Thanks for those sending in what you think is the manual, but any PDF that is "WW0340" is just the readme from the Microsoft Technet article converted to PDF and not the manual. (It's the same document I showed at 26:23 in the video.) The actual manual is a much longer book with much more technical information.
@@bowilhelmsen2399 I replied to your email. Unfortunately it's just the same files I already have. The PDF you have is so long because it includes a dump of hundreds of other unrelated technet articles.
Ask Dave from Dave's Garage UA-cam channel. He's a former MS Engineer. He may still have contacts that can get the manual. ua-cam.com/users/DavesGarage
One suggestion for getting the manual for the MACH 20: Maybe try hitting up Dave Plummer from the channel Dave's Garage. He's a retired OS Engineer from Microsoft and based on what he's said in several of his recent videos, he has access to or knows people in the official Microsoft archives. They apparently do keep an extensive collection of things so he might be able to get you the manual if you reach out.
Hey, Aidan here (the person that sent you the cards). Finally got around to watching the vid, and I learned a lot of stuff about the cards from this vid, super interesting stuff! If I remember correctly (though my memory is pretty bad) all the cards but the one with the Altera chip were found in a random bag, the altera one I believe was pulled from a non working pentium 4 or core 2 duo machine. That pc was found outside the gerontology department in my school so I think it was for a medical instrument. All the other cards were from the neuroscience, electrical engineering, and computer science building
Thinking back I think I actually remember the camera it came with in the electronics pile. I didn’t make the connection until now, but I think I threw it away because I couldn’t identify the connector
11:00 that is a card used primarily in the scientific/research community for imaging data acquisition. In other words, the SCSI-like connector goes to some spectrum of camera that is usually mounted on a microscope. This pre-dates firewire and USB 3.x image capture devices, so this goes to an older device (I'm guessing about 15-20 years old). The CCD cameras these cards attached to were quite well made and often outlived manufacturer support for the interface card and software. My guess is that the card is no longer supported by most camera vendors.
The MACH 20 was an accelerator card. I had one in my old XT long ago. Power the machine up and it runs as a normal XT. Hit a key combination and the accelerator kicked in giving you a nice speed boost.
Regarding the HP „Basic“ card I’m sture Curious Marc could help out there with tons of info on that one. He repaired on of the HP 85 series Instrumentation calculators a while back which also run the HP Basic for controlling HP GPIB lab equipment. The PCI card first looked like an multi channel data acquisition card with standard 10MHz clock input for precision data analytics. Judging by the Altera MAX Cpld it could potentially du those things too. We had something similar in the lab at the university- that one had an expensive Xilinx FPGA on board and two super fast scsi disk’s just for the datastreams. The called it the 100000 dollar pc back then. 1994 I think it was.
Great video! This card, "Diagnostic Instruments SPOT Imagine Solutions 459 PCI Bus Interface Card," looks like a scanner interface card for a high-speed scanner! LOL I used to sell them in my business decades ago. SCSI (UW and U2, but some were U160). And that HP "Vectra" PC compatible card: Looks like one of the (many) processor cards for IBM PC-AT back in the day! Remember those? NS16000, M68000/10/20/30/40, etc. They would run UNIX and IBM VM/370 & MVS (two cards for that one). IBM even came out with a "special" IBM PC-AT for that use. I wish I could find one or more of those cards (working!) It would be worth getting an IBM PC-AT just for that! LOL (Byte Magazine had a lot of issues about these--introducing the cards!)
Regarding that crazy HP board: I understand (but have no first-hand experience) that HP has heavily invested in "enterprise-grade" BASIC environments, and standardized them so there was a degree of compatibility across their platforms. I know there were lots of database applications written in HP BASIC. I would suspect that the card was for running large business BASIC programs that previously required HP minis or mainframes, on an HP Vectra workstation. They probably ported a version of the BASIC environment for one of their 68k-based minicomputers onto the card.
From a few other places like Curious Marc. HP pioneered the interface and it became IEEE-488 and GP-IB. It's a very easy interconnect system to talk to test equipment and automate things.
I think the target market was test automation; HP had a series of calculators and computers that could be programmed in BASIC to drive instruments through HPIB and collect data. This card would let those technical users run that code on a standard PC environment.
@@jaoswald Yes - HP-BASIC was extremely advanced for the time - that is actually the first language I knew that got me employment while still in college in the early-mid 80s! The HP-71B and HP-75 used the language, as well as a series of early desktop PCs (HP-80?). My HP-71B was crammed with programs I had written for my physics and math study. The HP-71B was often used with lab equipment over HP-IL, a sort of daisy chain system for peripherals.
@@ultrametric9317 interesting! In those early days, it seemed many computer makers thought users would write (and share or sell) BASIC programs. Perhaps if "microcomputers" hadn't eclipsed "minis" and mainframes, that path would have been taken. But with home computers, "hobbyists" could become professional programmers, but mostly languages like assembly and C were needed to get anything with decent speed. BASIC on a micro often wouldn't cut it, mostly only users of higher powered machines, or people doing small apps with we might call "scripting" could have that luxury. Modern programming took a very different turn than what the big corporate, and "pre-Microsoft DOS" industry leaders assumed.
@@squirlmy The first program I ever used on an IBM PC (5150) was IBM's own BASIC compiler! There were also FORTRAN and COBOL compilers - there were NOT cheap.
That PCI 'Diagnostics' Card is just a PCI-Extender. The connector is not SCSI but some sort of PCI external connection. I've read the Manual and it was used for high end image acquisition. Probably a generic card used to connect high-end industry testing equipment, MRI, X-Ray and stuff like that. The deal is, that the actual hardware would be too much to fit on a card and is inside the actual machine. Instead of actually building a PCI card for each case would result in a bottleneck from proprietary busses and connectors but this card would provide a breakout-cable with the full bus speed of the PCI slot. At least from what I've read in the manual.
I used to work tech support for PCSG (Portable Computer Support Group, Dallas, Tx.) The Mach 20 was based on the PCSG Breakthru 286-8mhz 16K cache accelerator card. I remember when Bill visited our offices on Harry Hines Blvd. The Mach 20 added EMS, and ms mouse. You must put a plug in the 87 socket and a 287 on the card IF you wanted math co-prosseor support.
The HP Vectra - we had a bunch of them in 1989. Bog standard PC clones, although build like a tank. Nothing fancy like the HP 150, which we also used. HP BASIC was quite a thing in those days as well. At that time, I was working at an architect who designed a huge office building for HP in Amsterdam. Later they designed the HP head office for northern Europe as well. As HP was our client, and we were about to enter the CAD-era, HP of course offered the HP 9000 mini system, running a CAD program written in BASIC. Way too expensive, so we settled for AutoCAD on HP Vectra machines and put in those nifty Nth Engine graphics cards to speed up things.
1:01 After watching this channel (main one and then this one, too, guess it's understood) for so long, only now I've learned that between your childhood in Canada and present Portland residence there was that very long era, like half your life at the very least, where you lived in California! How come I've never heard a mention of that in over 3 years?
Gaffer tape is a special tape used by roadies to tape cables and such, and its specialty is that it's removable and it doesn't leave a sticky mess behind. What you have there in your packages is just black regular ducktape.
The WD1002-27X might actually be a RLL controller recovered from a hardcard. It looks like it has mounting points for a hard drive bracket. I just bought one that came with a Miniscribe 3438 half height 3.5" 32MB RLL drive. Mine also has the +12V and +5V power output pins to run the hard drive directly from ISA power. Handy if you want to install on a computer with ISA but no molex power, such as a IBM PS/2 model 25 or model 30. BTW, the one I bought (WD1002-27X w/ Miniscribe 3438) does have the hard drive connectors at the top of the card rather than at the back. I also own a hard card with a Miniscribe drive that has the hard drive connector at the back, as you've described.
Your right the Diagnostic Instruments 0459 card is an interface card for medical/scientific imaging equipment. The AMMC chip is a pci glue chip to allow the Altera CPLD to talk to the PC.
I remember using that HPIB card in some test systems I programmed. One was for the boxes that ran the Airfone system in the planes. I had to control not only HP test instruments but also an environment chamber since they needed to be tested at temperature extremes. HP Basic was quite unique. Grab it and have some fun.
For that Microsoft card, I actually just recently got an MS "InPort" bus mouse without a controller card in an ebay lot of mice & keyboards, and they are such a strange creation, no electronics in the mouse itself as it's all done on the controller card, so all the X & Y and button click signals have to go through multiple wires in the cable to the card to process rather than four wires, thank goodness for PS/2 mice becoming the PC standard!!! :P
The "MIO-100" is out of an Epson 286 class machine. I have the identical card in my 12mhz machine here. It supports HD floppies and RT clock and such. The pci alltara card looks interesting. The MATCHMAKER is just a PCI interface chip to connect to what ever simulated devices are programed into the CPLD. And onboard ram suggests they had some sort of basic cpu / os stack running on the CPLD. A lot of people here thinks its for imaging systems. My first guess was for a CNC, but it may be for use in the medical field or survey fields.... or any number of things... The HP Vectracard, the cutout is for what would look like a double length 8 bit slot, however that was the "local bus" on HP's back in the day. A propratary 32 bit slot. Either for ram cards, or maybe they went as far as to have cpu cards as well. You are right on the money with the IBM I/O Digital, which performs functions in a way which is very similar to the 40 pin header on an raspbery pi.. . It is of course much more primitive, but this is the basic idea. Data acquisition, is usually the main use that I can think of. But with some reverse engineering, you could probably make that board do what ever you want. And that 286 seems to be missing another part. It would have a ribbon that would connect to the 8088 socket with the original cpu removed, a machine I acquired years ago has this with all the documentation.........Edit.. CALLED IT!! And I will poke around for the documentation. I know I still have it, but I will need time to get to my locker in the city. Last card is an AOpen 6 Pack plus. or one of its variants. And that was for expanding the original 256k 5150.
I have a similar HPIB card for the MAC. You can basically program the card to collect all the data from your instruments automatically without the computer's processor needing to be involved. In the case of the MAC card it also has a DMA controller so it can dump all the data to RAM directly. There were expensive cards back in the day.
I had one of those 286 type upgrade boards. The cable that went to the CPU socket was very fragile. You'd have to probably make one of those if you wanted this to work :) Now MINE was an XT to 386 upgrade board. I recognized that immediately. I wish I still had it. Museum piece there :D
Way back in the late 90's I installed a 16-bit 386 upgrade board. I think I put it into a friend's 286, and it upgraded it to a 386SX 16 or 20 MHz? Had RAM installed on the board, too. Funny thing is, I don't remember it having any connection to the CPU socket. It just plugged into a slot. It seemed to work, but the friend complained afterwards that it appeared to run SLOWER and he had random lock-ups & reboots. We ended up taking it out.
@@TortureBot the "better" corporate ones didn't. Perhaps yours was an Intel Inboard 386? I think they might have had their own BIOS as well. Requiring a cable was a kludge, and the OP's board was probably 8-bit ISA, the XT didn't have 16-bit ISA slots. You mention the board you had was 16-bit, and therefore was probably built to upgrade 286 mainboards. Clones with 8086 and operational 16-bit ISA were built, but the standard then was, of course, IBM PCs, and catering to low-end clones wasn't as profitable a market (although I'm not saying some didn't try)
Hard to believe that an ESP32 is 50 times faster (240 MHz), with 50x more RAM, 4MB flash running at 80MHz, Wifi, Bluetooth, ADC, serial, I2C and SPI for only $5 These old stuff just brings me back to my younger days, and has no practical application in my world. Purely nostalgic. Thanks for that.
Regarding the HP 82321C Basic Language Processor (aka Viper card) from my experience it will work in any PC with an ISA bus that is running DOS. I believe the drivers can be downloaded from the HP Museum website. The BLP card was essentially at the cross-over point between the use of dedicated controllers HP9000 series and PC’s for automated (HPIB / GPIB) test equipment. The advantage the Viper card had was that you could run a HP Basic programme controlling HPIB instruments in the background independently from the PC host and hence take advantage of both worlds.
That battery prevents special data from being lost so safe the configuration data first before removing battery so when you replace the battery you will be able to write the data back.
25 years ago I was working at a printing company, and saw an I/O board like that connecting the pc to a printing press. There was a smaller board connected to it via standoffs, and that board had relays on it. My guess is the pc was being used as a controller, or was logging information.
that last memory board at 30:04 looks to be a clone of a Quadram quad board. that 384k ram is base memory. These (and other similar multifunction cards like the ast 6 pack) were installed in the original 5150s and 5160s that only allowed 256 max on the motherboard. Cards like these were the typical way to bring these systems up to 640k. i'd wager the switches and jumpers are the same as a quadboard. if not, they may be the same as an ast 6-pack.
The choice of RTC chip tells me that this is probably more likely a clone of the AST 6pack+ than the quadboard, but yeah. If you got a 256k mainboard, then getting a card like this would be a no-brainer.
Microsoft has an Archive, managed by Amy Stevenson. She was featured on a handful of Channel9 (RIP) videos. If she doesn't have a copy, that's a problem. She has mentioned before that some items were lost to time before they built the Archives in the 90s. Let's hope someone still has it stored in a box somewhere.
IBM sold an External 720K floppy for the 68 pin adapter later on that used that connector. Its called the IBM 4865. There were other options too. But the controller only controlled two drives. The idea was you had a hard drive in one bay, and this added the second drive.
It's really interesting to me when you drop tidbits of your past, like at 1:00. I would have never guessed you lived in LA, after "Mon(t)real" and Portland. But I guess the showmanship, the knowledge of camera placement, all that kind of stuff might have had "roots" in your time spent there. And you halfway followed William Shatner's path to stardom. lol
5:46 The multi-IO card has an FCC ID sticker on the solder side. A bit hard to read in your video, but I see "E5Y6L9MIO100", which would make it a DFI MIO-100.
th99 (page 52790 because it won't let me post a link in the comments) has the docs for the MIO-200 variant of that card. Other than it having the two floppy connectors internally (woah), the layout, jumpers and dip switches look pretty much the same.
Makes sense that the FCC ID number starts with DFI, Exactly Diamond Flower Inc. We had tons of boards made by them in the early 1990's used them with 386/486 boards. They prolly even made a VLB version.
I remember watching a video years ago of a person whose job it was to be a Microsoft archivist. The way they talked their collection was pretty comprehensive, but maybe it’s just for the major product lines like Office and Windows.
In my experience, the heat from desoldering a leaking battery might activate the corrosive base reaction and cause further damage to the board. I would recommend to cut the battery off like you did on the first board, neutralize the base using vinegar, and only after cleaning the vinegar I would touch that card with a soldering iron.
IBM PC 5160 ( 8 slot cover ) Floppy drive controller supported 4 floppy disk drives, through a 37pin connector in the back. They were drives 'C' and 'D' and it was added because hard disks were so expensive, costing more than the computer itself. If you read the documentation, there are four drive select lines. Two for internal, and two for the external expansion case. They later used the same connector for the IBM PS/2 5.25 external disk drive. There were two versions of the IBM expansion chassis, one which only had the 37 pin connector, for two additional floppies, and the other which actually expanded the 8 slot bus, into 2x7 as the bridge took a slot in the host, and a slot in the expansion. The Mach-20 has a HD floppy adapter, and extended memory. It was supported by Xenix 286
Also keep in mind that a 287 runs at 2/3rd of the processor speed, and that a Mach-20 Accelerated PC, still had the hard disk speed of the original PC. A 10Mhz super turbo ran circles around it.
So regards to the mach20. Dave's garage on UA-cam worked for Microsoft and may know something. Just a thought I had. Great video really interested in the excellerator card.
I used to use an HP computer all in one at work. Crt all in one, weighed like a hundred pounds. Had a scroll wheel, ran "analytic basic", and used GPIB for controlling instruments. I also recall it wasn't x86 at all. I'm guessing the HP basic card enabled similar functionality on the pc.
The HP card was almost certainly for the HP PC-somewhat-compatible line of PC's. Generally slow (they were still making 8088 computers in the early 90's), but built like a tank. Certain government agencies favored them which kept HP afloat for a while. The HB-IB connector is a dead giveaway
I have one of these same cards in a box somewhere. I think the 40 pin connector is for a hard disk but I don't have any documentation to go with the card.
Mystery card at 5:30 There's a clear plastic label on the back with some information, including an FCC ID (E5Y6L9M followed by some numbers I can't read) and "made in taiwan" Looks like it's from DFI, Inc; there are a few options, but with a clear view of the FCC ID you should be able to figure out what it is.
From the partial read of the FCC number and the fact that the card has MIO-100 silk-screened on it, I believe that is the E5Y6L9MIO100. From the FCC ID search, the 'final action' date on the filing is October 8, 1986. Sounds like a reasonable time frame
Chances are any old mystery board with a big FPGA on it (like that Altera), it's gonna be some proprietary interface card for some obscure piece of equipment that is long gone.
15:12 That two-row Function Key label section at the bottom of the screen was very idiosyncratic of a lot of HP Vectra software. Most other software that had F-Key labels on the screen (like GW-BASIC of course) used only one row.
All of those cards show the diversity of creativity that IBM unleashed when it chose to make the ISA architecture a royalty-free public domain item. The varied uses for the PC were absolutely amazing, and the open source nature of the bus interface made it the most flexible computer platform ever designed. Of course, the Apple ][, Macintosh, and many other major computer brands/platforms could have done the variety of tasks that a PC could do. But their manufacturers chose to keep their interfaces proprietary AND charged royalty fees (some, like Apple, charged massive royalties to 3rd party hardware developers), and made it so 3rd party developers needed to create add-ons that would target only very large markets, so the diverse and creative uses for the non-IBM PC architectures mostly never saw the light of day. So the PC won courtesy of IBM making the open source hardware interface choice that some considered to be very unwise at the time.
For HP BASIC, I'm fairly certain it's just BASIC that had functionality added to control GPIB test equipment. Makes automated testing easier. That GPIO card would be awesome to use for a display of Christmas lights. 😁
I ran across an old 8088 at goodwilloutlet, but someone had already come through and pillaged the thing. All that I could get from it was an Intel card....Turns out its a upgrade card to turn an 8088 into a 386. The cable from the card to the mainboard's original processor is damaged, but I think I can rebuild it...and then I'll need a 386 to put in it...
I've got the manual for the DFI MIO-100. I'll scan it and send you a link. It looks like it probably uses the same clock software as the DIO-200X on minus zero degrees.
Sweet haul this episode. Do you or any of your community know of a good software repository for older MacBook or Mac's? I've come into possession of an old MacBook which is currently running OS X10.5.8 and I'd like to be able to do more with it than was possible with it's base installed software. Any helpful links would be greatly appreciated.
The PCI card look like something that would have been used to control and acquire data from a precision electronic instrument in the late 90's (or 2000's, some of those devices have barely evolved ) something like an electron microscope or even an high speed camera.
I believe the Diagnostic Instruments 0459 is an interface for some sort of specialized video device. A microscope or something similar. Edit: Looks like you found the same info I did!
(On the MACH20) Hmmm, it should be possible to make a separate custom bridge board to use combined with that so that it could run on an Amiga 2000 (for example)
i used to have a cd in the mid 90's that had descriptions of loads of isa cards of all types with there jumper settings ... i think it was called MicroHouse Tech Library .. it was great for identifying cards with no manufacture name on ... i will see if i can find it for you
I have a similar card to that PCI MATCHMAKER card at 10 minutes in the vid. I can't remember where I got it, but had it in storage for 20 years. This one is a full length card, has 4 small socketed "Lattice" chips, and one bigger Lattice chip, an Atmel AT29C512 socketed chip, some RAM I think, plus the AMCC PCI MATCHMAKER S5933QE surface-mounted chip. BUT get this... an Intel 80486SX-33MHz CPU is socketed at the end of the board. Nothing on the back of the PCB. I tried to find info on the net about this when I came across it a few months ago, but only found some parts with the MATCHMAKER chips on it (mostly all different), and then a small article talking about what I think was Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). WEIRD cards.
hahaha, i haved 4 pieces Siemens/Nixdorf 286er on card but every was his one PC two in one system don't work! But the Ram, worked with one Card, 4MB Ram nice ^^:--)) The DIP-switches on my RAM-Cards, was for the startadress of the RAM nice to see old things, thx
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
Thanks for those sending in what you think is the manual, but any PDF that is "WW0340" is just the readme from the Microsoft Technet article converted to PDF and not the manual. (It's the same document I showed at 26:23 in the video.) The actual manual is a much longer book with much more technical information.
I got the driver disk for the MACH 20 card. Any place i can upload this for you?
Also got a 356 page manual
@@bowilhelmsen2399 I replied to your email. Unfortunately it's just the same files I already have. The PDF you have is so long because it includes a dump of hundreds of other unrelated technet articles.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Just realized that to 😞Would be interesting to see this card in action.
Ask Dave from Dave's Garage UA-cam channel. He's a former MS Engineer. He may still have contacts that can get the manual. ua-cam.com/users/DavesGarage
Can't wait to see some more of that Mach 20!!! So cool!
One suggestion for getting the manual for the MACH 20: Maybe try hitting up Dave Plummer from the channel Dave's Garage. He's a retired OS Engineer from Microsoft and based on what he's said in several of his recent videos, he has access to or knows people in the official Microsoft archives. They apparently do keep an extensive collection of things so he might be able to get you the manual if you reach out.
Hey, Aidan here (the person that sent you the cards). Finally got around to watching the vid, and I learned a lot of stuff about the cards from this vid, super interesting stuff! If I remember correctly (though my memory is pretty bad) all the cards but the one with the Altera chip were found in a random bag, the altera one I believe was pulled from a non working pentium 4 or core 2 duo machine. That pc was found outside the gerontology department in my school so I think it was for a medical instrument. All the other cards were from the neuroscience, electrical engineering, and computer science building
Thinking back I think I actually remember the camera it came with in the electronics pile. I didn’t make the connection until now, but I think I threw it away because I couldn’t identify the connector
11:00 that is a card used primarily in the scientific/research community for imaging data acquisition. In other words, the SCSI-like connector goes to some spectrum of camera that is usually mounted on a microscope. This pre-dates firewire and USB 3.x image capture devices, so this goes to an older device (I'm guessing about 15-20 years old). The CCD cameras these cards attached to were quite well made and often outlived manufacturer support for the interface card and software. My guess is that the card is no longer supported by most camera vendors.
The MACH 20 was an accelerator card. I had one in my old XT long ago. Power the machine up and it runs as a normal XT. Hit a key combination and the accelerator kicked in giving you a nice speed boost.
Regarding the HP „Basic“ card I’m sture Curious Marc could help out there with tons of info on that one. He repaired on of the HP 85 series Instrumentation calculators a while back which also run the HP Basic for controlling HP GPIB lab equipment. The PCI card first looked like an multi channel data acquisition card with standard 10MHz clock input for precision data analytics. Judging by the Altera MAX Cpld it could potentially du those things too. We had something similar in the lab at the university- that one had an expensive Xilinx FPGA on board and two super fast scsi disk’s just for the datastreams. The called it the 100000 dollar pc back then. 1994 I think it was.
Or if Adrian isn't going to do anything with the HP card, he could pass it on to Marc.
Great video! This card, "Diagnostic Instruments SPOT Imagine Solutions 459 PCI Bus Interface Card," looks like a scanner interface card for a high-speed scanner! LOL I used to sell them in my business decades ago. SCSI (UW and U2, but some were U160). And that HP "Vectra" PC compatible card: Looks like one of the (many) processor cards for IBM PC-AT back in the day! Remember those? NS16000, M68000/10/20/30/40, etc. They would run UNIX and IBM VM/370 & MVS (two cards for that one). IBM even came out with a "special" IBM PC-AT for that use.
I wish I could find one or more of those cards (working!) It would be worth getting an IBM PC-AT just for that! LOL (Byte Magazine had a lot of issues about these--introducing the cards!)
Oh, and let me just say this: Microsoft MACH-10. :) Just to have the full family.
Regarding that crazy HP board: I understand (but have no first-hand experience) that HP has heavily invested in "enterprise-grade" BASIC environments, and standardized them so there was a degree of compatibility across their platforms. I know there were lots of database applications written in HP BASIC. I would suspect that the card was for running large business BASIC programs that previously required HP minis or mainframes, on an HP Vectra workstation. They probably ported a version of the BASIC environment for one of their 68k-based minicomputers onto the card.
From a few other places like Curious Marc. HP pioneered the interface and it became IEEE-488 and GP-IB. It's a very easy interconnect system to talk to test equipment and automate things.
I think the target market was test automation; HP had a series of calculators and computers that could be programmed in BASIC to drive instruments through HPIB and collect data. This card would let those technical users run that code on a standard PC environment.
@@jaoswald Yes - HP-BASIC was extremely advanced for the time - that is actually the first language I knew that got me employment while still in college in the early-mid 80s! The HP-71B and HP-75 used the language, as well as a series of early desktop PCs (HP-80?). My HP-71B was crammed with programs I had written for my physics and math study. The HP-71B was often used with lab equipment over HP-IL, a sort of daisy chain system for peripherals.
@@ultrametric9317 interesting! In those early days, it seemed many computer makers thought users would write (and share or sell) BASIC programs. Perhaps if "microcomputers" hadn't eclipsed "minis" and mainframes, that path would have been taken. But with home computers, "hobbyists" could become professional programmers, but mostly languages like assembly and C were needed to get anything with decent speed. BASIC on a micro often wouldn't cut it, mostly only users of higher powered machines, or people doing small apps with we might call "scripting" could have that luxury. Modern programming took a very different turn than what the big corporate, and "pre-Microsoft DOS" industry leaders assumed.
@@squirlmy The first program I ever used on an IBM PC (5150) was IBM's own BASIC compiler! There were also FORTRAN and COBOL compilers - there were NOT cheap.
That PCI 'Diagnostics' Card is just a PCI-Extender. The connector is not SCSI but some sort of PCI external connection. I've read the Manual and it was used for high end image acquisition. Probably a generic card used to connect high-end industry testing equipment, MRI, X-Ray and stuff like that. The deal is, that the actual hardware would be too much to fit on a card and is inside the actual machine. Instead of actually building a PCI card for each case would result in a bottleneck from proprietary busses and connectors but this card would provide a breakout-cable with the full bus speed of the PCI slot. At least from what I've read in the manual.
I used to work tech support for PCSG (Portable Computer Support Group, Dallas, Tx.) The Mach 20 was based on the PCSG Breakthru 286-8mhz 16K cache accelerator card. I remember when Bill visited our offices on Harry Hines Blvd.
The Mach 20 added EMS, and ms mouse. You must put a plug in the 87 socket and a 287 on the card IF you wanted math co-prosseor support.
The HP Vectra - we had a bunch of them in 1989. Bog standard PC clones, although build like a tank. Nothing fancy like the HP 150, which we also used. HP BASIC was quite a thing in those days as well. At that time, I was working at an architect who designed a huge office building for HP in Amsterdam. Later they designed the HP head office for northern Europe as well. As HP was our client, and we were about to enter the CAD-era, HP of course offered the HP 9000 mini system, running a CAD program written in BASIC. Way too expensive, so we settled for AutoCAD on HP Vectra machines and put in those nifty Nth Engine graphics cards to speed up things.
Looking forward to the Mach20 card video.
Every Wednesday around 18:00 UK time I’m always super excited for another video from your fine self!
Thank you
Andrew
🇬🇧
1:01 After watching this channel (main one and then this one, too, guess it's understood) for so long, only now I've learned that between your childhood in Canada and present Portland residence there was that very long era, like half your life at the very least, where you lived in California! How come I've never heard a mention of that in over 3 years?
Glad I was able to find the drivers and docs for you for that Microsoft Mach 20. Franco :)
Some great finds in this mail haul. Thanks for sharing!
These videos are great! I am really excited to see the accelerator card in action!
IIRC, many of the clone cards used the same dip switch settings as the equivalent IBM part. This wasn't 100%, but was always worth checking.
DIAMOND FLOWER, INC.
MIO-100 is the mystery IO Controller.
Gaffer tape is a special tape used by roadies to tape cables and such, and its specialty is that it's removable and it doesn't leave a sticky mess behind. What you have there in your packages is just black regular ducktape.
looking forward to see that MACH20 in action
Wow, can't wait to see more about the Mach 20, it sounds really interesting!
The WD1002-27X might actually be a RLL controller recovered from a hardcard. It looks like it has mounting points for a hard drive bracket. I just bought one that came with a Miniscribe 3438 half height 3.5" 32MB RLL drive. Mine also has the +12V and +5V power output pins to run the hard drive directly from ISA power. Handy if you want to install on a computer with ISA but no molex power, such as a IBM PS/2 model 25 or model 30. BTW, the one I bought (WD1002-27X w/ Miniscribe 3438) does have the hard drive connectors at the top of the card rather than at the back. I also own a hard card with a Miniscribe drive that has the hard drive connector at the back, as you've described.
Your right the Diagnostic Instruments 0459 card is an interface card for medical/scientific imaging equipment. The AMMC chip is a pci glue chip to allow the Altera CPLD to talk to the PC.
I love those needle tip bottles, so useful for precision lubricant or solvent application.
I remember using that HPIB card in some test systems I programmed. One was for the boxes that ran the Airfone system in the planes. I had to control not only HP test instruments but also an environment chamber since they needed to be tested at temperature extremes. HP Basic was quite unique. Grab it and have some fun.
High five Adrian.. I'm a fan of yours from BC
For that Microsoft card, I actually just recently got an MS "InPort" bus mouse without a controller card in an ebay lot of mice & keyboards, and they are such a strange creation, no electronics in the mouse itself as it's all done on the controller card, so all the X & Y and button click signals have to go through multiple wires in the cable to the card to process rather than four wires, thank goodness for PS/2 mice becoming the PC standard!!! :P
I have been looking for one of those Mach20 cards for years. My childhood IBM XT had one; I still have the XT but the Mach20 was lost to time.
The "MIO-100" is out of an Epson 286 class machine. I have the identical card in my 12mhz machine here. It supports HD floppies and RT clock and such. The pci alltara card looks interesting. The MATCHMAKER is just a PCI interface chip to connect to what ever simulated devices are programed into the CPLD. And onboard ram suggests they had some sort of basic cpu / os stack running on the CPLD. A lot of people here thinks its for imaging systems. My first guess was for a CNC, but it may be for use in the medical field or survey fields.... or any number of things...
The HP Vectracard, the cutout is for what would look like a double length 8 bit slot, however that was the "local bus" on HP's back in the day. A propratary 32 bit slot. Either for ram cards, or maybe they went as far as to have cpu cards as well.
You are right on the money with the IBM I/O Digital, which performs functions in a way which is very similar to the 40 pin header on an raspbery pi.. . It is of course much more primitive, but this is the basic idea. Data acquisition, is usually the main use that I can think of. But with some reverse engineering, you could probably make that board do what ever you want.
And that 286 seems to be missing another part. It would have a ribbon that would connect to the 8088 socket with the original cpu removed, a machine I acquired years ago has this with all the documentation.........Edit.. CALLED IT!! And I will poke around for the documentation. I know I still have it, but I will need time to get to my locker in the city.
Last card is an AOpen 6 Pack plus. or one of its variants. And that was for expanding the original 256k 5150.
That box looked like a bear attacked it from the inside.
I have a similar HPIB card for the MAC. You can basically program the card to collect all the data from your instruments automatically without the computer's processor needing to be involved. In the case of the MAC card it also has a DMA controller so it can dump all the data to RAM directly. There were expensive cards back in the day.
I had one of those 286 type upgrade boards. The cable that went to the CPU socket was very fragile. You'd have to probably make one of those if you wanted this to work :) Now MINE was an XT to 386 upgrade board. I recognized that immediately. I wish I still had it. Museum piece there :D
Way back in the late 90's I installed a 16-bit 386 upgrade board. I think I put it into a friend's 286, and it upgraded it to a 386SX 16 or 20 MHz? Had RAM installed on the board, too. Funny thing is, I don't remember it having any connection to the CPU socket. It just plugged into a slot. It seemed to work, but the friend complained afterwards that it appeared to run SLOWER and he had random lock-ups & reboots. We ended up taking it out.
@@TortureBot the "better" corporate ones didn't. Perhaps yours was an Intel Inboard 386? I think they might have had their own BIOS as well. Requiring a cable was a kludge, and the OP's board was probably 8-bit ISA, the XT didn't have 16-bit ISA slots. You mention the board you had was 16-bit, and therefore was probably built to upgrade 286 mainboards. Clones with 8086 and operational 16-bit ISA were built, but the standard then was, of course, IBM PCs, and catering to low-end clones wasn't as profitable a market (although I'm not saying some didn't try)
Hard to believe that an ESP32 is 50 times faster (240 MHz), with 50x more RAM, 4MB flash running at 80MHz, Wifi, Bluetooth, ADC, serial, I2C and SPI for only $5
These old stuff just brings me back to my younger days, and has no practical application in my world. Purely nostalgic. Thanks for that.
I'm such a giant nerd to sit here and watch this... Thank you
Regarding the HP 82321C Basic Language Processor (aka Viper card) from my experience it will work in any PC with an ISA bus that is running DOS. I believe the drivers can be downloaded from the HP Museum website. The BLP card was essentially at the cross-over point between the use of dedicated controllers HP9000 series and PC’s for automated (HPIB / GPIB) test equipment. The advantage the Viper card had was that you could run a HP Basic programme controlling HPIB instruments in the background independently from the PC host and hence take advantage of both worlds.
That battery prevents special data from being lost so safe the configuration data first before removing battery so when you replace the battery you will be able to write the data back.
25 years ago I was working at a printing company, and saw an I/O board like that connecting the pc to a printing press. There was a smaller board connected to it via standoffs, and that board had relays on it. My guess is the pc was being used as a controller, or was logging information.
that last memory board at 30:04 looks to be a clone of a Quadram quad board. that 384k ram is base memory. These (and other similar multifunction cards like the ast 6 pack) were installed in the original 5150s and 5160s that only allowed 256 max on the motherboard. Cards like these were the typical way to bring these systems up to 640k.
i'd wager the switches and jumpers are the same as a quadboard. if not, they may be the same as an ast 6-pack.
The choice of RTC chip tells me that this is probably more likely a clone of the AST 6pack+ than the quadboard, but yeah. If you got a 256k mainboard, then getting a card like this would be a no-brainer.
I used to modify those 256K motherboards into 640KB motherboards. A missing 29 cent IC, and a jumper was the only difference.
Thanks for sharing.. totally enjoy seeing all of those cards..
Microsoft has an Archive, managed by Amy Stevenson. She was featured on a handful of Channel9 (RIP) videos.
If she doesn't have a copy, that's a problem. She has mentioned before that some items were lost to time before they built the Archives in the 90s.
Let's hope someone still has it stored in a box somewhere.
If after Adrian tests it if he wants to donate it to the archive, I'd be happy to bring it over to Amy and get it added to the collection.
To save the configuration you would need to power the board up to let you save the configuration before removing the battery.
Accelerator cards were an interesting concept, especially in amigas
I wonder if Shelby over at Tech Tangents could make use of that HP card.
IBM sold an External 720K floppy for the 68 pin adapter later on that used that connector. Its called the IBM 4865. There were other options too. But the controller only controlled two drives. The idea was you had a hard drive in one bay, and this added the second drive.
It's really interesting to me when you drop tidbits of your past, like at 1:00. I would have never guessed you lived in LA, after "Mon(t)real" and Portland. But I guess the showmanship, the knowledge of camera placement, all that kind of stuff might have had "roots" in your time spent there. And you halfway followed William Shatner's path to stardom. lol
It was the wild west back then...plug and play of windows 95 be praised ☺️
5:46 The multi-IO card has an FCC ID sticker on the solder side. A bit hard to read in your video, but I see "E5Y6L9MIO100", which would make it a DFI MIO-100.
th99 (page 52790 because it won't let me post a link in the comments) has the docs for the MIO-200 variant of that card. Other than it having the two floppy connectors internally (woah), the layout, jumpers and dip switches look pretty much the same.
I figured someone else caught that, and here you are. Good eye.
Makes sense that the FCC ID number starts with DFI, Exactly Diamond Flower Inc. We had tons of boards made by them in the early 1990's
used them with 386/486 boards. They prolly even made a VLB version.
I remember watching a video years ago of a person whose job it was to be a Microsoft archivist. The way they talked their collection was pretty comprehensive, but maybe it’s just for the major product lines like Office and Windows.
Adrian, what is the FCC ID on the back of that card re: 5:36? Can sometimes look up the manuf and etc from that.
A cassette deck that goes into a PC? What is this, LGR Oddware? Seriously, though. Can't wait to see that video!
In my experience, the heat from desoldering a leaking battery might activate the corrosive base reaction and cause further damage to the board. I would recommend to cut the battery off like you did on the first board, neutralize the base using vinegar, and only after cleaning the vinegar I would touch that card with a soldering iron.
That digital I/O card definitely had to have been for controlling test equipment, likely something purpose built.
IBM PC 5160 ( 8 slot cover ) Floppy drive controller supported 4 floppy disk drives, through a 37pin connector in the back. They were drives 'C' and 'D' and it was added because hard disks were so expensive, costing more than the computer itself.
If you read the documentation, there are four drive select lines. Two for internal, and two for the external expansion case.
They later used the same connector for the IBM PS/2 5.25 external disk drive.
There were two versions of the IBM expansion chassis, one which only had the 37 pin connector, for two additional floppies, and the other which actually expanded the 8 slot bus, into 2x7 as the bridge took a slot in the host, and a slot in the expansion.
The Mach-20 has a HD floppy adapter, and extended memory. It was supported by Xenix 286
Also keep in mind that a 287 runs at 2/3rd of the processor speed, and that a Mach-20 Accelerated PC, still had the hard disk speed of the original PC. A 10Mhz super turbo ran circles around it.
So regards to the mach20. Dave's garage on UA-cam worked for Microsoft and may know something. Just a thought I had. Great video really interested in the excellerator card.
I used to use an HP computer all in one at work. Crt all in one, weighed like a hundred pounds. Had a scroll wheel, ran "analytic basic", and used GPIB for controlling instruments.
I also recall it wasn't x86 at all.
I'm guessing the HP basic card enabled similar functionality on the pc.
Can you use that tape deck as means to store data on the tape?
LGR might've covered it in one of unboxing videos, but only briefly.
I have a Microsoft Mach 20 accelerator in my Compaq Portable. It does indeed use a ribbon between the card and the mobo cpu socket.
ahhh "crusty blue corrosion" my favorite 60's song! :)
Yep, they still sell those D-Sub 37 connectors.. Yikes $17 each on Digi-Key.
i got that Floppy 8bit card, too
but i wonder - what is that huge scsi like connector - SASI ?
The HP card was almost certainly for the HP PC-somewhat-compatible line of PC's. Generally slow (they were still making 8088 computers in the early 90's), but built like a tank. Certain government agencies favored them which kept HP afloat for a while. The HB-IB connector is a dead giveaway
I reckon Shelby at TechTangents will be able to help with that HP card, he loves anything with that connector 🤓 (Hate you can't tag folk anymore)
I have one of these same cards in a box somewhere. I think the 40 pin connector is for a hard disk but I don't have any documentation to go with the card.
Wow what an incredible accelerator card! For today's and tomorrow's software! I can't wait to run Windows 3.0 🤣
Mystery card at 5:30
There's a clear plastic label on the back with some information, including an FCC ID (E5Y6L9M followed by some numbers I can't read) and "made in taiwan"
Looks like it's from DFI, Inc; there are a few options, but with a clear view of the FCC ID you should be able to figure out what it is.
From the partial read of the FCC number and the fact that the card has MIO-100 silk-screened on it, I believe that is the E5Y6L9MIO100. From the FCC ID search, the 'final action' date on the filing is October 8, 1986. Sounds like a reasonable time frame
Chances are any old mystery board with a big FPGA on it (like that Altera), it's gonna be some proprietary interface card for some obscure piece of equipment that is long gone.
That SPOT card was for sure for a CT scanner or something along those lines.
15:12 That two-row Function Key label section at the bottom of the screen was very idiosyncratic of a lot of HP Vectra software. Most other software that had F-Key labels on the screen (like GW-BASIC of course) used only one row.
External port on floppy also went to tape drive I had a 60 mg drive I think.
Hi at 5:35 you can see the FCC number on the rear of the floppy controller can you tell me what the number is?
All of those cards show the diversity of creativity that IBM unleashed when it chose to make the ISA architecture a royalty-free public domain item. The varied uses for the PC were absolutely amazing, and the open source nature of the bus interface made it the most flexible computer platform ever designed. Of course, the Apple ][, Macintosh, and many other major computer brands/platforms could have done the variety of tasks that a PC could do. But their manufacturers chose to keep their interfaces proprietary AND charged royalty fees (some, like Apple, charged massive royalties to 3rd party hardware developers), and made it so 3rd party developers needed to create add-ons that would target only very large markets, so the diverse and creative uses for the non-IBM PC architectures mostly never saw the light of day. So the PC won courtesy of IBM making the open source hardware interface choice that some considered to be very unwise at the time.
whats the progress on the mach 20 main video?
looking forward to the mach 20 video!
Whats the reason behind a rtc on a multi io card? Why?
Wow, I forgot about the Plus Deck. I had one and kind of wish I had held on to it (and many other things).
For HP BASIC, I'm fairly certain it's just BASIC that had functionality added to control GPIB test equipment. Makes automated testing easier. That GPIO card would be awesome to use for a display of Christmas lights. 😁
I ran across an old 8088 at goodwilloutlet, but someone had already come through and pillaged the thing. All that I could get from it was an Intel card....Turns out its a upgrade card to turn an 8088 into a 386. The cable from the card to the mainboard's original processor is damaged, but I think I can rebuild it...and then I'll need a 386 to put in it...
I've got the manual for the DFI MIO-100. I'll scan it and send you a link. It looks like it probably uses the same clock software as the DIO-200X on minus zero degrees.
the card at 1100 looks like a HP scope/spectrum analyzer interface card.
I’d like to see a video of that accelerator card in action ! Maybe Windows on an XT computer ?
5:36 - there's a hard to read sticker on the back, is there any useful info on that?
... besides the oddity that the one in th '99 has a 16-bit connector and this one doesn't...
Unfortunately I gave that one board away already so I can't look up the FCC ID.
Very interesting video, all hardware has a huge historical and financial value.
LIM (Lotus-Intel-Microsoft) expanded memory baby! Not extended - EXPANDED :) How cool is that! (What a disaster to program that nightmare!)
Sweet haul this episode. Do you or any of your community know of a good software repository for older MacBook or Mac's? I've come into possession of an old MacBook which is currently running OS X10.5.8 and I'd like to be able to do more with it than was possible with it's base installed software. Any helpful links would be greatly appreciated.
There's Macintosh Garden but I think it's more for 68k and PPC machines.
This is awesome. I just came across a Mach-20 myself today, no memory expansion or floppy disk, but did have the cable and connector.
The PCI card look like something that would have been used to control and acquire data from a precision electronic instrument in the late 90's (or 2000's, some of those devices have barely evolved ) something like an electron microscope or even an high speed camera.
I believe the Diagnostic Instruments 0459 is an interface for some sort of specialized video device. A microscope or something similar.
Edit: Looks like you found the same info I did!
It's weird when this video is fascinating for myself and my wife. 🤣
Package from Michael Orange… and the envelope bright orange too 😂 coincidence??
(On the MACH20) Hmmm, it should be possible to make a separate custom bridge board to use combined with that so that it could run on an Amiga 2000 (for example)
Tell me more about this "math coprosser". (28:19)
i used to have a cd in the mid 90's that had descriptions of loads of isa cards of all types with there jumper settings ... i think it was called MicroHouse Tech Library .. it was great for identifying cards with no manufacture name on ... i will see if i can find it for you
I think now you mentioned that it may be in the Simtel archives.
I have a similar card to that PCI MATCHMAKER card at 10 minutes in the vid. I can't remember where I got it, but had it in storage for 20 years. This one is a full length card, has 4 small socketed "Lattice" chips, and one bigger Lattice chip, an Atmel AT29C512 socketed chip, some RAM I think, plus the AMCC PCI MATCHMAKER S5933QE surface-mounted chip. BUT get this... an Intel 80486SX-33MHz CPU is socketed at the end of the board. Nothing on the back of the PCB.
I tried to find info on the net about this when I came across it a few months ago, but only found some parts with the MATCHMAKER chips on it (mostly all different), and then a small article talking about what I think was Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). WEIRD cards.
Could you use that cassette deck to load in software from real cassettes into an emulator? Like for a C64 or something?
The IBM card sells for 380 bucks, today. But info was scarce otherwise
I'm guessing that MACH-20 was quickly obsoleted when ATs became the norm.
Would Barnacules Nerdgasm know anything as he worked for Microsoft.
I think that card would pair with the imager I uploaded on my channel today.
hahaha, i haved 4 pieces Siemens/Nixdorf 286er on card
but every was his one PC
two in one system don't work!
But the Ram, worked with one Card, 4MB Ram nice ^^:--))
The DIP-switches on my RAM-Cards, was for the startadress of the RAM
nice to see old things, thx