Notices by GEM is truly truly outrageous (seg@oldbytes.space)

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

whoo Win95 lets gooooooo...

ah damn it

#retrocomputing #retropc #Windows95

@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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@thomasfuchs the kind of thing that could be done in a client

the obvious thing to me is just have your client sync a mirror of your follows and such, if the server disappears you just sync it to a new one