The Bizarre 1999 Commodore 64 Web.it Internet Computer
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- čas přidán 14. 05. 2024
- A system so strange I don't know where to begin! This is the Web It Internet Computer from Web Computers in 1999. It's effectively a 66MHz 486 PC with 16MB RAM that not only runs IBM PC DOS 7.0 and Windows 3.1, but also C64 software! To a degree. And the closer you look the weirder it gets.
● LGR links:
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● Here's a download for embOS for use in a VM:
winworldpc.com/product/window...
● All background music licensed from:
www.epidemicsound.com
00:00 Look at this weirdness!
01:05 The C64 Web.it Internet Computer
02:10 A web of bankruptcies and acquisitions
02:51 The new Commodore 64 for the 90s
03:14 It's Dutch? But it's German
04:01 Trackpad mouse? Nah, stylus
05:01 Ports and I/O
05:42 Powering on with dual CRTs
06:19 Say hello to embOS from IBM
07:27 A MIDI music test
07:53 Windows 3.1 except not
09:02 No hard drive, it's all flash
10:06 Stuck with preconfigured PC-DOS
10:42 It runs DOOM
11:09 Commodore 64 software
13:21 Dreaming of better hardware
14:22 Eh I'll pretend it's from 1993. This is neat!
16:01 Outroduction
#LGR #retro #computer - Věda a technologie
It looks like a manufacturer ended up with a pile of laptop bottom halves and someone in accounting figured out a creative way to dump them.
It's way to cheeply built. The use of a integrated PC is uncommon and also very cheap.
This is not the only one. I seen older models use integrated 486 already back I 1995 when it would be a decent pc
The chassis might actually be reused from a rackmount keyboard / trackpad for user in server rooms. Almost certain I've seen that exact shape.
I was thinking this as well. Lots of odd part/software choices, and that trackpad seems like it literally was a PDA screen they were already sitting on.
It's a doughnut hole of computers :)
@@laszlokovacs8348 the track pad seems particularly odd since normal finger operated track pads were common by then and since it wasn't a portable device anyway they could have just thrown in a cheap mouse instead. Def looks like they had a parts bin full of those stylus-operated ones they needed to get used up.
Feels like this would have been great in 1993, maybe even as late as 1995. But 1999?!
🤣
i think it's ok for office use. you have word thing ,you have excl thing, you have floppy drive. and it's cheap. As a computer it's not good in 1999, but as a word processor, it;s ok.
Yeah, at that point I only remember floppy disks being used to repair random configuration shit on computers.
just seems like a goofy mismash of old and new features that don't mix all that well together.
Yep, like many many tech goodies over the years, it is a victim of bad timing.
The C64 had enormous longevity in Europe, you would still find them in homes in 1993, sometimes as late as 94-95! most were replaced with Amigas but the old machine lived on, I remember C64 bundles still being on store shelves and apparently selling in the early 90s.
So yeah, this was still way late but the C64 brand did relatively recent life in it in Europe in 1999 which is presumably why this branding was chosen. It just failed to recognise how quickly we had all moved on with PC hardware advancing so rapidly through the 90s, in 1999 this looked like the stone age.
I know exactly the kind of market this was aimed at. Plenty of people around that time in Europe only ever bought a C64 as a computer. But the internet was booming and even they wanted to get into that action. So to put out a C64 that had internet capabilities was not that bizarre of an idea. But yeah starting off with dated technology in an era when even a top of the line PC could get pretty much obsolete in a matter of months was probably what killed this.
I remember shopping for my first computer to buy for myself at this time. I waited about 6 to 12months for the cheap ones to go from a 500mhz processor to a 1.2 ghz Celeron. The RAM also almost doubled in that time too! Crazy times!
Yep! The way I imagined it, considering that a lot of software developers would've already dropped support for 16-bit Windows, using it when it was new in 1999 would've probably been like using Windows 98 SE in 2009.
As such, I can only imagine how many Netscape Navigator errors Web-it users would've gotten, not to mention not being able to play streaming media, Shockwave, and Flash content! It was probably around the same realm as WebTV over in the US but with the ability to download files to diskettes.
An internet computer
What planet are you on? People in Europe were using C64s in 1999. Lol, absolutely not.
Not to mention that the C64 was only being emulated via software.
Using a PDA screen as a trackpad and that IDE port that's just there with no space in the case to actually be used have to be the weirdest parts of that thing, it's like they just threw together a computer with whatever parts they happened to have laying around.
Absolutely, it has “let’s just make a stew from leftovers in the fridge” energy.
The actual Commodore did that a lot too…
That's almost certainly what actually happened
@@LGR LOL ... EPIC
@@LGR As long as it's not Cooking with Jack's garbage stew all should be fine.
Every time you said something about what's actually running on this, my brain started to break.
Its OS is a reshelling of Windows 3.1, but made by IBM. And it's running on a machine branded as a Commodore 64, but one that requires a stylus and released a year at most before the Millennium?!
Ludicrous. Daft. Brilliant.
Glad it’s not just me, haha
Truly, the closer I looked the more baffled I became. Each aspect of this that initially looks normal ends up being bizarre in some unexpected way.
IBM had some rights to use Windows 3.1 left over from their old deal with Microsoft-it wasn’t free but I think they could modify it in ways that others could not, as with the Windows variant that shipped with OS/2, and could still sell their version of DOS. So this machine essentially has spare-part software to go with the spare-part hardware.
At least it isn’t running GEOS. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The fact that IBM let gave them licence to use thier version of the software is most intrigueing. I wonder if the motherboard and main hardware started life as an IBM portable dumb terminal project that got superceded by the internet. Didnt Amstrad sell that ludicrous email and fax machine phone thing around the same time?
@@LGRIBM had access to the Windows 3.1 source as part of there breakup deal with Microsoft over OS/2 it's likely they had rights to adapt Windows 3.1 for there own embedded os projects. This probably was IBM attempting to complete with Microsoft Modular Windows that ran on top of MS-DOS.
Ah, yes, the days of the Commodore Curse. Those were such... eventful times for those of us with Amigas.
Quick let's get cryptobros to buy the Commodore name and have them fail miserably
@@ozzie_goat commodore crypto lol
@@theconfusingwords Considering what they did to the Winamp name...(or lack thereof)
Yeah I remember those days all too well...
@@ozzie_goat Or better yet, Google. I'd say Meta but they're already bleeding out.
10:42 Finally, you can run Doom on a Commodore 64.
I don't remember Doom 64 like this.
@@indigomizumi Doom 64 was for the NINTENDO 64, not C=. That's the original DOS Doom.
@@SeeJayPlayGames it was a joke
@@SeeJayPlayGames I was making a joke. I know it was on the N64.
Or at least one that doesn't take 66.6 hours to load from disk.
I’d like to see how bad the “disturbing contents” that lead to the closure of the chatbase were
If you remember Yahoo Chat back in the day, I'd imagine the Chatbase was probably fairly similar. Lmao
Me too. Earliest capture on the Wayback Machine (from 2000) still has this notice.
in 1999 they where not as politically correct as today. so it had to be really messed up probably illegal things.
Any online chat always turns into a cess pool where there's no moderation or chat filters, neither of which was easy to do back then. The problem has never gone away, it's just moved to different platforms and we've gotten better tools for dealing with it.
they cracked open the big foot mystery
The OS intro jingle sounds WAY too epic for its own good and I don’t hate it 😂
it gives me Metroid Prime vibes
@@chuckleshelicopterwigwamjo7315 Yep, even Metroid in general. Like you found the Morphing Ball ability or some sh*t lol and the music gets you all pumped up for action.
Its the best part of the machine lol
Lifted straight from a PS1 RPG, I swear.
@@CptJistuce probably sourced the samples from the same sample CD, or used a Roland D-50, which was also incredibly common in that era (can't recognize the source myself, but so much of the 90s video game sound is straight from sample CDs - Bizzarre Guitars shaping the entirety of the Silent Hill soundtrack, and X-Static Goldmine being used in every single late PS1/PS2 era driving game and platformer).
Note that despite being released in 1999, this had Netscape Navigator v3 which was already two years old and eclipsed by v4+. 16bit (Windows 3.x) support was dropped after v4.08 which was released in late 1998. When this device was released it couldn't run the latest browser, but they didn't even bother to upgrade it to the versions of v4 that it could run.
V3 was a bit lighter on resources
@@agy234 A good point. It's been so long since I've used either of them.
Wasn't 4.x quite a bit more unstable as well? Been so long now, but I think I had to have both installed since 3.x was the only capable of handling online communities without constantly crashing or dropping letters when typing messages.
@@fisk0 Yeah, that would probably contribute. As I said, it's been a long time and I really only remembered that 4.x was out in '99. I like these theories as to why it was not used.
I appreciate that when most tech channels I've seen say they have something weird to show off it's really not all that strange but every time Clint says he has something weird in a video, it's actually pretty bizarre. One of the reasons I keep coming back to watch these, it's always something interesting.
My grandparents had a WebTV. Towards the end, it was impossible to use because of all the spam and it lacked a way to remotely administer it, making it hard to help them with issues!
Those were quite popular. I wonder what their first impressions were when it was new out of the box.
Oh man, I remember some senior family friends who had a WebTV. I was a child so I thought it was cool beans.
That thing is wild...
It "almost" has it, but the lack of a configurable bios and inability to boot to a different OS leaves it seriously crutched....
Still a neat thing to have in the collection.
I bet the BIOS is just closed down, the folks at Tulip certainly did not made a BIOS themselves and a guess would be that it is from the folks at Insyde, they made BIOSes for thin clients and this could be right up their alley.
In theory one could make a BIOS setup that runs on the computer, or if we have a disassembly check what address to jump to with DEBUG from DOS to open the setup.
Just needs a dump of said BIOS and a silent hour spent in Ghidra or IDA Pro. :)
They probably imagined it selling by the boat load to Internet cafes and museums and the like.
Almost is correct, the Sound card is pretty good, better than the computer I had in 1998 (actually there was no sound card).
I'm wondering if there was any way this could get a virus. It would almost certainly be immune to the ones written for normal PCs.
@@MrDuncl not easily, the virus would have to be written to take advantage of some loophole on this specific machine.
The big hurdle is the OS being stored in ROM, you can't touch it without a way to write to it.... So someone would have to study this machines architecture to figure out how to enable write on the ROM.
Without that, any virus that did run would be gone after a reboot.
After Commodore's bankruptcy, Commodore and Amiga became zombie brands - rising from the grave attached to some harebrained product that would flop, before being sold to a new owner and rising from the grave again. They must be cursed by this point.
they never did find what they needed... BRRRRRAAAAAAAAIIIIINNNS. That's what killed the company in the first place. Too much greed at the top, suppressing the brains working on the hardware.
@@SeeJayPlayGames True, but there's the opposite too. The problem with some engineers is that, left to their own devices, a product is never quite finished. "We can just add this, take that out, move this, redesign this and that." And you either end up with nothing but a huge hole in your budget, or with something that almost nobody else wants and costs more than anyone would pay. Many brilliant engineers are terrible businessman.😁
@@another3997 You just described RCA
I guess this is more like a cheap asset which was believed to be a saver for already dying companies. They're like "yeah, our finances are in terrible shape, and we don't exactly know what to do, but with some spare change we found in our "pockets" we can buy Commodore, which was on sale again in some kind of corporate Lidl. Everybody knows Commodore, they will be excited" And nobody really was excited because PC market was already pretty saturated at the point.
@@ShitHappensRLY 99 was the year when PCs as we know them now were really taking off in Germany, Web2.0 was on its way, the "Year 2000 future fever" etc etc. You also could already play "old school games" on your mobile bone... uhm, phone... No one needed a thing like that in 99, but maybe a few nerds who had their fun with it... Using Germany here, cause I can´t say much about other european countries at the time.
The shot at 16:05 is just so LGR. Content gold to be sure! 😂
christmas?
SMILE! Good catch. Didn’t see that first go around.
Wanted to like this, but it's at 69, so obligated to comment instead.
I thought 'clone' when I saw it too!
@@JaimesonLaLone not now clone
MIDI support is here!
COUNT ME IN!
7:03 hit me with a wave of Netscape Nostalgia! Thanks, Clint!
A part of me thought it was gonna work...
@@shuruff904 WIth a dial-up connection it actually might.
That Netscape splash screen is sweet. And so was the one for the 4.x versions, of course.
I know, right? We originally had Errols (yes, my family was one of those people. My brother had EarthLink). So we could only use Netscape.
It has a bit of a Nissan Juke vibe - in as such it looks like it's suffering from the mumps! Have always loved the concept of a "PC in a Keyboard" type thang, so am surprised I'd never heard of this until now. Thank you once again for helping to keep the memory of forlorn tech alive.
"Forlorn" is such fabulous and fitting phrasing.
Lol I always thought of that as a misspelling of "Joke"
You mean home computers? That’s the “pc in a keyboard” thing.
It was not uncommon to boot Linux from DOS in this era with loadlin, so it's probably no impossible to run something else on it.
I've only vague recollections of "Some company in Germany is trying to resurrect the Commodore name," but haven't actually seen this until now. I gotta be honest. I kinda love this hot mess of a machine. I'd be surprised if there's not a custom ROM floating around which would allow you to boot from an IDE drive.
You might also be thinking of a relaunch of the Commodore brand in 2007. I've visited their booth on Cebit in Germany back then.
I was a PC tech the first time, when this strange little machine was made. I was much further along in my IT career in 2007, and do recall that relaunch a little better than I recall this one ;)
*yet, you can bet someone will, even when there are less than a dozen left working
Seeing the Dutch box there this makes a lot of sense to me, people held on to their C64's and software for quite a long time here and the transition to the internet was a pretty slow thing unless you happened to be super into it.
I dunno, I had the playstation in the 90s and a desktop with dial up internet at home and at work. This machine would have been very disappointing. It was probably aimed at grandparents for when the kids came to visit
@@charleswhitney3235 Aimed at Grandparents who wanted to check out a few recipes, see what the temperature is in Iceland, and check out the football scores. Amazing stuff for them back in the day.
I dont know man, I am Dutch We had a C64/128, but when Windows 3.1 and MSDOS 6.22 PCs came out (affordable) in 1994/1995, we switched.
Yes Great at Gaming
I had COMPLETELY forgotten about this! I remember thinking that I would have liked to had one at the time it came out, if only it weren't specced like my 1993 clone PC that I had recently junked for a Pentium II 233 MHz overclocked to 300 Mhz in 1999. I also wasn't impressed with the choice of CCS64 as even then VICE was far superior. It's great to be able to see one put through the paces though, and confirmed my decision not to break the bank importing one just for the feelgood Commodore branding. Thank you for sharing this with us!
That brief late 90s/early 00's "internet appliance" era sure produced some weird hardware.
This seems like something that really should have been specced with more era-correct hardware though, a 486 was testing the limits even back then and would always make this look enormously dated despite all the cool internet marketing fluff.
Remember the "Fridge with Internet Access" that was being touted as the next big thing for a time around this ?
@@MrDunclI thought IoT was supposedly actually taking off? That being a collective term for things like that, with Internet access pretty much just for marketing purposes
@@nthgth What I was thinking of wasn't much more than a fridge with a tablet stuck on the door. Back before anyone had worked out how to get decent battery life on a tablet from internal batteries. It gets a mention in this video czcams.com/video/cvtCpEHjvNM/video.html
I think the companies that bought the Commodore/Amiga brand were thinking that the consumers felt some loyalty to the brand, so they could slap the name Commodore on a tea towel and people would rush out to buy it. But what they forgot was that C64 users bought the computer because of it's superior graphics and sound for it's day, the Amiga users bought the Amiga for the same reason, so slapping the Commodore name on a cheap 486 in 1999 and then making it emulate games from 1982 at 1/10th of the speed, wasn't going to fool any of those people who owned Commodore machines back in the day.
LGR first thing in the morning!!! It's gonna be a good day.
there's 6 p.m in my region but it's still gonna be a good day
And If u watch LGR in the evening, you gonna have a fucking good evening!
What a great channel! So relaxing videos. Such a pleasure to watch them.
Thank you, I hope you continue to enjoy!
@@LGR Thank you for your reply [an immediate one I should notice]. It means a lot. I will continue to enjoy! Have a nice one!
Welcome to the comment section family! It's easy to forget that new people find LGR all the time and it's not just those of us who have been watching forever somehow 😂
@@mialemon6186 I Appreciate Your Welcome! ThankU. New people gotta appear because CZcams gives suggestions in the sidebar. In my opinion each channel will find them sooner or later. Maybe not everyone is brave enough for the comment section, but I at least try to pretend to be one. Have a nice one.
Yes fans!
I love the trackpad / vanity mirror combo!
But do you really?....
Wow, the Commodore brand went around Europe in the '90s more than herpes.
I remember having to turn off a bunch of things in DOS to get One Must Fall running on an older machine. I'm surprised it's running here shortly after the mentions of the limitations.
Oh, I remember seeing that one on TV back then.
Of course, young young me didn't had 700DM nor did my mom but I always loved the idea.
Probably because we had a C64 years prior and maybe reason for why I like the Pi 400 too but yea...
Nice pronunciation of DM, Clint!
Quick question about DM. We always said: 100 DM not 100 DMs (like Clint did). How did you in Germany do it?
@@rutgerb DM, really.
It's both singular and plural, at least that is how I learned it.
They've literally taken everything you never wanted and fit it into a slim-ish case.
What a fascinating weird little machine and what a weird piece of history. The late years of Commodore are a strange time indeed.
Also, how strange that the computer is in German, but everything else is in Dutch. Perhaps a mix up that happened when packaging the machine?
My guess is that it could've originally sold in the Netherlands but made its way over to Germany at some point, where it was then shipped to me years later. I've never actually seen a Dutch version of the machine itself!
I also saw the dutch lettering and honestly I can't fathom seeing it sold back in 1999, everyone was secure on pentium 2-3 back then! Where the heck does LGr get these odd niche things love it!
@@LGR Where would someone have gotten a German OS install for this weirdness though? It doesn't look like there's any easy way of reinstalling the OS for users and I doubt there was any support for this thing after the company folded. Since the company was located in a very remote part of the Netherlands (overseas territories back then) I suspect they might have been too cheap to print international documentation and boxes. On the other hand they did bother to get the OS localised. Baffling!
OMG! You just dredged up some long buried memories. I begged my mum for one of these as a kid. I thought it was a cheaper compromise as an excuse to convince her to get me my first computer. On christmas day, seemingly not knowing the difference I opened a box to an... atari 2600. Not the computer I thought I would get. It wasn't until 4 years later when a library sold off its old computers I got my own grey box pc and bought dungeon keeper for my very first pc game. I had completely forgotten what this thing was called and now it seems young me might have dodged a compromised experience bullet.
Dungeon Keeper as a first PC game sets expectations VERY high.
atari 2600??? those were obsolete TEN YEARS before this thing
You must be thinking of the real original Commodore 64 from 1982-1990ish, not this thing from 1999.
Maybe a strange and specific thing to focus on, but love the shooting of this video. That blue background/lighting with the white light up front with the subject, and the wood surface under - plus the super crisp picture? Really nice to watch, and I'm not someone who often notices these things!
Thanks for adding actual captions for the Deaf - I had a c64 back in the day. Thanks for sharing.
That is indeed… a weird thing!
It’s own operating environment despite having what appears to be Microsoft Paintbrush. (Ahh, it’s actually a shell for Windows 3.1 😂)
It makes me really happy it has Netscape Navigator and Lotus 123.
I'm so surprised I haven't heard of this! I thought the whole "what if we made modern Commodore 64 for nostalgia" thing only came along later!
Just had a flashback to that attempt from 2011, the one that was asking for like $1000 for an Intel Atom machine shoved into a fancy C64 shell
I had a C128 when they were new. My brother and I bought it a Federated in Dallas back in the day. Loved our C64 Epyx and EA classic games! I had never heard of this unit and I am fascinated.
The Dutch part in the manual about the flash cards:
If you start from a flash card, your web it computer can play games, and other software you got (gifted or received? Doesn't translate that well) on special flash memory cards.
The other bit is about using the slots and starting up automatically, not that interesting.
It says pretty much the same things about the diskette.
So it does seems like sharing games and software was a possibility, or even endorsed.
And just for fun, the points on the right side of the box;
Surf on the web
Send and receive Email
Play games
Write letters
Use spreadsheets
Your personal agenda
Educational
Works with pc monitor or tv
Plug and play, plug in and start immediately
Startup in a couple of seconds
that 3.1 content brought back a lot of memories, thanks. great video :)
Ohm that's weird as heck. I remember playing with a range of earliest C64 emulators for PC in ~1992 - C64S - but I thought they were barely useable on 486 hardware. May be wrong in that. Not sureprirsed this is German though. Explains a lot of the weirdness. That touch screen that's suspiciously like a PDA, sitting right in front of a irDA port like what you'd find on a PDA reeks of the Vectrex - a system entirely designed around a warehouse of defunct vector VDUs. I bet that's whole assembly is a build from a job lot of unusable PDA parts.
What a interesting computer. That drive setup! I wonder if it was an effort to make the OS bulletproof or to just avoid using a hard drive at all (might have been cheaper?). I wonder if the 'trackpad' was some digital signature panel that got reused if it wasn't some random cutdown PDA screen.
Faulty hard drives started the downfall of Amstrad computers. Eliminating the hard drive and making the OS bulletproof means less guarantee returns, hence more profits.
I don't know - it's not like hard drives were all that expensive in 1999, especially smaller ones. Something along the lines of a 2 GB 2.5" IDE drive would have offered reasonable storage for an affordable price.
This is computer gold. i too grew up in that era with the vic-20 and c64 before moving onto ibm clone based computers(first was a zenith 486 dx2). i had no idea this machine existed, very fascinating. Thanks for the education and for what you do..
you really went and took me back to my childhood with some of those games. Doom, The skiing game, Mine Sweeper, and even the one game with the guy picking up the chips (can't remember what it's called).
Interesting computer 🙂 Released in the time, when flea markets were full of real Commodore 64's with very cheap prices. I regret selling my C-64 C in 1991 and not getting another one in those days, when they were cheaply available in flea markets. I have now the Mini C-64 though, and glad I kept even the Amiga 500.
Back in 1999 didn't yet have internet at home, but used indeed Netscape at work and visited even internet cafe's. A cup of coffee and half an hour browsing the net, those were the days 😅
It feels strange to see all the stuff on screen in German.... I don't even know why, it makes me happy that Clint has to deal with this beautiful language!
Wow man, that glimpse of that fighting game 'one must fall 2097', really really hit the nostalgia bone! Part of my reptile brain unlocked Instantly. Thx Clint!
This is pretty awesome! Always look forward to your videos. Especially the quirky ones!
15:08 Love that "Diamond Sleath 3D" video adapter - really flew under the radar in its time.
Now I want to see doom running on the little LCD trackpad!
Love these videos, man. My lowkey favorites. Keep up the great work!
This reminds me of Webtv. I worked at The Good Guys! during the late 90's and your channel brings me fond memories.
Around the same time, in the UK there was the Bush Internet TV / Internet set top box. It used Acorn's RISC OS on an ARM7500FE (around 50MHz'ish) but with the RISC OS desktop stripped out and just a web browser. If you were canny with a ZIP100 parallel drive, you could sideload the missing OS modules and get it to boot to a RISC OS desktop too.
So that IDE header might be able to fit a Disk on Module like you usually see on industrial PC's based around older 486 hardware. Might be worth a look.
The top of the case is too tight for the DOMs that I have here, I tried that. It'd work with an IDE extension cable, possible routed over to the empty area below the floppy drive. But then you run into the fact that this still doesn't allow you to access the BIOS through normal means, much less boot from another drive. It just makes sense to stick to CF over PCMCIA, I think.
@@LGR 😔😔😔
They mention bios access on the lemon64 forum website, but not how:
"Many WebIt buyers have connected a internal hard disk and even CompactFlash TRUE/ATA adapters using PCMCIA (has two slots) to boot the system from them so then load other operating systems... Perhaps you could then install new emulators. It's a machine that can be "hacked" so much because their creators launched it to the market hiding half of the things it can do. I.E.: you can access the BIOS, and there is an internal IDE connector, and there is no mention of it..."
Imagine if this form factor stuck and our keyboards today were mounted on top of 2 feet of graphics cards and liquid cooling
Great Review! Thanks! For more weirdness, the Alphasmart Dana, the Palm-like, full-size portable keyboard/LCD display device, also had a stylus holder above the keyboard.
Reminds me of the old WebTV set my grandma had at one point. I remember going to grandma's house and looking up info on Decipher's newest CCGs on that.
Cute icon
There were some 90s Linux distros (Monkey Linux comes to mind) that used the LOADLIN bootloader to launch the Linux kernel from within DOS. So that's one way to load an alternative OS.
Some versions of GRUB also seem to exist that can be loaded from within DOS, so you can try that to chainload another MBR from a floppy or a PCMCIA storage. Never tried that, but in theory it could work.
theres grub4dos but I don't think it boots linux
Thank you for covering this beautiful(?) disaster of a machine. Glorious.
Weird machine indeed...never saw it overhere in those days. Well done review Clint....greets from Belgium ;-)
Ah yes Commodore 64 Web it Internet computer. I only see one of these in magazine and some photos on the internet but never seen them in action at all. This is the first time seen in action which is incredible and fascinating at the same time to me. Pretty Cool.
What a beautiful mess. I never would of wanted one back in '99 though.
Nobody wanted one in "99 or 00 or 01. Hence the bankruptcy..
ahhh fridays. my day off work, alone in the house, and LGR uploads. perfection
oh my god. I've been looking for that UK video since my childhood. I saw it once and I've been on and off searching for it. and then it pops up in an LGR video
I think Commodore is still part of some Dutch company, as far as i know.
I did see something about a smartphone with the Commodore name on it some time ago.
May be interesting for a future video!
And as always, great video!
Most of the Commodore IPs are of uncertain ownership. At least three different companies claim to exclusively own the chicken head logo, and sme of the other IPs have such murky ownership that there are rumours of Russian mafia being involved. But who really knows these days
I presume the built-in keyboard is connected internally via PS/2. I wonder if it's possible to disconnect it and break it out to a PS/2 port mounted on the case somewhere.
The PC card slot might allow for more ports.
"The branding is weird.
The form factor is weird.
The specs are weird.
The release date is weird."
* 10 seconds later *
"It sold exclusively in Europe"
Theeere we go :D
Good lord... I saw the opening with the game "Mule". I wish you had the volume on!! That damn tune is additive...
4 words (?) that shouldn't go together in any capacity: 1999, Commodore 64, and *_web._*
Looking at the thumbnail... what in the bananabread is that!?
After watching the video... what in the bananabread was that!?
I still miss the old lgr. I think I'll go watch one of those videos. This was a good watch. Something I didn't know about.
LOVE your videos! Thank you so much!
What an incredibly weird oddity. Also, does this come with Stacker embedded on it?! There's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
I saw this thing a few weeks ago at the Computer Museum in Helmond, NL. What a weird thing indeed😃
Oh nice! Seems like a thing they'd have and certainly deserving of a spot in a Dutch museum.
@@LGR yeah it's pretty amazing. Lots of Europe computer history there, as well as some real oddities like an Aesthedes 2 in 98% working order. Amazing! You should come by one day (and let me know so I can buy you a beer😃)
Seeing that weird LCD-like trackpad thing makes me thing that rewiring the video output of the machine to use the trackpad as a screen would be a peak Action Retro totally-normal-computing(tm) project.
The freaking chatbase part cracks me up so much. Trust humans to fuck everything up without moderation.
Hell, it took Yahoo & AOL years to catch on how creepy a lot of their chat spaces had become.
4:55 You have also seen a stylus "hole" on nearly every single customer-facing credit card reader you've ever used (at least in 'Murica). For reasons beyond my comprehension, no one ever uses it... except me... because I know it's there. It is _so_ much easier than fumbling around with trying to get the pen to snap back in.
What on earth do you use a stylus for on a credit card reader?
@@fredjones100 Signatures.
It's funny to think how far computers have come - crazy to think about Windows 3.1 🤣
I kinda miss the 3.1 days. maybe I'm just nostalgic for those associated times.
@@sinisterthoughts2896 I loved 3.1! I have a WFW 3.11 VM to this day.
@@jamesslick4790 DOSBox runs it pretty well, too!
@@Chaos89P Yep. It sure does. and DOS Box saves files to your "REAL" hard drive. A plus for convenience! I do have 3.1 (as opposed to WFW 3.11) on my DOSBox install as well. Fun Rare software for Win 3.1 is Calmira II that gives Win 3x a Win 9.X UI. (For those into THAT kinda thing) LOL.
I love that this is a thing. Back in the 90s I worked at CompUSA and we sold a couple of nettop shenanigans that were less than impressive. This one actually looks a little better than most since it is an actual PC, hopefully you find a way to put another drive in and a way to boot from it. Now I have to look closer at the nettops when I'm rummaging or hitting up the thrift shops....
I loved when you totally creepy-faced from the lcd-pad :P
In Brazilian Portuguese webit is the sound that the frog makes
releasing a 486 windows3.11-based system in 1999, what were they thinking?
That trackpad reflection at the end was the best part of this computer
This piques my interest. Thank you I'm going to have to do some sleuthing for this one, here's hoping I can grab one.
Presumably it has Win 3.1 in ROM? It's impressively fast. There was a terminal with that approach too. I remember this being advertised when it was new. Not upgradeable but also pretty much immune from malware.
I had one and it was quite useless 😅
@@nichderjeniche ah well. It reminds me of the Amstrad em@iler though. Nice to look at but more ornament than use.
@@nineteenthly Never heard of that before.
For me it was the transition time coming from a real C64 and didn't had a real PC yet, somehow I thought I need it and the name was a another reason to buy it for me as the C64 fanboy I used to be.
@@nichderjeniche sounds like this is going to split according to the time-honoured fight between 65-series and Z80 CPUs! Maybe the old Speccy owners ended up buying Amstrad em@ilers and the old CBM 64 ones this thing.
It was a presumably British device used to send emails and contained a ZX Spectrum emulator with built-in games, and it would stop working, iirc, if you didn't send an email in a certain period of time. Some kind of subscription model, but I'd have to look it up.
The keyboard module looks very familiar. A lot like the keyboard in my laptop from 2003-2004. Mine was by Cherry iirc. I wonder if this one is an earlier iteration.
Reminds me of a VTECH toy computer
Awesome video on a great piece of computer history 😄
Mr. LGR, i have to say that the music you put at the beginning of most of your videos, reminds me strongly of SimCity 2000 :)
DM 600 is dirt-cheap for 1999. A regular PC (without monitor) would be around DM2500 / fl 2800 => 1300 USD.
I'm gonna be honest: You and Red Letter Media are the only two channels i REALLY enjoy any more on CZcams ;)
I'm Dutch but I don't remember ever hearing of this. What an odd piece of ware.
It's a strange experience to see so much Dutch text on your channel. 😄
Thank you for the shot of you smiling in the reflection of the LCD pad like a weirdo.
It's kinda useless yet kinda fascinating at the same time. There was a time when I would have loved to have one.
So, we could technically say that this is the most modern Commodore 64 released back then? because it looks just like any other commodore but with a more early Y2K-ish style, and i kinda dig the rounded curvy style this one has, just that it could had been better if they added at least a bit more powerful processor and prehaps 32 megs of ram, because for work seems a good thing to have at least back then but for anything else? its way too limited specially because it doesnt even have a CD Drive and those were all the rage back then so its kinda hard to sell a pc without one.
Interesting! Thanks for showing this.
I remember reading about this in an October 1998 edition of pc active magazine...
Kind of amusing to see how much it.... Overpromised and underdelivered, in a way..
Also; webtv.... Another big blast from the past for me
That software was almost 10 years old for 1999
I sometimes wonder that if Commodore would have marketed their stuff better and kept advancing, that they might have been a runner even these days. In reality they were actually early pioneers :o)
Love your videos LGR 💕💕
oh hell yes, it looks like a weirdo alphasmart