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IBM PS/1 Rig
SCTony:
I found a PS/1 (with monitor) for sale today - $5. It's a 386SX @ 16Mhz. It took me a few minutes to locate the CPU- no heatsink and a little on the small side. I haven't powered it up yet as I am not yet very familiar with it. It is interesting to see, even if it happens to not work. I happened to also find a PC World magazine from AUG 1990 NIB (new in bag, unopened) which has this very computer on the cover. An interesting trip to days gone by.
TWX:
The PS/1 was out after the PS/2, and the name was coined to show it as a lesser system like one would buy for home use. Not necessarily bad, but as you can see, definitely limited and proprietary.
A junior high teacher of mine had and old IBM PCJr with the modem expander side on it. I almost convinced him to give it to me, but he had misgivings at the last minute.
My first PC was a Packard Bell PB500, which was an XT with 4.77MHz 8088, 640K Ram, 30MB RLL hard disk drive, and a 5.25" double density floppy diskette drive. The video option was an 8 bit ISA ATI CGA card, and later I added a Compudyne 2400 baud ISA modem. I could put it into "turbo" and get something like 9.59MHz out of it, but I was unsure of what that meant for reliability, so I didn't always run in Turbo mode. The 84 key keyboard had a 5 pin DIN connector, and once I had some software capable of using it I added a mouse, though it was a really crappy mouse. Serial of course.
It started out with MS-DOS 3.3, and I upgraded to MS-DOS 5.0, which had online help. I also added a 3.5" floppy drive to it, but it took me awhile to figure out why I couldn't address 1.44MB floppy diskettes (the 8088 and this chipset couldn't see more than 1MB RAW, which meant taping over a hole and formatting disks for 720K). With the video card in question I could either do four color CGA with two possible color palettes or I could do 80x25 or 80x43 text with sixteen colors, eight standard colors and eight "high intensity" variants on the originals. I learned how to program ANSI animation sequences on it with "TheDraw" back in my BBS days. I was a regular on probably ten BBSes when I was thirteen years old.
Porn looks really crappy in four colors...
D-EJ915:
Same chip as in my PS/2 56, OS/2 is pretty slick on it but kinda on the slow side lol.
D-EJ915:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxuBgVkWvPQ
lol
SCTony:
TWX- your comments were spot-on with the PC World magazine review-
"An unambitious combination of basic AT hardware with built-in modem and simple software tools, the PS/1 is meant to lure families into buying their first PC."
Thanks for the link Kishy.
- I powered it up and all seems to work well (haven't tested the 1.44 floppy). Do you know if this originally came with the M2 keyboard? I have a dead M2 and want to try the capacitor replacement.
Colorful Intel logo from PC World ad--
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