I know I'm very late to this party, but your "Elephant" quote had me laughing: I was working in PC retail in the early 80s, and with IBM's original DOS disks there was a basic program called "ELEPHNT.BAS" which ran on a CGA colour adapter, and featured a basic animation of a tap-dancing Elephant! Also: IBM responded to the Compaq "menace" by making their own IBM portable PC, with an Amber screen. It was such a rush job that IBM's own DisplayWrite word-processor didn't work on it's screen! (Amber text on an Amber background, oops!) -and they had to rush out a DOS patch version that fiddled with display properties so it would finally run properly. Another feather in the Compaq's hat was how rugged and "bounce-proof" it was (a good thing considering the weight!) - If you dropped a Compaq portable on a hard surface, it would bounce and pop off a couple of panels, but was otherwise intact. A salesman took an IBM portable with him on the train to demo to a potential customer, and accidentally dropped it from 1 metre onto the station platform... apparently it spread out into a pile of electronics several metres across and never worked again!
I watched that thing come down the carousel in Newark and at LaGuardia early '90s, and it made it out to Harlem and Columbia with me every week for 3 months! Hats off to whoever put that thing together, and hats off to the 10 MB hard card I had which gave me the huge build I needed to bill the customer into the next decade and beyond!
Takes me back, my first IT job was configuring IBM PC's with AST Rampage cards adding 256K of RAM (lots of chips) and a real time battery backed clock, I always preferred the Compaq's over the IBM's, have a look for a Compaq SLT luggable PC Thanks for the vid and keep them up pls
On today's episode of 'Things UA-cam advertised and I clicked on...' Not that I regret the click. Very slick production, reminds me of Nostalgia Nerd and Laird's Lair. You've got a sub :D
I never had a green screen as a kid, and even now - there's something so retro-futuristic about them. I think it was their consistent use in films like Alien and The Thing that just made me believe that everything in the future would be displayed in green.
My first PC was a clone from Jameco in the coolest flip-top case. 1988. It has CGA graphics and a Panasonic dot matrix printer. We were running the NEC VC20 10 mhz chip. 20 mb MFM. We played Stonedale and text based adventures, but I twisted my dad’s arm to get us a VGA monitor and board-and eventually a Harris 286-16 motherboard with a whopping 4mb ram. Then we could play games, even run windows 3.1. That was key for my midi adventures. Miss those days.
My first PC was a 386DX with a whole 4Mb of RAM, which was a good spec when it was made, unfortunately by the time I had it the min spec for most games was a 486SX 25mhz.
Thank you, I have a few more videos planned and if people like them I'll make some more after that. I don't think this is ever going to be a huge channel and that's not really what I am aiming for, but if a few people like the videos I will keep going.
@@RetroBytesUK It's VERY hard to get noticed on UA-cam, I think the important thing is to make content that you enjoy. That's what I try to do. If anyone else watches it and likes it then it's worthwhile!
@@WhatHoSnorkers I think your spot on those do who have channels that have done really well are extreamly good at what they do, but have probably had a little bit of luck to break through as well.
@@RetroBytesUK Some of it is down to timing, as in 10 years ago it was easier. It's hard being found by the algorithm, although the Algo did suggest that I watch an Octy video so it DOES work. Octav1us benefitted from a shout out from Daniel Ibbertson. Octav1us did a shout out vid on small youtubers and from THAT vid I became a Patreon of OneCreditClassics. The key takeaway from Ashens' interview is don't go into it for the money and the fame, do it because you like it.
This was my first computer. Well, not mine exactly as it belonged to my dad's employer. But he would lug it home for me on weekends and I spent a lot of hours playing around. It was on that machine that I first learned to code BASIC, among many other things. This video was a fun nostalgia trip.
I wrote code for a small software company back in the day. They got a Compaq early on and, have worked on IMB PC's, I was blown away by the start up graphic that spelled out "Compaq" with a laser like beam. It was way to heavy to carry around but Ok to throw in the trunk of the car (boot) and bring to client demos. They didn't sell very many but it was a very nice machine for the time.
Compatibility and Quality. What a time it was to be alive and still be alive. We’ve experienced telephony innovation and computer innovation. Moore’s law in full effect.
I remember walking into a business computer shop to buy a pack of 5.25" floppies, probably for my C64 (before upgrading to an Amstrad PC512). Sales man saw me oggling the demo running on a Compaq, so got me to hold the keyboard while he lifted the running machine in the air and dropped it a couple of feet onto the desk, where it just rebooted and ran the demo again. I was very impressed at the time
This takes me back I got my first pc in my last year of a levels just before university. I worked the school holidays setting up a bunch of pcs for word processing, they were Hyundai 10mhz 8088 with Hercules graphics and 20mb hdds. After setting up 6 of them and training the staff to use them, I had earned enough to buy my own but with a 40mb hdd and cga graphics on a Philips 8833 monitor. After having the pc 3months I worked out that the graphics card was ega compatible (change a number of jumpers) and the Phillip monitor would support ega. Massive results
Its kind of unique that your videos start at a story worth telling, to end up with a machine worth showing and fixing it too. Like lgr stories with oddware combined. Idk if it works, idk if people stay to watch to the end enough. If not, you could always decide to split the videos. Or to edit both parts in with eachother instead of 2 sections
I am trying to mix the hardware it a bit more at the beginning so poeple know it's coming. It seemed to work with the victor9000 as a higher percentage of people watched to the end, so I will probably mix the hardware in a lot more through out the story elements.
My first PC was either IBM PC and/or a Compaq deskpro, but I definitely remember that distinction magenta CGA pallet. Especially for Accolades F1 Grand Prix. Saying that I do remember CGA having different pallets and I think some games used them. Then again this is some 30 odd years ago.
Yep. There were 3 pallets, with 2 brightness modes each, so de-facto 6 four color pallets. From the 4 colors of the pallet one (background color) was always black. F1 and Alley Cat (or was it Stray Cat?) were using Pallet 1, high brightness, while my favorite game, Digger was in low-brightness Pallet 0 (Brown, Green, Orange), accompanied by version of Hot Butter's Popcorn...
Loved the video, but I've spotted one tiny inaccuracy. You've said that developers had no choice in terms of colors using CGA, but that is not really true. CGA had 6 color palettes to choose from. Though all of them looked like crap without the composite color blending thing.
My first house owned PC was a Pentium 166 MHz with 16mb of RAM and a 2 MB cirrus logic video card. Quite the multimedia machine at the time. Played a lot on cool games on this machine.
Nice! I wasn't far. I had a Pentium 75 MHz with 16mb of Ram and 1 MB of Cirrus Logic video memory, it was on board. On top of that I had a "quad speed" CD-ROM (4x). It was a Packard Bell from Best Buy with Win95. Luckily it had expansion sockets so I was able to expand the video memory to 2 MB! Yay! I was also able to overclock to 133MHz. That enabled me to play MS Flight Simulator 95. I thought I was really fancy with my MS Sidewinder joystick Haha. Good times!
Thank you for the subscription it means alot that people are taking the time to subscribe, it's really encouraging me to make more videos. The version of Tetris is, Resident Tetris by NEXA Corp. It's the version I used to play as a kid as well, mostly at school, sssh don't tell any of my teachers I think I got away with it.
My first PC was a TRS-80 with a cassette drive. I spent hours typing in code from magazines and playing the resultant games. Zork, man. Freaking Zork. Wow. I never did learn how to code, despite all that work, though. LOLZ. In my teens, I did have a Kaypro 5 that ran CP/M. It was a crazy machine. Those "luggables" were insane.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX80. I also didn’t have a green screen like the other commenter but my dad had an early ish orange screen Toshiba laptop. I still have a 1-bit Macintosh SE/30 so accustomed to just 1 color. There is something both nostalgic but also pure about the simplicity of single colour screens.
The IBM /MSDOS version of Tetris by Spectrum Holobyte was actually the first commercial offering of Tetris. The OG! Played it on my Tandy 1000 when I was a young. Followed by offerings in Europe for various micros by Mirrorsoft. Before that a version for IBM /MSDOS machines was made by the original programmer in Russia which began to circulate around Europe several months prior to the commercial release. It was brought back from Russia by someone who negotiated the deal for the rights to the game. He brought it back as an evaluation copy and it began to spread first around Hungary. (I saw a documentary years ago about Tetris. This is the little I can remember.)
Great video, my first pc was an IBM pc xt way over his live span, and I have to fix it. Anyway I got a decent amd k6-2 running by years until I have to upgrade by windows XP time. The old computers are like a mistery to me because it was hard back then to fix it.
Our family's first PC was an ICL DRS M30. AMD 286 at 12 or 16 MHz (can't remember which), VGA graphics, 2 MB RAM, 100 MB hard disk. I recall it was MS-DOS 3.3 because that hard disk was partitioned into 3 x 32 MB, the max that DOS 3.3 allowed, plus one small one for the tiny bit of space remaining. It came with Windows 3.0 so must have been summer 1990. Looking it up, it was apparently a rebadged Acer, or maybe Acer built them under contract. It's an obscure machine to have: I think my Dad must have got it on a staff discount, because he'd worked for ICL for about 20 years at that point. But it was a pretty big step up from the ZX Spectrum 48K we had previously!
In the very early 90s, I had a Compaq desktop that I'd rescued from the bin at work... very similar to this but in a more "traditional" desktop case and with a "massive" 20MB hard drive. The foam and foil keyboard was already starting to fail even that long ago and the hard drive was starting to stick on power on too... but I loved it's green screen. I still remember when the original IBM-PC came out, I had been using Beebs and CP/M machines for a few years and a PDP-11 for a couple more I expected this new 16-bit micro to be something really special... but it was just the same as the CP/M machines or maybe even not quite as good. Fine, the manuals were in some very very expensive bindings but (what these days, we'd call) the UX was... "meh!"... I think the most "meh!" of my entire life. Then, a few years later, my mate got his Amiga and that was a lot more like I'd been expecting - at least that had multi-tasking.
Ah, yes... I was given one of these in January. I haven't even plugged it in yet because it seems like that blown rail is a common issue on these things if not electrics in general... I haven't even had it open yet. I hope to look at it soon.
The Compaq was not "the first ever IBM compatible PC". It was the first _legal_ IBM compatible PC to sell in large numbers. There were numerous PC clones before the Compaq, but most of them got in trouble for illegally copying IBM's ROM BIOS code.
Yep as you said there was the odd one or two that straight up copied IBM's bios (and yet in some cases where far from fully IBM compat), that sold in small numbers before IBM shut them down that shipped before the compaq. I think I mentioned one example Eagle in a passing joke in the starwars bit who IBM sued and forced to stop manufacture as a nod to the less than legit PCs that predated Compaq. Your right however its good to point it out explicitly.
Great channel! The Art of Nosie "Close (to the Edit) " background music really sold me. Does anyone have a link for this version of "Close (to the Edit)"?
In 1989 I was in college and taking a Pascal programming class. I didn't have my own PC, but a coworker's husband loaned me his Heathkit portable PC that was a clone of the Compaq portable. Dual floppies, 4.77 Mhz. Saved me a lot of time by not having to go to the campus and use the lab.
My very first experience with computers was the Tandy 3000, I recall having to load a boot disc and then finding a master rom that had all these games on it that my older brother and Uncle had setup. Shit was cool and I regret getting rid of it and all the floppies we had.
My grandfather had one of these. I used to love to play The Bard's Tale on it when I visited. I might be mistaken, but I think his only had one floppy drive and some gigantic (probably 20 or 40 MB) hard disk in the other bay.
We called these Luggables. Apple made a Macintosh Portable a couple of years later that used a 6V 'motor-scooter battery' for power. It weight a bit less than the Compaq, but it was not a bad first attempt at a truly cord cutting computer. Grid Computing kinda upstaged everyone with the first portable desktop class computer than fit in a briefcase. Apple soon answered with the Powerbook 100 designed by Apple, but built by Sony.
I might struggle with this one too, but I'm going to try my best to get videos out on a fairly regular schedual. It takes more effort than I realised to make these things, and I thought it would take a fair amount, but hopfully with each one I will speed up a little bit as I get more familure with the tools.
@@RetroBytesUK I never know how long mine will take. Last scripted thing I did real quick, for me anyway, like 3 weeks. I've had ones be at some stage for a year though. Mostly due to laziness though. I think for this sort of thing getting one done every few weeks/ once a month, is a solid doable pace. Just a case of finding the time and motivation really. Provided you're not making some epic length thing of course.
Well, my first PC was when I was quite young. Probably five or so. Dial up internet. Don't really remember anything else about it, apart from it running Windows 98. The first one I owned myself was my mom's previous after she bought a new one. I do recall it being a Compaq; I know it had 512mb of ram and an 80gb hard drive, with some flavor of pentium or celeron cpu. That would have been around 2006 or 2007, and it definitely wasn't new when I got it. Windows XP. Killed it with a virus from Limewire. Classic. I went from that to my own first PC that I bought myself; it had some flavor of AMD Athlon cpu from 2008, nvidia 6150se graphics, 3gb ram, and a 1tb hard drive. I thought I had myself a gaming monster, because it ran the original Halo. Ha! A friend of mine ripped all the parts out, put it in a new case with a larger power supply, and threw in a spare GTX 560 that he had in a drawer, and man, what a difference. I could play games with my friends! Moved from that to the first dedicated gaming PC I bought myself, with an FX-6300 and a GTX 1060, which I realize now was a somewhat mismatched pairing and not particularly good value. 16gb of ram though, and it was my first PC to run Windows on an SSD, so that was still a great experience regardless. About a year and a half ago, I learned to build my own, and I've got a Ryzen 5950x, 32gb ram, 12tb of SSD storage (and two 12tb hard drives on top!) with a 3080ti. Quite different from where I started. Love working on PCs. I've built nearly two dozen since I learned how, mostly for other people. It's a really fun thing to get into. Quite a long path to get here. I'll be 30 next year.
First PC was a compaq business machine of some sort in the mid 90s. Then a presario at some point. Hard. To remember exactly. First machine was windows 95 tho
Ah the Compaq Luggable... innovative but not really portable. The SLT line was much better at not ripping your arm off, although they were still pretty heavy beasts.
Thanks to every one who helped encourage me todo this, and ZombieWorkshop for doing some of the graphics for me.
can you link to the company making parts and cards for this... I am in the middle of restoring one myself
@@awsomedude0698 Here you go, good luck with the restore texelec.com/
I know I'm very late to this party, but your "Elephant" quote had me laughing: I was working in PC retail in the early 80s, and with IBM's original DOS disks there was a basic program called "ELEPHNT.BAS" which ran on a CGA colour adapter, and featured a basic animation of a tap-dancing Elephant!
Also: IBM responded to the Compaq "menace" by making their own IBM portable PC, with an Amber screen. It was such a rush job that IBM's own DisplayWrite word-processor didn't work on it's screen! (Amber text on an Amber background, oops!) -and they had to rush out a DOS patch version that fiddled with display properties so it would finally run properly.
Another feather in the Compaq's hat was how rugged and "bounce-proof" it was (a good thing considering the weight!) - If you dropped a Compaq portable on a hard surface, it would bounce and pop off a couple of panels, but was otherwise intact. A salesman took an IBM portable with him on the train to demo to a potential customer, and accidentally dropped it from 1 metre onto the station platform... apparently it spread out into a pile of electronics several metres across and never worked again!
I watched that thing come down the carousel in Newark and at LaGuardia early '90s, and it made it out to Harlem and Columbia with me every week for 3 months! Hats off to whoever put that thing together, and hats off to the 10 MB hard card I had which gave me the huge build I needed to bill the customer into the next decade and beyond!
Takes me back, my first IT job was configuring IBM PC's with AST Rampage cards adding 256K of RAM (lots of chips) and a real time battery backed clock, I always preferred the Compaq's over the IBM's, have a look for a Compaq SLT luggable PC
Thanks for the vid and keep them up pls
On today's episode of 'Things UA-cam advertised and I clicked on...'
Not that I regret the click. Very slick production, reminds me of Nostalgia Nerd and Laird's Lair. You've got a sub :D
I never had a green screen as a kid, and even now - there's something so retro-futuristic about them. I think it was their consistent use in films like Alien and The Thing that just made me believe that everything in the future would be displayed in green.
That and a text based interface would be the future, with the occasional low resolution graphic thrown in.
I had green. I also had amber for my college 286. I liked amber. Everyone in the house liked Rogue.
Be glad. I had a green monochrome. I was always envious of the amber monochrome crowd.
I agree the future was green from all the movies. I especially thought so with the first Xbox too
Try "cool retro term"
Probably my favorite compaq video on the youtubes :) Thanks for making great videos!
Only recently algorithms suggested I should see your videos, they are impressive as hell. Well done!
My first PC was a clone from Jameco in the coolest flip-top case. 1988. It has CGA graphics and a Panasonic dot matrix printer. We were running the NEC VC20 10 mhz chip. 20 mb MFM. We played Stonedale and text based adventures, but I twisted my dad’s arm to get us a VGA monitor and board-and eventually a Harris 286-16 motherboard with a whopping 4mb ram. Then we could play games, even run windows 3.1. That was key for my midi adventures. Miss those days.
I’m very impressed because I’m 15 years old and I love ibm and I’m so surprised that a small channel could make SUCH GOOD CONTENT THANK YOU 😊
My first PC was a 386DX with a whole 4Mb of RAM, which was a good spec when it was made, unfortunately by the time I had it the min spec for most games was a 486SX 25mhz.
My first pc was a 486 dx with 8 meg ram a 1 mb video card 2x cdrom and a 16 bit sound blaster. I bought it used in 1994 for 900 dollars.
Excellent work sir. Thoroughly interesting throughout, and you've gained a subscriber!
Thank you, I have a few more videos planned and if people like them I'll make some more after that. I don't think this is ever going to be a huge channel and that's not really what I am aiming for, but if a few people like the videos I will keep going.
@@RetroBytesUK It's VERY hard to get noticed on UA-cam, I think the important thing is to make content that you enjoy. That's what I try to do. If anyone else watches it and likes it then it's worthwhile!
@@WhatHoSnorkers I think your spot on those do who have channels that have done really well are extreamly good at what they do, but have probably had a little bit of luck to break through as well.
@@RetroBytesUK Some of it is down to timing, as in 10 years ago it was easier. It's hard being found by the algorithm, although the Algo did suggest that I watch an Octy video so it DOES work.
Octav1us benefitted from a shout out from Daniel Ibbertson. Octav1us did a shout out vid on small youtubers and from THAT vid I became a Patreon of OneCreditClassics.
The key takeaway from Ashens' interview is don't go into it for the money and the fame, do it because you like it.
This was my first computer. Well, not mine exactly as it belonged to my dad's employer. But he would lug it home for me on weekends and I spent a lot of hours playing around. It was on that machine that I first learned to code BASIC, among many other things. This video was a fun nostalgia trip.
I wrote code for a small software company back in the day. They got a Compaq early on and, have worked on IMB PC's, I was blown away by the start up graphic that spelled out "Compaq" with a laser like beam. It was way to heavy to carry around but Ok to throw in the trunk of the car (boot) and bring to client demos. They didn't sell very many but it was a very nice machine for the time.
I found this video through ad while watching LGR, clicked, and I liked it,
Subbed, and please make more.
Same here
Great video. Enjoyed the mix of general information and information about the specific machine.
I miss DOS PCs
I miss them too, the late 80's early/mid 90's was my favourate period of PC gaming.
Compatibility and Quality. What a time it was to be alive and still be alive. We’ve experienced telephony innovation and computer innovation. Moore’s law in full effect.
I remember walking into a business computer shop to buy a pack of 5.25" floppies, probably for my C64 (before upgrading to an Amstrad PC512). Sales man saw me oggling the demo running on a Compaq, so got me to hold the keyboard while he lifted the running machine in the air and dropped it a couple of feet onto the desk, where it just rebooted and ran the demo again. I was very impressed at the time
This takes me back I got my first pc in my last year of a levels just before university. I worked the school holidays setting up a bunch of pcs for word processing, they were Hyundai 10mhz 8088 with Hercules graphics and 20mb hdds. After setting up 6 of them and training the staff to use them, I had earned enough to buy my own but with a 40mb hdd and cga graphics on a Philips 8833 monitor. After having the pc 3months I worked out that the graphics card was ega compatible (change a number of jumpers) and the Phillip monitor would support ega. Massive results
Its kind of unique that your videos start at a story worth telling, to end up with a machine worth showing and fixing it too. Like lgr stories with oddware combined. Idk if it works, idk if people stay to watch to the end enough. If not, you could always decide to split the videos. Or to edit both parts in with eachother instead of 2 sections
I am trying to mix the hardware it a bit more at the beginning so poeple know it's coming. It seemed to work with the victor9000 as a higher percentage of people watched to the end, so I will probably mix the hardware in a lot more through out the story elements.
My first PC was either IBM PC and/or a Compaq deskpro, but I definitely remember that distinction magenta CGA pallet. Especially for Accolades F1 Grand Prix.
Saying that I do remember CGA having different pallets and I think some games used them. Then again this is some 30 odd years ago.
Yep. There were 3 pallets, with 2 brightness modes each, so de-facto 6 four color pallets. From the 4 colors of the pallet one (background color) was always black. F1 and Alley Cat (or was it Stray Cat?) were using Pallet 1, high brightness, while my favorite game, Digger was in low-brightness Pallet 0 (Brown, Green, Orange), accompanied by version of Hot Butter's Popcorn...
Loved the video, but I've spotted one tiny inaccuracy. You've said that developers had no choice in terms of colors using CGA, but that is not really true. CGA had 6 color palettes to choose from. Though all of them looked like crap without the composite color blending thing.
I wouldn't say inaccurate, just badly phrased.
My first house owned PC was a Pentium 166 MHz with 16mb of RAM and a 2 MB cirrus logic video card. Quite the multimedia machine at the time. Played a lot on cool games on this machine.
Nice! I wasn't far. I had a Pentium 75 MHz with 16mb of Ram and 1 MB of Cirrus Logic video memory, it was on board. On top of that I had a "quad speed" CD-ROM (4x). It was a Packard Bell from Best Buy with Win95. Luckily it had expansion sockets so I was able to expand the video memory to 2 MB! Yay! I was also able to overclock to 133MHz. That enabled me to play MS Flight Simulator 95. I thought I was really fancy with my MS Sidewinder joystick Haha. Good times!
Great stuff! You've got another sub :)
What's that version of Tetris called? That's the one I played as a kid and I haven't been able to find it yet.
Thank you for the subscription it means alot that people are taking the time to subscribe, it's really encouraging me to make more videos. The version of Tetris is, Resident Tetris by NEXA Corp. It's the version I used to play as a kid as well, mostly at school, sssh don't tell any of my teachers I think I got away with it.
I didn't know that the IBM legal department had such a dark side to them.......... (seriously loved that bit)
My first PC was a TRS-80 with a cassette drive. I spent hours typing in code from magazines and playing the resultant games. Zork, man. Freaking Zork. Wow. I never did learn how to code, despite all that work, though. LOLZ. In my teens, I did have a Kaypro 5 that ran CP/M. It was a crazy machine. Those "luggables" were insane.
The kaypro has a beautifully brutal case design, I've never managed to lay my hands on one. I would like to.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX80. I also didn’t have a green screen like the other commenter but my dad had an early ish orange screen Toshiba laptop. I still have a 1-bit Macintosh SE/30 so accustomed to just 1 color. There is something both nostalgic but also pure about the simplicity of single colour screens.
The IBM /MSDOS version of Tetris by Spectrum Holobyte was actually the first commercial offering of Tetris. The OG! Played it on my Tandy 1000 when I was a young. Followed by offerings in Europe for various micros by Mirrorsoft. Before that a version for IBM /MSDOS machines was made by the original programmer in Russia which began to circulate around Europe several months prior to the commercial release. It was brought back from Russia by someone who negotiated the deal for the rights to the game. He brought it back as an evaluation copy and it began to spread first around Hungary. (I saw a documentary years ago about Tetris. This is the little I can remember.)
Great video, my first pc was an IBM pc xt way over his live span, and I have to fix it. Anyway I got a decent amd k6-2 running by years until I have to upgrade by windows XP time.
The old computers are like a mistery to me because it was hard back then to fix it.
Our family's first PC was an ICL DRS M30. AMD 286 at 12 or 16 MHz (can't remember which), VGA graphics, 2 MB RAM, 100 MB hard disk. I recall it was MS-DOS 3.3 because that hard disk was partitioned into 3 x 32 MB, the max that DOS 3.3 allowed, plus one small one for the tiny bit of space remaining. It came with Windows 3.0 so must have been summer 1990.
Looking it up, it was apparently a rebadged Acer, or maybe Acer built them under contract. It's an obscure machine to have: I think my Dad must have got it on a staff discount, because he'd worked for ICL for about 20 years at that point. But it was a pretty big step up from the ZX Spectrum 48K we had previously!
In the very early 90s, I had a Compaq desktop that I'd rescued from the bin at work... very similar to this but in a more "traditional" desktop case and with a "massive" 20MB hard drive. The foam and foil keyboard was already starting to fail even that long ago and the hard drive was starting to stick on power on too... but I loved it's green screen.
I still remember when the original IBM-PC came out, I had been using Beebs and CP/M machines for a few years and a PDP-11 for a couple more I expected this new 16-bit micro to be something really special... but it was just the same as the CP/M machines or maybe even not quite as good. Fine, the manuals were in some very very expensive bindings but (what these days, we'd call) the UX was... "meh!"... I think the most "meh!" of my entire life. Then, a few years later, my mate got his Amiga and that was a lot more like I'd been expecting - at least that had multi-tasking.
Ah, yes... I was given one of these in January. I haven't even plugged it in yet because it seems like that blown rail is a common issue on these things if not electrics in general... I haven't even had it open yet. I hope to look at it soon.
Love the editing, subscribed.
Thanks Hector, nice of you to say.
The Compaq was not "the first ever IBM compatible PC". It was the first _legal_ IBM compatible PC to sell in large numbers. There were numerous PC clones before the Compaq, but most of them got in trouble for illegally copying IBM's ROM BIOS code.
Yep as you said there was the odd one or two that straight up copied IBM's bios (and yet in some cases where far from fully IBM compat), that sold in small numbers before IBM shut them down that shipped before the compaq. I think I mentioned one example Eagle in a passing joke in the starwars bit who IBM sued and forced to stop manufacture as a nod to the less than legit PCs that predated Compaq. Your right however its good to point it out explicitly.
Great channel! The Art of Nosie "Close (to the Edit) " background music really sold me. Does anyone have a link for this version of "Close (to the Edit)"?
It's from a cover tape I got with an acornuser magazine from the 80's.
In 1989 I was in college and taking a Pascal programming class. I didn't have my own PC, but a coworker's husband loaned me his Heathkit portable PC that was a clone of the Compaq portable. Dual floppies, 4.77 Mhz. Saved me a lot of time by not having to go to the campus and use the lab.
My very first experience with computers was the Tandy 3000, I recall having to load a boot disc and then finding a master rom that had all these games on it that my older brother and Uncle had setup. Shit was cool and I regret getting rid of it and all the floppies we had.
I had one of those and gave it to my sister to dial into BBS. It had a 20mv connor hardcard in it for storage.
My grandfather had one of these. I used to love to play The Bard's Tale on it when I visited. I might be mistaken, but I think his only had one floppy drive and some gigantic (probably 20 or 40 MB) hard disk in the other bay.
WOW! a portable computing center. The future is now
We called these Luggables. Apple made a Macintosh Portable a couple of years later that used a 6V 'motor-scooter battery' for power. It weight a bit less than the Compaq, but it was not a bad first attempt at a truly cord cutting computer. Grid Computing kinda upstaged everyone with the first portable desktop class computer than fit in a briefcase. Apple soon answered with the Powerbook 100 designed by Apple, but built by Sony.
That was good stuff dude. Nice and informative and witty and stuff.
Its nice of you to say. I've started working on a second video so hopfully I can get that out in a reasonable time frame.
@@RetroBytesUK Consistently getting vids made is apparently a good thing to do. I'm terrible at getting my scripted stuff post regularly.
I might struggle with this one too, but I'm going to try my best to get videos out on a fairly regular schedual. It takes more effort than I realised to make these things, and I thought it would take a fair amount, but hopfully with each one I will speed up a little bit as I get more familure with the tools.
@@RetroBytesUK I never know how long mine will take. Last scripted thing I did real quick, for me anyway, like 3 weeks. I've had ones be at some stage for a year though. Mostly due to laziness though. I think for this sort of thing getting one done every few weeks/ once a month, is a solid doable pace. Just a case of finding the time and motivation really. Provided you're not making some epic length thing of course.
Really enjoying your video's.
watching this three years later...
my first PC was a compaq!
LTE 5000something from 1996
that I got in 2001
well at least it was beige
Ok at darth vader, i hit the bell icon too, great videos. But the algorythm did pick you up, so who knows maybe more will get you recommended soon!
I had one of those, and used it a lot. I was young then ...
For the time they where really good. Did you use it as a desktop replacement, or where you travelling alot with it ?
I like the narration so much!!
Thats very nice of you to say.
OH GOD WHEN I GOT MY COMPAQ PORTABLE I HATED DOING THE KEYBOARD! THOSE PADS WERE A PAIN IN THE NECK!!!! I STILL HAVE NIGHTMARES ABOUT IT!
Well, my first PC was when I was quite young. Probably five or so. Dial up internet. Don't really remember anything else about it, apart from it running Windows 98.
The first one I owned myself was my mom's previous after she bought a new one. I do recall it being a Compaq; I know it had 512mb of ram and an 80gb hard drive, with some flavor of pentium or celeron cpu. That would have been around 2006 or 2007, and it definitely wasn't new when I got it. Windows XP. Killed it with a virus from Limewire. Classic.
I went from that to my own first PC that I bought myself; it had some flavor of AMD Athlon cpu from 2008, nvidia 6150se graphics, 3gb ram, and a 1tb hard drive. I thought I had myself a gaming monster, because it ran the original Halo. Ha! A friend of mine ripped all the parts out, put it in a new case with a larger power supply, and threw in a spare GTX 560 that he had in a drawer, and man, what a difference. I could play games with my friends!
Moved from that to the first dedicated gaming PC I bought myself, with an FX-6300 and a GTX 1060, which I realize now was a somewhat mismatched pairing and not particularly good value. 16gb of ram though, and it was my first PC to run Windows on an SSD, so that was still a great experience regardless.
About a year and a half ago, I learned to build my own, and I've got a Ryzen 5950x, 32gb ram, 12tb of SSD storage (and two 12tb hard drives on top!) with a 3080ti. Quite different from where I started. Love working on PCs. I've built nearly two dozen since I learned how, mostly for other people. It's a really fun thing to get into. Quite a long path to get here. I'll be 30 next year.
My goodness i laugh in almost every part of the video your good english humor i suppose is great. Good work indeed i like the video!
I'm glad it made you laugh, I do try to inject a little humour into them.
Cla cla cla close to the edge, to be in England in the summertime :)
First PC was a compaq business machine of some sort in the mid 90s. Then a presario at some point. Hard. To remember exactly. First machine was windows 95 tho
Where is the music from? It sounds AY, so I'm guessing a ZX spectrum game that I've played in the past.
That tetris version sounds like it was for hiding that you were playing games from the boss🤣
I suspect you are right, that or hiding it from teachers.
Dude these ads are getting better than subscribed content
Oh screq compaq! They screw up with fhese keyboards totally!
great video, really like you humor
Great video man
Appreciate it
Great vid!
True bro!
You should have showed microsoft flight sim!!
It used such hacks that running it was a pinnacle of IBM compatibility.
Love it
Now-a-days....Compaq would created a KickStarter, with a fake case, and a doctored IBM under a table.....then run off with the money.
Yeah there are a fair kickstarter scams these days.
my first pc was an amiga
Ah the Compaq Luggable... innovative but not really portable. The SLT line was much better at not ripping your arm off, although they were still pretty heavy beasts.
john cleese making fun of ibm 😂😂
“Look at this guy, look how smug he is!” Haha
First PC was a Compaq Presario 5528. Don't really recommend it.
jesus, the most annoying version of close i have ever heard! had to stop the video half way. pity, i quite liked it ;-(
Dude I like your video but, I think you talk to fast