A Hidden 386 PC! Proxim RangeLAN2 Access Point
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- čas přidán 30. 07. 2017
- Another fascinating retro computer here, but this is one that you probably wouldn't realize is a PC unless you took it apart! This has no hard drive at all, it runs DR-DOS completely off a 3.5" floppy disk.
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www.epidemicsound.com - Věda a technologie
Love that they used the floppy drive - definitely the cheapest way to do that back then. Easy firmware upgrades too, just swap the disk!
Exactly, it's a pretty great solution for what this was meant to do!
The brilliant part is that a floppy drive goes silent in a few seconds, as opposed to the horribly noisy hard drives of the era.
I love to watch these videos. I'm a electrical engineer
Why do electrical engineers think anyone else cares that they are electrical engineers?
Crouching LAN, hidden computer.
WalcomS7 nice death grips reference
It's actually a reference to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", which is a kung-fu movie.
nice jojo reference
You're a nice Morrowind reference.
featuring Ell Gee Arr instead of Li Mu Bai
Had one of these in an industrial settings years ago. Untrue that it will communicate with WiFi unless actually RangeLAN2 and the Intermec device is not. It is OpenAIR. Much as with CDMA vs. GSM, they may run at the same frequencies but the standards are completely different. OpenAIR/RangeLAN was a predecessor to WiFi and maxed out at 2.1 Mbps. PCMCIA cards were available that complied with the standard and this is how we did wireless networking before 802.11b. Items than ran off this were primarily wireless scanners in our case. Janus 2020 was the model if I remember correctly. Worked just fine for that purpose.
man do i love the random, goofy computers that you find
Haha, well thanks, there's plenty more where this came from
There has got to be a way to get some kind of display running on this. Geeks, Unite!
Lazy Game Reviews Clint, can you make video on your vintage calculator collection, just like david did with apple keyboards? I would love to watch it :)
Yep, I couldn't quite figure out how much that acid problem had destroyed. This is like a 386 fidget spinner for computer geeks. So many possibilities!
You are not the only one ;)
Laughed my ass off at this one, especially liked the little fake quotes from the company. It's amazing how much crap they just excluded from that board and had it continue to operate, especially the whole video subsystem. Oh and that teal one reminds me of SGI gear..
Hey, you're that guy.
What guy? :P
You've got a few Toshiba librettos. How are they working.
Yes, it reminded me of SGI too.
Yeah, it kinda looks like the same colour as the case of the SGI Indy.
Man, these sleeper PCs are getting intense.
When you sleeper PC is such a sleeper, it doesn't even has any usefull I/O.
New Old Computery-Things Intensifies
Not with a ricer card lol
Actually the motherboard I/O was that simple back in the day. You had to rely on add-on cards for more functionality like video, sound, lan, etc. What the router lacks is an I/O expansion card that would have a VGA, Lan, and/ or sound combo.
Travis Piper They didn't have blocked off AT-connectors though.
That is so cool! Covered up floppy drive, I love it.
You are cool as well!
What a weird device! I always find it interesting when manufacturers decide to use off-the-shelf products (especially when they're parts for desktop PCs, basically) for embedded devices like these.
I would say 512k is about right. Even the high-end routers of the time, such as the Cisco 2500 series, shipped with 4MB of RAM in 1994. In the world of access points, 512k should be enough for anybody...
Also, I bet the CPU was a lot more taxed than you suspect. These early wireless standards could sometimes do up to 11 Mbit, but even the 10 Mbit Ethernet is difficult for a 386 to keep up with. All the packets would likely be bridged through the CPU in this device - no DMA between the cards. So during periods of high throughput from the wireless clients, I bet the CPU was working hard.
Thanks for sharing this one. I work with enterprise networking gear, so it's interesting to see how we got to where we are in that field today.
That's probably also why they went with a high clocked SX (which is otherwise rather unusual) instead of a DX at the same or lower speed. No point having a 32-bit bus when you've got such a small amount of RAM and the vast majority of transactions are going to go to or from the 16-bit ISA anyway, but you might still need a lot of internal horsepower to actually manage the data. Plus it means it'll work with only two SIMMs instead of needing four...
11 Mbit lol. RangeLan did 2 Mbps physical, just like the original 802.11. 11 Mbit 802.11b came in 1999, several years after this product.
Old tech is just so amazing and fascinating to see, especially since you can see how certain pieces of tech were way ahead of their time even with the limited technical of their time
Blocking the AT keyboard port AND the floppy drive?! I've never heard of such insanity!
Vectrex4Life, never expected you.
Vectrex4Life Please upload more your videos are awesome
It was designed as an embedded device... no keyboard, video or other user based I/O was needed. Just turn it on and it does its job. Modern WiFi routers are the same concept except they have the bonus of being able to be configured over a web based GUI. Back when this device was made, there was no concept of URL based configuration so they used a serial interface to a terminal session instead.
I am hard at work on the next Forgotten Games. :)
The local management port is an RS232 Console port. Plug in console cable [to computer running] appropriate terminal emulation software (PuTTY, SecureCRT, etc.) [most like with settings of 9600, 8, N, 1 and No HW Flow control] and viola. It will allow you to configure the AP via CLI or Menu Driven CLI.
You should find a working example and put an ISA video card in it and get some games going for the proper LGR review treatment! :D
Going through a stressful move right now in my life ready to embark cross country. Only a cell phone with me in a empty room and LGRs videos are making my bad day better.
Best of luck, sir!
Museum Thank you friend.
Where ya going?
The tinkerer in me looked at that and thought "Okay, you could mount a CF card right on the IDE port with an adapter, no need for a cable, then get a basic soundblaster, maybe up the RAM to 4 or 8 megs, of course drop in a VGA card...or possibly track down the actual VGA chip and a 15-pin header, that'd leave the other ISA slot for something else...ooh, an I/O card to which you could connect a parallel port CD-ROM..." :)
thedungeondelver I suspect you could just solder in the missing connectors on the back and they'd mostly just work.
Had a similar idea myself. Either a CF card or that Solid State solution that he mentioned in the Woodgrain HDD upgrade episode, combined sound and video card if those exist in ISA format and then an I/O card with a parallel port and maybe a 2nd serial port. Worst case use the Covox Speech Thing on the parallel port if no combined ISA video/sound cards exist. (the Diamond EDGE he showed in another video would be perfect had it not been a PCI card).
You'd need a larger box and a taller ISA riser, I suspect, unless you want to go with a soundcard that has a CDROM interface built in...
Or you could just get a normal 386 and use that access point for what it was meant to, as a access point :P
man, I love it when you show such weird systems.
Always looking forward to Monday/Friday for these vids. Got to see one 4 minutes after upload!
Nice and unique find again! Love watching your videos!
Thank you!
Wow, just listening to the excitement in your voice. You can tell you really have a passion for this legacy tech. Love your videos man.
im just a kid but i like this. keep up the good work!
The music in the background you play in videos like this is just neat! I love it!
Like you mentioned. I really love all the off the shelf parts they used to build these. Pretty ingenious.
These are nice machines with an interesting background, but the resarch you made is AWESOME.
You know? The original Apple Airport Base Station, introduced alongside the original Tangerine & Blueberry iBooks in 1999, had a 486 embedded into the logic board; it was co-produced by Lucent and Apple, and was just $299 USD, was compatible with Macs and PCs, and was literally thousands of dollars less expensive than anything at the time.
I've actually never taken apart one, but it would be interesting to do so.
I love your videos, LGR! A big 'Hola' from México!
It's interesting, like how the original apple laser printer had a faster cpu than the computer it was meant to be used with.
Most early lasers did, in fact. At least, the Atari one did, though they saved money by relying on the computer's RAM via the DMA port, rather than putting loads of expensive memory into the printer itself.
And actually there's a whole load of devices that have intel chips in that you'd think were more at home in desktop computers. Some applications need more power and address range than a typical microcontroller can offer, and the architecture is plenty familiar to a broad range of programmers, so once their star has faded in the actual-microcomputer market, all of the x86's went on to have a surprisingly long afterlife as embedded logic cores instead. Not sure about the Pentiums, but it's certainly true for everything from the 8086/8088 up to 486, and most particularly 80186 and 386 - the former being a good value combination of features better known from the 286 with some of the simplicity of the 8086, as well as a number of things unique to it that made it a good microcontroller replacement, and the latter being your cheapest and most basic option for 32-bit code compatibility if you weren't comfortable with programming a 68020 or similar.
Thing is, few of those devices are quite like the Proxims... ie, they're not based off a regular desktop motherboard (and its chipset) and CPU, with easy-upgrade RAM sockets, ordinary old ISA cards and headers for floppy and parallel ports, and an AT-class power supply. Instead the familiarity starts and ends at the processor label being prefixed with "i80", and basically everything else is different... mostly the RAM is soldered directly to the board instead of being in modules, the various other motherboard chips are often conglomerated into a single VLSI unit specialised to that particular application (desktop mobos being the definition of "general purpose"), and there's rarely any user-accessible storage device or indeed any kind of video option, let alone an ISA bus...
It's a shame yours don't work. I wonder if, assuming you could fit them in there, an isa video card and ide controller could be used to make that into a full(ish) PC.
IDE is already built in, man. But yeah, inserting the video card is exactly the suggestion I was about to type in now. But also, adding a couple of 'em 4 meg SIMMs would be of help..
In short, LGR, thank you so much for this video, but please, please make a follow up!
P.S.: btw, a modern USB-to-floppy (GOTEK) emulator would replace the built in one neatly, wouldn't need way less maintenance, and, of course, having "99 floppies" under the hood would be pretty awesome for such machine, imho...
My real hope with releasing a video like this is that it opens more people's eyes to the fact that cool, hidden machines like this exist in the first place! Now that I've already covered it I can't imagine making a follow-up since I have way too many more interesting projects that deserve my time, but if anyone else happens to run across one of these PCs I hope they can perform those upgrades and show it to the world :)
Ben Heck could make that thing in function pc
You succeeded in that. (Well you, 8-bit guy & techmoan. The trinity of retrotech ;))
It is quite hard to find these things in Europe, though. It seems like these early odd devices never got here. I'm just glad I found 2 Macintosh Classics (both destroyed by their own batteries, unfortunately)
chadmasta5 that is one thing that I would like to do this summer, buy one of these machines, install a compact flash hard drive mounted directly to the IDE controller, attempt to fix sole control sorry dictation corrosion on the logic board, and throw in more RAM, a VGA video card, and maybe a sound blaster Pro 2, and of course buying a tiki board, and I might just have myself a very small MS-DOS gaming PC.
At keyboard.
I ALWAYS enjoy your voice, I find it very smooth and nice to watch. Keep up the good work, oh and do more oddware or thrifting!
Dude I love your classy music choices LGR!!!
A lot of network appliances are still x86/amd64 under the hood. Dell even did a range of unbranded versions of their Poweredge servers for different companies that made network gear.
Computer Chronicles, i love that show.
watched i think all of the episodes here on YT. that show is such a throw back with amazing future technology
Great video! I really like this current exploration of old hardware!
Whoa nice, I love when you do reviews of random curious electronic/device like that.
There are a LOT of business voicemail systems out there, mostly Lucent and Avaya, that use PC-compatible hardware just like this.
thank you for keeping the australians awake
sup mate
Heh, it's now like quarter to 4 in the morning.
Stay woke.
Awesome video, Clint. Thanks!
I'm glad there are people who appreciate this stuff. I've never thought nearly this much about this old stuff.
love you man! this stuff is always fascinating
I never fail to be surprised by just how many unique kinds of computers and tech that you come across.
Hilarious how they just stuck a floppy disk in there and sealed it off... Makes it easy to upgrade the "firmware" though - just plop in a different floppy disk...
Fun thing is that routers kept using floppies as their primary storage - or at least primary backup and firmware upgrade method - for an awful long time. This time last year I was working somewhere that had routers in use that offered only serial, ethernet, and floppy drive - no USB or anything. And they weren't exactly archaic kit, at least in terms of infrastructure hardware.
But if you only have about 4, maybe 8mb of flash for the firmware, it kinda works. In the case of these early 90s models, they might not even have bothered much with discrete files if there were only a limited number of models. You'd just have a 512kb (or smaller) system image file that would load into memory much like an emulator save state and then execute straight off the bat.
Be Inc used the RangeLan protocol for their prototype tablet that ran the BeIA OS. I used to have one of the tablets. It was a National Semi based computer with a 800x600 touch screen LCD. Pretty interesting. Booted from a CF card. DT-300 webpad.
Back in early 2000 I've been testing Proxim Tsunami MP11.a. It was a nice piece of hardware! Thank you for refreshing my memories :-)
10 min vids should come back! awesome stuff LGR !
What a fascinating bit of hardware, thanks for sharing it
I don't understand half the things you're talking about but I love it! :)
Very neat!
I remember using something similar with LEAF; Linux Embedded Application Firewall. It basically turns an old PC into an advanced gateway, router, firewall, and wireless access point. The nice thing was that LEAF only runs from a read-only floppy and that is the genius behind it. You configure the LEAF floppy in another PC and pop the disk and boot up the LEAF box. It loads everything in RAM and it runs from there. If you think the box has been compromised, you just shut it off. Any hacking done to it is gone. Then boot from the floppy again, probably after you've re-configured against the hack.
Hell yeah /r/Retrobattlestations! Love that subreddit!
This Channel Is Drop Dead Awesome!!!
Fascinating!
Ooooooooo, that felt like a mini tech tales I love it!
So many Amiga's I have had to repair from battery leakage over the last 10 years, some extreme examples have taken so much work to restore it's insane... Varta the destroyer of worlds!
No one needs 2160p Clint.
I can't believe that news cast didn't try to dumb down the technicals to it's beer chugging 90s viewers.
Something about these old machines just bring a smile to my face. What could you do to re-purpose it, I wonder...
Reminds me of these paint color matching systems they were made by some company Match Rite or something like that. Some of the standalone ones not hooked to a dispenser run a 386sx. I don’t remember if they booted from a hard drive or internal floppy but retailers that do manual mixing still use them to this day.
I had a PC in exactly the same form factor with the same AMD processor in a similar motherboard, but it had everything a PC needed, like hard drive and video :) The coolest and the most compact 386 desktop I've ever seen :)
I love LGR, man quotes strange letters and numbers at me for 6 minutes and I can't stop listening to it.
Can you please dump the floppies for historical purposes
That's the first thing I do with all floppies I get :)
Lazy Game Reviews you freakin rule Clint
yeah that's something I do too
Please Clint! dump the floppies and share with us!!
"That's the first thing I do with all floppies I get :)" - LGR
he already dumped those floppies
What an interesting little box. I imagine it wouldn't be very hard to convert this thing into a "Slim" Dos/Early Windows computer. I love the blue one more though.
It wouldn't be hard in theory, you'd just have to find one that isn't battery-corroded to hell and back ;)
nice find! and bit of history about wifi :)
I remember reading a reddit post where there was an old erver PC installed inside of another bigger server :D this sort of reminded me of that
The Cisco PIX was a 486 PC under its cover. I remember we needed a RAM upgrade and Cisco wanted $500 for a 4MB upgrade. One of the other Sys admins I worked with took the lid off and we saw it just used 72 pin EDO. So we purchased a $50 stick and performed the upgrade.
So you bought computers that don't work....AWESOME!!! Great video. Some crazy hardware out there.
This reminds me of our old Firewall / VPN devices. They replaced them my first week on the job, so I never saw them in action - but they hung around in a closet for years. They were Lucent "Bricks" - and the name was very apt, they were giant black 4U monstrosities with big industrial looking grab handles and even dust filters on the front. After a few years I thought about taking one or two to make a coffee table or something. I cracked it open and was surprised to see it was just a tiny Pentium II PC class motherboard tucked in one corner with a bunch of PCI LAN adapters and an Encryption Accelerator card booting off an IDE to CF adapter. Unlike these things, it did have a video card though. The newest one I looked at was a PIII and lacked the PCI Encryption Card so I guess the CPU was powerful enough by that point to do it all with software. They were replaced with Juniper NetScreen devices that I presume ran on ASICs because they were tiny in comparison. And now it is all in a landfill or scrap yard somewhere, made redundant by MPLS and IT managers running around yelling "put it in the cloud!"
These hidden PCs are not that uncommon even today. In the company I work for we got an internet gateway and a VoIP server which are basically the same thing: Standard PC components put in a custom form factor with crippled I/O and running specialized software.
Reminds me of the Mini ITX based ADSL router I put together that ran Smoothwall, back when ISPs only gave out ADSL USB modems.
I use modern proxim wireless hardware for doing WiFi surveys, it is the only NIC that works correctly with the software required by many hotel chains that will provide the wireless signal strength, along with SNR and some other important values. so looks like they have come a long way, but still really play in very specialized enterprise markets.
I have a box of 24 motherboards for these. Well, specifically, they are IBM OPAL LX 486SLC2 system boards. The 486SLC2 is really a 386 that IBM did some... stuff to. Unfortunately, out of the box of 24, only 4 appear to be salvageable. I'm going to remove the barrel battery and may replace with a newer 3.6v battery. I also came across 8 super small AT cases that I've been selling on the e of bays. I'm keeping one for myself.
I would love to repair that board for you! Man you get all the great stuff :) :)
thank you for another entertaining video!
A great vid like always. I can't Imagine why they wouldn't have sold it as desktop, access point combo.
Because it's a bad idea. You don't want to have your workers poking around server and network equipment for unrelated stuff
Main reason as said before is security. Combining a general purpose pc and wireless access point together to would be a poor design choice. Not just because users may get access to things they shouldnt, but typical end user problem eg poor maintenace, viruses would bring the computer down and the network with it. Theres also the inherent risks that would come with running a common operating system such as MS DOS/Windows which was not designed for networking and security (hello exploits!). Finally the last point is hardware specs and pricing. 386 computers were no longer top of the line and were at least a few generations old, but their low prices meant they could still be useful in situations where not a lot of cpu power is required. Throwing a video chip in would be an additional expense to buyers who would only be interested in having wireless access.
I'd guess it was rather for performance issues. You probably don't want your network to drop dead, just because someone decides to write a word document on the network devices, right ?.
I used to gut those just to get those riser cards. They're were really handy for squeezing another card into an older machine for benchtop data recovery.
i really like the new blurbs on the bottom left, they look nice and are helpful.
Thank you!
This sort of standard PC/server hardware in an appliance is still used today in a bunch of networking kit - I've seen an old network firewall used as a media PC just by putting a video card in it and installing linux - it's also common that the only video output is a serial port - usually via RJ-45 connector, but it's the same deal as a 9-pin, just a different connector.
Around when this unit was made, I used to sell those motherboards. They came out of a factory in Taiwan, and cost us about $40 with all the "normal PC" chips installed. I'd imagine this one with all the missing hardware was quite a bit cheaper. We'd sell them for around $200 each - memory extra, and of course no peripherals or drives.
The big problem was the quality. Fully 1/3 of them failed within a few months. To the factory, this was an acceptable loss rate as they were so cheap to produce. But try explaining that to some guy across the country who had to wait a week for a replacement to be mailed to him.
I always think that you actually deserve more subscribers and more views
Whoa those were the days:-) the venerable 386 PC!
Clint. You know what to do.
Use the spare one to build a proper 386 PC- attach a harddrive and a graphics card, go for it!
....After you get someone to fix the leak, that is.
Would love to see you get that thing working somehow and put your own stuff on it!
_That's it, it's good._ -LGR
I loved you over on "The Game Dave" channel! He needs more subs!
I am reminded that my teacher in my CCNA class said that some of the first routers were really just desktop style pcs in a router casing. So this tracks actually.
lol where did you get that "commercial/news report" on the product. That was so bizarre... i love it
Computer Chronicles. All episodes are on CZcams. At the end of every episode there was a short "news" segment called Random Access.
Back in the 1990's, I had an entire network that were built on these, and the Motorola WaveLAN radio. I had 100's of them..
The SX is 16 bit bus CPU. It talks to the world 16 bits at time, while being a 32 bit chip internally . That makes it really a 20 Mhz 386 functionally 386SXs talk naturally on a 16 bit ISA bus like a 286, AT type CPU. Code wise, they are like their 32 bit bussed relatives. I had one. I thought of it as a racing squirrel. I ran DOS and linux on it .
I love it! I can't tell if that design is creative as heck or lazy as hell - which is the best kind of design.
I was happy to see you in the finale of Game Dave
I was happy to be in it!
Blocking the keyboard connector because... security :-)
When you've been travelling and come home to 3 unwatched LGR videos. Bliss.
Even some Networkswitches use still a 386 or 486 today.
The reason it's a 386SX-40 is because they were a dime a dozen by that point. Even the DX-40 wasn't that expensive, and they were extremely popular with a lot of the smaller local PC builders for that reason.
That intermec case could possibly make a nice mini-ITX case if modded just right. (vent holes and IO plate modifications)
Many years ago, one of my old jobs was getting rid of their cash registers - so I asked if I could take one, and it turned out to be a full 486 DX!
That is very cool. I'll have to see if I can find one here in the UK.
"There ya go, it's good." -Proxim,probably xD
this is like one of those you can make it yourself or you can buy the prebuilt ideas.
:D - that blue one looks really modern for the time; compared with the beige/off white!
If you like hidden 386s try looking for old an Pre-Lucent buyout Livingston PortMaster 2E access server - A staple of early-mid 90s pre-56K ISPs. Placed where you'd have shelves of actual external modems (Or modems stripped out of their shells and slid in to cool little custom made racks) and gobs of analog phone lines. (56K required PRI or BRI or any other digital line on the ISP side and the access servers were pure digital)
If you peeked inside the Portmaster you'd see a little 386SX chip chugging along running the show (Along side a lot of dedicated serial hardware. Portmasters were no slouch)
No DOS to be found on the livingston though. Not really PC hardware either. Ran custom unix that booted off an internal ROM in true embedded fashion. Accessible via serial console or telnet. Old portmasters saw use after the death of 33.6 and modems in general because a device with gobs of serial ports could be turned in to a serial console access system with some clever configuration. Useful if you had lots of sun hardware or lots of linux systems with serial consoles.. As was common in the late 90s and early 2000s.
That front panel interests me - looks like there was provision originally for the floppy to be accessible.
Wonder if these guys literally bought up a then out of production computer line from another company and just used it with modifications.
Wonder how hard it would be to track down any of the original machines - cause a case this size would be interesting to play with.
Computers in disguise as not-computers are fascinating to me!
My job uses Fujitsu computers as cash registers and I'd love to be able to tear one open to see what it looks like inside...
Good video. Why don't you work with the 8-bit Guy to restore those motherboards and in the process make a video?
Watchguard made lots of routers and firewalls with stripped down PC's. I have an old Watchguard Firebox 1000 with a socket 370 motherboard and AMD K6-2 450 cpu. It has a PCI slot and I was able to boot it with a video card.
Loved it !