Deskstation Tyne: A MIPS R4600 based PC that runs Windows NT

CORRECTION: The BBC Micro used a 6502. The first ARM computer was the Acorn Archimedes in 1987.

* Tour, teardown and Windows NT fresh install. *

I recently got my hands on a vintage "powerful" MIPS R4600 machine from around 1994. This is a Deskstation Tyne RISC PC. This was released in the era of the early Pentium (P5) and probably cost $6500 or more.

There is little information about the company or the machines they sold, but this oddball machine glues a MIPS R4600 RISC processor to standard PC ISA and VLB slots. It runs Windows NT but the real issue is finding software that could natively run on this architecture. There is very little information about this system on the internet, but this one was running Newtek Lightwave 3D (and likely used as a video rendering box in conjunction with the Newtek Video Toaster running on a Commodore Amiga.)

The Deskstation Tyne - MIPS R4600 CPU Workstations PC

--- Tools

Deoxit D5:

Jonard Tools EX-2 Chip Extractor:

Wiha Chip Lifter:

O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)

Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:

Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:

Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:

Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:

TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)

TS100 Soldering Iron:

EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:

DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:

Magnetic Screw Holder:

Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)

RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)

Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)

Heat Sinks:

Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)

-- Music

Music: Wanderlust by Fejká

[SeanCC]

Yeah, in the 1994 - 1997 era these WinNT RISC systems started to show up which became very popular with the Lightwave crowd. Not only would this be loads faster than the last model Amiga offered in 1994, the company went out of business. These were 100mHz+ compared to MC68040 models offered at nominal 25mHz with faster 3rd party add-on boards, but not this kind of speed for a while. The MC68060 accelerators were only good for 50-66mHz or so.

Most of the folks in the circles I was familiar with opted for the DEC Alpha based RISC systems as they were very cost effective, also ran WinNT, but DEC developed a rather miraculous software-based emulation system for x86 compatibility called FX32. After the first couple times launching a new piece of software the system would instead run a copy made of new native code. It was so good it was even compatible with some x86 hardware drivers. I was able to do Premiere editing with a Personal Animation Recorder, which was a hardware based DDR, using a dedicated encoder/decoder board with attached SCSI drive, letting me do realtime broadcast quality video while any other PC would struggle to play anything higher resolution than 320x240 in full color with something like MPEG or Sorensen compression.

These workstations had at least the perceived coolness of running the same chip as in an SGI, which was what I had at work during this period, until '99.

[Mikeywil]

6:26 The BBC Micro did not have an ARM CPU, it was a MOS Technology 6502. The first ARM CPU was in the Acorn Archimedes line of computers beginning in 1987, which was sold under the BBC licensed brand mainly in the educational market. Those BBC branded models had red function keys (a throwback to its BBC Micro lineage, ) the models intended for the home market had green function keys, and business market machines had gray function keys.

[ncmattj]

Update: Apple’s new desktop and laptop chips made in-house are ARM based. We’ve come full circle.

[altrogeruvah]

Thank you Youtube for finally doing your job of recommending me something I'm _actually_ interested in! Great video, thank you!

[teknoman]

One of the big things that “saved” CISC was the decoupling of the architectural instruction set from the actual internal micro-architecture. Most CPUs today translate from one ISA to another on the fly. This gives your chip designers huge flexibility in designing the processor’s internals without breaking compatibility.

[RMCRetro]

Really nice tour thank you. The most famous home computer here in the UK with RISC was the Acorn (of ARM fame) Archimedes. A really great little range of machines which went into most schools

[bborkzilla]

I'm working on a product that uses a CPU with 48 MIPS64 cores. That architecture is still alive and well!

[Darieee]

I don’t know how I was fed this video when it’s only 50 views in, but I am enjoying it thoroughly !

[clydesdalefan]

If you haven't formatted the scsi drive yet, then you can easily get the my administrator password as well as all other account names and passwords.. you'll want to run either LCP or ophcrack against the SAM database. There are actually dozens of tools to do this but the two I mentioned above work wonderfully. Let us see it in all of its natively setup glory! Thanks and good luck.

[ultrametric]

Don't forget the terminator on the SCSI card :) Your videos bring back a lot of memories. EISA cards shared with IBM Microchannel that they could be configured in BIOS and not with jumper settings. What a bonus in the day!

[asgerms]

If it was my machine I'd probably look into installing a BSD unix. It's been a while since I used BSD, but it has an extensive "port"-system which basically means that all apps (many thousands!) can be automatically downloaded and compiled (from source-code) on your system; the latter being important as you probably won't find many R4600 executables out there. That should allow you to run alot of software on it. Thanx for the video, used to drool over these things.

[MrPufins]

i was totally waiting for him to talk about apple silicon and was like why did he not mention that.... then i looked at the upload date

[therealfranklin]

I used to have an old pre-release version of Windows NT5 (before they changed the name to 2000 (I mean, NT5 was supposed to ship in 1997, but you know, it's going to be easier to just ship in 1999 and call it 2000 so it sounds like it's from the future)) that would still install on alpha/mips(/and some other RISC, I think) machines. They could have left in support in the actual release, but I think they felt like it was time to let the totally awesome future pass them by.

[danmackintosh]

Ahh this feels good, hearing all the talk of RISC and SIMMs... Makes me wish I still had some of my old PC kit.

[ilikemorestuff]

That BIOS is very comprehensive, thanks for the great video.

[andrebaskin]

That brought back memories. I used to work for IDT, a MIPS partner that produced the processors, and part of my job was to help developers port applications to Windows NT on MIPS. I had a pool of Deskstation machines that I would loan out to developers. They were R4000 based not R4600 however. The R4600 was just coming out at the time and we had some R4600 machines in house.

[hisham_hm]

It's fun to think of these RISC vs CISC comparisons today because any RISC processor today is way more complex than any CISC processor from the 80s

[huguia]

Great video! I have already heard about RISC processors, but never seen one being used. Nice piece of computer history. You sir have earned a new subscriber! Cheers.

[CommodoreFan]

Awesome video, it's really neat to see computer hardware that was not really common back in the day.

[rhuwyn]

Love seeing videos on these old PCs. I was a kid when this was new so I never really got a chance to work on them myself, although I did get to work on a bunch of old Sparc systems later on.