My dad had a Versawriter and made all kinds of artwork with it! Later he bought the more expensive Apple Graphics Tablet. With the art he made with one of those, he won a computer art contest sponsored by Epson computer that sent my family to Japan when I was around 10 years old.
The Albert was very interesting, it's kind of reminiscent of the PC clones that would take over the market not long after, copy an existing architecture, but lay on a bunch of features that didn't normally come standard.
I remember our store selling those Versawriter things. They are very crude. It's basically a couple of game controls that plug in with software that computed the position bases on the angles. It was sold as a very cheap alternative to Apple's Graphics Tablet which was much more precise.
The digitizer brought memories back. I build one in school around 1987 to digitize geographic maps into a GIS system I wrote in turbo pascal on an XT or AT. The accuracy and sample rate was horrible (8 bit ADC) so it was replaced quickly by a professional CAD digitizer . I love your choice of collecting rare and unusual machines. Thank you for showing.
Sound Warning: I tried my best to eliminate any possiblity of CRT or transformer whine with a notch filter. I cannot hear thar frequency myself, and I don't think there were any machines featured that produced it.. but just in case.. beware. :)
The video text terminal can be connected to internet using USB dial up modem and a raspberry pi zero hosting the server connected to Wi-Fi. Alternatively you an use a esp32 to interface it directly to a remote server.
@24:30 So that is why the image gets drawn that way! I always thought it was down to a memory limitation. Love the channel. I'm learning tons of fun stuff about old tech.
Back in 1980/81 or thereabouts a high school friend of mine and I collaborated to make our own VersaWriter for his Apple ][ Europlus, after seeing the ad in BYTE. I did the mechanicals and he wrote the software. It worked but wasn't very accurate as we used cheap carbon pots not high precision wirewound units.
Thinkpad 760E represent!!! My grandpa handed one of those down to me as a kid and I as well have fond memories of these machines. I have 4 760's (3 working, 1 parts) great laptops.
Hey TTS, when I used to do a small bit of audio work, I would import audio streams into Adobe Audition to do all the work, it’s spectrogram view really helped me spot irregularities like pops, clicks, and whines without having to hear them myself! Cool whine is particularly easy to spot when using a spectrogram.
That's what I was trying to do. I don't think there was any this time fortunately.. but I did try to seek it out in Audition and use notch filter to kill it. Problem is since I can't hear it in the first place, I can seldom be 100% sure apart from trusting the display.
I loved my Versawriter! I couldn't afford the Apple graphics tablet, but I wanted to draw. I lived near the company that made Versawriters and I called them up and found out i could buy one directly and got a ride up there. I don't remember the native software being that bad. I used to copy comic book covers with it.
I still have an ex-govt. T3200SXC with Math co-processor in my Attic. Those weren't Lap Tops, they were fully fledged Luggable Lap Top Form Factor Desktop PC's. That got used well into the late 90's. They were an interesting machine, the C variant cost $18,000 Au at the time, came custom manufactured from Japan, and it's screen was a first of it's kind Hand Made 800x600 SVGA LCD alone costing $10,000 Au, iirc that was back in 1991. One painful problem with the 32C is that in order to save silicon they kept their Bios settings and firmware data in a hidden partition on the hard drive, which meant if the Partition was damaged in any way the entire system would be bricked and had to be sent back to Toshiba and be fitted with a new HDD (Thanks DOS6.22 Doublespace!).
LMAO at that newspaper report in the beginning as well as the animations. I have one of these Toshiba T5100. The screen is 640x400 and if you install Windows 3.1, you can use the Compaq Gas Plasma driver to run Windows in native resolution, unfortunately at 1bpp instead of 4. And your EGA monitor won't sync it.
This stuff is WAY before my time I started with Win XP back in the day and here in germany we dont have much older stuff so I allways love to just see random video about computer stuff My Biggest score was a C64 and a Zenith PC Clone !
just found your channel today via the great videos about the miniscribe fiasco and don lancaster's tv typewriter. i know.. extremely little about how computers work/computer history and everything you've shown is a good bit older than me, but your presentation/editing is engaging, jokes funny, and enthusiasm contagious! im looking forward to watching through the backlog of your videos (i've been finding them perfect to tune into as i draw!) :)
Several interesting things... the VideoText... which you could probably connect direct modem-to-modem to a bbs. (if it takes hayes commands, so much more the better) The Albert... which is totally new to me.... The laptop with ega and gas-plasma display....
Regarding the T5100 HDD problems, I had a similar issue with my T3200SX, just with a 256 MB CF card. I have the modded BIOS, which adds the XTIDE BIOS as well, so the laptop will boot with any HDD, not just the factory Conner. When I partitioned the CF card and installed MS-DOS on it on my Compaq Armada 1530 (before I would actually have the Toshiba), it wouldn't boot off of that card. If I did the partitioning and DOS installation on the Toshiba, it would boot fine, and even plugging the card into a USB card reader wouldn't damage the boot sector or system files :) However since it's quite hard to get to the HDD/CF card, I installed an Ethernet card into the 8 bit ISA slot (the 16 bit one has a SoundBlaster 16), and I just FTP the files over thanks to mTCP and the included FTP server application.
I bought one of those AT&T 1300 terminals. I'd read that some of the later models have Yamaha V9938 video chips in them, but this one has a TMS9118N like the TI-99/4A and the original MSX, and the main CPU is a TMS7001NL-4 8-bit microcontroller, 16K OTP ROM, a 1K EEPROM, and I think the only RAM is 128 bytes in the MCU and 16KB video ram.
Oh.. when starting a very old drive for the first time in many years, you may want to warm it up to about body temperature, that tends to help old lubricants.
Back in the day, I had a business repairing laptops. When a Toshiba 5100 came in one day with a broken (owner punched it in frustration) display, I contacted my parts guy for the cost of the display. $2000+ was the quote. The owner didn't want to confess to breaking the screen, and was planning on paying for the new screen himself. When he found out the repair was going to be $2500, he came back and took the unit out of our facility. He was back five minutes later with the laptop, now completely broken. We wrote up a repair order for $4200, including various parts of the case and a keyboard, and suggested he get a newer, non-plasma, Toshiba (which was about $5k and three times faster). He left the laptop with us, and his employer said to give him a new Toshiba. After transferring his files to the new laptop, we wiped it and then sold the machine as parts.
Yup. I ran into this with my own.. I had a T3100 that my Dad gave me for school. Loved having it. One day I was showing it to my friend and his brother, and the brother was seated on a bench and had it on his lap.... lost his grip and it crashed to the floor. Didn't even hit that hard but it was enough to shatter the screen. He offered to pay - until we were quoted around $1500 to replace it. They couldn't afford that. My Dad chewed me out pretty good too. Basically just kept the base and used it as an extra desktop computer until I traded it in for something else. I kinda laugh now given a 1920x1080 color LCD is only $100ish.
When I started working the first and second gens thinkpads were becoming obsolete and being replaced by newer units, I wanted one badly but they were still expensive. I got a pda (cheap casio thing) then found a deal for a massive 1996 second hand Dell, years later I got my first new laptop a Tecra A10.
That t5100 is neat I just only recently got a t5200/100 in working condition for the price of nothing as it was in the ewaste pile of my university same with a whole lot of other stuff like a pdp11/44, two Dec rl01 hard drives, unbuilt zx 81 kit and zx80, a research machines RM380z plus a lot more stuff I can’t be bothered to name.
I've got an old Concord Model C-1214 duel floppy drive that is missing the top, supposed to be Apple II compatible but it looks like the drive your Albert Apple II clone is supposed to have.
If you use Linux, you can use "hdparm" , a tool for IDE hard disks, which enable to slow the access speed and rotation. Very useful with a sensitive defect disk, at least ti image it before it's totally dead. It may take hours !!!
Didn't have a T5100 but I did have a somewhat later one, a T3100/20. It unfortunately had a dead floppy disk controller. I've had several of those old Conner hard disks and not one had failed on me.
Yeah this one wants to work but the spindle motor is sticking I guess. I don't see a way to get it open and lubricate like you can on other drives. The t3100 was a decent machine... lighter and smaller tha the t5100 I think.
@@TechTimeTraveller I don't think the T3100 was a whole lot smaller. I think the hard disk worked in mine but I couldn't get the floppy disk drive working.
I have a Pentium 2 Toshiba laptop from 1999. it still worked last time I powered it up, but the screen is cracked... Had it running Linux and could get online. Only thing it couldn't do is videos.
The versawriter tablet - does it have two potentiometers or or two rotatory encoders ? It can be interfaced with arduino. We can also write a software in processing for the same
keep hearing about vintage computer collectors running out of space... gee, how much is too much? I'd LOVE to have this "problem." I don't have ANY vintage computers at the moment. The best one I had burnt up in a fire, and it's too expensive for me to replace.
That's not how you use a mechanical digitiser! Move the puck to the end of a line, press a button, move it to the other end, press a button, and you have a straight line connecting the points. (It's also not so much a script, either, just a very primitive vector markup system.)
There's usually always a few T series laptops on ebay and if you're patient you can grab one pretty cheap. I love the amber myself.. I actually had one I brought to school (wasn't very popular though.. it was noisy and the key clacking annoyed people). But I enjoyed it.. til my friend dropped it and smashed the screen.
I had that exact VersaWriter for my Atari 65XE. Found it absolutely useless at the time. Probably due to calibration issues and being a kid unable to do it right.
Binging all your story videos (UA-cam recommended your hard drive brick video). In spite of watching other retro channels I've learned about a lot of new-to-me machines!
the mouse electronics only need to read the resistance (whatever) value of the arm joints, as angle, maybe also a linear axis resistance value (radial potentiometer linearization)
Yeah I never realized that they locked the BIOS.. but I suppose that's handy in the sense that you don't have to guess much about what the correct parameters are. I wonder if one could shoehorn in a newer IDE drive with the special capacity block jumper and maybe format it for whatever capacities they support? Kind of rusty on this stuff.
@@TechTimeTraveller This brings back old memories. Now I do remember that there were some software you could use to get around the HDD limitations of the BIOS. If I remember correctly it installed on the boot sector and bypassed the HDD I/O routines in the BIOS. So to the OS and partitioning software the full drive capacity was available. It's been so long since I used it that I can't remember what it was called. I have a feeling some HDD manufacturers provided this software, but they all bought their licenses from the same company. Another option was to use a controller card that supported large drives. So called HardCards were expansion cards with a HDD controller and a 3½" HDD. You slotted it in an ISA slot and the controller on the card took care of making the HDD accessible without you having to touch the HDD settings in the BIOS or configuring it using DIP switches or jumpers. You might still have to set some jumpers on the HDD card to make sure it didn't conflict with anything else in the computer. SCSI or ESDI was another possibility, but ESDI was basically dead when IDE became common and SCSI was the big boy I/O interface and a lot of people newer really understood how to use it. I thought it was pretty simple. Set one SCSI ID number for each device installed on the SCSI chain and make sure there were not ID conflicts. Terminate each end of the chain, and only there, and make sure termination power is enabled, usually only on the first and last device. Again you might have to configure IRQ, I/O address and memory address using jumpers to avoid conflicts. The cards firmware should load during post and display a list of connected devices. Once your HDD's show here you should be good to go. Heck, you might actually feel things like this has become easier today than they were back then, and you shouldn't be wrong in thinking that.
IIRC, it's because gas plasma screens are more like CRTs in that they update line by line, pixel by pixel, rather than just turning pixels on or off like an LCD does. I think. So you get the wave effect on camera because the refresh rate is outside the camera's range.
@@Sashko_Dee rather late but, it's _eventually_ what ended-up becoming plasma TVs! But of course those use a very complex array of red, green, and blue plasma cells. While these are just one very big plasma cell (hence monochrome), controlled much like a CRT was :)
For the Snap 1+1 - is it possible that those thumbscrew looking things are just to lock it in when you don't want to use the snap functionality? I imagine it'd be convenient to be able to lock it in if you know you're not going to be moving around much, but if you were on/off the dock constantly you could leave them unlocked?
That's a good thought! Additionally.. I discovered the screen 'snaps' out.. apparently they sold several different versions of screen and people could switch between them for different applications. But that's a good thought.. maybe those screws just hold it securely when it's being toted around a lot.
I really appreciate the effort you put in for the short newspaper segment at 0:43. Full page of content. What a good laugh! Thanks!
My dad had a Versawriter and made all kinds of artwork with it! Later he bought the more expensive Apple Graphics Tablet. With the art he made with one of those, he won a computer art contest sponsored by Epson computer that sent my family to Japan when I was around 10 years old.
The Albert was very interesting, it's kind of reminiscent of the PC clones that would take over the market not long after, copy an existing architecture, but lay on a bunch of features that didn't normally come standard.
I remember our store selling those Versawriter things. They are very crude. It's basically a couple of game controls that plug in with software that computed the position bases on the angles. It was sold as a very cheap alternative to Apple's Graphics Tablet which was much more precise.
😀 I'd forgotten about the Hamster Dance!
The digitizer brought memories back. I build one in school around 1987 to digitize geographic maps into a GIS system I wrote in turbo pascal on an XT or AT. The accuracy and sample rate was horrible (8 bit ADC) so it was replaced quickly by a professional CAD digitizer . I love your choice of collecting rare and unusual machines. Thank you for showing.
Sound Warning: I tried my best to eliminate any possiblity of CRT or transformer whine with a notch filter. I cannot hear thar frequency myself, and I don't think there were any machines featured that produced it.. but just in case.. beware. :)
I'd recommend better normalizing the insanely loud audio effects (like during the "unfridging" graphics) before worrying about coil whine.
Don't worry, most of the people watching this are getting up there too.
Haha if only,im rather young and old tech warms my heart@@roberte2945
"I thought Coco was just his mistress" killed me, the idea of retro collecting being worse than an affair 😆
The video text terminal can be connected to internet using USB dial up modem and a raspberry pi zero hosting the server connected to Wi-Fi.
Alternatively you an use a esp32 to interface it directly to a remote server.
Yes I was thinking similarly. I seem to recall someone had created a videotex server of sorts but I cannot find it now.
@24:30 So that is why the image gets drawn that way! I always thought it was down to a memory limitation. Love the channel. I'm learning tons of fun stuff about old tech.
You and "8-Bit Show And Tell" are the best Canadian retro - tech UA-camrs.
Thank you!
@@TechTimeTraveller The amount of effort you put in your videos is awesome and are criminally under-viewed.
The VersaWriter is a great find. I wanted one of those back in the early 80s, but they were so expensive.
Back in 1980/81 or thereabouts a high school friend of mine and I collaborated to make our own VersaWriter for his Apple ][ Europlus, after seeing the ad in BYTE. I did the mechanicals and he wrote the software. It worked but wasn't very accurate as we used cheap carbon pots not high precision wirewound units.
@@1944GPW I didn't try that but I built a light pen using instructions from a magazine. It worked but not great.
Thinkpad 760E represent!!! My grandpa handed one of those down to me as a kid and I as well have fond memories of these machines. I have 4 760's (3 working, 1 parts) great laptops.
Man that intro sequence is truely excellent!
Hey TTS, when I used to do a small bit of audio work, I would import audio streams into Adobe Audition to do all the work, it’s spectrogram view really helped me spot irregularities like pops, clicks, and whines without having to hear them myself!
Cool whine is particularly easy to spot when using a spectrogram.
That's what I was trying to do. I don't think there was any this time fortunately.. but I did try to seek it out in Audition and use notch filter to kill it. Problem is since I can't hear it in the first place, I can seldom be 100% sure apart from trusting the display.
I loved my Versawriter! I couldn't afford the Apple graphics tablet, but I wanted to draw. I lived near the company that made Versawriters and I called them up and found out i could buy one directly and got a ride up there. I don't remember the native software being that bad. I used to copy comic book covers with it.
Based on the auction notice in the video I found out that I grew up 9 blocks from Albert Computer in Northridge :)
I remember a lot of this stuff and it makes me feel old.
I still have an ex-govt. T3200SXC with Math co-processor in my Attic. Those weren't Lap Tops, they were fully fledged Luggable Lap Top Form Factor Desktop PC's. That got used well into the late 90's. They were an interesting machine, the C variant cost $18,000 Au at the time, came custom manufactured from Japan, and it's screen was a first of it's kind Hand Made 800x600 SVGA LCD alone costing $10,000 Au, iirc that was back in 1991. One painful problem with the 32C is that in order to save silicon they kept their Bios settings and firmware data in a hidden partition on the hard drive, which meant if the Partition was damaged in any way the entire system would be bricked and had to be sent back to Toshiba and be fitted with a new HDD (Thanks DOS6.22 Doublespace!).
LMAO at that newspaper report in the beginning as well as the animations.
I have one of these Toshiba T5100. The screen is 640x400 and if you install Windows 3.1, you can use the Compaq Gas Plasma driver to run Windows in native resolution, unfortunately at 1bpp instead of 4. And your EGA monitor won't sync it.
This stuff is WAY before my time I started with Win XP back in the day and here in germany we dont have much older stuff so I allways love to just see random video about computer stuff My Biggest score was a C64 and a Zenith PC Clone !
Lovely video ! I hope for a part 3
just found your channel today via the great videos about the miniscribe fiasco and don lancaster's tv typewriter. i know.. extremely little about how computers work/computer history and everything you've shown is a good bit older than me, but your presentation/editing is engaging, jokes funny, and enthusiasm contagious! im looking forward to watching through the backlog of your videos (i've been finding them perfect to tune into as i draw!) :)
1:17 Ooooo...I want to see the Intercolor 3600 terminal please! Yes!!!
Several interesting things... the VideoText... which you could probably connect direct modem-to-modem to a bbs. (if it takes hayes commands, so much more the better)
The Albert... which is totally new to me....
The laptop with ega and gas-plasma display....
Great video, that Snap 1+1 looks like a cool project!
Regarding the T5100 HDD problems, I had a similar issue with my T3200SX, just with a 256 MB CF card. I have the modded BIOS, which adds the XTIDE BIOS as well, so the laptop will boot with any HDD, not just the factory Conner. When I partitioned the CF card and installed MS-DOS on it on my Compaq Armada 1530 (before I would actually have the Toshiba), it wouldn't boot off of that card. If I did the partitioning and DOS installation on the Toshiba, it would boot fine, and even plugging the card into a USB card reader wouldn't damage the boot sector or system files :) However since it's quite hard to get to the HDD/CF card, I installed an Ethernet card into the 8 bit ISA slot (the 16 bit one has a SoundBlaster 16), and I just FTP the files over thanks to mTCP and the included FTP server application.
I bought one of those AT&T 1300 terminals. I'd read that some of the later models have Yamaha V9938 video chips in them, but this one has a TMS9118N like the TI-99/4A and the original MSX, and the main CPU is a TMS7001NL-4 8-bit microcontroller, 16K OTP ROM, a 1K EEPROM, and I think the only RAM is 128 bytes in the MCU and 16KB video ram.
Nice video! Love the work you do.
Thinkpad 760 was quite a nice machine.
Oh.. when starting a very old drive for the first time in many years, you may want to warm it up to about body temperature, that tends to help old lubricants.
Back in the day, I had a business repairing laptops. When a Toshiba 5100 came in one day with a broken (owner punched it in frustration) display, I contacted my parts guy for the cost of the display. $2000+ was the quote. The owner didn't want to confess to breaking the screen, and was planning on paying for the new screen himself. When he found out the repair was going to be $2500, he came back and took the unit out of our facility. He was back five minutes later with the laptop, now completely broken. We wrote up a repair order for $4200, including various parts of the case and a keyboard, and suggested he get a newer, non-plasma, Toshiba (which was about $5k and three times faster). He left the laptop with us, and his employer said to give him a new Toshiba. After transferring his files to the new laptop, we wiped it and then sold the machine as parts.
Yup. I ran into this with my own.. I had a T3100 that my Dad gave me for school. Loved having it. One day I was showing it to my friend and his brother, and the brother was seated on a bench and had it on his lap.... lost his grip and it crashed to the floor. Didn't even hit that hard but it was enough to shatter the screen. He offered to pay - until we were quoted around $1500 to replace it. They couldn't afford that. My Dad chewed me out pretty good too. Basically just kept the base and used it as an extra desktop computer until I traded it in for something else. I kinda laugh now given a 1920x1080 color LCD is only $100ish.
When I started working the first and second gens thinkpads were becoming obsolete and being replaced by newer units, I wanted one badly but they were still expensive. I got a pda (cheap casio thing) then found a deal for a massive 1996 second hand Dell, years later I got my first new laptop a Tecra A10.
That t5100 is neat I just only recently got a t5200/100 in working condition for the price of nothing as it was in the ewaste pile of my university same with a whole lot of other stuff like a pdp11/44, two Dec rl01 hard drives, unbuilt zx 81 kit and zx80, a research machines RM380z plus a lot more stuff I can’t be bothered to name.
cant wait to see more about the albert! great content!
I've got an old Concord Model C-1214 duel floppy drive that is missing the top, supposed to be Apple II compatible but it looks like the drive your Albert Apple II clone is supposed to have.
Of course an IBM 5100 costs US$ 9900, it is the only computer John Titor can use to save the world in the future.
And here I was foolishly thinking that my ThinkPad T420 was a brick
If you use Linux, you can use "hdparm" , a tool for IDE hard disks, which enable to slow the access speed and rotation. Very useful with a sensitive defect disk, at least ti image it before it's totally dead.
It may take hours !!!
I think the polarizing film is delaminating from the snap computer. Might be able to replace it.
Wait, did he say THREE HUNDRED??? And I thought I had a space problem with twenty five. 😀
Didn't have a T5100 but I did have a somewhat later one, a T3100/20. It unfortunately had a dead floppy disk controller.
I've had several of those old Conner hard disks and not one had failed on me.
Yeah this one wants to work but the spindle motor is sticking I guess. I don't see a way to get it open and lubricate like you can on other drives. The t3100 was a decent machine... lighter and smaller tha the t5100 I think.
@@TechTimeTraveller I don't think the T3100 was a whole lot smaller. I think the hard disk worked in mine but I couldn't get the floppy disk drive working.
I have a Pentium 2 Toshiba laptop from 1999. it still worked last time I powered it up, but the screen is cracked... Had it running Linux and could get online. Only thing it couldn't do is videos.
The versawriter tablet - does it have two potentiometers or or two rotatory encoders ? It can be interfaced with arduino. We can also write a software in processing for the same
I believe it has two potentiometers, ine in each pivot point on the arm.
keep hearing about vintage computer collectors running out of space... gee, how much is too much? I'd LOVE to have this "problem." I don't have ANY vintage computers at the moment. The best one I had burnt up in a fire, and it's too expensive for me to replace.
Trust me.. this is a problem you don't want.. lol. My interest borders on obsession sometimes.
@@TechTimeTraveller I'll hold onto one for ya. hahaha.
Are you ever able to recover anything from the hard drives in these old computers -- either software or data?
Do you think that the AT&T 1300 would be able to dial into your homebrew BBS if you connected it with a null modem cable?
I imagine it would if I could tap into the serial IO.
That's not how you use a mechanical digitiser! Move the puck to the end of a line, press a button, move it to the other end, press a button, and you have a straight line connecting the points. (It's also not so much a script, either, just a very primitive vector markup system.)
Ah. I had read Williams' tools were more like freehand drawing. Now I'm really looking forward to trying it out!
I'm really looking for one of those orange plasma or EL display laptops as a non internet connected writing computer.
There's usually always a few T series laptops on ebay and if you're patient you can grab one pretty cheap. I love the amber myself.. I actually had one I brought to school (wasn't very popular though.. it was noisy and the key clacking annoyed people). But I enjoyed it.. til my friend dropped it and smashed the screen.
@@TechTimeTraveller yeah the ones I've seen are either somewhat affordable with an untested screen, or in the hundreds of $.
I had that exact VersaWriter for my Atari 65XE. Found it absolutely useless at the time. Probably due to calibration issues and being a kid unable to do it right.
Just from my messing around with it briefly I find it very cumbersome. The one I showed for the Apple 2 with the pen was way more intuitive.
Hmm so thats the genesis of the agi engines way of handling graphics until vga days
Binging all your story videos (UA-cam recommended your hard drive brick video). In spite of watching other retro channels I've learned about a lot of new-to-me machines!
T5100 HDD difference between XT IDE and AT IDE.
how about the spring out mouse, but the robot arm is the mouse, not the mouse itself (no optics, or ball), just some buttons on the robot arm
can fold fully inside the computer, for storage, out of the way
the mouse electronics only need to read the resistance (whatever) value of the arm joints, as angle, maybe also a linear axis resistance value (radial potentiometer linearization)
I have a T5100 - it's a tank! Unfortunately the BIOS is pretty limited about which HDD it can handle.
Yeah I never realized that they locked the BIOS.. but I suppose that's handy in the sense that you don't have to guess much about what the correct parameters are. I wonder if one could shoehorn in a newer IDE drive with the special capacity block jumper and maybe format it for whatever capacities they support? Kind of rusty on this stuff.
@@TechTimeTraveller This brings back old memories. Now I do remember that there were some software you could use to get around the HDD limitations of the BIOS. If I remember correctly it installed on the boot sector and bypassed the HDD I/O routines in the BIOS. So to the OS and partitioning software the full drive capacity was available. It's been so long since I used it that I can't remember what it was called. I have a feeling some HDD manufacturers provided this software, but they all bought their licenses from the same company.
Another option was to use a controller card that supported large drives. So called HardCards were expansion cards with a HDD controller and a 3½" HDD. You slotted it in an ISA slot and the controller on the card took care of making the HDD accessible without you having to touch the HDD settings in the BIOS or configuring it using DIP switches or jumpers. You might still have to set some jumpers on the HDD card to make sure it didn't conflict with anything else in the computer.
SCSI or ESDI was another possibility, but ESDI was basically dead when IDE became common and SCSI was the big boy I/O interface and a lot of people newer really understood how to use it. I thought it was pretty simple. Set one SCSI ID number for each device installed on the SCSI chain and make sure there were not ID conflicts. Terminate each end of the chain, and only there, and make sure termination power is enabled, usually only on the first and last device. Again you might have to configure IRQ, I/O address and memory address using jumpers to avoid conflicts. The cards firmware should load during post and display a list of connected devices. Once your HDD's show here you should be good to go.
Heck, you might actually feel things like this has become easier today than they were back then, and you shouldn't be wrong in thinking that.
Nostalgia costs. How much are you willing to pay?
@12:05 Why is there a rolling shutter effect?
IIRC, it's because gas plasma screens are more like CRTs in that they update line by line, pixel by pixel, rather than just turning pixels on or off like an LCD does. I think. So you get the wave effect on camera because the refresh rate is outside the camera's range.
@@TechTimeTraveller Thank you for the detailed explanation. I didn't even know about gas plasma technology until now.
@@Sashko_Dee rather late but, it's _eventually_ what ended-up becoming plasma TVs! But of course those use a very complex array of red, green, and blue plasma cells. While these are just one very big plasma cell (hence monochrome), controlled much like a CRT was :)
For the Snap 1+1 - is it possible that those thumbscrew looking things are just to lock it in when you don't want to use the snap functionality? I imagine it'd be convenient to be able to lock it in if you know you're not going to be moving around much, but if you were on/off the dock constantly you could leave them unlocked?
That's a good thought! Additionally.. I discovered the screen 'snaps' out.. apparently they sold several different versions of screen and people could switch between them for different applications. But that's a good thought.. maybe those screws just hold it securely when it's being toted around a lot.
Anyone interested in a Thinkpad T60?