Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And today weâre headed back to the â90s
with this boxy beast right here: the Monorail PC, an all-in-one desktop computer that first
hit the market in November of 1996. [Windows 95 startup sound plays] Despite its bulky metal case making it look
like a piece of industrial equipment, the Monorail was a low-cost desktop PC intended
for first-time computer users. And for a short period in time they were the
new hotness, with Monorail being the 14th leading manufacturer of desktop PCs, growing
at a rate of 50% per quarter, and looking to become a $2 billion company by 2003. Unfortunately for them that didnât happen,
but this machine is still a notable footnote in personal computer history. The first reason is its unprecedented design,
packing a Pentium compatible motherboard, desktop-sized CD-ROM, floppy drive, and hard drive, and a color LCD monitor all into one unit. The second thing setting it apart was pricing,
with the original Model 7245 first going on sale in 1996 for just $999. At the time, that was a magic number for a
PC with a monitor included. So the Monorail was not only one of the cheapest
complete systems around, but it was perhaps the first all-in-one desktop with a built-in
LCD, predating computers like the Compaq Presario 3020 by nearly a full year. And obviously, before Appleâs iMac G5 by
a good eight years, that didnât arrive until 2004. Of course the Monorail is a way chonkier lil
guy by comparison, but the underlying idea is the same. Adjustable LCD screen up front, optical drive bay on the side, I/O section with all your ports around back. Even its âsealed caseâ maintenance philosophy is very Apple-esque, with Monorail intending it to only be upgraded by the manufacturer, voiding the warranty if you opened the case yourself. Something many tech reviewers back then did
not appreciate, despite Monorail's efforts to make upgrades as painless as possible. You see, Monorail Computer Corporation was dead-set on forging a new path in the personal computer business. The company was founded in 1995 by Doug Johns,
formerly the senior vice president of Compaqâs PC division, basing Monorail in the city of
Marietta, Georgia just outside Atlanta. At the time, 30 million American households
had never owned a computer, and Johns saw things like pricing, distribution, and maintenance
as barriers to entry. So he invested $2 million into Monorail in
1995, with several talented folks helping co-found the company, each coming from the
likes of Compaq, IBM, and Oracle. Pricing was one of the biggest initial hurdles,
since the main goal was to sell a sub-$1000 computer. Reducing overhead costs was key, and this
was accomplished by outsourcing practically everything. Monorail designed their PCs in-house and received
orders by telephone, but all manufacturing, logistics, repairs, and financials were handled
by outside partners. An original equipment manufacturer took care
of building the machines, at first being Phelps Technologies out of Kansas City, Missouri. Federal Express would handle all the shipping
and handling of the machines once they were built and packaged by the OEM. CompUSA was Monorailâs sole retail partner,
initially, so they took care of regional advertising and kept limited inventory in stock. And Suntrust Banks handled company finances, acting as Monorailâs accounts receivable department. Even the machines themselves were designed
around the idea of using third party options. FedEx told Monorail that the ideal dimensions for a package weighing between 15 and 25 pounds was 19âx19âx9.5â inches. Too small to fit both a monitor and a PC,
which is why Monorail decided to use a dual scan laptop LCD panel integrated into the
case. The rest of the components were on the lower end as well, with a 75 megahertz Pentium-class AMD CPU, 16 megabytes of RAM, a 1 gigabyte hard drive, 4x CD-ROM,
and a 33.6 Kbps FAX/modem. Nothing mind-blowing, but Monorail was keen
to push its planned upgrade path, offering faster processors and up to 80 megs of RAM at prices they claimed were comparable to doing it yourself. They recommended holding onto the shipping
box for this, so you could simply drop off your Monorail with FedEx, theyâd deliver
it to the original manufacturer for upgrades, and then send it back in a few days. As for the name âMonorail,â you might
be wondering: what kinda name is Monorail anyway? - âMonorail!" - âMonorail. Monorail. Monorail.â Well, like almost everything else at the company,
the name was outsourced. Another company called Name Lab was tasked
with the job, and the mandate was to come up with a friendly name that avoided overused computer company words like âCyberâ and âTek.â Apparently âMonorailâ fit the bill, despite
it not really having much in the way of meaning. It did at least lead to the company mascot,
Monorail Mo, the Monorail system conductor. Yeah weâll get to you later, Mo. Anyway, despite their lofty ambitions and
positive press, Monorail had a bit of a rough go of it at first. Their OEM, Phelps, went bankrupt so they had
to move manufacturing to Mitac and SCI Systems, certain retail partners were marking up the
price above $1000, critics werenât happy with the stingy warranty and upgrades, and
competitors were slashing prices to get their own PCs under a grand. By 1998 Monorail decided to move away from
all-in-ones and start focusing on boring white box towers aimed at business users, with machines
like the NPC 5000 and 7000 series hitting shelves late that year. You know what else hit shelves in late â98? eMachines, with their sub-$500 PCs using almost the exact same specs as those from Monorail,
but at prices hundreds of dollars less. The race to the bottom was finally bottoming
out and Monorail wasnât fully prepared. Pulling out of the PC market in the year 2000
and rebranding as Monorail E-Solutions, briefly becoming a business decision-making company
before fizzling out in 2002. But that was then and this is now, and weâve
got ourselves this lovely boxed example of a Monorail Model 133. This was introduced in early â97 at a price
of $1,299, with upgrades to the CPU, hard drive, video RAM, and CD-ROM drive over the
original Monorail. The manual and the mouse were long gone by
the time I got this, but it does have the original keyboard as well as this quick setup poster that kinda reminds me of a board game somehow. And thereâs our friend Mo again, guiding
us through the process of plugging things in, a quaint reminder of how fresh the PC
experience still was to many folks in 1996. But yeah, thereâs really nothing to it:
just plug in the keyboard, a mouse, and a power cable and youâre good to go. Time to power on the Monorail! [computer powers on, whirs to life] [beep] Right, so this runs the venerable Windows
95, complete with a custom Monorail boot screen. A nice touch indeed. Takes a while to load with that old hard drive,
so letâs take the opportunity to admire that die-cut steel case. [clunks metal metallically] Yeah for being a budget machine, this thing
is surprisingly sturdy. Itâs metal all the way around, weighing
in at just over 17 pounds or around 8 kilograms. And yes, it does feature expansion possibilities, thereâs a proper 16-bit ISA slot right there above the floppy drive. As mentioned earlier, this was not intended
to be user-serviceable. Though you can open it up somewhat by removing
a handful of T15 Torx screws around back. This provides access to the monitor, drives,
and expansion slot, but youâre only gonna get so far without really tearing things down further. And regrettably, that slot is in a really
cramped space up against the CPU and its fan, so there arenât many cards thatâll fit
without blocking the exhaust. From what I gather, Monorail only offered
a network interface card for this slot, and it was a very specific model since almost
nothing else fit. Once Windows finishes loading, a couple of programs start up. One is this control panel for showing system
information and display options. This is where you control the LCD brightness settings, which is either bright or dim. Just either/or, nothing in between. Contrast is an entirely separate thing, controlled using these two rubber buttons below the power and volume. Thereâs also a system tray icon that runs
on startup letting you open and close the CD tray by clicking it. [CD-ROM tray opens, closes] Yep, thatâs...
thatâs all that does. Seems Monorail included this after users complained
the CD-ROMâs eject button was cumbersome to reach by hand. Which, it is, so good call. Oh and before I disabled it, the Monorail Home Station program also used to start up with Windows. Keeping in line with the idea this might be
someoneâs first PC, itâs a collection of shortcuts to commonly-used programs, settings,
tutorials, games, and website links. And hey look, thereâs Monorail Mo again,
letâs hear what he has to say! - âMonorail Central Station! Itâs where every Monorail user starts off.â [door closes, monorail SFX] - âApproaching Internet Central.â - âNow I know youâve heard about the Internet.â - âInformation Superhighwayâ The âNet? Cyberspace?â - âCall it what you will, itâs on the
tip of everyoneâs tongue these days.â - âRight now over 63 million people are linked by computerâ - âto the Internet! To access the Internet, all it takes is your Monorail,â - âa standard phone line and an account
with an Internet Service Provider.â So yeah, Monorail Mo walks you through signing up to Mindspring dial-up and Monorailâs warranty and registration, and thatâs about it. There are other web-focused tutorials included
though, minus Mister Mo and instead itâs some generic narrator dude. Itâs pretty great. - âMake sure nobody has picked up the phone
recently,â - âas this can cause the modem connection
to hang up.â - âIf the modem seems to be in order and
no one has pickedâ - âup the phone, exit Internet Explorer
and start it up again.â For whatever reason, you can rewind the playback here, but like, in the way that youâd play a record in reverse. [narration plays backwards] Not entirely sure what the point of that is,
but it amuses me so I approve. Anyway, as for how the Monorail PC is to actually use? Well, itâs not ideal. The biggest issue is that awful 10-inch passive
matrix display, with its washed-out colors, tiny viewing angles, and smeary motion. Evidently Monorail offered a TFT active matrix later on, but this original display is dreadful even for â96. Granted, itâs perfectly fine for productivity
and games that require little in the way of movement. Youâre not gonna have a problem with word
processing, for example, or looking up articles within Microsoft Encarta or whatever. And uh by âwhateverâ I mean adult entertainment! Yeah it seems the previous owner figured out
the seedier side of cyberspace pretty quickly, thereâs seriously like half a gig of late
90s dial-up wank bank. [clears throat] Anyway so uh, point being
that this display isnât very good, and even something like Solitaire
can be irritating to play with it being so easy to misplace the mouse cursor in a waft of blurry pixels. Yeah, you can enable mouse trails to alleviate this, thatâs what itâs there for after all. But eh, cheap passive matrix displays, one
piece of â90s tech I wonât be yearning to use again anytime soon. At least the keyboard it comes with is half-decent, being manufactured by NMB Technologies. [keyboard keys thunking away] Itâs not a mechanical board or anything,
but it does feature NMB sliders over rubber domes, making it feel quite similar to the
Dell Quietkey keyboards. One can certainly do worse. However, you can certainly do better in almost every single way when it comes to mid-to-late 90s gaming. Again that display is total balls, and while
you can hook up an external monitor to alleviate that, itâs hard to justify going to the
trouble when the horsepower simply isnât there. Even though mine is the upgraded 133 megahertz
model, with RAM upgrades taking system memory up to 48 megs, itâs still in a rather un-sweet
spot in overall performance. First-person shooters from 1996 are sluggish,
with Duke Nukem 3D being playable but choppy, close to what I get on a PC running a hundred megahertz 486 Overdrive. Quake is another step down from that in terms
of playability, as expected. The Monorail only has an integrated Chips
& Technologies SVGA graphics chipset, with the Model 133 here boasting
one whole megabyte of VRAM. So it's really no surprise to get frame rates
in the low twenties. Something like Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver is playable too, something I was curious about since it relies on full screen
full motion video. And it does run rather sluggishly as well,
dulling down the game's pacing with every stunt happening in slow motion. And 1997 games like Pod here are truly unplayable, with chops, skips, and jumps all over the place. [choppy, skipping audio plays] This game was really made for Pentium MMX
CPUs and at least two megs of video memory, which the Monorail doesnât have and it shows. Really about the best kinda game to play on this would be higher-res adventure games, like Pajama Sam here. Youâre still gonna lose the mouse cursor
on occasion because of the LCD, but at least you can keep up with whatâs going on. And real-time strategy games like Age of Empires,
those tend to work pretty well too and the movement is slow-paced enough on default speed
settings. This kinda 2D fare really is about as far
as youâd wanna take the Monorail in terms of Windows 95 games. Thereâs also the DOS side of things to consider,
which is actually not half bad with its Crystal Sound chipset offering Sound Blaster compatibility. Itâs an imitation of the real thing of course,
notable in games like Commander Keen Goodbye Galaxy, but overall itâs entirely passable. And the speakers do an okay job too, theyâre actually louder and less garbled than I expected. [Commander Keen plays for a bit] Heh, again, not that youâd wanna play a
side-scroller very long with all the ghosting going on, and some additional issues with
resolutions lower than 640x480. Thereâs this black line running through
the middle of the screen, along with non-integer scaling, plus this wonky wave effect on top
of that. Not at all pleasant, but I think Iâve made
my point. [Keen pathetically dies] That being, the Monorail PC is a downright
compelling device, both to research and to go back and use, despite its cost-optimized
inferiority. Parts of it are astonishingly well-made, while
others are serious letdowns, and in the end I wouldnât recommend trying to track one
down except as a retro curiosity. You may have noticed the RMA markings all over the box I showed earlier, and yeah, from what Iâve read on old userâs forums it
seems these were constantly breaking in one way or another. I got lucky and found this one fully working,
something Iâm grateful for because Iâve been wanting to share the Monorail experience
on LGR for a long time now. And with that, I hope youâve enjoyed this
excursion with the Monorail. Please exit through the doors in a calm and
orderly fashion. [doors closing, monorail speeds up] If you had experiences with Monorail computers do leave a comment down below, Iâd love to hear about it. Or perhaps check out some more LGR, I post new videos every week so thereâs a lot to choose from. As always, thank you for watching!
Lmao at their mascot.