Video: Quick Start: Episode 7
Added 2024-03-21 03:51:18 +0000 UTChttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssob-7sGVWs
Coming up with a thumbnail or title for this one is gonna be fun. I have no idea how to foreshadow any of this nonsense concisely, this computer has two egregious hacks that defy most brief explanations. I'll figure it out after the weekend I guess.
I'm pretty sure this is a new record for "longest anticapitalist screed" for my channel, but the thing is, that's the theme of the series, and this specific computer is the final tentpole of said series. What made me decide to start covering these was discovering Phoenix Hyperspace, Dell Latitude-ON, and then finally the two nightmare-fuel products on display in this video. This is the completion of my original project, and I'm pretty happy with it.
There's more episodes after this one, but I won't lie: they're going to be less impressive. These are the three machines that I really wanted to cover, and they all reveal the absolute desperation that drove this whole forgotten-and-forgettable market into existence: A whole host of late-2000s computer companies that had no reason to continue existing, but no option to stop. I make this series as comical as I can to cover up the bitter truths that led to these products. Hope it helps!
Comments
Here is a UEFI hack that I coincidentally found right after watching this video that runs an IRC client: https://axleos.com/an-irc-client-in-your-motherboard/ Excellent write-up with great visualizations if you want to dive deeper.
GreenHamsOnToast
2024-04-05 18:48:25 +0000 UTCYou're so right about technology and design and you told it very eloquently! An example for me is that I kinda hate how smart phones are all now "one size slab" - I like smaller phones, but I guess that's because if I'm gonna use a computer, I'd rather use a proper computer (and keyboard <3 ) and I don't spend all day on my phone. There aren't many to choose from now that aren't like 6" flat slabs... but I've been thinking of getting one of the Unihertz Jelly 3 to 4 inch phones, since they're tiny and cute, run modern Android can run the couple of apps I need... but it's slim pickings.
jcx
2024-03-26 23:23:44 +0000 UTCExcellent video. I would be interested in more videos of just your thoughts on the state and history of the industry, and by extension why everything mostly sucks in the consumer electronics space now.
Logan Hartmann
2024-03-26 08:32:37 +0000 UTCI've met plenty of corporate it directors who were the direct source of the problem, I don't know what they want me to say.
Cathode Ray Dude
2024-03-25 18:29:36 +0000 UTCHey, I posted a video in a discord and a buddy of mine wasn't happy with the line "before corporate IT got their hands on it", given that he works corporate IT. Quote: "I'd very much appreciate a wording that doesn't refer to the workers, but clearly to the structures of useless and annoying constrictions over user education and proper tooling (which IMHO in the vast majority of cases get imposed by non-IT management)." Otherwise he has been enjoying the video (same as me). Cheers!
IonSprite
2024-03-25 18:27:40 +0000 UTCJeebus! This is cursed. Holy truck! I thought Phoenix Hyperspace was cursed, but this... this is a whole new level...
Chickenbread
2024-03-23 13:42:00 +0000 UTCMy main gripe with UEFI is that the motherboard manufacturer puts their own stupid logo in the boot screen, so instead of seeing what's actually happening (or a Windows logo when you boot Windows), you just see a Dell logo with a spinning progress bar below it, for example. And also, it seems rather wasteful of disk space. When you install Windows on a UEFI system, it creates a hidden FAT32 partition with the boot files that chainloads into your NTFS partition, that's just wasting precious space. In BIOS/MBR mode, you can make a partition start at sector 1 (I have a special image file I made to accomplish this) and go all the way to the end of the drive, using 100% of the available space minus sector 0 which is the boot record itself, and Windows is just fine with it. Even Windows 11 will boot this way, you just have to force the installer to ignore the UEFI requirement. I don't own one of those fancy schmancy new motherboards that lacks CSM (I understand the newest Intel generation mandates this) but it bugs me that I have to waste extra space on redundant boot files just to satisfy some arcane requirement for FAT32. I wonder if I can force it to just use a single NTFS partition and install and boot from it?
Danny Forche
2024-03-21 16:51:03 +0000 UTCI've been in disagreement with that take for decades, it's almost universally espoused by people who don't really have any technical knowledge; it's a meme, basically. Windows introduced a unique executable format, offers thousands of APIs, manages concurrent tasks, and runs in protected mode, it's impossible not to call it an OS. It relied on DOS for a handful of system calls but was by and large independent of it, which follows because... it runs in protected mode. DOS is exclusively real mode and is thus incapable of doing anything in protected mode; every DOS box in windows is running in a (literal) virtual machine emulating an 8086. What's left of DOS once Windows loads is simply a handful of low level library functions, which is the same thing you can say about the BIOS, which Windows NT and even Linux still use.
Cathode Ray Dude
2024-03-21 16:42:21 +0000 UTCWow, that was definitely a hot take I was not expecting - I've never ever heard anyone claim MS-DOS was not an operating system. I have, however, heard people say Windows wasn't an operating system until NT - and that even Windows 95, 98 and ME weren't operating systems because they were simply programs that ran on DOS, the real OS. If the defining factor of an operating system is that it has direct hardware access, DOS would by all accounts fit that bill. Yeah, protected mode became a thing, but that was more for applications running inside DOS (think Windows 3.x!), DOS itself had full hardware access. Yeah, it usually just used those BIOS calls you mention, but there definitely were programs that ignored it and let you interface directly with the hardware. Someone showed me this program whos name I forget, where it could rip all sorts of weird format floppy disks that are most definitely not IBM formatted or even readable by those drives, because it can ignore the BIOS stuff and let you manually specify the CHS geometry.
Danny Forche
2024-03-21 16:34:23 +0000 UTC
