Epson Equity 1 Computer Overview & Demonstration
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- Опубліковано 22 січ 2012
- Sorry about the audio blip around the 5:30 or so mark in this video. I'm not sure what went wrong there. I think the computer got a little behind and started dropping audio during the capture process.
Here is a look at a clone of the IBM Personal Computer. Epson's Equity I was a pretty standard "clone" machine, but it did have a few interesting features that added value and helped to differentiate it from other computers. At the time of its release, more powerful PCs did exist, but a system like this represented what most people bought. (Although, it should be said that the hard drive was often left out of home computers to save money.)
This machine's hard drive--seemingly made by Seiko Epson, or at least with a lot of their parts--has a stiction problem and needs help to run if it has been sitting. It also could use a cosmetic restoration and plenty of Retrobright on both the PC and monitor.
If you have an Epson Equity I+ PC, Epson's support page is here:
www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/su...
On a related subject, I had a near-perfect Epson Apex PC that my grandmother purchased new. I was at the computer store with her when she bought it in the early 90s. Eventually it came into my possession around the early 2000s after being owned by several other family members. I had all the boxes it came in and all of the books/software, but like a total idiot, I let my mother talk me into turning that computer into the recyclers. I'm still kicking myself over that one. Perhaps I will find another one someday. I do still have the books and software.
My dad purchased a used Epson Apex computer a few years after that, but the flood of 1994 took it away. - Наука та технологія
![Lp. Последняя Реальность #107 РОДНОЙ ДОМ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/IK3QKzKUlHM/mqdefault.jpg)
Nice to see some old tec again. I remeber the first PC we had that actually worked, Tandon XT, 512 KB of ram, later upgraded to 640 KB, 10 meg MFM hard drive which then got upgraded to 20 meg a Seagate ST225 if I remeber right, loved the noise that thing made :) Happy days of computing that was, long live DOS :)
And exactly 10 years later, the user manual can still be found on Epson's FTP server.
Isn't that something? It's unfortunate that so many "mainline" browsers have dropped FTP support.
This was my first computer... It had a 5.25" 360k floppy, 20 MB HD, CGA graphics and DOS 3.3. Eventually upgraded to EGA (but still had the Epson CGA monitor.. finding programs that could do EGA at 640x200 was challenging), added a 3.5" 720k floppy and a joystick card.
Ah, memories.
Mine had a 512k Orchid card, and a 10mhz, 8088 :)
Love these videos. Keep up the good work.
Very well designed machine. As I remember you could run CGA programs on a Hercules with a little utility called SIMCGA.
There were a couple of CGA emulators. I've had a cheaper B&W card in my Equity I+ for the same result.
Sure brings back memories. Funny that I still remember the DOS commands and could probably run this machine no problem. I thought I had long ago forgotten DOS. Thanks for sharing.
LOVE these videos keep em coming.
LOVE the computer, and the thunder @ 20:42!! :-)
vary cool i love to see old computers
AMD wasn't really "competing" with Intel back then; they were licensed by Intel to make exact copies of the Intel 8088 and 80286 chips, and were often used as a second-source vendor when the demand for CPUs exceeded Intel's production capacity to make them. It was only during the 386 era that AMD started making their own non-Intel-licensed CPUs with extra enhancements and higher clock speeds, which resulted in Intel suing them for patent infringement, but AMD won the case.
Had one of these and loved it.
I changed my Windows Command Line color settings to reflect this type of display. Never owned a a monochrome screen but green-on-black is just cool.
This was my first computer. Got it for free in 1994. i had Word perfect on it only. Then my dad at work found a new old version of Word Perfect in the trash and i was amazed. Back then we had a "586' for Internet and AOL Dial up internet only. My display as i recall was Orange.
The chorus at my school did William tell overachiever
Have you ever seen an Epson Equity Ie? That was their attempt at making a low-end PS/2 clone, and was the only computer besides the PS/2 Models 25 and 30 to ever use the MCGA video standard (a cut-down version of VGA).
@uxwbill If you leave iMovie's "Filter audio from camera" option unchecked, iMovie will make a high-pitched beep whenever it encounters dropped frames during the video capturing process. This beep will not be saved into the video file; it's just a warning that it encountered an error in the DV stream. A few very occasional dropouts are normal, and usually they won't even result in any noticeable glitching, but more frequent dropouts are a sign to change the tape or clean the head drum.
I had one of these computers with some custom hardware in it, that was used in a school's central clock and PA system. One of the cards was a terminal emulator of some sort. Neat to see one running as a normal computer! Love the Hercules card too. I've used a few of those over the years.
I have an Acer 286 system sitting at work that I plan on making video about soon. The case actually looks a lot like that Epson.
I love the effect at 6:50 on the monitor
That machine has the 5 1/4 hard disk installed right? I love hearing those old drives spin up! I used to have an 8 inch HDD MFM interface.. What a sound that made! I beleive it was a whole 10 mb in size! You have a great collection of historical computer systems... Thanks for sharing!
looks very similar to the Hyundai that you featured in a much newer video!
I've just been able to run my Equity thanks to the info in your video, the only problem is it is missing and OS, the HDD was probably wiped clean.
Too bad, I wanted to fiddle with a PC older than me!
***** As you explained the HDD problem in the video, I assumed this was my case, and removed the unit.
I powered it up separately, and it runs just fine, the motor runs, and the drive itself "beeps" (or something inside it moves and makes a similar noise).
After counting memory (640kB version), I get error 161, System options not set, and advises me to run SETUP in DIAGNOSTICS.
It also prompts to press F1 to resume, but after I do that, it says the drive has no OS, or that it has some error.
Is there some sort of BIOS setup I can access, as in modern computers?
***** I'll do that, thank you.
The PC looks incredibly pristine, no yellowed plastics, the interior is tremendously polished and dust-free, it would be awesome to be able to make it run.
I had this exact same computer back in the day. I used to telnet in to the colleges hp vax mini computer to compile and run cobol and rpg code, this thru a 33kbps modem I think. Ah those were the days hahaha, good video my friend.
Was that Thunder I hear in the background like you mentioned the Thundersnow?
So can the hercules video card do any other color beside green (like amber or red for those monitors)? Or is it just green, grey and black?
Cool computer, I own a Epson Apex 100, I've had it for years, still works good. I've added a seagate st-225 to it recently and enjoy playing classic games on it.
Ok...I've always wondered...What was Cardfile used for in Windows 3.x? My first Gateway 2000 486DX 2-50 had WfW 3.11 on it, and it had cardfile. I opened the program maybe...once and never messed with it again because I didn't know what it was for.
Another thing this reminded me of- Some years ago I found a driver that allowed the system to play normal sounds through the PC speaker, albeit a bit gritty sounding. I used it on an old Compaq laptop that had no audio card.
You speak of the dip switches on the front panel and you say they're used for setting CPU speed as well as other settings, what other settings are those dip switches used to set?
those keyboards are amazing
how about using disk park utilities to help avoid head sticktion?
When a hard disk drive suffers from 'sticktion' how can you tell that the heads are sticking to the disk platters? Does the hard disk make any noise that might give it away? I assume the system would also produce an error code saying it cannot boot the hard drive. Do you have another old hard disk you could install into this machine that would work with it?
Is there a way to get that program for the William Tell Overture? I think it would be pretty cool to run on my old PS\2's
@uxwbill Now that you mention it, I think the card mine had was a 5250. I've never seen one in action though, and I'm not sure exactly how they are used.
Wow, I've personally not come across a pc that can do two different video signals :o) Wow, the overture demonstration would make the London Philomonic envious!! ;o)
What error were you getting when you got the computer? Was it the 1701 “SEEKERROR” code?
Ahh... This kind of makes me think of a memory. My first "computer" I got to actually own was a Gateway 2000 Computer running a early version of Microsoft Windows.
When I first looked at that case I thought it looked familiar, then it dawned on me, it is very similar to the Gateway 2000 cases used in the 386, 486 and early Pentium days.
I just bought one of these for parts. Disassembling it was a real learning experience. In true Japanese fashion, there are quite a lot of compromises in these computers between design for manufacture, serviceability, and efficient use of space. The computer was designed such that the most commonly serviced parts are easily interchangeable, including the disks, the RTC battery and the power supply. However, the mainboard is a whole other story- you have to really tear into the thing.
My mother gave me this desktop. It was just those cheap $90 dollar HP clinic pc's you see behind cash registers and help desks and such. Nothing spectacular. It was probably manufactured in 2015. I opened it up to switch out the hard drives and to see what components the computer had. It was soo easy to service; more easier than I thought.
I got my gaming desktop computer next. It was a 2017-era HP pavilion. And since it gathered dust, soo I opened it up. It was completely and absolutely hard to open. Not to mention, the wires were all over the place inside and all cluttered. The wire connectors were cheap and garbage and I could not remove the heat sink and fan because it used special screws.
In the result of this, I have realized that the cheaper products are more happier to be serviced than the expensive ones.
Bill, The HP unit below this epson, is that an x86 based box ? Do you own or collect any non-x86 indusrial/scientific computers ? Thanks in advance for any response. Great video once again.
Why do you always sound so cheerful?
Well, why not? It's not any more difficult to be happy than it is to be irritated, discouraged, depressed or even angry.
@@uxwbill I think what they were saying is that the excessive cheerfulness is distracting from the actual video. I am not saying this to be negative just pointing out my perspective of watching this video. I like positive people.
Hi, I have the exact one but the lithium battery is missing so I get the 161 System options not set. However I do have the original EPSON Equity Diagnostis disk, but it doesn´t work. Do you think it still needs the battery for the disquette to work properly? Because the red light on the disk drive turns on, the disk spins and everything, but it does nothing... Also I have the Epson MSDOS 3.2 but it doesn´t work either. Thank you.
No, the disk drive is malfunctioning or incorrectly set up.
I know that Hercules are making wifi dongles and PCMCIA cards nowadays. I don't know if do anything else.
I know this is late, but as of 2010, Hercules manufactured computer speakers, DJ controllers for computers, webcams and doodads for wireless networking.
Do you have good old Norton Commander on that rig?
I found the front panel and motherboard of a destroyed Equity 1+ at my college. I also found (and grabbed) an IBM Model M with missing keys in case that got destroyed in the future. The keyboard is as old as the college, which opened in 85, the keyboard has a copyright year of 1986.
@uxwbill I know when bbishoppcm smashed a Dell notebook computer to pieces he must have crushed the hard drive because it started making a 'security alarm' type noise, I guess if you leave the computer on for too long with the hard drive stuck you could potentially burn the motor out if you're not careful. What's causing the heads to stick to the platters? I know a bit about HDD's but I don't really know what causes that kind of problem.
Have you thought of getting the harddrive to run and then cloning it with something like clonezillia?
Being an old MFM HD, it probably does not have auto park. There should be a program called "hdpark" (i think) that you could run before turning off the machine.
This should move the heads away from the platters so they do not stick on the surface.
I tried parking the heads pretty early on to see if it would help. It did not. The heads are only moved to a nominally unused area of the disk. It would be many years before loading and unloading ramps appeared in hard drives.
Interesting. I thought that parking always moved the heads away from the platters. I wonder how they expected drives to survive shipping undamaged.
I had a couple of drives that had a lever that put them in "transport mode" and one with a screw on the top marked "transport".
Come to think of it, I don't know that they moved the heads away from the platters, I just assumed that was what happened.
The impact printer sounds like it would be interesting to see I have seen Epson inkjets and scanners but I have never seen one of the impact printers they have made.
@crazycory25 Cardfile was a very simple database for keeping things like phone numbers and addresses. I never knew of anyone who actually used it, or any "electronic Rolodex" for that matter, because until the advent of PDAs like the PalmPilot (ancestor of today's iPhone), it was always easier and faster to keep a real Rolodex on your desk.
Do you have Equity I+ diagnostic program? May be it is still on hdd?
No, I don't have the diagnostic program.
I just thought of a good one do you remember how to use the dos edit , copycon or interlnk programs. I looked in my old computer stuff and found a old full size memory card that come off a epson 286 machine . The customer had a bad motherboard and epson sent me a up dated mother board that no longer used the memory card . The new mother board fit perfit
in and it went to 1 meg ram .I remember the customer asking me to install it a call to epson told him it would cancel warranty so I got it.
Unfortunately, it looks like Epson has removed information about their computers from their website.
That is truly unfortunate to hear.
@MarshallRA you can found green or amber montor version - never both
Do you remember what the make and model of the hard drive is?
No idea on the model. I think it was branded Epson.
Man that brought back memories back in my NCR days that was one of the computer that
NCR took care of . It may have been when ATT did a hostel take over of NCR during the 90s
We took care of all the pc sold by Sears and Home Shopping network . I still have a mother board somewhere for one of those I lost my books in a flood . I wander if any of the PC your family bought was from either places that NCT ATTGIS took care . Maybe a tech form there come by . We even did PM on the systems and set up
The video
analyzed the operation of a PC with Intel 80286 processor. Having a 286
with Windows 3.0 was much more comfortable than running native MS-DOS
programs. It was a luxury to have a 286 with
Windows 3.0 for more that could not be used in multitasking, because as
described in the video the processor 286 does not have this function. This computer is a beautiful piece of collection nowadays. Very good video friend. Thanks for recording.
This is not a 286 based PC!
uxwbill i had have a computer that ran ms dos but the hard drive thought other wise because it was a death star drive
I've got to ask, is there a download for the William Overture program, and can I run it on a 5160 XT / Pentium class CPU?
AIO inc. x86 comes with all the legacy instructions so it would work, but depending on the way it was programmed, you could have to use something to emulate a slower clock speed.
But I would still need the executable file itself in the first place to even know if I would need to do such a thing.
+AIO inc. You can download it from many sources, but you might want to do a UA-cam search for "William Tell Overture." The "Lone Ranger" part, which many of us older ones are familiar with, is only a relatively short part of the whole overture, which occurs near the end. You can go to one of those websites that offer conversion of UA-cam audio to MP3, convert it, then download it and burn it to disc. If you like the William Tell Overture, you probably would like many of the other overtures he wrote for his operas (The Barber of Seville, The Thieving Magpie--to name a couple).
Julian Adams A 5160 running DOS doesn't have IDE (ATAPI / PATA) support even and therefor cannot use a CD-ROM drive, let alone play MP3s with it's measly (for today) 640KB of RAM and 4.8MHz (about) CPU.
This will also not play through the PC speaker in any system, as it plays through a sound card which I only have in the form of an AdLib board which only supports MIDI formats.
@uxwbill I also somehow remember having to split that 200mb drive into multiple partitions (with different drive letters) due to it not being able to address the whole drive, not sure if it was a controller fault or a system hardware fault but I remember fdisk taking forever to format and partition the thing.
wow good~
Ahh good old dos:-) , ive had lots of enjoyment with DR dos/MS dos on my 1st pc.
its was an elenex xt with a repacement 8086 cpu made by nec i think, it had two speed modes controlled by a dos speed command.
I had a seagate 21mb mfm hdd on a western digitial card like the one in your machine, a video7 ega display card and a floppy drive card as the onboard interface was dead and i removed all the logic so the card would work.
xtpro/norton/dsbackup and others were my favorites :-)
I had the same head stuck to the platter problem with my Western Digital TM262
The Epson Equity 1+ was my very first computer back in 1988. Even new it was already a little dated as the 386 models were the hot new item. Mine was a 360K/5.25 single floppy model as that was all I could afford. No second floppy or hard drive - sometimes made for a lot of floppy swapping when working. Same green CRT. I kept and continued to use that same computer through about 1997, adding a second floppy, then a hard drive, then color graphics card and monitor as the budget allowed. I eventually built a 386 to replace my Epson. And sadly I junked the Epson because as we tend to do, we feel that old technology and hardware is useless and of no value. How I long to have that computer back. It was a big part of my life all those years. And now that I'm older I see it's true value. I have vowed to try and recreate that original computer. Can you please check and tell me what the model numbers are on the monitor and the keyboard? I may have to literally assemble it piece by piece. My quest started about a month ago and I have yet to find any Equity 1+ badged units for sale. Even pics or vids of that particular model seem scarce. Even the other Epson models I have seen for sale will usually be without their keyboard and monitor. So I thought I might ask you for those model numbers to have available as I'm searching. Thank you for taking me back with this video.
ResslerFarms you could check out ebay, but prices can be nasty sometimes
Vincebus - Been all over eBay and so far no I+. Seen a I, Ie and a II. I'll keep watching and maybe something will show up.
Oak Technology once made a VGA video card which could just about run any type of monitor you could throw at it.
good computer.
I WANT TO SEE THAT BOX!!!!!!!
Could you run windows 3.1 on that system ??
Darrm Hhjh no it's a xt processor is to old, you need a 286 fit 3.1 or 386 processor for 3.11
@uxwbill that looks exactly like the first PC I ever owned, which was an Epson Equity II+ 286 machine but in an identical case. Ran windows 3.1 and of course dos 6.22. Originally came with an EGA card but this was upgraded to a vga one and also a sound blaster pro in later years. I remember getting a 200mb or so IDE hard drive for it and thinking "man, what am I going to do with all that space?" most of which went to games of course, I miss those days.
Do you torrent stuff
I just pulled one of these out of my parents basement to show my kids. It worked as of a few years ago. Now after pressing power it says "640 KB OK / 1701 / 161 - System options not set (Run SETUP in DIAGNOSTICS) / F1 key to resume". When I press F1 the screen changes to a flashing cursor and doesn't continue loading and nothing on the keyboard does anything. Throwing this out there in case anyone knows what might be wrong.
The battery that keeps the settings and time in place has failed. Hardest part is replacing it -- Epson used a special non-rechargeable pack of lithium batteries. You may not have to: apart from not holding their settings or the time, some computers don't care once they've started up.
You'll need to run some kind of setup utility to reconfigure the computer properly. There may be a special key stroke to access it, or a utility that you'd run from a floppy diskette.
But will this system run minecraft?
I Have one of those Epson keyboards but no system
Looks like that system could use a bit of Retr0brite :)
How's the hard drive in this machine nowadays, if you still have it?
If left sitting for any length of time, it still sticks.
Have you ever considered upgrading it with an IDE controller and drive?
I can't seem to get my hands on something like an XT-IDE board, and even if I could, there is a more deserving computer that would get it first.
There's a kit on eBay by glitchworks you can buy for around $40, and you assemble it yourself. (There's also a pre-assembled one for around $100, but it's not worth it in my opinion) Perhaps that could be a future product review video or a page on your website? Also, what's the more deserving computer, and will it, or has it been featured in a video yet?
www.ebay.com/itm/Glitch-Works-XT-IDE-rev-4-Full-Parts-Kit-XTIDE-8-Bit-ISA-IDE-Interface-XT-IDE/273076596757?hash=item3f94a23015:g:E14AAOSwSZFZ2RU5
I never even knew Epson made computers
Just give the drive a firm ding with a mallet, will free it right up :)
it would be better to run windows 1.0 on that machine simply as a DOS file manager
Can I get a copy of your retro pc archive ;-)
It's not anything that can't be readily had on the secondhand market, and there would be the matter of copyright. Plus, I have no good way to transmit that much information.
uxwbill Hmm didn't think of that. Sending out that much data would probably set your modem on fire...
I am watchin your vid wile i am ilstalling a Win 8 virtual machine on my pc quiet a contrast between those systems
@uxwbill i remember in 1997 they were talking about making a 10 GB hard drive, and i said "WOW thats SOOOO HUGE!!! you could NEVER fill that up" now i can download 10gigs in just a couple of hours
it's funny, you usually know EPSON For printers, i never knew they made PC's
Now I thought you could run multi-tasking in real mode. Why not if you can't? Because with real mode you're not getting protection from the app and the hardware, but to my understand this didn't matter.
park the hard drive when done using
Hercules are into PC-connected DJ hardware these days, should anyone wonder...
640k should be enough for anybody!
last.