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anchor: fiftyonefifty
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This is off-course where it all started when it comes to the Personal Computer, these (yes I got two see the second one down below) I got probably from someone estate. The people where very happy to see them go so they were nice and cheap. This one works great but needs a bit off cleaning and I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to give those two amazing Tandon five and a quarter drives some service.
specs: For low cost and a quick design turnaround time, the hardware design of the IBM PC used entirely "off-the-shelf" parts from third party manufacturers, rather than unique hardware designed by IBM. The PC is housed in a wide, short steel chassis intended to support the weight of a CRT monitor. The front panel is made of plastic, with an opening where one or two disk drives can be installed. The back panel houses a power inlet and switch, a keyboard connector, a cassette connector and a series of tall vertical slots with blank metal panels which can be removed in order to install expansion cards. Internally, the chassis is dominated by a motherboard which houses the CPU, built-in RAM, expansion RAM sockets, and slots for expansion cards. The IBM PC was highly expandable and upgradeable, but the base factory configuration included: |
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Source: Wikipedia
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Like I wrote above I got not one IBM but two IBM 5150's I felt bad that the second one wouldn't get it's own page. This one needs a little bit off work I think a Rifa cap blew when the seller powered it on. So I will probably add an dedicated Appearances page for this one. Oh and it also needs an a new badge I might have a substitute for it or see if I can produce a replica.
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anchor: eightythreeeightsix
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More info to come!
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Soon to appear on the channel!
anchor: thirtytwoeightsix
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This is the computer that started it all, yes the IBM PS/2 model 30 286 is the reason that when I'm sitting at my desk I'm surrounded by CRT's. I found this computer on the dutch version off Ebay while on the hunt for an IBM typewriter. After booting it and seeing the MS-DOS 6.22 cursor I fell in love. of course it came with an awesome Model M keyboard.
Specs: Internally, the Model 30 286 features an Intel 80286 microprocessor clocked at 10 MHz. Instead of the pin-grid-array version of the 80286 as used in earlier IBM machines, the company opted for the plastic-leaded chip carrier version of the 80286, which was less expensive to produce and is less susceptible to damage when the user removes it from the chip's socket. The optional math co-processor slot meanwhile only supports dual-in-line-packaged 80287s. The packaging of removable RAM was upgraded from 125-ns SIPs to 120-ns SIMMs for the Model 30 286; only 256-kilobit or 1-megabit SIMMs were supported—the latter used in the stock 512 KB of RAM. IBM required the user install identical SIMMs in each of the four sockets available, meaning that RAM sizes beyond 512 KB are limited to 1 MB, 2 MB, and 4 MB total. The computer supports up to 16 MB of RAM on a third-party external expansion card however. |
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IBM used nine application-specific ICs on the system board both to reduce production cost and make the system board more compact. The more critical of these ASICs are the chipsets defining its AT compatibility, which were developed by VLSI Technology. These ASICs are packaged as surface-mount devices soldered to the board; virtually the only through-hole devices on the board comprise the three ROMs (one keyboard controller and two BIOS ROMs), the 80286, and the optional 80287—only because they come in sockets.
The Model 30 286 abandons MCGA for full VGA compatibility. The VGA circuitry is backwards-compatible with EGA, CGA, and MDA and supports up to a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels at 16 colors, as well as 320 by 200 at 256 colors. As the VGA standard is fundamentally analog, IBM recommended users purchase their IBM PS/2-styled VGA CRT monitors, available with either monochrome or color picture tubes—neither included in the base price of the Model 30 286. The Model 30 286's VGA circuitry can detect whether a monochrome or color IBM monitor is attached, providing an optimized palette of 64 shades of gray for the monochrome display. The Model 30 286's data path for its VGA circuitry is only 8-bits wide, compared to most of the rest of the system's 16-bit wide data paths, and the teletype video routines, as located in its ROM, perform significantly slower than on other members of the PS/2 range with 80386 processors owing to the 286's inability to copy ("shadow") ROM into RAM.
IBM manufactured the Model 30 286's optional 20 MB hard drive, while Alps manufactured its 1.44 MB floppy drives and Delta Electronics manufactured its non-autoranging 90.75 W power supply unit. The hard drive writes data using the MFM encoding standard; like the one in the original Model 30 before it, journalists remarked it as being slow. It paled in comparison to the AT's, according to PC Magazine, due to IBM limiting its data path to an 8-bit width and reducing the interleave skip factor from three to two. IBM included a disk-caching utility on the included Reference Disk in an attempt to help users combat its slowness.
The Model 30 286 abandons MCGA for full VGA compatibility. The VGA circuitry is backwards-compatible with EGA, CGA, and MDA and supports up to a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels at 16 colors, as well as 320 by 200 at 256 colors. As the VGA standard is fundamentally analog, IBM recommended users purchase their IBM PS/2-styled VGA CRT monitors, available with either monochrome or color picture tubes—neither included in the base price of the Model 30 286. The Model 30 286's VGA circuitry can detect whether a monochrome or color IBM monitor is attached, providing an optimized palette of 64 shades of gray for the monochrome display. The Model 30 286's data path for its VGA circuitry is only 8-bits wide, compared to most of the rest of the system's 16-bit wide data paths, and the teletype video routines, as located in its ROM, perform significantly slower than on other members of the PS/2 range with 80386 processors owing to the 286's inability to copy ("shadow") ROM into RAM.
IBM manufactured the Model 30 286's optional 20 MB hard drive, while Alps manufactured its 1.44 MB floppy drives and Delta Electronics manufactured its non-autoranging 90.75 W power supply unit. The hard drive writes data using the MFM encoding standard; like the one in the original Model 30 before it, journalists remarked it as being slow. It paled in comparison to the AT's, according to PC Magazine, due to IBM limiting its data path to an 8-bit width and reducing the interleave skip factor from three to two. IBM included a disk-caching utility on the included Reference Disk in an attempt to help users combat its slowness.
More pictures to come!
anchor: nthirthythree
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This IBM PS/2 Note was one of the first retro computers I acquired. It was a time when buying this kind of obsolete tech wasn't yet so expensive. I remember purchasing the computer without verifying if it still worked. When I tested it, I initially found that the computer wasn't functioning. However, when I showed it to a tech-savvy friend of mine, he discovered that the machine was actually working, but the backlight had died.
One common issue with this model is that the case plastics tend to degrade over time, causing the black top layer to deteriorate. Unfortunately, my IBM PS/2 Note is also suffering from this problem. If you'd like to see pictures of the plastic degradation, they can be found under the "More Pictures" tab. Despite the plastic issue, I still really appreciate the form factor and overall design of this machine. It has that distinctive IBMish look. |
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This computer did not yet make an appearence on the channel...
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My first mainframe! This a beast in a very fragile plastic shell!
More on it soon! |
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