Opening Up a Big ol' Pile of Retro Tech Packages!
[festive upbeat music] - [Clint] Greetings folks. Happy December! And it is time for another "unboxing of donations" of things that you've sent in over the past amount of months. So yeah, this is not a Christmas episode exactly, but yeah, it's in the spirit I suppose, opening up boxes of stuff! So yeah, let's just get right to it. A ton of great things in here, no doubt. Thank you in advance.
Let's get to it. All right, got one here from Will. Ah-ha, from Sabine Speed and Specialty in Garland, Texas. Here's a note here going over the creation of this thing. And, yes, thank you for watching and for making this. So this is a custom LGR case badge or really more of a keyboard badge.
I did a video a while back on my LGR Blerbs channel, where I got a Unicomp keyboard and made a really, quickly-made LGR badge for that keyboard case. And I got some offers saying, oh, would you like a metal one? Will was one of those folks who offered to send one, he put one together and send it. Yeah, gonna go ahead and put that on the keyboard case now.
All right, so here's that keyboard that, again, I've done a video on over on my Blerbs channel. But yeah, they had a little spot for a logo there. Got a little double-sided tape on the back and there we go. Perfect fit. Oh, yeah. Thank you.
That's awesome. Okay, I got one here from Bartek in Poland. Okay, got some disks.
Let's see here. Greetings from the other side of the globe. Hope these disks work. Hope so, too. So yeah, it appears we have an EP on floppy disks. "Principalities", I don't know how exactly to pronounce the artist's name.
But yeah, thank you very much. Albums on floppy disks always intrigue me. I'm curious to see what format they're in. It's kind of hard to read because it's printed rather low-res, but it looks like it's Scream Tracker. That's usually what these are, from -- I don't know, in my experience, are some sort of tracker file.
Something that can fit on a floppy disk and then play back with the right sound hardware, whether it be an Amiga or a Gravis Ultrasound or something. Anyway, awesome stuff. Okay, got one here from Jason. Spoilers inside. Mm, it is very shiny. [chuckles] Oh, what in the world? Got like woodgrain leather and the world's smallest laptop.
[laughs] What is this? Copyright Acme 1997. It appears to be magnetic. Look at this little thingy. Windows 95-esque thing going on there.
You have mail. [laughs] [gentle chimes] - [AOL voice] You've got mail. - [Clint] And then this is [chuckles], oh yeah, it's like a woodgrain wallet, ID holder, credit card thingy. Yeah, cowhide.
I have never seen [sniffs] yeah, I mean that's leather. What in the world, with a woodgrain finish. How does that work? All right, a little note on a General Motors Research paper here.
Hope I'm enjoying the oddball presents. Yes, yes I am. The wallet may be way too big for anyone, but maybe I'll use it anyway. Yeah, it is a bit too big for me, but I'll use it for something.
The magnet he got in 1995 or so. [chuckles] Seriously, that is, that's wonderful. Thank you. [gentle chimes] - [AOL Voice] You've got mail. - Okay, got one here from Kate and Tony in Canada.
Greetings from Canada's capital. Here's a Kodak picture disk and a strange Quiz Master game slash learning tool. A couple editions are included.
This is always promising. Okay, so the history on them is a little shady. But the story goes, they were programmed by my aunt's brother-in-law. It was supposed to be the latest in a series of get rich quick schemes. After he passed away years ago, my aunt thought I might get a kick out of them as a burgeoning tech geek. There were two boxes full of them and I saved just one of each type for posterity.
So this is a Windows 3.1 Kodak picture disk. Yeah, Windows 3.1, 486. That should be fun to look at. And then there's the Quiz Master. [laughs] Compulog presents.
Yeah, they are, they're sealed. Megasoft International. Well, I am definitely gonna be looking into this because I'm intrigued, especially, if this is some get rich quick shenanigans going on. Thank you very much, Kate and Tony. [chuckles] Okay, got one here from Carl in Germany.
Hope, I'm doing well. I am. As promised in the email from October, this is the unofficial Power Duke add-on CD. It was around 1997, was a teenager, showed his father Duke 3D.
He thought it was awful. [laughs] Some weeks later when I was sick at home, he came around with a Power Duke CD and he was super impressed. Wow, thank you very much for sharing this. This is one of those Duke 3D add-ons.
There were many, many, many of them, but I'd never heard of this one. Never seen it an eBay or anything. Power Duke. Come, Get Some. [chuckles in punctuation] The interesting thing he was telling me, I believe in the email, it wasn't just levels.
There's an H&K MP5, like an add-on weapon for Duke 3D on PC. I've never seen that before. Maybe I've just missed it somehow, but you rarely see weapon add-ons for the game. Definitely gonna check this out. Thank you very much for sending it over.
All righty, got one here from Matt. Ooh, how very red. I don't see a note in here, but I guess it's pretty self-explanatory. It is a piece of software, still sealed, Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager 386. Yeah, there were a lot of these memory managers back then.
The 386 came along making use of EMS. Had all kinds of extra RAM above 640K and this was one of several ways to make it happen. Really cool to have this in the package. Okay, I got one here from Nathan. A single packing peanut.
Ha-ha, ha, ha-ha, ha, here we go. This is the MDA slash parallel card I requested. It will definitely prove useful to me and hopefully I can find more information about it. Mhmm, so check this out. This is an interesting development.
So yeah, this is a new-old-stock or ah, pretty close to it, I don't know. MDA card. Hercules, I believe, as well, combined with parallel. You know just a useful little thing for old systems that I have many of and you know I like putting these kind of cards in there for video. But the reason that I ran across this was I saw a video on VWestlife where he actually discovered there's this website and they were selling them.
They had a bunch of these things that were really, really cheap, just under five, $10. And I tried to get one because I'm like, hey, that'd be a useful card to have. Of course, they were all sold out.
And then, yeah, Nathan got in touch said, hey, I got a couple, would you like one? Here it is. So thank you very much for this, even though I wasn't able to get it before they sold out, here it is anyway. So I will make use of it. It's just a neat looking thing, too. Like look at all the mask and everything it's just fascinating.
Okay, got one here from Emily. Letter on the back on MicroSD card. Huh, I guess we'll go ahead and read it.
And here is the letter. Got it opened up here. Thank you, once again, for sending the mug. Apparently, I'm taking it off your hands. It was just in the cupboard one night. How mysterious. Also, very glad to hear that my videos have proved helpful in any way and excellent that you're doing a lot better now, compared to a year ago.
May you continue to have an even better 2021. Let's get back to the unboxing. And as for what's in the box, look at this. That is a very blue IBM mug.
A rather large one, too. Hefty. Just for size comparison, here's a Snood mug that the Snood folks sent a while back and yeah, a fair bit larger. That'll hold a good amount of coffee. There's, also, a Cool Crab print out. Well, thank you very, Emily, for the mug. That is OG IBM thickness.
Okay, got a couple here from Numbat Ninja. Got some printouts on the side there. Well, dang, isn't that nicely packaged and it's from Scott. As promised, here's a roll of Advantix film to use in my Advantix Film Drive.
So yeah this is a bit of a thing. I got the reader for this to read these or scan them, view them, whatever, on PC a while back. But you need these that are already developed in order to do anything with them. And there's very few companies still developing this type of film.
And this other one [chuckles], again, very, very nicely packaged. As promised, here's a neat little Duke Nukem pen he received from a friend 20 years ago when he was working on Duke Nukem Forever. Sadly, the ink dried up, but it's somewhat notable because it is promoting "Planet of the Babes". Yeah, that's right, it became "Land of the Babes".
[laughs] Look at this, a 3D Realms Senator pen. Gonna see if I can get some ink put in there, but look at that. So you got a couple of windows there with different Duke phrases that change whenever you do that. Nice. Yeah, that's super cool. Thank you very much, Scott.
Okay, I got one here from Matt. Another Matt. And I don't see any note in there, but this is cool.
What we have here is a Cyrix CPU from 1997-ish, it appears. One of their GX MMX enhanced things. Does that mean 200 megahertz? Maybe. I've actually never used one of these generation Cyrix things. Only used their earlier ones, like the quote unquote "486" ones, which weren't really 486. But you know Cyrix did crazy things and they were a really cool company.
An alternative to the usual CPU folks back in the day. Thank you very much. That is gonna be fun to try in something.
All right, got one here from Dylan in Canada. Oh, yeah. [chuckles] So I know what these are, but what is this? Hmm, Nestle Coffee Crisp. Well, that looks good.
Yeah, these though, this just looks silly [chuckles] and rather cute. Look at, look at this. Look at this. Little tiny ATI speakers.
Just, yeah. Little black computer speakers. Smaller than any others that I have.
Stereo F/X, VGAStereo F/X. The heck does that mean? Why did they make these? They're unpowered. They're just little passive stereo speakers. And, yeah, offered to send them, I'm like, yep.
That's weird, never seen these before. So thank you very much for the very Canadian package of things. If anybody knows why ATI made these speakers, let me know. [chuckles]
All right, got one here labeled magnetic media. I approve of that. It is from V. Paul Bunyan.
Greetings, thought Apple II Myst is a kind of bizarre anachronism I'd enjoy. Indeed. I still can't quite read your name. What is that, Vince, I think? Yeah, Myst for the Apple II, three disks. Some kind of strange home brew project, I guess.
I don't know what to expect. This is intriguing, though. Thank you very much.
Um, got a long poster boy here from Eric. [poster thumps, Clint imitates] Eric of Nerd Herd Printing. Got an eBay store doing custom posters. Ah, man, look at this.
[chuckles] Have to get a farther out view here. But we've got our Commander Keen, "Goodbye, Galaxy!" poster and Duke Nukem 3D [chuckles] with my face on it. Okay. [laughs] That's truly ridiculous, okay.
Yep, thank you for that. Like Keen doesn't have my face on it, too, does it? No, that's just regular old Commander Keen. Awesome posters. Good quality too, actually. Some nice clear text and graphics. Thank you, Eric.
Okay, I got one here from Chris. Heh, "packing peanuts," I presume. Okay, got a couple of expansion cards in here.
Let's see the note. I picked up these cards in a lot containing several pieces of old hardware recently. But since I have no Tandy computers, thought they might find a better home with you. I will give them a home and a use. Been a fan of my channel for a couple of years now, but his wallet is certainly not a fan of the channel.
Oh, well. I cannot be blamed! And so let's see here. Yeah, okay, I remember him telling me about these now. So we've got a Tandy card here that has parallel and serial, 1985 Tandy.
I'm assuming it goes in a 1000. And this, oh yeah, this is useful. This is a little bit later, 1987, but also from Tandy. Just a standard EGA and CGA type of thing. But still, extremely useful cards to have.
I, actually, don't have too many of these EGA cards like this. Very useful cards for Tandys, or not. I mean, you can stick these in any PC with an 8-bit ISA slot, which is most from back in the day. So thank you very much. Okay, I got one here from Jairus. [chuckles] Certified peanut-free.
Oh! Mmkay. Oh, my apologies. Rhymes with Harris.
Thank you for the pronunciation guide. Okay, I've been watching LGR for years. Really enjoys my videos. Thank you very much. So this is a super specific promotional mug from Big Blue.
One of a few we found at Goodwill in the before times. Oh, I remember those times. And enclosed is a bag of coffee from the local coffee roastery. Not affiliated, just like them. Heck yeah, dude. Up all night, again? Get the all-nighter fighter the IBM Personal System/2, Model 25 Collegiate.
Again, bringing out this Snood mug for comparison. It's a little bit smaller. Then we have the bigger IBM mug. So look at that. Yeah, I got all these mugs in here and no coffee. What a travesty.
Scratch that, no way to *brew* the coffee. Looks like some was included. How thoughtful. I have to go back home and make some of this. Look at that. That looks good. Got some Cafe Campesino. Right in the middle, pretty much the way I like it.
Whole bean. [sniffs] Ohh. Much appreciated, Jairus. Love coffee. Ah, this looks awesome. Absolutely, gonna be brewing some of this when I get back home. And I'll use the mugs, man. Look, I got all these mugs here.
This is a great day for coffee! Oh yeah. This is my second batch I've made so far and it is super good. Thank you again for the coffee and the mug. Got one here from Phillip.
Ooh. I do not see a note with this. But, I do remember him telling me about it. So this is the Rainbow Runner G-Series, obviously. A TV and video upgrade for these cards: Productiva G100, Millennium G200, Mystique G200 and Millennium G400.
I have a couple of these. The thing is, I'm not entirely sure if I even need them, [chuckles] because, yeah, I think it's just like a standalone PCI capture card. MPEG encoder thing, Says compatible with all major brands of home video equipment. Unless it's just got some kind of interface where it connects directly to a Matrox card.
I mean, it looks like it might. But, that was one reason I said yes to this donation, 'cause I'm like, eh, I don't know exactly how this works. Yeah, look at that.
I mean looks like your pretty standard TV tuner capture thing with Philips stuff on there. Other capture cards and MPEG cards that I've used aren't really exclusive to any one brand. Well, I guess I will find out. Thank you very much Phillip for the [chuckles] Philips-based TV tuner card.
Alright, got one here from Kenneth. Oh, yeah. [laughs] So this is interesting. This is a Keypatch, AT by Genest Technologies. It's a little add-on for the IBM PC AT Model F keyboard. It adds cursor keys, as well as your navigation key cluster.
And there we go, just a 5-pin keyboard passthrough there. So you'd plug in your full-sized keyboard there and then that goes into a computer. And it looks so cheaply-made, but I mean, it serves a very real purpose on those keyboards. Because I mean,
they don't have this section. They have kind of a well you know, they have the Model F layout. And the original IBM AT had a Model F AT keyboard. Didn't get the Model M till later.
So anyway, just a weird little thing I'd never seen before. Kenneth got in touch and was like, hey, look at this. [laughs] So here it is. Thank you very much.
Okay, got a very yellow one here from Thomas in Austria. Ooh, got some treats. What is this? Neapolitan Manner Wien? Utz certified cocoa. Huh! I don't see a note, but I have a graphics card in here and I see a Hercules logo.
[chuckles] Look at that. So this is a Hercules 3D Prophet 4500. 64 megabytes. Yeah, in case you didn't know, Hercules was in the graphics card game for well beyond their monochrome days.
This one in particular, the 3D Prophet 4500, I'm not familiar with its capabilities or specs or anything. Just it's a 64 megabyte card, AGP. So that's cool and, plus, it's Hercules. I also really hope it works.
Cards from this era tend to go bad rather often. Thank you very much for sending it in. Future LGR here, just looking up what this card was. Yeah, it's a PowerVR Series 3-based thing.
That's interesting. This is the only card I have that does that. Apparently, 175 megahertz Kyro chip.
Yeah, an alternative to the various ATI cards and Nvidia cards like the GeForce2 MX. It'll be interesting to check out. Thanks again.
Okay, got one here from James. Yay, a note. All right, greetings, Crawfordsville, Indiana. Mm, apparently, threw in a little something extra alongside the mouse, and this is written on Lotus Word Pro on Windows 98SE.
Nimrod font, classy. Ah, this weirdness. [mug-induced laughter] You know sometimes an unintentional theme arises and apparently this time around, it is just IBM mugs, tea cups or whatever this is. This one looks well used and put in a few too many dishwashers, But, look at that. Emtek, a Motorola company, okay.
So yeah, here's the thing, the main thing anyway. An Optical Laser Mouse, uh-huh. Optical fiber engine inside by Hi-Bon. So the fact that it's an older optical mouse, that's one thing.
That's appealing on its own. But then there's [chuckles] when I saw the packaging and some of the writing on here and the way that this is just advertised and described, I had to say, yes. The optical fiber engine, and innovative multi-mode make Laser Mouse the ultimate input device for the Windows. [laughs] Detects moving patterns quickly and accurately like dragonfly's eye. This seems fantastic.
So, thank you very much. And also for the Emtek IBM cup. What am I gonna do with all these? I'm gonna make a display, I guess. All right, got one here from Aaron.
Got a decal patch, military thing here. Clint, I hope you enjoy the game. Picked it up at the Electronic Market in Seoul. This version of the game lets you play as some popular K-pop band. Ah, yeah. Check this out.
This is the South Korean version of "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2" for the PC and, yeah, look at that. I briefly knew that this was a thing and then I saw that it was mentioned on the Digital Foundry episode, like one of their retrospectives on Tony Hawk for PC and, well, you know Tony Hawk games in general. So I have the regular Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 for PC, which that's a cool thing on its own to have. Not a ton of folks, necessarily, played it on PC in my experience. But this one you got like exclusive music and the K-pop band or group or whatever it is. There's things in here that are very South Korean and this is such a unique version of it.
I can't imagine I would've ever come across this otherwise. So thank you very much, Aaron, for sending this in. This is really cool. Okay, before we get to the next one, I believe my microphone had come unplugged from the camera at some point along the way over this past little bit it'd been recording.
So my apologies for that if the audio crapped out and sounded like garbage. I'll try to fix it up as much as I can in editing. Oh sure, I fixed the audio, but at what cost? Screw you, past LGR. You messed up! So I've got this one here from Johnny. So enclosed are some Doonesbury things that were found sitting in a dank warehouse basement for 25 years.
And if you'd like to see video of this software's discovery, one of his urbex dives check around the 30 minute mark on the Johnny Xmas channel. There's a bean bag in here. Ah, so yeah, look at this. Heh! What in the world. [chuckles] So yeah, there's a few of these in here. So, I'm gonna keep one for myself and the other five, if you'd like one and you're cool with paying the shipping costs, then let me know at the email address at the bottom of your screen.
I'm assuming they're gonna go quickly though. So if you don't get a response that's why. But anyway, yeah, Doonesbury thing. It's a screensaver package.
There were tons of these kinds of things back in the day, This one happens to have a T-shirt included. So this is rather hefty and a little poofy. Since this one's already kind of unsealed... [tears open plastic] [chuckles] Here we go. You know, honestly, not being a reader of the comic or anything really related to it, I probably would have declined.
But when I saw this T-shirt. Look at that, like that's just a cool T-shirt regardless. The dude is surfing with an 8-megabyte RAM T-shirt and shorts with all these cables and connectors and he's on a parallel printer cable it looks like. Though, it doesn't have the right amount of pins. But yeah, anyway, all the shirts are an extra large and [coughs], yeah, they do smell like musty gross basement. So yeah, the others are all much more sealed up it looks like.
And, of course, inside you get the screensaver itself. I don't know if there is an activity. Yeah, there's activities, too. You got like games and little mini-desktop toys. Eh, par for the course for these things. Yeah, four three and a half inch floppy disks.
Some offers and paperwork. A little quick start guide. The great Doonesbury sellout continues. All kinds of things.
So anyway, yeah, an item liberated during urban exploration. That, yeah, I haven't received too many things like this before. So thank you very much, Johnny Christmas.
Guess I'll be at the post office soon. Okay, got one here from Vincent. Oh my, this one's dated September. Sorry, it took a little bit to get to this one. Greetings from Champaign-Urbana, birthplace of Mosaic web browser, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and HAL 9000. It's true.
All right, so a Macintosh game in here and a few extras. You stay safe as well. Ooh, so look at that new edition of "Bomber". [chuckles] Yeah, I was not familiar with this one. Never played it.
But yeah, just, I mean look at those delightfully dithered graphics. Early Macintosh stuff like this is highly appealing to me. Looks like it'll work on a Macintosh Plus, SE and higher. Apparently, there's a free computer headset inside? Huh! Yeah, look at that. So you do indeed have a little Gemini pair of headphones in here and there's disk one.
As well as copies of disk one and two. I don't know if there's an original two in here. It doesn't look like. Got a nice little manual, again with the delightful dithered artwork. I just love the way that looks.
And I'm assuming this is like a little copy protection thing. Yeah, "Priority Targets." Little tiny book. Oh yeah, that's gotta be copy protection.
Look at that. [chuckles] That is just a really cool package. Let's see the other things they did. "Bomber", "Tesserae" and "Darwin's Dilemma". Not familiar with any of those.
This is really cool to have the whole package. And a little package in here. Oh, wow. What is this? An IBM coin, huh.
Well, that is something. So this commemorative coin was given out in 2014 to those who took the IBM Systems and Technology Group, IT Professional courses, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the IBM mainframe. That makes sense. That's really cool, huh. Some neat things in here.
M.K. Linux? MakeLinux? DR 2.1, a full featured Unix-like OS for Macintosh. Mark Linux, maybe. [pronunciation chuckling] I don't know how that's supposed to be said out loud, but never heard of it.
That's awesome. And then, of course, in here we got a couple of packages of Red Hat. So we've got Enterprise Linux 5, client and a workstation it looks like.
Version Four, just four. I was gonna say four point something. Just four. Oh man, look at all those CDs. Goodness. 64-bit and 32-bit.
Okay, thank you once again. A bunch of interesting little extras. Dang lights, keep falling off. Be festive! Okay, I got one here from Nick. I believe there are a couple from him. This is just one of them.
Okay, it's a box full of a lot of things. So there's a Zip 250 drive. And also a, I wanna say it's floptical.
It's got a lot of laser assembly in there. Nope, it was this. Got a copy of Microsoft Basic Interpreter, or at least the documentation for it, for Apple Macintosh. Just the book. Nice sealed copy of Windows 98 Second Edition for PCs without Windows. I've been looking for this exact release for a good while. Most of the time it's the "Upgrade" one that you see.
And you know having it sealed and everything is great and, also, hopefully there's a copy that is unsealed. So, just use this one. There's also just a whole bunch of different, random assortment of things in here. OEM discs. This one was interesting.
What in the world? Look at that, Windows 95 Year 2000 Update CD-ROM. Gotta get that Y2K compatibility. Dragon stuff.
AOL 4.0, Windows 98. Yeah, a bunch of Windows 98 OEM things, 95 OEM. These are just like the installer packages for different manufacturers and whatnot.
That's pretty cool. 95 with the Internet Explorer Service Pack 1 disk. Oh, that's really good.
So I have been looking for a copy of this as well. Windows 95 with USB support. You know it's pretty much the version that I always install on a lot of different computers when I'm redoing Windows 95.
But typically I just have to rely on my burned copies. That looks familiar got a copy of Windows XP Pro in the folding sleeve. Oh, oh man, this is special.
So this is what got me really excited and say yes to the package in the first place. The other things are really cool, but this is just, this is Microsoft Windows. Just windows in this gigantic original box, ah, still sealed, mostly. This is just so uncommon to come across, it is ludicrous.
Yeah. I've never come across a copy of those even remotely affordable, or in much less sealed, pretty decent shape. So in particular, you can kind of see it there. This is Windows IBM Version 1.04. So yeah, it's not the very earliest release, but dang it, look at it.
It's Windows! Ah, this is gonna make a very special video at some point. Thank you so much. I am really excited to finally do a Windows 1 retrospective. This one is from Justin.
Oh, my goodness, what the heck? Didn't see a note included, but I'm just gonna start here. Classic SparQ drive in the box, one gigabyte. Little cartridge thingies that you can go in there and there's a parallel port version. Awesome.
And something called the Mind Path Remote Control, the essential tool for total control over professional presentation. It looks like a glorified PowerPoint remote. Yeah, 1995. I am always curious to see how these old infrared devices work. Typically, not tremendously well in my experience.
You know great under the perfect circumstances and surrounding and all that, but so many variables. And then here we've got something that I had never heard of before. This is the Lexmark Lexbook. Who knew they made laptops? [lid creaking] Ooh, very, very creaky laptops. I sure had never heard of this.
Ooh-kay, that is a weird feeling keyboard. Not bad, just a little weird. So anyway, I'm assuming this is like some sort of OEM design. Eh, who knows? I haven't done any research on it but.
[lid creaks even louder] [laughs] Is this thing made of oak? Needs some greasy, oiliness to go in there. Oh, my goodness. Look at that. You got, okay, there's a decent little assortment of ports. Yeah, I just never heard of this. So, hopefully, I can find a suitable power supply. It just looks so bland.
So thank you very much for sending these in and saving them, presumably, from Value Village. Okay, got a rather large one here from, I don't know, don't see a name. Don't see a note, but just a lot of individual components and seeing what some of them are already, yeah, I do remember. I think this is all Mac related stuff.
All right, so yeah, a lot of Macintosh related things, specifically, for that G4 tower that I got a while back. So the AGP graphics card of some kind. An ATI Radeon. Let's see, what is this? Radeon 9500 Pro, 128 megs with a IceBerQ Cooler.
Ermahgerd erceberq. Some kind of a hefty looking, I'm assuming, CPU upgrade. I believe he mentioned like Quicksilver-related stuff in here.
So maybe that's what this is. Yeah, it's like a logic board replacement. Yeah, that would go right there. So that's pretty awesome.
Also, came with CPU mounting screws, a little battery. There's the main thing I was really kind of interesting in, a Airport-compatible wireless card for the G4 over there. And I mean, yeah, look at all these things. Just a bunch of stuff. FireWire. ATA-133 IDE interface. Hard drive to go with it. A little mouse.
DVD-ROM drive. I can basically build a whole computer here, just about. Got some of those funky clear speakers and a keyboard.
So yeah, just a whole bunch of things. Thank you very much. I will definitely be using a few of these with the G4. So this rather large one here is from Durran. There's a Readme on top.
Hello from Portland. So this came through their work, thought of me right away. It's a weather station and software for Windows 3.1 and 95. Yeah, this will make a good Oddware, I am assuming.
Oh, there's an Instagram, needful_things_vids. And I can only assume that's a Stephen King reference. Heh. Ah, crap. [chuckles at lack of storage space] A little larger than I bargained for. That's how it goes. Check this out.
Here's the software side, WeatherLink, the ultimate in weather monitoring systems. $165 from Captain's Nautical Supply back in the day. I mean, just look at this.
Charts and graphs and meters and things. This looks delightfully... weathery. Windows 3.1, five megs hard disk space, four megs of RAM, a serial port and a mouse, printer recommended. Fantastic '90s art on front. And I'm gonna have to move the camera to get this thing in frame.
[laughs] This looks amazing. Well, this is the Davis instruments, Complete Weather Station, professional quality, easy-to-use. And I guess it comes with a bunch of hardware. Ah, yeah, I had never heard of this until I got the email about it.
And wow, I mean just look at all this; temperature, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, humidity and dewpoint, rainfall, time and date. Oh man, honestly, it's a bunch of stuff I have fun keeping track of just for fun anyway. [laughs] cuz I dunno, man, weather tracking is interesting somehow when you get older. It's like, [incoherent old man mumbling] Weather! How much did it rain? How cold did it get? And apparently it plugs in via serial. I don't know how this is gonna work at all. How does that work? Well, what does it do? Okay, so it's got the display console with the barometer, the inside temperature, neh-nuh-neh-nuhh.
Sensors, okay, here's what I was wondering about. It's got 40 foot cables, 12 meter long cables. It looks like three of them. It also looks like it doesn't necessarily need the WeatherLink software, but probably designed to work best with it. So I'm glad it came with it. Although, it appears that this was never opened.
So this is gonna be really involved. So that makes it immediately intimidating. But holy crap, what an amazing package of stuff. Thank you very much. And the last one here, I believe, is also from Nick who sent us the package of Windows 1 earlier.
So this one's even bigger. We'll see, what's inside this. As promised, one working Compaq laptop and dock. Awesome.
Haven't really used it, so hope I'll get more out of it. Seems to be a Pentium 120 with 32 megs of RAM. Heck yeah, dude.
Thank you very much, Nick, for the contribution and for packing things very well it appears. There's a lot of material in here. That's a lot of beige. Hunh! Well, look at this monstrosity. [laughs] That is incredible.
Wow. I don't even know where to start. There's so many things going on.
Look at this, what in the? Neh! It also -- wha? Yeah, there's two CD-ROMs. No, no, there's three! There's one, two, three CD-ROMs. [chuckles] Well, this is pretty amazing. Man, I hope that's an active-matrix LCD. That'd be a shame to have such a huge beast and it'd passive matrix, a DSTN or something. Anyway, this is a Compaq LTE 5280.
I keep looking for a floppy drive and I'm not seeing it. So I'm assuming that the bays are modular then, and maybe you'd be able to put a floppy drive in either here or the front or something. Because who the heck needs three CD-ROMs on a Pentium 1 laptop? Other than me.
[goofy laugh] And a few PCMCIA cards in here, 'cause there are two slots there it looks like. Actually, that might be four. Huh! It kind of looks like, well, I don't really know. It's kinda hard to tell.
It looks like maybe two slots of two for PC cards. But anyway, Lynksys Wireless-G, classic. 256 meg Compact Flash adapter. Oh, it's just the adapter with a compact flash card in it. That's awesome.
And a little ethernet because, of course. I'm assuming this lever -- yup. That's what makes this thing come off.
Look at that. It's just a massive docking station. Now the question is does it have internal expansion, too? It might.
A lot of these kinds of things also had like a ISA card expansion inside. It's definitely got this rear port going on. Hmm, I don't know. This is gonna take some research to figure out what in the world was going on with this. Why it has so many CD drives and how much this must have cost back in the '90s. An incredible amount, I can tell you that.
Anyway, a little battery button. So many buttons, infrared, oh my grr, so many things! Anyway, this is great. Thank you very much, Nick. Once again, I am honestly overwhelmed.
So yeah, check this out. I was doing some quick research on the laptop just to see what I could do in terms of getting one of those modular floppy drives. And it turns out it's *this* computer. I've read about this many times over the years. It is the laptop, that is the "ancient laptop" that's the only key to the McLaren F1, doing maintenance on it. So goes the story, anyway. That it uses DOS-based software to service the remaining F1s.
I don't know why this, in particular, would be the key, but ah, that might make for a premise for a video at some point. Anyway, this just keeps getting more interesting. Ah man, still super excited about that laptop, but I mean, all of this is just fantastic. As always, y'all have come through in some crazy generous ways.
So much of this stuff really helps keep the pace of LGR projects moving forward. And as we move into another year, hopefully, a little better than the previous one. There's a lot of stuff here that'll be a fantastic jumping off point.
Once again, deep gratitude to everyone who sent things in and offered to send things in. There's way more offers than I was able to accept. So thank you very much. Have a good Christmas and adjacent holidays and thank you for watching.
2020-12-19 16:03
