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1. Embed this notice
   GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Monday, 22-May-2023 22:11:43 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

   i have acquired the IBM PS/1

   it has a first generation Sound Blaster 16 in it

   floppy drives look to be the original equipment

   no hard drive, i think i have a period appropriate replacement that may even work

   it looks like a scrapper rather violently removed all the cables except power, dislodging the expansion riser in the process

   so i have to replace all those, dunno if i still have a stash of them somewhere

   has a 12-10-92 date stamp on the case cover, chips on the board have date stamps as late as 40th week 1992, so looks like this thing was built in Oct 1992

   perhaps this was someones Christmas '92 present 🎄🎁

   CDROM has a manufacture date of Jan 1993, so it was upgraded quickly or perhaps it sold later as a post-christmas clearance deal 🙃

   this probably came with Windows 3.1, and would have been a fairly high end machine at the time

   #retrocomputing #retropc #MSDOS #DOSgaming

   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 22-May-2023 22:11:33 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • Andrew Walshe
     @awalshe @Seg Depends what you compare it with. It came long after the PS/2 as its more affordable home-computing little sibling.
   • Embed this notice
     Andrew Walshe (awalshe@cyberplace.social)'s status on Monday, 22-May-2023 22:11:41 JST Andrew Walshe

     in reply to

     @Seg That was a fancy and expensive computer back in the day.

   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 22-May-2023 22:11:44 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • mnemonicoverload
     @mnemonicoverload @Seg I was annoyed when I inserted a Linux-based rescue disk into a laptop and it turned out Linux needed 4 MiB to boot, which was more than the computer had. 🤣
   • Embed this notice
     mnemonicoverload (mnemonicoverload@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 22-May-2023 22:11:45 JST mnemonicoverload

     in reply to
     @Seg That's an absolutely wild amount of RAM for a 486 of that era. I had 8MB in my DX40 and that was still twice what most people had in theirs.
   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Monday, 22-May-2023 22:11:47 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     IBM says these all came with 2400bps internal modems, and had Prodigy pre-installed

     it appears it was upgraded to 28.8kbps around 1994

     and it has a whole load of Micron RAM in it, manufactured in 1996

     this is 32mb! that's the max the board supports and a hell of a lot of RAM to have in a 486

     i had 16mb in mine back in the day and that was plenty to run anything you'd want to run on a 486 🙃

     an early Windows 95 will run great on this old beast

     #retrocomputing #retropc #MSDOS #DOSgaming

   • Embed this notice
     The Last Psion | Alex (thelastpsion@bitbang.social)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:04:56 JST The Last Psion | Alex

     in reply to

     • NCommander

     @Seg @ncommander In the UK, I remember Escom (German company who once owned Commodore) selling OS/2 Warp 4 machines alongside Win95. No idea how many sold.

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   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:04:58 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     • NCommander

     TWENTY-ONE FLOPPY DISKS LATER...

     attn @ncommander i found the holy grail, a retail PC that shipped with OS/2 pre-installed

     (yes i watched all the OS/2 streams)

     has Microsoft Works and Prodigy, same as the Windows pre-load, but Promenade is absent?

     did GeoWorks not run on OS/2? 🙃

     where did these sell???

     #retrocomputing #retropc #OS2

   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:04:59 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     uwu what is this?

     you could get an IBM PS/1 pre-installed with OS/2 2.0, on a machine that appears to be identical to this P71 model, with twice the RAM and a bigger HD?

     oh we're so installing this

     #retrocomputing #retropc #OS2

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   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:05:00 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     IBM, co-owner of Prodigy, seems to have been ahead of the curve, pushing online services as early as 1990

     we're a year out from September 1993 here folks

     notably Promenade was a little known service from Quantum Computer Services made specifically for the IBM PS/1 👀

     instant messaging!

     https://www.technologizer.com/2010/05/24/aol-anniversary/

     ... it appears Promenade was absorbed into AOL not long after this 🙃

     #retrocomputing #retropc #Promenade

   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:05:02 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     so what do you get as value-adds on a Fall 1992 IBM PS/1?

     lots of backup/restore options, a virus scanner, Microsoft Works 2.0, and some online services

     #retrocomputing #retropc #windows31

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   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:05:03 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     the BIOS/EZ-BIOS boot is excruciatingly slow for some reason but once DOS starts this thing flies!

     Windows 3.1 starts in seconds!

     a healthy 1mb smartdrv cache probably helps 🙃

     #retrocomputing #retropc #windows31

   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:05:04 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     well we can load an OS now

     one reason i picked this up is a similar 386 PS/1 with Win 3.1 and that wild door over the floppy drives on display at Target, is the first time i ever used Windows

     never seen one since until now

     and as it turns out, the original recovery disks for this system have been preserved!

     https://ps1stuff.wordpress.com/download/downloads-for-type-2133/

     TWELVE FLOPPY DISKS LATER we have a factory stock IBM PS/1!

     #retrocomputing #retropc

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   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:05:05 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     okay now we need a hard drive

     can't find the ~300mb drive i was thinking of, i dumped most every hard drive i had under 40gb at Free Geek Twin Cities when i moved

     could be absurd and put a 120gb drive in it 🙃

     but i found this one in my stash, a WD Caviar 1.6gb drive from April 1996 that refuses to work on my USB-IDE adaptor, however works perfectly on the PS/1, and pairs nicely with the 32mb RAM crammed in it

     has a fresh install of Win98 which would theoretically even boot on this machine, but we run in to our first Annoying Vintage Problem, the BIOS predates LBA by a few years and can't see more than 528mb

     https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing

     the way around this in DOS is to install a Drive Overlay like EZ-Drive, which does a bunch of hackery to boot itself first and replaces the entire IDE portion of the BIOS with updated drivers

     ta-da, we can boot DOS and use the entire hard drive! 🥳

     #retrocomputing #retropc #MSDOS

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   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:05:06 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     first order of business, a cleaning disk of similar vintage

     does the floppy work?

     ... no, it's flakey 😟

     welp swapping it out for now with a floppy drive i pulled out of a circa 2005 dell i found on the sidewalk in front of the San Jose library after they upgraded a few years back

     it gets 20.8fps in 3D Bench

     memtest86+ sure takes a long time but it passes, yay!

     #retrocomputing #retropc

   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:05:08 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     a pile of parts have appeared!

     if i'm reading the pinout right, the Panasonic CDROM uses the IDE key pin for something important so an un-keyed cable is required

     #retrocomputing #retropc

   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:05:09 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     well annoying problem, raided my circa 2006 Athlon 64 for cables and they're all hard keyed

     the PS/1 extremely isn't

     i don't want to cut pins off retro hardware 😥

     #retrocomputing #retropc

   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:05:10 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     it lives!

     kinda surprised they crammed 32mb in it but they didn't upgrade the CPU? 🙃

     would love to get an IBM 5x86 100mhz in it like my first 486 had

     wonder if the person i left it with still has it...

     sadly nothing more i can do with it until i find some ribbon cables

     and it needs an ethernet card

     #retrocomputing #retropc #MSDOS #DOSgaming

   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:05:11 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     has a Tseng Labs ET4000AX maxed out to 1mb on the board

     i was hoping for VLB but the AX is a 16bit bus, however it is still one of the best SVGA chips of the day

     and has 128k of direct mapped L2 cache, which is enough to support that 32mb RAM 😀

     #retrocomputing #retropc #MSDOS #DOSgaming

   • Embed this notice
     Rairii (rairii@haqueers.com)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:12:07 JST Rairii

     in reply to

     @Seg this is using a beta of GEOS too with the win 2.x-esque UI

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   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:12:41 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     • ArgentCorvid

     @argentcorvid AOL 3.0 bundled with Win95 OSR2 uses the same icons!

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   • Embed this notice
     ArgentCorvid (argentcorvid@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:12:47 JST ArgentCorvid

     in reply to

     @Seg Quantum, as in Quantum Link (from the C64), which became AOL.

   • Embed this notice
     Wintermute_BBS :verified: ⛔ (wintermute_bbs@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:14:00 JST Wintermute_BBS :verified: ⛔

     in reply to

     • NCommander

     @Seg @ncommander over here in germany, PC retailer "ComTech" sold PCs where you had the choice between OS/2 Warp 3 and Windows 95. This was in 1995.

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   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:14:30 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     well gave OS/2 a chance, installing the soundblaster CDROM drivers is a 100% manual process, and needs OS/2 2.1 to actually work anyway

     the text editor is weird, the file manager is awful, managing windows is painful, i figured the pre-load would have ET4000 drivers but no it just seems to be stuck with plain 16 color VGA...

     don't think i'm going to stick with OS/2 on this machine 🙃

     let me know if there's anything you really want to see

     how about a nice game of chess

     #retrocomputing #retropc #OS2

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   • Embed this notice
     Digital Mark λ 📚 🕹 💾 🥃 (mdhughes@appdot.net)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:14:45 JST Digital Mark λ 📚 🕹 💾 🥃

     in reply to

     @Seg Get used to the file manager, and in Warp you get a real dock with drawers. Things to play with: drag & drop colors & fonts anywhere. Files, folders, app borders & buttons. F-keys for window control are useful, it's kinda RatPoison-like.

     16-color kinda sucks, tho, it's meant for 256 color at least.

     It seriously was the best single-user OS. I switched to fucking Linux because I was doing web stuff and it was easier to run a server.

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   • Embed this notice
     mnemonicoverload (mnemonicoverload@libranet.de)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:15:04 JST mnemonicoverload

     in reply to

     @Seg
     OS/2 2.0 is rough until you remember it was competing with Windows 3.0 alone. As far as drivers for graphics and the CD-ROM the original system probably would have shipped with driver floppies for those same as they would have for the equivalent DOS or Windows versions. Having them rolled into the OS install wouldn't have been common at that point.

     Really though, if you want to experience the OS/2 that most people actually remember fondly you need to go for OS/2 Warp 3, at least. That's where it really came into its own. I'd say give it a try, that PC you have there should run it well and it would have been the natural upgrade path for someone who owned that system in period.

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   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Tuesday, 23-May-2023 13:17:12 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • NCommander
     • The Last Psion | Alex
     @thelastpsion @ncommander @Seg Yeah, OS/2 2.1 is a bit like messing with Windows NT 3.51.
   • Embed this notice
     purple 👊✊💨 (purple@nya.social)'s status on Monday, 29-May-2023 18:37:25 JST purple 👊✊💨

     in reply to

     • Phil M0OFX

     @Seg@oldbytes.space @philpem@digipres.club Back In My Day i used to mainline a 486 and honestly if you have the memory (and you do), it's best to go right to 98se, it's more or less stable but still quite usable on that class of machine. 95 is an exercise in frustration and always has been and it makes me sad tbh

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   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Monday, 29-May-2023 18:37:27 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     • Phil M0OFX

     @philpem this is a 486DX33!

     kinda suspecting something with the EZ-Drive overlay even though this is the version that is specifically supposed to support Win95 OSR2 FAT32 🙃

     whatever was mostly looking to boot to DOS mode to play games

   • Embed this notice
     Phil M0OFX (philpem@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 29-May-2023 18:37:28 JST Phil M0OFX

     in reply to

     @Seg I think that's the issue you need the K6 patch to fix. CPU too fast = Windows Protection Error.

   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Monday, 29-May-2023 18:37:29 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     whoo Win95 lets gooooooo...

     ah damn it

     #retrocomputing #retropc #Windows95

   • Embed this notice
     GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)'s status on Monday, 29-May-2023 18:37:31 JST GEM is truly truly outrageous

     in reply to

     okay, think i've had enough reminders of how fiddly this era was, decided on putting Windows 95 OSR2 on this thing, which will give us FAT32, networking, and all drivers for this system out of the box

     bad news, the cdrom is detected but doesn't see any disks, and to top it off the one CD burner i saved doesn't seem to work anymore 🙃

     that leaves the network card for mass movement of data onto this machine

     so by installing Basic Linux, an old two floppy Linux based on Slackware 4.0, i was able to feed the Win95 install files over the network

     https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/

     ezhttpd for the win once again

     https://github.com/SegHaxx/ezhttpd

     old PC tech trick, just copy the Win95 directory from the CD onto a blank C: drive, and start the install from there

     you will never have to suffer the dreaded "please insert the Win95 install CD" dialogs when fiddling with drivers

     #retrocomputing #retropc #Windows95

   • Embed this notice
     Phil M0OFX (philpem@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 29-May-2023 18:37:33 JST Phil M0OFX

     in reply to

     • purple 👊✊💨

     @purple @Seg I'm inclined to agree with you. That's why I'm running 98SE on my Libretto - not just the USB support, but also FAT32 and the dramatic reduction in headaches. It still bluescreens on occasion but hey, it's 9x, last of the 3.x kernel line... They all do that...

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