As a child I only spent watching these programs on TV. Today I am 41 years old and I am a specialist in networks, communications, servers, infrastructure in general, I continue with the same passion and love for myself to build a server, install a network switch, connect a cables is to go play I love my job
I remember going to computer shows in the town I lived in back in the day. It was a feeling of accomplishment building a computer from scratch, installing the OS and other software, and getting it up and running. The one advantage of buying hardware components and building your own machine is getting the components you want rather than buying a pre-built system where you don’t have much of a choice of the exact components you want, unless you want to pay a premium. I built many desktop computers back in the day!
Crazy the advances that really changed the PC landscape in the three or so years after this... in '92 it was very much usable to still be using a 386 with a Hercules card, or even a cheap as hell 10 mhz XT clone if you weren't a power user, but between multimedia PCs (Which, granted, were already becoming a thing in 1992) and Windows 95 and the rise of CD-ROM, suddenly the average home PC jumped in specifications a pretty decent amount
My first build was in 1994 or 1995. It was a socket 7, AMD DX4-100 CPU. I still can't believe how much ram and hard drives were back then. Also, literally all PC cases were cookie cutters; lots of bandaids required. You get far more bang for your dollar today. This was such an exciting time for PC enthusiasts.
Interesting how so much time has passed and physical slot and interfaces have changed many times over but the basic idea of putting together a desktop is more or less the same thing. You could just pluck someone from 1992 who was adept at putting together a rig and they'd put together a 2020 rig just fine .
From looking up RAM prices in 1992, even if purchasing all 49 MB on the low side of costs that year, it would still have cost upwards of $1,500 (1992 dollars) or more to expand the memory to that size. but, considering the cost of components in those days, and if you needed some serious computing power, I suppose it might be worth it.
This made me nostalgic for computer shows. There was an experience going to one, seeing weird tech and getting deals. I remember my last build from parts purchased at one, a pentium 233 mmx machine with a TX motherboard and the great innovation of getting a case that wasn't beige haha. Also picked up a transparent replacement housing for my playstation 1 haha. It was a fun way to spend a Saturday browsing a show.
Unfortunately, there were no computer shows in Montreal or I have not heard of them :( I do remember the Intel TX chipset. I think they were superior in some way to the Intel VX. I bought a VX based mobo back in 1997. I was broke.
Sounds like 1997 or 1998 to me. I went to college with a Pentium 200 MHz graduation gift (HP Pavilion 7360) that eventually received a Canopus Pure3D 2 12 MB Voodoo 2 card the next year. I built my first computer with parts from NewEgg, Directron, etc. in 2000 (AMD Athlon XP 1200 and Nvidia GeForce 2 probably)
no he just does not care or know how to properly install them correctly to him it's in the system it's fine does not matter if it's in there correctly so they will fit properly and make a connection so when you power up it works right
@@thomasbarkas6092 If you look carefully at the cards, you'll notice that there is a metal foot sticking down, out of the bracket on the left side of the slot. Whatever that foot is for, it's clearly not properly adjusted, and it's preventing the card itself from fully seating. Has "...no idea what the fuck..." he is doing, maybe, but I think it mostly an issue of poor preparation; those brackets were clearly meant to be adjusted to support the card and it was not done ahead of time.
Also that "you plug it and works" what a lie getting this at computers to work is a nightmare when you have multiple boards, jumpers here and there irq conflicts i/o ports to choose dma problems. slave master drives, selecting drive type on the bios.
Nice, but why not get a 7950X3D instead? Not only is it faster, the AM5 socket will last a lot longer too, so you'll be able to upgrade your CPU years later.
I did my first in 1996. Bought parts from Friz Electronics in LA. Pentium 166 MMX, Quantum HD upped to a Seagate, dual speed CD, 32 mb Ram in 2 slots of 16s. 56 kbps. Modem that I upgrade to 96kbps Qualcomm, VGA card and Super VGA monitor. Mouse and other neat stuff for the time... Disquette drive. Run Win95 disquettes. Office 95, FS 95. Epson printer.
This is a great episode! I just bought a new used tall tower 386DX-25 MHz. with a 387 math coprocessor, a memory board with a full 72*128 kB. of RAM, a 1.2 MB. floppy and a 1.44 MB. floppy, turbo button, controller card with its own BIOS for hard drives beyond the system BIOS limit plus the capacity for 4 total floppy drives, and a combination modem card and sound card. But no hard drive, so it was removed by the previous owner who used it as a gaming computer during its first life. This thing was a monster when it was new. I've been doing a lot of learning on the Internet to figure out how to get this computer in fully working order. I had to buy a DIN keyboard and a serial mouse. So far it boots via floppy and I can use it without a hard drive for word processing for example, but I need to get a hard drive it can use to enable everything else. 💻💾💾💾💾📀🖱
I'm about to build a new gaming computer so it's nice to have a show like this to keep me up-to-date on the latest parts. I watch it every week! (EDIT: That "TTL" graphics card looks neat; I wonder how well it can handle ray tracing?)
Update: The leaking battery on the motherboard of the tall tower 386 had actually leaked onto the controller card, severing two of the traces that led to the hard drive header. That’s why it could boot from floppies but not hard drives. Once I bodge-patched those traces, hard drives worked fine in it. I also added a SoundBlaster SB-16, a CD-ROM drive, a parallel-port external Zip-100 drive, and a CompactFlash adaptor expansion board so I can easily move files en masse to it and from it.
The trouble with building a computer back then was the technology was changing so fast that you couldn't keep up. I remember getting a LS-120 drive for one of my computers and within about 1 year you couldn't get LS-120 disks anymore. I got a kick ass 2 speed CD Rom drive for $200.00 and a year later none of the new disks would even play on it. I still think I have a top of the line video card from about 1990 that was kick ass with 256 colors. When was the last time someone had to buy a sound card for a computer? Hell I still remember paying out $100.00 for a 9600 baud modem so I could send faxes but my first one a year earlier was 2400 baud and a year later it was 33.6. I still have my first HD a Western Digital Caviar 1210 210 meg that was plenty of storage and now it is used as a coaster on my desk for my drinks. I built this computer about 10 years ago and the technology hasn't changed from then to now. Even processor speeds seem to have stopped increasing and the memory and video are at a standstill. The late 80s and early 90s were the fun time to be building computers but you needed a large bank account and as soon as you got it built it was out dated.
Yeah, my PC is 11 years old and my overclocked q9550 is still doing fine for my modern needs. I can play 4k hevc films on my 4k tv with this setup, no problems.
"When was the last time someone had to buy a sound card for a computer?" ==1997, when I had my BabyAT mobo. I had a SoundBlaster 16. It had a Cyrix P200L+. I think my next system was a Pentium 3. Since it was a miniATX mobo and all such mobos come with integrated sound, there was never again a need to buy a sound card.
@@procta2343 That's true but dial up modems never became integrated into the mobo. They just were replaced with the next technology. I think most people had 33.6 kbps and 56 kbps modem as a PCI card in 1997 to 2003. These were called softmodems since a portion of the job was done via software. These cards cost 30 to 50$. Some rare cards were hardmodems and they were PCI. Some people had external modems and these were hardmodems. They connect to your PC with a DB25 serial port. When DSL modems were invented, very few people had a DSL modems as a PCI card. Most people have an external DSL modem or cable modem or fiber optic modem.
@@procta2343 ... The thing is we still have the ability to use our analog 56k dialup today, mainly as backup nowadays, because we still have older PCs that have them & we still have one last landline (we had a few landlines before). But because we also have 4G on our smartphones, we use those first for internet, hotspots & tether. But those were the days in & around the Y2k years, where I used dialup for 10 years playing multiplayer games on Internet, such as Quake II & Battlezone II. I finally did get fiberoptic after that but it was shortlived, about 5 years, as I had to move away to a new house. 11/27/24
You gotta love the versatility of the 3 different floppy drives! Wow! Just imagine all the stuff you could do with that. You could put a couple of JPG files on those even! LOL :)
Haha, but in reality images back then were much smaller in file size because of the lower quality (MP). I was on the yearbook committee in high school and remember using a digital camera that saved to floppy disks. I can't remember exactly how many images one disk would hold but I do recall I could take a lot before it filled up. My guess is somewhere between 25-50.
@JimmyRussle Yeah, as the video suggests, by this time most people had hard disks so programs were quickly becoming bigger and bigger since they weren't constrained to one disk anymore.
It's amazing watching these videos with all of the old technology, but this stuff paved the way for the complex tech we have today. Imagine if energy technologies were allowed to flourish like computers were, by now we'd have 100% free and clean energy worldwide. There's a lot of very intelligent people working on it now, but the basic technologies were known for decades.
Back then, building PC's was a difficult proposition. This was before the ATX standard, so you had to be wary of proprietary formats. As long as you stuck with the AT form factor, you were good to go. Assembling the computer wasn't that hard, but you had to be careful with connecting the power leads to the on/off switch (yes, computers actually had a mechanical switch to turn a PC on.). The hard part was getting the hardware to work properly with the operating system using the correct drivers and resolving device conflicts. Plug 'n play and PCI weren't around yet.
+Dennis McIntyre Hard part was trying to get help when something went wrong... these days you just google your problem and up comes hundreds of answers to try. No such luck back then.
I remember in school in the mid 90s telling people I was building my own pc. No one believed me and thought I was trying to say that I could manufacture a chip. Despite my protestations that it was just buying to components and putting them together. That revalation wasn't well known back then. So did I build my PC? Naw... What teenager can afford hundreds of £ to buy the parts? 😅 Have built a few in adulthood though!
It’s amazing how these stuff is laughably obsolete in 2023. Yet the F-22 which is considered the best and most advanced fighter jet in service. Was already flying as a prototype back then.
"Yet the F-22 which is considered the best and most advanced fighter jet in service. " It has been updated since those days. But the development costs are insane.
My first computer was a handmade copy of the Microdata 1600 mini (about 700 ICs and 6 cubic feet of rack space). I booted it once then moved on to a KIM-1 6502 SBC which I used to help in my design of a Z80 S100 system (running CP/M & MP/M) that went into production for a few years. The timeframe for all this was 1976 - 1979. I ran benchmarks for the 4 MHz Z80 against the Microdata 1600 and found the Z80 was faster, largely because core memory in the 1600 had a 1 microsecond access time, a very common bottleneck for core-memory minis.
Doddo MultiGamer I ran a number of games that were character-based graphics, a Startrek game called TREK80, a Space Invaders game called TARG and a few others. They were actually quite good and operated at a selected speed setting (user set). At highest speed they zoomed along quite well.
This is one thing that hasn't really changed a whole lot since then. I mean yeah, we've got more ports, we've got USB, Firewire, SATA... Floppy drives have all but been replaced with CD drives, but the meat of building your own computer is still very much like what's in this video.
+Starscream Close to the same, but not quite. Back then you had jumpers for FSB, multiplier, voltage and everything else and you had to get that right. Even early sound cards were configured with jumpers (IRQ etc.). The CPU socket was usually one of those awful LIF sockets that was a total pain in the ass to remove the CPU from (you had to pull straight up with about 15 pounds of force, or gently pry the CPU out with a flat head screw driver a little bit at a time on alternating sides). The CPU wasn't keyed in any way, so you could put it in 90 degrees wrong (I assume it would have let out the magic blue smoke and stopped working if you ever did). Everything that's in the south bridge now used to be an add-in card. An add-in card for mouse (e.g. bus-mouse or PS/2), an add-in card for serial ports and parallel ports. An add-in card for floppy drive and IDE controllers. L2 cache came as DIP chips that you inserted into sockets on the motherboard, before they became soldered to the motherboard, then integrated on the CPU package (that's what that whole slot form factor was about) and eventually integrated into the CPU die. Cooling didn't matter; just the PSU fan drawing a little bit of heat out was enough. Nothing had a fan, or even a heat sink in the 286 days.
That former Cardinal Technology factory at 1827 Freedom Road in Lancaster PA is currently occupied by “Victory Church.” They did some remodeling around the front and side, for example where the “Cardinal” sign had stood out front had become a parking lot.
@@RWL2012 Yeah it was, they only had 28 mins each week to pack everything in they wanted to talk about, so often times it felt like segments where cut short, and/or rushed. These days we take things like UA-cam granite where a UA-camr can go on for 2 hours on something like a GPU if they want.
Of course, Compaq ALR never really went anywhere for the simple, obvious fact that it was proprietary, whereas you could get cards from anyone that would fit any PC compatible. I remember when I was working in computers a customer bought in an ALR to upgrade, and we basically couldn't do anything, including using the case, just like later Dells. However ALR cards could be found very cheap because they weren't very useful.
I recieved an AST Advantage 486 dx2/50 mhz with 12 mb ram and 200 mb hdd the Christmas of 1996! Those were the times :D Also recieved a 8x cd rom player and soundblaster for it later on too... Wish I still had that sexy beast! it looks like the AST Advantage 6066 computer but that seems to be the 66 mhz version.
Physically building the PC back then was easy; the real fun came when you had to swap cards in different slots and physically manipulate the jumpers to stop IRQ conflicts.
20+ years later ... i7, 16 Gb Ram, 4 Gb VRam, 4 Tb HD and still we want more power for gamming xD aaahh the old days, simpler times, 'simpler' computers :D
Loved how they left out the obviously most difficult part of PC assembly which are the front panel connectors! Also, you BETTER turn it on and pray, as the power button won't even work and not to mention the molex power connectors are all missing, LOL! "And essentially, we are assembled right now!" XD
Damn, I was born in 1992. I'm actually surprised by the size of that RAM. In 1992, you could buy 4MB SDRAMs to your laptop which were much smaller. Then in 1996, 16MB was minimum. Now, I tried to sell 512MB DDR2 SO-DIMM on eBay for $0.01 starting price and no-one bid.
The slot card spacing, slot panels, and screw on terminal is the same today! Of course most boxes have less space devoted to slots since most functionality is built-in, just GPU being the 90% need to have a card in there.
Cost comparison: The Microdata 1600 used core memory costing $2,000.00 per 8 kilobytes. That means my present system with 16GB RAM would cost $4,000,000,000.00 for memory. I also worked out hard drive energy inputs - ganging together enough 80 megabyte CMD disk drives from 1980 to make a 1 terabyte array would result in a power consumption of 6 megawatts. The comparison for smartphones gets even better results.
+Chubzdoomer I have a 1984 Power Macintosh that has only 1 megabyte of RAM. I bought a 2nd 1.4 MB diskette drives and used it to go on the internet back in 1997 and 1998. Back in the days when you could install Prodigy internet service with a single diskette.
Yeah I remember those days very well. Brings back when things were simpler compared to todays computer. Where the cpu are in the ghz range, hard drives in the terabytes drives. And having a floppy drives and a cd-roms were becoming popular.
Stewart asks if FCC certification is needed to build a PC, and the reps basically each give a completely different answer: a blunt "yes" and "no, the individual parts are already cleared". That... _really_ seems like something he should have pressed harder on. You super duper don't want any ambiguity under those circumstances.
My first own computer was an 486 dx-2 :D I Remember playing warcraft 1 or 2 on it :P Had a pentium 233 mhz after that, played d2 and some old 3d games I think but in summer 96 or so I bought myself a playstation one and was hooked on console gaming from then on.
Yeah most probably were, I've had some 486s and they are, The P1s along with Voodoo cards really brought gaming to another level. Some year after the height of the P1s came the "Build it yourself wave". I have a couple of 486 dx4 100 mhz :D and some pentium ofc.. P2s are nice too!
Large reason the PC got the cult following was the fact off the shelf components were plentiful and cheap. Configure exactly what you want. Mac, Amiga, Atari you bought what the company spoon fed you.
Back then, a 200 megabyte hard disk drive and a whole 2 megabytes of RAM was a lot. Today, a terabyte solid state drive and over 16 gigabytes of RAM is more then enough for the standard computer. But who knows what it will be tomorrow...
weird thing is the one that is still hardest thing to make your own PC is what hardware you want to use building the pc now is much much much easier back then, sometimes you don't even need screwdrivers (especially with tooless pc cases and parts)
First build, SIS 486 DLC 40 MHz, 4 MB ram 420 MB drive. Last upgrade, STILL using a Supermicro X6DAL-TB2, two Xeon 3.6 GHz CPU's 3 GB RAM, Nvidia 210 two 500 GB and one 1 TB drive.
1. Can't see how you can run three floppies on a ms dos pc, as there are only two configurable in the bios, and two connectors on the cable, one twisted, one not. The third drive, what drive letter will it get? 2. Can't see why you want two 5 1/4 drives, as the DS/HD 1.2m drives are backward compatible with the SS/DD drives at 360kb?
I thought it was my headphones! Because the left side was going, and I was sitting twisting the cord trying my best to fix it lmao. I feel like a fool xD
As a newbie It took me two days to get a CD rom drive to be recognised by the O/S. No internet or UA-cam to look up how to do it then. Just me and a book.
Early to mid 90s somewhere, don't remember the exact year it was a long time ago, built a 386. With just a couple exceptions my desktops since have been DIY. I've priced out my current desktop as a prebuild, and it might be cheaper now that Zen4 is out, but it was around 6000USD, I spent around 3400. And that was during the dark days of GPU scalpers.
It's not going to be cheaper spec for spec for every possible configuration, but to nail down *exactly* what you need and nothing you don't, there can be huge savings over OEM systems when you do that. And you understand it better too.
Those were the times aww :( Games like Tomb Raider, Warcraft 2, Diablo, Warlords 2, Time Commando, Carmageddon, Doom1/2, Command & Conquer and so forth.. Retro gaming is best! Luckily I've bought back several of my fav games. Ever played Dungeon Keeper 2? Still no game like that... pure fun! Warcraft 2 is still one of the best rts games ever but there should be some AI update to it. You should check out Brutal Doom :D Playstation is awesome too!, Gran Turismo... awww
I remember computer shows. The first two computers that I built, the components were bought at a show. Memories right there. I kinda miss the days of cases coming with a PSU.
You can still get barebones cases that come with a PSU. But why would you want to? They're usually very cheap, low-end PSUs and if you're building your own $500+ system, why cheap out on the PSU? It's the one component that can instantly destroy every other component you have.
My Dad built our first computer from dumpster diving. I think it was a PC-XT, with an 8088 CPU. The first computer show I went to was for building our next computer which was a 386 clone with a VGA monitor. It’s still in the closet somewhere and might still work.
Power supply wattage vastly depends on GPU and to a certain degree CPU config, hence systems not generally coming with them Anymore. Back in the day the wattage spread was much much less.
wasnt 486 computers modular as they are today where cpu/ram was inserted directly on the motherboard? I had one mid/late 90's but didnt know much at all about building computers back then. I know my p1 233mhz was like a modern pc for sure though
The horror of components that just wouldn’t comply, IRQ conflicts, ribbon cables that got tangled up, el-cheapo harddisks that failed after three months, dodgy computer companies with lousy service and warranty, crappy VGA-monitors, and then the motherboards with Vesa local bus, 8-bit, 16-bit, ISA slots. It was fun building it yourself, but I never had the money to buy proper components, so it was always a bit of a disappointment. I’m glad I can afford a no-worries laptop nowadays :)
It was a good job they weren't asked to demonstrate the working PC after assembling those components as most of the cards weren't inserted properly! I have self-built all my PCs since the early 90s and it's amazing how little it has changed - I still use case I bought over 20 years ago and keyboard is so old it has ps/2 connector 🤣.
As a child I only spent watching these programs on TV. Today I am 41 years old and I am a specialist in networks, communications, servers, infrastructure in general, I continue with the same passion and love for myself to build a server, install a network switch, connect a cables is to go play I love my job
Whenever I can’t sleep I run these videos. Knocks me right out.
Thought I was the only one😂👍
I remember going to computer shows in the town I lived in back in the day. It was a feeling of accomplishment building a computer from scratch, installing the OS and other software, and getting it up and running. The one advantage of buying hardware components and building your own machine is getting the components you want rather than buying a pre-built system where you don’t have much of a choice of the exact components you want, unless you want to pay a premium. I built many desktop computers back in the day!
Crazy the advances that really changed the PC landscape in the three or so years after this... in '92 it was very much usable to still be using a 386 with a Hercules card, or even a cheap as hell 10 mhz XT clone if you weren't a power user, but between multimedia PCs (Which, granted, were already becoming a thing in 1992) and Windows 95 and the rise of CD-ROM, suddenly the average home PC jumped in specifications a pretty decent amount
My first build was in 1994 or 1995. It was a socket 7, AMD DX4-100 CPU. I still can't believe how much ram and hard drives were back then. Also, literally all PC cases were cookie cutters; lots of bandaids required. You get far more bang for your dollar today. This was such an exciting time for PC enthusiasts.
Interesting how so much time has passed and physical slot and interfaces have changed many times over but the basic idea of putting together a desktop is more or less the same thing. You could just pluck someone from 1992 who was adept at putting together a rig and they'd put together a 2020 rig just fine .
That left speaker is killing in this video.
From looking up RAM prices in 1992, even if purchasing all 49 MB on the low side of costs that year, it would still have cost upwards of $1,500 (1992 dollars) or more to expand the memory to that size. but, considering the cost of components in those days, and if you needed some serious computing power, I suppose it might be worth it.
And now people are debating 4,8,16,32 but it ain't megs anymore, it's gigs
@@reeeec and here I am about to build out 128gb ram in my next video rendering build.
Windows 95 - just around the corner!
This made me nostalgic for computer shows. There was an experience going to one, seeing weird tech and getting deals. I remember my last build from parts purchased at one, a pentium 233 mmx machine with a TX motherboard and the great innovation of getting a case that wasn't beige haha. Also picked up a transparent replacement housing for my playstation 1 haha. It was a fun way to spend a Saturday browsing a show.
Unfortunately, there were no computer shows in Montreal or I have not heard of them :(
I do remember the Intel TX chipset. I think they were superior in some way to the Intel VX.
I bought a VX based mobo back in 1997. I was broke.
Sounds like 1997 or 1998 to me. I went to college with a Pentium 200 MHz graduation gift (HP Pavilion 7360) that eventually received a Canopus Pure3D 2 12 MB Voodoo 2 card the next year. I built my first computer with parts from NewEgg, Directron, etc. in 2000 (AMD Athlon XP 1200 and Nvidia GeForce 2 probably)
19:43 Those expansion cards don't seem to fit properly on the motherboard.
no he just does not care or know how to properly install them correctly to him it's in the system it's fine does not matter if it's in there correctly so they will fit properly and make a connection so when you power up it works right
I was hoping it was hooked up and there would be smoke when they powered it on
The MB is kinda flexing, maybe he didnt want to put too much force on it so it didnt break
LOL i know , notice his voice got all nervous ,as i think he knew he messed up ha ha
@@christineayres5339 I guess Stewart makes everyone nervous when he keeps pushing them along during the segment!
My left ear enjoyed this very much
My left ear enjoyed this video
My right ear is lonely
@Amd486 Microprocessor I'm using mono mode *and* a volume booster app, because the sound level is also too low
@@RWL2012 I hate the quiet sound cause I keep forgetting I got the volume cranked and the next video is always screaming at me fuck sake
@Amd486 Microprocessor Thanks for that, much better,
This comment is my hero
the guy at 20:00 definitely did not plug those expansions in all of the way. Good bye computer as soon as powered on.
Well obviously it wasn't fully built, because of time restrictions
@@RWL2012 Dude had plenty of time, he just clearly had no idea what the fuck he was doing.
@@thomasbarkas6092 If you look carefully at the cards, you'll notice that there is a metal foot sticking down, out of the bracket on the left side of the slot. Whatever that foot is for, it's clearly not properly adjusted, and it's preventing the card itself from fully seating. Has "...no idea what the fuck..." he is doing, maybe, but I think it mostly an issue of poor preparation; those brackets were clearly meant to be adjusted to support the card and it was not done ahead of time.
Also that "you plug it and works" what a lie getting this at computers to work is a nightmare when you have multiple boards, jumpers here and there irq conflicts i/o ports to choose dma problems. slave master drives, selecting drive type on the bios.
My first build was a 486DX266. Currently building i9-13900k / 4090.
Fair winds and following seas to all.
Nice, but why not get a 7950X3D instead? Not only is it faster, the AM5 socket will last a lot longer too, so you'll be able to upgrade your CPU years later.
@Psythik Valid points. I've built AMD systems in the past and they worked well. Intel is my current choice. AMD possible as a future build.
@@PsythikNot to mention AMD's power efficiency currently
I did my first in 1996. Bought parts from Friz Electronics in LA. Pentium 166 MMX, Quantum HD upped to a Seagate, dual speed CD, 32 mb Ram in 2 slots of 16s. 56 kbps. Modem that I upgrade to 96kbps Qualcomm, VGA card and Super VGA monitor. Mouse and other neat stuff for the time... Disquette drive. Run Win95 disquettes. Office 95, FS 95. Epson printer.
In 1996, I worked for company called DIGITAL EQUIPMENT my job was to assemble desktops. I felt I was Einstein.
Damn, you must have seen some great things back then, not to mention all the improvements we've had since then in the computer world.
This is a great episode! I just bought a new used tall tower 386DX-25 MHz. with a 387 math coprocessor, a memory board with a full 72*128 kB. of RAM, a 1.2 MB. floppy and a 1.44 MB. floppy, turbo button, controller card with its own BIOS for hard drives beyond the system BIOS limit plus the capacity for 4 total floppy drives, and a combination modem card and sound card. But no hard drive, so it was removed by the previous owner who used it as a gaming computer during its first life. This thing was a monster when it was new. I've been doing a lot of learning on the Internet to figure out how to get this computer in fully working order. I had to buy a DIN keyboard and a serial mouse. So far it boots via floppy and I can use it without a hard drive for word processing for example, but I need to get a hard drive it can use to enable everything else. 💻💾💾💾💾📀🖱
I'm about to build a new gaming computer so it's nice to have a show like this to keep me up-to-date on the latest parts. I watch it every week! (EDIT: That "TTL" graphics card looks neat; I wonder how well it can handle ray tracing?)
Update: The leaking battery on the motherboard of the tall tower 386 had actually leaked onto the controller card, severing two of the traces that led to the hard drive header. That’s why it could boot from floppies but not hard drives. Once I bodge-patched those traces, hard drives worked fine in it. I also added a SoundBlaster SB-16, a CD-ROM drive, a parallel-port external Zip-100 drive, and a CompactFlash adaptor expansion board so I can easily move files en masse to it and from it.
The trouble with building a computer back then was the technology was changing so fast that you couldn't keep up.
I remember getting a LS-120 drive for one of my computers and within about 1 year you couldn't get LS-120 disks anymore. I got a kick ass 2 speed CD Rom drive for $200.00 and a year later none of the new disks would even play on it. I still think I have a top of the line video card from about 1990 that was kick ass with 256 colors.
When was the last time someone had to buy a sound card for a computer?
Hell I still remember paying out $100.00 for a 9600 baud modem so I could send faxes but my first one a year earlier was 2400 baud and a year later it was 33.6.
I still have my first HD a Western Digital Caviar 1210 210 meg that was plenty of storage and now it is used as a coaster on my desk for my drinks.
I built this computer about 10 years ago and the technology hasn't changed from then to now. Even processor speeds seem to have stopped increasing and the memory and video are at a standstill.
The late 80s and early 90s were the fun time to be building computers but you needed a large bank account and as soon as you got it built it was out dated.
Yeah, my PC is 11 years old and my overclocked q9550 is still doing fine for my modern needs. I can play 4k hevc films on my 4k tv with this setup, no problems.
"When was the last time someone had to buy a sound card for a computer?"
==1997, when I had my BabyAT mobo. I had a SoundBlaster 16. It had a Cyrix P200L+.
I think my next system was a Pentium 3.
Since it was a miniATX mobo and all such mobos come with integrated sound, there was never again a need to buy a sound card.
@@louistournas120 A dial up Modem too, when was the last time people put one of those in a PC, early 2000s?
@@procta2343 That's true but dial up modems never became integrated into the mobo. They just were replaced with the next technology.
I think most people had 33.6 kbps and 56 kbps modem as a PCI card in 1997 to 2003.
These were called softmodems since a portion of the job was done via software. These cards cost 30 to 50$.
Some rare cards were hardmodems and they were PCI.
Some people had external modems and these were hardmodems. They connect to your PC with a DB25 serial port.
When DSL modems were invented, very few people had a DSL modems as a PCI card.
Most people have an external DSL modem or cable modem or fiber optic modem.
@@procta2343 ... The thing is we still have the ability to use our analog 56k dialup today, mainly as backup nowadays, because we still have older PCs that have them & we still have one last landline (we had a few landlines before). But because we also have 4G on our smartphones, we use those first for internet, hotspots & tether. But those were the days in & around the Y2k years, where I used dialup for 10 years playing multiplayer games on Internet, such as Quake II & Battlezone II. I finally did get fiberoptic after that but it was shortlived, about 5 years, as I had to move away to a new house.
11/27/24
I built my first computer in 1993. It was a 486-33 with a whopping 16 Mb of RAM.
You gotta love the versatility of the 3 different floppy drives! Wow! Just imagine all the stuff you could do with that. You could put a couple of JPG files on those even! LOL :)
Back then a 3MB program was huge and light years ahead of it’s time
@@Craiglaca1 nah....by 92 there were plenty of programs much bigger. I remember Wing Commander II was almost 30 megs on my 40 meg HD in 1991.
Haha, but in reality images back then were much smaller in file size because of the lower quality (MP). I was on the yearbook committee in high school and remember using a digital camera that saved to floppy disks. I can't remember exactly how many images one disk would hold but I do recall I could take a lot before it filled up. My guess is somewhere between 25-50.
@JimmyRussle Yeah, as the video suggests, by this time most people had hard disks so programs were quickly becoming bigger and bigger since they weren't constrained to one disk anymore.
This video actually predates JPEG! This was taped in late 1991, and JPEG didn't exist until September 1992.
It's amazing watching these videos with all of the old technology, but this stuff paved the way for the complex tech we have today. Imagine if energy technologies were allowed to flourish like computers were, by now we'd have 100% free and clean energy worldwide. There's a lot of very intelligent people working on it now, but the basic technologies were known for decades.
this is a video on how my computers built from of the shelf parts I put together to build my own computer
This guy ain't fucking around with this badass pc build
😂😂😭😂🤣😂🤣🤣🤣😭
Back then, building PC's was a difficult proposition. This was before the ATX standard, so you had to be wary of proprietary formats. As long as you stuck with the AT form factor, you were good to go. Assembling the computer wasn't that hard, but you had to be careful with connecting the power leads to the on/off switch (yes, computers actually had a mechanical switch to turn a PC on.). The hard part was getting the hardware to work properly with the operating system using the correct drivers and resolving device conflicts. Plug 'n play and PCI weren't around yet.
+Dennis McIntyre Hard part was trying to get help when something went wrong... these days you just google your problem and up comes hundreds of answers to try. No such luck back then.
@@oldtwins google wasnt even thought of, in fact the internet wasn't even out. Maybe in the very early stages.
@@procta2343 It's been around since the 80's, it was just a very different beast.
I am so nostalgic for these videos!!
I remember in school in the mid 90s telling people I was building my own pc. No one believed me and thought I was trying to say that I could manufacture a chip. Despite my protestations that it was just buying to components and putting them together. That revalation wasn't well known back then.
So did I build my PC?
Naw... What teenager can afford hundreds of £ to buy the parts? 😅
Have built a few in adulthood though!
at around 20 minutes. I love how the expansion cards is jumping out of the slots xD
Funny how that "Supposed Expert" can't put 2 expansion cards in properly. He failed to do so twice : 19:45 and 20:06
this was a game changer time for computer users as building your own computer was being started this way and grew from here
It’s amazing how these stuff is laughably obsolete in 2023. Yet the F-22 which is considered the best and most advanced fighter jet in service. Was already flying as a prototype back then.
"Yet the F-22 which is considered the best and most advanced fighter jet in service. "
It has been updated since those days. But the development costs are insane.
That Cardinal all-in-one PC was my very first computer when I was 5 years old in 1993.
My first computer was a handmade copy of the Microdata 1600 mini (about 700 ICs and 6 cubic feet of rack space). I booted it once then moved on to a KIM-1 6502 SBC which I used to help in my design of a Z80 S100 system (running CP/M & MP/M) that went into production for a few years. The timeframe for all this was 1976 - 1979. I ran benchmarks for the 4 MHz Z80 against the Microdata 1600 and found the Z80 was faster, largely because core memory in the 1600 had a 1 microsecond access time, a very common bottleneck for core-memory minis.
Doddo MultiGamer With a memory-mapped video card the frame rate was 80 FPS.
Doddo MultiGamer I ran a number of games that were character-based graphics, a Startrek game called TREK80, a Space Invaders game called TARG and a few others. They were actually quite good and operated at a selected speed setting (user set). At highest speed they zoomed along quite well.
The fun part was playing with jumpers to make sure the HD, Floppy drive and later CD-ROM drive would work properly as Master/Slave. Interesting times.
That’s racist
@11:11 I had that exact AMD 386sx motherboard and the same mini tower case, windows 3.1
This is one thing that hasn't really changed a whole lot since then. I mean yeah, we've got more ports, we've got USB, Firewire, SATA... Floppy drives have all but been replaced with CD drives, but the meat of building your own computer is still very much like what's in this video.
+Starscream Well said.
+Starscream Close to the same, but not quite. Back then you had jumpers for FSB, multiplier, voltage and everything else and you had to get that right. Even early sound cards were configured with jumpers (IRQ etc.). The CPU socket was usually one of those awful LIF sockets that was a total pain in the ass to remove the CPU from (you had to pull straight up with about 15 pounds of force, or gently pry the CPU out with a flat head screw driver a little bit at a time on alternating sides). The CPU wasn't keyed in any way, so you could put it in 90 degrees wrong (I assume it would have let out the magic blue smoke and stopped working if you ever did). Everything that's in the south bridge now used to be an add-in card. An add-in card for mouse (e.g. bus-mouse or PS/2), an add-in card for serial ports and parallel ports. An add-in card for floppy drive and IDE controllers. L2 cache came as DIP chips that you inserted into sockets on the motherboard, before they became soldered to the motherboard, then integrated on the CPU package (that's what that whole slot form factor was about) and eventually integrated into the CPU die.
Cooling didn't matter; just the PSU fan drawing a little bit of heat out was enough. Nothing had a fan, or even a heat sink in the 286 days.
God, I missed going to those computer shows with my Dad. Used to go every month.
That former Cardinal Technology factory at 1827 Freedom Road in Lancaster PA is currently occupied by “Victory Church.” They did some remodeling around the front and side, for example where the “Cardinal” sign had stood out front had become a parking lot.
Turn it on and pray, well you better pray pretty hard since it looks like you didn't even plug half of those cards in all the way.
Well obviously it wasn't fully built, because of time restrictions
@Bro. Matthew - PvtMadnage this was a very fast paced show.
@@RWL2012 Yeah it was, they only had 28 mins each week to pack everything in they wanted to talk about, so often times it felt like segments where cut short, and/or rushed. These days we take things like UA-cam granite where a UA-camr can go on for 2 hours on something like a GPU if they want.
19:49 push that damn thing in all the way! lol
Of course, Compaq ALR never really went anywhere for the simple, obvious fact that it was proprietary, whereas you could get cards from anyone that would fit any PC compatible. I remember when I was working in computers a customer bought in an ALR to upgrade, and we basically couldn't do anything, including using the case, just like later Dells. However ALR cards could be found very cheap because they weren't very useful.
amazing how far we have come...
I recieved an AST Advantage 486 dx2/50 mhz with 12 mb ram and 200 mb hdd the Christmas of 1996! Those were the times :D Also recieved a 8x cd rom player and soundblaster for it later on too... Wish I still had that sexy beast!
it looks like the AST Advantage 6066 computer but that seems to be the 66 mhz version.
my left ear enjoyed this
Physically building the PC back then was easy; the real fun came when you had to swap cards in different slots and physically manipulate the jumpers to stop IRQ conflicts.
It fun building my own computer then for the first time with ( tower casing, atx power pack, pci Vga card, pci sound card ,and some sim memory .
i remember 20 years ago, going to computer fairs, sadly now they are no longer on, and PC shops have practically vanished in the last 15 years.
Why does Maria Gabriel stutter at the end of her last name... She says Maria Gaaaa Briel... Am I missing something?
maybe that's just how she liked to pronounce it!
20+ years later ...
i7, 16 Gb Ram, 4 Gb VRam, 4 Tb HD and still we want more power for gamming xD
aaahh the old days, simpler times, 'simpler' computers :D
Now we're here, on the verge of i10, 32gb of ram, cpus getting better and cheaper, rtx 3000 nearby. How time goes huh
My man put the cache controller card in backwards at 19:45 lool
Loved how they left out the obviously most difficult part of PC assembly which are the front panel connectors! Also, you BETTER turn it on and pray, as the power button won't even work and not to mention the molex power connectors are all missing, LOL! "And essentially, we are assembled right now!" XD
Wonderpierrot the switch on the case was wired into power supply
@10:13 God it has been a while since i've seen one of those still not fully yelowed and still shinny inside!
Whoa I like the look of that tower case at 10:30.
Yep, games where something special when we where newly introduced to them already. Never tried dungeon keeper but heard of it.
4:26 My First PC :) Intel 386 but mine was like 40Mhz with the turbo.
19:43 is he related to the verge PC guy? A uncle perhaps?
Damn, I was born in 1992. I'm actually surprised by the size of that RAM. In 1992, you could buy 4MB SDRAMs to your laptop which were much smaller. Then in 1996, 16MB was minimum.
Now, I tried to sell 512MB DDR2 SO-DIMM on eBay for $0.01 starting price and no-one bid.
yeah my system has 128 gb of ddr4 so 512 mb not worth it or needed🤣
@@raven4k998ddr4 ? haha peasant 😂😂 i have 512gb ddr5 7200mhz
It's amazing how much has changed, but how much has stayed the same.
The slot card spacing, slot panels, and screw on terminal is the same today! Of course most boxes have less space devoted to slots since most functionality is built-in, just GPU being the 90% need to have a card in there.
Cost comparison:
The Microdata 1600 used core memory costing $2,000.00 per 8 kilobytes. That means my present system with 16GB RAM would cost $4,000,000,000.00 for memory. I also worked out hard drive energy inputs - ganging together enough 80 megabyte CMD disk drives from 1980 to make a 1 terabyte array would result in a power consumption of 6 megawatts. The comparison for smartphones gets even better results.
One WHOLE megabyte of RAM!? :-O
+Chubzdoomer I have a 1984 Power Macintosh that has only 1 megabyte of RAM. I bought a 2nd 1.4 MB diskette drives and used it to go on the internet back in 1997 and 1998. Back in the days when you could install Prodigy internet service with a single diskette.
1 MB of RAM. That was high end
11:30 the bios chip is bigger than the CPU..
I love that old PC cases :D, try to make a 'modern' pc inside one, but sadly my components were too big to fit :(
Yeah I remember those days very well. Brings back when things were simpler compared to todays computer. Where the cpu are in the ghz range, hard drives in the terabytes drives. And having a floppy drives and a cd-roms were becoming popular.
19:48 That metal bar should be on the right, no wonder it will not go fully in!
my left ear felt lonely with this one...
You sure it wasn’t your right ear feeling lonely?
Hot Swappable bay back then was HUGE. I can't even think of anyone I knew that had one.
very interesting how far Pc's have come, i can only imagine what will happen in the next 20 years
Not much so far....
Stewart asks if FCC certification is needed to build a PC, and the reps basically each give a completely different answer: a blunt "yes" and "no, the individual parts are already cleared". That... _really_ seems like something he should have pressed harder on. You super duper don't want any ambiguity under those circumstances.
0:00 Pretty sure that's a monitor factory.... but i get your point
11:30 That feeling when your current GPU is bigger than a mobo from 1992.
My first own computer was an 486 dx-2 :D I Remember playing warcraft 1 or 2 on it :P
Had a pentium 233 mhz after that, played d2 and some old 3d games I think but in summer 96 or so I bought myself a playstation one and was hooked on console gaming from then on.
I've been building my own PCs since 1993
wrong. you dont use a screwdriver, you use a swiss army knife that hopefully has a screwdriver
Yes. And remember to "screw with confidence." Also don't forget your "tweezers"
@@grizzly6699 but i sitll want to get the wireless anti static strap he must have travelled in time to get that anti staticf strap
Yeah most probably were, I've had some 486s and they are, The P1s along with Voodoo cards really brought gaming to another level. Some year after the height of the P1s came the "Build it yourself wave". I have a couple of 486 dx4 100 mhz :D and some pentium ofc.. P2s are nice too!
isn't it more fun to build your own pc from scratch?
Large reason the PC got the cult following was the fact off the shelf components were plentiful and cheap. Configure exactly what you want. Mac, Amiga, Atari you bought what the company spoon fed you.
Back then, a 200 megabyte hard disk drive and a whole 2 megabytes of RAM was a lot. Today, a terabyte solid state drive and over 16 gigabytes of RAM is more then enough for the standard computer. But who knows what it will be tomorrow...
weird thing is the one that is still hardest thing to make your own PC is what hardware you want to use
building the pc now is much much much easier back then, sometimes you don't even need screwdrivers (especially with tooless pc cases and parts)
First build, SIS 486 DLC 40 MHz, 4 MB ram 420 MB drive. Last upgrade, STILL using a Supermicro X6DAL-TB2, two Xeon 3.6 GHz CPU's 3 GB RAM, Nvidia 210 two 500 GB and one 1 TB drive.
1. Can't see how you can run three floppies on a ms dos pc, as there are only two configurable in the bios, and two connectors on the cable, one twisted, one not. The third drive, what drive letter will it get?
2. Can't see why you want two 5 1/4 drives, as the DS/HD 1.2m drives are backward compatible with the SS/DD drives at 360kb?
I thought it was my headphones! Because the left side was going, and I was sitting twisting the cord trying my best to fix it lmao. I feel like a fool xD
It was like ASMR when he was talking to those 2 guys, especially Jonh Chilvers.
Yes, you can still build your own computer today (I still do). However, these were the days where it was really fun.
Amazing how much computers have changed in 30 years...yet are basically the same.
As a newbie It took me two days to get a CD rom drive to be recognised by the O/S. No internet or UA-cam to look up how to do it then. Just me and a book.
Early to mid 90s somewhere, don't remember the exact year it was a long time ago, built a 386. With just a couple exceptions my desktops since have been DIY.
I've priced out my current desktop as a prebuild, and it might be cheaper now that Zen4 is out, but it was around 6000USD, I spent around 3400. And that was during the dark days of GPU scalpers.
It's not going to be cheaper spec for spec for every possible configuration, but to nail down *exactly* what you need and nothing you don't, there can be huge savings over OEM systems when you do that. And you understand it better too.
What are the chassis and the motherboard that the guy has at 10:20?
This reminds me of a time where you were actually kind of proud to say you have a 3 1/2" floppy. :P
Those were the times aww :( Games like Tomb Raider, Warcraft 2, Diablo, Warlords 2, Time Commando, Carmageddon, Doom1/2, Command & Conquer and so forth.. Retro gaming is best! Luckily I've bought back several of my fav games. Ever played Dungeon Keeper 2? Still no game like that... pure fun!
Warcraft 2 is still one of the best rts games ever but there should be some AI update to it. You should check out Brutal Doom :D Playstation is awesome too!, Gran Turismo... awww
@ 4:50 Epic Beard Man vs. Asian Business Guy. Fight!
Holy cow, computers were expensive back then. I do like the modular expansion cards, though. I wish that was feasible on modern machines.
Heh.. My first computer was a BBC Micro. My first PC was in 1992.. A 386DX-40 with 4Mb RAM and a 130Mb HDD. It was over 2 grand new...
I remember computer shows. The first two computers that I built, the components were bought at a show. Memories right there. I kinda miss the days of cases coming with a PSU.
You can still get barebones cases that come with a PSU. But why would you want to? They're usually very cheap, low-end PSUs and if you're building your own $500+ system, why cheap out on the PSU? It's the one component that can instantly destroy every other component you have.
True, but back then most PSUs were kinda shitty.
My Dad built our first computer from dumpster diving. I think it was a PC-XT, with an 8088 CPU. The first computer show I went to was for building our next computer which was a 386 clone with a VGA monitor. It’s still in the closet somewhere and might still work.
Power supply wattage vastly depends on GPU and to a certain degree CPU config, hence systems not generally coming with them Anymore. Back in the day the wattage spread was much much less.
wasnt 486 computers modular as they are today where cpu/ram was inserted directly on the motherboard? I had one mid/late 90's but didnt know much at all about building computers back then.
I know my p1 233mhz was like a modern pc for sure though
I used to watch this show. I'm now blown away by how advanced things were before M$/Crapple destroyed consumer choice.
My 1st PC was a:
1GB HDD
16MB RAM
1MB Video card
It was awesome =)
it didn't have a processor then...?
19:47 that... doesn't look seated correctly though
The horror of components that just wouldn’t comply, IRQ conflicts, ribbon cables that got tangled up, el-cheapo harddisks that failed after three months, dodgy computer companies with lousy service and warranty, crappy VGA-monitors, and then the motherboards with Vesa local bus, 8-bit, 16-bit, ISA slots. It was fun building it yourself, but I never had the money to buy proper components, so it was always a bit of a disappointment. I’m glad I can afford a no-worries laptop nowadays :)
My dad built an Apple ][ into a metal printer casing. It was the first computer I ever played, with a green phosphor Zenith monitor.
The guy explaining how easy it is to build a computer today, is a time traveller from the future...watch his eyes... A Jayz-half a cent
It was a good job they weren't asked to demonstrate the working PC after assembling those components as most of the cards weren't inserted properly! I have self-built all my PCs since the early 90s and it's amazing how little it has changed - I still use case I bought over 20 years ago and keyboard is so old it has ps/2 connector 🤣.
The guy in the green turtle neck reminds me of Zack Galifinakis in Between Two Ferns
can we please bring this back?? 3:18
Amazing how much computers have grown up lol