Exploring the J. Bond A333CD The 99 386 PC!
video description
Relating to finding PCs, I was lucky enough to find the exact make and model of computer I had growing and was able to buy it last summer. An AST 386/25 SX. I had an ebay saved search and as soon as it came up I bought it for a not unreasonable buy-it-now price. It even came with the matching keyboard. I gave it a good cleaning and inspection when I it arrived and it everything worked as it should. I guess my point is while the online prices are not as good as they used to be, and true deals much harder to find, if you really want one or two machines for a collection it's still cheaper than a lot of hobbies: )
Date: 2023-05-19
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Comments and reviews: 14
Michael
I used to work as a tech support assistant at a British children's book publishers in the late 1990s, and the writers/editors were using machines very similar to these. Every night, the last step in everyone's work routine was to slap the backup tape into the drive and run a backup. Incidental file (just those that had changed) backups every day, and a full drive backup on Friday. Those tapes were SUPPOSED to go into the massive, walk-in fire safe, but users being users, this was often ignored. The whir of tapes in the late afternoon was always somewhat gratifying. That 486 machines could somehow run Quark Xpress and not come to an immediate grinding halt was always amazing to me. Their ONE resident photoshop expert was always needing more storage, and when I left, his 'powerful' Pentium III photoshop beast was running a separate drive chassis with 4x 2GB hard drives, and his machine was the only one that had then massive 8GB tape backup drive (which took something like 30-40 minutes to make a full backup which I believe we actually had to enforce with threat of dismissal before he would perform the backup. On the subject of tapes, they were rock-solid reliable for data, but because tape, they were ALSO a pain to keep from getting tangled. I had a good half-dozen calls for tape tangle issues from the editors and artists during my 18 months at the company.
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I used to work as a tech support assistant at a British children's book publishers in the late 1990s, and the writers/editors were using machines very similar to these. Every night, the last step in everyone's work routine was to slap the backup tape into the drive and run a backup. Incidental file (just those that had changed) backups every day, and a full drive backup on Friday. Those tapes were SUPPOSED to go into the massive, walk-in fire safe, but users being users, this was often ignored. The whir of tapes in the late afternoon was always somewhat gratifying. That 486 machines could somehow run Quark Xpress and not come to an immediate grinding halt was always amazing to me. Their ONE resident photoshop expert was always needing more storage, and when I left, his 'powerful' Pentium III photoshop beast was running a separate drive chassis with 4x 2GB hard drives, and his machine was the only one that had then massive 8GB tape backup drive (which took something like 30-40 minutes to make a full backup which I believe we actually had to enforce with threat of dismissal before he would perform the backup. On the subject of tapes, they were rock-solid reliable for data, but because tape, they were ALSO a pain to keep from getting tangled. I had a good half-dozen calls for tape tangle issues from the editors and artists during my 18 months at the company.
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Captain
I like tape drives conceptually at least. When I was a kid, I actually wound up playing with an external one my dad's job had thrown out. I think it had 100MB capacity but I'm not totally sure, might've been a bit more. It was good enough to make a few backups of things important to us kids in that 90s era of computing though. These days I run a personal storage server that has 40TB of capacity, actually 4x 20TB drives configured as RAID10. It contains as much of my historical computing in the last 25 years I was able to scrounge up, from old CD-Rs and other backup resources, all conveniently accessible as a whole. While RAID10 does provide some redundancy I still fear something catastrophic happening, and it would be neat and convenient if I could acquire a tape drive with enough capacity to one-shot backup the whole thing. But unfortunately tape drives in that capacity are thousands of dollars, and as much as I loathe to retain data on purely mechanical drives, it's actually much cheaper to just keep buying more drives for more redundancy and just roll the dice that at least one set won't suffer a catastrophe.
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I like tape drives conceptually at least. When I was a kid, I actually wound up playing with an external one my dad's job had thrown out. I think it had 100MB capacity but I'm not totally sure, might've been a bit more. It was good enough to make a few backups of things important to us kids in that 90s era of computing though. These days I run a personal storage server that has 40TB of capacity, actually 4x 20TB drives configured as RAID10. It contains as much of my historical computing in the last 25 years I was able to scrounge up, from old CD-Rs and other backup resources, all conveniently accessible as a whole. While RAID10 does provide some redundancy I still fear something catastrophic happening, and it would be neat and convenient if I could acquire a tape drive with enough capacity to one-shot backup the whole thing. But unfortunately tape drives in that capacity are thousands of dollars, and as much as I loathe to retain data on purely mechanical drives, it's actually much cheaper to just keep buying more drives for more redundancy and just roll the dice that at least one set won't suffer a catastrophe.
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ATomRileyA
Brings back lots of memories, also cutting your finger is part of the experience lol. I remember looking at those tape drives and wanting one, a friend of my dads had one of those and also some bigger server type tape drives always thought they were cool but way out of my price range.
Reminds me that a relative of mine tipped me off to a office/factory that was being cleared out at had a hundred or so of computers like that, including 286's and a bunch of other big cards for driving cnc machines, i took a few and wanted to take all of them but had no where to store them, wish i had now and also a schools worth of bbc micros and Acorn Archimedes that i could not take either but tried to find homes for most of them.
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Brings back lots of memories, also cutting your finger is part of the experience lol. I remember looking at those tape drives and wanting one, a friend of my dads had one of those and also some bigger server type tape drives always thought they were cool but way out of my price range.
Reminds me that a relative of mine tipped me off to a office/factory that was being cleared out at had a hundred or so of computers like that, including 286's and a bunch of other big cards for driving cnc machines, i took a few and wanted to take all of them but had no where to store them, wish i had now and also a schools worth of bbc micros and Acorn Archimedes that i could not take either but tried to find homes for most of them.
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John
Oh wow, this is nearly exactly the generic system my dad bought the family around 1993 from a local computer shop, right down to the amd dx33 and colorado tape drive. and that christmas we got a SB pro 2 w/ sb cdrom. Had an Oak OTI-O77 graphics card in it.
Why do I remember the hardware so well? Because after my dad upgraded the family system to a pentium, he gave this one to me, and I put this new thing called Linux on it that I'd heard about during my HS internship that came with a free C compiler! . One got intimately familiar with hardware on your system running Linux in those days. I still have the X11 custom modeline scars. Took overnight to compile a custom kernel. Good times.
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Oh wow, this is nearly exactly the generic system my dad bought the family around 1993 from a local computer shop, right down to the amd dx33 and colorado tape drive. and that christmas we got a SB pro 2 w/ sb cdrom. Had an Oak OTI-O77 graphics card in it.
Why do I remember the hardware so well? Because after my dad upgraded the family system to a pentium, he gave this one to me, and I put this new thing called Linux on it that I'd heard about during my HS internship that came with a free C compiler! . One got intimately familiar with hardware on your system running Linux in those days. I still have the X11 custom modeline scars. Took overnight to compile a custom kernel. Good times.
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Need
Oh. this brings me back. The whole setup with a tape drive and a SB Pro 2 on a 386. 33sx though. I also had 8 megs of Ram. The only other differences would be a 1mb Cirrus Logic video card and an AST case. A big one at that.
Wolfenstein was one of the games I played the most, but CD-man was also played every now and then. The tape deck was because it was much cheaper to get a tape than a HD when I ran out of space. We did also have contacts that could supply us with new games with doubtful legality. A tape was excellent storage for money,
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Oh. this brings me back. The whole setup with a tape drive and a SB Pro 2 on a 386. 33sx though. I also had 8 megs of Ram. The only other differences would be a 1mb Cirrus Logic video card and an AST case. A big one at that.
Wolfenstein was one of the games I played the most, but CD-man was also played every now and then. The tape deck was because it was much cheaper to get a tape than a HD when I ran out of space. We did also have contacts that could supply us with new games with doubtful legality. A tape was excellent storage for money,
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Autingo
prices for those tape streamers fell quickly like with all computer-related stuff. by 1994 qic-80 120mb tapes had become the medium of choice for pc software piracy on our schoolyard. it took until 1997 that the first few folks got some of those early consumer-grade cd-writers. these happy few were very much into making music, had earned quite a bit of money with their hobby and were of course also very keen on burning their own music with the shiny new gear. because of these lucky circumstances we were happy to skip zip drives altogether.
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prices for those tape streamers fell quickly like with all computer-related stuff. by 1994 qic-80 120mb tapes had become the medium of choice for pc software piracy on our schoolyard. it took until 1997 that the first few folks got some of those early consumer-grade cd-writers. these happy few were very much into making music, had earned quite a bit of money with their hobby and were of course also very keen on burning their own music with the shiny new gear. because of these lucky circumstances we were happy to skip zip drives altogether.
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greenaum
Windows for Workgroups doesn't necessarily mean it was on a network. Could've been just sold that way, maybe MS were pushing it that week. Or it might just have been on the bunch of floppies he got back when he asked the guy next to him for a copy of Windows. Back in those days you'd just zip up your windows directory, easy as!
My first PC had a 50MB disk drive. Room for Doom, Sim City 2000, and Windows. But not all at once! So I'd keep each one zipped up on floppies and uninstall as needed. Using the DELTREE uninstaller.
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Windows for Workgroups doesn't necessarily mean it was on a network. Could've been just sold that way, maybe MS were pushing it that week. Or it might just have been on the bunch of floppies he got back when he asked the guy next to him for a copy of Windows. Back in those days you'd just zip up your windows directory, easy as!
My first PC had a 50MB disk drive. Room for Doom, Sim City 2000, and Windows. But not all at once! So I'd keep each one zipped up on floppies and uninstall as needed. Using the DELTREE uninstaller.
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ronkemperful
Fun and a bit of nostalgia. I had a 386 DX Epsom computer for my work machine back in 1994. My morning routine was to boot up the computer at 7: 45am, then to make coffee and put together ingredients for a loaf of bread in the bread machine (our office had a daily potluck-working lunch, and then use the restroom. I then would return to the Epsom computer and patiently wait for it to finish booting into Windows 3. 1, ELEVEN minutes later! The computer booted with the speed of Continental Drift!
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Fun and a bit of nostalgia. I had a 386 DX Epsom computer for my work machine back in 1994. My morning routine was to boot up the computer at 7: 45am, then to make coffee and put together ingredients for a loaf of bread in the bread machine (our office had a daily potluck-working lunch, and then use the restroom. I then would return to the Epsom computer and patiently wait for it to finish booting into Windows 3. 1, ELEVEN minutes later! The computer booted with the speed of Continental Drift!
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joe
Hey, Do you want to review a Horrible computer virus? I have a copy of the worst computer virus you've ever seen. It makes the computer become non responsive then the hard drive will run full tilt until it goes solid. Make a dedicated computer install and it will melt down and explode. Its contained in an AOL messenger. This virus is impossible to get rid of. I had to delete all my data and totally start over. I originally got it from Limewire long time ago. Let me know.
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Hey, Do you want to review a Horrible computer virus? I have a copy of the worst computer virus you've ever seen. It makes the computer become non responsive then the hard drive will run full tilt until it goes solid. Make a dedicated computer install and it will melt down and explode. Its contained in an AOL messenger. This virus is impossible to get rid of. I had to delete all my data and totally start over. I originally got it from Limewire long time ago. Let me know.
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Diego
Since i was a kid i love the sound of old Pcs, (back then they are new, for 20 years i work with IT and still missed the days of these white/bege loud beasts.
Fun Fact, because a political economical plan, these models are not avaliabe in Brazil until October 1991, and the prices are compared to a new popular car.
Sorry for my bad english.
Regards from Brazil.
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Since i was a kid i love the sound of old Pcs, (back then they are new, for 20 years i work with IT and still missed the days of these white/bege loud beasts.
Fun Fact, because a political economical plan, these models are not avaliabe in Brazil until October 1991, and the prices are compared to a new popular car.
Sorry for my bad english.
Regards from Brazil.
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Dukefazon
It's good new that the prices are going up, I have some stuff lying around to sell: )
14: 03 - I really like the colorful DOS prompt, I've never seen this before!
I like that you tried Operation Stealth with that machine, it's fitting well: ) I had that game on Amiga and I couldn't get past that guard for a long time, I just gave up on the game.
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It's good new that the prices are going up, I have some stuff lying around to sell: )
14: 03 - I really like the colorful DOS prompt, I've never seen this before!
I like that you tried Operation Stealth with that machine, it's fitting well: ) I had that game on Amiga and I couldn't get past that guard for a long time, I just gave up on the game.
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Annie
I had an AMD 386dx 40 back in the 90s. Great chip, nice option compared to the more budget 486s. They'd still beat me in most benchmarks but they also cost a lot more. Also my first homebuild PC. Scraped together a bunch of salvage parts from print classifieds and threw the thing together.
One of these days I need to build it again.
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I had an AMD 386dx 40 back in the 90s. Great chip, nice option compared to the more budget 486s. They'd still beat me in most benchmarks but they also cost a lot more. Also my first homebuild PC. Scraped together a bunch of salvage parts from print classifieds and threw the thing together.
One of these days I need to build it again.
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Eagle
everytime i see that Gateway monitor, i'm reminded of my time working for their outsourced techsupport call center in South Florida. and the silly customers who would break their tower somehow, give up on phone support and send BOTH the dang crt monitor(when we never asked for it) and tower into the service center. then I laugh at them.
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everytime i see that Gateway monitor, i'm reminded of my time working for their outsourced techsupport call center in South Florida. and the silly customers who would break their tower somehow, give up on phone support and send BOTH the dang crt monitor(when we never asked for it) and tower into the service center. then I laugh at them.
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Megaross
Honestly I like the generic random company pc's more than the big brand ones because that's what we had for years.
My old man worked crazy overtime to buy us our first PC and it was from some local company. For it's time it was a decent machine too, weird spec if I look back at it now though.
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Honestly I like the generic random company pc's more than the big brand ones because that's what we had for years.
My old man worked crazy overtime to buy us our first PC and it was from some local company. For it's time it was a decent machine too, weird spec if I look back at it now though.
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