In the mid 90s while in middle school I bought an old 286 from an old woman wanting to get it out of her closet. I dont think it was an IBM, but I loved working on that thing. Got Wolfenstein and the old 2D Duke Nukem games running on it. Tinkering is a hobby I definitely kept with me.
Brings back memories. I had an IBM PS/2 30 286. I ordered it new through the IBM employee purchase program. I got a discount. Between the order and the delivery, I broke my leg. It was delivered to an IBM retailer. When the system came in, I had to ask if the store was wheelchair accessible. I played King’s Quest IV all the way through while I was recovering.
When I started to study computer stuff in school in 1989 I got a PS/2 70-A21 with a 25MHz 386+387, 4 Megs of RAM and a 120 Mb HDD. That got me through 3 years of studies, and in June of 1992 I started working at the nordic IBM Helpware and OS/2 support hotline in Copenhagen. That was the start of my IT career which still continues to this day. There are still traces of old IBM to be seen in current Lenovo computers; the documentation, some of the terminology in the manuals and such.
In the mid 1990's a former employer gave me a PS/2 Model 30 286 that had been heavily used in an office environment. When I received it I opened it up and was shocked to see it was completely packed with dust squeezed into every nook and cranny right out to the shell of the case. My heart sank a bit as I thought to myself that it probably would not work. I had to pick out huge wads of packed dust before I could even get a glimpse of the motherboard. To my amazement after cleaning it up it worked fine when I turned it on. I question whether any modern day computer would work very long it you were to completely pack the inside of the case with bats of insulation.
Excellent video! I got a hand-me-down 2400 baud modem from a friend in 1996. By then everyone was on 28,800 but it opened the world of BBS to me. I would us ASCII (not ANSI) for faster loading times. Soon I got into trouble over the phone bill, so I saved up for a 33.600 Zoltrix and built my own BBS on Iniquity which ran after hours. If you can't call them, let them call you. Only went online in late 1998 and then ditched the BBS.
You're about three years younger than me I take it. I started calling BBSes in 1991 as a fourth grader on my Color Computer 2. As my tech advanced, I eventually started my own BBS when I convinced my dad to get me my own phone line. I ran it for a few years in my early to mid teens before my interest in girls took over my interest in running a BBS... plus, I got a Mindspring internet account, and retrospectively, it was sad seeing the BBS era being ushered out. These days, my favorite part of retro computing is connecting to BBSes. Though it's usually on my Wimodem232, from time to time I'll setup an old dialup modem and connect over the phone line... just to relive the whole experience ;)
I did try running my own BBS, but alas, I was too late to the party. It was more of an excuse to play with setting up programs. Renegade had a lot of settings to tweak.
@@userlandia Indeed! I ran Telegard and Renegade with FrontDoor for my FidoNet front end. I learned a LOT about batch file programming from FrontDoor LOL!
Great video!!! In the 1970's and1980's we were an IBM mainframe leasing co(360's, 370's, 4341's, system 3's 34's) . WHEN Times SQ NYC was redeveloped, we lost our lease on cheap office space and had to downsize to a PC NETWORK. This video brings back many memories!!! We became a PC dealer and MFG(the era of IBM PC clones). Dell and Microsoft killed that business(yes we sold and install hundreds of pc's for use with AOL AND COMPUSERV, DIAL UP!! (YES cable companies broad band killed dialup internet). Yes it was quite an era. With buliten boards and chat rooms people used them like face book pages today. Many nights we would stay up till 3am chatting on aol or compuserve!!!!!
I got one of these for free from my neighbor (they were scrapping it). I cleaned it up and to my surprise, the HD actually worked. Sadly, the floppy didn’t so I got a gotek which proved to be difficult because of the odd pin outs. After a nice eBay seller custom wired an adapter for me, I was able to get it working well. And then I was bit my the memory issue…bought so many sticks to try to bump it up to run windows but every single chip I bought just didn’t work. I ended up selling it a VCF east, vowing to never mess with PS2 again 😂 This video is really reminding me of that brief foray.
My dad was a tech school teacher from the mid 80s onward and the school let him bring home a dead ringer for that machine to work on his master's thesis. From then until January 1999 when we bought a new HP Pavilion with a P2 400 and Windows 98, we had that 286 with DOS 3.3, WordPerfect 5.1, and not much else
I finally got access to IBM computers in my senior year of high school, where they had a program that would bus some of the kids to a technical learning facility for advanced vocational classes. I lucked into getting into "Microcomputer Information Systems", along with a whole lab of IBM PS/2 systems of some kind. I was disappointed to learn that it was just a glorified typing class though. Luckily my teacher recognized that I was "advanced" enough to not need the normal class instruction, and gave me a book on QBASIC, and told me to go at my own pace, turning in the tests at the end of each chapter. I don't think she ever looked at them, as I'm guessing the book was a one-of promo sample that she didn't have the accompanying teacher's guide for. It helped a lot that I already knew BASIC from my earlier high school days playing on their Apple //es. I learned to type and to program on an IBM Model M keyboard, and still have and use one to this day. (I use the OS to remap the capslock key into a Super key, since it's still a 101 key keyboard.)
It's interesting where you might find this amazing computer. They had a dozen of them in my computer class in high school. Then, my first job was at a convenience store in 1991. All the 300+ stores in the chain had a PS/2 Model 30 to perform their daily business.
Ha, the juxtaposition of the discussion of being a 14 year old newbie and the old Something Awful Stupid Newbie avatar made me remember being the same age and getting onto SA, which... probably wasn't a good idea, either. I love this video, it's such a good time capsule.
Such a great in depth video. I loved hearing your personal background with the machine and what you did with it. I also racked up a huge phone bill by calling BBS numbers that I thought were local but were actually long distance. Whoops...
Just starting this video but excited as I’m pretty sure is was a model 30 my family got second hand around 1993. Before that we had a MicroBee which my parents bought new in 1983. So having a colour screen and Windows(!) was amazing to my 11 year old self.
"its lagging pretty far behind yping!" you can't escape me, typo! even if its used to illustrate a point I *also* had one of them RadioShack circuit kits, though not the one shown... I want to say it was a 150 in One with a Blue Box... though my memory is fuzzy on the exact details. Thanks for the congratulations and glad to have a .25 playback speed option grumble grumble We ALSO had a ThinkPad, I remember playing Jill of the Jungle on it.
Really enjoyed the video, lots of great information in there! I have a PS/2 Model 30 286... and I actually have someone working on a board design for SIMMs for it! We had these machines in my high school where they ran IBM Classroom LAN Administration System, which I administered while there, so I do have a soft spot for these systems.
My interest in old computers started like all the way back when I was like 7 years old in the early 2000s when I really wanted a computer of my own and I started reading a lot about 486 era computers and looking them up on eBay, the first retro machine I owned was an SLT 286 my dad's coworker gave him when I was 9 years old, sadly the PSU broke and I ended up throwing it away. When I was in the last few years of highschool I started picking up machines and old computer items from thrift stores and flea markets and built up a small "computer graveyard" as my dad calls it. in the mid 2010s due to space constraints I collected a number of 486 through Pentium M era laptops when ever I found one cheap enough on eBay. Now most retro stuff has skyrocketed that I don't partake much on buying any more hardware.
I remember seeing an old PS/2 sitting in an unused classroom at my elementary school I went to, I don't know what model it was specifically since I never got up close I just seen it sitting on the table through the doorway, and they had a ton of old EduQuest all in one machines still in use when the school closed down at the end of the 2004-2005 school year and the building was sold to become a preschool, I don't know whatever happened to any of those machines, I wish I would have asked and seen if they'd let me keep any of them, and there was also some really cool old boxed software from the late 80s and early 90s in the storage room off the library, I remember seeing a copy of Windows/286 or Windows/386 in there. But I guess I didn't really have the room for them at the time since there were like 8 of use living in an ~1300 sq ft house and the garage was pretty packed, but a man can dream.
Our paths are very similar! Christmas of 1996 is when dad bought me my first computer out of the newspaper classifieds. It was an IBM PS/2 model 30! with a 2400baud hayesmodem. Back then I was in the 513 area code, and it had Telix too! My favorite BBS at that time, was Forest Park BBS. Unfortunately, it appears that one was never archived but i remember it being on a BBS list which is how i found it to begin with. I ended up catching a virus shortly afterwords from downloading all the games on those BBSes and killed the PC. Couldn't really fix it as the disk drive quit reading my disks. Dad bought a 386 and thats when our first experience of the internet came into play 14.4K modem on Windows 3.1 with AOL 3.0. Not a pleasureable experience but it was my first nonetheless... Then in the summer of 97 dad finally broke down and bought a new machine. a 200Mhz CTX. We are only about 3 years apart, as I was 11 in 1997. also, not to nitpick too much but your IBM PS/2 stock footage, you have some serious leaky caps going on with the FDD and HDD and it needs attention, to be expected.
Yes, the drives were recapped shortly after this was filmed. One of those "Well, it's working for now, best to do it after I'm guaranteed to have the footage."
Amazing retrospective video on BBSes and presenting what we mostly loose. Early WWW looks rather tacky in comparison. Though I imagine that at the time Internet it must have felt incredibly futuristic, open and the way to go. Anyways, this video gives nice sneek peek in to amazing world of BBS and what we ultimately loose.
Ha! I had an Amstrad PC1512 upgraded to 640k. That was my first PC I got after my Color Computer 2. I have one of the PS/2 8086s with MCGA, a PS/2 286 huge tower, and a desktop PS/2 486 flavor... so many project machines. I haven't even used the 486 or 286 tower yet.
Very cool video. My father purchased an original IBM 5150 in 1981 (I was 9 years old) and we eventually upgraded to a PS/2 Model 30 because my dad didn't want to go 32 bit microchannel and be unable to use all his ISA cards. I remember this computer fondly and played many Sierra/Lucasarts games on it because it had VGA and the ISA bus allowed me to use Adlib, Roland MT32 and eventually settled down with a Soundblaster (the DAC was the game changer). I have fond memories of this computer. I played the fuck out of PC games on this beast.
Yes, the PS/2 was proprietary, which is largely why it failed. But this same video says nothing about Windows, which he clearly wanted, being proprietary! No, Windows was fine not being open source. The Commodore 64 was also mentioned in this video. Where were the C64 clones? Oh, that's right, there were none because Commodores were proprietary too. Anything about the proprietary Mac? No, no mention of that being proprietary either. Intel is proprietary. Not mentioned. If you don't want a proprietary machine, then do not buy a PS/2.
In the mid 90s while in middle school I bought an old 286 from an old woman wanting to get it out of her closet. I dont think it was an IBM, but I loved working on that thing. Got Wolfenstein and the old 2D Duke Nukem games running on it. Tinkering is a hobby I definitely kept with me.
Brings back memories. I had an IBM PS/2 30 286. I ordered it new through the IBM employee purchase program. I got a discount. Between the order and the delivery, I broke my leg. It was delivered to an IBM retailer. When the system came in, I had to ask if the store was wheelchair accessible. I played King’s Quest IV all the way through while I was recovering.
You truly were the king of quests!
When I started to study computer stuff in school in 1989 I got a PS/2 70-A21 with a 25MHz 386+387, 4 Megs of RAM and a 120 Mb HDD. That got me through 3 years of studies, and in June of 1992 I started working at the nordic IBM Helpware and OS/2 support hotline in Copenhagen. That was the start of my IT career which still continues to this day. There are still traces of old IBM to be seen in current Lenovo computers; the documentation, some of the terminology in the manuals and such.
Another well done video sir! Thanks for creating and sharing with us. Much time spent playing LORD back in the day.
In the mid 1990's a former employer gave me a PS/2 Model 30 286 that had been heavily used in an office environment. When I received it I opened it up and was shocked to see it was completely packed with dust squeezed into every nook and cranny right out to the shell of the case. My heart sank a bit as I thought to myself that it probably would not work. I had to pick out huge wads of packed dust before I could even get a glimpse of the motherboard. To my amazement after cleaning it up it worked fine when I turned it on. I question whether any modern day computer would work very long it you were to completely pack the inside of the case with bats of insulation.
Excellent video! I got a hand-me-down 2400 baud modem from a friend in 1996. By then everyone was on 28,800 but it opened the world of BBS to me. I would us ASCII (not ANSI) for faster loading times. Soon I got into trouble over the phone bill, so I saved up for a 33.600 Zoltrix and built my own BBS on Iniquity which ran after hours. If you can't call them, let them call you. Only went online in late 1998 and then ditched the BBS.
You're about three years younger than me I take it. I started calling BBSes in 1991 as a fourth grader on my Color Computer 2. As my tech advanced, I eventually started my own BBS when I convinced my dad to get me my own phone line. I ran it for a few years in my early to mid teens before my interest in girls took over my interest in running a BBS... plus, I got a Mindspring internet account, and retrospectively, it was sad seeing the BBS era being ushered out. These days, my favorite part of retro computing is connecting to BBSes. Though it's usually on my Wimodem232, from time to time I'll setup an old dialup modem and connect over the phone line... just to relive the whole experience ;)
I did try running my own BBS, but alas, I was too late to the party. It was more of an excuse to play with setting up programs. Renegade had a lot of settings to tweak.
@@userlandia Indeed! I ran Telegard and Renegade with FrontDoor for my FidoNet front end. I learned a LOT about batch file programming from FrontDoor LOL!
Great video!!! In the 1970's and1980's we were an IBM mainframe leasing co(360's, 370's, 4341's, system 3's 34's)
. WHEN Times SQ NYC was redeveloped, we lost our lease on cheap office space and had to downsize to a PC NETWORK. This video brings back many memories!!! We became a PC dealer and MFG(the era of IBM PC clones).
Dell and Microsoft killed that business(yes we sold and install hundreds of pc's for use with AOL AND COMPUSERV, DIAL UP!!
(YES cable companies broad band killed dialup internet). Yes it was quite an era.
With buliten boards and chat rooms people used them like face book pages today.
Many nights we would stay up till 3am chatting on aol or compuserve!!!!!
I got one of these for free from my neighbor (they were scrapping it). I cleaned it up and to my surprise, the HD actually worked. Sadly, the floppy didn’t so I got a gotek which proved to be difficult because of the odd pin outs. After a nice eBay seller custom wired an adapter for me, I was able to get it working well. And then I was bit my the memory issue…bought so many sticks to try to bump it up to run windows but every single chip I bought just didn’t work. I ended up selling it a VCF east, vowing to never mess with PS2 again 😂
This video is really reminding me of that brief foray.
My dad was a tech school teacher from the mid 80s onward and the school let him bring home a dead ringer for that machine to work on his master's thesis. From then until January 1999 when we bought a new HP Pavilion with a P2 400 and Windows 98, we had that 286 with DOS 3.3, WordPerfect 5.1, and not much else
My tenth grade keyboarding class had a whole roomful of PS/2 286s running on Novell Netware (no HDD). Great memories.
I finally got access to IBM computers in my senior year of high school, where they had a program that would bus some of the kids to a technical learning facility for advanced vocational classes. I lucked into getting into "Microcomputer Information Systems", along with a whole lab of IBM PS/2 systems of some kind. I was disappointed to learn that it was just a glorified typing class though. Luckily my teacher recognized that I was "advanced" enough to not need the normal class instruction, and gave me a book on QBASIC, and told me to go at my own pace, turning in the tests at the end of each chapter. I don't think she ever looked at them, as I'm guessing the book was a one-of promo sample that she didn't have the accompanying teacher's guide for. It helped a lot that I already knew BASIC from my earlier high school days playing on their Apple //es.
I learned to type and to program on an IBM Model M keyboard, and still have and use one to this day. (I use the OS to remap the capslock key into a Super key, since it's still a 101 key keyboard.)
It's interesting where you might find this amazing computer. They had a dozen of them in my computer class in high school. Then, my first job was at a convenience store in 1991. All the 300+ stores in the chain had a PS/2 Model 30 to perform their daily business.
Ha, the juxtaposition of the discussion of being a 14 year old newbie and the old Something Awful Stupid Newbie avatar made me remember being the same age and getting onto SA, which... probably wasn't a good idea, either.
I love this video, it's such a good time capsule.
Such a great in depth video. I loved hearing your personal background with the machine and what you did with it. I also racked up a huge phone bill by calling BBS numbers that I thought were local but were actually long distance. Whoops...
Really great video. So much good info and it brought back a lot of memories!
Your videos are too fun and well done to get so little attention, I really like them a lot. Much love.
This video is sooooo good. My favorite thing in retrocomputing is the stories about the machines, both about their creation and their use. Fantastic!
I really loved this story. I also got into trouble because of the long distance BBS-es as a kid!
Just starting this video but excited as I’m pretty sure is was a model 30 my family got second hand around 1993. Before that we had a MicroBee which my parents bought new in 1983. So having a colour screen and Windows(!) was amazing to my 11 year old self.
"its lagging pretty far behind yping!" you can't escape me, typo! even if its used to illustrate a point
I *also* had one of them RadioShack circuit kits, though not the one shown... I want to say it was a 150 in One with a Blue Box... though my memory is fuzzy on the exact details.
Thanks for the congratulations and glad to have a .25 playback speed option grumble grumble
We ALSO had a ThinkPad, I remember playing Jill of the Jungle on it.
Holy cow I'm SO GLAD I just learned of your channel from Action Retro! I'm on vacation, and I feel a binge watch of this channel coming on 😎
Really enjoyed the video, lots of great information in there! I have a PS/2 Model 30 286... and I actually have someone working on a board design for SIMMs for it! We had these machines in my high school where they ran IBM Classroom LAN Administration System, which I administered while there, so I do have a soft spot for these systems.
I knew you'd enjoy this one, Chris. ;) I would happily join in on a group buy on some SIMMs to get this to 4MB on the board.
@@userlandia excellent! I'll keep you posted on progress on the SIMMs!
My interest in old computers started like all the way back when I was like 7 years old in the early 2000s when I really wanted a computer of my own and I started reading a lot about 486 era computers and looking them up on eBay, the first retro machine I owned was an SLT 286 my dad's coworker gave him when I was 9 years old, sadly the PSU broke and I ended up throwing it away. When I was in the last few years of highschool I started picking up machines and old computer items from thrift stores and flea markets and built up a small "computer graveyard" as my dad calls it. in the mid 2010s due to space constraints I collected a number of 486 through Pentium M era laptops when ever I found one cheap enough on eBay. Now most retro stuff has skyrocketed that I don't partake much on buying any more hardware.
I remember seeing an old PS/2 sitting in an unused classroom at my elementary school I went to, I don't know what model it was specifically since I never got up close I just seen it sitting on the table through the doorway, and they had a ton of old EduQuest all in one machines still in use when the school closed down at the end of the 2004-2005 school year and the building was sold to become a preschool, I don't know whatever happened to any of those machines, I wish I would have asked and seen if they'd let me keep any of them, and there was also some really cool old boxed software from the late 80s and early 90s in the storage room off the library, I remember seeing a copy of Windows/286 or Windows/386 in there. But I guess I didn't really have the room for them at the time since there were like 8 of use living in an ~1300 sq ft house and the garage was pretty packed, but a man can dream.
I know the same feeling, I passed up some real interesting stuff during 2018-2019 because of lack of space.
The more I watched the more appreciate my AT and XT machines 😂
Our paths are very similar! Christmas of 1996 is when dad bought me my first computer out of the newspaper classifieds. It was an IBM PS/2 model 30! with a 2400baud hayesmodem. Back then I was in the 513 area code, and it had Telix too! My favorite BBS at that time, was Forest Park BBS. Unfortunately, it appears that one was never archived but i remember it being on a BBS list which is how i found it to begin with.
I ended up catching a virus shortly afterwords from downloading all the games on those BBSes and killed the PC. Couldn't really fix it as the disk drive quit reading my disks. Dad bought a 386 and thats when our first experience of the internet came into play 14.4K modem on Windows 3.1 with AOL 3.0. Not a pleasureable experience but it was my first nonetheless...
Then in the summer of 97 dad finally broke down and bought a new machine. a 200Mhz CTX.
We are only about 3 years apart, as I was 11 in 1997.
also, not to nitpick too much but your IBM PS/2 stock footage, you have some serious leaky caps going on with the FDD and HDD and it needs attention, to be expected.
Yes, the drives were recapped shortly after this was filmed. One of those "Well, it's working for now, best to do it after I'm guaranteed to have the footage."
@@userlandia Ahh gotcha, at least you got it taken care of before it eroded any more of the copper traces and ICs away!
Amazing retrospective video on BBSes and presenting what we mostly loose. Early WWW looks rather tacky in comparison. Though I imagine that at the time Internet it must have felt incredibly futuristic, open and the way to go. Anyways, this video gives nice sneek peek in to amazing world of BBS and what we ultimately loose.
"Online teen in 1997". So that's where that thousand yard stare came from.
Oh wow my first three systems were exactly the same.
I used to try and sell these. It had OS2 on it.... I sold it with AshtonTate's Frameworks on it.
KEFKA!!! AMAZING!
"..wasn't meant for games.." Hah! I had one - it survived long until a 486 sx ;).
Used Sezam Net in 1997. on my 486DX2 with a 14400bps modem (Belgrade, Serbia).
Ha! I had an Amstrad PC1512 upgraded to 640k. That was my first PC I got after my Color Computer 2. I have one of the PS/2 8086s with MCGA, a PS/2 286 huge tower, and a desktop PS/2 486 flavor... so many project machines. I haven't even used the 486 or 286 tower yet.
I'll raise my hand as likely the youngest in the room and say my first experience with a Thinkpad was a Lenovo one in like the 3rd grade
Do anyone have that Help Ware diskette or image? red diskette :)
Very cool video. My father purchased an original IBM 5150 in 1981 (I was 9 years old) and we eventually upgraded to a PS/2 Model 30 because my dad didn't want to go 32 bit microchannel and be unable to use all his ISA cards. I remember this computer fondly and played many Sierra/Lucasarts games on it because it had VGA and the ISA bus allowed me to use Adlib, Roland MT32 and eventually settled down with a Soundblaster (the DAC was the game changer). I have fond memories of this computer. I played the fuck out of PC games on this beast.
Not all had an IBM, but a clone.
hey, i live in the 413 area code!!
Yeah, too much proprietary stuff for the market, that was gravitating to standardization, to handle.
Using amiga 500 every day in 1997 was still cool.
Yes, the PS/2 was proprietary, which is largely why it failed. But this same video says nothing about Windows, which he clearly wanted, being proprietary! No, Windows was fine not being open source. The Commodore 64 was also mentioned in this video. Where were the C64 clones? Oh, that's right, there were none because Commodores were proprietary too. Anything about the proprietary Mac? No, no mention of that being proprietary either. Intel is proprietary. Not mentioned. If you don't want a proprietary machine, then do not buy a PS/2.
Pfffttt Muhammed Ali has a whole cellar full of punch cards.