Yes sirree Bob, my friends.
In today's video, the young whippersnappers in our audience
are gonna have a look at how the previous generation lived
because believe it or not,
we did have your mobile computers.
It's just that to say that they weren't quite as sleek
and sexy as a modern Ultrabook
would be a gross understatement.
So step one, I guess, is to get this puppy booted up.
Now, this might not stand out to some of you,
but one of the first things I noticed about this thing
is the power cord.
Fascinating, isn't it?
It's just a normal power cord.
There's no external power brick.
This thing has an internal power supply.
Are you kidding me?
All right, I'm gonna get this plugged in.
Now, Brian, the electrician,
who I borrowed this thing from,
he's got like a tech museum in his basement, that guy.
He actually told me the battery on this thing does work,
but lithium batteries don't age very well.
So I'd be surprised if it stays on longer
than a couple minutes.
So we're gonna run off wall power here.
This is like so exciting.
He also told me that he preloaded my favorite game on it,
which I don't remember talking to him
about retro games at any point.
So let's see what he put on here.
Wow.
Is that 80 megs of RAM?
That's actually pretty respectable
for a computer of this era.
I mean, it's not amazing, but it's okay, you know?
Windows 95.
So that makes this thing significantly older than Jake.
Like we literally have people working here
who are younger than this laptop.
I haven't heard that sound in so long.
All right.
So this is it.
This is the desktop experience.
Does it go any brighter?
No, it does not.
Wow.
That is not a fantastic display.
So I just wanted to check that RAM amount
and I realized I don't actually remember
how to access task manager in Windows 95.
You can't just right click the task bar.
Monitors the system resources your programs are using.
Like any program, the resource meter uses system resources,
when it's running.
This may cause your computer to run more slowly.
Isn't that great?
Back when we had like 100 megahertz CPUs,
your computer would warn you
about opening up resource monitor
because it could affect your resource consumption.
Wow.
That is a fairly rudimentary resource meter.
Well, your system resources, they're 86% free.
As for your user resources, same thing.
Why don't we try one of the other similar looking things?
Here.
How about system monitor?
Okay, that's more like it.
So we are using about 40 megs of RAM on what?
We don't know.
I tried to two finger swipe to scroll
and all I did was move my icons around.
Just like, yeah, yeah, sure.
You know what?
It gives you an appreciation for, you know,
modern grid arrangements
and everything snapping into place, right?
How big is our drive?
Wow.
Four gigs.
Fat 32 storage.
Isn't that beautiful?
I mean, to put that in context,
this Ultrabook has four times that in system memory.
All right.
So we're fired up.
Let's get into what Brian thinks is my favorite game.
And actually, okay.
There's no way he would have guessed this,
but I actually played so many hours of 1602 AD
back when the only gaming computer I had was a Pentium,
the 90 desktop that I inherited from my uncle.
Is the sound on?
If you don't happen to have something playing
while you're making adjustments,
you can press down for a test tone.
I'm gonna need a mouse though,
in order to play this game.
USB didn't come around until Windows 98 SE,
if I recall correctly.
This laptop doesn't have USB.
Actually, no, hold on.
Okay.
My pinky.
So that's labeled mouse keyboard.
That is a PS2 port.
And I happen to have in my bag of wonders,
a PS2 to USB adapter.
I'm gonna have to go digging deeper into the bag of wonders
and see if I have a PS2 mouse.
Okay, well, we didn't find a PS2 mouse,
but I did find a ball mouse with USB.
So I am hoping that this will...
Not bad.
Yes, my friends,
these were great for all sorts of things.
Picking up all the dust off your desk
and putting it in one convenient place
to be picked off and disposed of later.
Throwing these nice heavy rubber balls
at people you didn't like.
Oh man, got like hair and gunk wrapped around this.
Before I settle in for my nostalgic gaming session though,
actually, why don't we like take a closer look at this thing?
It's got some real problems compared to modern computers.
These bezels take up like as much of the top of the unit
as the freaking screen does.
They're so big.
This touch pad is abominable.
Though with that said,
I do appreciate the inclusion
of dedicated left and right clicks here.
Speakers suck.
And this thing is freaking heavy.
Like it is, it is chunky.
Like you were carrying a briefcase if you had one of these,
but it has some advantages compared to modern devices.
So even though we weren't really able to plug in our,
you know, modern mouse to it very easily,
it's still a pretty good thing.
And the audio on this thing is substantial.
So check this out.
You've got your floppy disc reader.
You've got not one, but two PCMCIA expansion slots.
So these could actually be used back in the day
to add new ports to laptops.
Go figure, right?
We've got our RJ11 modem port.
We've got the PS2 port we ended up using.
Check this out.
That my friends, yes, that is infrared.
I believe though,
instead of being used as just like a remote control
or to like control your TV,
this was actually for wireless data transmission.
Yeah, I know, right?
We've got our printer port.
We've got a dock port, VGA out, serial.
And then, oh, moving around.
Finally, my ARM is like actually falling asleep,
holding this thing up like this.
We've got our CD-ROM drive.
And finally, headphone microphone jacks.
Yes, my friend,
headphone jack and check this out.
Here's a feature you haven't seen in a while.
A removable battery.
Now, I mean, 2.7 amp hours.
That is not a lot.
And it obviously isn't gonna work very well anymore,
but hey, it had it.
Oh wow, seriously?
When there's an auto run,
you can't click anything behind it.
Multitasking.
There's so many things.
I completely take for granted these days.
All right, let's fire up some Corel WordPerfect.
So back to the things that are good about it.
This keyboard is amazing.
Compared to modern keyboards,
you might as well have a mechanical keyboard in your laptop.
Like this is flipping awesome.
The layout's great.
It's got dedicated keys for home and page up, page down.
It's got, look at this travel.
Listen to that.
Like that.
That is a laptop keyboard.
And check this out.
It's even got remappable shortcut buttons.
Like come on, 1996 wasn't such a bad time.
I mean, yeah, there's no Windows key.
You know what though?
1602 actually can be run on relatively modern machines.
And there is a game that I legitimately have not played
since like 2002 when the classroom computers
actually ran Windows 95, Windows 98.
And it's called Liero.
Unfortunately, getting it seems
like it might be a little tricky.
So a lot of you might not realize this,
but check this out.
Windows 95 is actually pre like
the blue Internet Explorer icon.
This is when like Internet Explorer was the name
because it was Internet Mail, Internet News,
and Internet Explorer.
What does Internet News even look like?
What do you, please select a folder
where Internet Mail should keep your message up.
What are you even talking about?
Internet News is the best way to keep your messages online.
news configuration.
Holy crap.
So we're gonna have to download the game separately
and then just copy it over to here,
except one small problem.
Even though the game is small enough
to fit on a single floppy disk,
I don't have any floppy disks.
Does this pop out?
Is this floppy drive removable?
Holy crap it is.
There must be like a catch somewhere for it.
It definitely, anyway.
Also, RJ45 was considered a fancy pants feature back then.
None of that.
And of course, even if Windows 95 did support USB storage,
it doesn't have any USB ports.
And Wi-Fi, oh, forget about it.
That was still a twinkle in the eye
of an engineer somewhere.
Like that, that's not a thing.
I'll be right back.
Fortunately, what is a thing
is this old external CD burner that I have.
And this spindle of CDRs
that I happen to have kicking around.
Like I still remember, when if you had a CD burner,
you were the coolest kid in class.
Like, yeah, they were slow and the software was atrocious.
Also, the blank disks were expensive.
So when a burn failed, it was like actually a big deal.
Like, okay, there goes a few more dollars, great.
Thanks for that.
but you could move a whopping 650 megabytes of data
in between machines or store it safely.
And that is exactly what we are gonna do.
Now, I don't actually have burning software installed
on this laptop because why would I?
But I seem to recall Microsoft building it in at some point.
Okay, how do you wanna use this disc?
With a CD, DVD player, Riero.
Manage, finish burning.
Okay, I'm burning a CD.
It's been a while.
Now, when I say these things were slow,
like I really mean it.
I'm going at a speed that is about eight times
what we would have had back then
in the early days of CD burning.
I'm only writing like a mega files
and it's still taking this long
because there was the preamble
and the like the finishing process
that had to be done on the disc
regardless of how much you wrote to it.
So let's see if this works.
Fortunately, if it didn't,
I've got this whole spindle
that definitely is not earmarked for any other purpose.
So Brian must have actually burned this for me.
That's awesome.
Thanks, dude.
Hey, there we go.
Holy crap, I think it worked.
Liero Windows 98.
Give her a second here.
Gotta ramp up that disc.
Okay, is this gonna work?
Oh, IRQ5.
Extended memory successfully initialized.
Press any key.
Oh yeah, Liero V1.33, baby.
Hey, Jake, you wanna play some Liero?
Liero.
So it's local multiplayer only.
Oh, so am I like WASD and you're?
Well, you're RFDG
and then you need fire, change weapons, and jump.
If it helps at all, mine's really not much better.
So there's a mini map down here.
Wait, I think I played this before.
Nah, there's a way to dig fast.
Ah, there it is.
You hold the direction you wanna go
and then you press back.
So you, like, you spam back.
I think this keyboard has ghosting issues.
Oh, I see.
So only one of us can like dig at a time.
Just get some explosives going on up in this biz.
I'm stuck, oh no.
Oh crap.
That was not what I meant to do.
Oh, get slaughtered.
That slow reload is killing me here.
No, I can't even aim.
Oh no.
Oh, right, the hook shot.
What?
I can't change my weapons
because you're holding down keys.
Yes.
No.
This is a match.
I can't change my weapon.
Nah, you're done.
We have 14 lives, we're gonna be here all day.
Yeah, when you're better at the game
and the controls are working,
it actually goes pretty quick.
Oh, the grasshopper's really powerful.
What the hell?
Okay, next point wins, I guess.
Yeah.
Shoot.
I shouldn't have said that.
And I'm done.
Thanks, bud.
Now, one of the other things I used my laptop for
when I was a teenager was looking at pictures.
So the problem, though, is that when you...
Did that just use Internet Explorer to open a picture?
It did.
It is downloading it from the CD-ROM drive.
Give her a minute.
Oh, yeah, there it goes.
She's loading.
She's loading in.
Skin tones were really not handled very well
on the default setting.
So you can hardly tell
because the display is so bad,
but if you zoom in on this,
can you tell how little color depth there is to this thing?
Yeah, it's pretty bad.
Look at it, like, loading in on the edges of the frame
as you...
Did you see that?
Yeah.
Oh, it's spectacular.
Now, fortunately, many older computers,
if you went into the properties,
much like you would today,
allowed you to, here we go,
change the color palette from the default 256 to high color
or even true color.
Now, with that said,
that didn't actually seem to do much for me.
And it might've been Windows 98
where they had a built-in picture viewer.
Can I open this with something else?
Like, is this something that's been altered?
Yeah, this is clearly no better.
The bottleneck here may actually be the display.
You guys will just have to take my word for it.
16 or better yet, 24-bit color
was definitely a much better experience
when looking at pictures on your laptop.
A better representation of skin tones, for sure.
That is assuming that your dial-up internet connection
could even download anything high res, high color.
I think that's enough of me fooling around with this thing.
Let's get down to business and play some 1602 AD.
Is the sound not working?
Did that turn it off or something?
It's not a form of DRM or anything.
It's just that the sound assets were too big
to actually copy over to the hard drive.
In-game music wouldn't work without the disk in.
Let's go ahead and close down the program.
Try that one more time.
Isn't that great?
Single player.
Oh, lame.
The yellow and blue player got big ships to start.
So settling a Southern island is good late game
because you've got like cotton and all that kind of stuff,
but actually Northern islands
were better for food production.
We have to explore the island.
One moment, please.
Ooh, cocoa and cotton, 100% yield.
Oh, and there's ore!
There we go.
Build a warehouse.
The controls are like so unintuitive.
Man, I might go home tonight and like legit play this game.
Let's get a Forester's hut going on over here.
I won't subject you guys to any more of that though.
So that's pretty much it.
That's a look at not the laptop that I owned as a kid,
but one that is pretty darn close.
It was a hand-me-down actually from my half sister's dad.
So it was all-in-one.
It was already worthless then,
and it's even more worthless now.
Well, thanks for watching you guys.
Thanks to Brian for giving me this old clunker of a laptop
to play with here.
And if you guys enjoyed the video,
you can hit that like button.
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I did my entire outro out of order, whatever.
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Yes.