Let's teardown some vintage IBM computers!
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- čas přidán 27. 04. 2023
- If you'd like to support the channel and help me to produce more videos like this, you can find me on Patreon: / miketech
You have my eternal gratitude!
Featuring my darling IBM PS/1 386 system from my personal collection! We'll also explore a very similar-looking IBM PS/1, as well as a lovely IBM PS/2 Model 30. Both of those systems came from the Franklin eWaste haul.
"little click on one" was a great subtle lock picking lawyer reference that I really appreciated. Cathode Ray Dude sent me your way and I subscribed after watching 2 videos, hope to see all of the units from that haul in due time!
Thanks! Yeah I couldn’t resist the nod to LPL. 😂
That sneaky reference to LockPickingLawyer at 8:30 was gold. :D
I just couldn’t resist!
Ah... I get the reference now! When I first watched that part I was scratching my head.
"the monitor is monitoring...." - best quote of the year 😅
Your intros are the most sassy classy of all tech youtuber in the wild, I so love it.
I appreciate you explaining things like the Yamaha chip on the sound card and the extra socket on the PS/1 mobo to us who didn't live this era. Good stuff.
It was definitely your voice in my head that made me elaborate on those things.
"My brain IBM!"
Got Mr. Roboto stuck in my head today! :)
Mike, what I love most about your channel is your contagious joy and excitement when taking care of these systems. Besides being such a cute and cool guy, the way you narrate the videos is very educational and clear. I love the videos on your channel; please keep up the excellent work.
Warm hugs from a Brazilian fan.
Best vintage computer content out there! Love the comedy, narration and editing 🎉
Fellow CZcamsr Epictronics showed in an older video how to modify the IBM PS/1 486SX board to take a regular DX in the math coprocessor socket. Following his instructions I upgraded mine to a DX 50mhz. I believe there's a thread on Vogons on how to do this mod also.
Ooh, I love his videos. Gonna have to look for that one! I do get a bit nervous about modifying retro hardware though. Might just hold out for a Pentium ODP. You're gonna see me hit the ceiling if I find one in this lot!
@@miketech1024 it's a pretty simple mod with just one jumper wire and easy enough to reverse.
@@miketech1024 Hope you find one. That'd be sick.
That's not an HD68 SCSI connector on the PS/2. It's actually a DB37 port, and likely was part of IBM's 5.25" Diskette Adapter, which was for connecting a 5.25-inch external floppy drive to a PS/2.
Huzzah!! You just made my Friday that much better! 😊 (haircut looks good too)
Brings back memories of a PS/1 Consultant unit my uncle gave me back in the early 90's. It had a DX-33 and 8MB RAM, which I bumped up to a DX/2-66 and 24MB. Pretty dang good box.
I have been looking forward to another one of your videos. This did not disappoint! Cheers!
I loved your excitement when you found that 486 chip !
Nothing brings out my childish reactions quite like discovering a 486 where I was sure there wasn't one!
That's paradise right here!
My first PC was a PS/1 with a 486SX/25 and 4MB memory. I used it until 1998, unfortunately, but I remember it fondly.
Absolutely love watching every single one of your videos you are a genius and extremely personable keep up this great work 😊
Had a PS1, PS2 and Amstrad 1640, all good machines in their day
Thank you for another excellent video. You are a good guy taking care of all this vintage equipment, and you explain it all very well. And pleasant to look at too! Hope you will have a great weekend. :)
Your dedication to getting that CDROM drive working was praiseworthy. Good job!
It was great seeing Doom on a 486 sx25. That's how I remember it; playable at full screen, but definitely less than 10fps.
Great video. I loved it.
Only after discovering MikeTech and his posse of commenters, did I learn what a 'slideshow' was, in terms of game playability, or lack thereof. 🙂
Great channel, enjoy every minute. Makes me remember my first computer, a DELL 486 33 Mhz, 4 MB RAM, 170 MB HD, Windows 3.1 🙂
Mike, you'll want to add a line to your autoexec that reads 'SET DMXOPTION=-opl3 -phase'. This does two things: 1) Enables phase-shift stereo sound effects and 2) Enables OPL3 stereo music. This works in Doom, Heretic, HeXen, Strife and Raptor as well as most other games that use the DMX audio middleware. Your ears will thank you.
I watched with great interest as you gently disassemble this wonderful computer. Great video!
Loved the LPL shoutout with the plastic tabs
Would be interesting to see the process of molding the new cover from scratch. Also would be cool to see those math coprocessors working if you find any. Nice video
I've long wondered about it. I know the molds are pretty expensive to make, but these things are just getting more and more brittle as they age. Maybe some advancement in 3D printing will save us. Curious to know if resin printing is the key.
@@miketech1024 It's possible to 3D print one now! It won't match 100%, but it's possible to 3d scan an existing one and reprint it with just a little bit of cleanup.
If you would like, I can take a shot at recreating it in CAD and try to print one out! All I need is some decent pictures of it from all angles with a ruler parallel to the side you're taking a picture of. If it turns out good, I can send it over so you can see how it looks!
Love your videos especially your enthusiasm when you come across computers from your childhood.
2:41 interesting, never seen screws like that. Convenient.
12:15 wow, perfect!
14:15 I love this little "insert floppy" animation. Love it, love it, love it.
18:40 haha so excited
Got the next one ready for release tomorrow. I really appreciate you watching and commenting!
It's so enjoyable watching people take the time to bring old devices back to life, and not just casting out. Also a quick complement, nice guns there buddy, you must work out.😊
To me it's like watching surgery.
the CMOS battery error could be caused by it not being configured. and as someone else said those upgrade sockets can usually be easily modified to take a regular 486 CPU.
exactly what i was about to write....just get to the setup, configure it, save and BAM! tthe error goes away!
Newly subscribed. Loving your videos. I work in IT myself and love all old machines. Great to see you bring them back to life, keep it up 👍🏻
I saw some Rifa caps in that PS2 PSU. I tend to replace them as I see them. Even if they are working now, it does not mean they won't take out the rest of the computer in a month. Even if they physically look alright, it is amazing what decades of rot can do to the things.
I love this shit. I still play around with my Tandy 1000 like this.
All of these computer systems that are considered vintage back from an era where I was a kid makes me feel vintage myself and I'm not sure how I feel about that 😂🤣 Awesome videos. It's always fun to see you disassemble and fix these systems to give them a new chance at life and being appreciated.
But they live, or they *will* live, which means, so will you! 🙂
My first work PC was a PS/2 Model 30 286, this brings back some memories!
The separate 3 pin connector from the power supply is for soft starting. If you notice that the power supply in that system doesn't have a large chonky AC power switch, it has a more normal DC power switch, like used in later ATX computers.
IBM and a few other manufacturers used that three pin header for soft start functionality. One wire is ground, one wire is +5vsb and the last is PS_ON. I believe the red wire is +5vsb, while the purple is PS_ON, but I'm not 100% sure. I've worked on three such machines with this soft start feature, but it has been awhile since I have. You can easily check which wire is which by looking inside the PSU, the wires are usually labeled on the PCB.
You can adapt an ATX power supply to take the place of one of these soft start units, if the original power supply has failed and isn't repairable for whatever reason. Or if you need more power than the original power supply can deliver. I had to do this in a customers' FM Towns PC that they had decked out, the original 200W PSU was too weak to power all of the extra boards and faster CPU and kept cutting out.
Thanks for the info! I found that, oddly enough both the red wire and purple wire have 5 volts on them while the PSU is off. Since it’s currently working I didn’t try too hard to start it on its own, but might still in the future.
Fantastic video.
The nervousness when bending those old brittle plastic tabs is real. I was on the edge of my seat.
Great video! Thanks for being so thorough. 👍
model 30! i had one of these a long time ago. i scrapped it in 2006 when i moved out of my parents' and really wish i didn't now.
These systems are a bit outside of my pervue, nearly everything I knew about DOS has evaporated from my head, unfortunately. I love the sound of OPL3, I've mentioned it a few times but the AOpen Cobra soundcard in my early Pentium 4 era Win 98 / 95 / DOS gaming PC has an OPL3 chip. I find it very strange that a brand new soundcard in 2001 would've had this feature, but I'm not complaining. OPL3 was a requirement for when I built this system and one of the few things I spent money on building the system, everything else was free, sound card was $20 and worth every dime. When I played Doom years and years ago as a kid it was with an OPL3 chip, it's the only way I can play it now. Likewise I was very surprised when that PS/1 turned out to be a 486, should be an awesome early DOS system!
Keep up the great work man!
Thanks! Yeah I nearly fell over when I uncovered that 486SX! That and the OPL3 chip definitely made up for the disappointment of the PS/2 condition. That day was an emotional rollercoaster for sure! 🤣
Love your channel! 🙌🏻
I've forgotten how loud PC's of this era are
Now it’s music to me. 🙂
@@miketech1024 it brings back memories for sure...
We had a 50z back in the day. Was our first PC after having a C64. It was stock 1MB RAM, 60MB HDD but we got a CPU upgrade board which plugged onto the 286 socket and upgraded it to a 386, the board was called 'hyper' something or other. Then our final upgrade was an IBM produced 486SLC2 50Mhz full drop in replacement motherboard for the 50z. Then the PS/2 was no longer meeting our needs because of the multimedia revolution taking place in the 90s as it was a pain to find multimedia solutions for and 50z had no space for an internal CD ROM so our next PC was an IBM PS/Valuepoint mini tower with a 486DX and soundblaster with CD ROM, eventually upgraded CPU to a Pentium overdrive, loved that machine, wish I still had it. I am also a big fan of the ThinkPad line and still have my Dads first laptop a 755CD in its original box. Sadly what makes the PS/2 bad for collectors these days is the proprietary parts, such a shame as they were great machines in the day.
You have a ThinkPad 755CD in its original box? That is beyond cool... I used to have a 760XL in the early 2000s, but ended up selling it on eBay many moons ago. That may be my favorite line of ThinkPads. Love how the entire keyboard lifts up to reveal the drives and battery! I recently acquired a 760E that's in great condition. The original battery still holds a decent charge! Yeah the proprietary nature of the PS/2 is unfortunate. I'm inclined to try my hand at creating adapters to at least make use of the on-board disk controller with more readily available drives.
@@miketech1024 I have a history with IBM South Africa, my Dad worked there from late 80's to mid 90's and I also did a bit of contract work while I was studying in the 1990s. There was a lot of cool tech coming out of IBM in the late 1980's though to the late 90's and I was fortunate to see and work on quite a bit of that tech. I provided support to large corporates in South Africa during most of my stint at IBM. I also have a 765D in box (was also my Dad's) but unfortunately it has a LCD backlight issue. The 701Cs was also an interesting machine with its keyboard as was the 755CDV which has a screen back which clipped off so you could use it with an overhead projector. I also got to test an unreleased (for South Africa) ThinkPad 850 PowerPC while working at IBM.
Awesome content! Keep up the good work Mike!
Love the lock picking lawyer reference
yet , another amazing video, Congrats on 5K subs, 10K won't be long from now!!
Awesome video. Love the PS/2!! 😀
Great you got them working, to a certain level.
I once had an IBM PS/2 Model 55SX around 2001-2002 while living in NC and before returning to Upstate NY in 2003. I actually scrounged many to sell while working at my employer's business, so I knew which one to get while still working for him. A shame I no longer have one... yet.
i really like your content, very chill reminds me of my childhood .... keep it up!
Hey Cutie! I absolutely loved this video as it took me way back. The quality of your camera shots are amazing along with how pristine you make these systems! Brings me back to installing my 28.8 USR modem on my AST Adventure 6066D. Keep it up!
Thanks! Oh I miss dialing up with my external USR modem. The handshake sounds were like music to me and that modems sounded great!
@@miketech1024 i remember thinking moving upto a 56k USR model was the best. Now I am enjoying a 1Gb pure FTTH connection to my house from Telus. Who knew…
floppy drive on a stick, lol, love it! great channel & content :)
As soon as I saw that Reveal cd-rom I knew exactly what sound card was in it. Back in 94 I had a PS/1 with a SC400 bundle that came with about 30 software titles. it was a 486sx-25 with 4mb and a 129mb hdd.
Just a bit off topic. 1994 was the year I bought my first computer. And it was the lowest of the low. Even by 1994 standards, it was wretchedly out of date. But it was a start.
Makes me think back when I started with computers your videos are great
Nice job it bring back a lot of memory when I work on DOS machines. Thanks for the video.
Very interesting! keep up the good work!
You found some real gems
Congrats on the 5000 subscriber mark Mike!
Excellent channel you've got there 👌
Thanks! I can't even believe it!
Love the channeling of LPL
It worked!
Owned PS/2 55SX back in the day. 386SX16 didn't even need a heatsink. Despite its inferior performance, I loved that thing.
Great video as usual! I forgot about those coprocessors! I hope you find one!
Reminds me of my childhood. Had a 386 SX with 16MHz back then. To play Doom, i had to shrink the window to almost minimum size to have a playable experience.
I don't think have ever laughed so hard when you said "Little click on one". XD You channeled the LPL well.
Have just found your channel and have subscribed love the way you present stuff good luck building your channel you have won me as a viewer
Dave
London uk
Thanks!
@@miketech1024 just happened on it and I can’t stop watching your stuff I’m hooked lol
Interested to know how you got into this and retro stuff have you told the channel about your background?
Mike, it's great to see the lowly PS/1 getting some love, people like to dump on them but they are not bad systems, it filled a niche, a PC that could go along with the Performa series Macs that Sears sold(which also get a lot of hate).
That PS/2 Model 30 came in three different variants, the 8086 you have,m a Model 30/286 with a 12 MHz 286, and a Model 30 386 with a 16 MHz 386-SX 16 MHZ. One note about PS/2 Floppy drives and the 30/50 series 3.5" hard drives, there is a pair of capacitors (if I remember they are 22 Microfarad) they will go bad and cause the drive to act erratically or not function at all, and if they get bad enough they will leak and eat the PCB. They are a good candidate to replace using Aluminum Organic Polymer capacitors, which use a solid electrolyte so there is nothing to leak.
IBM used PS/2 machines as the Service Element or SE console machines on late 977x series and ES/9000 series mainframes, the early ones ran the SE program on bare metal and the later ones ran a captive version of OS/2.
Thanks for the great info! The PS/2 line of systems have been my favorite since early childhood, especially the Model 50Z. Sure wish I still had that machine…
@@miketech1024 glad to help where I can, always learning more about those machines and how to fix them. It’s part of working at a computer museum :)
There's so many classic comments in your videos... floppy drive on a stick... lol.
Also, I know you say your photoshop skills suck, but your editing skills are top notch! Dunno how much time you put into editing, but it really pays off. Thanks for putting that effort in.
here's a new sub for you, and a like, with hopes that your channel grows exponentially. As a crusty old fart that grew from an Atari 2600 to a Vic20, to a C64 and then grew to love PCs with the very units you are highlighting, I love this stuff. It's nostalgic in seeing what I used to have and tried to learn with (without the benefit of CZcams to tell me what I was doing wrong), and it's comical to see what I had then and measure it against what I have now. It's nice to have a channel that falls somewhere between 8BitGuy or Adrian's Basement and the plethora of content creators focused on current computing. It's a good niche you found there, and I hope only the best for you in it.
Thanks!
Great video!
great stuff thanks
can't wait for the next video!
Pretty sure I had a 386 PS/2 system back in the mid 90s. It had a b&w monitor with it. Ahh the memories.
As ever, we come for the gun show and we stay for the computers.
LOVE YOU MIKE! 🥰
Man we used to have these kinds of computers at work in the '90s, I wonder whatever became of them! Wish I had a couple!
Sweet, another vid! :D
I'm looking forward to seeing you get that PS/2 fully working in future. I released a new game on Sunday for which that machine is just about the perfect spec 🙂
Ooh I need to check that out! It looks like an XT-IDE card is probably the quickest path to getting this thing to boot because the floppy cables and original hard drive seem to be unobtainium. I am absolutely dying to play around with an 8086 again!
congrats for the 5K subs
I bet that floppy drive from the PS/1 has a metal 3.5" diskette shutter stuck inside it. Those did tend to get loose and rip off inside a drive if you force it.
Could be. Haven’t investigated it yet. I still remember the first time that happened to me when I was around 8 years old. Spent about 20 minutes performing frantic surgery with some paperclips. The operation was a success! After that I was sure to check every disk to confirm the slider was flush.
I have spent the day binging your videos while modding a keyboard. Your level of detailed knowledge makes your adventures through these old systems really exciting. It is making me want to buy an unreasonable amount of machines to go through. For me, a really interesting part of the process is the possibility of preserving old digital art of all kinds that may exist on hard drives and disks. You ever get into that kind of stuff?
Thanks! Every once in a while I do poke around user data, but a few decades of working in IT has made me a bit gun-shy of it. Seen too many things I’d rather not see!
@@miketech1024 Ain't that the truth!
It is very apparent the manufacturers never intended these systems to be around for this long. I love seeing these get resurrected. It’s the ultimate sign of rebellion.
These videos have such a chill vibe to them. Also unusual to see a leaking CR2032, perhaps that damaged the battery holder's connection to the board?
Surprised me too. As far as I can tell, battery voltage is making it to the board. There is either a problem with the circuit that switches between battery and PSU, or there is some config issue I’m missing.
And there I was thinking PS/2 ports were newer than they really are, my head was stuck in AT until mid 90s. BTW, don't take this wrong, but I love falling asleep to your videos 😂It's just so soothing to me, going into a melancholy trip, and the ocasional click of death. (Of course I wake up, and watch the rest of the video again)
That’s ok with me! I’m glad you’re enjoying them.
8:27 LPL shoutout ftw
I found some cables that convert the IBM floppy connector to a standard one (ordered two for the two PS/2 Model 30s that I have, though they are newer 286 versions with CPU upgrades to a 386 and 486!)
Styling wise I really liked the IBMs of the 1980s. Built to look clean and professional in an office environment, they were an expensive product that I very much wanted to buy, but never could justify. Fun fact: IBM never thought of making much of a profit on their PCs when they first launched them in 1981. They instead thought of these machines as a way to get small to medium sized businesses into the IBM ecosystem, then when something more was needed, they could integrate these computers with their mainframe. ,
26:12 All this computer hacking is making me thirsty, I think I'll order a Tab...
Xtide in one of those isa slots will sort out your hard drive whoas. I hope that floppy works cause they are expensive to replace. The caps are a common problem for those floppies. For the model 30.
So, you're not at all concerned about those Rifa power filter caps? I'm honestly surprised they didn't let out the magic smoke when you first powered it up.
Sweet new video, just got a new video and Sound Blaster Live! Never worked with IBM desktop, only thinkpads.
Nice! Do you still have any Thinkpads?
@@miketech1024 Oh no, 8 year me completely killed the XP install on one. So "genius" me took it apart. Same story with a 380ED and 380 but those have 9x windows on them.
I had a PS/1 but with 4 memory slots for a total of 24MB and a 486 DX2-66. I only had 3 slots but 2 HDDs. I added a IDE CDROM card, Ethernet and either better Video or swapped it for a soundcard on demand. Windows 98 took 6 hours to install, but Network worked absolutely flawless, unlike my fren's K6-2 at the time. Sadly my mom threw it away like many years ago. I wanted to buy a replacement, the bigger one with the stock 66mhz, SCSI and 1 PCI Slot. But it was too expensive at the second hand.
Nice video. A bit of a shame that the cases are roughed up and the PS/2 was half gutted. Great that they work though. On the PS/1 you should also be able to use a 486 Overdrive in addition to the 487 or Pentium Overdrive. The Overdrive DX266 and DX4100 (which has onboard voltage regulation to work on old boards like this) show up relatively often online for varying prices. The ODPR variants will work in any socket but the ODP ones should work on this board as well
The only complain I have with this episode is that it ended too soon...
also 8:27 reference to lockpickinglawyer was a nice touch, I guess people here we all watch the same stuff more less lol
The system definitely needs to be configured (set date/time/etc.) before the 161 error goes away.
Wow. three and a half minutes in and I'm crying inside. I wonder if this first system you've looked at here was a junk (maybe not really but to someone) machine and they scavenged parts from it - the cutting of the lock wires and the cable to the scsi at the rear, I can NEVER understand how someone could butcher a machine like that, even when they were aplenty, still.. you shouldn't just destroy something that has SOME type of value. Tragic. I sure hope you can find a shining light here with this one.
Interesting to see. Hope you have a chance to dive into some macs soon! Macintosh May?
So far I only have two retro Macs. Really hoping to find one more so that I can make a complete Mac video!
ugh I hate it when they cannabalize things in such a manner, but guessingif they thought this was scrap, they probably assumed that it wasn't going to matter. never had the original model 30 but yeah only subtle differences between that and the model 30 286. they used a RLL drive, with a small hack you can use an ide drive with these via a controller card. That's a good sound card. I got a yamaha OPL-3sax card from my brother in law years ago and am glad I never got rid of it. while I'm a sound blaster card fan, the yamaha does put out some awesome sound. my ibms flashed that cmos error until I did the configuration. unfortuantely mine uses a dallas clock, so will have to eventually find a replacement. a word of warning, those release clips can become pretty brittle as well, had one break on me a while back. at this age, I avoid taking these apart as much as possible..
Another great video Mike. You might want to edge back on the gain of your microphone though, it's regularly clipping just a little.
Thanks! Yeah it's time to get some better recording kit...
We're gonna need you to pick that tab one more time just to make sure it wasn't a fluke!
Hey MikeTech and all, I just want to state for the record, even though everybody knows it. DOOM villains always die real good!
"Look how they massacred my boooyy!!" that poor PS/2. I really need to get myself one of those 4 finger annoying clip popper thingies.
Without the missing front panel I can't tell if your 486 PS/1 is one of the models I sold at Best Buy when I was in college, but I definitely sold that Reveal multimedia kit. That generation of PS/1 is an underrated machine, and they were priced pretty reasonably too. Best Buy really didn't push them though, so they didn't sell as well as they could have.
Crazy to think about these being sold at Best Buy!
I wonder if you knew, but you can affect the floppy disk sounds quite drastically in Linux by changing the head step rate. I tried to find similar utility for DOS/Windows, but never did that. The head step rate is the rate at which the FDC (floppy drive controller) moves the floppy drive head to each consequent track when seeking. The floppy disks have a somewhat dummy system in that, so they just are getting basically control signals to advance the head, and the controller cannot even know if the operation succeeded or not. So to get an optimal value, you just have to try out. The default settings are usually very conservative, and thus the step motor has time to stop and wait for the command to move to the next track. The faster the step motor, the more there is time to wait - and usually, the noisier the floppy drive gets. I was completely unaware of such a setting until trying out installing OS/2 2.1, which during the installation made a very crunchy sounding floppy drive whisper quiet. I didn't know how I did until I found an utility in Linux (I think it was floppycontrol, but I'm not sure) that had this step rate configuration option - and sure enough, I was able to replicate what OS/2 did.
This is all I want in life. Thanks!
32:42 Never have I ever seen a 5.25 load like that before. A new wrinkle in the brain for me today
One of the many reasons I love this drive.