The slot on the front is for upgrading the RAM, although the proprietary RAM cards for it are just as impossible to find as the PS/1 Audio Card -- which I did actually manage to obtain, so I should do a video about it. But it really is basically identical to the audio chip in the later Tandy 1000s, including the 3-voice music and 8-bit digital audio playback (but no recording). It also includes a standard 15-pin PC joystick port, which can be used to control MIDI devices.

@BollingHolt

2 жыл бұрын

Yes, a video on that sound card would be awesome!

@sebastienkneur1280

2 жыл бұрын

It is my first computer. My father bought it in 1990 or 1991. It was a 2121 model with a 386SX20, 2MB of RAM and a 40MB disk drive. I bought the sound card later but it wasn’t of much use because it wasn’t compatible with Adlib or Soundblaster standard. And it was expensive at the time. If I knew I could use a ISA Soundblaster compatible card, I would have bought one instead. I remember it was very slow because we mostly used it for Windows productivity application (MSWorks, Winword 2.0, etc.). When I upgraded it to Windows 3.1 and Word 6.0, I had to wait for about 10 minutes until it was launched and the RAM expansion was too expensive and too hard to find. I don’t have great memory of this machine. It was too much proprietary and too much outdated when we bought it. My classmates could buy a multimedia PC with 4MB of RAM, a 486 processor, a 80MB HDD, a CDROM drive, soundcard and HP for about the same price the following year. Unfortunatly, my parents throwed it away a long time ago, so I don’t have the sound card anymore.

@McTroyd

2 жыл бұрын

Would love a video on it. I have a PS/1 model 2011. In lieu of that sound card, I was also thinking about building a PCB for that ISA riser, and using the space for ISA cards, since I can't install the ISA riser.

@fffUUUUUU

Жыл бұрын

@Kev, please do the video on that!

@nennoable

11 ай бұрын

I had the original audio card AND the ram cards in mine. From brand new, it cost a bomb at the time. I loved that computer, I used to code on it in every language I knew, including x86 ASM.

You know you’re a proper retro computer geek when you get excited about a standard removable cmos battery 👍🤘

@nickwallette6201

2 жыл бұрын

It’s the little things. :-)

@blackterminal

Жыл бұрын

I retro fitted a removable battery on a old CBM PC. Not a great job but it did the job. Sadly I've only turned that pc on a couple of times.

@martindejong3974

Жыл бұрын

Yes, but the CR2032 is one of very few batteries that never leaks, and is easily replaceable. most cylindrical lithium batteries tend to leak, and destroy PCB traces.

This was the first computer we owned. I begged my father to buy a PC so I could play games, and I was slightly disappointed that he got this particular model. But he loved it, and used it for his writing for at least ten years! And… it was capable of running most of what I wanted to play anyway!

@volvo09

2 жыл бұрын

When we got our first computer machines like this were out, but my dad bought a 286 with a monochrome monitor. As a kid I was upset, I wanted a color monitor... But it was my dad's computer anyways, he wouldn't let me touch it unless it was for a school report, or when I was forced to "play" math blaster. 😆

@Ehurst01

2 жыл бұрын

This was the first computer my family owned too. I just got it back from my parents in box. I need to recap and replace the battery. Hopefully I'll have time this summer.

@peterdevreter

2 жыл бұрын

@@volvo09 praise yourself lucky, my dad bought a apple Macintosh ED. Pretty useless for a kid that wanted to play games. But a nice machine for true type font wordprocessing.

I had this EXACT IBM as a kid in the late 90s. I picked it out of the trash down the street from me and was surprised to find that it worked perfectly! Was my personal bedroom computer until around 2000.

@adriansdigitalbasement

2 жыл бұрын

That's pretty amazing to find such a machine curbside back then! I wonder why it was abandoned seemingly so soon after it was purchased?

@bgoins12

2 жыл бұрын

@@adriansdigitalbasement I wondered that as well! Found it August of 98 when I was 10. At first I thought it was a word processor and then realized it was a PS/1. The entire setup was there in an old box. The only difference was this one had the sound card with it.

@IBM_Museum

2 жыл бұрын

@Pedro Daniel Lopes Ferreira: Late-model PS/2 systems (made in the early 1990s) had an RTC without Y2K troubles, but people may not have known. It may have been more that they were rather dated by then (Pentium 90MHz at highest). No new microchannel adapters were being made either.

@neilpatrickhairless

Ай бұрын

one of my ex girlfriends parents gave me an IBM in or around &98 or '99 (model 2155 I think? - it had Windows 3.1 for Workgroups on it presumably stock) and I used it until about 2003. I got Photoshop 3 to work on it, and used it for chatting on AOL/AIM quite a lot. It was actually a really nice computer for the time it came out and to this day IMO Windows 3.1 is the best Microsoft OS. I like my operating systems to be generally devoid of nonsense and bloat and 3.1 certainly fits the bill. It even had the Norton Desktop on it that made the desktop functional and got rid of the program manager window. Good stuff 🤙🏼

Take a close look at the video. The first time when you ran the Confgur Utility it actually marked the floppy as "incorrect" and "will be updated on next boot". I think it simply was not configured in the bios, and starting the utility detected it.

@AaronOfMpls

2 жыл бұрын

Good catch! Still, it was a good idea to take the drive apart and clean it anyway, given all the nicotine gunk in there.

@ps5hasnogames55

2 жыл бұрын

@@AaronOfMpls wahhh nicotine gunk wahhhh. antismokers are so annoying

@Jammermaker

2 жыл бұрын

@@ps5hasnogames55 as someone who smokes, nicotine gunk in your fucking computer and electronics is still absolutely terrible. This is why I don't smoke in my house because I'm not a fucking maniac and also I spent a lot of money on my computer I don't want it having a layer of tar that collects dust like a magnet on it. Tyvm.

@ps5hasnogames55

2 жыл бұрын

​@@Jammermaker if you care so much why dont you just quit smoking then since all that tar and gunk is in your lungs right now huh... oh thats right, you dont care, you're just jumping on a bandwagon to virtue signal. its your house. smoke in it if you want. electronics aren't going to be ruined by nicotine just like no one has actually died "from smoking" (that's right, they conned you, just like no one has actually died "from the p&emic" but instead from pre-existing conditions...yep!)

@nickwallette6201

2 жыл бұрын

Alright, whose That One Uncle is this?

First family computer, bought at Sears, IBM PS/1. Fundamentally changed my life. We bought the initial model with monochrome screen and no hard disk; returned it within a week and got the same processor but with a hard disk and vga display

I know you say that restoring the aesthetics isn't really your thing but you've done a great job here. The end result is great - maybe restoring things is growing on you?

@adriansdigitalbasement

2 жыл бұрын

Heh! I love cleaning stuff, removing sticker residue, etc ... it's the paint work that I am not a fan of LOL! Definitely welding stuff on with epoxy when it's hidden I like too :-)

@Chevroletcelebrity

2 ай бұрын

yeah your right. He doesn't really do a great job with restoring the cases. It sure isn't his strongsuit 🤔

The proper term for that “worm shaft” (at least among machinists) is “lead (rhymes with “weed”, not with “head”) screw”. Model railroaders, though, tend to call it a worm gear. This sort of arrangement is very common in various types of machinery where you have a high-speed, low torque motor, and you want low speed, high torque (force), but in a linear motion perpendicular to the axis of the lead screw. Disk drives are one, but they’re also found in 3D printers, lathes, vertical/horizontal milling machines, and so on. If your control of the input angle is precise (a stepper motor or servo), then they can achieve very high precision in linear positioning of some sort of workpiece (in this case, the R/W head assembly.)

@outerfroggy1

2 жыл бұрын

I'm a heavy equipment mechanic by trade and it was burning a hole in my head that I couldn't remember the proper name for that drive mechanism lol thanks

@IBM_Museum

2 жыл бұрын

"The proper term for that “worm shaft” (at least among machinists) is “lead (rhymes with “weed”, not with “head”) screw”. Model railroaders, though, tend to call it a worm gear." I wish I had asked about the term from my Dad when he was alive - he was both.

@williamsquires3070

2 жыл бұрын

Another term used in the Aviation (repair) industry is “Jack screw”; the MD80-series of jet airliners had a jack screw in the tail section. There was a crash caused by a Jack screw that wasn’t lubricated.

My first PC was an IBM 2121 386sx/16MHz with 2mb ram, 80mb HDD, color VGA with Win 3.0. (I started late). My first upgrade was to a 212mb HDD. IBM told me that only an IBM branded upgrade would work but I looked and saw that the pins looked the same on the generic Maxtor drive in the back of computer shopper magazine so took the risk because it was like 1/3 the price. Luckily it went well and that began my computer technician career. I've always said if it had smoked I would have gotten out of computers because as a kid I wouldn't have been able to afford to buy another. But instead I then upgraded from a 2400 BPS mode on to a 9600 BPS modem. Started a BBS, started an ISP, started a highly successful computer retail / repair store. So for 25 years now computers have been my livelihood. And it all started with the IBM PS1

2 жыл бұрын

My too, But color EGA

Micro channel architecture (MCA) was IBM’s attempt to reassert it dominance in the PC market by creating a heavily patented much improved successor to the old AT bus (renamed ISA by clone manufacturers) that others would have to pay royalties as high as 5% to use in their IBM PC compatibles. Many clone manufacturers balked at this idea and stuck with 16 bit ISA for the time being, though some briefly went with the VESA Local Bus standard that came out in the 486 era. For servers, the limits of ISA were just becoming too great so they created a version two of ISA called Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA), which was basically just a longer ISA slot that had performance improvements comparable to MCA but was also backwards compatible with older ISA cards (EISA slots had the last third of the slot separated by a solid section that fit into a notch on edge connector of EISA cards). Eventually in the late 90s, PCI replaced EISA and VESA for clones (though it’s MB’s of the era retained at least one or two legacy ISA/EISA slots and IBM finally threw in the towel for MCA in favor of PCI. This means that MCA cards where not as numerous of EISA and often if they can even be found for what you need retro-wise they go for a pretty penny these days (even back they cost more due to IBM’s patent licensing fees) This is why I recommend not going with PS1&2 machines for general retro PC purposes unless you specifically want to have one of the those machines for some reason. Get a EISA or VISA local bus based clone PC. IBM poorly handled MCA from a marketing standpoint and charged too much for patent licensing of MCA and just wasn’t dominant by then to force the market you go with MCA in face of the non-patented EISA. It’s similar to the mistake Sony made with Betamax. Apple did something similar but more sneaky with Firewire (where they had patents on key aspects of the standard (which they had invented jointly with serveral companies including Sony and Panasonic) where they initially allowed digital video camera manufacturers to include firewire on their camcorders free so it would becomes a standard for DV input to computers from camcorders but then once it did they charged licensing fees so that PC MB manufacturers would have to pay Apple patent fees to be able to offer it on built-in to PC motherboards which is why many did not and as such Firewire on PC’s was largely limited to third-party add-on cards and a small number of higher end MB options and some higher-end laptop modes. Intel was much smarter with Thunderbolt and not trying to charge high patent licensing fees for it has gained more inclusion by default on modern MB’s. Apple hasn’t repeated the same mistake with the USB-C connector/port standard which they also helped jointly developed) so it’s also pretty standard like USB-A & B was.

@motorb1tch

Жыл бұрын

apple might have been ONE party involved in developing the usb-c plug, but apple does not own this standard. if they did, i seriously doubt they would have changed their ways. thunderbolt still is apple exclusive, they just allow to connect usb-c, too.

@Charlesb88

Жыл бұрын

@@motorb1tch Who now’s if Apple would have repeated their old tricks if they owned patents on USB-C but given how the EU to be going to force them to use USB-C on all iPhones and iPads sold in Europe, I doubt that they would have gotten away with that sort of trick in this day and age anyways.

We had a PS/1 2011 and I really enjoyed it - some of my favourite writing and gaming memories are from that machine - but yes it was limited and it wasn't long before we replaced it.

This video will help me when I power up my almost new 2121 for the first time. Almost no signs of use. Only shipping damaged the F6 key and the back of the case was a bit bent. Thrilled to see two mint ISA slots in it and only little dust.

I had a 2121 without the expansion when I was a kid. This taught me all about computer science in and of itself. Loved it!

The floppy issue was probably related to the bios setting to boot from the internal ROM DOS.

Neat machine. I will say that IBM quality of the time is probably why this machine still worked with only very minor maintenance and repairs. I remember seeing these for sale at the Sears store in Asheville when I was in High School.

@SpearM3064

2 жыл бұрын

Yep. If there's one thing you can say about IBM, it's that they never did anything half-assed. For example, there's a reason why the Model M is still considered one of the best, if not _the_ best, keyboards ever produced. They didn't do a half-ass job on the instruction manuals, either. I used to be a COBOL and FOCUS programmer on an IBM/370 mainframe... the manual for FOCUS was split into two books, which were over 1,000 pages each.

The Ultima 6 Intro still has it's magic.

FD was more than likely just bound up and turning it broke it free to work properly. Awesome video as always.

7:00 Okay, here's a story but I don't know if I remember correctly. In 1993/94 I was working in a shop for consumer electronics. That shop was part of the (then and to this day) biggest chain of consumer electronics shops in Germany (MediaMarkt). When i remember correctly MediaMarkt had a deal with IBM for selling exclusive models of IBM tower computers. Those were driven by IBM's BlueLightning processors. There were 3 models: a 486SLC25, a 486DLC33 and a 486DLC2/66. An they were built in the same case as the PS/1 2168 or at least they looked extremely similar.

@adriansdigitalbasement

2 жыл бұрын

I wouldn't be surprised one bit that was happening. They did like to stick those 486 CPUs into lots of things around that time.

Love the look of this system, and I read about them in PC shopper back in the day, but I've never seen one out in the wild, but the IBM PS/2 was all over the place, and my middle school(they had the all in one PS/2 models)had classrooms full of them running DOS/3.11, and my high school in 9th grade typing class had a bunch of the tower PS/2 systems networked together running DOS/Win 3.11, till the next year we got a mix of DELL, and Gateway systems running Windows 95, and later Win 98 with my first taste of high speed Internet, and I was so fast at my typing class as it was self paced, that I was done in less than 1/3 of the year passing it both years with flying colors, and I was so bored that I spent it just playing the pre installed games on the network on the IBM systems like Pac-Man, and a few others, and on the DELL just surfing the internet, and various people who picked on me in school would be yelling to our teacher he's not doing his work, and goofing off trying to get me in trouble, and she would look at them, and tell them to shut up, he's already finished the entire course, and passed it. LOL!!

@SpearM3064

2 жыл бұрын

I know, right? I remember having to take a typing test for one job I applied for. I'm not a touch typist (I don't use the home keys); it's just that after 40 years of typing on a computer (I first taught myself how to program in 1982 on a VIC-20, that's how long I've been doing this), I sort of instinctively know which finger is closest to the key I want to hit. So, my typing speed is somewhere over 100 wpm, with 99% accuracy. Yes, I got the job. What was funny, though, is when the interviewer saw the test results and said "Jiminy crickets!". I don't think he expected me to type THAT fast. 🤣

@CommodoreFan64

2 жыл бұрын

@@SpearM3064 My family's first computer was also a VIC-20 with a VIC-1541 disk drive in mid 83, as my parents had split just a few month earlier. I was 2 at the time and my only sis 7, and dad tried to butter her up with the computer, saying I'm giving you a headstart in school, blah, blah, blah, but I took too it more than anyone even at that early age, and my grandfather saw me taking too it as well, as my mother was renting a house on same side of the street with a 2 min walk to my grandparents place, and he was an old school typewriter typist himself having helped start a credit union, so by the time I was in 5 year old Kindergarten, he had me reading/writing on a near 2nd grade level, and already being a fairly good at typing for my age, and have been ever since. Having said that, I've never had a job where I had to take a typing test, or my typing speed mattered long as I got my work done on time, but I did have have to change out my keyboard recently as for nearly the past 2 decades I've worked for a non profit for seniors, and meals on wheels running a senior center in my small hometown, and my desk is in an open common area, and I was using an older IBM board with sliders over domes(I collect keyboards, and do to the the non profit nature of my job, I'm also my own IT guy), and I type so fast, and hard when I was doing my daily/weekly paperwork, that it was driving some of my clients nuts, so I switched to a quieter Perixx split keyboard which also helps my RSI lol!

Hi Adrian, I was surprised and delighted to see this very familiar IBM PS/1 2121 on your channel! This PS/1 was the first PC I ever bought. I was still in school and had saved up for buying my first PC. After a tour of several PC stores, I also went to the IBM dealer, not planning to buy and IBM, and to my surprise they sold this computer at an even lower price than the comparable no-brand clone PCs sold in other stores. And this was a complete set including the monitor, very affordable. So I bought this PS/1, and it kind of grew on me. I did much of my school work on this computer. I actually expanded this PC a lot, I had 2 floppy drives and a backup tape drive on the floppy bus, so three devices. I had two hard drives stacked on top of eachother, which were auto-detected fine, a sound card, a VGA card with more colour capability, and I bought my first CD-ROM drive which had a small 8-bit interface card. I took off the slot bracket, sawed off a piece of the PCB and soldered it to the bottom pins on one of the ISA slots. I had the floppy and CD-ROM flatcables running out of the back of the case just underneath the cover. I remember the ROMShell also can be activated by holding down both mouse buttons and power on, but it also changes the setting to always boot from the ROMShell afterwards. Which was annoying because I had used dblspace on my harddrives, and had to find a way to boot dblspace from a floppy disk, and then get the CUSTOMIZ.EXE file started. Later I made a copy on floppy of course. I still have this computer, but I gave away the monitor to someone after not using the PC anymore. Recently I powered it up, it needs around 32V on that power connector and has an internal power module which makes all the power rails. I tried to use a laptop power supply and step up module from Aliexpress, but that one soon gave up the ghost. I still plan to make a different connector on the back, take out the power module and modify a small PC power supply to plug into the back of the PS/1, and supply the power rails directly. A 30+ volt power supply is not something easy to come by. Except maybe from an old HP inkjet printer, but I wonder if that would have enough power. I still have the original hardware manual for this computer. I also read somewhere that it is possible to expand the memory of the VGA chip on this mainboard because there are two unused footprints for additional RAM chips. I love all your work, and you have even let me develop a new appreciation for old CRTs! I still have some! I most of all love your "fixing" videos, I also love to repair stuff! Kind regards, Rodney Knaap

Great vid, enjoyed every minute of it. I remember seeing those for sale in Sears of all places. Great to see a teardown, and glad you got it working 100%!

I really love industrial looking stacked air vents in the front.

Hello and thank you a lot for your videos! They are amazingly interesting and it sends me back in the 80s when I was a kid. I remember when Indianapolis 500 came out, it instantly became my favorite car game! The speed sensations for the time were just crazy (the sound helps a lot). A very sincere thank you for all those very interesting technical repairs (your CRTs videos are a must too!) and for the throwbacks straight into the 80s :D Just a suggestion, at the end of the fixing of the computer, you said something like "I'm going to clean it and see you when it's done", but I honestly wouldn't have minded to watch the cleaning process too ; ) There's something satisfying in seeing an old crusty computer being brought back to an almost new condition. Maybe you didn't include it as the video was already 37 minutes long and you didn't want to make it too long. But then my suggestion would be to instead say "I'm going to clean it, if you want to watch that process, go on my second channel where I've uploaded that part". Which would also bring more people on your second channel (that I only recently learned about and was shocked by the amount of videos from you that I still need to watch! :D ). But hey, that's just a suggestion, nothing more, I won't become an angry fan if I'm not heard, I know it also means extra work to shoot, edit and publish another video, so don't worry! :D Keep up the great work, stay safe and thank you! Cheers from France!

I had a 2011 286 model with the 1MB upgrade given to me in the late 90’s. Back then no one cared being well into the pentium II era and they were basically e-waste. I had it connected to the internet, ran a DOS IRC client and some version of Arachne an ancient DOS web browser. I just loved how compact, simple and fast that thing was for such an old machine.

Cool video. Got mine in 1991. First computer I owned. Wanted to show it to my kids, so I recently fired it up again. Didn't last long after about an hour the monitor started smoking... Back in the box and see if I can fix it one day. Too many good memories, such as Outrun and all the Sierra Online games.

This was my first IBM PC growing up.. sooooo many fond memories of it.. Someday I plan to get one.. hard to find that model on eBay... Super glad you did this video.. makes me happy. 😁

I loved my PCjr as a kid! Spent many hours playing MS Flight simulator and teaching myself QBasic programming. I also had that Indianapolis 500 game. This episode sure brings back good memories! Thanks!

Before I got my own computer back in high school, I had an older friend who's dad worked at an IBM factory. They gave him this computer as a going away present when he left. I would go to my friend's house and play on this machine all the time! We installed Monkey Island 2 and Ultima 7 on it. It worked pretty well. I remember him using Prodigy on it when it used to cost 25 cents per email! Promenade was also an online service that came bundled with it. It was a fairly good PC for it's time. I did buy one of eBay about 10+ years ago and the power supply in the monitor was bad. I think a lot of things broke on these models eventually. The built-in modem, although slow, was pretty cool at the time when you usually had to buy one separately. Great video! I learned how floppy drives work. Thanks!

5:30 in the morning (couldn't sleep). Went to YT to find a ADB video covering a classic IBM PS/1. Nice!

I love the amazed face the floppy head is making at 16:30 - it just looks so shocked! (And it's really too bad that IBM enjoyed making incompatible floppy drives so much)

Back in the day of windows 95 and 98, I asked my mom for a computer. She came home with one of these she picked up at a yard sale and gave to me. While it wasn't the machine i wanted, it was the best she could do as we didn't have much money. The computer wouldn't boot to windows 3.1, but i had a friend of a friend walk me through the commands on the phone to get it to boot. It was such a great feeling to be able to fix a computer. This was the machine that started my love of computers. I was able to get a job fixing computers later on, and get my diploma in information technology. This was the computer that set me on my path with Information technology. I lost the computer many years ago, and have been trying to find one again, but super expensive, so i won't ever own one again, but i can't thank my mom enough for getting me that computer many, many years ago. Such a great little computer.

I used to have one of these from a school surplus auction. It was an all-in-one model, with the monitor and computer in the same case, and had of all things an 80186 clone CPU in it. The only machine I've ever seen with that chip and I to this day kick myself for not realizing at the time how obscure that sucker actually was!

PS/1 was a good concept, but.. also a sign of how little IBM understood of what was going on in the PC market outside corporate environments. At the time I worked for IBM, and had a bit of involvement in the PS/1 and especially PS/VP machines (which were a much better attempt at catching up with the 'non corporate PC market', but hampered by some bad decisions causing them to just miss the mark). I remember the PS/1 being surprisingly popular with small businesses and schools, and surprisingly unpopular within IBM (hard to get anyone to take it serious, but then, it was hard to get anyone there to take the home and small business market serious)

@johntrevy1

2 жыл бұрын

Wasn't that just the way things were back then? If you were of the Proletariat class having a IBM compatible was simply out of the question.

@GreenAppelPie

2 жыл бұрын

I really do wish IBM had made better decisions at the time, they coulda been a strong contender

@adriansdigitalbasement

2 жыл бұрын

Nice context. I guess IBM had just been doing what it had been doing best for so long, thinking that supporting the business market was where they could make money. (With the lucrative support contracts and what not.)

@c128stuff

2 жыл бұрын

@@johntrevy1 depends on where on the planet you are, but by the early 1990s, many people who had a computer would either have an IBM clone or would soon get one, just not an IBM branded one. In the early 1990s, IBM tried to change that.

@c128stuff

2 жыл бұрын

@@adriansdigitalbasement that was what they knew.

My first PC, and one of the few I still feel nostalgic about. I was just discovering DOS games like Stunts, The Incredible Machine, and Wolfenstein 3D.

I remember the PS series coming out. The PS/2 were pretty powerful for the time. But unfortunately for IBM, nobody wanted proprietary PC hardware, even if it was from IBM.

@BlackEpyon

2 жыл бұрын

Clones are cheaper.

@squirlmy

2 жыл бұрын

@@BlackEpyon Not just entire clones, but 3rd party expansion cards, floppy drive connectors, PSU connectors. People had buyer's remorse whenever they wanted to upgrade or even repair an IBM PS/2. Also being late and charging high prices for OS/2 was a huge mistake.

@BlackEpyon

2 жыл бұрын

@@squirlmy In all fairness, the microchannel architecture was superior to the 16-bit ISA of the time. The problem wasn't just that IBM wanted to diverge from the emerging PC compatible market (which was becoming the standard), but that they insisted on charging a licensing fee just to make products which used the architecture, which drove up prices for what little 3rd party microchannel cards there were.

@SpearM3064

2 жыл бұрын

@@BlackEpyon They were fine for things like university computer labs, which (at the time) weren't expected to change their hardware anytime soon. When I went to university, initially all my computer courses were on a VT/100 dumb terminal connected to the student mainframe. In my sophomore year, they got rid of the terminals and replaced them with PS/2 model 25s, running a VT100 emulator if you needed to connect to the mainframe. The main reason for the change, though, is so that students had access to more computers able to run Turbo Pascal or Turbo C.

@BlackEpyon

2 жыл бұрын

@@SpearM3064 Yeah, but they could have afforded more computers if they went with a clone instead. Businesses were still running on the "nobody was ever fired for buying an IBM" mentality. Or maybe IBM gave them a good deal on them, like Apple does with the public school districts in my area. Anything to get people hooked on a more expensive product.

I love seeing these old computers again...

All excellent, but seeing Indy 500 again and hearing that you did exactly what I did (drive the wrong way) made my day.

Love seeing the PS/1 getting some love. Dad bought an IBM PS/1 Consultant. 486/25 with 4mb of RAM, 125MB HDD., 2400 bps modem. We bought a sb16 and cdrom later on, and upgraded to 8mb ram and a 28800bps modem. Wiped out dads machine a couple of times playing with the recovery diskettes lmao. The computer taught me a lot and i miss it so much. I found another one in a thrift store, but it got eaten by hurricane sandy. Now prices are just through the roof and its terrible. Keep up the great work adrian! Late edit: had prodigy and I remember looking up how to beat sonic 3 on the BBSes. Always wanted to see what promenade was about but i cant find a single thing on it. Flash in the pan i suppose.

@mortrek

2 жыл бұрын

Had a Consultant as well. Mine was a 486 dx2 66 8mb. Got an Aztec/mitsumi cd addon kit and eventually extra 16mb ram and evergreen overdrive. Used it for a long time, making Doom WADs and even Duke 3d levels, BBSing, and everything else that could be done on it..

@Asmodai1234

2 жыл бұрын

Same specs as the 2133 style one I grew up - though I'm not sure if they marketed it with the Consultant name. Eventually upgraded it with a 4x CD-ROM drive, SB16 and 4mb of RAM. It was the family computer for a very long time till I was eventually able to buy a used Pentium 100 on my own. As an adult and calculating how many months salary it would have cost at the time, I'm incredibly appreciative of the sacrifice my parents made to get it for the family (and launch my brother and I both on IT-related careers).

What a lovely piece of history! Thanks to take such good care of it!

Great video Adrian! I have a Type 2133 PS/1 and it is possibly my favorite retro PC with how versatile it is. Does everything retro well. Glad you got that floppy drive working, as replacements are painful to acquire.

Oh, that proprietary modem... When I was in the seventh grade, I had to replace one of them for my teacher who had a PS/1. Back then, that modem cost $185 to replace which was expensive for a 2400 baud modem! I hated proprietary machines back then, but these days, they're among some of my most desired machines to add to my collection!

My first family pic was a ps/1 model 2155 g54. So a few years after this one came out. 486sx 25mhz 4 mb ram 170 mb hd. By then they had standadardized the ps/1 with its own power supply and 5 internal isa slots. I still have it and we maxed it out with all the upgrades includes a bios card that slows for a hard river above 200 mb. Great video Adrian, I still watch your ibm pcjr videos over and over.

This is a really neat find, especially paired with the original monitor. Thanks for the video!

26:40 Holy smokes, the BIOS lets you choose to boot directly into Prodigy?? That's amazing!

That's a heck of a machine to have had sitting for that length of time awaiting a video!

I loved Indy 500 back in the day! I had a 286 machine with a pc speaker and eventually invested in an Adlib sound card. I was blown away with the quality 😂

my dad bought a PS/1 in the spring of 1994 which was a 486DX-33 with, I think, 4 MB RAM and 120-ish MB HDD. It was essentially just a PS/2 with a different front, but it had ISA slots and a normal power supply, and most importantly it had a proper IBM keyboard

I've never seen a combo like this that wasn't severely damaged. Looks great!

@Spacelux007

4 ай бұрын

Not an Personal computer IBM. The only one were desktops or towers at PS series. This computer should never exist. Os warp was programed for these models and it looked bad.

Hi Adrian. I had the exact same problem with a floppy drive on my Apple IIgs. It turned out to be very dirty heads, and after copious amounts of cleaning, it came to life just like yours.

Nicely done, it game out great. What a cute little system. And I love the metal drive sleds, so much more sturdy than the brittle plastic ones Apple used in the 90s.

Great job Adrian good to see it working again

Fascinating to see how the 3.5 Inch floppy drives have this cool mechanism that slides the metal door protecting the magnetic disk open! They might not store a lot of data, but they sure are innovative piece of technology, and were surely less fragile than the 5.25 or the 8 inch ones.

The PS series design aesthetic has dated _so_ much more gracefully than the melted-blob late 90s and early 2000s aesthetic. I think it still looks great, and I'd love to have a mini-ITX replica case in the same form factor as one of those PS/2 towers.

@CommodoreFan64

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah same, just in 90's IBM matte black in a Micro-ATX style with a few extra filtered cooling vents.

@nickwallette6201

2 жыл бұрын

The PS/1 design language is so odd. It almost looks like what would be underneath the decorative bezel. I love it and am offended by it all at the same time, which is just fascinating to me.

Gotta tell you, the end result is very impressive. The look and design of those machines were unique to IBM. We had a couple of those at work at the time, but we ultimately decided to stop buying real IBM and go with clones. The price difference was substantial at our site with nearly 1000 employees.

@BlackEpyon

2 жыл бұрын

And THAT is why IBM lost the market. Clones were cheaper.

@parrottm76262

2 жыл бұрын

@@BlackEpyon For the business I worked at, it was more than that. Our purchasing rules evolved to require at two sources for everything we bought. When IBM started manufacturing PCs with parts unique to IBM, that put the dagger into their PC business as far as we were concerned. We could have justified a premium for IBM IF they had not tried the avenue they did.

@BlackEpyon

2 жыл бұрын

@@parrottm76262 Makes total sense.

Nice work getting this back up and running. Reminds me of my old IBM Aptiva from my early teens. That nasty nicotine caked fan made gag. Smoking is totally disgusting.

First video I've watched on your channel. Nice restoration of this piece of computer history. While I have been a computer nerd since I was 7 starting with an Aquarius *cough* and quickly moving to a Trash-80 COCO, and on up the line of Tandy and IBM clones (thank you Computer Shopper)... I was never one to get into the component repair side of electronics. I could build, configure, use and teach the hell out of them though. In high school 88-92 era, my "computer" teachers hated me as I knew so much more than them on the technical aspects. 41 years later and I am still in the IT world. I have subscribed to your channel and will go back through your archive and look forward to future videos.

I have fond memories of these PS/1 machines. I have a model 2011 at the moment, with the vga monitor. My 2011 was totally dead and I modified it to have the guts of a HP Thin Client with a 500mhz Via Eden cpu and it works very well. The power supply from the screen provides around 32 volts dc and a voltage regulator module on the motherboard derives the +5v, +12v rails from there, so theoretically , someone could make an external power supply.

@BlackEpyon

2 жыл бұрын

Pretty sure I've got a few 32V printer power supplies kicking around from all those broken inkjets I kept getting. I prefer laser anyways.

Yep that's it, my childhood computer right there. Even that exact 386 model. Such great memories with it, that user interface really did feel futuristic, spent a ton of time with that computer without much DOS knowledge, probably would have given up without it. Lots for great games for the time and hooked up to a dot-matrix printer it was the go-to for making cards and banners and posters. It sucked that it didn't last so long with being cutting edge as a few years later going into a computer store for new games being told that everything is going to CDs now and floppy disk games are becoming non-existent. Still it was great while it lasted. And damn looking at that price tag, gotta go thank my parents for getting it brand new when it came out, that sure was out of our price range, but glad they got it!

Oh yes Indy 500 was one of my Amiga Favs back in the day, lost count of how many hours I played on it, and funny enough I got it running on my Nintendo 2DS xl the other week. Been a blast playing it again. Great video as always , keep up amazing work!

This exact model with the 386 and DOS 4.0 was the first PC I saw in my life. A friend's father had brought it to their home only a few months after the Berlin Wall fell. No idea how he paid for it. It was an absolute marvel. Only computer I had seen before was a smuggled in C64. I spent all my savings on an Amiga 500 in September 1990, a PC was far out of range.

@adriansdigitalbasement

2 жыл бұрын

That is awesome! The Amiga 500 was such a great machine too, amazing you were able to suddenly get such a wonderful machine after having nothing. (Of course after spending all of your savings!) I’d rather have had an Amiga 500 back then versus some slow XT with crappy graphics.

@catriona_drummond

2 жыл бұрын

@@adriansdigitalbasement I certainly had a good time yes. I had had books before though, and there was a major shift from reading towards gaming that did not please my parents at all. XD

I have never seen this computer model before - but what I have seen before is the driving game that you show in the end. And trust me, even young me in Germany loved driving in the wrong direction and smashing into the other cars. :-D Thanks for this trip down the (oval shaped) memory lane

Oh man, some of the Indy 500 crash replays were pretty fantastic. I spent days and days just coming up with ways to crash the cars! Damn good memories right there

Our fist family PC was the 286-10MHz with 40MB HDD and 512k version. Kings Quest and Space Quest were a common sight on there along with calling BBSs late at night over the 1200baud modem.

I remember designing the European version of the internal modem for the PS/1 when I worked for MTD in the Netherlands. I designed several "special modems", like the modem for the Atari Portfolio as well.

My first computers were ps2s my special education teacher gifted me "severe ADHD and undiagnosed autism spectrum disorders" I carried them two miles home and I loved them both very much

Wonderful video on this PS/1! I never saw one of these in any computer store that I went to back in the day. I do remember Microsoft Works from when I was in college in the late 1990s. I typed up some papers in Works and I miss it.

It was my very first PC. The floppy started working because of the configur.exe. The connector on the front is for a propetary memory expansion module. Also the rare PS/1 sound card does not have a slot but connects to the mainboard through the ide like white connector near the isa raiser connector.

Wow, that is amazing. I am glad you found the ps1wordpress website and that you were able to fix the floppy diskette drive. My Grandma's brother owned a 2168 MultiMedia model IBM PS/1 back in the day. our first computer was an IBM Aptiva 2168-M71 and I have a few IBM Aptiva systems myself. I really enjoyed your video, Adrian. I hope your IBM PS/1 works out for you. take good care of it. :)

what a blast from the past, these games.

Cool , GO Boilers, I remember playing games on an amiga in the dorm back in my college days. The cad machine we used on campus was the size of a living room .. also remember doing projects on mac paint program.. lol

I got one from my dad who worked at IBM back in 1990 when I was 10 years old ... it is one of my favourite PC's ever! upgraded it with a better soundcard, played many DOS games for hours on it... good old days! it even served years later as a "party report machine" during some Demoscene events in the Netherlands...

I interviewed with Papyrus (Indianapolis 500) back in '89 before graduating from school. I remember they showed the that game and what they were working on next. Lots of machine code programming. I recall one of them being excited I knew emacs. Ended up not working there, gong instead to a small research company in Cambridge.

We had the PS2/Model 35 I think, little all in one unit with 2 3.5” floppy drives, some monochrome, some color. Learned Fortran, Pascal, Assembly, C, Basic and C++ on those things.

@pauld4238

2 жыл бұрын

Addition: this was in high school in the early 90’s.

Great job! I remember playing Indy 500 on the Amiga back in the day. Good times.

I remember seeing a version of this in my elementary school. It was used as a library catalogue. All the other computers in my school were Apple computers, though.

Another interesting video. I didn’t know about the PS/1, but became quite familiar with the PS/2 Model 30, as my employer developed a range of measurement systems based around that PC.

Indy 500 was one of my favourites as a kid, it even worked ok on the 286 machines we had in school. That built in rom shell is fascinating.

Yup, I'm yet another person that saw these for sale at Sears, back in the good old days when companies were experimenting with lots of different graphical shell file manager things (Deskmate, GEOS, etc.) before Windows conquered the world.

@squirlmy

2 жыл бұрын

I'm pretty sure it was the intro of the Mac GUI which shifted Microsoft's priorities away from the IBM OS/2 partnership (and away from Xenix, altogether) The more significant point, to me, was that Windows 3 blocked IBM's OS/2. I never got to play around with Deskmate or GEOS until they were long obsolete.

I remember seeing this and messing around with it at Montgomery Ward back in the day. It had a Prodigy pre installed and King’s Quest V, too. I want one now lol

This was interesting. My high school, back in the 90's, had PS/2 systems. This is the first time I've seen a PS/1. I always thought the PS/2 systems got their name from the keyboard/mouse ports. Until this, I didn't know there was an actual PS/1.

@AaronOfMpls

2 жыл бұрын

More like the other way around -- the PS/2 ports got their name from the computer. (The physical plug/port is technically a 6-pin mini-DIN.) And I'd heard of the PS/1 before (as a "lesser" system to the PS/2) but never knew much about it.

@petergathercole4565

2 жыл бұрын

@@AaronOfMpls The full name was "IBM Personal System/2", indicating a follow on from the "IBM Personal Computer". IBM at the time was very fond of putting slashes in the names of their systems, for example System/360 and System/370, System/36, System/38, AS/400, and the similar era RISC System/6000, and of course "half an operating system" (OS/2 - well, it was actually quite good, though expensive).

I got a tip once for jbweld, wax paper. Ore baking paper. Mix it on that. And you could roll the paper into a spout. Like whipped cream spout. I haven’t tried it. But presumably you can throw away the left over without much mess. Anyway. Cool restoration. It looks really good. I hope you enjoy much of it.

Adrian, this brings back lots of memories. We got one of these brand new as I entered 9th grade back in 1991. Started my love affair for PCs, and ultimately led to my career today. We had the 2121-P82 model.. 386 sx-20 2MB ram and 80MB hard drive... but most importantly, a 2400 baud modem which allowed me to get into BBSing. First upgrade was a Soundblaster 2.0. Loved the old Sierra games!

@telengardforever7783

Жыл бұрын

One of my childhood dreams was to write an awesome BBS program... But by the time I finally got my Masters in Computer Science, BBSing was long dead. Such is life.

I had this when I was in grad school. 1991. Did all my work on it.

I had one of the cheapest ones of these back in the day. It was something like CA$750 and I splurged and got the 40MB hard drive over the 30MB, which was a good choice as I was buying a copy of Stacker pretty soon. And I updated the memory with third-party memory, even though that was limited by the 286. But I loved that machine. It got me through undergrad and I managed to squeeze out an amazing amount of work and play on it. I ditched IBM DOS-HELL for MS DOS as soon as I could figure out that there were hidden system files I needed to copy. Ran WordPerfect 5.1 on it, in fact I had WordPerfect Works and replaced the less-capable word processor with the real thing. Best thing about that is that I could copy tables and text from the spreadsheet to WP and paste it in the page. Pre-Windows. Only got rid of it because I graduated, and needed a machine that could run DOOM! (I should ask if who I sold it to still has it, lol. It was only 1994 or something.)

I've never seen a physical volume control for a PC speaker before. Would have been a great feature on the many PCs of the era I've had. Great video, thanks!

My father used worked for IBM in south France for all his career as a project manager. One day he came back from work with this exact PS/1 model. Only the monitor was a bit different in that it had pots instead of those sliders... At that time, this PS/1 model was already a bit outdated, and it seems IBM were clearing off some remaining stocks at special prices for their employees. But PC's and computers in general were still very expensive, even for my father which somewhat worked "at the source". 386sx16, 2Megs of ram and 40megs hard disk...and lets not forget the crippled 16bit data bus. On the paper, it seems that you couldn't do a lot with that, but tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys to free-up as much RAM as possible, I've managed to play a ton of games including all the classics from Lucas Art such as Monkey Island 2, Day of The Tentacle, Indiana Jones and The Fate of Altlantis, Sam and Max hit The Road, as well as great games such as Prince of Persia, Lemmings, Beneath a Steel Sky... and many other shareware titles (Bananoïd comes to mind lol), etc, etc. This was my real introduction to PCs. One day, I had enough money to buy a sound card. I was able to afford a Sound Blaster Pro clone (can't remember exactly which one), and had a ton of fun recording stupid things with my best friend, playing .MODs and enjoying the games with sounds and music. The 2Megs of RAM, as I've said, were always a problem. The 4Megs propriatery upgrade, which would bring the memory to a whopping 6Megs was unavailable for me at the time. It goes into the empty port you see on the motherboard. This memory upgrade is still unobtainium today. I've searched for one for the longest time and I think that it would be a nice project for someone with electronic knowledge to clone this memory card (only IBM and Kingston sold one), that would allow to run many more titles in a more confortable maner. The other upgrade I did after the sound card was to add an ISA VGA card with 1Meg of VRAM. I have to say that it is a worthy upgrade if you have one lying around. It really helps to speed-up the display snappyness and the scrolling in games. My advice would be to put one of those in the available PS/1 ISA slot. I still have this very computer somewhere in my basement, with its original keyboard and mouse. I was never able to part with it, and I don't know if it still works, but it fallowed me from France to Germany, the country I am living in today. Anyway Adrian, thanks for your video, this one brought up lots of nice memories and nostalgia. I'm eager to see what you come up with this machine in terms of upgrades... 🙂

A high school buddy had one, one of the posh kids, where the rest of us had clones. As I recall, we eventually concluded that our clones were more "ibm compatible" than his ps/1 as he had trouble running some of software we could run.

Am I the only one seeing a surprised face from 15:57 onwards on the disk mechanism? 16:26 near Adrian's fingers - the drive is like OOOOOOOOH

I must admit I had never seen nor heard about IBM PS/1 machines. I had thought that The IBM range started with the PS/2 and then there was the PCjr which was made as a failed replacement before the world moved onto the AT based systems by the start of the 386 era. With the drives repaired and the 16 bit sound card that is becoming quite the nice tidy little retro system. If you have one, installing a 486 overdrive into this machine (and maybe a RAM upgrade) would be a great upgrade just to take it to it's ultimate state.

Great video. I had no idea these units used a power supply in the monitor. Funny we're back to powering our computers from the monitor again with USB-C.

Indy 500 was the first simulator in a long line created by Papyrus. The main programmer, Dave Kaemmer, helped start iRacing, one of the top racing sims around today.

Awesome video. My closest cousins had a PS/1 286 10mhz with the grayscale VGA monitor - so the 2011 I believe. It was their first computer and a lot of hours were playing Kings Quest VI, Super Huey II and Cabal amongst others. That grayscale monitor was very interesting/unique in that it was technically VGA but just with 256 shades of gray instead - have not seen many examples of that and pretty strange way of slight cost savings in my opinion. Meanwhile I had gotten a used Packard Bell Legend 286 12mhz - and one of the first games I got with it/played was Indianapolis 500. I absolutely spent most of the time going backwards on the track trying to get as big of a wreck as possible and watching the replay with the different camera views the game had. Thanks Adrian for the great trip down memory lane!

My first PC, after my C128, and the last desktop I bought instead of built, was a PS/1 286 10mhz, bought at Service Merchandise. The main case was not as tall as the one you have, and didn't have the built-in ISA slots. I had all the upgrades for that, including the proprietary memory, external 5-1/4" drive box, and the ISA card box, mostly bought at Sears and through Computer Shopper. It got stupidly tall with all that. I remember that that little VGA monitor was really good.

Honestly, I don't know that I've ever seen that particular model or form factor before. Not even in KZread videos. Not sure why, I've seen all kinds of common, uncommon, and legendarily rare computers in the depths of the KZreads before. Just never really came across a breakdown of this guy, so thanks for that! What an interesting machine. I've certainly also never seen one in person, either. I would never have guessed 1990 if you had just shown me the case and described how it got it's power, but then with the internal modem and the PS/2 port keyboard and mouse I knew it couldn't be _too_ old. Odd aesthetic and engineering hangovers from the 80s era IBM machines with a more modern (for the time) functionality. I love it.

Wish you had included a timelapse of the cleanup. Its always very satisfying to see the old machines polished up. 😢

My family's first PC was a PS/1, it was a 2168 Tower Unit. It has a 486 DX2 66Mhz, 8MB RAM, 340MB WD Caviar HDD, 3.5" & 5.25" Floppy drives, 14.4 modem, and a Model M2 Keyboard. Came with Windows 3.1. No sound, no cdrom. We still have it somewhere. The thing was a trooper - it even got hit by lightning and still continued to work.

I’d really love to get hold of a nice IBM setup. I keep looking!

My first computer was an IBM PS/1 2011-M01.... Greyscale display and floppy-only, no HD. My parents bought it from Service Merchandise way back in the day as the display model. Only upgrades I did to it was to swap the processor (an Intel 286-10) and put a Harris 286-12. Also added a 2MB RAM expansion. Played Wolfenstein-3D on that machine. Used Bank Street Writer and IBM Writing Assistant for homework. Later I found a completely loaded PS/1 at a salvage place for $10 (this was when Pentium machines were first hitting the market).

LOL -- I believe I have those exact two nut-driver tools, myself. When I graduated high school in 1988 a friend of the family who knew I was into computers gave me a tool kit and a book called "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" as a graduation gift. The tool kit contained two nut drivers that were designed specifically to fit the two sizes of hex-head screws common in IBMs and their clones in that day. They look *a lot* like those that you have there. And I still have them in my toolbox downstairs because they're so convenient to use.

That was my first PC. I'm trying to get one again. So many good memories!