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IBM PS/2 found inside school wall!

Without needing "special" floppy disks. PS/2s didn't use twiggys!

That's quite unusual. I wonder if whoever put it there placed it thinking it was just a temporary move or they wanted to save it as sort of a time capsule idea. What an odd place to store one, though. I remember when I found my PS/2 30 and 50 in my school's basement. The business teacher actually remembered putting them down there.
 
Without needing "special" floppy disks. PS/2s didn't use twiggys!

Perhaps he's referring to the machine needing a Reference Diskette to restore its CMOS information. Granted the disk itself if a plain old floppy, but you'd need to download the appropriate image and create one...
 
Could be what he was trying to say, but maybe some of them hadn't seen floppies before. The article did say, "Most of the staff here is young." Which could say they had no or barely any idea of what a floppy was.
 
Could be what he was trying to say, but maybe some of them hadn't seen floppies before. The article did say, "Most of the staff here is young." Which could say they had no or barely any idea of what a floppy was.

Then they have to be pretty darn young, because at least around here, floppy disks were in common use through the early 2000s. When I was in college in 2002-2004, every PC in the school's computer labs (mostly Gateway Pentium IIIs) had a 3½" floppy drive and a 250 MB Zip drive, and I used both formats to save my homework and projects.
 
My god! The legends were true! :v

Man, it was awesome when IBM essentially the only name for educational computers. Almost every school had two dozen PS/2's.
 
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On my job-4 (a system admin for a school's computer lab) about 15 years ago we had a closet with all kind of communication equipment. And I put a small Linux box there. It was alive at least for the next 5 years, after that a (then current) system admin discovered it and changed the root password and disabled some accounts, so I haven't had access to that box ever since, but I think it is still alive :).
 
Quite an odd discovery, it does make me wonder what might be hidden at the local schools here, as I've seen Pentiums, my Prolinea, etc that randomly show up in the ewaste or in random piles that were never seen anywhere.

I do find it interesting that the computer wouldn't have been moved, not noticed missing on inventory or such. Also interesting that it might be hidden there but not have a boot disk in the drive as it looks complete in the picture.
 
My god! The legends were true! :v

Man, it was awesome when IBM essentially the only name for educational computers. Almost every school had two dozen PS/2's.

It varied from district to district. Some used Apple, some used IBM, and some used TRS-80/Tandy. Many used Apples in the lower grades and IBMs or PC clones in the higher grades, since Apple had the clear advantage in educational software, while PCs were better for preparing students for college and the business world.

When my father was a math and computer teacher at a county college, in 1985 they bought a whole bunch of Tandy 1000s (the first model), which remained in use there for many years.
 
From what I've seen, my elementary school had Apple IIs and Commodore 64s. (I saw a Lisa in one of the old yearbook pictures.) The middle school had mainly PS/2 Model 25s and 50s. The high school had a mix of Macintosh SEs, PS/2s, and some XT clones.
 
At first I thought it might have been used as a BBS, hidden out of sight during the day and administered by a teacher/SysOp during the evening. But if it was, it was short lived or not open to non-students, because I never heard about it, and I wouldn't doubt that I called every local BBS at least once.

Also, that's pretty much all my school had too, was IBM. I switched school systems in 1989, and though my new school was better equipped than my old one, I mostly used the same IBM computers from my first day of school until my last. I think they were known as the Model 25? It was the all-in-one Mac looking PS/2.

They were still in use when I graduated almost 10 years later, although the school had added about a dozen Win95 machines by then, low end Pentiums or possibly high end 486 machines. If memory serves, they were generic beige boxes from a local system builder. However, with so few machines available unless you had a pressing need for the GUI, you ended up in the old lab using DOS on the PS/2.

I heard from a younger student they were still using those old dogs as late as 2002, which doesn't surprise me at all. As far as I can tell, my school had an aversion to getting rid of anything, since every classroom had at least one Commodore PET or Apple II collecting dust. Would be kind of amusing if they were still sitting on a few of those...
 
I think they were known as the Model 25? It was the all-in-one Mac looking PS/2.
That is the Model 25.
I heard from a younger student they were still using those old dogs as late as 2002
Wow. That's making use of what you've got. Wonder if they used the original dot-matrix printers with them too?
Our school still had Mac LCIIs and LCIIIs at 2003. We fully used Performa 5400 and Power Mac 5260s until 2005. And up until 2006, the school's server was run on two old Compaq ProLiant (maybe ML350) servers. I remember taking my first Acelerated Reader test on a 5260.
 
Then they have to be pretty darn young, because at least around here, floppy disks were in common use through the early 2000s. When I was in college in 2002-2004, every PC in the school's computer labs (mostly Gateway Pentium IIIs) had a 3½" floppy drive and a 250 MB Zip drive, and I used both formats to save my homework and projects.

I blame Apple and the iMac for the demise of the floppy disk. Damn you Steve Jobs!!!
 
Nah, I don't think Apple had any innovation behind the demise of the floppy. With the subnotebooks and the evolution of the ultrabook or thin client laptops they did away with almost all removable media. Although the early subnotebooks were awesome when they had the built-in floppy. Once all the stupid stuff was connected externally and you had this octopus/web of wires everywhere that you had to pick up or put away if you wanted to drag the system elsewhere...er.. well I guess you can tell how I felt about it.
 
Then they have to be pretty darn young, because at least around here, floppy disks were in common use through the early 2000s. When I was in college in 2002-2004, every PC in the school's computer labs (mostly Gateway Pentium IIIs) had a 3½" floppy drive and a 250 MB Zip drive, and I used both formats to save my homework and projects.

Agreed!! I was in school from 96 - 2000 and all my papers / research papers were saved on 3 1/2" floppies!!

Also, I LOVE how they say "Digital Discovery" like its some Mayan ruin type of thing. Its from 1988, not THAT long ago. Very cool find and I'd love to have it, but its not an ancient relic....or am I showing my age?
 
They didn't mention what was found beside the computer - the skeleton of Justin Case, an IT staff member who went missing in 1992 :)
See. No one cares about nerds. The old computer was more newsworthy.
 
Smack2k said:
Agreed!! I was in school from 96 - 2000 and all my papers / research papers were saved on 3 1/2" floppies!!

When I was at school we had these things called pens and using them we had to draw every individual character on to something called paper. :p

And unlike the stuff stored on 3 1/2" floppies there's a chance that the paper content can actually be retrieved..

-Tor (glaring at my stack of unreadable 3 1/2" floppies)
 
There is a story or two floating around about an AS/400 that got sealed into a small room or closet when a renovation was done. The small business that was using it kind of lost track of it - the terminals were in other rooms and they all worked.

It took a few years until the machine needed maintenance for somebody to figure out that they could not find the machine. The IBM CE or business partner traced the wires back through the walls, and eventually they broke down a wall to find the machine. (Still running.)

There were pictures .. I need to find a reference. This was pre-internet so it's probably in a newspaper archive somewhere ...
 
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