From a few minutes of web sleuthing, it looks like that mystery Samsung module is a 4MB ROM SIMM for use with the Power Macintosh 6100 and Performa 61xx series.
@@electronicengineer I'm just "caching" in on jokes I have a "memory" of, I'm not trying to "ram" that point home, I'll try to stay "in-line", if I come across any more I'll "socket" to you!...
Adrian, we love the long videos. Keep 'em coming, don't hold to shorter times. More Adrian at the bench is more joy for us. We love going on these journeys with you. Hour long mini mail calls all the way, baby!
First off, I love the old TSR wizard avatar. But to the point: Iomega's products were all designed to a price point, and then further pennies were shaved off. They're some of the most cheaply-built computer equipment I've ever seen. Even if you can verify that the electronics are all functioning properly, some tiny plastic internal part may have warped by a fraction of a millimeter and is preventing the head from properly aligning. Everything they made was a nightmare. I knew a guy who did corporate data recovery off Zip, Clic, and Jaz disks for a time. He had to stop because the dozens of NOS drives he'd bought all failed after only about five years.
@@TheRealColBosch I think one of the greater design sins was that Click of Death was actually a transmissible disaese! For those who might not know, CoD would damage disks in such a way that if you put that disk in another drive, it would damage the drive.
I have come to the conclusion that I am addicted to Adrian's videos. I checked again and again to see the next MMMC, worried that something happened because it wasn't appearing. Turns out I was a day early.
I just saved a couple of TI99s and a working PEB with 5 cards and a disk drive in it. First, the thing is a monster at almost 40 lbs shipped! The box is over engineered as much as the cards. The top comes off and the cards slot down in and stick out the back. The whole PEB felt like it was created for some other system other than the silver color scheme. Hope you can see one in person some day! It was amazing to see in the wild and play with it.
Honestly, I don't mind a 'super long' video. It's fun watching you fix things. It is part learning about all these old computers I never had access to, and part seeing how well things hold up over time. Plus soldering and making circuit boards is fun. The Sheep could be called "Nibble" or "Byte" because of how sheep like to nibble on things... I had a Zip drive in high school, and my one friend had the Jazz drive. I also had a "Clik" drive, but that was later re-named to "PocketZIP" and it literally never worked. It was busted straight from the moment I purchased it, which was for $20 and unopened at a second hand store... Should have been my first clue--but hey. Ya didn't know back then. It really is a shame that Iomega went down as it did... They did some cool stuff! They were really innovative, they had support of the motherboards... Just... The hardware wasen't quite 'good' enough. Other solutions were either more reliable, or cheaper in the long run... And then 'flash' storage came out and WHOOSH there went the need to have spinning disks... And then all the patents are just useless... But I have real fond memories of going to the local PC store, buying a ZIP disk, and then filling them with games off of my endless stacks of 3.25 floppies... You might be able to connect that Jazz drive to a modern computer and run some recovery software on it to maybe be able to recover some data... I'm not sure though. I use Recuva, it works pretty well, and it is free for personal use.
Ahem... the (old) URL for the tv-b-gone PCB is... on the PCB. (Anyway, the project has moved to a new location: learn.adafruit.com/tv-b-gone-kit. And yes, there is a parts list.)
I don't. However, like many UA-camrs, Adrian often adds (textual) notes to his videos about stuff he realizes after recording, like during editing. I just guess he missed it then, too.
Hi Adrian, the text on the rear of that enclosure is not Dutch, it's Swedish, and it says that it must be connected to a mains outlet with EARTH! EDIT: Side note, I approve of the sticker removal!
I agree. Earth connections are vastly overrated. I only use it on my oscilloscope, my guitar amps, my dishwasher and my washing machine :-) All of my 45 computers and their peripherals work just fine without it :-)
I seem to recall that the zip drive "Click of death" was due to the drive head beating itself against the housing during read failures, similar to how old floppy drives would behave. The problem was that the drive head would knock itself out of alignment very easily doing this so if you had any disks with bad sectors, it wasn't long before you had more, and eventually your drive would fail to read any disk. It would seem to be communicable as well when bad disks written to by a bad drive would then be taken to a working drive the click of death would continue there until it too stopped working. Its been a long time since I looked into the issue, but that's what I think it might have been.
I think the SyQuest drives were more reliable despite the cartridges not being as rugged. But then they were the originator of the small-format removable cartridge hard disk and they invested enormously into ensuring the technology was reliable, including developing a new type of disc media.
FWIW, the click of death happened on Zip when the Zip disks were physically damaged. They spun so fast that they'd rip the heads right off the drive. A drive thus damaged would damage any disk you insert into it. That's why the Click of Death was "contagious".
I have a fully loaded PEB with my TI. And let me just say, the entire thing breaks my back lifting it but it's a sight to behold. I love that thing. BTW, the cards go facing UP and the metal clips help you pull the cards out. If you get the PEB, be sure to get the "fire hose". It's a GINORMOUS cable that runs into the PEB and to the side of the TI.
Those TI-99/4A PEB cards were plugged in from the top. The backplane was actually at the bottom laying flat. Had one back in the day. Wow those cards brought back great memories.
That's clearly Ram Romus. Concerning the text on the back of the enclosure: it isn't Dutch, but Swedish. It states that "the appliance must be connected to a grounded socket".
RAM name suggestion: Captain RAMbunctious :D Also as someone who ends up making a lot of long form vintage tech youtube videos as well, I like your long form videos. I've also learned so much from you about fixing things. Please keep up the great work!
Back in the 90s when I first started using the internet, I set up an old 386 PC I had with a modem, installed an early version of Linux and configured it as a dial-up router (no broadband then!). I would browse to a web page it served, press the button and it would connect my home network to the internet. Similarly there was a "stop" button to hang up (I only had one phone line...). I used this for about 5 years, and when the hard drive failed (it was on 24/7 and in my gardern shed..) I didn't want to spend any money fixing it so I configured it with a ZIP drive. It would boot the kernal from floppy, load the ZIP drivers, and then continue booting from the ZIP drive. It did take a long time to boot but since this only really happened when I had a power failure it wasn't a problem. I continued to use this until I moved in 2001 and shortly after got broadband installed. The ZIP drive was still working, I just had to remember to delete log files etc fairly aggressively :) I don't recall what happened to the ZIP drive in the end, I expect it got lost in one of my subsequent moves.
Remember when people called and it disconnected everything? hahaha - I know there was gear in the 90s for that, but I was mid '80s on the C64. I am mostly sure no interrupt hardware was available then yet, to the general public, at least. I was a young kid. heh heh
Apple 4MB ROM SIMM 341-0741. This ROM module is used in some Power Macintosh and Performa models. AND the writing on the back of that external case is Swedish - "Must be connected to a grounded outlet" even though the word "grounded" is misspelled in Swedish! :)
Adrian, as an owner of parallel iOmega ZIP 250 drive, I can confirm that that stuff works flawlessly on 286 machine (just be sure that your I/O controller with LPT port is OK, I spent way too long trying to fix the drive while the cable on a controller turned out to be faulty. Never tested it on XT since I don't have one.
Approx 45 min is about right. I felt that last weeks episode of just half an hour was too short. These MMC episodes are really one of the highlights of the week. The best part is when Adrian gets some candy to try (I've started to buy gummy bears!), or get something odd and weird. Just love this series
No please man don’t make them short..... I rely on your videos for much more than you know. The length of your videos is a big reason I watch you, aside you great content of course.
Hello, A Ram is male, A female sheep is a Ywe (pronounced U). Love the videos, Has a SCSI Zip drive on my 486 DX2 66 back in 1993/4 and had DITO tape drive backups also.
Adrian: "This would be using probably diodes I guess - entirely just diodes". Immediately shows a picture of the completed board, entirely filled with transistors, says nothing 😁 I'd guess you meant transistors in the first place, but had that DDL latch still on your brain 🙂 Great video, as always!
That's the same parallel port Zip Drive I had, and I had that heavier brick power supply. That didn't fail on me, I got hit by the infamous click of death. I switched up to a USB Zip Drive after that and I kept backups of some of my work on those disks for so long that when I finally jumped to external HDD's for storage, the name on the folder for that stuff has since remained "ZIP Backup." I never thought to change it. 😅
I have to agree Blue LEDs are overused these days. I loved them when I was young and they were new though. I am much more sparing with using them today, but still do use them. I love the short mail calls.
So nice to watch that Iomega Zip drive (the blue one). It was seeming to me that it was not so long ago that I was using them. In fact, it was so modern back then when at my office we (an architecture firm) started using them instead of floppy drives. Now it's like 21 years ago. Life happens so fast...
I had a friend that worked at the same ISP I did in the mid 90s that had a Jaz drive. He had the 1gb version and at least one disk failed within a month or two and that was the end of it's traveling since the disk cartridges were so expensive. We also had a 4x cd-r burner there(the first one on the market) that we ended up going in together and buying a spindle of cd-r's for around $5 a disc which was a steal at the time. We had a fractional T3(6mbps) there and at the time seems ridiculous fast when downloading at 28.8 at home. Funny thing is I always resist watching long videos but get hooked immediately. I still need to go back and watch the Mac IIsi power supply one as I have one from that same ISP job(with 32mb of ram and 40mb hdd) where the power supply has issues.
Hehe, I actually designed and built one of those clocks when I was a senior in high school in 1979. Had one extra option though. With the flip of a switch, you could also have 3 rings of LED's that lit up for seconds, minutes, and hours. You could also set that display to show either the LED only for each ring, or light all of them up to the current time. Of course, mine was first tested on a bread board, and then built out on an Augut wire wrap board. You couldn't get custom PCB's back then for less than $100 each, and you had to order a 1000 or something stupid.
I don't mind these videos being long.. I've been watching a few in a row of the older mail call videos and enjoying them! Greetings from New Jersey (^_-)/
I never owned a Zip, but I still have two Bernoulli and a whopping five Jaz drives. The reason why I have five is quite funny, and involves numerous errors from iOmega European assistance. The first one was replacing the two internal drives (green) with two external one (also green), the second was to send three (instead of two) white Jaz drives to replace the original internal two, and then they completely forgot to ask back for the external one (we agreed they would have sent a pickup, but they never did). At the time each unit still costed several hundred $.
On a HackaDay post from Dec 8, 2021, it describes a software tool that Steve Gibson had provided source code to port a Zip and Jaz drive inspector to Windows to enable low level repair of the cartridges. This might get a few of your dead ones going again.
Oh, that makes a lot more sense. I paused the video and used the google translate app to read it out, and it come out as 'The appliance must be connected to an iodinated mains socket'.
From what I recall, 1GB disks worked fine in 2GB drives ONLY if they had never ever been used in a 1GB drive. From what I understand, the heads in the 2GB drive were extremely vulnerable to dirt and the enclosures were designed differently to prevent the heads getting dirty - while the older 1GB drives didn't have that problem and weren't engineered with the same level of head protection - thus the heads in a 1GB drive would get quite dirty but still work fine, but a 1GB disk used in a 1GB would pick up some of that dirt and if then put into a 2GB drive would transfer some of that dirt onto the more sensitive heads and cause significant problems. If that is what has happened here, you will probably find the 2GB drive will now have issues until the heads are cleaned - and you should not use any disks that have ever been in a 1GB drive OR have been in this 2GB drive while it's heads were dirty.
Jaz drives, a piece of retro tech I have zero nostalgia for. Used to own one when they were new, and I was lucky to get 3 months of use out of a cartridge. Horrible failure rates. Had a friend that worked at Iomega who said failure rates on jaz drives approached 80%. The jaz drives killed the company.
Holy cats! I really, really wanted one but decided to wait, and get a ZIP drive instead - but thank goodness I "only" spent $200 back in 1995 or so for the Zip vs. the nearly $800 for the Jaz + controller...
I have several of those Jaz drives . All work fine and very reliable. No problems with cartridges. The 2 GB drive writes and reads 1 GB cartridges fine with no problems. The cartriges are way better than Syquest's version. Maybe you confuse these with Syquest cartridge drives (SkyJet 1,5 GB). Syquest is absoutely horrible. The drives are weak and often don't want to work without any reasons and the cartridges are all faulty. I've got 20 Pieces new old stock and three of them are dead. The rest had errors all over the platters. I had to low level format all of them. In comparison everything about the Iomega Jaz drives and cartridges is way better, more solid, more robust and very reliable.
That's true, but not because of their reliability (or the lack of it). I can't find any concrete figures for failure rates, but my research suggests that the reported failure rates were way overblown. The failure rate of Zip drives was actually around 1% or 2%, and Jaz drives a little more than that (more than 1% but less than 5%). What killed the company was the emergence of competing media, in particular the CD-R. The introduction of widespread, inexpensive CD-R drives and media which could be read by any standard CD-ROM drive began to eat away Zip’s market share for removable backups. Businesses also started installing local area networks (LANs) that allowed large file transfers between machines without any removable media at all. Compared to these new options, a proprietary removable floppy drive was far less attractive. So their sales dropped rapidly, despite many attempts to rekindle interest (first the Jaz drive, then the Clik).
@@SpearM3064 I actually owned 2 Zip drives, they were fantastic, never had a problem with them or the zip cartridges. With the Jaz however, I went through 3 drives in an 18 month period (1gb, I never had a 2gb drive) and a large number of Jaz carts. I would have never been able to afford that but my friend who worked at Iomega could get me a three pack for $20.
Yeah that's what I thought: The Jazz drives were the unreliable ones. Most of the Zip drives are still purring like a kitten after 30 years of service. I know mine does 👍
Your comment at 47:00 reminds me when I still was in the Network Industry- A company I did work for, had ZIP drives. errfff!! What a nightmare! The drive would, (so called) backup data, but remove the cartridge put back in and it would not copy back to local PC. THIS HAPPENED A LOT!! Their control software was quite flaky!!!
The infamous Iomega “Click of Death.” I had a SCSI Jaz drive back in the day. Lost all my stuff on that disk! Zip drives weren’t as bad. That was the same case mine had. It was a SuperMac.
Those I/O cards for the TI strongly resemble the interface modules used in IBM Mainframes. Big chunky cases of aluminum clamped over cards with pull tabs to extract them. Though on the mainframes they were probably hot swappable.
I think Ramac is a good name for him - as a reminder of the IBM hard drive - to represent the amount of space all of this RAM will take up if people keep sending it!! :)
I had that same case. I knew I recognized it in a previous video. These were really generic, though it's nice that this one has an outlet on it. I had an external scsi drive for the macs at school (they locked down the macs with OnGuard) so I could have a personalized mac for my own work, where everyone else shared a hard drive (no logons at the time with 5400's.) I think I paid $20 for the enclosure. It worked so well.
I vote for Ramesses (the Great)! My ZIP drive also had its switch-mode PSU die. Fortunately it still works with the older linear power brick, but it is bulky. I should get (or make) a USB to barrel-connector cable, since its 5V/1A requirement is easily satisfied by any phone charger... My favorite version is the ZIP-100 Plus, which works with both SCSI and parallel! (Not at the same time, of course.)
The parallel port zip-drive was my primary external storage from the mid 90's and for several years. My experience is that the transfer speed greatly depends on the chip used to drive the paralel port. My fastest, and favourite was using it on a motherboard based on the Via mvp3 chipset. Paired with AMD k2-2 and k2-iii was my primary system for years.
I have also wondered about the Zip drive reputation I actually thought it came from files/data getting corrupted, but I have no specific recollection to substantiate that. I have had them flash like this one did in the video. I think most people would assume the drive is junk based on that failure mode. If it lights up but doesn’t work it would be pretty easy to conclude the power is actually fine and it’s the drive that is malfunctioning.
Rammy is a cool name, but I could live with RAMBO also. I hope that every packet in the future will have at least one RAM stick in it so that Rammy makes an appearance :)
Those mystery TI edge pcbs are to go from a TIPI or sideport 32K adapter that I designed, to the standard edge connector for attaching further expansion devices.
I used to have hella jazz drives. I used them to boot up old Mac systems with SCSI ports. I remember thinking 1gb was so huge especially when these old macs only had 80MB hard drives lol.
I still have an original printer port 100MB zip drive, in it's protective padded bag, with all the accessories and even 20-odd disks. Slow as hell, but it worked. Much better than floppies as far as reliability.
The "great" thing about Jaz and other removable platter hard drives was: once you got media errors on one disk, chances were your heads and drive interior were already contaminated and you could basically throw all the stuff away (after hopefully managing to get at least some data off the cartridges).
Adrian: “This one shouldn’t be too long”.
Me: looks at the video length
I don’t mind them long. It’s always going to be a great video.
It's DRAM
Dee Ram
I'll close the door on the way out.
Damn it.
*Follows you out*
He seems a bit static for that occasion though. I'd suggest "Ass Ram".
Nice! ;-)
But what about RAMbo
Nah it RAMmstein
Nickname "Edo"
You should name the ram Rambo, a combination of RAM and Haribo.
The name of the ram should be Rambo! 💥 Rambo, the RAM ram! And he should have a bandana.
Sounds good to me.
He just needs a bandana and a bandolier.
Im absolutely convinced that everytime you say "no more ram" we all reach over to our parts bin to send more
From a few minutes of web sleuthing, it looks like that mystery Samsung module is a 4MB ROM SIMM for use with the Power Macintosh 6100 and Performa 61xx series.
Don't keep these short, Adrian; they're excellent.
Adrian: "A little more short, a little more concise". Me: Checks length of video :D
Right? Just in case you're reading these, Adrian, I really enjoy long videos, man.
2:19 - it's a Ram, that means it's a male sheep. A female sheep is called a Ewe. When it comes to RAM it's Crucial to get the name right! ...
hahaha i see what you did there - well played sir.
so ram is vall-e :))
@@tomaskovacik That sounds like the same song that Samsung!
Lots of "tongue in cheek" humour going on in this comments section guys... LOL Fred
@@electronicengineer I'm just "caching" in on jokes I have a "memory" of, I'm not trying to "ram" that point home, I'll try to stay "in-line", if I come across any more I'll "socket" to you!...
These videos are the cheapest and best therapy I've ever experienced.
Adrian, we love the long videos. Keep 'em coming, don't hold to shorter times. More Adrian at the bench is more joy for us. We love going on these journeys with you. Hour long mini mail calls all the way, baby!
Your videos can never be too long in my opinion. Very relaxing watching them. I really enjoy them.
Here in North Yorkshire a ram is called a Tup, so my suggestion is 'Tuppy'!
Love the TPAI reference. UA-cam makes this planet so much smaller. Nerds united!
"I wonder if it's a disk problem, or the drive?"
*Yes*
First off, I love the old TSR wizard avatar. But to the point: Iomega's products were all designed to a price point, and then further pennies were shaved off. They're some of the most cheaply-built computer equipment I've ever seen. Even if you can verify that the electronics are all functioning properly, some tiny plastic internal part may have warped by a fraction of a millimeter and is preventing the head from properly aligning. Everything they made was a nightmare. I knew a guy who did corporate data recovery off Zip, Clic, and Jaz disks for a time. He had to stop because the dozens of NOS drives he'd bought all failed after only about five years.
@@TheRealColBosch I think one of the greater design sins was that Click of Death was actually a transmissible disaese! For those who might not know, CoD would damage disks in such a way that if you put that disk in another drive, it would damage the drive.
I have come to the conclusion that I am addicted to Adrian's videos. I checked again and again to see the next MMMC, worried that something happened because it wasn't appearing. Turns out I was a day early.
You could call the ram Nibbles. I love the longer videos.
I just saved a couple of TI99s and a working PEB with 5 cards and a disk drive in it. First, the thing is a monster at almost 40 lbs shipped! The box is over engineered as much as the cards. The top comes off and the cards slot down in and stick out the back. The whole PEB felt like it was created for some other system other than the silver color scheme. Hope you can see one in person some day! It was amazing to see in the wild and play with it.
Honestly, I don't mind a 'super long' video. It's fun watching you fix things. It is part learning about all these old computers I never had access to, and part seeing how well things hold up over time. Plus soldering and making circuit boards is fun.
The Sheep could be called "Nibble" or "Byte" because of how sheep like to nibble on things...
I had a Zip drive in high school, and my one friend had the Jazz drive. I also had a "Clik" drive, but that was later re-named to "PocketZIP" and it literally never worked. It was busted straight from the moment I purchased it, which was for $20 and unopened at a second hand store... Should have been my first clue--but hey. Ya didn't know back then. It really is a shame that Iomega went down as it did... They did some cool stuff! They were really innovative, they had support of the motherboards... Just... The hardware wasen't quite 'good' enough. Other solutions were either more reliable, or cheaper in the long run... And then 'flash' storage came out and WHOOSH there went the need to have spinning disks... And then all the patents are just useless... But I have real fond memories of going to the local PC store, buying a ZIP disk, and then filling them with games off of my endless stacks of 3.25 floppies...
You might be able to connect that Jazz drive to a modern computer and run some recovery software on it to maybe be able to recover some data... I'm not sure though. I use Recuva, it works pretty well, and it is free for personal use.
Bit late to the party, but he should bbe called nybbles, with a y
Ahem... the (old) URL for the tv-b-gone PCB is... on the PCB. (Anyway, the project has moved to a new location: learn.adafruit.com/tv-b-gone-kit. And yes, there is a parts list.)
Never underestimate how hard it is to actually look at a pcb while also filming it :)
I don't. However, like many UA-camrs, Adrian often adds (textual) notes to his videos about stuff he realizes after recording, like during editing. I just guess he missed it then, too.
Rambus the Ram, esq.
He loves litigation. Also fresh grass, but mostly litigation.
Hi Adrian, the text on the rear of that enclosure is not Dutch, it's Swedish, and it says that it must be connected to a mains outlet with EARTH!
EDIT: Side note, I approve of the sticker removal!
@Dr ROLFCOPTER! It's actually called the equivalent of Earth in Sweden.
Inderdaad geen nederlands ;-)
I agree. Earth connections are vastly overrated. I only use it on my oscilloscope, my guitar amps, my dishwasher and my washing machine :-) All of my 45 computers and their peripherals work just fine without it :-)
And then in the picture of the built 4 bit computer the battery is from the Swedish company Kjell & Co. Nice with a lot of references to Sweden :)
🇸🇪🇸🇪 was suprised to see Swedish instead of Dutch. Gör om gör rätt 😂
I had a Parallel port Zip Drive when they first came out and I loved it.
I seem to recall that the zip drive "Click of death" was due to the drive head beating itself against the housing during read failures, similar to how old floppy drives would behave. The problem was that the drive head would knock itself out of alignment very easily doing this so if you had any disks with bad sectors, it wasn't long before you had more, and eventually your drive would fail to read any disk. It would seem to be communicable as well when bad disks written to by a bad drive would then be taken to a working drive the click of death would continue there until it too stopped working. Its been a long time since I looked into the issue, but that's what I think it might have been.
I think the SyQuest drives were more reliable despite the cartridges not being as rugged. But then they were the originator of the small-format removable cartridge hard disk and they invested enormously into ensuring the technology was reliable, including developing a new type of disc media.
FWIW, the click of death happened on Zip when the Zip disks were physically damaged. They spun so fast that they'd rip the heads right off the drive. A drive thus damaged would damage any disk you insert into it. That's why the Click of Death was "contagious".
Yes!!! The video I’m always looking forward to! 😁😁😁
A very interesting show. Rammy is a good name for the ram.
I have a fully loaded PEB with my TI. And let me just say, the entire thing breaks my back lifting it but it's a sight to behold. I love that thing. BTW, the cards go facing UP and the metal clips help you pull the cards out. If you get the PEB, be sure to get the "fire hose". It's a GINORMOUS cable that runs into the PEB and to the side of the TI.
I love the dedication you put in all donations!!
Those TI-99/4A PEB cards were plugged in from the top. The backplane was actually at the bottom laying flat. Had one back in the day. Wow those cards brought back great memories.
I was trying to think of a RAM joke, but I can't remember it
Wow, seems like that joke lost power... ;) :P
Adrian, i don't know about the others, but I LOVE your long videos. One of my fav old tech channels! Keep the excellent work!
That's clearly Ram Romus. Concerning the text on the back of the enclosure: it isn't Dutch, but Swedish. It states that "the appliance must be connected to a grounded socket".
RAM name suggestion: Captain RAMbunctious :D
Also as someone who ends up making a lot of long form vintage tech youtube videos as well, I like your long form videos. I've also learned so much from you about fixing things. Please keep up the great work!
Thank you for the great video. I’m sure you get tons of conflicting comments, but I appreciate the long videos.
I think the name should be Didi R.
edit: Full name Didi Ram, but Didi R. for short...
@Dr ROLFCOPTER! In German, Didi is a usual shortened form of the names Dieter or Dietrich, which are both male names. ;-)
I was just going to say that. Didi !
Came here to propose the same :D
Didi RAMone
弟弟(Didi) in Chinese means little brother.
Back in the 90s when I first started using the internet, I set up an old 386 PC I had with a modem, installed an early version of Linux and configured it as a dial-up router (no broadband then!). I would browse to a web page it served, press the button and it would connect my home network to the internet. Similarly there was a "stop" button to hang up (I only had one phone line...). I used this for about 5 years, and when the hard drive failed (it was on 24/7 and in my gardern shed..) I didn't want to spend any money fixing it so I configured it with a ZIP drive. It would boot the kernal from floppy, load the ZIP drivers, and then continue booting from the ZIP drive. It did take a long time to boot but since this only really happened when I had a power failure it wasn't a problem. I continued to use this until I moved in 2001 and shortly after got broadband installed. The ZIP drive was still working, I just had to remember to delete log files etc fairly aggressively :) I don't recall what happened to the ZIP drive in the end, I expect it got lost in one of my subsequent moves.
Remember when people called and it disconnected everything? hahaha - I know there was gear in the 90s for that, but I was mid '80s on the C64. I am mostly sure no interrupt hardware was available then yet, to the general public, at least. I was a young kid. heh heh
Apple 4MB ROM SIMM 341-0741. This ROM module is used in some Power Macintosh and Performa models. AND the writing on the back of that external case is Swedish - "Must be connected to a grounded outlet" even though the word "grounded" is misspelled in Swedish! :)
Adrian, as an owner of parallel iOmega ZIP 250 drive, I can confirm that that stuff works flawlessly on 286 machine (just be sure that your I/O controller with LPT port is OK, I spent way too long trying to fix the drive while the cable on a controller turned out to be faulty. Never tested it on XT since I don't have one.
Thanks for these videos , they have kept me sane throughout 2020😁
Mmm 😋 chapters :) Thanks Adrian, great video as always
If somewhere exists the toplist of countries with the largest RAM reserve, Adrian is in the top three :)
Wow - I have a couple of those external drive cases - they work really well!
Approx 45 min is about right. I felt that last weeks episode of just half an hour was too short. These MMC episodes are really one of the highlights of the week. The best part is when Adrian gets some candy to try (I've started to buy gummy bears!), or get something odd and weird. Just love this series
Adrian, many of us like a nice meaty video. No complaints about long ones here.
The length was perfect and I wouldn't even mind longer ones.
Adrian I think you are now officially the worlds RAM bank. The more you say you don't want it, the more people will send to you I swear!!! haha
No please man don’t make them short..... I rely on your videos for much more than you know. The length of your videos is a big reason I watch you, aside you great content of course.
Hello, A Ram is male, A female sheep is a Ywe (pronounced U). Love the videos, Has a SCSI Zip drive on my 486 DX2 66 back in 1993/4 and had DITO tape drive backups also.
Adrian: "This would be using probably diodes I guess - entirely just diodes".
Immediately shows a picture of the completed board, entirely filled with transistors, says nothing 😁
I'd guess you meant transistors in the first place, but had that DDL latch still on your brain 🙂
Great video, as always!
That's the same parallel port Zip Drive I had, and I had that heavier brick power supply. That didn't fail on me, I got hit by the infamous click of death. I switched up to a USB Zip Drive after that and I kept backups of some of my work on those disks for so long that when I finally jumped to external HDD's for storage, the name on the folder for that stuff has since remained "ZIP Backup." I never thought to change it. 😅
Rammstein is the obvious name choice here
Ramsey. Real world name and real world computer thing!
Call him RAM-bo :D the name :D Thank you for the Video.
Call him Rom. xD
Space Knight? 🤔
Romulus
He looks like a Kingston to me.
RAM Space Knight.
I have to agree Blue LEDs are overused these days. I loved them when I was young and they were new though. I am much more sparing with using them today, but still do use them. I love the short mail calls.
That new camera of yours is quite an improvement!
So nice to watch that Iomega Zip drive (the blue one). It was seeming to me that it was not so long ago that I was using them. In fact, it was so modern back then when at my office we (an architecture firm) started using them instead of floppy drives. Now it's like 21 years ago. Life happens so fast...
My first University, OSU, had standardized on them. Every “school” pc had an internal Zip drive. This was 20yrs ago.
PAI is an awesome channel nice of you to plug him.
I had a friend that worked at the same ISP I did in the mid 90s that had a Jaz drive. He had the 1gb version and at least one disk failed within a month or two and that was the end of it's traveling since the disk cartridges were so expensive.
We also had a 4x cd-r burner there(the first one on the market) that we ended up going in together and buying a spindle of cd-r's for around $5 a disc which was a steal at the time. We had a fractional T3(6mbps) there and at the time seems ridiculous fast when downloading at 28.8 at home.
Funny thing is I always resist watching long videos but get hooked immediately. I still need to go back and watch the Mac IIsi power supply one as I have one from that same ISP job(with 32mb of ram and 40mb hdd) where the power supply has issues.
Hehe, I actually designed and built one of those clocks when I was a senior in high school in 1979. Had one extra option though. With the flip of a switch, you could also have 3 rings of LED's that lit up for seconds, minutes, and hours. You could also set that display to show either the LED only for each ring, or light all of them up to the current time. Of course, mine was first tested on a bread board, and then built out on an Augut wire wrap board. You couldn't get custom PCB's back then for less than $100 each, and you had to order a 1000 or something stupid.
Awe! I would love to get my hands on a PEB!
I don't mind these videos being long.. I've been watching a few in a row of the older mail call videos and enjoying them! Greetings from New Jersey (^_-)/
I never owned a Zip, but I still have two Bernoulli and a whopping five Jaz drives.
The reason why I have five is quite funny, and involves numerous errors from iOmega European assistance.
The first one was replacing the two internal drives (green) with two external one (also green), the second was to send three (instead of two) white Jaz drives to replace the original internal two, and then they completely forgot to ask back for the external one (we agreed they would have sent a pickup, but they never did).
At the time each unit still costed several hundred $.
On a HackaDay post from Dec 8, 2021, it describes a software tool that Steve Gibson had provided source code to port a Zip and Jaz drive inspector to Windows to enable low level repair of the cartridges. This might get a few of your dead ones going again.
Great video Adrian.. I do like the longer videos 👍
the writing is not Dutch, it's Swedish, says "the device must be plugged into grounded receptacle"
And it's spelled wrong too! Should be 'jordat' not 'jodat' :)
That was what I was gonna say, you beat me to it.
Oh, that makes a lot more sense. I paused the video and used the google translate app to read it out, and it come out as 'The appliance must be connected to an iodinated mains socket'.
From what I recall, 1GB disks worked fine in 2GB drives ONLY if they had never ever been used in a 1GB drive. From what I understand, the heads in the 2GB drive were extremely vulnerable to dirt and the enclosures were designed differently to prevent the heads getting dirty - while the older 1GB drives didn't have that problem and weren't engineered with the same level of head protection - thus the heads in a 1GB drive would get quite dirty but still work fine, but a 1GB disk used in a 1GB would pick up some of that dirt and if then put into a 2GB drive would transfer some of that dirt onto the more sensitive heads and cause significant problems.
If that is what has happened here, you will probably find the 2GB drive will now have issues until the heads are cleaned - and you should not use any disks that have ever been in a 1GB drive OR have been in this 2GB drive while it's heads were dirty.
Jaz drives, a piece of retro tech I have zero nostalgia for. Used to own one when they were new, and I was lucky to get 3 months of use out of a cartridge. Horrible failure rates. Had a friend that worked at Iomega who said failure rates on jaz drives approached 80%. The jaz drives killed the company.
Holy cats! I really, really wanted one but decided to wait, and get a ZIP drive instead - but thank goodness I "only" spent $200 back in 1995 or so for the Zip vs. the nearly $800 for the Jaz + controller...
I have several of those Jaz drives . All work fine and very reliable. No problems with cartridges. The 2 GB drive writes and reads 1 GB cartridges fine with no problems. The cartriges are way better than Syquest's version.
Maybe you confuse these with Syquest cartridge drives (SkyJet 1,5 GB). Syquest is absoutely horrible. The drives are weak and often don't want to work without any reasons and the cartridges are all faulty. I've got 20 Pieces new old stock and three of them are dead. The rest had errors all over the platters. I had to low level format all of them.
In comparison everything about the Iomega Jaz drives and cartridges is way better, more solid, more robust and very reliable.
That's true, but not because of their reliability (or the lack of it). I can't find any concrete figures for failure rates, but my research suggests that the reported failure rates were way overblown. The failure rate of Zip drives was actually around 1% or 2%, and Jaz drives a little more than that (more than 1% but less than 5%).
What killed the company was the emergence of competing media, in particular the CD-R. The introduction of widespread, inexpensive CD-R drives and media which could be read by any standard CD-ROM drive began to eat away Zip’s market share for removable backups. Businesses also started installing local area networks (LANs) that allowed large file transfers between machines without any removable media at all. Compared to these new options, a proprietary removable floppy drive was far less attractive. So their sales dropped rapidly, despite many attempts to rekindle interest (first the Jaz drive, then the Clik).
@@SpearM3064 I actually owned 2 Zip drives, they were fantastic, never had a problem with them or the zip cartridges. With the Jaz however, I went through 3 drives in an 18 month period (1gb, I never had a 2gb drive) and a large number of Jaz carts. I would have never been able to afford that but my friend who worked at Iomega could get me a three pack for $20.
Yeah that's what I thought: The Jazz drives were the unreliable ones. Most of the Zip drives are still purring like a kitten after 30 years of service. I know mine does 👍
Adrian ... it's a ram ... male for sure. And i vote for name Ram ! Thanks for great content . All best from Croatia.
Ramon. Definitely !!!
Great work, keep it up 👍 think “Chip Ram” would be great for the name for Ram 😏
Your comment at 47:00 reminds me when I still was in the Network Industry- A company I did work for, had ZIP drives.
errfff!! What a nightmare! The drive would, (so called) backup data, but remove the cartridge put back in and it would not
copy back to local PC. THIS HAPPENED A LOT!! Their control software was quite flaky!!!
The infamous Iomega “Click of Death.” I had a SCSI Jaz drive back in the day. Lost all my stuff on that disk! Zip drives weren’t as bad.
That was the same case mine had. It was a SuperMac.
Those I/O cards for the TI strongly resemble the interface modules used in IBM Mainframes. Big chunky cases of aluminum clamped over cards with pull tabs to extract them. Though on the mainframes they were probably hot swappable.
I enjoy your channel. Feel free to make the videos as long as you want.
I love the PAI channel. I think youtube gives us nerds the same suggestions.
I think Ramac is a good name for him - as a reminder of the IBM hard drive - to represent the amount of space all of this RAM will take up if people keep sending it!! :)
Your new camera is soooo much better. 😍
I had that same case. I knew I recognized it in a previous video. These were really generic, though it's nice that this one has an outlet on it. I had an external scsi drive for the macs at school (they locked down the macs with OnGuard) so I could have a personalized mac for my own work, where everyone else shared a hard drive (no logons at the time with 5400's.) I think I paid $20 for the enclosure. It worked so well.
I vote for Ramesses (the Great)!
My ZIP drive also had its switch-mode PSU die. Fortunately it still works with the older linear power brick, but it is bulky. I should get (or make) a USB to barrel-connector cable, since its 5V/1A requirement is easily satisfied by any phone charger...
My favorite version is the ZIP-100 Plus, which works with both SCSI and parallel! (Not at the same time, of course.)
I have the exact same SCSI enclosure, but with a CD-ROM in it, connected to my Amiga 1200’s PCMCIA via a SquirrelSCSI card 👍
The parallel port zip-drive was my primary external storage from the mid 90's and for several years. My experience is that the transfer speed greatly depends on the chip used to drive the paralel port. My fastest, and favourite was using it on a motherboard based on the Via mvp3 chipset. Paired with AMD k2-2 and k2-iii was my primary system for years.
You can get right angle IC sockets for the LEDs on the clock.
It doesn't need a name, just a bucket. Every time you get ram you can throw it in the bucket and say 'RAM for the Ram God'.
Call him Ramesses 🐏
He is kind of like a pharaoh
My thoughts exactly!
It is not over-engineered, it is quality...
“RAMMY” is perfect name! Don’t touch it!
I have also wondered about the Zip drive reputation
I actually thought it came from files/data getting corrupted, but I have no specific recollection to substantiate that.
I have had them flash like this one did in the video.
I think most people would assume the drive is junk based on that failure mode.
If it lights up but doesn’t work it would be pretty easy to conclude the power is actually fine and it’s the drive that is malfunctioning.
Rammy is a cool name, but I could live with RAMBO also.
I hope that every packet in the future will have at least one RAM stick in it so that Rammy makes an appearance :)
I have tha same Iomega zip drive and had the same problem with the two lights. I opened the PSU and replaced the caps and it worked.
Don’t shorten them please! Love your content!
The name of the ram should be Rambo! 💥 Rambo, the RAM ram! And he should have a bandana.
Those mystery TI edge pcbs are to go from a TIPI or sideport 32K adapter that I designed, to the standard edge connector for attaching further expansion devices.
boop boop bap bah dee doo doo! I actually made a dance to your theme song, my cat does not appreciate it.
I used to have hella jazz drives. I used them to boot up old Mac systems with SCSI ports. I remember thinking 1gb was so huge especially when these old macs only had 80MB hard drives lol.
I still have an original printer port 100MB zip drive, in it's protective padded bag, with all the accessories and even 20-odd disks. Slow as hell, but it worked. Much better than floppies as far as reliability.
A ram is always a boy/man Let me think great name rammustin (ram must be in) love your channel I have learnt so much from your skills on the videos
You can always look at the voltage rating of the input caps in an unknown smps. If it is made for 220-240V, they will be rated 400-450V.
The "great" thing about Jaz and other removable platter hard drives was: once you got media errors on one disk, chances were your heads and drive interior were already contaminated and you could basically throw all the stuff away (after hopefully managing to get at least some data off the cartridges).
I think Rammy should have random objects like tools taped to it every episode, which you access randomly on-camera.
I have a parallel port SCSI adapter around here somewhere...
It uses to work with any DOS machine right down to DOS 3.1 and 3.3 on an XT!