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.
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!
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.
@@ABRetroCollections The Ambra line apparently sold pretty well in Canada, as IBM let the brand continue two years after they pulled the plug on it in the U.S. and in Europe.
Well, they also kept PhoenixBIOS with their Aptiva lineup, even before using Acer motherboards. They only used their own bios for PS/2 models and some Netvista.
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!
Fantastic video. I'm amazing at the apparent time and effort it takes to produce a quality UA-cam 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,.
I remember that!. I LOVED OS/2, once the quirks were understood. I was also familiar with DR DOS, but not so much with CP/M. I worked for TI beginning in 1973, on their geophysical systems, then their TI 990 systems, then the TI PC, with Rod Canion before he left to form Compaq. I stupidly turned down his offer to go with him to Compaq, thinking PCs were still toys compared to the multi-user systems I had been working on.
Thank you for this trip down memory lane. I began my IT career working on hardware very similar to this. Hearing the floppy grind on cue was magical. The slow pan across the ISA bus slots with all the expansion cards. 🎉
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.
I shoehorned windows 2000 server onto a dual Pentium Pro 200 to be a home server back in the day. It worked surprisingly well. Anyway, I suspect you could probably get some version of windows on there - and if not you could probably rig up some version of Linux.
i ran dual P5-100s on Debian Linux in 2000....was all second hand salavaged hardware...no idea what the motherboard was...used it as a web server and to compile kernels for other machines.....ran non stop for 7 months when the motherboard flatlined on me....all the other hardware moved on to other projects....
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!
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.
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. ❤
Depends what virtualization software you're using. If it's something that uses KVM or Xen as the hypervisor, you probably could customize the post screen (no guarantees about the amount of effort involved).
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.
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!
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.
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.
Wow.... I never knew that..... Since 1896s ?... It would be a very tough way to get people to understand the knitting patterns and techniques to be associated with computing. I tried to buy some knitting cards in recent years and even found that way too convoluted. It only took a mere 30 years... Or skipping the knowledge.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
@@sedrosken831intels 386's based under license to not sell them as standalone too, but theres just the question remains of why? Did ibm just have fab capacity without use?
@@lassikinnunen The fun part about that clause as I understand it, is that they were completely free to sell it as part of a large assembly like a motherboard. So they did. Note how you never see those CPUs loose, it's not just because they have to be soldered. As for why, They can manufacture those for cheaper than Intel would sell them real ones, and they can reuse some older designs. Plus they were quite competitive, with that extra level one cache they could usually go toe to toe in whatever you wanted productivity wise with a real 486DX2. They didn't hold up so well in games, but they didn't exactly have a poor showing either. The later Cyrix designed ones aren't subject to those same limits, and being able to brand some as their own was literally a term of the agreement they struck with them. That lasted through to the 6x86 era.
@@sedrosken831 yea but what did intel get out of it? Like they were in position to limit them, so why not just make them buy 486's? The whole deal including the clause to just be sold as upgrade packages or system boards originating from 386 era before intel changed the way they dealt with other fabbers?
@@lassikinnunen As I understand it, the licensing deal originated back in the 286 era when Intel was still okay with second sourcing agreements. IBM just took a mile when given an inch and their volume was so relatively low that I'm guessing Intel didn't consider it worth their time to litigate it. As for limiting them, I'd say they were pretty effectively neutered by being stuck selling them as whole packages with motherboards. Imagine how well they'd sell if they had been able to launch a PGA socket version and undercut Intel like Cyrix and AMD did?
I built a few Blue Lightning machines from OEM parts in 1994. The SLC2/66 boards were surface mount packages that reminded me of common 386sx boards. Was a pretty fast little CPU for dos/windows 3.11.
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!
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.
2X single-disc CD-ROM, with a proprietary interface! The sound card is a Media Vision Pro Audio 16 with a 16-pin header for the CD-ROM. Ambra provided several multimedia kits to choose from, and this combination was one of them. Totally agree about the Ambra animation on boot-- did not expect to see such a cool startup screen for a "budget" PC!
@@theserialport Thanks for all that. Clearly that CD-ROM reader needs some serious attention if it can be repaired at all, I've never seen a CD-ROM drive do that before. At first I thought it was one of those 4 disc readers like Vwestlife has demonstrated and it was having trouble selecting a disc slot, but clearly there's something else wrong. I don't know much about Media Vision, but I've been told they went out of business very quickly.
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.
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.
My first computer was a Packard Bell with an Intel DX/2 66 Mhz CPU, and 8 MB RAM. I was 14. It came with a 14.4 kbps modem, and a Sound Blaster 16 sound card, and ran MS-DOS 5 dot something, and Windows 3.11. I believe it had a 680 MB hard drive, and a 2x CD ROM drive. I ended up upgrading the CPU to the overdrive 83 Mhz, and 16 MB RAM, and a 56k US Robotics X2 modem with the X2 upgrade. Ahh, the memories of how proud I was connecting at 51.3 kbps. I thought it was so fast, then I got cable internet and ended up only using it for BBS connections. LoL.
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.
You talk like IBM losing market share was a failure, but I thought it was well played. They got in when it was new and had high margins and got out when it was commodity with low margins.
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
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..
Funnier fact on the "Pentium Bug" a year later after it became widely know it actually got referenced (intel got lampooned even) in pop culture in the Freakazoid cartoon as the entire origin of the main character, and the main villain. A strange bug in their "pentacle" chip that took a convoluted thing to actually activate the bug.
5:10 At one time, IBM manufactured Intel compatible Cyrix processors in Essex Junction, Vermont. The processors had a innovative feature called "double clocking". Internally, the processor ran at twice the system board's clock rate, giving a good performance improvement over Intel's own offering. Intel was not pleased.
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.
Man, I REALLY don't miss those old style u-shaped case covers. They were a pain to get off. And even more of a pain to put back on if they got warped. And they easily got warped. Sometimes just taking them off.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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'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 used to sell the hell out of the Blue Lightning. I had an exclusive supplier locally so my phone was blowing up to build BL systems. Until the bottom dropped out suddenly and I was left with trays of expensive keychain ornaments. I probably have 1 or 2 in storage. I know this video is a year old but, if you need still one I can try to dig one up and send it over?
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.
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.
I wonder if you could help me?. I've got a full sized tower PC that I've held on to forever and am not sure what I've got. The front panel has space for 6 full sized drives and 2 floppy sized drives. It's shell is plastic and has that old PC color.to it but inside is roomy and made of aluminum with room for extra hard drives. It has a folding metal piece for the motherboard so it can be pulled out and worked on. The motherboard has no video port and an expansion slot video was added. what is it?
"And amazingly this [...] survived long enough" the lab I did my minor had an apple ii, a dos computer, and an OS/2 😂 university departments are like Hotel California for PCs, they can always enter, but they'll never leave 😂
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
I laughed hard when it started snapping at you like an angry dog.
Broken cup holders are so annoying
that was hysterical
RUN
it sounded like a horse galloping hahaha
That was funny and not a failure mode I've seen before. Usually they just fail to open.
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.
Why was it locking?
@Andrew Burns so that people didn't try and remove the module for the scanner they where quite expensive back then nearly 1,000 per module
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.
It was a Celeron or a P3… it was not both.
@@lookoutforchris It’s a PIII Celeron as opposed to a PII Celeron or P4 Celeron.
"...as to..." 😔
So it's a socket 370 celeron...?
No such thing as a P-III celeron...
@@solomongrundysfoot
@@benny7811?
CD-Rom Drive: "Finally, I have awakened! I hunger for souls!"
"...Let's just disconnect the CD-Rom power supply."
"NOOOoooooooo!"
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!
I have a drive that likes to do things like that. Fixed it with a new belt and some grease.
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.
Fantastic quality for a small channel. Excited to see you grow.
Fantastic video! No clue these even existed until right now.
I did, but never saw one in real life. I don't think they were a thing in Canada.
@@ABRetroCollections The Ambra line apparently sold pretty well in Canada, as IBM let the brand continue two years after they pulled the plug on it in the U.S. and in Europe.
Awesome video Serial Port. Hopefully the recapping of that sound card goes well. Look forward to the next video!
Thanks - working on it!
Creative Lab
I am mostly surprised that IBM even licensed Phoenix BIOS instead of using their own BIOS implementation and went full clone
Well, they also kept PhoenixBIOS with their Aptiva lineup, even before using Acer motherboards. They only used their own bios for PS/2 models and some Netvista.
@@chucku00 They couldn’t use their own BIOS as that would make them incompatible with the prevailing standard for IBM compatibility. 😂
IBM went to Phoenix for everything a few years later. Lenovo still uses them for ThinkPad to this day.
@@CandyGramForMongo_ You my friend just added another layer to what I can currently best describe as a dystopian free market wedding cake.
You never go full clone...
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!
The fact that this channel already has 8k subs is honestly incredible. You’ve done an incredible job.
His style reminds me of 65scribe on UA-cam. History and humor. I like it!
@@jasonwoodruff5186 love that guy. always kept me so engaged
Two months later its 17k
@@informatikabos5481 yup! my little channel has sadly not been so successful. 😣
it's all about getting the exposure.....first i've seen The Serial Port.....sub'd
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
11:50 sick back track. Makes me feel nostalgic.
Fantastic video. I'm amazing at the apparent time and effort it takes to produce a quality UA-cam 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,.
I remember that!. I LOVED OS/2, once the quirks were understood. I was also familiar with DR DOS, but not so much with CP/M. I worked for TI beginning in 1973, on their geophysical systems, then their TI 990 systems, then the TI PC, with Rod Canion before he left to form Compaq. I stupidly turned down his offer to go with him to Compaq, thinking PCs were still toys compared to the multi-user systems I had been working on.
Thank you for this trip down memory lane. I began my IT career working on hardware very similar to this. Hearing the floppy grind on cue was magical. The slow pan across the ISA bus slots with all the expansion cards. 🎉
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.
The icons this computer shows during boot up are just so cool!
A wag once said that, as respects the Pentium chips with the calculation bug, the "Intel Inside" badge was a warning label.
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!
I shoehorned windows 2000 server onto a dual Pentium Pro 200 to be a home server back in the day. It worked surprisingly well. Anyway, I suspect you could probably get some version of windows on there - and if not you could probably rig up some version of Linux.
i ran dual P5-100s on Debian Linux in 2000....was all second hand salavaged hardware...no idea what the motherboard was...used it as a web server and to compile kernels for other machines.....ran non stop for 7 months when the motherboard flatlined on me....all the other hardware moved on to other projects....
A server OS was unfathomable
Look forward to where this goes!
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!
BTW, the use of drum and bass on the background is so dank. Makes an already bad ass video even more bad ass! 🤩❤
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.
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. ❤
Depends what virtualization software you're using. If it's something that uses KVM or Xen as the hypervisor, you probably could customize the post screen (no guarantees about the amount of effort involved).
Wow this was totally off my radar, and I thought I had a pretty good working knowledge of this time period. Interesting stuff!
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.
That BIOS splash screen is just amazing.
OMG, that POST animation is so amazing! 😮😍
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!
I really hope we see this system more. I love early "odd ball" systems.
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.
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.
Wow.... I never knew that..... Since 1896s ?... It would be a very tough way to get people to understand the knitting patterns and techniques to be associated with computing. I tried to buy some knitting cards in recent years and even found that way too convoluted. It only took a mere 30 years... Or skipping the knowledge.
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 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'm pretty sure my grandad had an Ambra 386. I was trying to remember the brand for years and this sparked a memory.
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
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.
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.
That was a later iteration from after IBM agreed to manufacture Cyrix CPUs. The original blue lightnings were, as stated in the video, modified 386s.
@@sedrosken831intels 386's based under license to not sell them as standalone too, but theres just the question remains of why? Did ibm just have fab capacity without use?
@@lassikinnunen The fun part about that clause as I understand it, is that they were completely free to sell it as part of a large assembly like a motherboard. So they did. Note how you never see those CPUs loose, it's not just because they have to be soldered. As for why, They can manufacture those for cheaper than Intel would sell them real ones, and they can reuse some older designs. Plus they were quite competitive, with that extra level one cache they could usually go toe to toe in whatever you wanted productivity wise with a real 486DX2. They didn't hold up so well in games, but they didn't exactly have a poor showing either.
The later Cyrix designed ones aren't subject to those same limits, and being able to brand some as their own was literally a term of the agreement they struck with them. That lasted through to the 6x86 era.
@@sedrosken831 yea but what did intel get out of it? Like they were in position to limit them, so why not just make them buy 486's? The whole deal including the clause to just be sold as upgrade packages or system boards originating from 386 era before intel changed the way they dealt with other fabbers?
@@lassikinnunen As I understand it, the licensing deal originated back in the 286 era when Intel was still okay with second sourcing agreements. IBM just took a mile when given an inch and their volume was so relatively low that I'm guessing Intel didn't consider it worth their time to litigate it.
As for limiting them, I'd say they were pretty effectively neutered by being stuck selling them as whole packages with motherboards. Imagine how well they'd sell if they had been able to launch a PGA socket version and undercut Intel like Cyrix and AMD did?
I built a few Blue Lightning machines from OEM parts in 1994. The SLC2/66 boards were surface mount packages that reminded me of common 386sx boards. Was a pretty fast little CPU for dos/windows 3.11.
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!
One of my coworkers had one in her home office way back. It was a nice machine at the time.
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".
My second pc was an Ambra 386-sx, brings back memories, had 4mb ram and a 80mb hdd and external plextor scsi writer.
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.
2X single-disc CD-ROM, with a proprietary interface! The sound card is a Media Vision Pro Audio 16 with a 16-pin header for the CD-ROM. Ambra provided several multimedia kits to choose from, and this combination was one of them. Totally agree about the Ambra animation on boot-- did not expect to see such a cool startup screen for a "budget" PC!
@@theserialport Thanks for all that. Clearly that CD-ROM reader needs some serious attention if it can be repaired at all, I've never seen a CD-ROM drive do that before. At first I thought it was one of those 4 disc readers like Vwestlife has demonstrated and it was having trouble selecting a disc slot, but clearly there's something else wrong. I don't know much about Media Vision, but I've been told they went out of business very quickly.
LMSI CD-ROM, very rare
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 have an IBM Aptiva 2176-C77, looks similar to this in some way inside. Pretty cool machine!
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.
My first computer was a Packard Bell with an Intel DX/2 66 Mhz CPU, and 8 MB RAM. I was 14. It came with a 14.4 kbps modem, and a Sound Blaster 16 sound card, and ran MS-DOS 5 dot something, and Windows 3.11. I believe it had a 680 MB hard drive, and a 2x CD ROM drive. I ended up upgrading the CPU to the overdrive 83 Mhz, and 16 MB RAM, and a 56k US Robotics X2 modem with the X2 upgrade. Ahh, the memories of how proud I was connecting at 51.3 kbps. I thought it was so fast, then I got cable internet and ended up only using it for BBS connections. LoL.
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.
Yeah we never got compensated
Nice video!
Excellent and entertaining!
You talk like IBM losing market share was a failure, but I thought it was well played. They got in when it was new and had high margins and got out when it was commodity with low margins.
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
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..
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.
Funnier fact on the "Pentium Bug" a year later after it became widely know it actually got referenced (intel got lampooned even) in pop culture in the Freakazoid cartoon as the entire origin of the main character, and the main villain. A strange bug in their "pentacle" chip that took a convoluted thing to actually activate the bug.
The boot screen is nice!
5:10 At one time, IBM manufactured Intel compatible Cyrix processors in Essex Junction, Vermont. The processors had a innovative feature called "double clocking". Internally, the processor ran at twice the system board's clock rate, giving a good performance improvement over Intel's own offering. Intel was not pleased.
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.
Wow. I had messed with Ambra machines in the late 90s as surplus machines, but had no idea they were related to IBM.
I like this BIOS post screen.
I was just getting into that, was a good tune, 9:23.
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.
Man, I REALLY don't miss those old style u-shaped case covers.
They were a pain to get off. And even more of a pain to put back on if they got warped.
And they easily got warped. Sometimes just taking them off.
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.
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.
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.
I remember very well FDIV mitigation in Linux kernels in the 90s (I was a relatively early adopter.) The F00F bug soon followed.
Hah, interesting about Linus's Ambra... I knew it was a 486, did not know it was Ambra. My first Linux box was a 486DX/33mhz with 4M of RAM.
Heh... surrounded by other IBM PCs, aaaaand one lone E-Machines Hackintosh there on the end. ;-)
Amazing content.
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,
"Vintage"....?!..... 😂😅....
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.
It seems, the CD-Rom is hungry :). Thx for the great Video!
Very cool POST
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...
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'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 used to sell the hell out of the Blue Lightning. I had an exclusive supplier locally so my phone was blowing up to build BL systems. Until the bottom dropped out suddenly and I was left with trays of expensive keychain ornaments. I probably have 1 or 2 in storage. I know this video is a year old but, if you need still one I can try to dig one up and send it over?
Interesting that it has a Phoinex-BIOS - in other words a clone BIOS that sort of was reverse engineered from the original IBM BIOS?
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.
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
Predominance of beige as well.
I had an Ambra monitor on my clone PC, that one Linus had looked very similar!
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.
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.
Hi whats the title of that track at 10:53 ? Thanks
I wonder if you could help me?. I've got a full sized tower PC that I've held on to forever and am not sure what I've got. The front panel has space for 6 full sized drives and 2 floppy sized drives. It's shell is plastic and has that old PC color.to it but inside is roomy and made of aluminum with room for extra hard drives. It has a folding metal piece for the motherboard so it can be pulled out and worked on. The motherboard has no video port and an expansion slot video was added. what is it?
What is the name of the song that starts at 10:33? Great video!
"And amazingly this [...] survived long enough" the lab I did my minor had an apple ii, a dos computer, and an OS/2 😂 university departments are like Hotel California for PCs, they can always enter, but they'll never leave 😂
I’d love to know more about how the dual CPUs worked on consumer operating systems, were these actually supported?
I remember when this model disappeared without a trace. It was the first Ambra Alert.
I built and sold PCs in the 90s. Bought all my parts on the open market.
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
The mouse became the Packard Bell mouse in the 486/Pentium days
This is good stuff. Have a comment for engagement.
Nice video, how is the drum & bass track called please?
Ibm is still the go to default for good computer for business tho
The only PC that looked like that thumbnail, I've never heard of. Is one that didn't need to reboot constantly.😜
I remember that mouse. Drunk islet great name for a computer.
This song is awesome! 😎
What's it called?