Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x6UiQxvaKQ
The (Not So) Tiny PC That Got Britain Online
Introduction
In the 1990s, Tiny Computers took over the British airwaves, print press, and even indeed the high street with promises of affordable family PCs that would get Britain browsing. It also happens that my family were one of their customers - so let’s check out this Tiny PC and learn all about the story behind it!
Script
This is a Tiny computer.
What is the story of when you got your first PC?
Let me hear yours first!
Back in those days there was a brand called Tiny-
Just normal sized..?
Yeah, I’m not quite sure about the exact story behind that one, but it’s certainly something we can delve into a bit later on in the video.
Now this is a very, very special machine for me because I actually had one just like this when I was a kid, like literally identical setup to this with the matching keyboard and these exact speakers and this exact monitor and everything - and as you can see, it’s in beautiful original condition as well - and even came with the original stand, which we also had back in the day.
And I think the most perplexing thing about this is the fact that it’s far too small for a computer with a mouse - there’s actually nowhere to put the mouse when you use it, which is a bit of an oversight on Tiny’s part! I assume they bought a job a lot of these from when before computer mice were a thing and just kind of fobbed them off on the unsuspecting British public, as you do.
Oh, and it even comes with the matching printer and even the original mouse mat - I mean, how exciting is that?
Yeah, about as exciting as an early 90s beige box PC can get but as you can see this thing is absolutely filthy, it’s quite badly yellowed, and it’s supposed to be a lovely sunny weekend here in the UK so I thought what I would do is to give it a quick clean and then we’ll stick it out in the sun for a couple of days - try and brighten it up a few shades, I don’t want to go over the top with the retrobriting or anything like that - and then we’ll give it a bit of a teardown and see what’s inside it, and also take a look at the software side of things too.
…and if you enjoy poking around electronics nearly as much as I do you will no doubt be familiar with this video’s sponsor PCBWay.
They’ve already built quite the reputation among this community over the past 10 years for their excellent customer service in all things PCB fabrication - but did you know that they are now also offering 3D printing, CNC machining, and injection moulding?
Please do check out their link in the description below and a big thank you to PCBWay for sponsoring this video!
And as I’m going to be getting my hands all over this thing over the course of this video, I think it’s only wise to give everything a good old clean, but it turns out I don’t really have any proper cleaning materials here in the studio, so I’ve had to resort to the old YouTuber’s Friend of IPA and a bit of toilet roll, which is perfectly fine.
Just scrubbing all of the various bits and pieces, and to be honest, they’re not too bad - they’re actually not too filthy compared to a lot of the stuff that I’ve seen over the years. So not sure if this PC has had a lot of use over its lifetime, but hopefully we’ll find some clues as to that when we start to poke around the software.
And then, as promised, it all goes out in the sun, and yes, this certainly did raise some eyebrows with my landlord here at the studio, not to mention the people in the neighbouring offices, but you gotta do what you gotta do - and you may have heard of a process called “retrobriting”, which basically involves taking these old yellowed plastics and submerging them in hydrogen peroxide in one form or another and this is called “sunbrighting” which is where you essentially just cut out the chemicals and just leave the stuff in the sun - and a well-known American YouTuber once asked me:
“What is the British obsession with sunbrighting!? Why do all of the British YouTubers keep doing it!?”
- and my answer to that was that we don’t really see much sun in the UK so when it does come out we all go a bit crazy and we like to give it offerings - offerings of old computers and our pasty white British bodies as well. So that’s the story behind that - and to be honest I don’t really want to do anything too extreme when it comes to whitening this - I just want to even things up a little bit. I don’t want to try and make it look like it’s brand new or anything like that.
So a few sessions in the sun will be more than adequate for this old Tiny PC while I work on other videos.
…and here we are, a month later, and the British summer is well and truly over, so that’s all the sun that we’re going to get. My hair’s grown a little bit - thankfully, I’m not quite at the age where it’s all fallen out yet - and I’ve also had a fight with some Atari 7800s, so quite an eventful month, but yeah, here we are, and I think this is actually a really fair representation that you’re seeing on screen here - my camera settings, my lighting, everything in here is very, very consistent: the white balance on the camera and all of that stuff so I’m really pleased with this - of course, it doesn’t look brand new, but it has lightened up by a few shades and the unevenness - particularly the keyboard, which was very, very yellow compared to the rest of the computer - you know, it’s all just looking nice and even and consistent now, which is really great to see - and that’s exactly what I set out to achieve, so that’s fantastic - and all of that manhandling of this hardware in and out over the past few weeks means that I have got a bit more familiar with it, so the keyboard, I haven’t been able to work out what brand that is - maybe it’s a Keytronic keyboard, I’m not really sure. It’s unbranded.
The mouse, however, that is a very famous and prestigious brand:
“Mouse”
Yep.
Speakers, again, they are unbranded, but one thing I did spot about these, which I had forgotten about from back in the day, was that you can actually run these on AA batteries, and I remember when I was a kid, I had my little Discman CD player that I used to take on holiday and stuff, and yeah, I actually used to take our computer speakers with us as well so I could listen to my music, because I was a bit of a weird kid.
Just a couple of other things: The monitor, again, pretty much unbranded, but it does say “Made in Korea” on the back - and I noticed that the model number for this starts with “SM”, so maybe it’s a Samsung monitor - I don’t really want to take it apart to find out, but if so, that’s quite nice, quite a decent brand.
Although I did notice something very strange about the cable: it’s a 15-pin VGA cable on one end, although it is missing a few pins, but that’s not all that unusual. But the other end is 9-pin, which is really weird - It’s like an old CGA or EGA type connector. Not something I’ve seen on a monitor of this vintage, but hey, if that’s all the pins that they needed, I guess that was sufficient and probably saved them a few fractions of a penny on every single monitor that they manufactured.
So what I want to do next, before we get this powered up, is just have a look inside - I want to check that everything looks OK before we plug this thing into the mains - and also it’s kind of intriguing because it’s got this original Pentium sticker on the front and if it hasn’t been upgraded I don’t actually own an original Pentium system - I’ve got 486s and I’ve got some slightly later systems so this will slot quite nicely into the collection if it’s all original.
So let’s take it apart and have a look!
So, I must admit, initially looking around this thing, I did initially think that the case was held on by these two weird triangular security screws, and I was very thankful to discover that they’re actually included in my iFixit screwdriver set - #notsponsored, #otherscrewdriversetsareavailable - but it turned out that actually no, they’re a structural part of the case, so I very swiftly put those back in and it’s actually just this one screw in the middle that holds the top case on- that’s quite tight, we’ll just unscrew that - and then hopefully it should just slide off as always.
OK, that was perhaps a little bit more violent than it should have been but we got there in the end! Let’s lift the lid and see what we have in here.
So a very sparse setup indeed, isn’t it? So the first thing that really jumped out to me was this missing 2032 clock battery here, which evidently hasn’t been installed by the motherboard manufacturer when this was actually made - instead they’ve gone with one of these clock modules that has the battery built in, which is disappointing to see because they are a bit of a ticking time bomb so I’m not quite sure what we can do about that and even if it’s still working.
We have our Pentium CPU here - at least I assume it’s a Pentium - that’s a socket 7, look at the tiny little fan on there!
…and this is the slot - I think this is for an external cache module for that CPU so that might be a worthwhile upgrade if I’m going to be keeping this fairly stock.
We have three ISA slots here, we’ve got four PCI slots, and if I just unplug the IDE connectors - so we’ve got the IDE controller on board, as you might expect of this era - ooh, we’ve got some hot glue there, that’s nice, what’s that for!?
These connectors have actually been glued in, I’ll get a shot of that so I can show you.
Oh, there we go - and yeah, let’s just…
All of the plugs-
All of the plugs have been glued in with a glue gun! My goodness!
It’s almost like I built this thing. Come on, there we go. No glue can stop me. So, yeah, we’ve got the audio cable here from the sound card to the CD drive - we’ll have a look at that in a second, work out what sound card it is. I seem to remember ours had an ESS AudioDrive in it, which was actually quite a decent card for its time.
But this has- it’s got four SIMM slots - I’m not quite sure how much RAM we’ve got there, of course, we’ll find out when we boot it up and we have a single DIMM slot so this really is a product of its era and that kind of transitional time from the earlier sort of 386, 486 systems of the past.
We’ve got a mixture of ISA and PCI, we’ve got DIMMs and SIMMs, we’ve got an external cache module and one of those weird clock modules. So this is an interesting system! This is great to see!
So, an ISA sound card. This will be nice for actual proper DOS compatibility, which is great to see. It’s got a Crystal chip on it.
Wow, that is fascinating - so we’ve got a model number of SR-S161-F on that - I have no idea what that is, there’s no other kind of branding on it. I’m not sure if that’s some kind of OEM special that they had made just for these PCs. I’ll look that up and I’ll put the information up on the screen. But, hey, those crystal sound chips weren’t too bad so that’s not all bad - look at all of these on here, on the actual connectors. They’re, they’re like ferrite filters, aren’t they?
Obviously to reduce interference on the audio inputs and outputs - really weird setup, that, I’ve not seen that before on a sound card.
And that is a modem. I’m not quite sure what speed that is - probably 56k if it’s 1996, could be 28k I guess. It’s got a Lucent chip on it and yeah, something you don’t see in PCs nowadays. So you’ve got your “Line” and your “Phone” there so you can actually plug it into your phone line and then plug the phone itself into the modem - and this is how we would have connected to the internet back in 1996 - or indeed sent faxes, sent and received faxes, if it is a fax modem, from our PCs. Living in the future!
…and here is our graphics card. So we have some slots here for some RAM in case we want to upgrade that - I’m not quite sure how much it has on board, hopefully we’ll find out once we get Windows booted up. It’s a Cirrus Logic GD5446, not one I’ve come across before. Again, looks like it’s all mostly on one chip - and of course we’ve got the BIOS chip there, that looks like an EPROM, and some kind of feature connector as well.
…and the hard drive is just a cheap and cheerful Seagate Medalist, that’s-
What’s the capacity on there? 1080 megabytes, so that’s a 1 gigabyte drive, that’s actually quite reasonable for 1996 - of course, I don’t know if that’s the original drive or if that’s been upgraded at some point, but hopefully that still works, and we’ve got some software that we can check out.
There is an optical drive in here as well, that’s just a bog standard CD. It’s an 8 speed. I won’t bother taking that out, because I want to get on and get this thing booted up - and the power supply is just completely generic, unbranded, 200 watt switching power supply, and of course that is AT so we’ll have to see if that works too.
Hmm, I’ve been trying to prise this heatsink off the CPU using this plastic spudger here - I don’t actually have any proper computer spudgers, so this is like a car trim thing - but of course it’s plastic and it’s nice and pointy and it’s nice and strong, so it’s a spudger. I can’t actually remove the CPU from the heatsink, and I am a little bit concerned that I might damage something if I force it. So these things, you know, thermal compound and all that kind of stuff - a bit less important with CPUs of this era - I’m not saying it’s not important, but I think I’m going to leave that for now because I want to get this thing booted up and I don’t want to risk damaging anything.
And here it is, our Tiny PC all reassembled and ready to go - so I think without further ado, let’s get this thing booted up!
Not awkward at all!
Beep, very good.
Hard drive noises, also very good - and as we can see, hey, it looks like it’s POSTed so that is a very good start. Now I can see that the monitor is flickering on the camera here so what I will do is to switch to a direct capture for the next bit.
So it’s just nice to confirm a couple of those bits of hardware that we’ve just spotted of course, we’ve got a Pentium-S 100 megahertz CPU. We’ve got 16 megabytes of RAM, which seems about right for a computer of this vintage so that should be perfectly fine - and we’ve got that Seagate 1 gigabyte hard drive, and that was actually sounding quite healthy.
It’s not making any horrible noises so you never know, hopefully there’s an OS on there so we can get this thing booted up. But the biggest problem is that CMOS clock battery, because as we just spotted, that isn’t a coin cell like it would normally be, it’s one of those awkward real time clock modules so I’m going to have to see what I can do about that.
But that doesn’t prevent us from booting the system. So if I just press F1 to skip past this…
…and we have Windows 95, wonderful! Yeah, that’s probably what I would expect from a computer of this kind of era.
Ah, music to my ears.
Now, of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve fired this PC up - when I first got it, I did have a bit of a poke around. I was hoping to find something to do with the original Tiny software setup - any kind of remnants of that: recovery media, default applications that kind of thing and indeed try and work out when this was last used - and it seems that this was last used by its previous owner around the end of 1999, beginning of 2000, so 25 years ago or at least getting on for it, which is really interesting.
Now I don’t want to share any of their personal information or any of their personal documents or anything like that - of course, that wouldn’t be right - but there are a few things that I found on here that were very representative of that era of home computer use and I think will help to tell that story and speaking of that story I think it’s about time we had a look at the actual history of Tiny itself.
So I think it’s fair to describe Tiny as an iconic brand in their home market of the UK, and indeed pretty prolific, particularly at their peak during the mid to late 90s, but Tiny was actually formed way back in 1981 as a division of Willow Vale Electronics Limited, a company that made parts for TVs and radios.
I think it’s also fair to say that Tiny was very much a household name as well - I mean, not only did they advertise in the computing press, but also pretty heavily in the mainstream press and indeed on TV, particularly around Christmas time as their target market were families and home users - and to make the brand as accessible as possible for those users, not only were their PCs very low cost, but they also had physical shops that you could actually go and visit and get hands on with their hardware.
And to facilitate this, they actually assembled their computers in the UK, so whereas a lot of their competitors were building their computers in the Far East and then taking a few weeks to ship them across to the UK, Tiny were actually assembling them here, which meant that they could respond to changes and demand in the market very quickly.
Unfortunately, the relentless push for lower costs coupled with widespread reports of poor build quality and reliability meant that by 2002 the company found itself in financial difficulty, and administrators were called in. Tiny’s assets were purchased by British entrepreneur Tahir Mohsan, who owned Time Computing, which was a rival company, and if you’re a regular viewer of this channel you’ll no doubt be familiar with that name because that’s the company that made my Desk PC that I’ve made a couple of videos on.
Anyway, he incorporated Tiny into his Granville Technology Group and shut down most of their retail locations, and unfortunately the Tiny brand never really reappeared on the market, and his company went bust in 2005, taking both brands with it.
As for today - well, if you check the Wikipedia page for Tiny computers, curiously they do seem to think that the brand had something of a revival in recent years, and is even still trading in some form or another today, but I must admit I couldn’t actually find any evidence of that outside of Wikipedia, so I would take that with a very large pinch of salt indeed - and if someone is still using the name and maybe the logo, to be honest, there’s not going to be any connection to the original company anyway - and that’s what I want to focus on, that original company, and also their contemporaries in the PC market in the 90s, because they caused something of a mini revolution:
They took PCs, which were once the preserve of offices and workplaces, and put them in the home and made things like the internet accessible to families and to home users for the first time - and I think that was a very big deal indeed - and that’s something I’d like to demo via the medium of some of the stuff that I found on this very PC.
And what better place to start than with Internet Explorer, in this case version 5.5, an absolute classic version of this browser running here on Windows 95. Now, it’s not really the browser itself that we’re interested in but the selection of ISPs that are set up on this computer - and by the way, I am going to blur out the usernames here because they are linked to the original owner’s full name, but that’s not really important.
The fact of the matter is - ISPs, plural. I mean, that may seem a bit strange to some people, but it was actually reasonably common here in the UK in the late 90s.
Allow me to explain.
So I was quite lucky as a kid in that my family got online way back in 1995, and the reason for that was that my dad’s company was based in America, and they used AOL, and they used AOL’s email specifically to communicate pretty extensively, and they wanted him to have access to that at home because of the time difference.
So, they stumped up for the cost of a 28k modem and a subscription to AOL, and I believe they also covered the cost of the calls as well. But for most people, connecting to the internet in the early 90s would have been a very expensive affair indeed, because you’ve got the cost of that monthly subscription and the cost of the calls to actually connect to it, which would have been billed by the minute.
Now, Freeserve came along in 1998 and they completely upended the market because, as the name implies, they made the internet free - there was no longer a monthly subscription, you just paid for the cost of the local rate call and there was some kind of setup that meant that they got a small fraction of that back to help cover their costs, which was also helped by the fact that they were backed by the Dixons Group, a huge high street retailer and computer retailer of the time - and of course this led to a bit of an explosion in copycat type services - so there was also BT Click which I see is also set up on this PC, and later on Freeserve was acquired by a French company called Wanadoo and rebranded - I think that was around the year 2000.
I also found another very interesting looking one on this PC that I hadn’t heard of which was “Easy UK” or “EZ UK” - not the greatest name in British English, but I did spot, scrolling down here, that the calls to this one could cost as much as £1 a minute - and thankfully they did limit that connection to 20 minutes at a time, but yeah, £20 for 20 minutes worth of internet!? Wow!
…and I suppose the point is that those time limits didn’t just apply to horrifically overpriced ISPs that nobody had ever heard of, but were a very common feature of those free internet service providers in the late 90s - and that, combined with the fact that none of them had any kind of contracts in place, or credit card details required, or any of that, and the fact that those ISPs were often massively oversubscribed and unreliable and slow as a result, meant that people would just try lots of different ones out - you could pick up discs at your local supermarket, get it set up, and basically hop around and find the one that worked for you - and, hey, that might be the case with this PC.
Obviously there’s no way of actually telling, but it does seem like a very common setup for the time. Now, of course, all of these people getting online in the late 90s led to a massive explosion in creativity and people sharing stuff - of course, before the days of social media and Discord and all of that depressing stuff we had email and we had instant messaging and we used to share all sorts of interesting things - and this is making me feel very old, stood here in saying this - but it’s an important part of history that I need to cover and indeed, I did find some examples of these things on this PC, which I would like to show to you.
…and what with this being a video on the internet of all places, I thought:
“Well, what better place to start than with videos - on the internet!”
Now, these were a very different beast 25 years ago - they were small, they were grainy, the framerate was terrible, they used MPEG 1 compression, the audio was terrible, but you know what?
They were amazing to see - and of course, before the days of social media the way that we used to share these was via email, and you’d just receive a funny video, you’d think it was hilarious, and then you would forward it on to multiple friends, and these things would spread around the world like absolute wildfire - and perhaps the funniest part is that, for those of us that were stuck on dialup around this time, these videos would take multiples of minutes to download before you could even watch them, and then if you wanted to forward it on to someone it would take even longer to reupload it to send it to that person, but we still shared them because it was loads of fun!
But of course it wasn’t just video and here is a genre of email forward that I think has actually fallen by the wayside in recent years - and I suspect I know why, but we’ll take a look at one first - and this falls into the category of weird stuff built in Microsoft Office, I think. I’m not really sure how else to describe it, but yeah, this is The Sir Geoff Spoons Amazing Korea / Japan 2002 Guess The Score Competition, and evidently someone had a lot of fun - probably on company time - putting this spreadsheet together including all of the formulae to actually calculate the scores behind the scenes, all of the styling, the graphics, and everything else, and it’s an incredibly impressive effort for Excel 97.
Ah - well, I say it’s incredibly impressive - it was until I saw this!
Yes, this is “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” and it’s a complete game running inside Excel and I had to enable macros to allow this and I think this is a bit of a clue as to why this isn’t really a thing anymore because of course Excel macro viruses also exploded in the 90s as a result of people sharing stuff like this because people just got into the habit of just enabling anything but yeah, this game itself is - it’s ridiculous!
It’s got so many questions built in, it’s got all of the lifelines: so you can phone a friend, you can ask the audience, you can 50:50.
It’s incredibly comprehensive and it’s really impressive - in fact, I’m probably going to do a video of me just having a play through of this and just upload that to my second channel if you want to go and check it out - and I might even make this spreadsheet available, I need to check it out and make sure there’s nothing personally identifiable associated with it. Of course, you’ll need an older version of Excel to be able to play it because the modern versions are very locked down. But yeah, this is hours of fun and it really did bring back a lot of memories of some of the crazy stuff that was doing the rounds at the time.
…and speaking of things that you probably shouldn’t just be running willy nilly, how about executable files!? Yep, full blown programs. This one comes in the form of a jolly little Christmas song which, unfortunately, I can’t play the audio for for two reasons - one being that I did a test upload of this and immediately got hit with a full blown copyright strike, and the other being that it’s full of bad language!
But yeah, this is an actual executable program and people sharing this kind of stuff of course meant that viruses also ended up running rampant, led to the rise of antivirus software in the kind of the mid to late 90s as well - and to be honest, probably also was a direct influence in Microsoft moving home users over to the NT codebase with Windows XP - and around that time, websites were getting a lot more interactive thanks to things like Flash, and indeed, people were forwarding Flash animations and particularly games to each other as well - and speaking of things that were popular in the late 90s, how about this weird Ali G game / soundboard / music maker thing!?
There was also this full screen ad for Corona which I think was very, very much unofficial based on some of the lyrics - and I think we’ll stop this here!
Or how about this full blown game of Connect 4?
Yeah, a little bit too easy that one, and definitely nothing to do with the fact that I changed the difficulty to easy after it absolutely thrashed me for a few games.
And finally…
The Urinal Game. Yeah, it’s a men’s toilet simulator, and the aim of the game is basically that you’re presented with various scenarios, various combinations of people standing at the urinals, and you have to pick which is the best place to stand - and actually, I think most men who’ve used these things will probably be familiar with the unspoken rules of the men’s toilets, and will actually do pretty well in this game - I think I got four or five out of six the first time I played it - but yeah, certainly one of the more unusual things that I’ve seen.
Of course, I knew going into this that this was going to be a very nostalgic video for me to make - I mean, after all, this was the very first PC that my family ever owned, and it’s been so nice finally being able to get my hands on one again after all these years. But I must admit, even I wasn’t prepared for how deep the rabbit hole actually went - I mean, these low cost PCs and low cost internet access around the turn of the century, 25 years ago, really did revolutionise things and really did change the face of the internet forever. Now, whether that was a good thing or a bad thing is still up for debate, I think, but it certainly was a thing.
But that’s all I’ve got for you for this video, so thank you as always to my supporters on Patreon, on Ko-Fi, and my YouTube Channel Members, and most of all, thank you to you for watching.
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