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Video: Quick Start: Episode 7 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-03-21 03:51:18
Imported:
2026-06

Content

https://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!

Files

Quick Start Ep 7 RC2

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cathoderaydude Tip me: https://ko-fi.com/cathoderaydude

Comments

Zen The Fox

Just reading the description and I can't wait to watch this omg. Update, I said I wouldn't watch this tonight but I was hooked and had to watch the full thing before bed. Nothing prepared me for this. I won't be sleeping tonight. Great video as always Gravis!

doink

Loved this one. All your Outlook/Exchange stuff hits home for me, it’s basically my entire job. Also, yes, you can do IMAP/POP3 with Exchange, it’s really just a single checkbox. I remember when I realized that every idiotic thing you’ve ever seen a company do was just so some jackass could get a bonus. Hard work is for suckers!

Pietro Gagliardi

I'm surprised they didn't just stick a hypervisor in there. Always-on VMware! Imagine the power savings lost if this thing interfered with the regular SMM.

George Dorn

The rant gave me goosebumps. That's some good screeding, right there. Somewhere, a retired HP product manager has awoken in a cold sweat and doesn't know why.

GRDC

For all UEFI should be less of a house of cards than BIOS, it's amazing how much every UEFI implementation I've seen trips over itself in absolutely baffling ways. Especially with "secure boot", which flat out doesn't work on several systems I own, and on several Intel manufactured motherboards has to be disabled to update the firmware.

_Pai

The end of innovation in technology is most apparent at trade shows like CES. You used to be able to go there and see things that would change everyone's lives. Now it's either new products that serve incredibly niche slices of the population or the same products but faster. Computers and smartphones in particular feel like they've reached an "end of history" where evolution has stopped and the same basic designs will just march indefinitely into the future. If some new tech comes along that completely blows up the way we do things, it will have growing pains and misfires before it homogenizes into a standard. Even smartphones went through weird and wacky designs before universally becoming black slabs. Stuff that you've covered on your channel like the early MPEG cameras and the Musicstory are products of eras like that, when companies were just throwing designs at the walls and seeing what sticked. To me that's what makes tech fun, and hopefully someday there will be some huge innovation that creates a whole new market and tech will be fun again for a little while.

Adam Demasi

That was definitely the most Gravis rant of all time, the perfect conclusion to Quick Start even. You’re dead-on right about every single thing, and how fitting it be about HP when they’ve been intent on destroying their reputation on subscription printers recently. I wish I were making it up when I say they put out a press release titled “Never own a printer again with the HP All‐In Plan” only a few weeks ago. Also, thank you for solving the mystery of what the heck “QuickLook” is on my 2008 HP Compaq 6730b, i.e., well within the bounds of the computers-are-slow Vista era. I can press the ℹ️ soft key from power off and it takes me to a “required component not found” BIOS screen. The machine had a clean (not an HP system image) copy of XP on it originally, and I installed 7 on an SSD, so it never was set up with an HP_TOOLS partition. I’ll have to mess around with it now. I kept thinking it was a feature I’ve seen on Toshiba business laptops from this era, where you can press Fn-Space to change your screen resolution… for some reason. Not sure how that’s any better than hitting Win-+ to launch Magnifier. But again, some manager at Toshiba got a promotion for that, so whatever.

a clayote

I guess the nearest thing to a computer with an "add" right now is the M3 MacBooks, which use a whole different architecture for... well, really impressive battery life, basically.

a clayote

Will HP make an ARM Linux laptop? Who knows!

Bulk Bogan

As soon as I saw that EFI file, I thought of how great it would be to have fully developed applications in a tool like Ventoy that could boot near instantly. Most Pendrive Linux installs I use take around 20 seconds, so the ability to get straight into something like GParted via the EFI file itself would be awesome.

Akshay Anand

Man don't tempt me with something that could never be real lol

Snuguru Maestro

Well, that explains why AI and quantum computing is the new thing that EVERYONE does. It's a new jellybean to add to your motherboard and a new platform for code. It's the new gadget to sell before it gets standardised and becomes commonplace.

Bike Forever

Justat the time I thought I needed to know about mbr and uefi comes CRD to the rescue. Tho it turns out I probably just need to clean the dvd lens.

Alex Cruise

The Bob rant is EXCEPTIONAL

DurradonXylles

Random aside, but Gravis, your joke about telling Tim Cook that Apple Silicon isn't the future just sorta came true TODAY: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract-secret-encryption-keys-from-apples-mac-chips/ Unpatchable M-series CPU vulnerability that leaks encryption keys, and Apple's only solution to mitigate the flaw is to cut CPU performance by nearly HALF. Sorry, it was just funny watching this video and only an hour later seeing this article float around on Discord.

Danny Forche

Wow, 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.

cathoderaydude

I'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.

Danny Forche

Well, arguably Windows 1.0 wasn't an OS in its own right, it was just a DOS manager much like the DOS Shell that shipped with MS-DOS 4.0. At what point do you consider Windows becoming a full-fledged OS? 3.0 or 3.1? Or not until 95 where it booted itself?

Danny Forche

My 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?

cathoderaydude

I'm afraid I have to disagree with that as well. Windows 1.0 introduced a new executable format and new APIs. When you ran Word under Windows in 1985, the only portion of DOS it would have ever touched is the filesystem calls. Windows 95 also depended to some extent on the DOS filesystem driver. It's my frank and honest opinion that the *only reason* anyone believes pre-NT Windows was "not an OS" is because you could type WIN to start it from DOS, and by that standard, Linux isn't an OS because you chainload it from GRUB - and you could also chainload it from *within DOS or Windows* back in the LILO days. See, this is exactly my point - the lines used to be extremely blurred. The modern concept of an OS is "the thing that is in charge of all software execution as long as the system is running, and upon which all software depends," but by that standard, Windows 1.0 fits, and DOS doesn't. Once a DOS app was running, DOS was irrelevant - the app could leverage it if it wanted to, and it could return to DOS on exit if it wanted to, but it was all purely optional. You could launch a DOS app and have it immediately purge DOS from the system, nothing stopped it, and it's not "preemptive" in any way. DOS could hook interrupts and system calls, and if a program called those then DOS would regain control, but a program could simply not call those, or uninstall the interrupt handlers. It's just like the BIOS - once your machine is booted, it's completely out of the way. You can use it if you want, or ignore it.

Drew Hoffman

Title suggestion: "Taskmasters"

Eric

I literally verbalized "preach" multiple times during the sermon about how DayStarter was conceived. I can taste metal just *thinking* about how such a lost concept is willingly given form.

Kerne

UEFI is PITA. Things like Dell's UEFI rack server maintenance software is bloated and dog slow.

Kerne

I found the deep dive into SMM fascinating. I've never had a reason to learn about it before. ^_^ (Daystar is truly an abomination... that some demo or virus coder got HP to publish it is kinda impressive tho.)

Mark Elliott

That rant at the end is just *chef’s kiss*. Perfect. What a video.

K Stark

"Screenwriter? No, you misheard, I said I was a screedwriter"

Anonymous Freak

The logo on boot thing has been going on since long before UEFI. You cannot boot direct from NTFS because UEFI specifically does NOT include an NTFS driver for security reasons. And the Windows boot loader 100% expects to be on a FAT partition that ISN’T the same as the NTFS Windows partition. A Linux you could absolutely hack into booting direct from a single partition, either FAT or by manually adding an ext3 driver to your UEFI if you know how to do such a thing. But it’s considered a terrible idea.

Chickenbread

Jeebus! This is cursed. Holy truck! I thought Phoenix Hyperspace was cursed, but this... this is a whole new level...

cathoderaydude

I'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.

Rain

Why did you apologize for talking so much? Never apologize for talking, I love hearing you talk about things so much I give you money every month! Excellent video as always Gravis

Logan Hartmann

Excellent 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.

jcx

Are you thinking of the program Omnidisk? That's a pretty good one for reading obscure floppy formats.

jcx

You'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.