The first Energy Star desktop: IBM PS/2 E

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Updates: Patron @bmartin427 noticed some bent pins on the PCMCIA socket on the card that wasn't working. I took a closer look and they were not touching, but since there was some signs of physical abuse, I checked the other side and oof! "There's your problem!" Some pics of the damage here -> bsky.app/profile/adriansdigitalbasement.com/post/3lcochoac6c26 Regarding the PCMCIA card, several viewers mention there was a second SMD cap I missed under the wires, so if you end up with one of these boards, make sure to replace both of the caps. Also, Ian Scott has this to say about the PicoGUS issues: "Once I saw you had issues with the PicoGUS in GUS mode I kind of remembered Kevin Moonlight (creator of the Pico PCMCIA card you alluded to) having issues with DMA on his PS/2E. I mentioned it to him and he says apparently the PS/2E doesn't have pullup resistors on the DMA lines! That can definitely wreak havoc on DMA and loading GUS samples. However SFX in Sound Blaster was working... 🤔 BTW, Cubic Player does support the 8-bit Sound Blaster, you just have to make sure the T part of your BLASTER variable is set right (should be T3 for SB 2.0)."

[@rchltmedia]

immediate follow! idk you had bluesky. they had zero hate against each other.

[@KatarinaMelki]

I should point out I've been following Kevin's Pico PCMCIA development for quite some time. His original goal with it is adding modern WiFi to machines running DOS, Win 3.x, and Win 95. The sound card bit comes from building off the Pico GUS. I am waiting somewhat patiently for when I can finally get a couple for my IBM Palm Top PC 110 and ThinkPad 360P. But my point being this single card should do LAN and sound for machines like this PS/2 E.

[@ericpaul4575]

There is a second cap under the wires on the PCMCIA cards.

[@djdoo]

​@@ericpaul4575 Yes saw that too nice catch! Also the capacitor Adrian replaced writes C2 next to it so logically there should be a C1 somewhere else on the board and it is there under the coloured cables hiding

[@falken_gt4]

Looks like a Xenomorph or 2 has hatched from that bad boy

[@LGR]

Damn this thing is cool, I had no idea about this model! Far ahead of its time indeed.

[@ToTheGAMES]

Blerbs when? ;)

[@312diag]

Think ...cash register.

[@mewimi]

Hell yeah Clint! IBM ps/2 super slim lol.

[@Electronics-Rocks]

Loads used in financial services/ banks & HMRC on the UK. I think these were also assembled in the UK & probably the GB models.

[@vwestlife]

"This program cannot be run in a DOS session" actually means it is either an OS/2 program, or a Windows NT-family program (since NT traces its roots to OS/2).

[@asanjuas]

An os2 program exactly not a Windows one.

[@SomewhatLazy]

Pro Tip for you Adrian. I've been giving my old electronics alcohol baths after recapping. I found that I can easily reuse the alcohol without the dirt and grime from my usage by using an old brita pitcher with a used filter. I use the brita to filter my drinking water and keep the old filters when I replace them for use with cleaning the alcohol. Works great!

[@vwestlife]

As for early low-power desktop PCs, one of the first was the Tandy 1000RL, introduced in 1990. It had a fanless 25-watt power supply and came with a driver to automatically blank the screen and shut off the IDE-XT hard drive after 10 minutes of inactivity. Tandy said it "only uses as much power as a clock radio" (not counting the CRT monitor, of course!) so you could leave it on all day.

[@Pixelmusement]

Just a quick tip to improve your Minesweeping: You were focusing a lot on where mines COULD be, but don't forget to look around and see where mines CAN'T be! ;)

[@9rune5]

I remember drooling over various PS/2 towers back in the day. The introduction of VGA and all that 32-bit hotness was mindblowing for 14 y.o. me.

[@mar4kl]

Heh. I was 23-27 during the "heydey" of the PS/2, and I was drooling over them, too! The first one I used was a PS/2 Model 30, and it was... well, it was better than the IBM PC/AT that I had been using, although not as good as the Syntrex PC that I used after that. (In my first job, I was a computer programmer and tech support person for a small software company, and part of my job was to help ensure compatibility with all the IBM PC clones that we got our hands on, so I must''ve used at least a dozen different computers during my year working there.) Yeah, ok, the IBM PS/2 was something of a disappointment for me performance-wise, but it sure looked cool on my desk. At my second job, I eventually got an IBM PS/2 Model 55SX, and that was kind of the end of my interest in PS/2s. My experience with that model was decidedly unsatisfactory. The out-of-box failure rate we experienced for that model was about 30%, the 80386SX processor was underwhelming, and the things were hard to open and close, which was mainly my problem, as I had to install terminal emulator cards in each one we received. In between, though, my second employer procured a PS/2 Model 80 tower, which became our very first Novell network server, and a PS/2 Model 70, which ran AT&T Unix and hosted an industry-specific application. That Model 70 was a very impressive PC, although I wouldn't have wanted to be the one footing the bill for it. (As equipped for our needs, it cost as much as a midsize car at the time!)

[@mistermac56]

Blast from the past for me! We used about 10 of these PS/E computers with Token Ring cards at a community college I retired from in 2012 for staff and faculty to register students each semester at locations on campus back in 1993 until 1998, when we abandoned Token Ring and moved over from a IBM 4341 mainframe to DEC Alpha servers.

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

One note about the "serif font" on the motherboard - that is a sure-fire signal that this was designed in Japan.That specific font is really common in '80s-'90s designed-in-Japan-for-English-speaking-markets circuit boards.

[@wacholder5690]

Many smaller PS/2 particularly portables and laptops started their life as IBM PS/55 developed for the japanese market. The N23, N33, L40 and even the ThinkPad 720C laptops for instance. The PS/2e also had some sort of japanese developement history. The final products run different ways, but the developement stage was quite narrow.

[@Vondoodle]

That font is still common today

[@wacholder5690]

PS/2 with a serial number starting with 23- are US-made (Boca Raton or Raleigh). 55- are made in Scotland (Greenock), 72- is Raleigh again, 97- is Fujisawa in Japan for the domestic PS/55, where a lot technology was developed for PS/2 and early IBM laptops (L40SX, N33SX, CL57SX). On printers (Proprinters mainly) of that time you find 43- and 44- plant-ID, which are factories in Italy, where IBM had an almost fully robotized plant for those Proprinters.

[@johnhorvath4989]

Don't let proprietary hard drives scare you away from the microchannel ps/2 systems, there is now a nice McIDE available which is a microchannel to IDE using the xtide bios modified.

[@IBM_Museum]

@21:16 - The PGA socket (which otherwise has a PLCC interposer socket for the 387SX/387SL NPU plugged in on top) is for a proprietary CPU daughtercard, in this instance, an IBM 486SLC3-75. That upgrade won't fit inside the 'E'; It is when the same motherboard is used in the 9535 (3x3 'Space-saver') or 9540 (5x5 'Desktop') cases. Of course, the 'Ardent-Tool' website has further information.

[@Chlorphen]

I love this channel and the second one, Adrian is such a nice presenter. Can't say I understand much of it but it's very enjoyable.

[@cacheman]

2:46 Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish warning admonishing you to connect to a grounded outlet if also connecting to a tele- or data network.

[@sasiuru]

And Finnish text is just short and blunt as usual, just "Device must be connected to grounded outlet" - without any extra explanations. Just do it, g-d d-mmit... Just usual straight blunt Finnish way to say it. Swedish and Norvegian versions a way longer with some explanations. Just loving it, straight to the business no small talk. 😁

[@storhemulen]

​@@sasiurushould have been some "perkele" added also.

[@mar4kl]

8:30, IBM 486SLC2 processor - In 1994 or 1995, I used a custom-built computer at work that had a 486SLC2 processor. Nobody seemed to have anything nice to say about it, and the computer it was on the poky side and seemed to have more than its fair share of compatibility issues. "Super Low Cost" was what they said the SLC stood for. I didn't know a whole lot about what was inside computers at the time, and I don't know details about that processor, but it's quite possible that this is just another example of suitability to task. I was writing program code for database applications, so I needed speed for loading and unloading programming environments and compatibility for the hardware we used to create our installation packages, and apparently neither of those things were the 486SLC2's strong points. But for just running the standard-issue productivity applications of the day, especially on a computer intended to consume as little power as possible, it was probably just the ticket.

[@ultrametric9317]

The fancy mobo font is instantly recognizable as the APL/2 italic font. APL was a very interesting and strange computer language from the 1960s that was created by one man - Ken Iverson. It was actually my very first interaction with a computer in 1973, a time-share system through an IBM Selectric teletype with an APL typing ball. This is a very, very cool little computer! Somehow I knew that the CPU was going to be a 486SLC, and when it turned out to be more or less a disembodied 700C Thinkpad, I had to smile. Great find!

[@jeromethiel4323]

I heard that APL actually stood for "A Programming Language." Very tongue in cheek. ^-^

[@ethandicks3]

I got a couple of these back around 1999. I used one at work as a router in our Development Environment (a fake Cisco PIX, just to enforce routeable protocols and firewall rules vs broadcast protocols in imitation of our hardened Production network for our subscription product). I maxed the RAM out in mine (either 12MB or 16MB, whichever) and stuffed in four PCMCIA 10/100 NICs. I loaded Red Hat Linux 5.2 on it. It's still running that. Mine came without the original IBM 9507 LCD monitor but since we ran the one like a router, it mostly booted and ran headless. Fun little box as long as you can deal with the limited memory.

[@ultrametric9317]

IBM was way ahead of the curve in many ways. The reference disks may be irritating but that was real plug and play way before Windows 95. The Microchannel bus architecture made end-to-end bus mastering a reality, and prompted and encouraged the development of PCI. The components, other than those infernal surface mount capacitors, are bulletproof, and the engineering of the physical layout always a joy to behold.

[@piwex69]

You had me at solenoids for card locks.

[@IBM_Museum]

@2:14 - The 'E' is a reference to being energy efficient; One (expensive) version had an LCD display. The model numbers you read at the start mean a '95xx'-series (later PS/2s; the earlier systems were 85xx) and the submodel encoding is items like the hard drive size, CPU (a 'B' encoding means IBM 486SLC2-50Mhz), and installed OS. There are details of the 'E' at the 'Ardent-Tool' website.

[@KatarinaMelki]

As someone who restored a ThinkPad 700C earlier this year I am fairly confident, as you suspect, that the optional LCD would be the same as from that machine. Another difference though, is the use of ISA here. The 700 and the 720 (released in 1993 with the 50MHz SLC2 and PCMCIA standard) both use MCA bus and ESDI for hard drives. Fortunately I found an incredibly rare IDE upgrade for mine, but Eric, aka Tube Time, has been working on an SD to ESDI for the 700.

[@wacholder5690]

25:57 Back then we used a Dremel and a 2mm *drill* and opened up the VGA connector on the board. On specific monitors this pin was used for early DDS-Data and the display cable was not detachable. So we made room for the pin instead on all PS/2 - there is nothing behind in the connector anyway and you need to drill in only 3 or 4 mm through the plastic.

[@noth606]

paused at 19:45 because there are some assumptions here that should be supplied with an *asterisk* - PCMCIA does not per se require drivers, and a standard mass storage device on a standard implemented buss would not need that. There can be an incompletely implemented buss which does require it, or a non-standard card which does, but the default assumption that a lot of people have about drivers being needed is not correct. It depends on whether the device is a standard device or not. A standard device would be for example a floppy drive or a harddrive, there might have been others but I'm going off memory. The reason why I'm pointing this out apart from polishing my besserwisser-class nerdbadge is that you can boot off PCMCIA devices that are standard, so you can boot off a properly implemented floppy or HDD or Flash card. And yes, these things do exist, they don't grow on trees but are also not UFO artifact class hard to find.

[@tim1724]

RIPL (Remote Initial Program Load) is for the diskless versions of this model, to boot over the network. It's basically IBM's version of PXE (but from around five years before Intel introduced PXE).

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

That's pretty cool. So I guess that speed setting had something to do with token ring?

[@tim1724]

@ that would be my guess

[@IBM_Museum]

@@tim1724: Either Token-Ring or Ethernet - IBM had the 'ICLAS' (IBM Classroom LAN Administration System) that ran on top of Novell Netware. The schoolkids just had to turn on the Model 25 or EduQuest system for what was set up. There are are few videos up about ICLAS.

[@myself248]

@@adriansdigitalbasement 4MB and 16MB were Token Ring speeds, so yeah.

[@Lukeno52]

161 and 163 are the classic ThinkPad errors for "my CMOS battery is dead". Can be quite helpful on eBay, as people who don't do any research and don't have any knowledge will just think it has a catastrophic fault and list it as being broken, especially as some won't let you boot at all with that error present!

[@SenileOtaku]

Yep. that's how I got my T430 for $25.

[@Davide0033]

@@SenileOtaku where y'all get so lucky, i literally can't find anything on ebay for a meaningfull price

[@mar4kl]

29:25, reliability of 1.44MB diskettes - Yup. Before I got my hands on my first streaming tape backup drive, I backed up on diskettes. I don't remember ever having to restore an entire backup, but I did occasionally have to bring back a file or two from my backups, and it was distressing how many backups turned out to have read errors. Sometimes I could get around them by trying again, sometimes cleaning the diskette drive fixed the problem, but a lot of the time, the backup would just be unusable. So, I always kept several backups around and hoped for the best. The brand of diskettes didn't seem to matter.

[@6LordMortus9]

Love the minesweeper section :)

[@ibm3480]

5250 is the AS/400 - System 36 - System 38 terminal emulation protocol. Just like the 3270 in the System 370 - System 390 terminal emulation protocol.

[@BaronVonBeef]

My grandmother actually used to work in IBM Greenock in Scotland

[@wacholder5690]

BTW: there was a small AIX workstation using the very same case and similar layout. It came with onboard Token-Ring adapter and my leaking memory a) cannot recall the type and modelnumber or b) locate them in the basement to have a look. But I found my PS/2E - that one from the picture you'd shown. The monitor is somewhere in my storage a few miles away. I'm a hoarder.

[@pipschannel1222]

Very cool little machine, Adrian! The planar looks a lot like the Model 35, 56 and 57.. 1:04 The 486SLC2 is an actual IBM part and was not made by Cyrix. The IBM SLC(2)s are a lot faster than Cyrix' SLC(2)s because of a more efficient cache design, which is why your benchmarks show such positive results.. The L1 cache on IBM's SLCs tends to fool a lot of benchmark programs though, making them seem faster than they really are. They're pretty difficult to benchmark as their actual memory inferace to the CPU is only 16-bit wide while the 16k of very fast write back L1 cache is 32-bits wide making esp. benchmark programs that use tiny integer bench-loops make them seem way faster than they are because they can run entirely within that 16k ;-)

[@jwmeng]

IBM made a bunch of different small form factor desktops with the 486SLC2. My mother had one - a PS/2 56SLC2 - at her office (at a major brokerage and financial advisory firm) in the mid-90s. It basically just ran a terminal program over a DOS installation with token-ring network support for printer sharing. These were marketed as upgrades to large terminal installations and were easier for sysadmins to maintain, as well as requiring less supporting hardware and electric power to implement and run.

[@tw11tube]

I'm unsure the design of the IBM SLC2 cache is actually better than the design of the Cyrix SLC2 cache, it's just that the size of the Cyrix cache is close to being a joke or just enough to make it fast in very simple benchmarks (1KB), whereas the IBM SLC2 actually does the right thing and compensates for the extremely bottlenecky bus interface my adding *more* cache than an original 486 has. The Cyrix SLC2 is pointless in many applications, because it just happens waits for the bus twice as the cheaper non-clock-doubled SLC.

[@root42]

1:04:04 the 486SLC from IBM is NOT based on the Cyrix SLC, even though the names are similar. Instead it is based on the Intel core.

[@IBM_Museum]

Correct, the IBM 386SLC, 486SLC2, and 486SLC3 CPUs also have an Intel copyright imprinted on them because they are derived from the 386SX codemask for an agreement between IBM and Intel. They were limited to being in a PLCC form-factor that were soldered in to only IBM systems. All are able to run the 486SX (no FPU) instruction set and have nice levels of L1 cache onboard (8Kb for the 386SLC and 16Kb for the 486SLCx models) to improve performance.

[@MrAzztech]

what a cool machine adrian! love the black board

[@frugalprepper]

I actually sold a bunch of these and setup networks for small doctors offices to run some kind of software for managing there practice. I normally worked for an ALR reseller that loved ALR, so that is mostly what I worked with, but the lady that sold the software liked IBM. She would have IBM servers as well, but they would set them all up with ethernet and not token ring at least.

[@gusbert]

In my experience as an electronic designer (started in 1983) the values of these bulk caps are not critical. I used to just throw some caps across the supply rails as was practical for that particular design i.e. physical size and voltage rating. So you are right, replacing a 68uf with a 47uf or even a 22uf is not really important.

[@button-puncher]

Laptop as a desktop. Interesting to see when manufacturers starting doing this. Thanks Adrian!

[@vwestlife]

I have a PS/2 Model 56 SLC (upgraded to a clock-tripled 486SLC3!) and it also has 72-pin SIMMs even though it is a 386SX-based system. In fact, you can install up to 20 MB of RAM and the system will recognize it (the Reference Disk recognizes all 20 MB) even though only 16 MB is usable due to the limitation of the CPU.

[@helmargesel3972]

Thanks for the education

[@javiermesa-martinez8731]

There was also a matching flat panel monitor that went with that model. Which was likely one of the first production desktop LCDs The PS/2E + LCD was basically the original reference system for the EPA Energy Star program. I think originally the program intended to push manufacturers to offer models with specific max wattage and efficiency by offering incentives for large deployments. So IBM basically just stuffed laptop components in a desktop and called it a day. It was expensive given the LCD monitor that was supposed to be paired with to meet the power budget for the subsidy

[@JeffTiberend]

Watching play Minesweeper made this video wonderful. You did better than I would have. 😂 love watching you play Doom. You might need a gaming channel if you keep this up. 😂

[@redavatar]

It has the Aptiva style of buttons & tray so it would surprise me if it was 1992 - more like late 1993 or early 1994 which is when the Aptiva style first appeared. EDIT: ah mid 1993 so I was close. I wonder if this PC was kind of a precursor to the Aptiva range then - I really do love the style. Shame about the custom connections because I have several Aptivas and they make for great retro PCs.

[@wacholder5690]

10:51 Back then the system was excessively expensive if it came with the space-saving keyboard and the 9507 LCD monitor. You had to extra pay for the energy you'd saved ...

[@mamayl8592]

Hopefully we get a follow-up on this machine. I would be interesting to see how far it can be pushed/upgraded/optimized. Perhaps overclocked? Solid state storage?

[@manliereeve457]

Hi I have one of these, and yes W95 runs like a 3 legged dog... on a hot day...

[@ljonesj]

Love the content Mr black I'm setting up my own work bench with my laptop as I do 3d printing and some modern computer work

[@RETROMachines]

God, that's beautiful, I need that for my IBM collection.

[@AttilaSVK]

As for the IPA dispenser, try a spray bottle. They are cheap, and work really well. I use them for cleaning my 3D printers' build sheets. The other (more expensive) option is a spray can of IPA, I used VMD 89 in the past, but I'm not sure if that exact product is available in the USA as well.

[@theturtle32]

What an interesting specimen!

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

"The power supply is just kind of warm…" - That power supply is lower wattage than my iPad power brick.

[@GarthBeagle]

Neat little system! My 2nd PC had a IBM 486 SLC2/66

[@cliffshockley4406]

5250 is a terminal protocol. Emulators are used to control IBM AS/400 or iSeries midrange computers.

[@Sorbus79]

IBM Greenock seems to have been an interesting place. It had its own ScotRail station for staff commuting, "IBM Railway Station"

[@wacholder5690]

12:43 It is a 95xx series machine (PS/2 Premium Line), so it supports a reference partion on the harddisk / hardfile, where you can store utilities, diagnostics and suchlike. On MCA systems you have a point in the POST, where the cursor jumps from left to right side on the screen. You press CTRL + ALT + Insert here ... and enter the Reference / System partition. CTRL + A brings you to advanced diags within that. Since the PS/2e has been originally intended to be a medialess system even with no FDD this approach isn't primarily used. The reference partition can be installed (IIRC) as a "convenience partition" if you have the spare 3 - 4 MB on your hardfile, but it is not mandantory. With the FDD only you need the PS/2 starter disk. And a new CMOS battery on an old system like that which hasn't ran for *ages* ...

[@ibex485]

Before MS-DOS 6.0 added the option to bypass Config sys & Autoexec bat, or go through them line by line, we used to spam Control+C (I think that was the right combination). I recall it being a bit hit and miss, but it should get you into a system without a boot disk.

[@CandyGramForMongo_]

PCMCIA: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms!

[@user-nd8zh3ir7v]

very nice looking little pc, windows 3.1 brings back alot of memories!

[@johnwells558]

On my picogus , I had to change the irq from 5 to 7 and disable the LPT1 to get some games working, also regarding VGA socket, I got a hot pin and made a hole in the plastic to allow the VGA cable to fit.

[@Electronics-Rocks]

On util disk creation a 720k disk would have been default as CMOS corrupted. DOS would bypass this so works with 1.44m FD.

[@hugolandgren4114]

Seems to be for the nordic market. Label by the power connection is in Swedish, Norwegian and Finish and says: "The device must be connected to a grounded outlet when the protective low voltage output is connected to a network that passes through both ungrounded and grounded environments."

[@wacholder5690]

21:35 The 387SX-25 for PS/2E came with a PLCC-Adapter socket.

[@jorgelotr3752]

59:34 I'd start from the three 2s at the right, and going by possible combinations, the mine should be directly above the middle one, since the only other possibility (one above the rightmost one and another on top of the mine at the left) is blocked by the possible choices of the pair of 2s right beside. 1:00:38 The mine for the one MUST also be in contact with the 2 below it, meaning the three sqares on top should be safe and that the other mine for the 2s on the right should be on the vertical with the one you've already identified.

[@roygillotti4615]

I worked at the Semiconductor fab the Memory was manufactured and tested, in the late 90s I worked in DRAM/SRAM memory testing at the module level as in before the modules were soldered onto the DIMM boards. I did a quick look at the numbers on the memory modules and got a quick look at the Lot ID and could tell it was a year code well before my start date in 1998... Edit: Further into the video the Cyrix 486 Chip was also fabricated at the plant I worked in.

[@davidemmons8001]

Yeah, I love my IBM PC 340 but that was after they dropped the MC junk. Well made systems. I will be on the lookout for a PS/2E. Thank Adrian. Great video.

[@wthrwyz]

5250 is the terminal type for IBM midrange servers (AS/400, and still used by IBM i on Power Systems today). My guess is that is a reference to some sort of support for a Twinax serial terminal interface for connecting the PC to one of those systems.

[@niksgarage]

For me, the problem with this machine was that it came out just as the IBM Thinkpads were starting to get some market traction, and given that the LCD was the real limiting factor in both thinkpads and the PS/2 E, for me the Thinkpad was the real energy saving machine. And it could run on batteries (for many, many minutes at a time)

[@niksgarage]

In 1992 I was working for a slice of IBM called IBM OEM Europe. The OEM 'divisions' of IBM were given the task of selling IBM technologies to other manufacturers - disk drives to Apple, IBM motherboards to Apricot and others, whole RISC systems to Bull in France and so on. A PS/2 E arrived one day and I was asked (told) to go find a market in Europe for its technologies. I failed miserably to find people who were interested in making anything that would use anything from that machine - except all of the usual PCMCIA cards and disk drives = which since it had already stolen those from the Thinkpads were already addressed. To be honest, there wasn't anything else about this machine's technology that was compelling and novel, tthat other manufacturers might want. It was just a repackaging exercise.

[@jwmeng]

@@niksgarage At that time I think IBM did the marketing better than everyone else within their own product lines.

[@richardbrobeck2384]

Adrian great video !

[@rajatanpacelana]

That is a very nice IMB machine... looks like its a must have thingy..

[@Electronics-Rocks]

I nearly forgot as i still have a DSP for this machine! One use case was X-ray departments as i still have a dedicated PCMCIA DSP for fast accurate speech recognition! The DSP ic was used in military as well!

[@matthouben4242]

I replaced the 85MB HDD in my IBM L40SX PS/2 laptop with an IDE2CF adapter with a 512MB CF card in it. It worked straight out of the box, no configuration needed. Like with this machine, the HDD was connected using a 44 pint cable, so I got a corresponding IDE2CF adapter. For the rest it was just booting from a MS-DOS boot, partition the CF card with fdisk and format /s it.

[@Nerd3927]

Very interesting how historic fists can be totally forgotten. Cool video, enjoyed this very much. Oh, btw, "Can not run in DOS" means it is an OS/2 version.

[@FrancisFjordCupola]

59:10 - Minesweeper. To the southeast of the 4 there is a 2. It sees a bomb to the west (and the south of the four). Thus that two must have a bomb to the north or northeast of it. Since there is another two next to it, to the east who also already sees a bomb, both two's "share" a bomb and the cell northeast of the second two must be safe.

[@helgew9008]

Another interesting method for transferring files, is to use a cable on the serial or parallel port with LapLink, FastLynx or InterLink. Back in the day, this was a great option, because it was super cheap and available for pretty much every computer on the market.

[@anumeon]

Scandinavian machine... :) Love it (It had swedish and finnish on the sticker next to the power imput)

[@myleft9397]

"I don't know much ago these" Adrian & Epictronics collab incoming?

[@HamburgerAmy]

I'm happy im not the only person who does the towel over the computer chair action

[@FrancisFjordCupola]

I loved the PCMCIA expansion cards.

[@paulwalsh9680]

Thanks for a fascinating video. Reminds me of the days we had PS/2s (model 70 or 90, I can't remember) where I worked, with all the "fun" of getting sound cards and Token Ring to work, as well as "hi-res" 1024x768. We also had a few IBM "portable" (I think "luggable" would have been more accurate 😉) PCs with 9" amber displays. Novel at the time, but I don't think they got used that much!

[@MikoKisai]

59:53 For the 2 on the right-hand side, whichever the remaining mine was, it would also give the last cell for the 2-clue to its left. Therefore, the third cell from the right in row 3 can never be a mine. The same sort of thing applies to the 2s over by the 4: whichever cell has the mine for the left-most 2 also gives the last mine to the 2 on the right, so the cell 3 to the right of the 4 can't be a mine. And after you uncovered the 1 in row 2, none of the three cells above it could be mines because the 2 below it would had to provide the mine for the 1.

[@IBM_Museum]

@3:42 - The microchannel version of the PS/2 'E' is actually an RS/6000 XStation 160...

[@ovalwingnut]

Those are some pretty sweet boards, parts and "add-on" cards that came with that PS2..... I have no doubt that the part numbers started with "Ka'ching!". Just saying

[@ibm3480]

I have a PS/30 286 and I was able to solder some jumpers on standard memory and it now has 4 megabyte. So I'm sure standard memory can be adapted / modified to do the same here.

[@IBM_Museum]

The 30-pin 1Mb SIMM modification is more intense - For the retro-development 1Mb SIMMs, I wish they could use the other edge for the IBM pinout. IBM 72-pin SIMMs have some loopback pins for a "Presence Detect" logic mechanism.

[@starsundsternchen802]

I used to play Minesweeper a lot back in the day. Absolutely loved that game.

[@rarbiart]

those minesweeper interludes are a lot more entertaining than watching sweets and chocolate being unpacked and commented.

[@starsundsternchen802]

@rarbiart I like both!

[@thedungeondelver]

Those PCMCIA adapters open up so many options - external CD-ROM, Network card, modem, sound card, and you can keep that last ISA slot for other things.

[@dminalba]

The motherboard was assembled in Greenock, Scotland which is about 19 miles away from me (I live further on the coast near Greenock) IBM opened the facility in 1954 initially building typewriters, then banking terminals by the 1970s. They moved on to the IBM PC becoming the main manufacturing plant for Europe in 2009 IBM left the facility following IBM selling the PC division to Lenovo, The IBM campus was so vast that in May 1978 British Rail Scottish Region opened a rail station called IBM Halt. (Halt means a small unstaffed rail station in British English). Following the demolition of the IBM campus in 2020 IBM Halt station was mothballed by ScotRail the current incarnation of the former British Rail Scottish Region in the hope the site will be one day redeveloped.

[@timothyp8947]

Absolutely love small form factor machines. At one point in the (now distant) past had a Sun 'lunchbox' SPARCstation on my desk at work - a lovely looking bit of kit. PCs always seemed massively oversize by comparison - but the little PS/2 in this video looks far more sensibly and desirably proportioned.

[@root42]

1:08:17 freddyv's ModMaster XT us perfect for testing the PicoGUS in both SB and also GUS modes!

[@jorgelotr3752]

1.44 MB disks ARE very unreliable, mainly the later ones. Last time I bought a pack in the early 2000s, some of the disks got damaged on first use (bought the pack, inserted the disk, saved some files, tried to read them back, none worked). By the end of their marke t run, you had to make sure you had copies of the copies, because they could become bad just by letting them sit still for 5 minutes.

[@SenileOtaku]

My DOS 486 machine is a Twinhead SubNote 486SLC. Cost all of $10 at a flea market (in it's original carrying case even) and in great shape. Problem is I don't have the floppy drive for it, so the only way to copy files on or off is with Interlink and a LapLink cable. Eventually I need to open it up and change the backup battery, but I want to be sure to have a camera (or two) to document it since there's so little documentation available currently. I'll also need to find why the built-in trackball doesn't work right.

[@Dr_Mario2007]

Speaking of VGA power-down signals used by this ancient computer, it also has jumped over to DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort display interfaces as well, especially with HDMI-CEC also sporting legacy VGA shutdown protocol for ancient OSes if anyone dare to use it on modern hardware. After all, DVI is basically a digital superset of VGA specifications.

[@chadhartsees]

Wow, never seen one of these. I'm intriuged by the use of PCMCIA. I loved those when I was running laptops as my main/desktop computer. It's surprising to me that more desktop makers/system integrators didn't put PCMCIA slots on normal PCs as some kind of neat easy to use expandability (gimmick?) feature. Like that would have went right in there with a Packard Bell or Compaq's strategy back in the day... or Gateway 2000.

[@IBM_Museum]

@11:50 - The 'Peter' referenced at the 'Ardent-Tool' is Peter Wendt, an IBM field engineer in Germany; He was the first to do the DS1287 RTC mod and have the information online. "Winblows" is from Louis Ohland, the first compiler of information from the comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware newsgroup that the 'Ardent-Tool' now holds. It is still very active with us making discoveries even now.

[@wacholder5690]

You got to be careful what you write on the internet. It sticks like flypaper ... 😁

[@IBM_Museum]

@@wacholder5690: Indeed! And a correction: It was Peter that made the "Winblowz" and "Wincrap" comments in April of 2000 on the comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware newsgroup!

[@wacholder5690]

@@IBM_Museum Guilty. But I wasn't alone doing that. For instance it was a favourable designation on IT-staff to reference Intel machines running M$ Windows as "WinTel". In contrast to i.e. RS6000s with AIX. This "M$" designation for MicroShafts crappy money-milling attempts was also used fairly often. But what. That were the times of Win 3.1, WfW 3.11, NT 3.5 and - shortly afterwards Win95 which was, after my opinion, the first useable Windows version. I still have an IBM 5155 Portable PC in my living room running PC-DOS 3.2 and Windows 1.03 German ... it takes almost 2 minutes to get it going. Just for the snorts and giggles. See the crappy video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/pKfahWqlicl8e5Y&ab_channel=Wacholder 🤣

[@yatapaws]

i tried buying one of these a few years agoo it didnt work out but it's cool to see them !!

[@KAPTKipper]

I wonder if IBM made these for education. They had a product called iClass based on Novell in the 90's that they packaged with PS/2 computers of various models into labs.

[@CaptainSouthbird]

3:52 Haven't watched the rest of the video to see if it comes into play as I'm writing this, but I know a certain amount of IBM PS/2 systems deliberately used "slightly incompatible" 72-pin RAM which could be fixed by some kind of wire-soldering trick. I had a machine when I was kid where I had to do this. So it looked like 72-pin SIMM RAM, but it technically didn't work, and for no reason other than IBM being IBM at the time. 26:27 This was always one of my favorite (later) random PS/2-isms... [error codes equals] "NOT OK"... something so poignant and direct about that

[@simmo1024]

If I recall, monitors used to have the power looped through the PSU on the computer. When you pressed the mechanical switch to turn off the PC, it would also turn off the monitor. Think this stopped happening with ATX, when the mobo controlled the power with a soft button rather than the mechanical switch.

[@ibm3480]

If you use PC-DOS 7 or SVAR-DOS (Free-DOS) you can create a config.sys and autoexec.bat boot menu to skip the current settings. Basically like a safe mode to skip the system config or custom settings for certain programs.

[@awd42]

Hey, I have one of these! I don't really use it any more, I'd thought about sending it to you or LGR but figured y'all already had a huge backlog of stuff. I acquired it from a friend in 1998 or '99, and it had OS/2 on it. (It had been retired from his work.) I played around with Win95 and Linux on it, and actually used it as a router (with two PC Card NICs) for a few years, replacing a classic blue Linksys which didn't play nice with our cable modem, first under Debian and later OpenBSD. I retired it when connection speeds got faster and it couldn't keep up. I need to recap my PCMCIA card. It stopped working and the error code corresponded to "expansion ROM error". I guess I also need to get one of those Compact Flash adaptors. One thing still burned into my brain: Linux (at least kernels of the time) needed the kernel parameter "floppy=thinkpad" in order for the floppy drive to work.

[@blacklion79]

I picked up such a monitor for a change about 10 years ago to use as a screen for a Chinese MiniPC in my networking closet.

[@wacholder5690]

14:13 My PS/2e with 9507 - but at that time without the space-saver keyboard. I would put a ?? on "weight", since the thing came with a cast-iron tilt / swivel base / height adjustment, a separate "Power Brick" (the black box to the right) and an adapter to catch mouse or keyboard activity - or the lack of - to enter / leave power save mode.

[@doomer37]

Recently grabbed myself a PS/2 model 56, and of course the diskette drive is the only thing that doesn't work. Even the old Conner drive works fine. Figures, right.