOS 2.0 :)
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
wow, thanks for this video, so well done! this machine was my first computer when I was in my early 20s, and it's where I learned how to use spreadsheets, word processors, database programs, it was pivotal in the skill set I was later able to offer. GREAT video!!
Just to note, the 4.77MHz clock of the original IBM PC is also derived from the NTSC clock--the machine would use a 14.32MHz oscillator, or four times the NTSC clock, which was divided down by 4 for the display and by 3 for the CPU (max speed of an 8088 was 5MHz, so fastest they could get was 4.77MHz). So the direct cost savings by running the CPU at 3.58MHz directly would be pretty minimal, all told.
One of my earliest purchases. I loved the machine. It was in many ways better than a PC at the time. Unfortunately, I was drawn to the the early PC clones and ended up selling my MBC550. Great video that brought back pleasant memories!
Yay.... Nostalgia Nerd, LGR and a Sanyo MBC 550, the very thing I've been waiting to see, the 550 brings back so many memories.
Thank you for a great video. I miss those days.I do have a few old system in attic,. Never could let them go.
Gotta say, there's something quite nice about Sanyo using that "Hi-Fi component" look for their PC clone.
A bit of a correction. It wasn't that DOS and BIOS couldn't handle text functionality such as cursors, but that you needed to use BIOS routines to do anything other than just read/write from STDIN/STDOUT (ie: interfacing with your computer like its a terminal program). The BIOS routines (int 10h to be exact) could move the cursor, change its type (blinking or underline), scroll part of the text up/down, change colors, etc. But people didn't like to use the BIOS routines because they were slow. Like, really slow.
For example, the original IBM 5150 had their original CGA card which could not share the video RAM with the CPU if it was reading text for video output -- if you tried to write to it during anything but vertical blank, it would cause random garbage to appear. (Called "snow" at the time.) The BIOS routines (as implemented by IBM) would always wait for vertical blank to change any video memory, so this made them rather slow. Particularly when clone hardware started to appear which fixed the CGA card's hardware problem and did need the so-called "snow fix." Therefore, writing directly to video memory was possible, and this made text functions a lot faster.
At that point it was kinda impossible to shove developers back into the INT 21h/10h box for total %100 cross-system platform and the rest is history.
A side note: This is why before we got 386 systems and true virtual hardware access, using DOS apps in Windows 1.0/2.0/286/etc was not very useful -- a DOS program could only use the INT 21h/10h functions to draw text/get keyboard input and be displayed in a window, otherwise Windows had to "shell out" and give the program full access to everything in full-screen mode (taking up critical low-memory). If you used Windows 3.0/3.1, you might remember there still being a shell-out mode for DOS programs in case they did really funky hardware stuff that might clobber Windows 3.x's own stuff. :)
A fascinating machine and thank you for bringing back many memories of the early days of IBM compatible machines.
I raise your $999 Sanyo and suggest you take a look at the Advance 86 which was built in the UK by Ferranti in 1983 and was sold through select WH Smiths Home Computer branches from around £360. I know this because my first job was in one of those shops and I remember using and selling them. They were even available without any hard or floppy drives at all - yes, they came with a casette interface as standard! - perfect for the home user market at the time.
Some information on these genuinely affordable first UK IBM compatible machines can be found online. I'm sure the world is ready to hear about these almost completely forgotten PC pioneers
Oh nice, I saw one of these on my local Craigslist a while ago and was hoping to find an in depth video on them like this lol. Glad someone finally took a look at it
8:30 Hi-fi manufacturer indeed! This Sanyo PC even looks like my dad's Sanyo hi-fi!
I love this Japanese design philosophy, everything looks like a piece of HiFi equipment
I wanted to watch Halt and Catch Fire again... Joe MacMillan . Lost but not forgotten.
We’re overdue for a review of the Giant.
30 years later still looks new, no retrobrite required
I miss Byte magazine so much. I remember as a child in the 80s looking forward to my mom bringing the latest issue from the news stand.
One odd thing visible in the video but not mentioned is that the indicator LED of the currently selected floppy drive always stays lit, even while it is not being accessed.
This machine almost looks like some fancy HiFi equipment. Love it ❤️
This has long been one of my most-wanted PC clones, but i have yet to run across a cheapie. Stoked to finally see a video about it. Never even knew about the matching monitor!
For such a great PC, I could even forgive you RAID: Shadow Legends...
With the video? Probably nothing, but it has something to with this marvellous machine
1:05 Byte magazine. I really never got around reading those.
But anyone here remember Computer Chronicles?? I still remember the opening "Computer Chronicles is provided to you by Byte magazine, and BIX, the byte information exchange.."
That was an absurdly long time ago but it's stuck..
Dam that jolted my memory. I can still vaguely remember some others. Like the Software Publishers Association "dont copy that floppy", Intel Corporation "personal computer enhancements", and Leading Edge "leading the way into the information age"
I've seen few snippets of the show here and there, but never the full shows. Well, one can only hope. Who knows, maybe someone kept a full episode somewhere..
There is a channel on here called The Computer Chronicles, not sure if its related to what you are thinking of:
ua-cam.com/users/ComputerChroniclesYTvideos
@Rogeh you can watch (i think) all of Computer chronicles on archive.org its realy realy good. Long live Gary Kildal.
@@lnxrox yes, rip poor Gary.
hi nostalgia nerd I don't normally do this and I don't usually write comments but you are just on another Level I'm I've watched most if not all of your videos and I'm absolutely astounded by your attention to detail and and your passion for the Old School of all retro things as specially PC stuff I'm can't wait for more videos keep up the good work much love 👌🏻👍🏼
I remember these beasts. I was in my teens, working for a computer specialist who mostly sold business machines. They had all the usual computers, Apple, Apricot, etc, but got one of these in to see how it would sell. The silver made it look a bit dated even back then, like a cheap Amstrad Hi-Fi of the time. So he had the case and keyboard surround resprayed in a textured spatter finish cream colour, wich was all the rage at the time, as computers moved away from the literal black boxes they used to be. Always lusted after one of these, but it was waaaaaay too much for me at the time. So I had to stick with home computers until the late 80's, when I could afford my first cheap second hand IBM compatible. So this video is a real nostagia trip for me.
I love the look of old motherboards with rows and rows of ICs!
I remember my dad got one of these as part of an NRI computer course, and my little sister and I eagerly went to the grocery store to buy a game on a 5 1/4" floppy. Brought it home, it didn't work, returned it (yes, they allowed that!), tried another, didn't work, returned it, tried Zork. Zork worked. It was our first PC game we ever played. Little did we know that our poor little Sanyo didn't even have a graphics card!
I trained on a Sanyo MBC-555 in the 80s. We had the grey disk drive model, double sided!!! We were always amused by the sound “capabilities” which, by the way, can be accessed by typing “beep”. I forget, now, if that was from DOS or BASIC, but it was definitely in one of them. Our machines were running on MS-DOS 2.1 IIRC. I never did know why I couldn’t boot PC disks from other systems on the Sanyo, now I do. I didn’t know about the BIOS, at the time. I STILL have my box of Sanyo disks in storage. No idea if they still work. I kept them in the hope I’d one day be able to recover the software and documents myself, and friends wrote and saved on them. It never occurred to me I could get an MBC-555 from eBay! I might have to start looking. Thanks for the memories!
EDIT: Our favourite Sanyo MBC-555 game was a Space Invader clone, called “Cash Crisis”
I picked up one of these at a hock shop's garbage bin for $5 around 1992. They couldn't get it to work, but I was able to copy a Sanyo boot disk from a college mate and it was good to go.
I wouldn't be surprised if the fascia and overall outside of the case originally came from a piece of high-fi gear. I bet Techmoan would know for sure.
The closed captioning on this video is great!! Love the description of sounds!
Early 80's bought an insurance job lot from a damaged freighter. Complete with mono monitor twin 160kb floppies, Centronics i/f, Word perfect, Spreadsheet thought we on a winner. Never sold one ! Gave them away to anyone who wanted them. Kept one at home for nostalgia.
What a blast from the past! The look and sound really took me back. My father used a Sanyo MBC-555 at work. He used it exclusively for WordStar, so its unique qualities weren’t an issue, but its limits compared to our home XT surprised me.
I had one that I learned DOS assembler programming on back in the day. I do remember the incompatibility forced me to buy a better clone just shortly after I bought it.
Notable about DOS 1.x is that it doesn't support directories. So if you insert a disk with a directory on it, it shows as a file with no extension that seems to be a concatenation of everything in it. The original Compaq luggable that I had, had Compaq DOS 1.2.
I had one of these back in the day. Morgan Computers in the UK were doing a package deal of Sanyo base unit and keyboard with a tiny NEC 9" green monitor and Xerox(?) daisywheel printer. I remember using Wordstar and vaguely remember that I could use/transfer documents saved on a 5" floppy directly on a Compaq PC running Windows 3.1. The video is interesting to see what else the MBC555 could do and also how well made it was. Inevitably when I sold the system I didn't get much for it since very few knew what they were.
The clock - disk provlem was due to a reverse mounted capacitor. You could fix it or mount a new battery backed clock. Loads of things were produced so you could write any format of disk and read all sorts of cpm and msdos disks
This was my first computer and it was magnificent. The floppy controller died on the motherboard and a replacement board was about 95% the cost of a newer more advanced machine. The manual covered both DOS and CP/M simultaneously and badly, and it was clear that English was at best a third language for the engineer that wrote it. Two floppy drives made it a production monster with WordStar. Even had a few games that played decently. Only had the green screen monitor. The Silver Fox was a tricked out version of the 550 which I didn't learn about until after I bought a 550. I doubled the RAM which helped a lot. You never forget your first love.
What a lovely Hi-Fi looking system, unfortunately rendered inoperable, when Octav1us nicks those boot disks. :(
HOLY COW! This (or something very much like it) was the first computer we ever had in my house as a kid! It was something that my dad had brought home from work. Quite certain it was obsolete and was probably just gathering dust at his office. Don't think we had any of the original disks, either. All I really do remember is having a disk with a few text-based adventure games.
Now I'm wondering whatever became of that machine...
Wonderful video as always
I have a Sanyo Telly thats almost exactly the same as that monitor, bought it to run my Amiga on in 1990. Was still working last time I powered it up a couple of years ago!
Probably hugely disrespectful, but I would love to see a sleeper build with that machine as the base, I love the chunky retro design and that keyboard looks awesome..
Why is that disrespectful
@@nukiradio Just seems a bit sad to gut a working vintage machine like that, but that really depends on how many of them are still out there.
@@Sweaty_Ken Eh, you just gorra find a vintage machine like that that *isn't* working. It suddenly stops being "disrespectful", and starts being "breathing-a-new-life-into-the-machine"
Ngl a case like that is quite literally my dream housing for ryzen 🌞. You see ry is on a bookshelf and can't house a blu ray drive
They said that lunch at the IBM canteen was only $5… plus $2 each for the optional knife, fork, and plate.
Thumbs up, Mr. Nerd. Very informative, well done!
While I certainly don't miss the speed at which things loaded from them, I miss the sound of floppy drives clunking away. I remember installing games and knowing that if I heard a rhythmic click click click from my 3.5" high density that everything was going just fine and nothing was corrupted.
Even with my retro machines I tend to use a GoTek these days just for reliability reasons. Notably, I never seem to be able to *write* disks from images that work reliably using a USB FDD on a modern machine, which makes using floppies without good working copies of the original software nigh impossible.
Sanyo definitely made good stuff, their own way. The 550/555 design carries over from or to the Betacord 4590 / 4650 betamax line. Gorgeous aesthetics indeed.
But brings back memories of almost losing a finger in the 4650 tape mech as a young child when I decided I'd try a tape sensor switch repair with it plugged in. Happy to report that my nose picker is working just fine. Of note, Tandy used a similar silver scheme on their early Color Computer models and Model 3. The Model 3 is definitely in my top 3 nicest looking computers ever built as a result. Love it!
Looks like a TV/VCR Combo with a keyboard, very cool
I had a friend who had one of these MBC-555's. He had even entered (and won) a contest on the Soft Sector magazine with a one-line program.
At the time I was trying to learn (and get through junior high) CP/M on a dual-drive MBC-1100.
That’s a sexy looking machine, like silver/black colour scheme! Did you know that Sanyo also made CD player DAC chips that where used by Sega in their Mega CD? Appearantly a lot of cd players and cd-roms used their audio chips. Btw, those Teac Drives are they the FD-55B model? I couldn’t see it but do these have termination resistors in them (on the A drive). I wonder if they made a version with automatic signal termination like YE-Data did on their later models.
Teac! That's right. The last drive installed had the terminator resistor chip if I recall. It was all just straight through ribbon cable. The IBM used some funky modified cable.
The Sanyo was super easy and Tim Purvis or someone had a fancy bios that supported 720M drives. You needed high density disks for that.
Great job sir! My old TV 28" widescreen CRT was a SANYO!
Thanks Mr. Usborne Books.
those intro shots are so badass. what a great looking machine, all retro future. thanks for sharing, friend! 💙
Hearing Clint's voice at not even 30 seconds in really threw me into a "Wait...wut?" moment.
Nice voice over Clint!
I had one that I built from the NRI kit. Good intro to building computers. I loved SoftSector, and it had some very good articles. I added more ram via piggyback method, and also got some arcade style sound function, to replace the standard honk! :) I found a C compiler (MIX C) and a IDE of sorts (CTrace). MIX C also had a pretty decent math package called C/MATH Toolchest. Prob/Stats, ComplexArith/LinearAlg, NumericalAnalysis/DSP I was very pleased that this ran on my MBC550. I used the C compiler and typed in a program I found for a Mandelbrot set. It was strangely satisfying to see that underclocked 8088 draw the M figure, pixel by pixel, until a line was complete, then it would wrap around and draw the next line. To see the complete figure, I would start the .exe at around 11pm, then go to bed. It wasn't fast, but I thought of it more or less as "the little train that could
I remember seeing these models and loving the keyboard.
1980s: "Only $1000"
2020: "Only $700 for the thing you make phone calls on!"
Me: I wish new phones didn't cost so much
And that was in 1980's dollars. If you adjust that for inflation, that means even this "affordable" PC was about $2,658. With most PCs being in the $2,000 to $3,000 range, that translates to $5,342 to $8,014 for an average PC. God DAMN, computers were expensive back then.
13:25 the closed captions are on point
I remember around 1987, my school wanted to get a bunch of PCs to start a computer lab. The cheapest they could find had the computer, monitor, and floppy all in one unit, like the early macs. They only had one slot, which we used to hold a network card to access software on a server. They worked, but were terrible to take apart and work on.
Lovely video, Pete! Really enjoyed it! Love that era!
All the best!
Loved the video. I really wanted one of these in 1985, it was being sold at my local Computer shop (Sandbox Micro, in Fairborn, Ohio) for the $999 price. But I could not afford it. I ended up with a store demo unit of a Tandy 1000a, which was a better result.
Don't understand half of what your talking about but it's still really interesting
Ah the feel of cleaning keycaps, and clackity keys and firing up an 8088 based pc... pleasing!
I bought at Sanyo 555. It had 256k of memory. It also came with a monochrome (green) monitor and went for $1499 in Canada in 1986. He has mentioned that it had no ALT key. The industry standard word processor was Word Perfect and it needed a discrete ALT key for some functions. So they bundled Word-Star. (Save was Ctrl-KD. How do I still remember that?!) Mainly though it was a real computer. I could use it for word processing and typed some papers for my grad student wife. Better than a typewriter, although the "near letter quality" dot matrix printer took about six hours to print a ten page document! I guess we all had to start somewhere.
Not only did I own one of these, I sold them. At the time I worked in Computer Dept of London Drugs here in Canada (kind of a mini Walmart before Walmart became Walmart).
My friends parents had one of these when I was a kid, was in their family room cause no one gave a crap about the old thing but I loved it as a kid, used to program up Basic stuff and play on it for hours. No idea whatever happened to it, probably still sitting where it did back when I was a kid.
I remember reading a magazine article about a hack it to improve the 256k maximum installed base memory of a MBC-555 to 512k by literally soldering memory chips piggybacked onto the existing ones, with a couple of other leads for addressing.
Thank you for taking the time to clean your stuff off.
MVG zooms in on his keyboard and you can see the pubes and grime all over it.
Marvelous piece of art! I mean video. And the computer.
12:57 Octavius back there :D
Haha.. That computer looks very much like the VCRs Sanyo was making at the time. Actually, the silver plastic look was very popular in most of consumer electronics back then... Silver plastic and fake wood accents... Classy!
Another awesome video! I have been watching your content for a couple of years now and it has always been top notch, keep it up! You should try covering the MiSTer in one of your future videos!
I had one of these computers but I broke it when swapping one of the floppy disc drives for a 3 half inch drive. I guess a simple swap wasn't possible. I really miss it. I've still got the manual for the sake of nostalgia. The monitor lasted another 20 years or so.
That is what I first learned to program on. My first computer!!! And yes I still own one!!!!
Never had one of those, but my first IBM PCs were certainly not _affordable._
Great background music... Love it..
I was always curious why more old PC/micro manufacturers didn't try to go for the contemporary hi-fi component look. Having a PC or an MSX in your stack would have looked really cool! This Sanyo is the closest I've seen in a pre-ATX PC.
Nice LGR cameo there!
I remember back in my YTS days in 1988 my training centre had one of these amongst the other pc's and people would try to get in early to snag this as it was so much snappier to use than the other machines in wordperfect. The fact it was silver was also a bonus as silver electronic things were much cooler in the 80's