German viewer here. That forum post is mostly about backing up the content of that Maxtor hard drive via Norton Commander and serial port - and building an adapter for that. There is also someone talking about a ps1 floppy adapter hack as well, but nothing useful like detailed descriptions. As far as the hard drive interface goes, speculation in that forum post is that it's interface is most likely some form of esdi. One member mentions that when measuring the pins, the signal is similar to MFM - the context seems to indicate that he might actually talk about the floppy connector though (which does not make sense to me, but whatever, but I know nothing about things like that) EDIT: There appears to be an emulator for the PS/1 2011 called "IBMulator" - and while I have not tried it, the author mentions that the hdd interface is a "8 bit RLL XTA-like interface". Not sure if that helps.
Wow, when I thought this IBM couldn't possibly get more weird. 8-bit RLL with an edge connector! lol. What a strange and interesting IBM. Thank you for checking the forum thread!
I have a PS/1 2011 but with a 30MB HDD, a monochrome monitor and 512KB RAM expansion. I also bought the ACU (Adapter Card Unit, adds 2 16-bit ISA slots) and the elusive audio option. Bought it in 1991 with money I was saving for years as a gift for myself for getting into engineering school.
It was Necroware that remarked that some buyers snap up large quantities of the Benchmarq chip, but that there were alternatives, but he thought it was better to reuse the Dallas chips. It was in his video on reviving Dallas chips. I don't know if hacking up a Dallas chip is preferable to the Benchmarq chip solution, but it is good that both exists
Haven't finished the video, but if the "Dallas" that you're talking about is the old clock/calendar chip, then you _shouldn't_ even need to hack them up to add an external battery. Apparently they're still in production (I guess something industrial must use them?), so you can just get modern-production chips.
The page for the DS12C887 specifically describes it as a "Drop-In Replacement for IBM AT Computer Clock/Calendar". I guess the A variants of the 887 models (or any 885 variant?) are required if you need the RAM Clear function.
The audio card 34-pin port is basically stripped 8-bit ISA. This video shows how to build an adapter for an AdLib clone: th-cam.com/video/2Tcj0prMleE/w-d-xo.htmlsi=U59PwP5ELnXbHYhy As Indicated there you can add a small amplifier circuit to boost the sound between the card output and the monitor speaker.
I still have my ps1 2011, with win 3.1 installed and... It's slow as you imagine. I do also have the rare sound card options which adds midi ports, joystick port, pcm audio inc. Microphone input and 3 tandy like sound channels. Silpheed was also bundled with it and updated to support said card and it sounds great!
I remember seeing a PS/1 at a vintage computer collection having not heard of it. Then I went home and looked it up and thought it was funny that they released it 3 years after the PS/2 lol
I almost ended up with one of these back in 1993. My father and I were doing demolition at a small factory here in Central Florida (I would've been 23 at the time) and in one room there was an office chair with one of these and monitor sitting there. I even recall seeing a diskette in the drive. I was an Amiga user at the time FWIW. Anyway, since the buildings were being demolished internally before being refurbished, I asked pop if I could snag the computer as it was completely by itself, no desk, etc., I don't think the building we were in even had power anymore. It was a one day gig (for me), and he said no but he'd ask at the business. I don't recall if he ever told me but obviously I didn't end up with it, so I surmise either one, it was removed, two, it was thrown away, or three, he asked and they said no. Given that at the time it only would've been a couple of years old, I would wager it was removed, having been forgotten there for a while and collected by the company (Blue Bird orange juice, in case anyone was curious).
PS/1 was my first PC, mine was bundled with Disney Sound Source and bunch of Disney games like Rocketeer. That thumbnail brings back memories, playing Monkey Island on that PC :)
@@Epictronics1 I checked wikipedia for PS/1 models and my model was 2121 (386SX, 2MB, 40MB). That case was brilliant as no tool was required for opening it. The mouse was worst mouse I've ever used but it served its purpose.
I had one at work (were we used to use maxed out 286s and 386 sx clones) by some strange coincidence in 1992. I remember I wasn’t impressed with the performance, but sheer feeling of having the first original IBM on my desk was nice and new. The clickiness of that keyboard was astonishing. To say nothing about the oddly shaped mouse.
@@Epictronics1 the main thing is to soak surface between hot glue and the thing underneath with IPA, size of the blob does not matter. IPA doesn't dissolve it, it breaks adhesion.
@@Epictronics1 and that super cute RAM upgrade!! Useless and so annoyingly proprietary but so cute! It looks like a "My First Computer" type of toy! :D
It looks like there is/was a PS/1 sound card that appears to fit and is connected by ribbon cable from the pictures on the wiki and this paragraph introducing it: IBM released the PS/1 Audio card for use with its PS/1 model of home computers at the beginning of the 1990s. The sound card was specifically manufactured for the IBM PS/1 which used 24-pin ribbon cables to attach devices to the motherboard rather than the ISA standard of the time. The sound card included a PSG with 3 square wave channels, and 1 channel for noise, and an 8-bit DAC.
Should be an interface "XTA (XT Attachment) Rarely used implementation of IDE with an integrated 8 bit XT controller.” It only seemed to be used on the IBM 286 models of the PS/2 Model 25 and 30, and on Sega TeraDrive, and has a ESDI style connector with 44 pins that carry both 5V and 12V rails over a few cables, there is also the IBM series of these HD type WDL-330P (30 MB).
Interesting. So I should be able to swap drives with my Model 30. Not sure if I dare, they are so silly rare nowadays. Maybe I'll try if I can confirm the pinout somehow
Didn't the Model 25 and 30 use ESDI? Which was weird enough to begin with, since the 286 models could have used piain IDE. Looks a lot like the PS/1 is more or less a shrunk down PS/2 model 30/286, and replacing the model 25. This one is a type 2011.
These are cute little systems. I rescued one from a thrift store a couple years ago, albeit the monochrome model. Unfortunately mine is missing the front bezel 😑
My mom had this exact model and, fittingly, that's where I first played Monkey Island, the first big box game I'd ever bought on my own. So this was a very nostalgic trip down memory lane for me. :) PS - And yes, DOS 4 was awful.
36 volts was most likely used because it allows for a smaller conductor. If you had to provide 5/12v over an external wire, the cable would be huge and bulky, as well as subject to voltage drops that may cause stability issues. It's the same reason why PoE+ uses 48-52v, to be able to transmit useful amounts of power over the tiny 22/23AWG conductors in CATx cable.
All I can glean from that post is that somebody managed to make an adapter to IDE, they mention having been able to find the pinout 3 months prior to the post, now of course the pinout is completely missing so that if you followed their instructions, you'd be operating completely blind with a high chance of destroying the drive. I have a very similar machine, it's identical to my childhood PC. It's got an 80 MB Maxtor HDD too as well as the 512k RAM expansion, which is weird since the machine has 2MB RAM already. I'm currently almost done playing through all Commander Keen parts on it. The model of monitor is slightly different on my childhood PC and the one I have now - on mine the picture is tiny with a huge black border around it. The potentiometers are sliders. It also had DOS 4 in ROM.
Not quite correct. Someone used an IDE cable to build an adapter for using standard 3.5 inch floppy drives. The whole thread is more about ways to backup that Maxtor drive than the drive itself.
@@Epictronics1 I certainly have fun with mine. I'm also using it to maintain my arcade machine PCB repair logs. They're nearing 1MB in size - it's a plain text .txt file! Still a 2.5MB RAM 286 is good enough. I totally dig the PC Beeper volume control, so did my mother back when I was little and played video games.
36V might be to increase the effective power delivery over the relatively small conductors in the cable from the monitor. Much like how newer USB standards can deliver 12V or more to a phone for battery charging. 36V at 1A needs much smaller conductors than 5V at ~7A as an example. And you can tolerate more of a voltage drop from 36V while still being able to create a reliable 5V rail.
That's, IMO, the most probable explanation. Low enough voltage to be utterly safe being exposed on external connectors, but high enough to carry the required wattage without demanding too much current. Having four different voltages (some in parallel on multiple pins for current sharing) would complicate the design of the cable and PSU in the monitor.. And, you're going to have loss on the cable, which encourages the use of local regulation on the load side vs. providing the necessary 5V/12V directly on the pins. So, if you're going to have a DC-to-DC regulator anyway... you can pretty much pick any convenient input voltage. So... why 36V? Well, why not?
Such a cute machine! I'm curious about that little RAM expansion card, whether it's possible to reverse engineer it and design a new one that can increase the memory above the 1MB mark. That's just way too little memory to make this a useful machine, so I'd hope they at least had the option for a larger memory expansion card.
Yeah, Except for the MCA bus, IBM failed to protect all their "inventions" Apple is still doing pretty well, so I guess owning the OS was what mattered in the end.
@@Epictronics1 I dunno about that. :-) I'm sure it helps, but IBM is nowhere near as market savvy as Apple, and the latter had nearly failed several times themselves. IBM is too big, too slow, too bureaucratic to be in a competitive, bleeding edge market. I don't think owning the OS would've saved them. haha
Another great video, I always wanted to buy one of these for the small form factor for my kids to use to play games on, but when i did research on it it just didn’t make sense compared to all the better spec clones.
It's no IDE drive according to the thread. It seems to be a special XT-Bus for harddrives. He managed to backup his drive to a PS/2 via an adaptercable he made himself.
I think you glossed right over something significant on the customiz.exe screen (23:30-ish) - There's references to "Built-in DOS", *in addition to* reading configuration from either the floppy or hard-disc. Does this machine have DOS baked into the ROMs on the motherboard?
286 in 1990? I guess for certain office applications it would be sufficient but the 286 was made obsolete extremely fast since it lacked the proper Protected Mode.
That's what you get for cost reduction. Maybe IBM intended it to be used as a replacement for mainframe terminals, but for most desktops, it was underpowered since you could buy a 386 or even 486 clone box on every corner of the street by then.
@@Stoney3K Yet that's the odd thing about this, it's meant as an affordable consumer desktop machine made to compete with the clones, but it's really impotent for 1990/1991, and yet also a 286 isn't necessary if all you're gonna do is use it for wordperfect, then you might as well get a cheap Turbo XT that they were still making and selling by this time.
1MB ram was normal and enough when I bought my first pc that was 12Mhz 286 in 1988. Pretty much all dos programs and games worked perfectly within the 640kb limit and the memory above was just used as high memory for dos and drivers to free up more of that 640kb for programs and games to use. 286 is too slow for anything that comes later and would require more ram so having 4MB of ram only became common with 386.
Yes, grab your smartphone and start recording. Move it around different areas of the machine while you record. When you watch the recording turn up the volume and you should be able to hear where the noise is louder. I used this method to find a noisy component in another video. My guess is one of the coils on that copper PCB or inside the CRT. Please note that the display may have 100-10000 volts inside even with the cord unplugged. Don't remove the lid on the display without proper training.
Hi, The Hard Drive isn´t IDE, is a ESDI drive (power and signal through the same cable,just like the floppy drive)....pratically unobtanium today, and very prone to failure.... Back up the contents of the drive ASAP!
I wonder if this was a 'budget' version of their system / monitor combo.. I remember back when my parents bought their XT clone system (it was a GoldStar system, which I believe became LG) xt, monitor, useless software (but it was what it was then) Dos 3.3 I think, no windows at the time, 640K ram no himem (that sucked, it wasn't expandable either) CGA graphics on a card which was nice I put a cheap Trident VGA card (not super, ha couldn't afford that one) we added a 2400 baud modem, 2 5.25" drives, no hdd.. that thing was like $2,000 and that was a LOT of money back in the 80s.. So I guess maybe this was a 'cheaper' idea? Great machine though.. I can't wait to see a follow up
@@Epictronics1 Lucky and didn't even know it. We didn't have money, not at all. There was always food on the table, even if it wasn't much, but the fact that my parents were keen enough to know technology was that important to our future, astonishes me to this day. I learned it all, from scratch, as did my parents, and today i can say i truly understand computers and how they work. Thanks mom and dad..
@@nickwallette6201 That's exactly what my parents say at Thanksgiving after the sixth time that evening that I bring up the fact that Prescott Bush tried to overthrow FDR and establish a US fascist dictatorship.
German viewer here. That forum post is mostly about backing up the content of that Maxtor hard drive via Norton Commander and serial port - and building an adapter for that. There is also someone talking about a ps1 floppy adapter hack as well, but nothing useful like detailed descriptions. As far as the hard drive interface goes, speculation in that forum post is that it's interface is most likely some form of esdi. One member mentions that when measuring the pins, the signal is similar to MFM - the context seems to indicate that he might actually talk about the floppy connector though (which does not make sense to me, but whatever, but I know nothing about things like that)
EDIT: There appears to be an emulator for the PS/1 2011 called "IBMulator" - and while I have not tried it, the author mentions that the hdd interface is a "8 bit RLL XTA-like interface". Not sure if that helps.
Wow, when I thought this IBM couldn't possibly get more weird. 8-bit RLL with an edge connector! lol. What a strange and interesting IBM. Thank you for checking the forum thread!
I have a PS/1 2011 but with a 30MB HDD, a monochrome monitor and 512KB RAM expansion. I also bought the ACU (Adapter Card Unit, adds 2 16-bit ISA slots) and the elusive audio option. Bought it in 1991 with money I was saving for years as a gift for myself for getting into engineering school.
I think you've become the definitive channel for PS/1 and PS/2 content. Thanks to you I'm discovering machines from those series I never knew existed!
It was Necroware that remarked that some buyers snap up large quantities of the Benchmarq chip, but that there were alternatives, but he thought it was better to reuse the Dallas chips. It was in his video on reviving Dallas chips. I don't know if hacking up a Dallas chip is preferable to the Benchmarq chip solution, but it is good that both exists
Yes, I have kept all my empty Dallas chips. When we run out, I'll start reusing the chips inside.
Haven't finished the video, but if the "Dallas" that you're talking about is the old clock/calendar chip, then you _shouldn't_ even need to hack them up to add an external battery. Apparently they're still in production (I guess something industrial must use them?), so you can just get modern-production chips.
The page for the DS12C887 specifically describes it as a "Drop-In Replacement for IBM AT Computer Clock/Calendar". I guess the A variants of the 887 models (or any 885 variant?) are required if you need the RAM Clear function.
Ive got an PS1 Model 2011 too. Now i try to build an OPL2 Card for the AudioSlot. With Audio Out to the Monitor. It is a neat little machine.
Awesome, keep us posted!
@@Epictronics1 my prototype is working. In this stage it is very quiet. But iam on it.
The audio card 34-pin port is basically stripped 8-bit ISA.
This video shows how to build an adapter for an AdLib clone:
th-cam.com/video/2Tcj0prMleE/w-d-xo.htmlsi=U59PwP5ELnXbHYhy
As Indicated there you can add a small amplifier circuit to boost the sound between the card output and the monitor speaker.
@@retrotomat Very cool! Thanks for sharing
I still have my ps1 2011, with win 3.1 installed and... It's slow as you imagine. I do also have the rare sound card options which adds midi ports, joystick port, pcm audio inc. Microphone input and 3 tandy like sound channels. Silpheed was also bundled with it and updated to support said card and it sounds great!
MIDI! Are you telling me you can run an MT-32 on this machine? I need to get one of those cards somehow
@@Epictronics1 yup! But together with the ISA card expansion module it is a very collectable item so good luck
I remember seeing a PS/1 at a vintage computer collection having not heard of it. Then I went home and looked it up and thought it was funny that they released it 3 years after the PS/2 lol
I almost ended up with one of these back in 1993. My father and I were doing demolition at a small factory here in Central Florida (I would've been 23 at the time) and in one room there was an office chair with one of these and monitor sitting there. I even recall seeing a diskette in the drive. I was an Amiga user at the time FWIW. Anyway, since the buildings were being demolished internally before being refurbished, I asked pop if I could snag the computer as it was completely by itself, no desk, etc., I don't think the building we were in even had power anymore. It was a one day gig (for me), and he said no but he'd ask at the business.
I don't recall if he ever told me but obviously I didn't end up with it, so I surmise either one, it was removed, two, it was thrown away, or three, he asked and they said no.
Given that at the time it only would've been a couple of years old, I would wager it was removed, having been forgotten there for a while and collected by the company (Blue Bird orange juice, in case anyone was curious).
Another very enjoyable journey repairing a lesser known vintage system in this case. Good work!
Thank you!
PS/1 was my first PC, mine was bundled with Disney Sound Source and bunch of Disney games like Rocketeer. That thumbnail brings back memories, playing Monkey Island on that PC :)
My first WinTel PC was an IBM 286 too (a different model) It never gets old messing around with these machines :)
@@Epictronics1 I checked wikipedia for PS/1 models and my model was 2121 (386SX, 2MB, 40MB). That case was brilliant as no tool was required for opening it. The mouse was worst mouse I've ever used but it served its purpose.
@@LaLLi80 That's a nice machine. Yeah, the mouse is pretty horrible lol
I had one at work (were we used to use maxed out 286s and 386 sx clones) by some strange coincidence in 1992. I remember I wasn’t impressed with the performance, but sheer feeling of having the first original IBM on my desk was nice and new. The clickiness of that keyboard was astonishing. To say nothing about the oddly shaped mouse.
That keyboard is amazing to type on
Hot melt glue is easy to remove if you apply some IPA between glue and glued parts.
Even with a large blob like this?
@@Epictronics1 Yep
Was going to write exactly this. Now i didnt have to.
Wrote it, and now deleted it😢
@@Epictronics1 the main thing is to soak surface between hot glue and the thing underneath with IPA, size of the blob does not matter. IPA doesn't dissolve it, it breaks adhesion.
Built-in DOS? Does that explain the 4 ROM modules? This is SO CUTE I love it!!!
Yes, it has DOS in ROM! Unfortunately, I'm having some problems accessing it. More on this in a future video :)
@@Epictronics1 and that super cute RAM upgrade!! Useless and so annoyingly proprietary but so cute! It looks like a "My First Computer" type of toy! :D
It looks like there is/was a PS/1 sound card that appears to fit and is connected by ribbon cable from the pictures on the wiki and this paragraph introducing it: IBM released the PS/1 Audio card for use with its PS/1 model of home computers at the beginning of the 1990s. The sound card was specifically manufactured for the IBM PS/1 which used 24-pin ribbon cables to attach devices to the motherboard rather than the ISA standard of the time. The sound card included a PSG with 3 square wave channels, and 1 channel for noise, and an 8-bit DAC.
Sounds like fun to me! Someone needs to clone it. They are impossible to find
18:11 If you need to you can also remove the shroud on a dallas module with a hot air station, bend the pins straight, and wire a new battery.
That IBM ps1 tower series of videos were my all time favorite on your channel, and what originally brought me here and got me to subscribe.
Thanks. I still have one more thing we need to try on that PS/1 Tower :)
Should be an interface "XTA (XT Attachment) Rarely used implementation of IDE with an integrated 8 bit XT controller.” It only seemed to be used on the IBM 286 models of the PS/2 Model 25 and 30, and on Sega TeraDrive, and has a ESDI style connector with 44 pins that carry both 5V and 12V rails over a few cables, there is also the IBM series of these HD type WDL-330P (30 MB).
Interesting. So I should be able to swap drives with my Model 30. Not sure if I dare, they are so silly rare nowadays. Maybe I'll try if I can confirm the pinout somehow
Didn't the Model 25 and 30 use ESDI? Which was weird enough to begin with, since the 286 models could have used piain IDE.
Looks a lot like the PS/1 is more or less a shrunk down PS/2 model 30/286, and replacing the model 25. This one is a type 2011.
These are cute little systems. I rescued one from a thrift store a couple years ago, albeit the monochrome model. Unfortunately mine is missing the front bezel 😑
Parts for these are difficult to find but not impossible. It just takes time. Luckily we have a few other projects to work on while we wait :D
Wow, what a weird system! Super cool!
Is that the width coil mounted on the yoke of the monitor?! That's interesting!
My mom had this exact model and, fittingly, that's where I first played Monkey Island, the first big box game I'd ever bought on my own. So this was a very nostalgic trip down memory lane for me. :)
PS - And yes, DOS 4 was awful.
36 volts was most likely used because it allows for a smaller conductor. If you had to provide 5/12v over an external wire, the cable would be huge and bulky, as well as subject to voltage drops that may cause stability issues.
It's the same reason why PoE+ uses 48-52v, to be able to transmit useful amounts of power over the tiny 22/23AWG conductors in CATx cable.
Yes, very likely
All I can glean from that post is that somebody managed to make an adapter to IDE, they mention having been able to find the pinout 3 months prior to the post, now of course the pinout is completely missing so that if you followed their instructions, you'd be operating completely blind with a high chance of destroying the drive.
I have a very similar machine, it's identical to my childhood PC. It's got an 80 MB Maxtor HDD too as well as the 512k RAM expansion, which is weird since the machine has 2MB RAM already. I'm currently almost done playing through all Commander Keen parts on it.
The model of monitor is slightly different on my childhood PC and the one I have now - on mine the picture is tiny with a huge black border around it. The potentiometers are sliders. It also had DOS 4 in ROM.
Very cool. Let's have some fun with this weird and wonderful IBM :)
Not quite correct. Someone used an IDE cable to build an adapter for using standard 3.5 inch floppy drives. The whole thread is more about ways to backup that Maxtor drive than the drive itself.
@@Epictronics1 I certainly have fun with mine. I'm also using it to maintain my arcade machine PCB repair logs. They're nearing 1MB in size - it's a plain text .txt file! Still a 2.5MB RAM 286 is good enough.
I totally dig the PC Beeper volume control, so did my mother back when I was little and played video games.
@@senilyDeluxe holy cow! That is a shitload of characters about arcade repairs :o :o :o
@@Epictronics1 Fixing arcade machine PCBs is my favourite thing to do! Also clacking away on a Model M *is* kinda addicting :-)
36V might be to increase the effective power delivery over the relatively small conductors in the cable from the monitor. Much like how newer USB standards can deliver 12V or more to a phone for battery charging.
36V at 1A needs much smaller conductors than 5V at ~7A as an example. And you can tolerate more of a voltage drop from 36V while still being able to create a reliable 5V rail.
Great work, very entertaining❤
Thank you
I would suggest the reason it has a 36V supply was so that they didn't have too much current running through that cable?
Quite possible
That's, IMO, the most probable explanation. Low enough voltage to be utterly safe being exposed on external connectors, but high enough to carry the required wattage without demanding too much current.
Having four different voltages (some in parallel on multiple pins for current sharing) would complicate the design of the cable and PSU in the monitor.. And, you're going to have loss on the cable, which encourages the use of local regulation on the load side vs. providing the necessary 5V/12V directly on the pins. So, if you're going to have a DC-to-DC regulator anyway... you can pretty much pick any convenient input voltage. So... why 36V? Well, why not?
@@nickwallette6201 Basically, the monitor is acting like a laptop power brick.
Very satisfying! 😊
Such a cute machine! I'm curious about that little RAM expansion card, whether it's possible to reverse engineer it and design a new one that can increase the memory above the 1MB mark. That's just way too little memory to make this a useful machine, so I'd hope they at least had the option for a larger memory expansion card.
I think there were cards as large as 4MB for these IBMs
It'd be super cool if you were able to find a sound card for it, or if someone's reverse engineered it, to build one.
36V is an odd voltage to be sure! They were doing an "Apple" in keeping their design rather proprietary to their system.
Yeah, Except for the MCA bus, IBM failed to protect all their "inventions" Apple is still doing pretty well, so I guess owning the OS was what mattered in the end.
@@Epictronics1Well, they protected it--but not against EISA!
@@Epictronics1 I dunno about that. :-) I'm sure it helps, but IBM is nowhere near as market savvy as Apple, and the latter had nearly failed several times themselves. IBM is too big, too slow, too bureaucratic to be in a competitive, bleeding edge market. I don't think owning the OS would've saved them. haha
Another great video, I always wanted to buy one of these for the small form factor for my kids to use to play games on, but when i did research on it it just didn’t make sense compared to all the better spec clones.
Thanks. Yeah, this is a quirky IBM :) It doesn't make any sense, but I think it could be really fun to hack :)
@@Epictronics1 I agree, it would be interesting just to see whatever bracket to allow the sound card looked like.
It's no IDE drive according to the thread. It seems to be a special XT-Bus for harddrives. He managed to backup his drive to a PS/2 via an adaptercable he made himself.
I think you glossed right over something significant on the customiz.exe screen (23:30-ish) - There's references to "Built-in DOS", *in addition to* reading configuration from either the floppy or hard-disc.
Does this machine have DOS baked into the ROMs on the motherboard?
Yes, it does. More on this in the upgrade video
286 in 1990? I guess for certain office applications it would be sufficient but the 286 was made obsolete extremely fast since it lacked the proper Protected Mode.
That's what you get for cost reduction. Maybe IBM intended it to be used as a replacement for mainframe terminals, but for most desktops, it was underpowered since you could buy a 386 or even 486 clone box on every corner of the street by then.
@@Stoney3K Yet that's the odd thing about this, it's meant as an affordable consumer desktop machine made to compete with the clones, but it's really impotent for 1990/1991, and yet also a 286 isn't necessary if all you're gonna do is use it for wordperfect, then you might as well get a cheap Turbo XT that they were still making and selling by this time.
1MB ram was normal and enough when I bought my first pc that was 12Mhz 286 in 1988. Pretty much all dos programs and games worked perfectly within the 640kb limit and the memory above was just used as high memory for dos and drivers to free up more of that 640kb for programs and games to use. 286 is too slow for anything that comes later and would require more ram so having 4MB of ram only became common with 386.
Nice little box, shame there is no way to lock the screen to the main box.
Ther's always glue ;)
I got the same model , but when is ON does a weird noise ( something between huuummm and buuuzzzz ) . Any idea ? Greetings from Argentina ...
Yes, grab your smartphone and start recording. Move it around different areas of the machine while you record. When you watch the recording turn up the volume and you should be able to hear where the noise is louder. I used this method to find a noisy component in another video. My guess is one of the coils on that copper PCB or inside the CRT. Please note that the display may have 100-10000 volts inside even with the cord unplugged. Don't remove the lid on the display without proper training.
Hi,
The Hard Drive isn´t IDE, is a ESDI drive (power and signal through the same cable,just like the floppy drive)....pratically unobtanium today, and very prone to failure....
Back up the contents of the drive ASAP!
The monitor has a cable which powers the PC? How bizarre!
My first PC was the 386 version of this
I wonder if this was a 'budget' version of their system / monitor combo.. I remember back when my parents bought their XT clone system (it was a GoldStar system, which I believe became LG) xt, monitor, useless software (but it was what it was then) Dos 3.3 I think, no windows at the time, 640K ram no himem (that sucked, it wasn't expandable either) CGA graphics on a card which was nice I put a cheap Trident VGA card (not super, ha couldn't afford that one) we added a 2400 baud modem, 2 5.25" drives, no hdd.. that thing was like $2,000 and that was a LOT of money back in the 80s.. So I guess maybe this was a 'cheaper' idea? Great machine though.. I can't wait to see a follow up
Thanks. Goldstar indeed became LG (Lucky Goldstar) Yeah, computers were silly Expensive back then. We were lucky to have any computer in the 80s!
@@Epictronics1 Lucky and didn't even know it. We didn't have money, not at all. There was always food on the table, even if it wasn't much, but the fact that my parents were keen enough to know technology was that important to our future, astonishes me to this day. I learned it all, from scratch, as did my parents, and today i can say i truly understand computers and how they work. Thanks mom and dad..
Looks like XTA/ESDI interface pre-IDE era. Not compatible with 8 BIT XT-IDE
There is a project out there to fit an XT-IDE with an adapter. I will be building the adapter in one of the three upcoming videos
U have quite an interesting accent, where u from (or maybe what's your native language)?
I learned English from many different teachers with different accents. That's why it's such a mix
@@Epictronics1 my GF isn't a native speaker but when I was listening to your blog she noticed how easily she understands you :)
I'm not sure how to feel about you calling my first IBM PC "The Weirdest IBM"... shame? pride?
Pride! It may be weird, but it's awesome and very interesting. Looking forward to what we can do with this machine
It's sn IBM product, so what's the secret sequence of keys to make it collaborate with the Nazis?
Ugh.. can we just.. not..
@@nickwallette6201 That's exactly what my parents say at Thanksgiving after the sixth time that evening that I bring up the fact that Prescott Bush tried to overthrow FDR and establish a US fascist dictatorship.
@@SamwiseOutdoors Yeah, well, there's a lot of that going on lately. .. or... forever.