My Smallest 486 Desktop PC: Unisys CWD-4002
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
Mich-l
Never thought I'd see one of those again! They made an even thinner 386 varient that only housed one drive bay (FDD or HDD. Those things were practically indestructible! I had a client, the restaurant in a Holiday Inn, that was still using these things to run their old ASCII-based light-pen POS system in the early 2000s! It was a franchise hotel and the proprietors didn't want to spend the money to update the absolute ancient Holidex reservation and billing system, which made upgrading the restaurant POS system precarious due to the antiquated billing interface. Most of the units we had were the 386 versions running on just a floppy disk with the most elaborate AUTOEXEC. BAT file I've ever seen. Everything was configured via that crazy batch file. Initializing the NIC, launching the Novell DOS client, initializing a RAM drive, connecting to the -server- (the little 486 like the one you have in the manager's office, downloading a copy of the POS client software to the RAM Drive, creating a bunch of NULL files one for the Holidex ID and a dozen more for other Holidex configurations, connecting to the Holidex gateway, initializing the light-pen, serial mouse hack in case the light-pen was broken or missing and finally launching the POS software with multiple lines of config flags! It was a mess; in fact I got the job because the IT company who had been hired to build them some additional POS PCs didn't know anything about Novell and couldn't figure it out and called me.
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Never thought I'd see one of those again! They made an even thinner 386 varient that only housed one drive bay (FDD or HDD. Those things were practically indestructible! I had a client, the restaurant in a Holiday Inn, that was still using these things to run their old ASCII-based light-pen POS system in the early 2000s! It was a franchise hotel and the proprietors didn't want to spend the money to update the absolute ancient Holidex reservation and billing system, which made upgrading the restaurant POS system precarious due to the antiquated billing interface. Most of the units we had were the 386 versions running on just a floppy disk with the most elaborate AUTOEXEC. BAT file I've ever seen. Everything was configured via that crazy batch file. Initializing the NIC, launching the Novell DOS client, initializing a RAM drive, connecting to the -server- (the little 486 like the one you have in the manager's office, downloading a copy of the POS client software to the RAM Drive, creating a bunch of NULL files one for the Holidex ID and a dozen more for other Holidex configurations, connecting to the Holidex gateway, initializing the light-pen, serial mouse hack in case the light-pen was broken or missing and finally launching the POS software with multiple lines of config flags! It was a mess; in fact I got the job because the IT company who had been hired to build them some additional POS PCs didn't know anything about Novell and couldn't figure it out and called me.
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R. a.
These where really designed as a step up from a dumb terminal. I remember owning my first workstation by Unisys, and that thing was a monster If I recall correctly, it was a Pentium 200 with get this 128mb of ram! At that time, in 1998 that was insane as was the 4. 3 gb scsi hard drive. This was 72 pin memory. Windows NT terminal server just rocked on that beast. But these systems would have communicated accross a network to access most of it's information. Thats why it had the low spec hard drive. No need for a lot of room locally after all.
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These where really designed as a step up from a dumb terminal. I remember owning my first workstation by Unisys, and that thing was a monster If I recall correctly, it was a Pentium 200 with get this 128mb of ram! At that time, in 1998 that was insane as was the 4. 3 gb scsi hard drive. This was 72 pin memory. Windows NT terminal server just rocked on that beast. But these systems would have communicated accross a network to access most of it's information. Thats why it had the low spec hard drive. No need for a lot of room locally after all.
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lazygamereviews
Yo this is one of my favorite 486 systems! O_O did yall know there's a jumper on these that would let you overclock to 40mhz! (80 for DX2) there's also a 50mhz jumper setting which would have resulted in a 100mhz DX2! That woulda been off the chain -- but I couldn't get that sh#t to work.
I got my CWD-4002 back in 2013 when they were cheap as hell on ebay lol! It was yo boy's first 486 system and just like LGR the first thing I did was put a sound card in -
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Yo this is one of my favorite 486 systems! O_O did yall know there's a jumper on these that would let you overclock to 40mhz! (80 for DX2) there's also a 50mhz jumper setting which would have resulted in a 100mhz DX2! That woulda been off the chain -- but I couldn't get that sh#t to work.
I got my CWD-4002 back in 2013 when they were cheap as hell on ebay lol! It was yo boy's first 486 system and just like LGR the first thing I did was put a sound card in -
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Joolz
Greetings Clint, just watched this video more than 2 years after it was made and it could have been yesterday; Your videos are very satisfying time capsules that please the senses with other wise forgotten sounds and memories; thank you very much for that; Anyway i felt compelled to ask if you ever think on doing that Unisys history video? no relation to the company just really enjoy those Tech Tales series, thanks again for great content
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Greetings Clint, just watched this video more than 2 years after it was made and it could have been yesterday; Your videos are very satisfying time capsules that please the senses with other wise forgotten sounds and memories; thank you very much for that; Anyway i felt compelled to ask if you ever think on doing that Unisys history video? no relation to the company just really enjoy those Tech Tales series, thanks again for great content
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fanjoy
I miss the days when we really didn't have to worry too much about CPU coolers or large heatsinks. I mean many slower 486's actually didn't even need a heatsink. I think I had one 486 that had a heatsink and fan assembly but it was only a 486 DX2 66 MHz I think. Just thinking about that. How things have changed. These days you almost need a mountain of a CPU cooler to keep modern CPUs cool.
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I miss the days when we really didn't have to worry too much about CPU coolers or large heatsinks. I mean many slower 486's actually didn't even need a heatsink. I think I had one 486 that had a heatsink and fan assembly but it was only a 486 DX2 66 MHz I think. Just thinking about that. How things have changed. These days you almost need a mountain of a CPU cooler to keep modern CPUs cool.
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Joseph
Man, I've been looking for a basic 386/486 laptop for a long time. Just something to run Win 3. 11 and DOS games on but everything has gotten SO expensive and most don't work and/or are stripped. Even this lil guy is upwards of $130 to $150 as of right now. Maybe some day. Another great video and an awesome lil machine!
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Man, I've been looking for a basic 386/486 laptop for a long time. Just something to run Win 3. 11 and DOS games on but everything has gotten SO expensive and most don't work and/or are stripped. Even this lil guy is upwards of $130 to $150 as of right now. Maybe some day. Another great video and an awesome lil machine!
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Grundelwanderer
Those Advent speakers. man I loved those, inexpensive and sounded really good. worked at a Computer Renaissance oh so many years ago. those little guys were a secret weapon to make a sale, usually for a lower end system, I could throw them in at a very low coast and they sounded so impressive.
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Those Advent speakers. man I loved those, inexpensive and sounded really good. worked at a Computer Renaissance oh so many years ago. those little guys were a secret weapon to make a sale, usually for a lower end system, I could throw them in at a very low coast and they sounded so impressive.
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Innova
I used to work for Unisys as a network operations engineer. I saw a few of these stacked in the back of the data center, along with an old decommissioned Burroughs mainframe. Unisys is historically fascinating and I hope that you do a video on the company!
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I used to work for Unisys as a network operations engineer. I saw a few of these stacked in the back of the data center, along with an old decommissioned Burroughs mainframe. Unisys is historically fascinating and I hope that you do a video on the company!
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005
That would make a great DOS6. 22 and Windows 3. 11 era machine imho. Doesn't take up space and kind of looks oddly modern. It's slopped frontage reminds me of my old Amstrad PC2386DX/65 actually. Hmmmm. food for thought. Cheap you say? (well. 3 years gao)
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That would make a great DOS6. 22 and Windows 3. 11 era machine imho. Doesn't take up space and kind of looks oddly modern. It's slopped frontage reminds me of my old Amstrad PC2386DX/65 actually. Hmmmm. food for thought. Cheap you say? (well. 3 years gao)
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Commander
Make one of these a good mini PC. Micro-ATX or something like that would work!
Intel Core i5 and a mini cooler, 1TB hard drive/ 256GB SSD, stuff like that.
EDIT: I mean Mini-ITX, I made this comment a while ago.
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Make one of these a good mini PC. Micro-ATX or something like that would work!
Intel Core i5 and a mini cooler, 1TB hard drive/ 256GB SSD, stuff like that.
EDIT: I mean Mini-ITX, I made this comment a while ago.
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