Great video as always and a rewarding watch. I remember watching the ‘Painting With Light’ series as a kid and thinking how powerful it seemed compared to my then 8 bit BBC Micro! A long time ago, in 1987 as a member of the school film club, we went on a behind the scenes visit to Granada Liverpool studios at the Albert Dock. It was a full informal half day and the chief studio lighting guy (who our teacher was mates with) showed us around, from the control room to the back rooms. In their media room they had a Paintbox set up with a number of overhead static cameras for digitising images. We were allowed to have a play about, digitising shots of our hands, and drawing some stuff. Great fun, I remember the media guy saying that the hardware they had access to was some of the best broadcast tech and also very expensive. Our film club had 2 VHS Panasonic cameras so we were genuinely amazed at the gear Granada used. A few years later when I moved South I very nearly applied for a software dev role at Quantel Newbury. Keep up the good work 👍🏻
This massive machine with hundreds of chips, now all possible with a hand-held device that runs off a battery. Amazing. Too bad its in such beat-up shape!
I just love how much hardware is in these things. It must have been an awesome challenge for the hardware designers, something I would have loved to be involved in. The 68349 has a CPU32+ processor core which has an instruction set similar to the 68020, but with improved performance that is closer to the 68030.
I used a Henry, Editbox and Domino in my early years as an editor. This video brings back many good memories when I was using Quantel machines. Good luck on the restoration.
The big selling point of the Editbox was its networking ability. When I worked at NBC Sports they had Editbox terminals all networked throughout the facility to cut sports highlite reels and such.
I still can't quite get over the sheer brute-force engineering of gear from back then. ie. throw as much DRAM and custom chips at the problem. lol Hi, btw. lol
The optical cable hanging inside seemed to be conviently close to where the high speed network board should be.... Maybe it had one and someone swiped it? Get that with the vintage Minicomputers and Telecoms gear I collect, complete apart from one part or option
It's unlikely, what you don't see in the video is i had to remove the card retention brackets. These are metal plates that screw fit over the edges of the cards which were in place and we also know the provenance of this machine, but a very good suggestion!
Love this old stuff, so much lovely silicon! I use hot soapy water and baking soda to clean corroded boards. Might be a good place to start for the pcb cleanup.
Given the corrosion on other parts, and the extreme amount of sticky and potentially conductive dust, it really would've made a ton of sense to take the PSU apart before trying to power it. Otherwise you're just kinda making more work for yourself than you need to.. :x Good luck and do your best with the restoration! Very cool and extremely unique project.
You could try to recover the data off that failing hard drive. By using a third party service. Because you have extra drives that are identical that they can remove the platters out of the dead drive and put into a live drive and recover your data. Just a thought.
That is a good suggestion but my previous experience tells me there was probably not much on it. Generally the way these Quantel machines where used most files were deleted after a project ended and you don't generally see anything interesting on the shared disk. All the good stuff is on the video disks in the Buddy.
@@DextersTechLab The 90s.. Yeah, somewhat blurry.... I was a wireman, gone self employed (made redundant) when the BBC had a shake-up. This was about the time that only Macs were up to some broadcast tasks, PCs had a long, hard road ahead of them. As a result, facilities were still a lot of wiring and patch fields. I'd got 422 as a customer and did much work at Manchester, some at Bristol and installed (wiring and hardware) thier EditBox at Soho. For me, the most notable thing about Quantel was the military style hardware schedule. Nuts and bolts with 12 digit, hyphenated part numbers, ultra detailed drawings, and seemingly excessive crate construction. You certainly got lbs for your £sd.
@@dougaltolan3017 Nice so that means you might have installed the two HALs i have here if you were around Manchester. Yes they eye wateringly expensive but they spared no expense when it came to putting them together and i do like that.
I remember we were having a lot of drives failing on our Henry (1996 ish?). I mentioned to the engineer that the hard drives Quantel were charging £600 each for were only £150 retail ( they were just formatted differently) Not only that Quantel only gave a 1 year warranty whereas Seagate gave a 5 year warranty. What a scam.
To be fair, Quantel used only the best Fujitsu drives and they often modified the firmware. Quantel also had to pay for the fuel for their Citation jet 😂
Blimey, you can really see why these were so expensive! Quite apart from the amount of expensive circuitry crammed into it there must've been shedloads of NRE, and they can't have been cranking them out by the thousand... Many thanks for the tour! (New to the channel, insta-subscribe.)
Interesting to see the Buddy disk array. So much smaller in footprint/form factor than the Dylan box (which would seem to be as big as the WHOLE EditBox itself).
My god, so many FPGAs. I can certainly see why this thing was so damn expensive. All that custom "hardware" would be extremely expensive. I'm sure those weren't low end FPGAs. Not to mention the cost to develop the circuitry they implement.
@@Kboyer36 at that point you need to consider volume. If you're only going to be selling like a few hundred units, maybe even a few thousand, it's not necessarily worth the money for a custom ASIC.
Great video as always and a rewarding watch.
I remember watching the ‘Painting With Light’ series as a kid and thinking how powerful it seemed compared to my then 8 bit BBC Micro!
A long time ago, in 1987 as a member of the school film club, we went on a behind the scenes visit to Granada Liverpool studios at the Albert Dock. It was a full informal half day and the chief studio lighting guy (who our teacher was mates with) showed us around, from the control room to the back rooms. In their media room they had a Paintbox set up with a number of overhead static cameras for digitising images. We were allowed to have a play about, digitising shots of our hands, and drawing some stuff. Great fun, I remember the media guy saying that the hardware they had access to was some of the best broadcast tech and also very expensive.
Our film club had 2 VHS Panasonic cameras so we were genuinely amazed at the gear Granada used.
A few years later when I moved South I very nearly applied for a software dev role at Quantel Newbury. Keep up the good work 👍🏻
It's quite mindblowing that I can do everything this machine does and more, using free software on consumer hardware these days! X
This massive machine with hundreds of chips, now all possible with a hand-held device that runs off a battery. Amazing. Too bad its in such beat-up shape!
I just love how much hardware is in these things. It must have been an awesome challenge for the hardware designers, something I would have loved to be involved in.
The 68349 has a CPU32+ processor core which has an instruction set similar to the 68020, but with improved performance that is closer to the 68030.
I used a Henry, Editbox and Domino in my early years as an editor. This video brings back many good memories when I was using Quantel machines. Good luck on the restoration.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Would absolutely kill to see a MIRAGE setup turn up, absolutely ADORE the effects banks on it (i think that's the right word, could be wrong)
Totally, the Mirage remains very much a mirage at the moment! I still like to think there might be one, but i am not hopeful!
The big selling point of the Editbox was its networking ability. When I worked at NBC Sports they had Editbox terminals all networked throughout the facility to cut sports highlite reels and such.
I still can't quite get over the sheer brute-force engineering of gear from back then.
ie. throw as much DRAM and custom chips at the problem. lol
Hi, btw. lol
Hey Ash, great to see you still watching!
@@DextersTechLab Always, mate. ;)
The optical cable hanging inside seemed to be conviently close to where the high speed network board should be.... Maybe it had one and someone swiped it? Get that with the vintage Minicomputers and Telecoms gear I
collect, complete apart from one part or option
It's unlikely, what you don't see in the video is i had to remove the card retention brackets. These are metal plates that screw fit over the edges of the cards which were in place and we also know the provenance of this machine, but a very good suggestion!
So many cards. Awesome machine.
I look forward to seeing more of it.
Yes, there will be a follow up coming soon!
@@DextersTechLab YAY.
Love this old stuff, so much lovely silicon! I use hot soapy water and baking soda to clean corroded boards. Might be a good place to start for the pcb cleanup.
Given the corrosion on other parts, and the extreme amount of sticky and potentially conductive dust, it really would've made a ton of sense to take the PSU apart before trying to power it. Otherwise you're just kinda making more work for yourself than you need to.. :x Good luck and do your best with the restoration! Very cool and extremely unique project.
Most excellent. Thanks
You could try to recover the data off that failing hard drive. By using a third party service. Because you have extra drives that are identical that they can remove the platters out of the dead drive and put into a live drive and recover your data. Just a thought.
That is a good suggestion but my previous experience tells me there was probably not much on it. Generally the way these Quantel machines where used most files were deleted after a project ended and you don't generally see anything interesting on the shared disk. All the good stuff is on the video disks in the Buddy.
When there were 5 of these in Britain, I had installed 3 of them.
I would be interested to hear some of your memories of the time?
@@DextersTechLab The 90s.. Yeah, somewhat blurry....
I was a wireman, gone self employed (made redundant) when the BBC had a shake-up.
This was about the time that only Macs were up to some broadcast tasks, PCs had a long, hard road ahead of them. As a result, facilities were still a lot of wiring and patch fields. I'd got 422 as a customer and did much work at Manchester, some at Bristol and installed (wiring and hardware) thier EditBox at Soho.
For me, the most notable thing about Quantel was the military style hardware schedule. Nuts and bolts with 12 digit, hyphenated part numbers, ultra detailed drawings, and seemingly excessive crate construction. You certainly got lbs for your £sd.
@@dougaltolan3017 Nice so that means you might have installed the two HALs i have here if you were around Manchester. Yes they eye wateringly expensive but they spared no expense when it came to putting them together and i do like that.
I remember we were having a lot of drives failing on our Henry (1996 ish?). I mentioned to the engineer that the hard drives Quantel were charging £600 each for were only £150 retail ( they were just formatted differently) Not only that Quantel only gave a 1 year warranty whereas Seagate gave a 5 year warranty. What a scam.
To be fair, Quantel used only the best Fujitsu drives and they often modified the firmware. Quantel also had to pay for the fuel for their Citation jet 😂
Blimey, you can really see why these were so expensive! Quite apart from the amount of expensive circuitry crammed into it there must've been shedloads of NRE, and they can't have been cranking them out by the thousand...
Many thanks for the tour! (New to the channel, insta-subscribe.)
Welcome and glad you enjoyed!
Interesting to see the Buddy disk array. So much smaller in footprint/form factor than the Dylan box (which would seem to be as big as the WHOLE EditBox itself).
Is it time for the part 2 to the 386 computer?
Ahh sadly i decided i was never going to finish it, it's an abandoned project i am afraid.
My god, so many FPGAs. I can certainly see why this thing was so damn expensive. All that custom "hardware" would be extremely expensive. I'm sure those weren't low end FPGAs. Not to mention the cost to develop the circuitry they implement.
With the number of custom FPGA's they had on there, its curious if it would have been cheaper to just commission their own custom chips.
@@Kboyer36 at that point you need to consider volume. If you're only going to be selling like a few hundred units, maybe even a few thousand, it's not necessarily worth the money for a custom ASIC.
I cant belive someone would pay that much for a computer and let it get that dirty
Doesnt look too bad.
Wow, lots of 90s tech porn in there lol